He nodded thoughtfully. “So to be sure I understand: You are proposing that we, together, take apart Northwell International. How?”
“That will be discussed once we’re all in the same room, but there are options. You, for example, can go after their training school in Beijing and stop their expansion on Sakhalin Island.”
“Yes,” he said, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. “It is a possibility. But we cannot go after their headquarters. Do you have the Americans’ cooperation?”
“We will,” she said. “But even without them each country can go after Northwell’s clients. Tóuzī is under your jurisdiction. Without customers, this ends.”
Chen smiled, perhaps liking the simplicity of her words, perhaps finding them ridiculous. “And I understand there is a carrot.”
“Carrot?”
“A reward for taking part.”
“Well, China gets to build its oil pipeline without having to worry about terrorists.”
He rocked his head, as if that were no reward at all. “I mean the files.”
“Yes,” she said, noting the interest in his voice. For three months Northwell and the Second Bureau had been banging their heads against Library encryption.
“Question,” Chen said, breathing loudly through his nose and squinting across the arena. “How do we know that Milo Weaver will hand this to us? That he won’t pull a trick?”
“That’s easy,” she told him. “He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want his family to die. None of us, Chen, want to die.”
“Very good,” he said with a smile. “How do I get in touch with you, or Milo himself?”
“You don’t. If you agree, then you meet us on Thursday. We’ll contact you with the address.”
“And that is all? We meet, discuss our options, and then put a plan into action?”
“Exactly,” she said. “Unless you have a better idea.”
He shook his head, that smile returning. “No, no. It is a wonderful plan.”
Crossing the parking lot again, she felt their eyes on her, and she also felt the anxiety of a plan that wasn’t quite as clear-cut as she would have liked. There were too many moving parts, and one of those moving parts—Chen—was under the thumb of their enemy. Li Fan had been right—the Second Bureau had no reason to kill her. Yet. But what about Thursday? Once the principals were together in one room? Would Northwell decide that the simplest move was to send in their soldiers and wipe out everyone? Reckless, sure, but so was funneling millions to Boko Haram, or sending Tourists out to sink Filipino ships.
It wasn’t going to work. She felt this so strongly that, heading back to Küblis, she nearly kept driving north, to Zürich, where she could board a plane to anywhere. Instead, she called Milo and told him what she believed needed to be done to make this work. Otherwise, none of them would make it out of Switzerland alive. He didn’t like it, told her it was crazy, but said he would think about it.
“You better think quick,” she snapped.
9
Alexandra’s rented room on the bucolic, rural edge of Serneus was airy and gave her and Milo a clear view down to the valley. The view was starting to fade as night emerged, and that was when Leticia called from her car and spoke to Milo. After he hung up, he sank into a deep silence that irritated his sister. She knew, after all these years, that Milo’s silence didn’t always mean deep thought; it often meant confusion. So she forced him to tell her exactly what Leticia had said.
Just as Northwell’s annual meeting on Friday was where the consortium was most vulnerable, Leticia had argued, their own meeting, on Thursday, was where they were most vulnerable. And the meeting place, a seasonally closed restaurant on the side of a ski slope, chosen for its solitude, was also the perfect spot for a mass killing.
“She didn’t give Chen the address, did she?”
“Of course not. But the Sixth Bureau knows it. And she thinks Chen has a line into them.”
“What makes her think that?”
“Experience.” When she frowned at him, he said, “He’s too confident.”
“So what does she want to do?”
“Change of location.”
“That’s easy enough.”
“But that’s not it,” he said. “If we can’t get the Americans on board, she wants to do something crazy to convince the others to join us.”
“Sounds like Leticia Jones.”
In the morning when Oskar pulled up in one of the BND’s black four-wheel drive SUVs, guarded by two blond beasts, they told him about the change of location, and he shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “I can tell everyone.”
“But not Chen.”
