The Tourist Read online

  "No," said Milo. "He's never broken a law in the United States. He can come and go as he pleases, but I don't think he ever does."

  Simmons nodded, then placed both her hands flat on the table. "Anyway, we'll get to this in a little bit, but one thing's been nagging at me. After making all these connections, you went and killed Tom Grainger, right?"

  "Right."

  "In a fit of anger?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don't buy it."

  Milo stared at her. "I'd been through a lot, Janet. You never know how you're going to react."

  "And, by killing your boss, you've obliterated the only evidence that might have proven at least some small part of your story."

  "I never claimed to be a genius."

  The silence was broken by Janet Simmons's ringing phone. She looked at the screen, then walked to the corner, a finger pressed against her free ear as she answered it. Both men watched. She said, "Yes. Wait a minute. Slow down. What? Yeah-I mean, no. I didn't do that. Believe me, I had nothing to do with it. No-don't do that. Don't touch anything until I'm there. Got it? I'll be"-she glanced back at them-"a half hour, forty-five minutes. Just wait, okay? See you then."

  She snapped her phone shut. "I've got to go right now."

  Both men blinked.

  "Can we pick this up again tomorrow?"

  Milo didn't bother answering, but Fitzhugh stood, muttering, "I guess so."

  Simmons looked around the interview room. "And I want him out of here."

  "What?" said Fitzhugh.

  "I've cleared a solitary cell at the MCC. I want him moved there by the morning."

  MCC was the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a pretrial holding facility next to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.

  "Why?" asked Milo.

  "Yes," said Fitzhugh, annoyed. "Why?"

  She looked at Fitzhugh and spoke as if she were voicing a threat: "Because I want to be able to talk to him in a place you don't control completely."

  The air seemed to escape the room as she, miraculously, held both their gazes. Then she left.

  Milo said, "Looks to me like Ms. Simmons doesn't trust the CIA."

  "Well, fuck her," said Fitzhugh. "She doesn't tell me when my own interrogation ends." He shoved a thumb over his shoulder. "You know why she's hot and bothered now, don't you?"

  Milo shook his head.

  "We've got a Russian passport with your face on it, under the name Mikhail Yevgenovich Vlastov."

  Milo looked taken aback by that, because he was. Whatever plan Yevgeny had hatched, exposing his secret life couldn't be part of it. "Where'd you get it?"

  "That doesn't concern you."

  "It's a forgery."

  "I'm afraid not, Milo. Not even the Company makes them this good."

  "So what's it supposed to mean?"

  Fitzhugh reached again into his jacket and took out some folded sheets. He flattened them on the table. Milo didn't bother looking at them; instead, he watched the old man's eyes. "What's that?" he said flatly.

  "Intel. Compromised intel that ended up in Russian hands. Intel you had access to immediately before it was compromised."

  Slowly, Milo's gaze moved from Fitzhugh's eyes to the papers. The first one read:

  Moscow, Russian Federation

  Case: S09-2034-2B (Tourism)

  Intel 1: (ref. Alexander) Acquired Bulgarian embassy tapes (ref. Op. Angelhead) from Denistov (attache) and will forward via U.S. embassy. 11/9/99

  Intel 2: (ref. Handel) Recovered items from FSB agent (Sergei Arensky), deceased, include… copy of tapes from Bulgarian embassy (ref. Op. Angelhead). 11/13/99

  He knew from the concise style that Harry Lynch had put this together. He really was an excellent Travel Agent. In 1999, touring under the name Charles Alexander, Milo had acquired some secret embassy tapes from the Bulgarian embassy in Moscow. The acquisition was called Operation Angelhead. Four days later, another Tourist-Handel-had come across a dead FSB agent, or killed him, and upon his body found a copy of the Angelhead tapes. Milo didn't know how the copy had made it to the Russian.

