The Nearest Exit

by Olen Steinhauer

  So far, no one had asked him a single question, and he wanted out. He’d grown sick of the stink. He’d watched the testosterone overflow and fights break out. Some skinheads had smuggled in a couple of knives, and two Bosnians had been cut already. More importantly, tomorrow he was expected at the Austrian embassy, and at this rate he wouldn’t get questioned until the middle of the week. So when one of the skinheads was returned to the cell, grinning, Radovan flagged his escort. “Tell Pavle Ðord-evi ć that Radovan Pani ć has information for him.”

  He’d seen Pavle Ðorð-ević in the unheated entrance when he and ten others were dragged in to join the crowd of young men that now numbered about two hundred. He’d known Pavle in high school, though to call them friends would have been a stretch. He’d punched Pavle’s face when both were fourteen, and the policeman’s long nose still made a slight detour halfway down to his lips. But it was the only name he knew.

  The cop pretended to ignore his request, and after he left some of the Bosnians began to hassle him-who was he planning to give up? He stood his ground and told them that a well-known Novi Beograd gangster was his boss. It was enough for them to give him breathing room.

  Hours later, around six thirty, he was led to an interview room, where Pavle sat smoking a Marlboro and scratching his broken nose. He ignored Radovan’s attempts at reminiscing and pocketed his cigarettes when Radovan made a move for them. He spoke as if he’d been awake for a week straight. “I don’t have time for your bullshit, Radovan. Get to the point.”

  “I’ve got information. Let’s make a deal.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “The good kind. The kind that gets you a promotion. You agree to let me go, and it’s yours.”

  “You’re going to tell me who organized the burning of the American embassy?” Pavle grinned. “That information won’t get me promoted. It might just get me a bullet in the head.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with Belgrade. No one gets in trouble except some foreigners.” He paused. “In particular, an American.”

  Pavle exhaled smoke, then after a moment placed his Marlboros back on the table. Radovan took one and waited for Pavle to light it. “Go on,” said the cop.

  “Do we have a deal? I’ve got to get out. Family business.”

  “If it’s as good as you say, then sure.”

  “It is, Pavle. Believe me.”

  7

  The request came in the form of a morning e-mail with a red priority flag, asking her to please come to Conference Room S on the second floor for a 10:00 A.M. meeting. It had been sent by Teddi Wartmüller’s secretary.

  The second floor was a rarity for Erika. She kept to her office on the ground floor, and when the directors of the various departments wanted to talk, they came to her. There had always been a silent understanding in this, since the second floor was where they stocked the French wines and the ten-year-old single malts for serious intelligence bureaucrats poring over policy dictates and making serious decisions. Such important people required their meals be delivered and their drinks poured; it was a place Erika Schwartz did not belong.

  She’d been invited not merely to the second floor but to the most esteemed and contentious of the conference rooms. Each department had been tapped to pay for S’s renovation more than two years ago. They paid for the Spanish leather upholstery, the Italian cabinets, and the long conference table made of Finnish oak and fitted out with its own laptops and cameras for conference calls displayed on an enormous plasma television at the end of the room; at the other end, windows with electric blinds surveyed the grounds. The inevitable argument over funding this monstrosity had finally uncovered the true purpose of S, which was to impress the Americans. This, of course, was before the CIA’s Afghan heroin scandal shut down most of their joint operations, but construction had continued anyway. Since the room’s completion last year, not a single American had entered Conference Room S, nor had Erika.

  The irony was deeper, because Room S was only a stopgap before the entire building moved to the new headquarters in Berlin, which, according to recent estimates, would be finished by 2011. Even though the move was still at least three years off, the arguments and deals over who would get corner offices had been going on ever since Gerhard Schröder’s security cabinet decided five years ago to centralize the BND in Berlin. This, too, was a debate Erika had been left out of.

