The Nearest Exit (37 page)

In the old days, he would have known these huge men who acted as Tourism’s first barrier against intrusion, and called them by name, but these two had come along after his dismissal, and they were as mute and humorless as their predecessors. There was one familiar face, though—Gloria Martinez, who worked the front desk. She was pretty but stern; this had never stopped Milo from flirting with her in an unending game of proposal and rejection.

The last time she’d seen him, Milo was being beaten to the ground by three doormen in this cold lobby. Now, the look on her face suggested she had assumed him dead, and she showed the maximum emotion her position would allow: “Good to see you again, sir.”

“Ms. Martinez, you are, as ever, a sight for sore eyes.”

When he stopped to be photographed by the computer and
stated his name for the microphone, Gloria Martinez didn’t even blink when he said, “Sebastian Hall.” She had only ever known him as Milo.

In the elevator the doormen patted him down, then used a key to access the twenty-second floor. The ride was silent, and Milo watched their stony faces in the mirrored walls.

When the doors opened, he involuntarily caught his breath. This, for six years, had been his daily destination, his nine-to-five. A quietly productive floor of cubicles and computers and busy Travel Agents combing through the intelligence sent in by a whole world of Tourists. Now, though, the most striking thing about the Department of Tourism was its emptiness. The maze of cubicles was still here, but they were empty. In a few, kneeling in mock prayer, technicians fooled with computer cables, tagging and logging hard drives, but they were like sweepers cleaning up after a parade, not even raising their heads to acknowledge the visitors heading to the offices along the far wall.

On the left and right, windows watched over the midpoints of skyscrapers under slate clouds, and ahead of them, through open blinds, was the office Grainger had used when running the department. It had been taken over by Owen Mendel, then the surprisingly young Alan Drummond, and now, behind the large desk, sat a prematurely white-haired man with reading glasses—fifty-five, Milo remembered. It was a familiar face from CNN talk shows and the occasional C-SPAN sleeper. He was a man not used to having to work through such volumes of paperwork, not used to having to lead a mole hunt. Senator Nathan Irwin.

Milo hoped that, for their first meeting, he wouldn’t snap and murder the senator.

Then again, he wasn’t sure what he hoped.

Irwin wasn’t alone in the office. Drummond was leaning back in a chair used for visitors, and two young men in suits stood around, slouched. One muttered into a cell phone and watched the visitors approach, then turned and said something to Irwin, who took off his glasses. All the men watched them enter.

“Thanks, guys,” Drummond said as he got to his feet, and the two doormen withdrew.

Irwin remained seated, so Drummond made introductions. “Nathan, this is Sebastian Hall.”

Irwin blinked at him, then shook his head. “You mean—”

“Yes,” Drummond cut in, “but for security we stick to work names.”

“Of course,” said Irwin. He finally pushed himself up and stretched a large hand across his desk—actually, Grainger’s desk. The department had decided to keep the oak monstrosity after his death.

Milo stepped forward and shook the senator’s cool hand.

“This,” Drummond continued, “is Max Grzybowski, the senator’s chief of staff.”

The blond young man stuck out a hand, smiling goofily. “Pleased to meet you.”

The one with the phone kept whispering into it but raised a hand and offered a salutary smile.

“He’s Dave Pearson, legislative director,” said Drummond, and Milo waved casually back. “They’re Senator Irwin’s personal assistants, and they’ve been given the same clearance as the senator.”

The senator nodded agreeably, then pointed at Milo. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, er, Hall. Have time for a drink?”

“That’s up to Mr. Drummond, sir. I’m due for some debriefing, I think.”

“It’s up to me now,” Irwin said before Drummond could answer, “and I want us to chat before your debriefing. Max, can you take care of it?”

After months on the road, there was something freakishly civilized about what followed. Max took out a BlackBerry. “Four o’clock all right?”

Milo shrugged.

Max said to Irwin, “That way you can still make dinner at six with the Joshipuras. Stout—it’s a bar up on Thirty-third.”

Dave Pearson finally ended his call. “Would you like me on hand?”

Everyone looked at Irwin, who shook his head. “Let’s keep this off the record, shall we, Hall?”

“I’m a big fan of off the record, sir.”

“Four at Stout should work,” Max told them both. “Minimal clientele.”

“You sound like a regular,” said Milo.

“Max is a regular of all the world’s better drinking establishments,” Irwin informed him, then settled back down. “Now, though, I’d like to hear a little more about your theory.”

“My theory?”

“Your theory that there is no mole in Tourism.”

There were no spare chairs, so Milo remained standing. “Sure. But first you have to get your mind around one thing that’s almost nonexistent in our line of work.”

“What’s that?” asked Irwin, and Drummond leaned forward expectantly.

“A sense of humor, sir.”

He took them through it all—Grainger’s letter, the failed attempt on Gray’s life, Gray’s approach to the Chinese, and Xin Zhu’s priming of Marko Dzubenko.

“It sounds to me,” Irwin said once he’d finished, “like you’re fond of this Chinaman.”

“He found a way to throw us into complete disarray and make us fear for our existence—all without harming a single person. We could learn a lot from his way of thinking.”

“Alan, what do you think?”

“About Xin Zhu?” Drummond asked, frowning.

“About the theory.”

Drummond mused on this, tilting his head from side to side. “It holds water. The strange thing, to me, was always that Marko Dzubenko and the Chinese ambassador referred to only one operation. We had to assume the Chinese had wider knowledge but preferred to only let this one out in order to pressure us. It was poker, and we had to assume they weren’t bluffing.”

“So now you’ve decided they were.”

“The Budapest safe house,” Milo cut in. “That’s what settled it for me. After helping him for months, they cut Gray off completely in the space of an afternoon. Took all his research with them. They’re not interested in him blowing our secrets.”

