The Tourist (33 page)

FW: Texas BBQ Party!

Dear Friends,

To celebrate Drew's 19th birthday you're all invited

to enjoy some REAL Texas BBQ in Loretta's back yard at 6

PM on Thursday, July 19. It's gonna be a blast!

--Jane & Stu Kowalski

She and Milo knew the Kowalskis from Stephanie's school, but their son, Drew, was only seven. She clicked
REPLY
and said she was sorry, but she couldn't make it, she was in Austin for a few days. She'd bring back some
"Real
Texas BBQ sauce" as a present. Now, it was five o'clock on Thursday. Time to go. Stephanie was with Hanna, playing Chutes and Ladders, while Miguel was again in front of the television, watching financial news. She gathered his keys and shook them.

"Can I take the Lincoln? Want to get some ice cream." He took his eyes off the television and frowned. "Want company?" She shook her head, gave him a peck on the cheek, then told Stephanie to be good; she'd be back in a sec. Stephanie was winning her game, and had no desire to leave it. On her way out, Tina left her cell phone on the table beside the front door--she'd seen enough television to know satellites could track her that way in a matter of seconds. Then she took two jackets from the wall hook and folded them so they looked like laundry. The heat blasted her when she stepped outside, and she paused, clutching the jackets. She crossed to the paved driveway and the Lincoln Town Car her father replaced each year with a fresh one. As she fooled with the lock, she noticed the red sedan in front of the Sheffields' bi-level. Rodger pretended not to be looking at her, but she noticed him leaning forward to start up his car.

Damn.

She stayed calm. She put the jackets on the passenger seat, then drove slowly down the lane, up the next right, and out to the highway that led into town, the red sedan always in her rearview.

She pulled into a plaza off the highway and parked in front of a coinoperated Laundromat. The sedan parked two rows back. She went inside, where the warmth of the machines fought the limpid air-conditioning, and put the jackets in a washer but didn't insert any coins. The few other Thursday afternoon customers didn't seem to notice. She took an empty seat not far from the front windows and watched the parking lot. It took him a while, but she knew he would have to do something. He couldn't see inside, and with the heat he had to be getting thirsty. Or maybe he just had to pee. It took forty minutes. He got out of his car in his dark sunglasses and trotted over to the 7-Eleven beside the Laundromat. Go.

She ran out, leaving the jackets behind, ignoring the sweltering heat, dove into the Town Car, and screeched out of the parking space, nearly hitting a bicyclist. Instead of heading to the highway, she turned right onto a back road and parked behind the plaza. Then she got out, pulse racing, and ran around the high, graffitied wall to stand at the corner and watch the lot.

The Laundromat and 7-Eleven were on the far side of the plaza, but she could still spot Rodger in his sunglasses, clutching a redand-white Big Gulp as he stepped outside. He stopped, looked around (she pulled her head back), and ran to his car. He didn't drive away immediately, and she suspected he was calling in his failure and asking for orders. That's how these people were. They always wanted orders.

Then the sedan took the same path as Tina had, but turned left onto the highway. He crossed the median and headed back toward her parents'

house.

She was overcome by exhilaration. Tina Weaver had thwarted the Department of Homeland Security. Not many people could say that. She started the car, but waited until her shaking hands had calmed. The exhilaration didn't disappear, but it mixed with a resurgence of fear. What if they decided to do something to her parents? Or Stephanie? That was ludicrous, of course, because she only wanted to lose them for a short time. But maybe they'd figured out that e-mail; maybe they knew exactly what she was doing, and would kidnap her family to manipulate her. Did they even do that? Television was no help on this point. She continued down the back roads, past small, ramshackle houses lacking even brown grass. It had been a dry summer here, and some of these chain-linked yards looked like miniature dust bowls. She emerged onto a paved road and drove north on 183 toward Briggs. At a bend in the highway, in a bare dirt clearing, sat a broad, screenedin building below the sign
LORETTA'S KITCHEN
. She had come here as a child, and when she married she brought Milo. "Real

Texas barbecue," she'd told him. They'd sometimes sneak out here, away from her parents, to eat brisket and biscuits with gravy and talk over their life plans. It was the location of many of their fantasies, where they felt they could know with reasonable certainly what university Stephanie would go to, where they would retire to when they won the lottery, and, before a doctor gave them the difficult news that Milo was sterile, the name and character of their next child, a boy.