  As she prepared for the trip upstairs, her suspicions running in various unproven directions but self-consciously dwelling on those two empty wine bottles from Friday night, Oskar wandered in, his eye looking only a little better. “Any word on the face recognition?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I can call down.”

  “Don’t rush them.” She used the edge of the desk to pull herself up, then took a few steps forward. Her feet were sore from the weekend, and she wondered miserably if she was going to have to buy a cane. That, really, would be the end.

  She went alone to the elevator, and on the second floor young assistants with folders sped past her to their important duties. Room S, on her right, was locked, but through the blinds she saw four people positioned around a hectare of oak. The laptops were packed away.

  Her heart sank. Standing around the head of the table, sipping coffee from a china cup, Brigit Deutsch and Franz Teufel were laughing at one of Teddi Wartmüller’s bad jokes, while Berndt Hesse, the one friendly but unexpected face in the room, sat nursing his cup as if no one were there. She knocked, and Berndt looked up and said something to Brigit, who pressed a button on the table to unlock the door.

  “Erika!” Wartmüller announced as she came in. His cheeks were unusually red today, belying a long-lost youth that had been crushed by his rigorous climb to the top of Berlin’s intelligence apparatus. Not that his wild ways had disappeared entirely, though-the world of rumor had a special corner for stories of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual escapades. A devout bachelor since a late-seventies divorce, he’d over the years let slip innuendoes about key parties, exotic clubs, and boys, though no one ever knew if they were true or only to embarrass guests.

  “Please,” said Wartmüller, waving his hands around. “Sit down and I’ll have Jan bring some croissants.”

  “Just coffee, please,” she said as she shut the door and gradually made it to a seat on Berndt’s side-he gave her a clandestine wink.

  Wartmüller pressed another button and ordered a fresh round of coffees, then clapped his hands together. “We’re all here, then.”

  Brigit and Franz took seats on either side of Wartmüller like, Erika thought, synchronized dancers. They were his twin acolytes-Wartmüller always kept two young apprentices to play off one another-and between them, in the middle of the table, was a single yellow file. Yellow-a departmental work order.

  Jan, an elegantly attired Pole who’d come with Room S, arrived carrying a tray. He collected the empty cups and replaced them with steaming coffees, then left. With a twinkle in her eye, Brigit went to a cabinet at the end of the room. She took out an untouched bottle of Asbach brandy and said, “I’m going to spice mine up. Anyone else?”

  A trick, Erika thought. She covered her cup with a hand, wondering if they’d actually gone over security footage just to find out how much she was drinking. Had things really become that petty? “Straight for me, thanks,” she said.

  Brigit, unfazed, cracked open the bottle and poured a healthy dose into her own cup.

  “Now that that’s out of the way,” Wartmüller said, giving Brigit a mock glare, “we can get to it. Erika has had a busy weekend.”

  Talking as if she weren’t in the room was another Wartmüller technique, a very effective one.

  “Perhaps she can tell us what she’s been up to?”

  She saw no reason to lie, so she didn’t. As she talked, though, another part of her wondered how they’d learned about her activities-from their faces, none of what she said was news. She was confident enough of Oskar’s loyalty not to
question it now, but perhaps poor, emotional Hans Kuhn had been cornered.

  Then again, she had nothing to hide, so perhaps their source didn’t matter.

  “Would you call this investigation a personal favor for your friend the policeman?” Wartmüller asked.

  Berndt cut in, speaking his first words. “Favor or not, I think this falls under your jurisdiction.”

  Erika appreciated the interruption. Back in West Germany, during that other time, she and Berndt had been confidantes of a sort. Once foreign policy had been reassessed after ’89 and each was forced to find new specialties, they had kept up contact. She remained in intelligence, while he moved on-she couldn’t quite call it up-into politics.

  She said, “As Berndt points out, it did seem to fall within our scope. Yes, Inspector Kuhn called me because of our friendship, but I took it on because I considered it our responsibility. That’s why I felt free to use our resources.”

