The Tourist Page 7

  Une poupee de son

  When she couldn't get her daughter in focus, Tina realized she was crying. Milo had been right all along. It was beautiful. She glanced at Patrick gaping at that little screen, muttering, "Wow." Maybe this would finally convince him that Milo was A-OK, despite what he'd believed yesterday when he called her office, at Columbia 's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

  "I don't like him."

  "What?" Tina had snapped back, already irritated. "What did you say?"

  " Milo." She could tell he was slipping into an afternoon buzz, maybe one of his famous five-martini lunches. "I'm talking about Milo Weaver. I never trusted him, not with you, and certainly not with my daughter."

  "You never even tried to like him."

  "But what do you know about him? He's just some guy you met in Italy, right? Where's he from?"

  "You know all this. His parents died. He's from-"

  " North Carolina," Patrick cut in. "Yeah, yeah. How come he's got no southern accent?"

  "He's traveled more than you know."

  "Right. A traveler. And his orphanage-he told me it was the Saint Christopher Home for Boys. That place burned to the ground in 1989. Pretty convenient, don't you think?"

  "I think it's pretty convenient you know this stuff, Pat. You've been snooping."

  "I'm allowed to snoop when the welfare of my daughter's at stake."

  Tina tried to purge that conversation from her head, but it kept banging at her as Stephanie sang, her voice carrying crystal-clear through the auditorium. Tina didn't even know what the song meant, but it was gorgeous.

  "Look, Pat. I could bitch about how you left me when I was pregnant and needed you most, but I'm not angry about that anymore. The way things ended up… I'm happy. Milo treats us well; he loves Stephanie like his own. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  Stephanie's pitch rose, the music swirling around her. She nearly bellowed the last lines, then fell silent. A final few bars of music, as Stephanie rocked in the same nonchalant dance she'd seen France Gall do in that Eurovision performance Milo tracked down on YouTube. She looked so cool, so hipper-than-thou.

  Patrick repeated, "Wow."

  Tina whistled, standing and shouting, swinging her fist in the air, exhilarated. Some other parents stood and clapped, and Tina didn't care if they were just being polite. She felt giddy all over. Milo really would've loved this.

  7

  It had been a lousy year and a half for the Company. No one could say exactly where the trail of bad luck had started, which meant that the blame leapfrogged up and down the hierarchy depending on the public mood, pausing to wreak havoc on this or that career. News cameras arrived to witness early retirements and awkward dismissals.

  Before moving on, these humiliated unemployed dropped in on Sunday morning television roundtables to spread the blame further. It was the ex-assistant director, a soft-spoken career spook, now exceedingly bitter, who best summed up the general consensus.

  " Iraq, of course. First, the president blames us for supplying bad information. He blames us for not killing Osama bin Laden before his big act of public relations. He blames us for uniting both of those failures into a disastrous, unending war, as if we pointed him to Iraq. We defend ourselves with facts-facts, mind you-and suddenly the president's allies in Congress begin to pick us apart. What a coincidence! Special investigation committees. If you spend enough money and look hard enough, all organizations turn up dirty. That, too, is a fact."

  Georgia Republican Harlan Pleasance was the one who really dropped the bomb, back in April 2006. He headed the second special investigation committee, which, based on the results of the first committee the previous month, focused on money trails. With access to the CIA budget (a secret since the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act), Senator Pleasance wondered aloud how the Company could fund, for example, the recently uncovered ten-million-dollar gift to the unlikely named Youth League, a militant Chinese democracy group based in the mountainous Guizhou province that had ironically named itself after the communist youth organization. It took less than three months for Senator Pleasance to report on CNN's The Situation Room that the Chinese militants' gift had come from part of the sale, in Frankfurt, of eighteen million euros' worth of Afghan heroin, which had been clandestinely harvested by Taliban prisoners under U.S. Army guard. "And no one told us a thing about it, Wolf."

