The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on a train. I’m going to Switzerland.” She was silent a few seconds, so I said, “How are you? Is everything all right?”

  “Other than thinking you were dead?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Other than that.”

  “Paul keeps calling me. Asking if you’ve gotten in touch.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. Of course he’d been pestering her. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll talk to him. He won’t bother you anymore.”

  “But,” she said, looking for words, “what’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

  How to explain it? Was I in trouble? Probably, yes, but sitting in that clean train it didn’t feel like trouble. I said, “It’s about my brother.”

  “You mean Haroun?”

  “He’s alive.”

  Another moment of silence, longer this time. “He’s not, Abdul. You know that.” She was starting to speak to me the way she did to Rashid when he was confused.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” I said, trying to sound as sane and as calm as possible. “But I saw him. He’s alive, and he’s in Europe.”

  “But your father went to his—”

  “His grave. He flew to Mauritania and saw a marker in the ground. He never saw Haroun’s body. None of us did. He didn’t die.”

  “Then … then what did he do?”

  This, really, was something I couldn’t tell her. If the knowledge of these new Tourists had put a price on Milo Weaver’s head, then I wasn’t about to do the same to my family. “It’s unclear,” I told her. “But I know where he’s going now.”

  “Switzerland.”

  “Yes.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was choked. “Abdul, can’t you come home? Talk to Paul. He’ll help you figure it out.”

  My heart sank. She didn’t believe me. No—she believed that I believed what I was saying, but she didn’t trust that I hadn’t lost it. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “How’s the monster?”

  “He misses his dad.”

  “I miss him,” I told her. “I miss you.”

  We spoke a little more, but the sentiments felt empty. She was too scared to say too much, in case I was on the edge, and I was too scared to tell her what was really going on. She again told me to talk to Paul, then told me she loved me. “I really love you,” I told her, as if it had ever been in doubt, which I suppose it might have been a long, long time ago.

  When I hung up, it only took thirty seconds for the phone to ring. A part of me, as I picked it up off my thigh, thought it might be Laura calling back, but no, of course not. It was Africa section, and when I answered Paul said, “What’s going on, Abdul?”

  “Did you get my report?”

  “It’s a hell of a read.”

  “And?” I asked, wanting him to hurry up. “Are you going to act on it?”

  “Because if we don’t you’ll share it with the press? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Fair enough. After two days holed up in that Madrid hostel, listening through headphones to the hours of interview, ruining my thumbs, the threat had felt necessary. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Something has to be done,” I told him. “We can’t let this go on.”

  “And you believe Milo Weaver?”

  “My dead brother tried to kill us. Yes, I believe Weaver.”

  “Look,” Paul said, sounding tired. Maybe he was. “I appreciate what you’ve done. We all do. But you send me a screed about a secret army of industrial spies and killers, and you expect the Agency to take action within hours? As admirable as your work has been here, this is the first time you’ve been sent abroad in the line of duty. I show this to the seventh floor, what do you think they’ll say? You’re not giving evidence here. You’re spouting conspiracy theories.”

  “You already knew about my brother,” I said. “It’s why you sent me.”

  Silence. Then, patiently: “It doesn’t matter what I know or don’t know, Abdul. It’ll look like conspiracies to them. How do you know Weaver isn’t playing you?”

  How did I know? I’d asked myself that until the very moment that Haroun’s eyes had met mine. From that point on, I didn’t need to be convinced anymore. “You’ll find the evidence here,” I told him. “They’ll all be at Davos. Weaver, too. I’ll arrange the meeting.”

  That was when he broke. “You’ll do no such thing, Abdul, because your job is done. You understand? Get home now, or we’ll issue a Notice for you. Understand?”

  “But—”

  “Enough, Abdul. Get Stateside.”

  A part of me had expected this, though the rest of me had hoped, unrealistically, that everyone could be swayed simply by the depth of my conviction. “See you in Davos, Paul,” I said, then hung up and turned off my phone.

  7

  Three months were like forever. That was a thought that came to him when he saw Tina’s bright eyes appear in Erika Schwartz’s doorway. As they embraced, Milo flashed on that moment in 2001, in Venice, when he’d first stumbled across this beautiful, pregnant woman on the damp cobblestones, seizing up as labor pains shot through her.

  Now, eighteen years later, these two strangers—the woman and the baby inside her—had become such a part of him that without them he was no longer fully himself. During those months apart he’d felt as if parts of him, some internal organs, were missing. He could function, but something somewhere deep in him had stopped working. It was why he’d started smoking again, and within that first half hour of their reunion Tina sniffed and called him on it. But now that he was with them, the urge for nicotine faded. He was whole again, and the infant born on that day in Venice was a grown woman with tears in her eyes, and into her ear he whispered, “It’s almost over, Little Miss.”

  It was a gift, these two days in Schramberg. He was like a sponge, demanding stories from them, particularly Stephanie.

  “I’ve been learning about nature,” she told him. “A month ago I went into the forest and lived for three days without any tools.”

  “What? But it was freezing!”

  She shrugged. “I had a coat. I ate rabbit and ferret.”