The clientele of Loretta's was evidenced by the pickup trucks and big rigs gathering heat around it. She parked between two rigs, waited until six, and walked through the hot dust and into the restaurant. He wasn't among the crowd of construction workers and truckers getting their hands dirty on the picnic tables, so she went to the window and ordered a brisket plate, biscuits and gravy, and ribs from a pinkcheeked girl who, after taking her money, gave her a number. She found a free table among the chatter and laughter of the sweaty, sunburned men, ignoring their intense but friendly stares.

She watched the highway and the dusty parking lot through the screened walls, waiting, but didn't see him. Then he was right behind her, saying, "It's me," and touching her shoulder. His cheek was suddenly beside hers. She grabbed his face and kissed him. The tears, too, had crept upon her unawares, and for a moment they only hugged; then she pushed him back to get a look at him. He looked tired, baggy-eyed, pale. "I worried you were dead, Milo."

He gave her another kiss. "Not yet." He glanced out at the lot. "I didn't see anyone following you. How did you get away?"

She laughed and stroked his rough cheek. "I've got a few tricks up my sleeve."

"Twenty-seven!" the girl at the window called.

"That's us," said Tina.

"Stay here." He went to the window and returned with a tray overflowing with food.

" Where've you been?" she asked when he'd settled beside her. "Too many places. Tom's dead."

"What?" Her hand on his arm squeezed tight. "Tom?" He nodded, lowering his voice: "Someone killed him."

"Someone . . . who?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Of
course
it does! Did you arrest him?" she asked, then wondered if that was a stupid thing to ask. Despite the years she'd spent with a Company man, she really knew nothing about his work.

"Not really. The guy who pulled the trigger--I had to kill him." She closed her eyes as the stink of vinegary barbecue sauce overwhelmed her. She thought she might be sick. "Was he trying to kill you? This guy?"

"Yes."

Tina opened her eyes and stared at her husband. Then, overcome again, she grabbed him and squeezed. He was here, finally, and she felt the kind of consuming love that fills you with the desire to eat your loved one, a feeling she hadn't felt since their courtship. Her teeth grazed his stubbly cheek, which was wet from tears she could taste. His? No--he wasn't crying. He said, "The point is, everyone will think I killed Grainger. I'm on the run now, but once they've made up their minds, there won't be a safe place in the country for me."

She got control of herself and pulled back, her hands still on him; his hands were on her. "So, what now?"

"I've spent days thinking about that," he said, strangely matter-of-fact.

"Every way I turn it, I can't figure out how to solve the problem. The Company wants me dead."

"What? Dead? Why?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, but before she could protest, he added,

"Just know that if I show my face again, I'm dead." She nodded, trying to mirror his logical composure. "But you were collecting evidence before. Did you get it?"

"Not really."

Again, she nodded, as if these things really were part of her world, things she could actually grasp. "So what's the answer, Milo?" He took a raspy breath through his nose and looked at the untouched food. To it, he said, "Disappear. Me, you, Stephanie." He held up a hand.

"Before you answer, it's not as hard as it sounds. I've got money hidden away. We've got new identities--you got the passports, right?"

"Yes."

"We can go to Europe. I know people in Berlin and Switzerland. I can make a good life for us. Trust me on this. Of course, it won't be easy. Your parents, for instance. It'll be hard to visit them. They'll have to come to us. But it can be done."