“Of course not,” he said, then checked his watch. “Vice President Wang speaks immediately after Angela Merkel, at two o’clock. I will tell Li Fan personally, and she can decide who to share it with.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a heavy manila envelope, opened it, and spread five laminated cards on the coffee table. Milo picked up one, and Alexandra followed suit. The card she held had Leticia’s photo and identified her as a stringer for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Milo handed over the one he was holding, identifying Alexandra as an employee of Der Spiegel.
“It’s the only way to get inside the security ring,” Oskar told them.
“Thank you,” Milo said.
Alexandra placed hers back on the table. “I already have one.”
Oskar smiled. “Vivian Wall?” He shook his head. “Three hours ago the British put out a warrant for Ms. Wall. I believe Mr. Booth’s wife had a hand in that.”
That was news. She looked down at the cards—Milo, Poitevin, and Dalmatian were also taken care of, each under assumed names. She sighed. “These are German publications. My German isn’t very good.”
Oskar sniffed. “You’re in Switzerland. Their German is not very good either.” Then he winked, looking remarkably confident given the haphazard schemes they were putting together. To Milo, he said, “And the Americans?”
“I’ll call them this evening. They’ve had enough time to think, so I should get an immediate answer.”
“Good.”
“What about Katarina Heinold?” Alexandra asked.
“She lands tomorrow morning,” Oskar said. “I will pick her up personally.”
“Good,” she said.
Oskar’s expression changed, and the confidence bled out of it a little. He cleared his throat and took another envelope out of his jacket pocket. As he opened it and took out two small photos, he said, “In terms of potential issues, of which there are many, let me add another. Ingrid Parker was sighted in Klosters.”
He handed over the photos. They were both distant surveillance shots of a woman, but in different locations. In the first, she was sitting with a young man in a Berlin square Alexandra recognized from Kreuzberg. In the second, she was getting into a car on a pretty little street that could only be in Switzerland. They weren’t good pictures, the woman’s face in shadow, but the height and short-cropped hair looked familiar from a thousand news stories. Milo passed them to Alexandra, who frowned.
“How long has she been here?” Milo asked.
“We don’t know. The Berlin shot is two weeks old, the Klosters shot two days. We don’t know what they’re planning, but we’ve shared the pictures with our allies, and the Swiss know to watch out.”
Alexandra didn’t like this. A Massive Brigade action in the middle of the Forum wasn’t just dangerous; it could undermine everything they were trying to do.
Alexandra passed back the photos. “Do the Swiss know what we’re doing?”
“Why would we tell them?” he asked.
“Well, if we can’t arrest these people, maybe the Swiss would be interested in doing it for us.”
Oskar grinned broadly, almost laughing. “You really think that the Swiss will want to put handcuffs on billionaires who have come to their country to be part of the biggest networking event in the world? They make a hundred million dolla
rs over the space of one week. No matter my opinion of them, the Swiss are not stupid.” He shook his head. “The only thing we could expect is for them to arrest us for troubling their guests.”
10
It had taken a full exhausting day of trains, buses, and subways to reach Klosters, a half-hour train ride from Davos. I would have gone the whole way, but there was no chance I’d find a room there during the Forum, and I even had trouble in Klosters, trudging through snow from hotel to hotel, eventually lucking out in the one-star Adventure Hostel.
I passed out in my little room, and when I woke it was late. I showered and wandered down to the restaurant and gobbled down cheese and fruits and fondue with tortilla chips. I wasn’t alone in the restaurant—it was full of young people chattering in European languages. Journalists, I supposed. Hand-to-mouth scribblers come to find a new angle on the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. I wondered who they thought would speak to them. They were all hunched over phones and laptops, except for one table in the back where a woman about my age sat with a tough-looking young man; they, unlike the others, had a notepad in front of them. They passed a pencil between them, each scribbling something on the page. At first, I thought they were deaf—but no, they were talking quietly to each other the whole time. Then the woman looked up, and around the restaurant. A pretty, serious face with dark hair that had been chopped short—it was so familiar. Did I know her? Someone from the Agency?