  It had taken weeks for Tina to be talked into allowing this wilderness survival weekend, and even though one of Erika’s guards had been assigned to keep track of Stephanie from a distance it had terrified her. “But she’s different now,” Tina confided in him. “In a good way, I think.”

  Their shopping trips, sometimes to Schramberg, more often to far-flung towns to avoid notice, began in early December when Tina told Erika that if she didn’t allow a change of scenery she would face an insurrection. Unlike Milo, who had arrived skinny and sunburned, his wife and daughter looked healthy and strong, and for that he was thankful to Erika Schwartz.

  Two days were enough, just barely, to repair him. He shaved and cleaned himself and ate and spent every moment with them. And when the stories ran out he just watched them—“kind of like a creep,” Stephanie noted. Then it was Tuesday morning and time to go. He kissed them, then walked with hobbling Erika Schwartz out to another smuggler’s car, an Audi.

  “You know where you are going?” she asked.

  “The Arkaden.”

  “The Russians don’t matter as much as the Americans,” she said. “You cannot expect Germany to attack one of its largest financial institutions if America protects two of its largest companies.”

  Milo opened the car door. “They need time to absorb it. I’m going to call them tomorrow night.”

  “You are pushing it.”

  “If I call now, the answer will be no.”

  Erika looked at him a long time, and he had the sense that her face was a mask covering an Escher maze of conflicting considerations that he would never entirely understand. This old woman was probably the most complicated and inscrutable intelligence officer he’d ever had to face, and in the past he’d paid dearly for underestimating her. Then she nodded abruptly. “Go,” she said.

  During his long drive, he
thought about how his life had changed. He could no longer fly to New York and sit in a conference room to calmly talk people into his way of thinking. Instead, he had to skulk from one meeting place to the other, crossing borders undercover and stopping in roadside stores to pick up amateur tools of the trade, as he did at the last gas station in Germany, where he bought four burner phones from four different manufacturers.

  Nearer to Davos, he found a radio station relaying live coverage of the Forum. Prince William was talking with David Attenborough about climate change. “We are now so numerous,” Attenborough said with his familiar intonation, “so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms that we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it.”

  He’d been unable to make Alan’s funeral in Boston, and when he called Penelope after the ceremony she’d finally broken, shouting down the international line that Milo was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. He’d had to absorb that blow, because what choice did he have? Maybe she was right. Alan, Kristin, Noah, Leonberger, Griffon. Heeler, probably.

  The Attenborough session ended with applause, and after some brief commentary, as he was rolling through the outskirts of Davos, seeing soldiers in the distance, Brazil’s newly inaugurated populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, came on the radio. Milo turned it off.

  He parked in the basement lot of the Rätia shopping center at the southern end of Davos, not far from the train station. He pulled on the hood of his coat and used sunglasses, knowing there were cameras he couldn’t spot as he made his way up the Promenade to the Arkaden cinema, where he bought a single ticket. The audience was thin, most people in the center or up front, so Milo took a seat along the back wall and settled in. The lights went down, and a series of advertisements for upcoming films scrolled, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was watching the aisles on either side, waiting.

  When they finally arrived, the film had started. In it, one young asshole, on what looked like a New York street, videotaped another young asshole punching and knocking out a Chinese man. For YouTube likes, apparently. Back at their house, though, they were paid back by an unseen person, violently, and that was when Milo noticed a sliver of light to his right as the theater door opened and closed. Two men entered at the same time as, on his left, a third man entered. They let the doors shut behind them. Milo was surprised that Maxim Vetrov had brought the same two thugs he’d had with him in Algiers. Maybe they’d lobbied for the job, a respite from the relentless North African sun.

  Vetrov removed his wide-brimmed hat and edged his thick body slowly along Milo’s row to reach him. The other two worked their way to the center of the next row up. Settling into the seat beside Milo, Vetrov smelled of cigarettes. “Hello, Mr. Weaver,” he said in his halting English.

  “Thank you for coming,” Milo said, but in fluent Russian, which earned raised eyebrows from Vetrov.

  “Russian?” he asked.

  “Half,” Milo said, then smiled at the two thugs, whom he suspected would soon have a crick in their necks from turning to stare so ominously at him.

  “I have to admit, I am surprised,” Vetrov said. “In Algiers, you did not seem very happy to meet us. And now that we have a warrant out for your arrest, you invite me to Switzerland.”

  “In Algiers, I didn’t understand. Neither did you.” When Vetrov frowned, Milo said, “You thought I was working with Egorov against you. And I thought you were working with my enemies. In fact, both of us wanted the same thing, and Egorov made sure neither of us knew it.”

  “He was very clever,” Vetrov said. “Clever old man.”

  “By then Joseph Keller was long dead. He’d been killed in Paris. And Egorov had destroyed Keller’s list. But he pretended otherwise because he wanted to destroy me.”

  This seemed to disturb Vetrov, and he sighed, glancing up at the movie, then back to Milo. He said, “When Kirill came back to Algiers, he was supposed to bring Joseph Keller with him. But he didn’t. He claimed that Keller had been killed by accident. But then he began to change everything. His daily movements, his meetings with his mistress. He began sending encrypted cables to Moscow—but not secretly, mind. He made a show of it. Very strange.”