  It was an open secret within Langley that, while all this might be true, there was no human way to discover it from the existing paper trails. Another agency was feeding Senator Pleasance his information. Most believed it was Homeland, while others-and Milo was part of this group-believed it was the National Security Agency, which had a much older, historic beef with the CIA. It didn't matter, though, because the public didn't care where the information came from. The facts were just too enticing.

  Whatever began the steady bloodletting, it was Pleasance's discovery that turned it into a public, and international, massacre. First, the embarrassed Germans rolled back their historic support and shut down many joint operations. Then it became a race. Fresh special committees demanded financial records as minor politicians took a stab at national recognition, while Langley began incinerating hard drives. Louise Walker, a typist, was arrested for this, and after a lengthy meeting with her lawyer became convinced that the only way out was to give a name. That name was Harold Underwood, a low-level bureaucrat. Harold was also assigned a convincing lawyer.

  So it went. Eighteen months from beginning to end, resulting in thirty-two arrests: seventeen acquittals, twelve jail terms, two suicides, and one disappearance. The new CIA director, whose approval was rushed through the nomination hearings, was a tiny but vociferous Texan named Quentin Ascot. In front of the Senate, on elevated heels, he made his position clear. No more black money. No more operations that hadn't been approved by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. No more cowboy antics at Langley. "No more rogue departments. It's a new world. We serve at the pleasure of the American people, who pay our bills. We should be an open book."

  The Company's collective groan could be heard around the world.

  The four secret floors of offices on the Avenue of the Americas, stocked with Travel Agents who focused on the running of, and assimilation of information collected by, Tourists based in all the populated continents, was (behind closed doors) considered a prime target for the inevitable cuts. Director Ascot, it was rumored, wanted to relieve the world of Tourism altogether. He claimed that Tourists, with open-ended resources and no need to collect receipts, would bankrupt the Company. But since he didn't have enough internal support to erase the clandestine department, all he could do was slowly chew it up.

  Milo learned of Ascot's first tentative steps when he arrived at LaGuardia from Tennessee and met Tom Grainger in the airport security office. The old man had sent away the "rent-a-cops," as he called most non-Company personnel, and through a two-way mirror they watched crowds jostling at the luggage carousel, the irregular flow of travelers along mass transit lines that had in recent years become national threat centers. Both men missed that almostforgotten time when travel was about arriving someplace new, not about getting through the clunky measures of antiterrorist law.

  "They're starting the post-massacre frenzy," Grainger said to the glass, a drawn look on his face.

  Even by CIA standards, Tom Grainger was old-seventy-one years, most of his white hair lost to the shower drain, his cabinet full of prescription pills. He never appeared in public without a tie.

  "The Grand Inquisitor has sent a memo through his underlings-through Terence Fitzhugh, to be precise. I'm to prepare for executions, he says. Ascot 's predicting a war of attrition, and he's getting me to take out my own people. It's slow hara-kiri."

  Milo had known Grainger since 1990, when he'd been invited to become part of the Company's clandestine world in London, and he knew the old man was always melodramatic when it came to Langley. His secret department in M
anhattan was his private dominion, and it hurt him to be reminded that people in another state really pulled the strings. Maybe that was why he'd decided to appear at the airport, rather than wait for morning to talk in the office-no one here could listen to his bitching. "You've been through worse, Tom. We've all been through worse."

  "Hardly," Grainger said dismissively. "One-quarter. That's how much we're losing. He's giving me the heads-up. Next year we'll work on one-quarter less funds, which'll barely cover operational costs. I'm supposed to decide which Travel Agents get pink slips, and which get transferred to more public departments."

  "And the Tourists?"

  "Aha! Too many. That's the gist of it. Twelve slots for the whole of Europe, working around the clock, and yet I'm supposed to get rid of three of them. Bastard. Who does he think he is?"

  "Your boss."

  "My boss wasn't there when the planes came, was he?" The old man rapped a knuckle on the glass. A boy standing nearby turned to frown at the noisy mirror. "I guess you weren't either, were you? You never did visit the old office… no." He was fully engaged in his memories now. "You were still a Tourist, just barely, and we were sitting at our desks, drinking Starbucks, as if the world wasn't preparing to explode."

