The Tourist Page 13

  On Milo 's suggestion, they left the hotel by the rear stairwell and slipped out through the service entrance. Einner insisted on driving, and as they sped along the Al toward Charles de Gaulle, Milo filled him in on what Angela had told him the previous night.

  "You were supposed to call me, Weaver. Wasn't that our deal?"

  "I thought you'd at least leave the microphones on."

  Einner shook his head, frustrated. "We made a deal. I stick to my deals."

  "You cleared it with Tom, didn't you?"

  A pause. "At first he said no, but he called back and told me to do as you asked. But still, Weaver. You should've called."

  "Sorry, James." He continued with Angela's tale of the young Sudanese radical convinced his mullah had been killed by the West.

  "So he saw a European face," said Einner. "What's that mean?"

  "It means the Tiger wasn't lying. He did kill Salih Ahmad. And probably not for the president. If I believe Angela's story- and I do-then I don't think she was ever in contact with Herbert Williams. I think Williams was spying on her. Maybe he worried she was looking into his identity-who knows? If she was tracking Rolf Vinterberg in Zurich, and if Vinterberg is connected to Williams…" Anything, really, was possible. "All I know is that Angela started collecting evidence, then she ended up dead."

  "What about Colonel Yi Lien?" Einner asked. "You can weave whatever complicated story you want, but the fact remains that he got hold of information that she had access to. This Williams character was photographed with Lien. You're not seeing this straight, Weaver."

  "But it makes no sense," Milo insisted. "If Angela was leaking information, then why would her controller kill her? That only draws more attention."

  "So she couldn't give up his identity," Einner said, as if this were obvious.

  "No," Milo began, but he didn't have anything to follow it up with.

  "Whatever the reason," said Einner, "killing Angela served some purpose. We just don't know what it is yet."

  Einner was right, and he knew it. He noticed how the young Tourist's hands trembled on the wheel. Was that how he could be so bright-eyed this early in the morning? "Are you doing uppers?"

  Einner gave him a sidelong glare as he took the airport exit. "What?"

  "Amphetamines, coke, whatever."

  "You think I'm high?"

  "I mean in general, James. For the job. To keep going." A bouquet of road signs listed airlines. "Now and then, sure. When I need to."

  "Watch out. They ruined me in the end. I was a real mess.”

  “I'll remember."

  "I'm serious, James. You're a good Tourist. We don't want to lose you."

  Einner shook his head to shake off the confusion. "Fine. Okay."

  Together, they bought a ticket from a pretty Delta clerk who'd shaved her head bald, then settled in a cafeteria to wait for the plane. Since there was no hard liquor available, Einner took a small, leather-covered flask of bourbon from his jacket. He set it on the table and told Milo to drink. As it burned Milo 's throat, the bourbon shook loose a thought. "Dead drop."

  "What?"

  "Something about this never felt right. If Angela was passing secrets to Herbert Williams, then why did she meet him in the flesh? That's not how you do it. You meet once, set up a dead drop, and never see each other again. That's Spying 101."

  Einner considered this. "Some do meet face-to-face."

  "Sure," said Milo. "If they're lovers, or associates, or friends. But Angela wasn't this man's lover. And she was too smart to risk exposure like that."

  They both stared across the field of faces around them, running through this. Some faces stared back-children, old women, and: there. Milo straightened. The dirty-blond woman with the swollen eyes. She was some distance away, beside one of the curved bubble-windows, smiling distractedly, but not precisely, at him. The handsome man beside her wasn't smiling.

  Milo wondered, stupidly, why they always showed up at restaurants.

  "Wait here," he said and walked toward the couple. The woman's smile dissipated. She said something to her partner, who put a hand under the lapel of his jacket, as if he were packing heat. Perhaps he was.

  Milo stopped several feet short so the man wouldn't feel the need to take his hand out of his jacket. To the woman, he said, "Did you assemble a good report? Want my flight plan?"

  This close, he could see a light sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks. She spoke English well, but with a heavy accent, so he had to pay attention to each word. "We have plenty of information now, Mr. Weaver. Thank you. But perhaps you can tell me-who is your friend?"

