He looked up, but the Hyundai was gone. The driver had been one of the two in Berlin, the “Germans” who’d been shadowing him.
16
The existence of his shadow put a pall over the rest of the day’s surveillance. Had the Germans tracked him to London? Unlikely. More likely, they hadn’t been Germans in the first place, and it only proved that the file on him was more correct than Drummond knew: Milo wasn’t so clever after all.
He felt tense and exhausted by 4:00 P.M., when Ryan returned home for the evening. Still, he’d gotten his photographs, and in a pub, over a tepid plate of steak and kidney pie, he sent them to one of the phone numbers Drummond had given him-an analysis unit that had probably been pieced together from friends in the “war on drugs.”
By then, he had played and replayed his shadow’s face in his head, going over the previous months’ jobs, searching for some connection. Tourism, as Drummond had pointed out, is only as secure as its anonymity. The same is true for Tourists themselves. Their only real safety lies in their lack of identity, and when that disappears the world becomes far more dangerous.
Not just dangerous, but…
He stared at his plate, realizing that his shadow’s existence proved something larger than his own stupidity. He called Drummond. The voice mail answered. He said, “It’s no longer a theory,” then hung up. Within five minutes, his phone was ringing.
“What’s with the elusive messages, Hall? Is he or isn’t he selling secrets?”
“No sign yet. I mean the larger story. It’s not a theory.”
Drummond cleared his throat. “Some explanation, please.”
Milo tried. It was all about his shadow. Berlin, and now London. “Only the department knows my day-to-day location-correct?”
“Correct.”
“Well, if you really don’t have someone shadowing me-you don’t, do you?”
Drummond verified this with a grunt.
“Then someone inside the department is leaking my location, and has been doing so at least since Berlin.”
“Is the guy Chinese?”
“Don’t be simple, Alan. I just don’t see another way to explain it.”
He mused over that, humming. “Well, if you see him again…”
“I know. I will.”
The image analysts texted their reports on Ryan’s acquaintances. None raised any red flags, though one-the old woman the whole family helped to church-was unidentifiable. It was possible that Dzubenko had been mistaken about the day that information was transferred, or that the meeting time had been changed since his defection. Milo needed to be sure, though, so he returned to Hampstead Heath as the sun hung low, preparing to disappear, and rain began to fall. He checked the sodden ground along Ryan’s path and examined the two trees against which he’d stretched, but it was while he was crouched in the wet grass under the second of the three benches that he found it, and finding it surprised him almost as much as the German had.
It was a small USB flash drive, cleverly encased in two inches of wood, stuck with adhesive to the underside of the bench. A casual observer wouldn’t have noticed anything, and in the failing light Milo nearly missed it, too, but he was depending more on his hands than his eyes, and when he caught the edge of the wood he pulled and felt it break off easily into his palm.
He took out his phone, which contained a Company-installed standard USB port. As a light shower began, he copied the contents of the flash drive-three Word documents-then replaced it. He was soaking wet by the time he squatted among high shrubs farther down the incline.
The documents were encoded and unreadable, so Milo sent them to the analysts with a note for Drummond: From subject-no recipient yet. He pocketed the phone and made sure his view of the bench was unobstructed and clear (a lamppost illuminated the area), then checked the time. It was seven o’clock, cold and pouring rain, and he had no idea how long it would take for the drive to be picked up. It would be, he suspected, a very long night.
He was wrong. At a little after eight, a tall, elegant figure crossed the Heath, heading toward the bench. Milo brought the phone to his eye, zooming in. The figure paused by the bench and looked around. Milo lowered the phone and stood. “What the hell are you doing?”
Einner shook his head and walked down to him. “You must be freezing your ass off.”
“Get out of here.”
“Drummond thought you could use some help. You hadn’t moved for nearly an hour-he wanted to find out if you were dead.”
“He could’ve called.”
Einner didn’t answer. They both knew that Drummond just wanted to make sure Milo hadn’t abandoned his phone and walked.
“Did it pan out?” Milo asked.
“I found you, didn’t I?”
“I mean your angle. Did Marko’s story check out?”
“Yeah. And I assume that you sitting in the rain means yours is checking out, too.”
“Just waiting for the pickup.”
Einner grinned, then turned to look at the empty bench up the hill. He pointed at the nearby lamppost. “See that?”
“The lamp?”
“Yeah. Look at the top of it.”
When his eyes adjusted to the glare, he could make out three inconspicuous cameras atop the pole. He exhaled. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Sure you do,” Einner said and took out his phone. After a moment, he said, “Can I get a visual on a surveillance camera? Exactly, baby. Just see where I am and there should be three to choose from. I need a bench.”
As he waited for the reply he shrugged at Milo.
“How’s it coming in? Great. Listen, we’re going to need IDs on anyone who sits there or fools around with it. Particularly the latter.” He covered the mouthpiece and said to Milo, “Underneath?”
“Yeah.”
“You heard it? That’s what we’re looking for. And you’ll be reporting it directly to Hall. You have the number? Thanks, you’re a doll.” Einner hung up and opened his arms. “Come praise your betters.”