  Milo had heard all this before, Grainger's endless replay of September 11, when the former secret CIA office at 7 World Trade Center collapsed. It didn't happen immediately, because the nineteen young men who hijacked four planes that morning didn't realize that by hitting one of the smaller towers they could wipe out an entire Company department. Instead, they went for the glory of the enormous first and second towers, which gave Grainger and his staff time to flee in panic before the main targets crumbled, bringing number seven down with them.

  "It was Beirut times fifty," said Grainger. "All of Dresden stuffed into a few minutes. It was the first wave of barbarians coming to sack Rome."

  "It wasn't any of those things. Is this what you needed to talk to me about?"

  Grainger turned from the glass and frowned. "You're sunburned."

  Milo leaned against the LaGuardia security supervisor's messy desk and looked down. His left arm, which had hung out the driver's side window, was definitely a different tone. "You want to just wait for my report?"

  "They've been calling like mad," said Grainger, ignoring the question. "Who's this Simmons bitch?"

  "She's all right. Just angry. I would be, too."

  Through the window, luggage clattered down a conveyor belt as Milo outlined his conversation with the Tiger. "He wanted me to track down the people who stuck him with HIV. Terrorists, he thinks. Sudan connections."

  " Sudan. Great. But all he had for you was this one name. Herbert Williams. Or Jan Klausner. It's pretty sketchy."

  "And the Hirslanden Clinic. He was there under the al-Abari alias."

  "We'll look into it."

  Milo chewed the inside of his cheek. "Send Tripplehorn. He's still in Nice, isn't he?"

  "You're better than Tripplehorn," said Grainger.

  "I'm not a Tourist. Besides, I'm due in Florida on Monday."

  "Sure."

  "Really," said Milo. "Me, the family, and Mickey Mouse.”

  “So you keep telling me."

  They watched passengers press closer to the carousel, knocking into each other in an exhausted panic. To Milo 's annoyance, his boss sighed loudly. He knew what that meant, and that knowledge told him why Grainger had taken the trouble to come out to LaGuardia-he wanted to railroad Milo into another trip. "No, Tom."

  Grainger peered at the travelers, not bothering to reply. Milo would wait him out. He would stay silent, not even pass on the revelation that the Tiger had come from the ranks of their own Tourists. If it was true, Tom already knew it, and had kept this information from Milo for his own reasons.

  Almost sadly, Grainger said, "Think you can head out tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "Ask me where."

  "Doesn't matter. Tina's on the warpath. I missed Stephanie's show."

  "Not to worry. I called an hour ago with a personal apology for sending you out. I took the responsibility on my own shoulders.”

  “You're a real saint." (

  "Sure I am. I informed her that you were saving the free world.”

  “She stopped believing that long ago."

  "Librarians." Grainger sniffed at the travelers. "You should've listened to me. There are absolutely no odds in marrying smart women."

  Truth was, Grainger actually had given him this advice a week before he and Tina married. It had always made him wonder about Terri, Grainger's now-deceased wife. "Might as well tell me about it," he said. "But no promises."

  Grainger patted his back with a heavy hand. "See? That wasn't so hard."

  8

  It took them most of the sunset hour to reach Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood Milo had grown to love over the last five years. When they were apartment hunting, Stephanie still just a baby, Tina had been immediately taken by the brownstones and upscale cafes, the cozy, soft-edged world of dot-com kids and successful novelists; it took Milo a while longer.

  Family life was a different beast from what he'd known before-unlike Tourism, it actually was life. So he learned. First, to accept, and after acceptance came affection. Because the Slope wasn't about the nouveau riche torturing cafe workers with elaborate nonfat coffee specifications; Park Slope was about Milo Weaver's family.

  The Tiger had called him a bourgeois family man. In that, at least, the assassin had been right on the mark.