  All three of them turned to look at the cafeteria table, but Einner had already disappeared. "What friend?" Milo asked.

  The woman cocked her head and blinked at him. She reached into her pocket and took out a leather identification booklet. A yellow card inside identified the woman as an SGDN officer attached to the DGSE, or the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure – external security. As he got to her name-Diane Morel-she snapped the ID shut. "Mr. Weaver, the next time you come to France, I hope you'll get in touch with us."

  He started to say something, but she was already turning and, with a nod at her partner to follow, heading down the corridor.

  Milo walked back toward the table, worrying over this, then spotted Einner behind a family of Orthodox Jews. They met among the seats in between.

  Einner stared at him, round-eyed. Milo held up a hand. "Yeah, I know. I'm losing it."

  "But how do you know her?"

  "She and her buddy were the ones following me."

  "Why?"

  "Just keeping an eye out for trouble."

  Einner stared down the corridor at their dwindling forms. He turned to Milo. "Wait a minute. You don't know who that was, do you?"

  "She's a DGSE agent. Diane Morel. The ID looked fine.”

  “DGSE?"

  Milo finally placed a hand on Einner's shoulder and forced him into a plastic chair. "What's the big puzzle, James?"

  Einner opened his mouth, closed it, then said, "But that's Renee Bernier."

  "Colonel Yi Lien's girlfriend? The novelist?”

  “Yeah. I've seen all the pictures."

  Instinctively, Milo stood, but it was too late. The French agents were gone.

  19

  The eight-hour flight was without turbulence, and he was able to catch about three hours' sleep before landing at JFK a little after noon on Saturday. Once he'd endured the long line at passport control, he rolled his carry-on through tired crowds and out the front doors, then stopped. Leaning against a black Mercedes with tinted windows was Grainger, arms crossed over his chest, staring at him. "Need a lift?"

  "I've got a car," Milo said, not moving.

  "We'll take you to it."

  "We?"

  Grainger made a face. "Come on, Milo. Just get in the car."

  The other half of "we" turned out to be Terence Fitzhugh from Langley, which explained Grainger's mood. The assistant director of clandestine operations was settled uncomfortably behind the driver's seat, his long legs just fitting in. After Milo had put his bag in the trunk, he was invited to join Fitzhugh. Grainger had been relegated to chauffeur, and Milo wondered if Fitzhugh was sitting behind him as protection against potential snipers.

  "Tom tells me there was a problem in Paris," Fitzhugh said once they were under way.

  "Not a problem. Many problems."

  "More than Angela Yates getting killed?"

  "Turns out your Chinese colonel, the one who had the memo, was being worked by the French." He peered up at Grainger, who was watching them in the rearview. "Lien's girlfriend, Bernier. She's DGSE. Real name, Diane Morel. Whatever she was doing with the colonel, French intelligence was getting its share of his hard drive."

  "Is that some crude innuendo?" said Fitzhugh.

  "You know what I mean."

  "Tom? Why the hell didn't we know this?"

  Grainger was focused on the traffic leading ou
t to the parking lots. "Because the French didn't tell us."

  "Did we tell them we were interested in the colonel?"

  Silence.

  Fitzhugh let it go and returned to Milo. "So. We shell out for airfare and an expensive hotel, and all you've got for us is bad intelligence and a dead employee?"

  "More than that," Milo said. "Angela's supposed contact-Herbert Williams-he's the same cutout the Tiger dealt with. The same man who ended up killing the Tiger. Angela wasn't giving him anything; I think he was shadowing her."

  "Better and better," Fitzhugh mused, tapping the back of Grainger's seat. "Any good news for me, Milo? I'm the one who has to go back to Langley and talk up Tourism. I'm the one who has to show them what kind of excellent work is done at the Avenue of the Americas. I could, of course, report that the office is full of idiots who don't know a DGSE agent when they see one and confuse a shadow with a contact, but I fear they'll decide it's time to cut the department entirely."

