The Tourist Read online

  He stumbled to a stop. Perhaps it was a bomb. But bombs weren't pink, and they didn't hit like that. They exploded or crashed into the ground with hard noises. This pink thing hit with a soft, wretched thump. That's when he knew it was a body. On one side, spread among the splash of blood on the cobblestones, he saw a scatter of long hair-it was the pretty girl he'd spotted on the terrace last night.

  He looked up, but the terrace was again empty. The pregnant woman screamed, tripped, and fell backward.

  Frank Dawdle produced a pistol and shot wildly three times, the sound echoing off the stones, then turned and ran. Angela bolted after him, shouting, "Stop! Frank!"

  Charles Alexander was trained to follow through with actions even when faced with the unpredictable, but what he saw-the falling girl, the shots, the fleeing man-each thing seemed only to confuse him more.

  How did the pregnant woman fit into this?

  His breathing was suddenly difficult, but he reached her. She kept screaming. Red face, eyes rolling. Her words were a garbled mess.

  His chest really did feel strange, so he sat heavily on the ground beside her. That's when he noticed all the blood. Not the girl's-she was on the other side of the hysterical woman-but his own. He could see that now. It pumped a red blossom into his shirt.

  How about that? He was exhausted. Red rivulets filled the spaces between the cobblestones. I'm dead. Off to the left, Angela ran after the dwindling form of Frank Dawdle.

  Amid the indecipherable noises coming from the pregnant woman, he heard one clear phrase: "I'm in labor!"

  He blinked at her, wanting to say, But I'm dying, I can't help you. Then he read the desperation in her sweaty face. She really did want to stay alive. Why?

  "I need a doctor!" the woman shouted.

  "I-" he began, and looked around. Angela and Dawdle had disappeared; they were just distant footfalls around a far corner.

  "Get a fucking doctor!" the woman screamed, close to his ear. From around that far corner he heard the three short cracks of Angela's SIG Sauer.

  He took out his telephone. The woman was terrified, so he whispered, "It'll be all right," and dialed 118, the Italian medical emergency number. In stilted, too-quiet Italian from just one painful lung, he explained that a woman on the Rio Terra Barba Fruttariol was having a baby. Help was promised. He hung up. His blood was no longer a network of rivulets on the ground; it formed an elongated pool.

  The woman was calmer now, but she still gasped for breath. She looked desperate. When he gripped her hand, she squeezed back with unexpected strength. Over her heaving belly, he looked at the dead girl in pink. In the distance, Angela reappeared as a small form, hunched, walking like a drunk.

  "Who the hell are you?" the pregnant woman finally managed.

  "What?"

  She took a moment to regulate her breaths, gritted her teeth. "You've got a gun."

  The Walther was still in his other hand. He released it; it clattered to the ground as a red haze filled his vision.

  "What," she said, then exhaled through pursed lips, blowing three times. "What the hell are you?"

  He choked on his words, so he paused and squeezed her hand tighter. He tried again. "I'm a Tourist," he said, though as he blacked out on the cobblestones he knew that he no longer was.

  Part One. Problems of the INTERNATIONAL TOURIST TRADE

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 TO THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2007

  1

  The Tiger. It was the kind of moniker that worked well in Southeast Asia, or India, which was why the Company long assumed the assassin was Asian. Only after 2003, when those few photos trickled in and were verified, did everyone realize he was of European descent. Which raised the question: Why "the Tiger"?

  Company psychologists, unsurprisingly, disagreed. The one remaining Freudian claimed there was a sexual dysfunction the assassin was trying to hide. Another felt it referenced the Chinese "tiger boys" myth, concerning boys who morphed into tigers when they entered the forest. A New Mexico analyst put forth her own theory that it came from the Native American tiger-symbol, meaning "confidence, spontaneity, and strength." To which the Freudian asked in a terse memo, "When did the tiger become indigenous to North America?"

  Milo Weaver didn't care. The Tiger, who was now traveling under the name Samuel Roth (Israeli passport #6173882, b. 6/19/66), had arrived in the United States from Mexico City, landing in Dallas, and Milo had spent the last three nights on his trail, camped in a rental Chevy picked up from Dallas International. Little clues, mere nuances, had kept him moving eastward and south to the fringes of battered New Orleans, then winding north through Mississippi until late last night, near Fayette, when Tom Grainger called from New York. "Just came over the wire, buddy. They've got a Samuel Roth in Blackdale, Tennessee -domestic abuse arrest."

  "Domestic abuse? Can't be him."

  "Description fits."

  "Okay." Milo searched the cola-stained map flopping in the warm evening wind. He found Blackdale, a tiny speck. "Let them know I'm coming. Tell them to put him in solitary. If they've got solitary."