  Wartmüller grinned. “Oskar Leintz-he’s one of our resources. Looks to me like you’ve been getting the poor boy into trouble.”

  “He had an accident on some stairs.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  As this seemed to be his cue, Franz reached for the yellow file and pushed. It slid down the long table toward Erika but stopped halfway. Berndt had to get up and reach out to drag it the rest of the way. Because they worked as two sides of the same person, Brigit did the speaking for Franz. “This is part of your investigation?”

  Inside the file was a still from the Berlin video. The man, clear from the excellent image reconstruction, had heavy, tired eyes but otherwise looked fit. Handsome in an entirely anonymous way as he talked to Adriana. She turned it over and scanned the next page, important details leaping out at her. The BMW the kidnapper had driven had been reported stolen and subsequently found, abandoned and clean, in the Tempelhof parking lot. The Opel driven by the kidnapper’s possible shadow had been rented by an American, whose name they had no record of. Then she saw that the face-recognition software had found a name: Milo Weaver. American. Last known employer: Central Intelligence Agency.

  Despite the elegant surroundings, she said, “Scheisse.”

  “Indeed,” Brigit said into her spiked coffee.

  His point made, Wartmüller returned to the second person. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’re objective enough for this job, Erika. You do seem obsessed with the Americans.”

  There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when the intelligence she offered on the Americans could be taken at face value. No longer. That had ended with Afghanistan, poppy fields, and processed heroin making it all the way to Hamburg.

  She’d discovered the trail in late 2005, more luck than detective work, while tracking suspected terrorists who turned out to be simple drug barons. Yet the foil-wrapped bricks they brought into the EU had begun life in fields of Taliban prisoners guarded by the U.S. Army. The bricks were sold on to packagers and then distributors in Europe. All run by the CIA to fund things that its masters in Congress chose not to pay for, or didn’t know existed.

  She’d brought the information to Wartmüller immediately, and his initial reaction had been the same as hers: disbelief, followed by outrage. She’d even been impressed that a man like him could still feel outrage. He praised her work and told her she would be a crucial part of the nasty job they were going to pull on the cretins at Langley.

  A week passed, then two, and she finally got another appointment with him-his schedule had suddenly become full. The outrage was gone, replaced by the stoic pragmatism that she’d expected in the first place. Yes, they were all outraged, he explained, but it had been decided that the greater good needed to be served. In this case, the greater good constituted the reams of excellent intelligence the CIA shared with them as it battled terror around the world. “It’s a matter of keeping your head, Erika.”

  Maybe Erika had been at fault-two years later she still couldn’t be sure. In her own estimation, she had kept her head, even as she arranged a slim package of evidence and, in a London pub, handed it off to a representative of Senator Harlan Pleasance, a Republican who was running a committee investigating CIA finances. Pleasance, she knew, was eager for the national spotlight and would squeeze the maximum use out of it. Which was what he did. The story spread like a pandemic, and in the face of protests Berlin had no choice but to condemn the CIA and sever many of its joint operations. Which was why Room S had never been used for its intended purpose.

  Wartmüller figured it out, of course. Though no physical evidence could convict her of leaking classified information, she was the only possible source. Evidence has only a slight advantage over rumor, and Wartmüller had spread the story around the intelligence community: Watch out for Erika Schwartz. She’s corrosively anti-American.

  Now here she was again. She had a CIA employee on tape kidnapping a Moldovan girl who had spent an unimaginable period suffering nightly multiple rapes in a foreign land that later became her home.

  “I’ve talked to Dieter,” Wartmüller told her. “He’s happy to take over the case.”

  Dieter Reich was one year away from retirement, with an undistinguished history that had earned him a basement office. “Sir, I don’t think Dieter can-”

  “It’s done,” said Brigit, and Franz nodded to remove all doubt.

  She looked at Berndt, who seemed to be avoiding her face. “Well, Berndt? Is there a reason you’re here to witness this?”