  He flipped through the rest, pausing a moment longer on the third one, which read:

  Venice, Italy

  Case: S09-9283-3A (Tourism)

  Intel 1: (ref. Alexander) Track Franklin Dawdle, under suspicion of fiscal fraud in amount of 3,000,000 USD. 9/10/01

  Intel 2: (ref. Elliot) FSB source (VIKTOR) verifies Russian knowledge of the missing 3,000,000 via Dawdle, Frank, and the failed operation to recover in Venice. 10/8/01

  Fitzhugh read it upside down. "Yes, your last operation even made it to Moscow."

  Milo turned the sheets over. "Are you really that desperate, Terence? You can put a sheet like that together for any field agent. Information leaks. Did you check how many pieces of intel ended up in French or Spanish or British hands? Just as many, I'll wager."

  "We don't have a French or Spanish or British passport with your face on it."

  That was when Milo knew-Fitzhugh didn't care about his confession anymore. Murder was small fish when compared to being a double agent. It was the kind of catch that would add a gold star to Fitzhugh's record, and put Milo into either a lifetime of solitary or a quick grave.

  "Who gave it to you?"

  Fitzhugh shook his head. "We're not telling."

  No-Fitzhugh had no idea who had given it to him. Milo had a pretty good idea, though, and it threatened to atomize whatever faith he had left.

  11

  Tina had awakened that morning in Myrtle Beach and taken Stephanie out to the shore feeling lighter, almost forgetting about the tears from last night's poor sleep. She felt, she realized as she settled on a rented lounge chair and watched her daughter splash in the Atlantic, like a cuckolded wife, but the other woman couldn't be surveilled or attacked because the other woman was an entire history. It was not entirely unlike when she, in junior high school, started reading the alternate histories of her own country, finding out that Pocahontas had become a pawn in colonial power struggles and, after a trip to London with John Rolfe, died of either pneumonia or tuberculosis on the voyage back.

  But where those broken national myths had filled her with youthful self-righteousness and indignation, her husband's broken myths humiliated her, made her feel stupid. The only smart thing she'd done, she realized, was deny Milo his last request that they disappear with him.

  Her feelings intensified when they landed at LaGuardia, then took the airport shuttle into Brooklyn. The streets were claustrophobic, and each familiar storefront was another accusation from her old life. That was how she was beginning to see her life: old and new. The old life was wonderful because of its ignorance; the new life was terrible because of its knowledge.

  Their bags weighed a ton as she followed Stephanie, who rattled the apartment keys as she ran up the stairs. She reached the door while Tina was still on the second landing, opened it, then came out again and pressed her nose through the guardrail. "Mom?"

  "What, honey?" she asked, hiking the bags up onto her shoulder.

  "Somebody made a big mess. Is Dad home?"

  At first, when she dropped the bags and galloped that last flight, she was consumed by an inexplicable surge of hope. Lies or not, Milo had come home. Then she saw that the drawers in the table by the entrance had been pulled out and turned over, leaving a pile of loose change, bus tickets, takeout menus, and keys on the floor. The mirror over the table had been taken down and turned to face the wall, and the loose backing paper had been ripped off.

  She told Stephanie to wait in the hall while she examined each room. Destruction, as if an elephant had been mistakenly let in. She even thought: Come on, Tina, an elephant can't get up those stairs. She realized she was getting hysterical.

  So she called the number Simmons had left and listened to her calm voice insisting that this wasn't her doing, and she would be right over, and please don't touch anything.

  "Don't touch anything," Tina called as she
hung up, but Stephanie wasn't in the hall. "Little Miss? Where are you?"

  "In the bathroom," came the irritable answer.

  How much more of this could Stephanie take? How much could she take? She hadn't told Stef about the sudden expansion of her family, the addition of a great-grandfather and a new grandfather she'd met in Disney World, but Stephanie was nobody's fool. In the hotel room this morning she'd started asking, "Who were you talking to in the old people's home?"

  Tina, unable to keep lying to her own daughter, just said, "Someone who might know something about your daddy."

  "Something to help him?" Despite having never been told, she knew Milo was in some kind of trouble.

  "Something like that."

  Tina took her out for Cokes at Sergio's, a pizza joint, and called Patrick. He sounded sober and clearheaded, so she asked him to come over.

