The Nearest Exit (10 page)

“He said that the Department of Tourism was the dirtiest part of America’s filthy intelligence machine.”

“And he said he had a mole in this secret department?”

Dzubenko nodded and held out his empty glass; Milo refilled it.

“He offer any evidence of this?”

“Well, I’ve got some experience in this sort of thing. Learning what’s true and what’s not.”

“I imagine you do.”

“Sure. I knew that with this fat fucker the best thing was to play on his vanity. I told him he was a liar. I told him no one would have a secret department with that kind of name, certainly not the Americans. They’d call it Alpha Bravo. Or Operation Free-Fucking-Eagle. Something like that. We had some girls with us by then—so we talked in English—but in Russian I’d tell the girls he was a big fat liar. You see what I was doing? I was using his manhood to get the evidence from him.”

“Extremely clever,” said Milo. “I suppose he rose to the challenge.”

“You suppose right. First he made me swear to keep my mouth shut—this was just for me. Then he told me about one of the Tourism Department’s operations, in the Sudan. One that was supposed to cripple China’s oil supply. This was back in July, and—get this—it all surrounded the Tiger.”

“The Tiger?” Milo asked, feigning ignorance.

“Come on! You know, that famous assassin. The one who killed the French foreign minister a while back. He was hired by the CIA.” Dzubenko shook his head. “Now, Zhu started with this, which made me doubt him right away, but then he slowly told me the whole story.”

“Which is what you’ll do for me right now.”

For the next hour, Dzubenko told it as he remembered it. He told it the way one tells a story he’s had to repeat often in recent days, playing with red herrings and side characters, knowing that the essential focus will not be lost. He began with the assassin, Benjamin Harris, otherwise known as the Tiger, and his surrender to a man
from the department named Milo Weaver, with a message:
Someone has killed me with the HIV virus, and I want you to find him
. “But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Not for any Company agent, least of all someone from this fucking-secret department.” Dzubenko was right about that; it hadn’t been enough to get Milo moving. It had taken more. It took the untimely death of an old friend, Angela Yates, and its connection to the Tiger, to make him act. Dzubenko took a drag off his Marlboro. “People are all the same. We need a personal reason to get our asses off the couch.”

He told how an agent in the Department of Homeland Security decided Milo was responsible for Angela’s death, and he had to go on the run. “From Disney World—can you believe it? He was there with his old lady and his kid. Tina, that’s the wife’s name. The daughter was called Stephanie. He had to leave them behind and go black.”

Dzubenko knew about the other players: the Tourist James Einner, the Russian businessman Roman Ugrimov, Diane Morel from French intelligence, and the Tourist Milo had killed, Kevin Tripplehorn, aka, many other names. He knew that it all connected to an attempt to destabilize the Sudanese government by blaming the murder of a radical cleric on the Chinese, who had significant oil interests in that country. Zhu told Dzubenko that the murder itself was one thing—the mullah had been a pain for everyone—but the riots that followed were the real crime.
Eighty-six is the official number
, Zhu told him,
but more died. Innocents. Even a few of our own people, working in the oil fields. There was no need for that
.

Zhu knew, further, that the plot had been instigated by Thomas Grainger, then head of Tourism, now deceased, as well as Terence Fitzhugh, also deceased. Both of whom had been directed by a certain senator, Nathan Irwin of Minnesota.

“That was a fuck of a messy month. Don’t get me wrong—we have plenty of messy months ourselves, but we expect a little less bloodletting from the CIA. I mean, you guys have a real budget. It should lead to less corpses, no?”

“It should,” Milo said, all the feeling drained from his limbs. This man knew everything.

“But there was one thing Zhu couldn’t figure out, and it irritated
him. This Weaver guy. He was the one who figured out what was going on, and as a result everyone wanted him. Homeland Security wanted him for murder. The Company wanted him dead so the story wouldn’t get out.
But this man
, Zhu said,
he lives the most charmed of lives. He survived
. That really confused him. He said Weaver spent a couple months in prison, and his marriage fell apart, but he did survive. Now, not only was he still living and breathing, he was even working for his old employer again. He wanted to know how he pulled off that trick. You know what I told him?”