  Milo rubbed his lips before answering. One of the virtues of Tourism is the individual agent's overall ignorance. All the Tourist need know is the content of his orders. Since leaving the field, though, Milo had grown weary of this continual self-justification to bureaucrats like Fitzhugh. "Listen," he said, "the problem's not with our operation. Without Einner's work, we wouldn't have extra photos of Herbert Williams. And without Angela's work, we wouldn't know that the Tiger was paid through a bank in Zurich by a man named Rolf Vinterberg."

  "Vinterberg? Who the hell's Vinterberg?"

  "It's an alias, but it does put us that much closer to whoever was paying the Tiger. Also, Angela came across a Sudanese radical who actually saw the Tiger delivering Mullah Salih Ahmad's corpse to his backyard."

  "I see," said Fitzhugh, nodding. "So the president of the Sudan hired the Tiger. See? That's intel."

  "We don't have anything on the president. In fact, I don't think it was him. Neither did the Tiger."

  "Now I'm really fucking confused," said Fitzhugh.

  "Think of it this way," Milo said in his most professorial voice. "We're looking for the person who killed the Tiger. I think that same person killed Angela and is responsible for killing Mullah Salih Ahmad."

  Fitzhugh stared at him, unblinking, as he processed this. Grainger turned into the Lefferts Boulevard B parking lot, neck craned. "Where's your car?”

  “Let me out here."

  Grainger parked between two rows of dusty cars, but the conversation wasn't over yet. Milo waited until Fitzhugh, having considered the matter carefully, said, "He's dead, Milo. The-look, I'm not going to call him the Tiger. That's just stupid. Give me one of his names."

  "Samuel Roth."

  "Okay. This Sam Roth-he's dead. Now, I can take this information to Langley, but to them it's a cold case-it's Homeland's cold case. Who paid him, who killed him-to Langley, that's all moot. It won't give the president a boner. To give the president a boner, they'll want something active to pass on. What they want is for us to stop the bad shit before it happens. The whole world thinks it knows who killed this mullah, so spending money to prove this wrong isn't exactly priority. Besides, the world's a better place without that fucking mullah. Got me?"

  Milo did.

  "What you need to do now is focus on the jihadis who are still alive. The ones who are still a threat to world peace and banking. That's the kind of live bait they want to hear about in Virginia."

  "Yes, sir," said Milo.

  "Good. I'm glad we see eye to eye." Fitzhugh stuck out a hand, and Milo took it.

  Grainger helped him take his bag from the trunk, whispering, "Thanks."

  "For what?"

  "You know what. For not telling him the Tiger used to work for us. That would really mark the end of things.”

  “You promised to tell me about it."

  "Tomorrow," Grainger said and patted Milo 's shoulder. "Come by the office and I'll let you read the file. Deal?”

  “Sure."

  20

  The conversation with Fitzhugh had done nothing to relieve his anxiety, had in fact exacerbated it, so after leaving the airport Milo popped the battery out of his phone, took some turns, and headed farther out on Long Island. He took an exit and parked among dilapidated clapboard houses. For ten minutes, he watched children hanging out on stoops until he was sure no one had followed him. He made a U-turn, then followed another path, looping toward the island's midpoint, where he parked again at a series of narrow storage rooms surrounded by a chain-link fence called Stinger Storage.

  Milo had always been a many-key kind of man. He had a key to his car, his apartment, his desk in the office, Tina's parents' house in Austin, and one unmarked key that-were he asked-he would say led to his apartment building's shared basement. In truth, that key opened this storage space.

  The key fit, but after so long the lock had clammed up, so it took a moment. Then he opened the door to the deep closet where he kept his secrets.

  It was no bigger than a single-car garage, and over the years he'd filled it with items that might, at some point, prove useful. Money in various currencies, credit cards under different names, with driver's licenses to match. Pistols and ammunition. He had

  CIA-issued passports that he'd kept after jobs were done, claiming they'd been lost along the way.

  In a separate combination safe in the rear of the room were two metal boxes. One was filled with family documents-documentation he'd collected over the years that tracked the life of his mother. His real mother, the ghost-mother he'd never told Tina, or even the Company, about. There were also copies of Company files about his biological father, another secret. For now he wasn't interested in this. He took out the second box.