“Now that’s something I don’t quite get,” said Irwin. “Why wouldn’t they want to blow our secrets?”

“Because right now Xin Zhu owns that secret. He’s got the upper hand. All this was just to inform us of that fact.”

“Why now?” asked Dave Pearson, leaning against the blinds. Milo blinked at him. “What?”

“Why did they decide to let go of Henry Gray at this moment, rather than later? We’d just started the vetting process. If they’d waited another week, we might have completely gutted the department. It would have really damaged us.”

“It was me.”

“The world revolving around you again?” asked Drummond, smiling.

“Zhu learned I was in Budapest looking for Gray. It was convenient. He even told Gray that I was looking for him, and said he should meet me. He was never interested in ruining us.”

Irwin nodded slowly as it all became clear. “Jesus. The sons of bitches! I’m starting to share your admiration, Hall.” Then he turned to Max Grzybowski. “Make sure no one ever knows I said that.”

“Will do, Captain,” Max said, grinning.

“Let’s not all fall in love with Zhu,” Drummond said, shifting in his chair. “The fact is that his game cost five lives.”

“Who?” asked Milo.

“Recalling Tourists is never foolproof. You pull agents out in the middle of an operation, and some don’t make it. A couple of them were being watched and tried to hurry home too fast. One had to break out of jail to get back; he made it as far as the train yards before the dogs got him. The other two are just dead—no explanation yet.”

Everyone remained silent a moment, thinking about those deaths in far corners of the world.

“So don’t tell me Xin Zhu is some intelligence saint,” Drummond said.

Everyone in the room noticed the disgust in his voice, but Milo was the only one impressed by it.

Drummond walked him back to the elevator, and as they waited for it he muttered under his breath, lips unmoving, about the mess Irwin had been causing. “He’s comprehensive. It’s great when you’re going through a federal budget, but not now. I have no idea when we’ll be online again.”

“But it’s done now. Irwin can head back to Congress, and you can get back to work.”

“He’s demanding to oversee the reassignments. His assistants are advising him that if something blows up just after he’s left, he’ll get blamed for it. He’s already entered the swamp, and he wants to make sure he doesn’t track anything back onto the Senate floor.”

Milo glanced back. Irwin and his assistants were huddled together over their game plan. The technicians were far away.

Drummond said, “The Germans didn’t hurt you much, did they?”

“Just my pride. How did you know where I was?”

“When?”

“When I was at Erika Schwartz’s house. They took apart my phone, but you figured out where I was and got to her through Theodor Wartmüller. How?”

Drummond shrugged. “I guess I can share—you’ve got a tracker in your left shoulder.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do,” he insisted. “Since October all Tourists have one. Phone trackers are too easy to bust, or lose. You got yours in training, one of the hundred immunization shots.”

“No one told me?”

“We don’t tell anyone.”

Milo began to reflect on this fact, that every move he’d made had been easily tracked by Drummond on his computer. “Wait. That means you knew where I was after I kidnapped Adriana. You
knew
I didn’t take her body out into the countryside.”

Drummond stared back at him but said nothing. There was a kind of sadness in his face.

“You didn’t expect me to kill her, did you?”

Finally, Drummond said, “Don’t give yourself a headache. No, I didn’t want her dead, but we had to get rid of her. That’s why I chose you, the only Tourist with a child. I knew that, given a whole week, you’d find some other solution.”

“You could have told me that.”

“Maybe, but I wanted you to hide it from me. If I couldn’t figure it out, then no one else could, either.”

Milo couldn’t speak.

“And you came through—almost. What really went wrong?”

“I overestimated my friends. Then you had her killed anyway.”

“You were her last chance.”

Silence fell between them, and Milo hit the elevator button again. He didn’t know if he believed any of this, or if he just didn’t want to.

“You’re not really quitting, are you?”

“You’ll get my resignation letter by to night.”

“Jesus, Weaver. I need you here.”

The elevator opened, and Milo stepped inside. There was a pleading quality to Drummond’s voice that worried him, but he’d been through this so many times in his head that it was as if the resignation had already been filed. There were so many arguments he could make, but only one mattered: “We set up the girl. Then we killed her.”

“And because of that, we now have an open invitation at BND headquarters. They built an overpriced meeting room—Conference Room S—solely for meetings with us. After a year it’s finally being used. That’s no small thing.”

“Yet not big enough.”

Milo watched the despair grow on Drummond’s face as the doors slid shut. Beyond, one of the senator’s aides—Dave Pearson—was standing at the blinds, watching them.

By the time he was out on the street again, having nodded to the doormen and winked at Gloria, he felt something like freedom. Not freedom exactly, because he knew he would have to work to make it safely through the extensive exit interviews, but he was certainly lighter. It was the release from obligation, a rare and wonderful feeling.

He wanted to call Tina, and even stopped at a pay phone, but changed his mind. Better to go to her later, when he knew he could stay. He stuck a square of Nicorette into his mouth.

Stout was mostly empty, partly because the after-work revelers had moved farther uptown, partly because most of its remaining clientele hadn’t gotten out of work yet. He settled at the extremely long, woody bar and ordered a vodka martini. It was delicious, and he thought over all the vodka martinis he’d had over the last three months, in Moscow, Paris, Podgorica, London, Zürich, Budapest, Berlin, Rome . . .

While the drink’s name made most people think of Italy, the only place he’d ever had a really good one—big, ice cold, and very strong—was in Manhattan. Though Stout’s version wasn’t nearly as good as, say, the Underbar of the W Hotel on Union Square, it was still leagues ahead of any Florentine café’s, and he gave the bartender—a blonde with a slight harelip—earnest thanks.