“I don’t,” said Milo, “but I’d like to know.”

“I told him this Weaver character was obviously working with the bad guys himself. Because the bad guys are the only ones who ever survive. Zhu thought that was pretty funny.”

The truth was that Yevgeny Primakov had helped him stay alive, and it struck him that the question of whether his father was a good guy or a bad guy was just a matter of perspective.

He’d had enough. It wasn’t just that the Chinese knew ninety percent of what had happened last year; it was simply hearing it again, described so vividly, and the way Dzubenko’s words brought back all those mixed feelings of confusion and anger and despair. He stood and offered a hand. “Thanks, Marko. You’ve been a big help.”

“So now will you move me to Wisconsin?”

“Wisconsin?”

“I have a cousin who lived there for two years. The most beautiful place on earth. The best women, too.”

“I didn’t realize,” said Milo. “We’ll see what we can do. You need anything else?”

Dzubenko looked at the full ashtray and the vodka bottle. “Another carton. Maybe some tonic water for mixing—my stomach’s starting to hurt.”

“Maybe you need some food instead.”

“Tonic’s fine.” He picked up the television remote. “It’s good, you know.”

“What?”

“Your Russian. Not that teach-yourself-Russian bullshit most of you Company guys use.”

“Thanks.”

Dzubenko turned on the television and added, “Poka,” an informal good-bye.

“Poka, Marko,” Milo said, and as he closed the door behind himself, he heard a German talk show hostess ask, with utter earnestness,
You mean that, after all the things he did, you slept with him again?
The studio audience let its contempt show with a synchronized
Boo
.

Drummond was coming down the stairs. “So?”

“It all fits.”

They stepped onto the dark porch, and cold, erratic gusts hit them. In the distance, against the glow of headlights on the highway, the silhouette of a guard stood smoking a cigarette. In the foreground, the Lincoln started up, but Drummond didn’t bother stepping down to the grass. He didn’t say a thing, so Milo said, “He tells me we have sixty-three Tourists in all. Is that about right?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I used to know how many we had in Europe, but that was my focus. Grainger never shared the big number.”

“It’s the number we’re supposed to have, yes.” He coughed into his hand. “This is some serious bad news, but I want to vet him more before freezing things.”

“Freeze?”

“I don’t want the Chinese picking off our Tourists for sport. If we do have a mole, then I’m using the Myrrh code.”

Myrrh was the universal recall, the order of last resort. “Shouldn’t you wait for a second source?”

“Dzubenko is the second source.”

“What?”

Drummond chewed on something, perhaps the inside of his
mouth. “As soon as I got his story, I started asking around. Any Chinese intel on double agents. There were a few leads, but these kinds of rumors are a dime a dozen. They always sound convincing until you ask for compromised material, then they dry up. But a friend over in Asia-Pacific told me about someone they’ve got in the Guoanbu. A woman. She’d been in the Third Bureau, which deals with Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, for a couple years. Nice, solid source for low-level intel. Then, in late December, there was a personnel shuffle, and she ended up in the Sixth Bureau, counterintelligence, and a small office on the outskirts of Beijing, run by one Xin Zhu.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Drummond shook his head. “Don’t get too excited. Zhu runs his department like al Qaeda runs its operations—in cells. Each individual works on a fragment, completely insulated from the person working at the next desk. This discipline is kept in check by the knowledge—or rumor, it doesn’t matter—that a percentage of them are only there to spy on the others for the boss. Sounds like a dreadful place to work.”

Milo didn’t bother saying that it sounded familiar. “She does have some access, though, right? We could backtrack the intel that crosses her desk.”