  He arrived before Simmons, and together the three of them returned to the apartment. The least-demolished room was Stephanie's, so they let her sort through her things while Tina told Patrick everything. Absolutely everything. By the time Simmons arrived, Patrick was in a state. Even during the height of his jealousy, he'd suspected none of this. Now he had to comfort Tina, who kept breaking down in tears. When Simmons stepped through the door, he turned on her.

  "Don't tell us you didn't do it, okay? Because we know you did. Who else would've done it?"

  Simmons ignored the blustering man and ranged through the apartment, stopping to smile and say hello to Stephanie, then took photos of each room with a little Canon. She stood in corners for multiple angles and crouched beside the disassembled television, the shattered vases (gifts, Tina explained, from her parents), the sliced sofa cushions, the small broken strongbox that had only held some family jewelry, though none of it had been taken.

  "Anything missing?" Simmons asked again.

  "Nothing." That, in itself, was depressing enough-after all this mess, no one had deemed her possessions worthy of stealing.

  "Okay." Simmons straightened. "I've documented it all. Now it's time to clean up."

  They got to work with broom and dustpan and Hefty bags Simmons had picked up from a convenience store. While she was squatting beside a broken mirror, picking up dozens of partial reflections of herself, she said, "Tina?" in her most friendly voice.

  Tina was behind the television, trying to screw the rear panel back on. "Yeah?"

  "You said some Company people came a few days ago. Two days before I visited. Remember?"

  "Yeah."

  Simmons walked over to the television, ignoring Patrick's accusing stare as he swept up shards of glass and pottery. "How do you know they were Company?"

  Tina let the screwdriver drop to the floor and wiped her forehead with her wrist. "What do you mean?"

  "Did they say they were Company, or did you just assume it?"

  "They told me."

  "Show you any ID?"

  Tina thought about that, then nodded. "At the door, yes. One was Jim Pearson, the other was… Max Something. I can't remember his last name. Something Polish, I think."

  "What did they ask you about?"

  "You know what they asked about, Special Agent."

  "No, actually. I don't."

  Tina came out from behind the television while Patrick looked for the best defiant pose. By the time Tina settled on the sofa, he had found it: He moved behind her, a hand on each shoulder. "Do you really need to interrogate her again?"

  "Maybe," Simmons said. She took the chair across from the sofa, the same place she'd sat during their first interview here. "Tina, it may be nothing, but I'd really like to know what kinds of questions they asked."

  "You think they're the ones who did this?"

  "Maybe, yes."

  Tina thought about it. "Well, they started with the usual. Where was Milo? And they wanted to know what Milo had told me in Austin."

  "When he asked you to leave with him," Simmons said encouragingly.

  Tina nodded. "I told them the other Company people had already been through that-your people, too-but they said maybe I'd forgotten something that would help them. They were actually pretty nice about it all. Like high school career counselors. One of them-Jim Pearson-he went down a list of items to see if anything rang a bell for me."

  "He had a list?"

  "In a little spiral notebook. Names, mostly. Names of people I didn't know. Except one.”

  “Which one?"

  "Ugrimov. Roman Ugrimov. You know, the Russian I told you about, from Venice. I had no idea why they'd bring him up now, so I dutifully said that I'd met him once, and that he'd killed a girl and I didn't like him. They asked when, I said 2001, and they said they didn't need to hear about it." Tina shrugged.

  "What other names?"

  "Foreign names, mostly. Rolf… Winter, or something like that."

  "Vinterberg?"

  "Yeah. And some, I guess, Scottish name. Fitzhugh.”

  “Terence Fitzhugh?"

  Again, Tina nodded. The look on Simmons's face encouraged her to go on. "When I said I didn't know anything about him, who he was or otherwise, they didn't believe me. I don't know why. It was all right that I didn't know Vinterberg, but Fitzhugh?" She shook her head. "That, they didn't buy. They said things like, Milo didn't tell you anything about Fitzhugh and some money? I said no. They kept pushing. At one point, Jim Pearson said, What about Fitzhugh in Geneva, with the minister of- But Max hit him in the arm and he never got around to finishing the question. Finally, once they saw I was really annoyed, they packed up their shit and left."

