The Nearest Exit (41 page)

Heading down on the elevator, on his way to meet his wife for dinner, Alan Drummond felt an unfamiliar emotion that Wednesday after noon: satisfaction. It wasn’t the pleased satisfaction of someone who’s just finished a particularly good meal or some fulfilling sexual act, but the satisfaction of someone who’s spent too much time dissatisfied and has finally gone through a twenty-four-hour period largely free of disappointments.

Rebuilding the Department of Tourism had taken only four days. The technicians who had removed the computers and disassembled the cubicles had kept detailed records of where each had come from, and it was just a matter of repeating the procedure in reverse. There were glitches, of course. Human error. A couple of Travel Agents ended up with the wrong computers, but instead of bringing in the technicians again Drummond had them switch cubicles. By then the remaining thirty-eight Tourists had been redeployed, and while most were able to continue their previous assignments, seven had to abandon them and begin new ones. One, though, was less lucky. Her sudden disappearance was badly timed, and when she returned to Jakarta a welcoming committee was waiting for her at Soekarno-Hatta International; twelve hours later she was confirmed dead.

Though the number of Tourists was still dreadfully low, during
the four days since their redeployment only that one had been lost, and they’d gained two more from the ranks of the Travel Agents, both of whom were now suffering through training at the Point. The memory of the Guoanbu’s game still haunted him, particularly as he thought of those five Tourists—Stanley, Gupta, Mobuku, Martinez, and Yuan—who had been lost during the Myrrh recall. Among those who were left, though, significant work had been done, and not just the miserable work of keeping the department above water. Two terrorist cells—one Pakistani, one Saudi—had been infiltrated; three nuisances (Syrian, Moroccan, and Palestinian) had been liquidated; a Tourist had acquired choice intelligence about Hugo Chávez’s government during the resolution of the Andean crisis between Ec ua dor, Colombia, and Venezuela; and one Tourist had even saved the lives of two French journalists in Najaf. That was positive work, progress, and it proved that Milo Weaver was a shortsighted fool. Despite his years in administration, Weaver had an incomprehensible misunderstanding of how compromise was necessary in order to do the good work.

The department had even survived Director Ascot, who had gotten wind of the mole hunt from God-Only-Knew-Who. Nathan Irwin dreamed up the lie to save them: “It’s simple, Alan. You tell that bastard that since taking over you’ve grown disgusted by the lax security in the department, and the only way to deal with it was to bring everyone back to New York and give them new identities. You needed the fake mole hunt to justify the recall.”

The fact that the lie worked beautifully had the ironic effect of making him and Irwin partners in crime. Ironic, because Irwin had savagely fought Drummond’s appointment to head Tourism. That was politics for you.

By Friday, though, Irwin and his nosy staff would be out of his hair, and he would be free of the perpetual oversight.

Nothing was perfect; nothing had ever been. The new go-codes, for instance, were impossible to remember. Six-digit numbers. So each time he called a Tourist he had to pull out the abused list from his top drawer, which listed everything: work name, phone number, go-code, and reply code. If he wanted to call one while he was outside
of the office, he had to hightail it back to the Avenue of the Americas, go up to the twenty-second floor, and unlock his office and then the damned drawer. Irwin and his aides insisted it was the only secure way to run things, and they were probably right, but it made Drummond’s job that much more impossible.

Still, he’d survived—they’d all survived—and there was a certain satisfaction in that. He was starting to believe he could survive for a good long while in the Department of Tourism.

To celebrate his new lease on life, and to apologize for having missed a lunch date with his wife for a last-minute powwow with visitors from the Department of Defense, he’d reserved a table for two at Balthazar, Penelope’s favorite restaurant. He and Penelope had a long, known history of blowing a significant amount of their income on expensive restaurants. He couldn’t help it—seeing Penelope’s joy when a goat cheese and caramelized onion tart was placed before her made it all worth it. For the truth, which was so rare in his circles that admitting to it publicly would have been social suicide, was that he loved his wife deeply and thanked God that his undeserving ass had ever been blessed with her.

Lost in these embarrassing thoughts, he settled into a black Ford in the basement garage. Jake was behind the wheel; Jake, who had just returned from a holiday in Miami with his family. Drummond asked about the weather down there, and how the family was doing, and when his phone rang and he saw it was Irwin he considered not taking it—but the man was still technically his boss. “Sorry, Jake. I have to take this.”

“No worries, sir.”

Drummond raised the separation window. “Hello, Nathan.”

Nathan Irwin skipped the greetings. “What’s this about Hang Seng Bank?”

“It’s taken care of.”

“One of their CEOs gets his laptop stolen, and the next thing we know HSBC is selling all its options?”

“What did you think they’d do with the information?”

“Sit on it. That’s what I thought they’d do. I’ve got friends at Hang Seng, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know you were going through all our active case files.”