Despite his slow speech, Tina wasn't sure she had heard him right. An hour ago, the worst news she could imagine was that Milo had been injured. She'd nearly collapsed, imagining that. Now, he was telling her that, as a family, they should disappear from the face of the earth. Had she really heard him right? Yes, she had--she could tell from his face. Her answer came out before her brain had a chance to process it: "No, Milo."
43

He'd been crying since Sweetwater, a half hour back. For the first hours of driving, there had been no tears, just red, stinging eyes. He wasn't sure what had finally triggered them. Perhaps the billboard advertising life insurance, with the Midwestern family smiling back at him--happy, insured. Maybe that was it. It didn't matter.

What really struck him as the sun set up ahead, turning to flame against the flat, arid West Texas landscape, was that he hadn't actually been prepared for what happened. Tourists survive by foreseeing unexpected eventualities and preparing for them. Maybe his oversight meant he'd never been much of a Tourist in the first place, because he never even considered the possibility that his wife would refuse to vanish with him. He went through her excuses. At first, they didn't have anything to do with herself; it was all about Stephanie.
You can't just tell a six-year-old her
name's something else and she's going to lose all her friends, Milo!
Though he hadn't posed the question, he should have asked if it was worse or better than having her dad disappear. He hadn't asked it because he was afraid of the answer: Well, she does still have Patrick, doesn't she?

Finally, she admitted that it had to do with herself as well.
What would I
do in Europe? I don't even speak Spanish well!

She loved him, yes. When she saw how her refusal was killing him, she kept grabbing his face and kissing his flushed cheeks and telling him just how much she loved him. That, she insisted, wasn't the issue, wasn't even a question. She loved Milo completely, but that didn't mean she would ruin their daughter's life in order to follow him across the world, spending years looking over their shoulders for some hit man.
What kind of
life is that, Milo? Think about it from our perspective.
Well, he had, hadn't he? He'd imagined them with Stephanie at Euro Disney, finishing their aborted vacation with laughs and candy and no more interruptions from the cell phone. The only difference was that they used different names. Lionel, Laura, and Kelley.

Now he knew why the tears had finally reached him: It was the realization that she was right. Grainger's death had rattled him, turned him into a desperate dreamer, imagining that the soft-edged world of Disney could be theirs.

Milo had been too in love with his fantasies to realize how childish they were.

And now, where was he? In the desert. It went out in all directions--

flat, two-toned, empty. His family gone, his one real ally in the Company dead, killed by his stupidity. There was only one ally left to him in the world, someone he never wanted to call, whose calls he always dreaded. At Hobbs, just over the New Mexico border, he stopped at a generic gas station/convenience store with peeling white walls and no airconditioning. The fat, sweating woman behind the counter sold him quarters and directed him to a pay phone in the rear, by the canned soups. He dialed the number he'd memorized back at Disney World, then put in all his quarters.

"Da?" said that familiar old voice.

"It's me."

"Mikhail?"

"I need your help, Yevgeny."

STORYTELLING

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2 5 TO

MONDAY, JULY 3 0 , 2 0 0 7

1

Terence Albert Fitzhugh stood in what had once been Tom Grainger's twenty-second-floor office. No longer. Through the ceiling-high windows behind the desk lay a vista of skyscrapers, the canopy of the urban jungle. Beyond the blinds on the opposite wall lay a field of cubicles and activity where all the young, pale Travel Agents made sense of Tourist chatter, culling it into slim Tour Guides that eventually made it to Langley, where other analysts produced their own policy-ready reports for the politicians. Each of those Travel Agents, he knew, hated him.

It wasn't him in particular they hated, but Terence Albert Fitzhugh as a concept. He'd seen it in Company offices throughout the world. A kind of love develops between department heads and their employees. When a department head is ousted, or killed, departmental emotions grow volatile. When that department is, like Tourism, invisible to the outside world, the staff depends on its chief that much more.