  While she'd been talking, Simmons had again produced her BlackBerry. She was typing. "Jim Pearson and Max…"

  "I don't know."

  "But they had Company IDs."

  "Yeah. They looked fine to me. I know Milo's pretty well-it keeps ending up in the wash."

  "And they never said why they were asking about Fitzhugh?"

  Tina shook her head. "I got the feeling Max thought they were saying too much." She paused. "You really think those are the guys who made this mess? They annoyed me, but I wouldn't expect this from them."

  "Like I said, Tina. It wasn't Homeland. I'd have heard about it.”

  “And the Company?"

  "Maybe, but I haven't heard anything from them either."

  Tina grinned. "You're still in counseling, right?"

  "Exactly." Simmons got to her feet. "Okay, let's get this place finished, and if you come across something that doesn't belong here, let me know."

  They spent the next three hours reassembling electronics, picking up broken pictures, and restuffing cushions. It was frustrating work for all involved, and halfway through it, Patrick opened a bottle of vodka for general use. Simmons declined with thanks, but Tina poured herself a tall shot and drank it down in one go. Stephanie watched all of this wryly. She spent most of the time in her own room, repositioning dolls that had been taken from their proper homes. Around seven, as they were finishing, she came out of her room holding a cigarette lighter that advertised a Washington D.C., bar, the Round Robin, at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

  "How about that," said Simmons, slipping on a latex glove and turning it over in her hand.

  "What is it?" asked Tina, a little bubble of adrenaline rising at the sight of physical evidence.

  "Strange, is what it is." Simmons held it up to the light. "I know the place-big politicians' haunt. It might be nothing though."

  "That's pretty bad tradecraft," said Tina. "Leaving something behind."

  Simmons slipped the lighter into a ziplock bag and pocketed it. "You'd be surprised just how lousy most agents are."

  "I wouldn't be," Patrick assured them all, and Tina almost smiled-the poor man was feeling left out.

  As she prepared to go, Simmons's phone rang. She took it into the kitchen. Tina caught a momentary, uncharacteristic sound of glee from the special agent's lips. "You're kidding! Here? Perfect."

  When she emerged from the kitchen, though, she was all
business again, and after thanking Patrick for his help she pulled Tina into the hall and told her that, in the morning, she'd be meeting with Yevgeny Primakov. Tina's feet went cold. "He's in New York?"

  "He'll be at the UN headquarters. It's a nine o'clock appointment. Do you want to meet him?"

  Tina considered it, then shook her head. "I need to go to the library, take care of stuff I've let slip." She paused, knowing that Simmons could see through the lie-the truth was that she was terrified. "But maybe later, you could… I don't know…"

  "I'll give you a full report. Sound all right?"

  "Not really," said Tina, "but it'll have to do."

  12

  Fitzhugh ate at the same Chinese restaurant on Thirty-third they'd ordered Weaver's takeout from. He chose a table near the back to avoid interruptions, and to ponder the Nexcel message he'd received from Sal.

  J Simmons sent request at 6:15 PM to DHS acting director requesting license to access bank and phone records of Terence A Fitzhugh. At present, request is under consideration.

  Over Szechuan chicken, he tried to think through this. It proved what he'd been sensing, that Simmons didn't trust him at all. It was in her tone, the entire way she dealt with him. Interagency rivalries were one thing, but this level of tension… she treated him as if he were the enemy. And now, she was asking Homeland's director for access to his records.

  So he'd nipped it in the bud with a phone call. The request for access, he had been assured, would be denied.

  Even so, he felt himself on the defensive, and that wasn't what he needed now. He should be leading the attack in order to control all possible damage by putting away Milo Weaver and ending this investigation.

  The passport. That was his trump card. He still didn't know who had sent it. Forensics had only produced a single white hair: Caucasian male, aged fifty to eighty, a diet high in protein-but that described half of the intelligence world. He no longer cared who his benefactor was; his only concern was to wrap up this case before Simmons found a way to ruin all their hard work.