A wave of paranoia came over me. Was I already cornered?
Then the recognition came together, because sitting with Laura in the evenings, I’d seen the face so many times that it was a part of my internal landscape. Ingrid Parker, the de facto leader of the Massive Brigade. Here?
Of course here. Where else could she best stab at the heart of the international capitalist system that made American injustices possible? Not only possible, but probable? Where else could she attack the very kind of thinking that had resulted in Northwell and its Tourists? I—
But then she turned her head to the side, and the nose, I saw, was too long. The cheeks too sallow. She was very much like the feared Ingrid Parker, and the way she leaned conspiratorially close to her friend certainly looked like what people imagined she would be doing. But, no—this was an unfortunate doppelgänger.
And then my relief cracked when this faux Ingrid Parker looked up, across the restaurant, and into my eyes.
Suddenly terrified, I turned away and waved for the bill.
Up in my room, I threw on my coat and went out for some air. I skirted around cut snowbanks and followed people down to the center of Klosters, which was bright with illumination. Vendors and well-dressed visitors filled the streets and looked into the windows of stores that made me think of gingerbread houses. It was a spectacle of capitalism, so clean after the places I’d been. The bright, quaint opposite of Laayoune, and a part of me—a small part, admittedly—wanted to be back there. I hadn’t taken pictures and had nothing to show Rashid.
Was I really worrying about pictures to show my son? Yes. Because to worry about everything else, to worry about my dead brother, was too much to handle. Yet, by the time I found myself back at the train station, I realized that I hadn’t put any of it out of my mind after all.
The train was full of people far wealthier than me, and, looking out the windows at Klosters falling away and the trees and mountains rising in the darkness, I kept flashing on violence. In Laayoune and on that dark Spanish road, and the violent realization that my brother was one of them. How had that happened? What had brought Haroun from our mundane childhood to that place? I thought back to our fights about the world, how differently he saw it from me. That unbearable cynicism, the world as a perpetual power game, one without room for love or hope.
What they don’t admit is that everything is falling apart in slow motion.
It was late when the train pulled into Davos Platz, and the little station, like Klosters, was bright, scattered Swiss police milling on the platform. When I disembarked, I half expected them to ask for my papers, but they just watched us head through the cold, around the station to the square. That was when I finally saw a face I knew. He was standing by a black Mercedes sedan, scanning faces with the same expression as the cops on the platform. Then he caught my eye and jerked his head for me to come closer. I did, unsure what was going to happen next. Paul opened the back door and said, “Get in the fucking car, Abdul.”
Mel was waiting in the backseat. She did not look happy.
Still, there was no shouting or hand-wringing. We drove, mostly in silence, slowing for swarming pedestrians in the brightly lit streets, and stopping for a security check, where a Swiss soldier looked at the World Economic Forum passes held by everyone except for me. After some consultation, he waved us all on, and we got out at the small, six-story Congress Hotel, right next to the long, modern Congress Center. Paul handed the car keys to a bellhop, and he and Mel brought me up to a small room on the top floor, where Sally was waiting with a bottle of red wine for all of us to share.
She was clearly the one in control, leading the questions, and I took them through my journey through Casablanca, Laayoune, Foum el-Oued, Arrecife, then to Huelva. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d put it all in my report. She stopped me plenty of times, wanting to know more about Milo’s librarians—the Japanese man, who I guessed had been Poitevin, and the angry, now-dead Griffon. They wanted to know about Milo’s state of mind; my assessment that he was remarkably well adjusted, considering, seemed to disappoint them. They wanted to know about his sister, Alexandra. When they showed a lot of interest in Leticia Jones, I got the feeling that they had a history with her.
After taking them through the gunfight in the Spanish countryside, I finally turned the interrogation around. “What I need to know,” I told them, “is why you didn’t tell me about my brother.”
