The Last Tourist Page 8

  “Is that so strange?”

  “When he then dies on the day you magically appear, yes.”

  Milo wondered about that as well but didn’t have enough information to understand anything just yet. “When did this start?”

  Rahmani tilted his head, examining Milo, who suddenly worried he’d shown too much interest. “August twenty-two. Does this mean something to you?”

  Milo shook his head. “Do you know why he was in Paris?”

  “A security conference—the usual. Can you tell me why you are here?”

  “Egorov wanted to talk to me. I don’t know what about.”

  “It was something he could not mention over a telephone?”

  “I got that impression.”

  “And do you, Mr. Weaver of UNESCO, often fly to North Africa when elderly Russians call you?”

  “He was a friend of my father’s, long ago.” That was true, but the next was not. “I thought that it might have had to do with him.”

  “Yevgeny Primakov.”

  “Yes,” Milo said, realizing that Rahmani knew a lot more than he was saying. Did he know about the Library? Maybe. But that, at the moment, was less important than what else Rahmani was telling him. Kirill Egorov’s patterns had abruptly changed four weeks ago, after his return from Paris. Was that when his mysterious ward had shown up, the person he wanted Milo to protect? Milo leaned closer. “Where did Egorov go to get breakfast?”

  A smile flickered on Rahmani’s face. “El Kahwa El Zarka, over in Dar El Beïda.” He blinked at Milo. “But before you become too excited: He never met with anyone of interest there. Only his mistress.”

  “Who is she?”

  Rahmani smiled but said nothing—he’d shared enough.

  “Then I suppose Kirill found better coffee,” Milo said, even though he didn’t believe it. Neither of them did.

  There were more questions, but by then the purpose of the interrogation had been satisfied. Rahmani tried to poke holes in his story, but only halfheartedly, then returned to the subject of his Russian brothers and Algeria’s precarious position in the world. Eventually, Milo explained that he needed to fly to New York. “UN Headquarters,” Rahmani said, nodding somberly.

  “Are you going to let me go?” Milo asked.

  Rahmani raised his hands, energy flowing back into him. “Let you go? Let you go? Have you not been listening to a word I am saying? Algeria cannot afford to make enemies. And to hold you here and anger our great friends in America and the United Nations? Perish the thought!”

  Milo was surprised that Rahmani personally brought him to Houari Boumediene and walked with him to the ticket counter. He’d missed his Air France flight so had to settle for an Air Algérie–Turkish Airlines ticket that would stop in Istanbul on the way.

  At security, Rahmani raised a hand in farewell. “Please, Mr. Weaver. Next time you come to Algiers, do give me a call. We can try that excellent coffee.”

  8

  Leticia Jones was angry with herself. They’d had a room for two days, under Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t noticed the only other non-Japanese guests in the Sun Hotel. Yet she hadn’t figured it out. Age, maybe, or the distraction of Milo Fucking Weaver. What a piece of work he was. Sweeping in a decade after their last good-byes, as if she’d been in Wakkanai just waiting for him. No, not for him. The developer. That’s who she’d been waiting for, and now she had a tail.

  She had seen them down at the harbor before Milo arrived at the hotel, one of those couples that was not a couple, and her senses had begun to tingle. Brown guy, five-ten, late forties, walking shoulder to shoulder with a younger white woman with thick eyebrows who spoke quietly to the man who was clearly not her man at all. But Leticia had also been followed back in Tokyo by Milo’s ham-fisted librarian, and she’d assumed these were more of the same. Then Milo stumbled out of town, and in the evening when Leticia headed down to the harbor to wait for the ferry from Korsakov, she spotted the white woman fooling with a rental bicycle.

  Why were they still here? Why hadn’t Milo taken them with him when he left? Did he really think he could continue to keep tabs on her?

  The answer only occurred to her the next morning at the docks, when the brown guy appeared again, meandering past the lines of fishing boats, talking on his phone, and she kicked herself for not realizing it earlier: They weren’t Milo’s people.

  That tingle returned, the one that had kept her alive more times than she wanted to remember. It told her the time had come to move on.

  She had everything she needed—the three IDs she switched between, money, credit cards—but unless she went back to the hotel she was going to lose the robe she’d picked up in Tokyo, which was a damned shame. She’d never found one as soft, and probably never would again.

  She walked inland, through the industrial wasteland, and predictably the man—Mr. Young—followed for a while before realizing where she was going, at which point he hurriedly made a new call. But he stayed with her, crossing the road to pass the bright orange Yumeshokukankita Market and around it to reach the big, airy station, where she bought a train ticket to Asahikawa. Her Japanese was good enough to earn praise from the old woman behind the counter, who explained that she had just missed the 10:21, but there were two more leaving at 12:55 and 5:40. Then, when Leticia followed her purchase with a ticket for the bus to Sapporo, which wouldn’t leave until 6:30 the next morning, the old woman asked which trip she was going to take.

  “I just can’t decide,” Leticia told her. “What do you think?”

  “Sapporo,” she advised. “Definitely Sapporo.”