Milo patted his pockets and came up with Nicorette, feeling inept next to this tech-savvy young man.
Einner said, “Let’s go find some girls.”
17
They left the park separately and took the tube back into town. Appearing in public together would have broken any number of Tourism rules, so they settled for an indoor party. Milo picked up a new suit, and, even though Einner had said he would bring “something fun,” Milo bought a bottle of Finlandia vodka and another of some very dry Noilly Prat vermouth. He had just showered and dressed again when there was a knock at his door. Einner swept past him and examined the room, then sniffed the steam in the bathroom.
“Where’s the party favors?” asked Milo.
“Am I not enough?” Einner stripped off his coat, which was dry despite the rain outside-he was probably staying in the same hotel. “You just take care of the drinks, old man.”
“Vodka martini?”
“I’d kill you for one.”
Milo mixed them up in glasses in the bathroom, and when he emerged found Einner by the window, the blinds pulled, leaning over the breakfast table. With a credit card he was cutting up sixteen lines of cocaine.
Einner looked up, squinting. “The nose? Will it work?”
“I’ll give it my best shot.”
They sat across from each other at the table and toasted their survival. Einner made a face after his first sip. “Ouch.”
“More vermouth?”
“An olive might help.”
“They were out.”
Einner took another sip, then handed over a rolled ten-pound note. “Try that on.”
Milo stuck to the one swollen nostril with an open passageway, then passed back the note. He wiped his sore nose unconsciously and drank and watched Einner inhale two lines as if this were his morning routine.
“When was the last time you did blow?”
Milo’s memory seemed to be both slow and
quick. “Christ, six years ago? No, seven.”
“Aha! Back when you were the great Charles Alexander.”
They’d had this talk before. Milo said, “He was never as good as people would have you think. It’s a myth, just like the Black Book. It keeps Tourists on their toes.”
They did two more lines. Milo mixed more drinks. As he came out of the bathroom, his phone vibrated for his attention. It was a message from the analysts:
Package picked up. Pavlo Romanenko, third secretary political section, Ukrainian embassy, London.
“My lead checked out.”
“Two for two,” Einner said, then refused Milo’s offer of a Nicorette and nodded at the four remaining lines. “Ready?”
“I should take a break.”
“What you should do is quit wiping your nose.”
He hadn’t realized he was doing it. They both laughed; then Einner settled and said, very seriously, “You really think we’re in trouble?”
“With a mole?” Milo frowned at his glass. “Maybe. It’s looking like it.”
Silence followed. Einner then related the story of two Iranians he’d killed a few months ago in Rome. “Direct from Tehran to make local al Qaeda contacts. Typical setup. One, the nervous moneyman. The other a Revolutionary Guard to do the heavy lifting and keep Moneybags in line. I took out the tough one first-the guy hung around his hotel window too much-then went in for the soft target. It turned out I was wrong. Moneybags was as frothing as his guard. Nearly killed me with his hands,” Einner said, raising his own in a pair of claws. “Before I shot him, he asked if I knew why, in the end, his people would win. No, Mohammed. Tell me. His people, he said, still had belief on their side. We, on the other hand, had nothing.”
“How’d you answer that?” Milo asked, curious despite himself.
“How do you think? I killed him.” Einner finished his drink. “I wasn’t about to lecture him on the Black Book.”
Milo left to refill their drinks in the bathroom, wondering about the point of that story. When he returned, Einner was stretched out on the bed, stomach down, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. He took the martini with thanks.
“So why’d you come back?” Einner asked. “You were out of the Company. Grainger was dead, and you’d spent time in the pokey for his murder. You still came back.”
“Maybe I wanted a last fling with adventure. Some fun.”
That provoked a shake of the head. “No, man. You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.”
“Maybe I realized I’m no good at anything else.”
Einner seemed to believe that, then he didn’t. “You’re not that good. Not anymore.”
“To be honest, I don’t know. It was probably a mistake. You heard Drummond. I don’t care what reasons he comes up with, I’ll never regret not killing that girl.”
“She’s dead anyway.”
“Not by my hand.”
Einner sighed loudly. “Sounds like Mohammed was wrong-you, at least, have run head-on into your beliefs.”
Milo felt anxiety slipping through his buzz. “Maybe. But any department that orders a hit like that doesn’t deserve to stay around.”
“You just wander into the spy business yesterday?”
“Come on, James. Even you’ve got limits, right? If you’d been given that assignment-don’t tell me you’d actually do it.”
Einner thought a moment but didn’t answer. He raised himself from the bed, grabbed his martini, and lifted it. “To knowing what to do, and when.” They both drank; then Einner asked, “Did you ever figure it out?”
“Figure what out?”
“Last we talked, I was stewing in my own shit, and you were off to figure out who was assassinating Sudanese mullahs.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“It really was Grainger?”
Milo nodded. “But the orders came from Senator Nathan Irwin. He’s the one who ordered Angela killed, then Grainger, once he’d become a liability.”