Again, he shook his head. “Nothing she’s worked on has dealt with any Western sources. Zhu kept her with her specialty, and the best she gets is occasional dirt on Macau and Taiwanese politicians. Only once did she come across what you and I are interested in. Once. And that was just blind luck, and lust. A couple weeks after she started working there, Zhu’s own secretary, An-ling Shen, began showing interest in her. She let him take her out one night. He’s an insignificant man physically—portly, nearsighted—and knows there’s only one way to woo an attractive younger woman into bed. With secrets. So he told her that his boss, Xin Zhu, had an important source within the CIA.”

Milo waited, but Drummond didn’t continue. “And that’s it?”

“Sadly, she didn’t sleep with him. Her controller asked her to give it a try, but she has her limits. Can’t blame her, though. It might have been a test. That was my friend’s guess, and it would have been
mine, too, if it hadn’t been for Marko Dzubenko. But,” he said, sighing a cloud of white, “Marko does exist, and I see it all entirely differently. I believe it.”

“That’s a lot of loose tongues,” Milo pointed out. “Both Zhu and his secretary.”

“People are flawed.”

“What do we have on Xin Zhu?”

“It’s tough getting information out of the Guoanbu. He’s a colonel—we do know that. Late fifties. There was a verified residence in Germany during the early eighties. No wife we know of, but rumors—unverified, so far—of one son. Last mention of his name was in ’96, when the State Council approved a consolidation plan that recalled a lot of their Western undercover agents, the ones living as businessmen and academics and journalists. He was against it, but Jia Chunwang, the minister of state security, gave him a semipublic rebuke. After that, Zhu essentially disappears from the records. His office is a marginal outpost of the Sixth Bureau, and our girl on the inside can’t even tell us the scope of its purpose. Were it not for Marko Dzubenko, we’d just assume Zhu’s department dealt with regional politics.”

“I still don’t buy it,” Milo said. “You’ve got Xin Zhu. By all appearances he’s politically dead in the water. He’s a heavy drinker with a weakness for women. Not only that, but he’s sharing extremely classified information with a nobody—a Ukrainian lieutenant who ends up defecting soon afterward. He’s also got a loose-lipped, horny secretary. How does a man with all these flaws end up a colonel, and a colonel running a mole in our department?”

“You’re not the only one to ask that,” Drummond said after a moment. “The Tourist who first met with Dzubenko brought that up. Which brings us to another theory, one that I’m starting to warm to. It’s that Zhu has reached the end of his rope. After the humiliation of the midnineties, he’s grown bitter. The mole, then, isn’t his. It’s the brainchild of one of his competitors, and he’s sabotaging it to block that person’s career.”

“That would make the drunkenness an act. As well as the secretary’s
indiscretions—which would mean that he knows the girl works for us.”

“Or not,” said Drummond. “There’s no way to know. Marko certainly wouldn’t know the difference. In any case, what’s indisputable is that this Chinese colonel shared information he couldn’t have unless he had some kind of connection to Tourism. Do you know what the biggest threat to Tourism is?”

“Other than a mole?”

Drummond shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. A mole would be a terrible blow. Still, we could reorganize and regroup. Myrrh is a radical decision, but it’s the safest. Bring everyone back, hand out new names and go-codes, replace staff. The crucial thing for us is to keep it quiet. I’ve already assured Ascot that we’ve discounted Marko’s story, so if he gets wind that we really are hunting a mole, he’ll shut us down in a heartbeat.” He stared at Milo significantly. “Everything we do from here on out is under the radar.”

“Understood.”

Drummond chewed the inside of his mouth again. “While a mole would hurt, Tourism could survive. That’s not our biggest threat. The biggest threat to Tourism is knowledge of its existence.”

“Which the Chinese have. So does a Ukrainian lieutenant.”

“They’re not the only ones. The French have an inkling of it, and so do the Brits. There are sites on the Internet that speculate about us, too. Which is as it should be. Right now, Tourism is a myth. It’s a fable that people either consider poppycock or believe in. The believers are terrified that we might exist, because a myth is far more frightening than reality.”