He would deal with their hatred later. Now, he shut the blinds and went to Grainger's computer. Even a week after his death, it was still a mess, because Tom Grainger had been a mess--one of those old cold warriors who'd spent too much time depending on pretty secretaries to keep order. When faced with their own computers, these old men ended up with the most cluttered desktops on the planet. 1 le had made everything else into a mess as well.

At first, of course, Fitzhugh thought he had cleaned up Grainger's mess. Tripplehorn had received his orders, and when Fitzhugh called back, the Tourist confirmed in a strangely flat voice that the job was done. Fine. Then, at the scene, he'd noticed the blood inside the house. Why had Tripplehorn taken away Weaver's body? There was no need for that. The next day, forensics almost gave him a coronary--the blood wasn't Weaver's. They didn't know whose it was, but he did.

Tripplehorn had not answered his phone; Milo Weaver had. Then, after a frantic week of scouring the country, a miracle. Fitzhugh accessed the network server, typed in his code, and replayed the video of that morning. A surveillance technician had done a quick edit of footage from various cameras. It began outside the building, among the throng of midtown commuters jostling wearily to their jobs. A time code ticked at the bottom of the screen: 9:38. Among the crowd was a head that the technician had marked with a roving arrow. It started on the other side of the Avenue of the Americas, paused, and jogged through a gridlock of yellow taxis to their side.

Cut to: a second camera, on their sidewalk. By then he'd been identified, and in the lobby the doormen were taking positions. On the street, though, Weaver seemed to reconsider. He stopped, letting people bump into him, as if suddenly confused by north and south. Then he continued to the front door.

A high lobby camera, looking down. From here, he could see where the doormen had positioned themselves. The big black guy, Lawrence, was at the door, while another waited by the palm tree. Two more hid in the elevator corridor, just out of sight.

Lawrence waited for him to enter, then stepped up to him. There was a moment when everything seemed all right. Agreeably, they chatted in low tones as the other three doormen approached. Then Weaver noticed them approaching, and panicked. That's the only explanation Fitzhugh could come up with, because Milo Weaver turned on his heel, swiftly, but Lawrence was ready for that; he'd already grabbed Weaver's shoulder. Weaver punched Lawrence in the face, but the other three doormen had arrived, and they piled on him.

It was a remarkably quiet scene, just a little scuffling and the gasp of the pretty desk clerk--Gloria Martinez--just out of sight. When they all got to their feet, Weaver was cuffed behind his back, and three doormen led him to the elevators.

Strangely, Weaver smiled as he passed the front desk, even winked at Gloria. He said something that the camera didn't pick up. The doormen heard it, though, and so did Gloria: "I think I lost my tour group." What a card.

He lost his sense of humor once he reached his cell on the nineteenth floor.

"Why did you kill him?" was Fitzhugh's opening gambit. Whatever Weaver said now would tell Fitzhugh what to do next.

Milo blinked at him, hands chained behind his back. "Who?"

"Tom, for Christ's sake! Tom Grainger!"

A pause, and in that moment of silence, Fitzhugh didn't know what the man would say. Finally, Weaver shrugged. "Tom had Angela Yates killed. That's why. He set her up to look like a traitor, then killed her. He lied to you and me. He lied to the Company." Then he pushed it further: "Because I loved that man, and he used me."

Had Milo killed Tripplehorn, and then, for his own reasons, shot Tom Grainger? If so, it was a burst of cool, fresh air in Fitzhugh's muggy life. He said, "I don't give a shit what you thought about him. He was a CIA veteran and your direct superior. You
killed
him, Weaver. What am I supposed to think? I'm your superior now--should I worry that if you smell something you don't like I'll be next on the slab?"

It hadn't been time for questions yet, though, so he made a show of frustration, claiming he had meetings to attend. "Reorganization. Restructuring. Cleaning up your goddamned mess."

On the way out, he'd whispered to Lawrence, "Strip him to his birthday suit and give him the black hole."