  “Thanks.”

  Tickets in hand, she went out and flagged a white taxi, noticing Mr. Young now getting into a little Mazda with the not-his white woman at the wheel. “Airport,” she told her driver. As he headed east, she glanced back to find the Mazda keeping a safe distance. She used her phone to buy an All Nippon Airways ticket for the 1:15 flight to Tokyo.

  It took less than twenty minutes to reach the little airport, which only ran three flights a day, and when the driver let her out she could see the Mazda coming around the curve behind them. Beyond the road lay the expansive parking lot and then an open field of green parkland heading inland for half a mile until it reached a line of roadside trees at the park’s entrance. Inside the airport, she headed straight for the bathroom, where she closed herself in a stall and checked her watch.

  The Tokyo flight didn’t leave for another hour, the train to Asahikawa in forty-five minutes. The bus ticket to Sapporo was backup, in case everything fell apart. And if she didn’t time this just right, it would.

  She waited twenty minutes. Though she took the opportunity to pee, the rest of her time was spent listening to Japanese women come and go, gossiping and whispering to one another about troublesome men and children, and work, which was also troublesome. At one point someone entered silently, then left again without doing anything. It might have been Mrs. Young; she didn’t check.

  At exactly twelve thirty, she flushed the toilet and left the stall, washed her hands quickly, and left the bathroom. She spotted the man right away, on a chair near All Nippon’s Festa shop. He saw her, then averted his gaze clumsily to find his friend, waiting at the top of the stairs to the second floor. Leticia didn’t bother showing them anything. She just went back outside and walked to the first taxi in the queue and hopped in. “Train station,” she said in Japanese.

  As they started to pull away, she turned to see the man and woman bolting at full speed out of the airport, across the street, and to the big parking lot, where they’d been forced to leave their Mazda. She leaned close to the driver’s seat and, in her kindest voice, said, “I’d like to try something, if you don’t mind.”

  “Try what?” he asked, eyeballing her in the rearview.

  “You know that park over there?” she asked, pointing across the open field.

  “It’s for the kids,” he said as he turned onto the main roa
d. “Horses, goats, rabbits.”

  “Sounds great. I’d like you to drive me to the entrance to the park, let me out, but keep driving to the train station. Can you do that?”

  “Why? Am I picking someone up?”

  “No. But you’ll earn another five thousand yen.”

  An extra forty dollars was enough to brighten him up. “What do I do when I get to the station?”

  “That’s up to you, but I need you to go all the way there. Can I trust you?”

  “You obviously don’t know me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. There’s no one you can trust more than me.”

  “I’m very lucky to have found you, then,” she said, and started counting out thousand-yen bills, placing them on the armrest. “But it has to be fast. I jump out and you keep going.”

  “Do you want to tell me why?” he asked.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “No trouble, though?”

  She shook her head and gave him a brilliant smile. “No trouble at all.”

  By the time they followed the road’s curve to reach the entrance to the park, they were hidden by trees, and when she jumped out and sent him on his way she quickly dropped into the overgrown grass. She lay flat, waiting, and after three cars passed she warily raised her head and started to jog back, heading across the field.

  She guessed that by the time she reached the airport the taxi was only halfway to the train station. She showed her e-ticket and went to the small lounge to wait for her Tokyo flight. It was all about timing: Her shadows couldn’t get from the station to the airport in less than fifteen minutes. By the time they figured out what was going on and made it here, she would be in the air.

  9

  Milo hadn’t set foot in the United States for nearly six months, and while he and his family had once lived not so far from JFK Airport, over in Park Slope, when he stepped outside to join the busy taxi queue, he didn’t have the feeling of returning home. There was something off in the cacophonous hustle that typified New York City, the feel of a threat hanging in the air.

  He supposed it was a hangover from Algiers, because, even trading calls with Alexandra from Atatürk Airport, they hadn’t gotten any closer to discovering why Kirill Egorov had been killed by his colleagues—because by now Milo was running with the most straightforward explanation. Nor was there any way to figure out who Egorov had wanted him to protect. Did Paris have anything to do with it? Alex promised to check. But that was a long shot, and now, with Egorov dead, it was beginning to look like he would never learn who the old man had been hiding.

  Or maybe the feeling that had overcome him had nothing to do with Egorov and was instead deeper, born of the creeping worry he’d been carrying for months. That the world was leaning at too dangerous an angle, and that if they didn’t watch out it would topple.

  No. He knew what it was: Leticia had been approached to join a resurrected Department of Tourism, and he had just landed in the city where its headquarters had once been. And he knew, because he was no longer the man he used to be, that if they wanted to, any Tourist could walk right up to him and end his life before he even knew they were there. Everything, now that he’d landed in America, was a potential threat.

  Alan Drummond, whose cheeks were starting to bloom with late-life rosacea, was in a perfectly silent Tesla sedan idling at the curb. Milo threw his bag in the backseat, and as soon as he got into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut, Alan pressed the accelerator and they were off, the Tesla’s big navigation screen charting the gridlock traffic in their immediate future.