  “He needed to create the illusion he was protecting Keller.”

  “Maybe,” Vetrov said with a shrug. “So we monitored his phone. He called one Milo Weaver, of UNESCO, and told him that there was someone for him to protect.” He raised a short finger. “Evidence! Clearly he did have Keller. Now, then, was the time to confront him.”

  “And kill him,” Milo said.

  Vetrov shook his head vigorously. “No, no. Talk. A slap and tickle, yes, but talking, mostly. Unfortunately, his heart was not up to a simple interrogation.”

  “So Egorov really did die of a heart attack?”

  “I am afraid, yes.”

  “Another question,” Milo said. “When he picked up Joseph Keller in Paris, whose orders was he following?”

  Frowning again, Vetrov shook his head. “The Kremlin’s, of course. And we wanted him alive. We wanted information on Sergei Stepanov’s operations.”

  “But the Kremlin did kill Anna Usurov.”

  Vetrov held up his hands, as if defending himself. “Usurov—yes, maybe they did that. She was in Moscow, attacking Putin. She had to expect it.”

  “What about Boris Nikolaev?” Milo asked, using Leonberger’s real name.

  “Who?”

  “He worked for us in Moscow. He was looking into Usurov’s death.”

  Vetrov’s expression darkened. “Nikolaev was yours?” He shook his head. “The man killed himself—our people only wanted to speak to him. He put two militiamen in the hospital.”

  This was what Milo had assumed after reading the police reports, but it helped to have it verified.

  Vetrov shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. “So are you going to tell me? I hope I didn’t fly to Switzerland just to make friends with you.”

  Milo told him, but slowly so that it wouldn’t sound too unhinged, about Egorov’s friends, the international corporations, and their weapon of choice: specialized Northwell agents working to advance their interests by whatever means necessary.

  Vetrov’s frown had deepened so much that he worried the man’s face would collapse on itself. “A private army,” he finally said.

  “Not just any private army. This one is global, and it’s expanding. They have no problem working against Russian, Chinese, European, or American interests. They’re not interested in long-term stability. They’re motivated entirely by short-term gain. But this,” he said, tapping the arm of his chair, “is where they meet every year. To establish yearly goals, settle financing, and bring in new clients. This is the only chance we have to get them all in one place. But I can’t do it myself. I need help.”

  “You need the GRU.”

  “I need the GRU,” Milo agreed.

  “You ask for a lot, Mr. Weaver.”

  “I have no choice. They’re trying to kill me.”

  Vetrov stroked his mustache. “I will have to discuss with Moscow.”

  “Of course.”

  Vetrov’s eyes turned to the screen, where a man with wild hair sat in a wheelchair, staring back at the audience. “Samuel L. Jackson,” he said, smiling. “What an actor. You like him?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and slowly standing. “Not everybody. There never has been and never will be anyone in the world who everyone likes.”

  He nodded to his thugs, who also got up, and all three of them headed to the exit. Milo waited until they were gone, then took out his burner phone and sent a message to Alexandra: Done.

  8

  Again Leticia left her car by Lake Davos, where the afternoon sun glinted on the water, twinkling brightly. She took the bus all the way to the southern end of town, around the ring of black-clad soldiers, to Davos Platz, where she disembarke
d among business suits and heavy coats and walked up Talstrasse. Residents who hadn’t rented out their apartments for exorbitant prices walked little dogs along the snow-scraped sidewalk and barely gave her a glance. For a week each year, Davos became wildly multicultural, and the residents no longer noticed.

  It only took ten minutes to reach the hulking form of the Vaillant Arena, which like so many other buildings had been built with sloping roofs to emulate a ski lodge. As she crossed the empty parking lot, she saw along the second-floor balcony two heavily wrapped Chinese men looking down at her. The lot was cut in half by a high chain-link fence set up by construction workers, but one end had been left open for her. By the time she reached the glass front doors, there was another Chinese guard approaching it from inside and unlocking it to let her in. She expected to be patted down, but he made no move to do that, only led her through the wide, dark space to another set of doors that opened into the huge stadium that usually hosted ice hockey but was now in the midst of a lengthy renovation that wouldn’t be completed for a few more years. When the Forum came to town, the workers were all sent on vacation, leaving an empty shell in the middle of town, ideal for a private meeting.

  At the rink-side seats, another Chinese man—heavy, with a hairy mole on his chin—stood and shook her hand with a big smile. “Hello,” he said in English, his accent strong, losing the l’s along the way. “My name is Chen.”

  “Leticia,” she answered.

  “Please,” he said, motioning to the chair beside him, and they both settled down as his guard wandered away.

  For a moment, neither spoke, only looked across the dry expanse in front of them, and up at the high rafters. She thought of Li Fan’s warning: Leticia was sitting with the enemy now, one of Northwell’s friends. She and Milo had talked it through, but actually being here, her plan felt weak and haphazard. Finally, she said, “Did the Germans explain what’s happening?”

  “They did.”

  “And I expect you have questions.”