Sally blinked innocently at me. “Your brother?”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “You grilled me about him before I left. Then it turns out he’s working for them. He tried to kill us. Tried to kill me.”
“Is that why you didn’t come home, Abdul?” she asked. “Because of your brother?”
Now it was me who blinked. Rapidly, trying to get my vision straight. Tears had suddenly formed. “Why didn’t you prepare me?”
Sally looked over at Paul, who said, “Given the size of the planet, and where you were heading, we didn’t expect you to cross paths. Why burden you with more than you needed to know?”
“You knew who Haroun was working for.”
“Don’t give us omnipotence,” Sally warned. “We knew things, yes. We’d seen Haroun around. We’d connected him to others, but we didn’t know who they were working for. One of our better theories was that he was working with Milo Weaver. Particularly after we learned of the existence of the Library and its connections to the Massive Brigade.”
“And now you know that’s not true,” I said. “He tried to kill Weaver. He works for Northwell. They all do.”
Paul leaned back, chewing the inside of his mouth. Sally crossed her legs at the knee. And in the dark corner, by the bedside lamp, Mel’s shadowy form didn’t move at all. They didn’t look surprised—none of them did. They didn’t look angry or horrified or even, really, very interested. And that’s when it started to dawn on me. Not the details, but the shape—a hulking, dark shape coming out of the fog. A shape that, in a way, scared me more than men in Saharan alleyways, or even my brother coming back from the dead.
I said, “I don’t know how you’re not seeing it. This isn’t about the Massive Brigade. They aren’t the threat. These companies—MirGaz, IfW, Tóuzī, Nexus—they’re destabilizing the world for profit.”
“Now listen,” Sally said, looking deep into my eyes. “You’re upset. We get that. But listen, okay?”
I nodded dumbly.
“You’re bringing in all of this—this whole story—but you’re getting everything from a professional liar.”
“I’v
e taken that into account,” I blurted. “Each time—”
“Just listen, all right?” she said, a little less patient now. “Use your analyst skills. You’re getting everything from a single source. We, on the other hand, have you, the rest of the Agency, allied intelligence, and more SIGINT than you can imagine. Sources in industry and in our enemies’ camps. So when we tell you to bring it down a notch, it pays to listen.”
Paul cleared his throat, and Sally looked up at him. He had a question in his face, and she shrugged in answer, so he straightened and said, “Abdul. There are a lot of pieces on the board. Things you can’t be reading into. But I can tell you a few things. One: We weren’t kidding about a Massive Brigade threat. The Germans reported that Ingrid Parker is in Klosters. This is serious.”
“Klosters?” I asked.
They all noticed the tone in my voice.
“A couple of hours ago, I saw a near-perfect match for Parker. At my hostel, in Klosters. But it wasn’t her.”
Paul frowned. “You sure it wasn’t?”
“Absolutely.”
Sally said, “She was in Berlin, too. Your seeing someone else doesn’t mean Parker isn’t here.”
Paul seemed to agree with that assessment. He went on: “Second thing is we have multiple sources telling us Weaver was the one who killed Joseph Keller in Paris.”
“Of course you do,” I cut in, not liking the patronizing tone. “Russia, UK, China, Germany probably, and someone in the States. The same countries where Northwell has clients.”
Mel turned on the corner lamp, saying, “That doesn’t make them liars.”
“And what you don’t know,” Sally said, “what you don’t need to know—is that we’re not here to throw a grenade into things. Have you thought about what would happen if Milo Weaver’s story got out? Forget for the moment if it’s true or not. Think about the repercussions. Do you know how big Nexus has become? How much money they bring into the US economy? Last year, they posted a profit of over twenty-five billion. They’re expected to reach forty this year. That’s Apple and Facebook territory. What do you think this story would do to American innovation in the world?”
The Last Tourist Page 29