“Fucking senators,” Einner muttered, and Milo realized that he’d already known all this. Perhaps Drummond had shared. He just wanted to know what Milo knew. Finally, Einner said, “This man must be on your shit list.”
There was no need to answer that.
Einner cleared this throat. “Let’s finish up this stuff.”
They took turns, then wiped the remnants onto their gums. Milo refilled their drinks, but when he came out again there were eight more white lines on the table. Einner was in one of the chairs, wiping his nose. “I’m close to the Book, Milo.”
“It’s Sebastian. And I don’t believe you.”
“Why not? You found a copy of it. In Spain, you said.”
“I was lying, James. There’s no such thing as the Black Book of Tourism.”
Einner rocked his head from side to side, digesting that. “We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve found clues. I think it’s in Bern.”
“What clues?”
“You think I’d tell you? An unbeliever?”
According to the legend that all Tourists learned at one point or another, twenty-one copies of the Black Book of Tourism had been hidden by a retired Tourist in secret spots throughout the world. The myth of Tourism’s Bible fed into each Tourist’s desire for a single guide to show him the path to survival and sanity and perhaps even morality in a profession that encouraged none of these things. Until last August, it had only been a myth.
Milo, driven by some undeniable desire while in prison, had sat down and written it himself. Not long-maybe thirty pages-but it summed up what he thought such a book should say. He’d later copied it out by hand into twenty-one children’s schoolbooks and, over the first month of his return to Tourism, spread them throughout Europe and Russia. Then, over time, he’d slowly left clues to their whereabouts.
So when Einner said that he was closing in on a copy in Bern, Milo could chart the clues that had brought him so far. A name engraved on the rear of a tombstone outside Malmö, Sweden. An address included in the records of that name, of a nonexistent patient in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, a Toulouse teaching hospital. On one of the exterior walls of that address in the north of Milan, the hardly visible polyurethane words MARIANS JAZZROOM. Einner was nearly there. Milo wondered, with a tinge of despair, just what he would make of his collected wisdom.
Einner was in the toilet when the knock on the door came. It was 11:00 P.M.
“Get that, will you?” Einner called, as if this were his room. “And don’t ever say I don’t take care of you!”
Through the peephole, Milo saw a wide-angled view of two women with faux-fur coats, short skirts, and tiny purses. They not only dressed the same but looked the same, and when he opened the door he realized they were twins.
With a rough working-class accent, one said, “James ’ere?”
“Be right out!” he called over the flushing toilet. “Make them some drinks, Sebastian!”
Milo invited them in and scooped up his phone. They peered around the room as if they’d never been in a hotel before, which he seriously doubted. One alighted on the lines of cocaine. “My kinda party, innit.”
“I’ll be back with the ice,” Milo said. They were already sitting down at the table, tightening the ten-pound note, when he closed the door behind himself. On his way down the corridor to the stairwell he heard Einner saying, “Where the fuck?”
Milo kept on until he had reached the hotel bar. He was suddenly ill, and for some inexplicable reason kept imagining James Einner with his throat cut. He drank gimlets to wash away the image. When he returned two hours later, the room was empty, but it stank.
18
The phone woke him at six. “Yeah?”
“Riverrun, past Eve.”
“And Adam’s.”
Drummond cleared his throat. “Looks like it’s verified.”
“Bad news.”
Milo heard papers shuffling through the line-if he was calling from New York, it was 1:00 A.M. there. “You’r
e going to Warsaw for the next one. It’ll take a little more time.”
“Okay.”
“How’s Einner treating you?”
“We’re old friends. But you knew that, of course.”
“Are you?” he said, then sighed. “Listen, I’ve gotten some word from a friend in Germany.”
“Friend? This have to do with-”
“It has to do with you, Hall. Your ethnic radar might not be so bad. Someone in German intelligence was looking for you, but I’m assured that it’s being taken care of.”
“Why were they looking for me?”
“It doesn’t matter. You should be clear now. If you do see them again, let me know. Got it?”
“Sure. That’s good news.”
“Good?”
“If the Germans are shadowing me, then a Chinese mole is no more likely than it was the day before yesterday.”
“It means we’re still deciding, Hall, which means you’re still vetting.”
He popped aspirin, a multivitamin, and two Nicorette-he’d left the Dexedrine in the hotel trash-then checked out. He tipped the doorman who found him a taxi, and nearly dozed on the ride to the airport, half dreaming of James Einner and his two friends.
Milo hadn’t slept with a woman since October, and that had been a clumsy, desperate attempt with his wife. A part of him wondered if he’d made a mistake sidestepping a night of mindless sex, if only because it carried no investment. Simplicity: just an easy trajectory toward orgasm. Unlike that last attempt in October, it might have been fun.
Fun.
You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.
His phone shivered on the M4, and he read the Warsaw instructions.
He was just in time to catch an eight twenty British Airways flight, and when he touched down at Frederic Chopin Airport a little before noon, he was nearly sick with hunger. The official guarding this Schengen entry point gave his Sebastian Hall passport a little more of an examination than he was used to, but in the end it was all the same. “Business or tourism?”
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