The Nearest Exit (30 page)

“And who sent the extortion letter?”

“That was the question, wasn’t it? I had our lab go over the envelope, but I wasn’t about to show the letter or the photos.”

“Of course.”

“Mailed from Berlin. No recognizable prints. Address from a
laser printer—nothing to tell from that. So I went back to the club myself. The thing had been shut down. I backtracked and found out who had been running the club back then.”

“Rainer Volker.”

Wartmüller halted in midsmoke. “You are good, aren’t you?”

“Was he the one?”

“Before I got a chance to talk to him, I got a call from one of my American contacts.”

“Who?”

When he exhaled, smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Owen Mendel. Turns out they had been watching Volker. They learned what he was up to, that he was blackmailing me. It wasn’t their business, really, but Mendel understood that I couldn’t take care of it through BND channels. He offered an exchange of services.”

“An exchange?”

“He makes my problem go away, and in return I lobby for a little more cooperation with the Americans. The cooperation that was lost, mind you, because of your obsession with Afghan heroin.”

The woman and dog had left Erika’s field of vision, but then a young couple began to cross the park in the opposite direction. That’s when she knew—it was Brigit, suspicious Brigit, keeping an eye on her mentor with some of the extra staff.

Wartmüller continued, “The Americans knew that Volker was blackmailing me, and they even knew the name of the girl in the photos—Adriana Stanescu. All this trouble, over a Moldovan!” He shook his head. “Very quietly, they took care of Volker.”

“Killed him.”

“Yes. But quietly. I thought it was done. Just to be sure, I did a search on this girl, this Moldovan. Somehow she’d gotten a visa and was living up in Berlin. I started to think. Soon, we’ll all be up in Berlin. It was too easy to imagine—me on the street every day, my photo appearing in the newspaper. Really, there were a hundred ways for this girl to look up one day, raise her finger, and point. For her to start screaming.” He rubbed his face, which despite the cold was damp. “It began to drive me crazy. I called Mendel, but it turned out that he’d left the Company and I was passed on to some other guy.
Alan Drummond. We talked turkey, as they say. After conferring with his people, he promised to get rid of my anxiety if he could start seeing some results from my side.” Wartmüller paused. “I told him thank you very much.”

“Did he?”

Wartmüller cupped his ear. “Eh?”

“Did he see results from your side?”

He shrugged. “Hamburg, primarily. You know about that operation. But there were some other things in Cologne and Nuremberg. Rwanda, too.”

Erika considered whether or not to say it aloud, because both of them knew it already, but her anger got the better of her. “That’s treason.”

“Is it?”

“Unless you got clearance to pass on that information. Did you?”

He pursed his lips, then changed position, and it struck her that Wartmüller had passed through the emotional stages very quickly and come out the other side. “Listen, Erika. I’ve been in this game as long as you have. You’re good—we both know that. You’ve connected the dots and ended up with me. Really, though, what do you have? Suppositions. Rumors, at best. Trust me: You’ll find nothing else. I’ve made sure of that.”

Now he was doing it, giving voice to the fact that both of them already knew. She had an American spy’s single line—
It was for you . . . German intelligence
—the tragic history of an immigrant girl, and the involvement of a secret department across the ocean that would never open up its files for her perusal. She had nothing, but she wasn’t about to admit that. The best she could do was fan his anxiety. “The photos of you came from a videotape, which is still out there.”

He shook his head. “The Americans destroyed it.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

He wasn’t going to take the bait, not yet. “You lie like a politician, Erika. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.” He stood and squashed his cigarette beneath his heel and looked down on her. “I’ve got that conference call.”

She didn’t bother watching him walk away. Instead, she took out
her cell phone and called Oskar. “It’s your mother,” she told him. “Send your friend home immediately.”

“Is that all?”

“Just do it, and I’ll be in touch.”

“Of course you will,” Oskar muttered. He sounded very disappointed.

It was a simple enough transfer, but even Milo, eye-strained from two days of television and sore down his burned arm, could see that they were worried. Oskar led the way while Heinrich followed; Gustav had left earlier. They didn’t blindfold him or bind his wrists, just walked with him out Erika Schwartz’s back door and down the woody incline of her yard to a dried creek bed that separated properties. They followed it to the left—north, Milo thought, then wasn’t sure—and passed the occasional high security fence and signs warning trespassers away from the homes of important people.

“No cameras?” Milo asked after a while.

Oskar rocked his head while, behind, Heinrich stumbled in the undergrowth. “Here, no. At each end, where the roads are, yes. We’ll have to be careful there.”

“You could have just taken me out the way you brought me in.”

“Unfortunately, this is the only way to assure your safety.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

Oskar stopped and looked back at him, hard. He didn’t need to say a thing. They went on.

They reached a residential road where a quaint stone arch spanned the creek, and Oskar pointed out the cameras. There were three—one on the stones, two in the trees—so they remained in the woods and continued fifty yards up the road. They waited until a white van
with the insignia of a Karlsfeld plumbing company pulled up to the side of the road. Gustav was behind the wheel. Heinrich took the passenger seat; Oskar joined Milo in the rear.

The drive took about an hour and a half, and during that time Oskar slowly relaxed. He never warmed to Milo, but neither did he seem to view him as a tactical enemy. The distinction was important. Then his phone rang, and he answered it, grunted a few times, and handed it to Milo. “It’s for you.”

“Hello?”

“Theodor Wartmüller,” Erika said. “He’s the one who ordered your release.”