  At Garfield Place, he climbed out of Grainger's Mercedes with a promise to talk the next morning in the office. But he knew, as he mounted the narrow interior stairs of their brownstone, that he had already made up his mind. Family man or not, he was going to Paris.

  At the third floor, he heard a television. When he rang the bell Stephanie shouted, "Door! Mom, door!" Then Tina's quick footsteps and, "Coming." When she opened it, she was buttoning her shirt.

  Once she had him focused, she crossed her arms over her breasts and in a high whisper said, "You missed her show.”

  “Didn't Tom talk to you?"

  He tried to come in, but she wouldn't step out of the way. "That man will say anything to cover for you."

  It was true, so he didn't dispute it. He just waited for her to make up her mind. When she did, she grabbed his shirt, pulled him close, and kissed him fully on the lips. "You're still in the doghouse, mister."

  "Can I come in?"

  Tina wasn't truly angry. She came from a family where you didn't hide your anger, because by venting it you stole its power. That's how the Crowes had always done it in Austin, and what was good enough for Texas was good enough for anywhere.

  He found Stephanie in the living room, splayed on the floor with a pile of dolls, while on television cartoon animals got into trouble. "Hey, girl," he told her. "Sorry I missed the show."

  She didn't get up. "I'm used to it by now."

  She sounded more like her mother every day. When he leaned over and kissed her head, she wrinkled her nose.

  "Dad, you stink."

  "I know, hon. Sorry."

  Tina threw a tube of moisturizing cream at Milo. "For that sunburn. Want a beer?”

  “Any vodka?"

  "Let's get some food in you first."

  Tina boiled ramen noodles-one of the five things, by her own admission, that she knew how to cook-and brought out the bowl. By then, Stephanie had warmed to Milo 's presence and climbed up beside him on the sofa. She gave a rundown of the other performers at the talent show, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the utter injustice of the winning performance-Sarah Lawton's rendition of "I Decide."

  "But what about yours? We worked on it for weeks."

  Stephanie tilted her head forward to glower at him. "It was a stupid idea."

  "Why?"

  "Because, Dad. No one understands French."

  Milo rubbed his forehead. He'd thought it was a fine idea,
his child performing a Serge Gainsbourg hit. It was unexpected. Innovative. "I thought you liked that song."

  "Yeah."

  Tina took the far end of the couch. "She was incredible, Milo. Just stunning."

  "But I didn't win."

  "Don't worry," he said. "One day you'll be running the New York Philharmonic, and Sarah Lawton will be serving up fries at Fuddruckers."

  " Milo," warned Tina.

  "I'm just saying."

  A crooked smile filled Stephanie's face as she gazed into the distance. "Yeah."

  Milo dug into his noodles. "We've got it on video, right?"

  "Father couldn't get it in focus. And I'm too small." That was how Stephanie differentiated the men in her life: Patrick was Father; Milo was Dad.

  "He told you he was sorry," said Tina.

  Stephanie, not in a forgiving mood, climbed to the floor to rejoin her dolls.

  "So?" said Tina. "You going to tell me?"

  "This is good," Milo said through a mouthful of noodles.

  "Where?"

  "Where what?"

  "Tom's sending you off again. That's why he called-to soften me up. He's the least subtle CIA man I've ever met.”

  “Now, wait-"

  "Also," she cut in, "I can see the guilt all over your face."

  Milo peered over his bowl at the television. The Road Runner was defying gravity once again, as Wile E. Coyote suffered the fate of the rest of us, the ones chained to the laws of physics. Quietly, he said, "I need to go to Paris. But I'll be back by Saturday."

  "You don't do that kind of work anymore."

  He didn't answer. She was right, of course, but over the last year he'd disappeared on more and more "business trips," and Tina's worries had found voice. She knew enough about his life before they met to know that that man wasn't the kind of husband she'd signed up for. She'd signed on with the person who'd left all of that behind.

  "Why's it so important you go to Paris? It's not like the Company doesn't have a whole army of goons to send."

  He lowered his voice: "It's Angela Yates. She's got herself in some real trouble."