Lawrence, with his bloodshot eye, betrayed a moment of disgust. "Yes, sir."

The black hole was simple. Strip a man naked, give him a little while to become comfortable with his nakedness, and, after an hour or so, turn off the lights.

Blackness in itself was disorienting, but on its own it had no impact. It was just blackness. The "hole" came sometime later--hours, maybe minutes, when the doormen, wearing infrared goggles, returned two at a time and beat the hell out of him. No light, just disembodied fists. Take away time, light, and physical security, and a man quickly wants nothing more than to sit in a well-lit room and tell you everything he knows. Weaver would remain in the hole until tomorrow morning, by which time he would welcome even Fitzhugh's presence.

Back in the office, he read through Einner's report, delivered after their travels to Paris and Geneva. Despite Milo's attack on him, Einner insisted that Milo could not have been responsible for Angela's death. "He had the opportunity to switch her sleeping pills, but not the motive. It became obvious that he wanted to find her killer more than I did." In a blue font, Fitzhugh added his own assessment--"Rampant Speculation"--to Einner's report, then typed his initials and the date. A little after four, someone knocked. "Yes? Come in." Special Agent Janet Simmons opened the door.

He tried not to let his irritation show. Instead, he thought the same thing he'd thought during their first meeting--that she might have been an attractive young woman if she hadn't put so much effort into appearing otherwise. Dark hair pulled severely back, some navy suit with too-loose slacks. Lesbian slacks, Fitzhugh secretly called them.

"Thought you were still in D.C.," he said.

"You got Weaver," she answered, gripping her hands behind her back. Fitzhugh leaned back in the Aeron, wondering how she'd learned that.

"He came to us. Just walked his ass through the front door."

"Where's he now?"

"Couple floors down. We're giving him the silent treatment. But he's already admitted to killing Tom."

"Any reasons?"

"Fit of anger. Thought Grainger had used him. Betrayed him." She reached the available chair, touched it, but didn't sit. "I'll want to talk to him, you know."

"Of course."

"Soon."

Fitzhugh rocked his head from side to side to show that he was a man of multiple minds--not schizophrenic, but complicated. "Soon as possible. Be sure of that. But not today. Today there's no talking. And tomorrow, I'll need a full day alone with him. Security, you know." Simmons finally sat in the chair, her wandering eye gazing over Manhattan while her good eye locked on to him. "I'll pull jurisdiction if I have to. You know that, right? He killed Tom Grainger on American soil."

"Grainger was one of our employees. Not yours."

"Beside the point."

Fitzhugh eased back in the chair. "You act as if Weaver's your nemesis, Janet. He's just a corrupt Company man."

"Three murders in a month--the Tiger, Yates, and Grainger. That's a bit much, even for a corrupt Company man."

"You can't seriously think he killed all of them."

"I'll have a better idea once I've spoken to him." Fitzhugh ran his tongue over his teeth. "Tell you what, Janet. Give us another day alone with him. Day after tomorrow--Friday-- I'll let you sit in on the conversation." He held up three stiff fingers. "Scout's honor." Simmons considered that, as if she had a choice. "Day after tomorrow, then. But I want something now."

"Like what?"

"Milo's file. Not the open one--that's useless. I want yours."

"That'll take a little--"

"Now,
Terence. I'm not giving you time to misplace it, or take out all the juicy stuff. If I'm waiting to talk to him, then I better have some interesting reading."

He pursed his lips. "There's no need to be aggressive about this. We both want the same thing. Someone kills one of my people, and I want him scratching concrete for the rest of his life."

"Glad we're agreed," she said, though gladness left no mark on her face. "I still want that file."

"Can you at least wait ten minutes?"

"I can do that."

"Wait in the lobby. I'll send it down."

"What about the wife?" she asked as she stood. "Tina. Have you questioned her?"

"Briefly in Austin, after Weaver made contact, but she knows nothing. We're not bothering her anymore; she's been through enough."