  Other than the red face, Alan looked undeniably fit. After a mild heart attack eight years ago, he’d become a fitness nut, and now haunted Tribeca gyms and blended esoteric smoothies in his kitchen—and the results were startling. His cheekbones stood out, his skull was clearly defined, and his pink skin glowed with health. As he drove, eyes on the road, Alan tapped a clear plastic cup that sat in the cup holder, full of green liquid. “Made that for you.”

  Milo eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Almond milk, protein powder, lecithin—”

  “Lecithin?”

  “For the brain.”

  “Why’s it green?”

  “Spirulina,” Alan said. “Algae. Crazy healthy.”

  Milo had no intention of drinking the mixture, so he changed the subject. “You heard about Algiers?”

  “Alex told me. She even called Said Bensoussan for help.”

  Milo nodded; Alexandra had told him this back in Atatürk. “I want to drop in on him before the meeting.”

  Once, their roles had been reversed; Milo had worked for him rather than the other way around. Alan Drummond had been the Department of Tourism’s final director, his short tenure ending abruptly with the end of the department itself, a disaster that had arguably shaped them both.

  As Milo recounted his Algerian adventures, Alan absorbed it all without comment until the very end, when he said, “We can put someone on it, but it doesn’t sound like a front-burner worry. Not with the patrons grumbling.”

  “You know what the meeting’s about?”

  He shook his head. “But I’ve got suspicions. You didn’t give them that Jordanian intel. You passed it to Israel instead.”

  “They needed it first.”

  “Israel isn’t paying our bills. And our patrons don’t want to learn things from the papers. Particularly when those things are happening in their own country.”

  Milo looked out the window at the traffic and the ugly expanse leading from the airport to the city. These decisions—choosing which country got what information, and when—were as close to manipulation as the Library ever got. The Lebanese intelligence, dealing with the movement of certain known terrorists through Beirut, had been entirely time dependent, and if he’d given it to Lebanon first the Israelis would have lost their chance to catch the person in question. “The Lebanese didn’t want him in their territory anyway.”

  “Of course they didn’t. And of course they were secretly happy the Israelis took care of it for them. But it serves them better not to admit that.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Milo said, and stretched himself out in the seat.

  “I saw a preview of the IPCC report.”

  Milo didn’t have to ask what the IPCC was—Alan kept constant track of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the IPCC’s report, which had been ordered in 2015, involved ninety-one authors from forty countries, many of whom Alan was by now on a first-name basis with. He’d sometimes show up at Milo’s home in Zürich after sitting with IPCC scientists at their headquarters in Geneva, just so he could vent his frustration at the world’s blindness to the encroaching disaster. When America had pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement a year ago, it took Alan three full hours of yelling to finally exhaust himself.

  “Tell me,” Milo said.

  “It’s not good. We’re looking at a one-point-five centigrade rise by 2030 at the current rate. At least one-point-five. And that’s the average—it’ll be two or three times higher in the Arctic.”

  “Translate that for me.”

  “Bad shit. Melting ice will raise the global sea level by half a meter. And it’ll keep rising, even if we keep it to one-and-a-half degrees—which doesn’t look fucking likely. Say good-bye to the Maldives and Solomon Islands. Say good-bye to New Orleans, Miami, and Atlantic City. Boston’s underwater. Bergen. Half of Baltimore.”

  “I’m guessing the West Coast is not much better.”

  “Not if you’re in Seattle, Madera, Silicon Valley, or the LA coast. No, you’re screwed. It’s not just people—you can forget about the coral reefs. Seventy to ninety percent of them are toast.”

  Milo looked ahead at the gridlock leading into Manhattan. If ever there was an iconic image for human destruction of the planet, it was this—thousands of cars driving through packed, desolate-looking neighborhoods toward huge, e
nergy-wasting skyscrapers. “Well,” he said, “I guess everyone moves inland. Problem solved.”

  “You’re jerking my chain.”

  “Just trying to be a problem solver.”

  So Alan took a breath and gave him a dissertation on the ills that awaited middle America: extreme weather patterns, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and mudslides, and new diseases immune to antibiotics. Wildfires. “The melting ice caps lower the salinity in the oceans, which means the nutrients at the floor of the ocean can’t move to the surface and produce plankton algae, which fish live on. And so do we. Seventy percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen is produced by marine plants. We’re killing ourselves, and not enough people are panicking.”

  Though Milo agreed with Alan’s assessment, he had listened to this, or permutations of it, plenty of times before. “Want to hear about Japan?”

  Alan hummed an okay.

  “She’s not signing up.”

  “What a shame,” he said unconvincingly. Alan disapproved of recruiting Leticia. He, not without reason, considered her reckless, but unlike in the old days in the Department of Tourism, Milo’s decisions prevailed. “Were you not convincing enough?”

  “She wants more.”

  “Money?”

  Milo shook his head. “Utility. She wants to change the world.”

  “We talking about the same Leticia Jones?”

  “She’s gone through an awakening,” Milo said as they slowed for traffic. “By the way, they’ve opened the department again.”