  He swallowed and stared at his hands, still clutching his coffee cup. “I’m the one who brought the order, Erika. It’s direct from Berlin. No one wants you mixing with the Americans anymore. They wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “They? The CIA, you mean?” It came out louder than she had planned, and she felt sweat collecting on the back of her neck. “Well?”

  “Yes,” he said while the others just stared. “We can’t afford to piss off the Americans any more than we already have.”

  “And Reich?”

  “Their suggestion,” he said, an involuntary twitch playing around his left eye. “They feel like he’s someone they can work with.”

  8

  She spent the rest of the morning in her office, researching Milo Weaver, once of the Central Intelligence Agency. As of last year, according to what information they had, he had been dismissed from his supervisory position in a New York office (the purpose of which was murky) under suspicion of financial misconduct. For this, he’d spent a month and a half in prison until his name was, also according to the file, cleared. Since then, Milo Weaver had been unemployed, living in Newark, New Jersey. He was separated from his wife and daughter, who lived in Brooklyn.

  None of this was familiar, but she still felt a pang of something like familiarity. Had she met this man before? She didn’t know the face, though something in those heavy eyes nagged at her. The name? Milo was not so uncommon in the East, but this man was a westerner…

  There was only one record of him being in Europe recently-Budapest. She found this not from his file but by cross-referencing reports from various European sources. In December, Johann Thüringer, a German journalist who made occasional reports to the military’s intelligence office, the ANBw, from his home base in Hungary, reported that a stringer for the Associated Press, Milo Weaver, had arrived looking for Henry Gray, another journalist, American, who had disappeared. Interesting, but of little use to her now.

  At noon, the BND operator forwarded a call to her. It was Andrei Stanescu, Adriana’s father. He’d said so little in Berlin that at first she didn’t recognize his soupy accent, but she did recognize the desperation in the gasps between his labored German words. “What I like to know is the name, please. The name of this man what kill Adriana.”

  She lied. She said that they still didn’t have anything on the man. When he asked why his face wasn’t in the world’s newspapers, as his daughter’s face had once been, she began to stutter. Literally. She couldn’t quite get the lies out in a convincing manner. So she pushe
d responsibility away entirely. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanescu, but I’m no longer heading the investigation. You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Dieter Reich.”

  After getting rid of the Moldovan, she called on Oskar, who had been sipping coffee in the break room, chatting up the girls from the second floor for information. “Anything?” she asked.

  “Wall of silence.”

  “I want to know where Milo Weaver has been during the last few months, and where he is now. Can you do that?”

  Oskar had the energy of youth and the temerity to think all doors were open to him. In this case, he would have to reach the basement-level room that tapped into U.S. satellite communication, which kept real-time track of border stations across the world and the passports that crossed them. “Sure,” he said, “but Teddi will know. An hour, maybe two-but he’ll know. Is it really worth it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  He frowned at her desk, perhaps wondering if he was overstepping some line.

  “Go ahead,” she told him.

  “Why not just let it go? It’s barely even our jurisdiction. Let Dieter have it.”

  She considered that, because it was a good point. Erika had enough to deal with. Why fight for a case no one wanted her on? Perhaps it was this, finding out it had to do with the Americans. She was living up to the role they had all imposed on her, of the slavering anti-American.

  No. It was Adriana. It was knowing all she’d been through.

  “The way I see it,” she said, “I can either do my job, or I can retire. I’m not quite decrepit yet.”

  The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he shrugged. “Well, in an hour or two he’ll know.”

  “By then,” she told him, “I’ll be back on the case.”

  Her self-confidence was more than delusion. Before her fall from grace, Erika had devoted numerous hours to investigations directed at members of the BND itself. Occasionally, when rumors became too prevalent, she was called in to assess their factual basis-a position that had earned her no new friends. Twice her investigations had ended in dismissals, once in jail time, and once in suicide-yet in that last case her research finally cleared the man in question.