“You expect me to just sit around on the twenty-second floor twiddling my thumbs? I want a sit-down with you on this Hang Seng deal. Try to salvage something from it.”

“In the morning, Nathan. You know where to find me.”

The senator hung up, leaving Drummond with a bad taste in his mouth.

Jake stopped beside the tower at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street, and Drummond collected his briefcase and climbed out, showing an open hand in farewell. As the Ford sped off, he nodded at the old doorman whose name he never remembered.

The doorman apparently knew who he was. “There’s someone waiting for you, sir.”

“Yes?”

He nodded at the long couch in the foyer, and Drummond suddenly lost his appetite. Milo Weaver got up to meet him. He wasn’t smiling.

“You could’ve called beforehand,” Drummond told him. “Not sure that’s a good idea.”

“How did you find out where I live?”

“It’s not a state secret, Alan.”

Drummond frowned, then looked at the elevator. He wanted to ignore him and take that elevator straight up to the sixteenth floor, to Penelope, but Weaver had the wild-eyed look of someone who wouldn’t be ignored. “So why the hell are you here?”

“Can we talk upstairs?”

“Absolutely not. I’m not having my wife get friendly with you.”

“Right. Wife,” Weaver said, as if he’d forgotten this important detail. He looked over Drummond’s shoulder at the doorman, who had returned to the sidewalk but watched them carefully through the glass doors.

“The place isn’t bugged, Milo.”

Weaver nodded, then wiped at his nose, a move that covered his mouth as he spoke. “We were wrong, Alan. There is a mole, and he’s been in place for a while.”

“You’re a fucking nut, Weaver.”

Milo shook his head, his heavy eyes full of conviction. Drummond knew then that a quiet dinner with Penelope was now a vain hope. Maybe Weaver had been right all along—the world really did revolve around him.

The argument had come to Milo all at once in a voice that his mother would have known. Big. The bigger voice that would never lie to him.

It proved that, no matter what Tina or Bipasha Ray thought, he really had been listening to his wife.

I even take it a step further sometimes and think that maybe his genius lies in the fact that the original cover, the first one I’ve peeled off and thrown away, that
that’s
the real one. That I’ve long ago abandoned what really is Milo Weaver. That it’s somewhere in the trash and I’ll never find it again
.

How had the sequence of thoughts played out? He wasn’t sure. “
Genius
”—that word had probably made him think of Xin Zhu, whom he still admired deeply. Zhu had been on his mind anyway, for over the last days elements from Yevgeny’s file had come to him unbidden at unpredictable times. Like in the middle of couples therapy, at the mention of the word “genius.” Tina had planted the seed: A genius gives you the real story with the first layer of cover, so that once you’ve discarded it, it’s no longer viable.

Then he remembered her saying,
How much time has to pass before your life stops being classified, huh? It never occurs to you that by then it might be too late
.

Time. Too late.

The inverse: too early.

He recalled Marko Dzubenko and his drunken time with Xin Zhu. On the Chinese New Year, February 7.

But there was one thing this 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
.

Then Henry Gray, on Sunday, March 2:

We’d had a ton of progress over the last week . . .

What kind of progress?

Well, we learned what happened to you, for instance
.

What happened to me?

You survived, didn’t you? Grainger’s letter told us you were investigating, but we weren’t sure if you were one of the casualties or not. Everyone wanted your ass, after all. You got out of prison and went to live in New Jersey—we knew that—but then you disappeared, and we didn’t know until this week that you really were still alive
.

How’d you figure that out?

Ask Rick. He came in with the information
.

The timing was wrong. Xin Zhu already knew about Milo’s return to Tourism, but he waited until that last week with Gray to let the journalist know what he had been aware of all along.

He remembered that part of Xin Zhu’s technique was to become the kind of man you would like. For Gray, he was a serious and angry spy. For Dzubenko, he was a drunkard and a womanizer. What if he’d done the same to Milo? Because he did like Xin Zhu, a brilliant spymaster with an acute sense of humor, that quality so lacking in their business. What if Milo’s Zhu wasn’t the real one either?

None of this, though, would have come to him had he not read that carefully collated file that his father had broken into his apartment
to leave for him. His father, it turned out, knew much more about Xin Zhu than Drummond did, and Milo had stayed up until four in the morning, reading about the fifty-seven-year-old man from Xianyang, near the ancient city of Xi’an, who had been swept up by the Cultural Revolution, then eaten by it as his middle-school education landed him in the Down to the Countryside Movement, which sucked up five years of his life, until 1974, farming wheat in Inner Mongolia. He survived, and upon his return went to work for the Central Investigation Division, moving on to the Guoanbu in the eighties. In 1982, he married Qi Wan (1960–1989), and that same year his only child—a son, Delun (1982–2007)—was born.