  By the time he rolled into Blackdale that Independence Day morning, his travel companions were three days' worth of crumpled McDonald's cups and bags, highway toll receipts, candy wrappers, and two empty Smirnoff bottles-but no cigarette butts; he'd at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he'd collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallasarea Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.

  Milo shouldn't have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River's tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn't look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter's July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.

  Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn't ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo 's mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox's wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo 's hangover had been pleading for.

  Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. "I will have to get your signature, understand."

  "I'd expect nothing less," Milo said. "Maybe you can tell me how you caught him."

  Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn't showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff's face. "Wasn't us. His girl-Kathy Hendrickson. A N'Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn't like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that's how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car. Eye-talian."

  "Fabio Lanzetti," said Milo.

  Wilcox opened his calloused hands. "There you go. We'd just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us."

  It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Israel. Now, he'd been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.

  "Nothing more?" he asked the sheriff. "No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?"

  The flesh under Wilcox's chin vibrated. "That's it. But this guy, Sam Roth… is that even his real name
?"

  Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. "Manny, we're not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it's different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where's she now?"

  The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. "Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her."

  "I'll want her, too."

  "Leslie can pick her up," Wilcox assured him. "But tell me-your chief said something about this-is that boy really called the Tiger?"

  "If it's who we think it is, yes. That's what he's called."

  Wilcox grunted his amusement. "Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak."

  Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox's homebrew. "Don't be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?"

  "Their president?"

  "Foreign minister. And in Germany there was the head of an Islamist group.”

  “A terrorist?"

  "Religious leader. His car exploded with him in it. And in London that businessman-"

  "The one who bought the airline!" Wilcox shouted, happy to know at least this one. "Don't tell me this joker killed him, too. Three people?"

  "Those are the three from last year we can definitely pin on him. He's been in business at least a decade." When the sheriffs brows rose, Milo knew he'd shared enough. No need to terrify the man. "But like I said, Sheriff, I need to talk to him to be sure."

  Wilcox rapped his knuckles on his desk, hard enough to shake the computer monitor. "Well, then. Let's get you talking."

  2

  The sheriff had moved three drunks and two spousal abusers to the group cell, leaving Samuel Roth alone in a small cinder-block room with a steel door and no window. Milo peered through the door's barred hatch. A fluorescent tube burned from the ceiling, illuminating the thin cot and aluminum toilet.

  To call his search for the Tiger obsessive would have been, according to Grainger, an understatement. In 2001, soon after he'd recovered from his bullet wounds in Vienna and retired from Tourism, Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghanistan, he would spend his time on terrorism's more surgical arms. Terrorist acts, by definition, were blunt and messy. But when someone like bin Laden or al-Zarqawi needed a specific person taken out, he, like the rest of the world, went to the professionals. In the assassination business, there were few better than the Tiger.

  So over the last six years, from his twenty-second-floor cubicle in the Company office on the Avenue of the Americas, he'd tracked this one man through the cities of the world, but never close enough for an arrest.

  Now, here he was, the man from that embarrassingly meager file Milo knew so well, sitting comfortably on a cot, his back to the wall and his orange-clad legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Samuel

  Roth, or Hamad al-Abari, or Fabio Lanzetti-or five other names they knew of. The assassin didn't check to see who was peering in at him; he left his arms knotted over his chest as Milo entered.

  "Samuel," Milo said as a deputy locked the door behind him. He didn't approach, just waited for the man to look at him.

  Even in this light, with its harsh shadows and the way it yellowed his skin, Roth's face recalled the three other photographs back at the office. One from Abu Dhabi, as al-Abari, his features half obscured by a white turban. A second from Milan, as Lanzetti, at a cafe along the Corso Sempione, talking with a red-bearded man they'd never been able to identify. The third was CCTV footage from outside a mosque in Frankfurt, where he'd planted a bomb under a black Mercedes-Benz. Each remembered image matched these heavy brows and gaunt cheeks, the pitch eyes and high, narrow forehead. Sometimes a mustache or beard hid aspects of the face, but now his only mask was a three-day beard that grew to the top of his cheekbones. His skin was splotchy in this light, peeling from an old sunburn.

  Milo remained beside the door. "Samuel Roth-that's the name we'll use for now. It's easy to pronounce." Roth only blinked in reply.

  "You know why I'm here. It has nothing to do with your problems with women. I want to know why you're in the United States."

  "What name are you going by?" asked Roth, in Russian.

  Milo grimaced. He was going to have to go through the motions. At least a change of language would hide their talk from these Tennessee boys. In Russian, he answered, "I'm Milo Weaver, of the Central Intelligence Agency."

  Samuel Roth looked as if that were the funniest name he had ever heard.

  "What?"

  "Sorry," Roth said in fluent English. He raised a hand. "Even after all this, I still didn't expect it to work." He had the flat, irregular accent of someone who'd absorbed too many.

  "What didn't you expect to work?"