  Inside were documents that had nothing to do with the Company. He'd put them together years before, after reading of a family-husband, wife, and baby daughter-who had been killed in a road accident. He tracked down their Social Security numbers and slowly reintroduced them into society. Bank accounts, credit cards, some small property in New Jersey, and a post office box not far from that little house. Eventually, he ordered passports for all of them with his family's photographs. According to the official documents in that box, the Dolan family-Laura, Lionel, and little Kelley-was alive and healthy.

  He slipped the three passports and two credit cards into his jacket pocket and locked everything up. Not until he was on the main road again, near where he had first changed direction, did he slip the battery back into his phone and power the thing up.

  He couldn't say exactly why he'd taken this precaution. It was Fitzhugh, he supposed, biting at his heels. Or Angela being suddenly gone, and the unsettling feeling that her death meant a lot more than was visible to the naked eye. The ground had become just a little less secure. He got this feeling sometimes, either from real reasons or simple paranoia, and it calmed him to collect the Dolan papers and know that, at any moment, he and his family could disappear into the anonymous currents of human bureaucracy.

  As before, he listened at the door. There was no television, but he could hear Stephanie quietly singing "Poupee de cire, poupee de son." He used his key and set his bag beside the coats, calling in a television-husband voice, "Honey, I'm home!"

  Stephanie appeared from the living room and threw herself into his midsection, knocking the air out of him. Tina followed her out, but slowly, rubbing her disheveled hair and yawning a smile. "Glad you're back.”

  “Hangover?"

  She shook her head and smiled.

  Twenty minutes later, Milo was eating leftover stir-fry on the sofa; Tina was complaining about the stink-possibly of cigarettes, though she couldn't be sure-all over him; and Stephanie laid out her plans for Disney World before climbing off the sofa to go search for the television remote. Finally, Tina said, "You going to tell me about it?"

  Milo swallowed a final bite of stir-fry. "Let me take a shower first."

  21

  Tina watched him groan as he got off the sofa, push past the coffee table, and lea
ve the room. There was something surreal about this, the way that Milo had returned home from a trip where his oldest friend had died, and now everything was back to normal.

  She'd met Milo in the most extreme of circumstances-not even her parents knew what had happened in Venice -and suddenly he was just there. No explanations, no apologies. It was as if he'd been waiting for years on that damp Venetian street for her to appear, waiting for someone to devote himself to.

  "I'm a spy," he told her a week into their swiftly escalating affair. "Or I was, until the day we met."

  She'd laughed at that, but it was no joke. The first time she'd seen him, he'd had a pistol in his hand. She'd assumed he was a cop of some sort, or a private investigator. Spy? No, that had never occurred to her. Well, why, then, did he quit that job after they met?

  "Just too much, I guess. Way too much." When she pressed, he admitted something that she had to work a while to accept: "I came close to killing myself a few times. Not pleas for attention, because in that life an attempted suicide doesn't get you any attention. It just gets you retired. No, I wanted to die, just so I could stop having to live. The effort was driving me nuts."

  That threw her. Did she want a potentially suicidal man in her life? More importantly, did she want one in Stephanie's life?

  "I grew up in North Carolina. Around Raleigh. When I was fifteen, my parents died in a car accident."

  At that, her face had stiffened, and maybe it was this tragedy that made her suddenly feel a rush of love for this man who was still, essentially, a stranger. Who, after that, wouldn't be touched now and then by a terrible melancholy, even toy with thoughts of suicide? Before she could put her emotions, and the obligatory apology, into words, he'd gone on, as if he needed to quickly relieve himself of the whole story.

  "It was a small family. My father's side had all passed away, and my mother's folks died not long after I was born.”

  “So what did you do?"

  "I didn't have much choice, did I? I was fifteen, and the state put me in an orphanage. In Oxford. North Carolina, not England." He shrugged. "Not so bad as it sounds. In fact, my grades went up, and I got a scholarship. Lock Haven University. Small school in Pennsylvania. During a student exchange to England, some embassy goons visited me. Brought me to see Tom, who was in London then. They thought I might want to serve my country."