“Thanks,” Milo said, then waited. Only silence followed, and in that silence he realized he knew the name Wartmüller, but wasn’t sure where from. “Do you have it covered?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Have you got the whole story?”

“Enough of it.”

“You have evidence?”

More silence followed. No, she didn’t have the evidence to arrest the man.

“If I can, I’ll help.”

“Why?”

“You know why. You know I didn’t hurt her.”

“I don’t know anything, Mr. Weaver.”

“Was it blackmail?”

“Of course.”

Then Milo hesitated, because he finally remembered why he knew that name. “When?”

“What?”

“When was the blackmail?”

“Do I get the sense you know something?”

“I need details if I’m going to help you.”

“December.”

Milo felt a wave of acid climb into the back of his throat. He swallowed it down. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

She sighed, and Milo thought he heard wind—she was outside,
away from ears. “I don’t think I need to tell you anything. You can ask your own people.”

“I’ll do that. And I’ll find a way to pass on anything that looks useful.”

“Let’s hope I don’t need anything from you.”

“Let’s hope,” said Milo. “One last thing.”

“Yes?”

“Budapest. You told me I’d been in Budapest, but I hadn’t. Were you making that up?”

She sounded surprised. “We have it through a source. You were there, all right. Not just a writer—you also claimed to be a doctor and a film producer.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know?”

“Please. It’s important.”

“You were looking for an American journalist named Henry Gray. He’d just come out of a coma and had disappeared. You apparently plagued his girlfriend, who’s also a journalist.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Zsuzsanna Papp, I think. Hungarian. Works for
Blikk
.”

“Did I find this Henry Gray?”

“Not as far as we know. All we know is that you were there some days, asking around, then disappeared.” She paused. “Is someone out there using your name?”

“Thanks, Erika. I’ll be in touch if I can help.”

He returned the phone to Oskar, who grinned oddly as he hung it up. It was no more comforting than his boss’s smiles. In English, he said, “So Mr. Weaver is going to help us. Excuse me if I’m not filled with the hope.”

When they finally stopped a little before noon, they were in the center of Innsbruck, across the Austrian border. “The train station is a block that way,” Oskar said, pointing, then handed over Milo’s wallet, disassembled phone, key ring, and iPod, along with two hundred euros in small bills “to get you closer to home.” He made no move to shake hands, so Milo didn’t either, but when he passed the
cab he waved to Gustav and Heinrich. Gustav, confused, waved back with a smile.

The Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof was stocked with stores and cafés. After looking over the departures schedule, he bought a fresh gauze bandage for his forearm, a bottle of orange juice, and a large sandwich of cold cuts, which he ate outside, staring at the Friday lunch crowds and the gray traffic pushing through Südtiroler Platz. Once he was finished eating and had wrapped his arm in the bathroom, he put his phone together again, powered it up, and went to a café to wait. As soon as he sat down, the phone vibrated for his attention. A message:
Myrrh, myrrh
.

Never in his career had the universal return code been sent. It meant that Dzubenko’s various stories had checked out, a Chinese mole was assumed, and the entire department was closing down.

If there was a surprise in all this, it was only that he didn’t give a damn anymore.

Things could change so quickly—a department could panic and call back all its agents, and one of its agents could hear a single name, Theodor Wartmüller, and decide that the department itself no longer deserved to exist.
Let it go down in flames
, he thought.

Still, he followed procedure, if only because it was second nature. He didn’t call in, because Schwartz could easily have wired his phone to send her any numbers he dialed, and no one called him, because his reappearance might simply mean that another agency had control of the phone. He also avoided pay phones, since he couldn’t be sure that Schwartz hadn’t warned the Austrians of his arrival. He wanted to trust her, but that wasn’t really an option.

He ordered a caffè latte and settled in for the long wait, which turned out to last four hours. During that time, he drank coffee and wandered the claustrophobic streets around the train station, peering into windows selling liquor, chocolates, and aids for sexual gratification. He plugged into his iPod and found himself listening to Bowie’s
Low
, that desperate-sounding voice saying, “Oh, but I’m always crashing in the same car.”

It was around three when, on his way back to the station, he saw
James Einner walking briskly toward him. There was a smile in his eyes, but nowhere else, and as they passed one another he only said, “Check the window,” and continued on. Three doors down, on a windowsill, he spotted a cheap Nokia; it was already ringing.

“Lovely to hear from you,” Milo said into it as he continued back to the station.

“You being watched?”

“Doubtful, but with this many cameras around they don’t need to leave their laptops. Where am I going?”

“Vienna, then Dulles. I’ll be on the plane with you. You see the recall message?”

“Why the panic?”

There was a pause. “We’ll talk about it in Vienna. The Eurotel at the airport. I’m bringing the drinks,” he said and hung up.

Milo bought a first-class ticket to Vienna’s Westbahnhof and dozed briefly as the landscape turned black. Occasionally, his forearm throbbed, but he didn’t feel like checking for infection, and during a particularly stinging session he noticed a dark-skinned man—midthirties, long sideburns, fit, glum—enter the car and move slowly along, touching seat backs as if counting them. As he approached Milo’s seat toward the rear, he glanced briefly into Milo’s eyes and dropped a gray Siemens onto the empty seat beside him. Milo stared at the phone, then glanced back, but the man was already exiting the car.

It was common enough in his line of work to gradually collect cheap phones, but it didn’t usually happen so quickly. Milo left the phone where it was and peered out at the night, the train gradually overtaking the lights of a distant city. Then the phone rang a monotone
beep-beep
, and he answered it but said nothing.

“Misha, it’s me.”