  "I'm lucky I even remember you. I forget a lot of things these clays."

  "If you don't answer my questions, I'll hurt you. I am authorized."

  The prisoner's eyes widened; they were bloodshot and tired.

  "There's only one reason you'd risk entering the country. Who are you supposed to kill?"

  Roth chewed the inside of his cheek, then spoke in a laconic tone: "Maybe you, Company man."

  "We were tracking you since Barcelona -you know that? To Mexico, then Dallas, and that rented car to New Orleans where you picked up your girlfriend. Maybe you just wanted to know if she survived Katrina. You switched to your Italian passport-Fabio Lanzetti-before switching back in Mississippi. Changing names is a nice trick, but it's not foolproof."

  Roth cocked his head. "You'd know that, wouldn't you?"

  "Would I?"

  Samuel Roth wiped his dry lips with his fingers, stifling a cough. When he spoke, he sounded congested. "I've heard a lot about you. Milo Weaver-a.k.a. many other names. Alexander." He pointed at Milo. "That's the name I know best. Charles Alexander."

  "No idea what you're talking about," Milo said as nonchalantly as he could manage.

  "You've got a long history," Roth continued. "An interesting one. You were a Tourist."

  A shrug. "Everyone likes a vacation."

  "Remember 2001? Before those Muslims ruined business. Amsterdam. Back then, I only worried about people like you, people who work for governments, ruining my business. These days…" He shook his head.

  Milo remembered 2001 better than most years. "I've never been to Amsterdam," he lied.

  "You're curious, Milo Weaver. I've seen files on lots of people, but you… there's no center to your history."

  "Center?" Milo moved two steps closer, an arm's length from the prisoner.

  Roth's lids drooped over his bloodshot eyes. "There's no motivation connecting the events of your past."

  "Sure there is. Fast cars and girls. Isn't that your motivation?"

  Samuel Roth seemed to like that. He wiped his mouth again to cover a large grin; above his sunburned cheeks his eyes looked very wet, sick. "Well, you're certainly not motivated by your own well-being, or else you'd be somewhere else. Moscow, perhaps, where they take care of their agents. At least, where agents know how to take care of themselves."

  "Is that what you are? Russian?"

  Roth ignored that. "Maybe you just want to be on the winning side. Some people, they like to bend with history. But history's tricky. Today's monolith is tomorrow's pile of rocks. No." He shook his head. "That's not it. I think you're loyal to your family now. That would make sense. Your wife and daughter. Tina and… Stephanie, is it?"

  Involuntarily, Milo shot out a hand and gripped Roth's shirt at the buttons, lifting him from the cot. This close, he could see that his dry, peeling face was riddled with pink sores. This was not sunburn. With his other hand, he squeezed Roth's jaw to hold his face still. There was rot in the man's breath. "No need to bring them into this," Milo said, then let go. When Roth fell back onto the cot, his head knocked against the wall.

  How had this man turned the interrogation around?

&nb
sp; "Just trying to make conversation," said Roth, rubbing the back of his skull. "That's why I'm here, you know. To see you."

  Instead of questioning that, Milo went for the door. He could at least squelch Roth's one voiced desire by removing himself from the room.

  "Where are you going?"

  Good-he sounded worried. Milo tapped the door, and one of the deputies started working the lock.

  "Wait!" called Roth. "I have information!"

  Milo jerked the door open as Roth again called, "'Wait!'" He didn't slow down. He left the room and kept moving as the deputy pushed the steel door shut.

  3

  The sultry noontime heat swallowed him as he fooled with the new Company-issue Nokia he was still learning to master, finally finding the number. Between a parked blue-and-white and the dead shrubs around the station, he watched as storm clouds began to fill the sky. Grainger answered with a sharp "What is it?"

  Tom Grainger sounded the kind of irate people are when they've been abruptly woken, but it was nearly noon. "I'm verifying it, Tom. It's him."

  "Good. I don't suppose he's talking, is he?”

  “Not really. But he is trying to piss me off. He's seen a file on me. Knows about Tina and Stef.”

  “Jesus. How'd he get that?"

  "There's a girlfriend. She might know something. They're bringing her in now." He paused. "But he's sick, Tom. Really sick. I'm not sure he could make a journey."

  "What's he got?"

  "Don't know yet."

  When Grainger sighed, Milo imagined him kicking back in his Aeron chair, gazing out his window across the Manhattan skyline. Faced with the dusty pale-brick buildings along Blackdale's main street-half of them out of business but covered with Independence Day flags- Milo was suddenly jealous. Grainger said, "Just so you know-you've got one hour to make him talk."

  "Don't tell me."

  "I'm telling you. Some jackass at Langley sent an e-mail off the open server. I've spent the last half hour fending off Homeland with make-believe. If I hear the word 'jurisdiction' one more time, I'll have a fit."