"I see." Without offering a handshake, she walked out, leaving Fitzhugh to watch her march in her lesbian slacks through the maze of cubicles. He lifted the desk phone and typed 49, and after a doorman's military opening gambit--"Yes,
sir"
--he cut in: "Name."

"Steven Norris, sir."

"Listen carefully, Steven Norris. Are you listening?"

"Uh, yes. Sir."

"If you ever send a goddamned Homelander upstairs again without clearing it with me first, you're out of here. You'll be guarding the front gate of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad wearing a George Bush T-shirt instead of body armor. Got it?"

2

She'd taken a room on the twenty-third floor of the Grand Hyatt, atop Grand Central Station. Like any room Janet Simmons worked in, it quickly became a mess. She despised hotel blankets, stripping them off immediately to make a pile at the bottom of the bed. Tothis, she added the extra pillows (one was more than enough for her), room service menus, the alphabetical book of guest services, and all the sundry extras that overflowed the bedside tables. Only then, finally cleared of distractions, could she sit on the bed, open her laptop, and start a new Word document to transcribe her thoughts.

Simmons didn't like Terence Fitzhugh. There was the irritating way his eyes measured her bustline, but that wasn't it. What she hated was his sympathetic frowns, as if everything she said was a piece of revelatory, disappointing news. It was pure Beltway theater. When she stormed his D.C. office after the murder of Angela Yates, he gave her that same kind of treatment, with an "I'm going to get right on top of this, Janet. Be assured." She'd expected nothing, and so it was a shock when an envelope arrived the next afternoon at her office at 245 Murray Lane. A highly censored, anonymous surveillance report on Angela Yates. And there it was. At 11:38
P.M
. Milo Weaver entered her apartment. Surveillance was paused (no reason given--in fact, there was no reason listed for the surveillance at all). By the time the cameras were on again, Weaver was gone. An estimated half hour later, Angela Yates died from barbiturates. A single window of opportunity, and there was Milo Weaver. Later, at Disney World, she'd found a frightened but stubborn wife and a cute, sleepy kid, both puzzled by the sight of Simmons, Orbach, and the other two men waving pistols. But no Milo Weaver. Grainger, it turned out, had warned him off.

Then, a week ago, Tom Grainger came up dead in New Jersey. It was a strange scene. The outline of Grainger's corpse in the front yard was straightforward enough, but what about the three windows that had been broken from the outside? What about the unidentified blood at the foot of the stairs, just inside the front door? What about the seven bullets lodged in the stairs themselves--9mm, SIG Sauer? No one offered an explanation, though it was clear enough that a third person had been on the scene. Fitzhugh pretended to be baffled by the whole thing.

In Austin, Tina Weaver disappeared for three hours. When Rodger Samson questioned her, she admitted that Milo had wanted her and Stephanie to leave the country with him. She'd refused. He'd vanished again, and Janet had believed that she would never see Milo Weaver again. Then, that morning, she'd received the enlightening call from Matthew, Homeland's plant in what the CIA considered its ultra-secret Department of Tourism.

Why had Milo turned himself in?

She opened the manila envelope that Gloria Martinez had handed her, and began to read.

Born June 21, 1970, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Parents: Wilma and Theodore (Theo) Weaver. In October 1985, a
Raleigh News & Observer
clipping told her, "an accident occurred on 1-40 near the Morrisville exit when a drunk driver ran head-on into another car." The driver, David Paulson, was killed, as were the occupants of the second car, Wilma and Theodore Weaver of Cary. "They are survived by their son, Milo." She typed the requisite facts into her Word document.

Though no documentary evidence backed it up, a report explained that Milo Weaver, at fifteen, moved into the St. Christopher Home for Boys in Oxford, North Carolina. The lack of documentation was excused by another newspaper clipping, circa 1989, reporting that a fire had destroyed the St. Christopher complex and all its records, one year after Milo left North Carolina behind.