The Tourist (40 page)

"What, honey?" she asked, hiking the bags up onto her shoulder.

"Somebody made a big mess. Is Dad home?"

At first, when she dropped the bags and galloped that last flight, she was consumed by an inexplicable surge of hope. Lies or not, Milo had come home. Then she saw that the drawers in the table by the entrance had been pulled out and turned over, leaving a pile of loose change, bus tickets, takeout menus, and keys on the floor. The mirror over the table had been taken down and turned to face the wall, and the loose backing paper had been ripped off.

She told Stephanie to wait in the hall while she examined each room. Destruction, as if an elephant had been mistakenly let in. She even thought:
Come on, Tina, an elephant can't get up those stairs.
She realized she was getting hysterical.

So she called the number Simmons had left and listened to her calm voice insisting that this wasn't her doing, and she would be right over, and please don't touch anything.

"Don't touch anything," Tina called as she hung up, but Stephanie wasn't in the hall. "Little Miss? Where are you?"

"In the
bath
room," came the irritable answer. How much more of this could Stephanie take? How much could
she
take? She hadn't told Stef about the sudden expansion of her family, the addition of a great-grandfather and a new grandfather she'd met in Disney World, but Stephanie was nobody's fool. In the hotel room this morning she'd started asking, "Who were you talking to in the old people's home?" Tina, unable to keep lying to her own daughter, just said, "Someone who might know something about your daddy."

"Something to help him?" Despite having never been told, she knew Milo was in some kind of trouble.

"Something like that."

Tina took her out for Cokes at Sergio's, a pizza joint, and called Patrick. He sounded sober and clearheaded, so she asked him to come over. He arrived before Simmons, and together the three of them returned to the apartment. The least-demolished room was Stephanie's, so they let her sort through her things while Tina told Patrick everything. Absolutely everything. By the time Simmons arrived, Patrick was in a state. Even during the height of his jealousy, he'd suspected none of this. Now he had to comfort Tina, who kept breaking down in tears. When Simmons stepped through the door, he turned on her.

"Don't tell us you didn't do it, okay? Because we know you did. Who else would've done it?"

Simmons ignored the blustering man and ranged through the apartment, stopping to smile and say hello to Stephanie, then took photos of each room with a little Canon. She stood in corners for multiple angles and crouched beside the disassembled television, the shattered vases (gifts, Tina explained, from her parents), the sliced sofa cushions, the small broken strongbox that had only held some family jewelry, though none of it had been taken.

"Anything missing?" Simmons asked again.

"Nothing." That, in itself, was depressing enough--after all this mess, no one had deemed her possessions worthy of stealing.

"Okay." Simmons straightened. "I've documented it all. Now it's time to clean up."

They got to work with broom and dustpan and Hefty bags Simmons had picked up from a convenience store. While she was squatting beside a broken mirror, picking up dozens of partial reflections of herself, she said,

"Tina?" in her most friendly voice.

Tina was behind the television, trying to screw the rear panel back on.

"Yeah?"

"You said some Company people came a few days ago. Two days before I visited. Remember?"

"Yeah."

Simmons walked over to the television, ignoring Patrick's accusing stare as he swept up shards of glass and pottery. "How do you know they were Company?"

Tina let the screwdriver drop to the floor and wiped her forehead with her wrist. "What do you mean?"

"Did they say they were Company, or did you just assume it?"

"They told me."

"Show you any ID?"

Tina thought about that, then nodded. "At the door, yes. One was Jim Pearson, the other was . . . Max Something. I can't remember his last name. Something Polish, I think."

"What did they ask you about?"

"You know what they asked about, Special Agent."

"No, actually. I don't."

Tina came out from behind the television while Patrick looked for the best defiant pose. By the time Tina settled on the sofa, he had found it: He moved behind her, a hand on each shoulder. "Do you really need to interrogate her again?"

"Maybe," Simmons said. She took the chair across from the sofa, the same place she'd sat during their first interview here. "Tina, it may be nothing, but I'd really like to know what kinds of questions they asked."

"You think they're the ones who did this?"

"Maybe, yes."

Tina thought about it. "Well, they started with the usual. Where was Milo? And they wanted to know what Milo had told me in Austin."

"When he asked you to leave with him," Simmons said encouragingly. Tina nodded. "I told them the other Company people had already been through that--your people, too--but they said maybe I'd forgotten something that would help them. They were actually pretty nice about it all. Like high school career counselors. One of them--Jim Pearson--he went down a list of items to see if anything rang a bell for me."

"He had a list?"

"In a little spiral notebook. Names, mostly. Names of people I didn't know. Except one."

"Which one?"

"Ugrimov. Roman Ugrimov. You know, the Russian I told you about, from Venice. I had no idea why they'd bring him up now, so I dutifully said that I'd met him once, and that he'd killed a girl and I didn't like him. They asked when, I said 2001, and they said they didn't need to hear about it." Tina shrugged.

"What other names?"

"Foreign names, mostly. Rolf. . . Winter, or something like that."

"Vinterberg?"

"Yeah. And some, I guess, Scottish name. Fitzhugh."

"Terence Fitzhugh?"

Again, Tina nodded. The look on Simmons's face encouraged her to go on. "When I said I didn't know anything about him, who he was or otherwise, they didn't believe me. I don't know why. It was all right that I didn't know Vinterberg, but Fitzhugh?" She shook her head. "That, they didn't buy. They said things like,
Milo didn't tell you anything about Fitzhugh and
some money?
I said no. They kept pushing. At one point, Jim Pearson said,
What about Fitzhugh in Geneva, with the minister of-
-- But Max hit him in the arm and he never got around to finishing the question. Finally, once they saw I was really annoyed, they packed up their shit and left." While she'd been talking, Simmons had again produced her BlackBerry. She was typing. "Jim Pearson and Max . . ."

"I don't know."

"But they had Company IDs."

"Yeah. They looked fine to me. I know Milo's pretty well--it keeps ending up in the wash."

"And they never said why they were asking about Fitzhugh?" Tina shook her head. "I got the feeling Max thought they were saying too much." She paused. "You really think those are the guys who made this mess? They annoyed me, but I wouldn't expect this from them."

"Like I said, Tina. It wasn't Homeland. I'd have heard about it."

"And the Company?"

"Maybe, but I haven't heard anything from them either." Tina grinned. "You're still in counseling, right?"

"Exactly." Simmons got to her feet. "Okay, let's get this place finished, and if you come across something that doesn't belong here, let me know." They spent the next three hours reassembling electronics, picking up broken pictures, and restuffing cushions. It was frustrating work for all involved, and halfway through it, Patrick opened a bottle of vodka for general use. Simmons declined with thanks, but Tina poured herself a tall shot and drank it down in one go. Stephanie watched all of this wryly. She spent most of the time in her own room, repositioning dolls that had been taken from their proper homes. Around seven, as they were finishing, she came out of her room holding a cigarette lighter that advertised a Washington D.C., bar, the Round Robin, at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

"How about that," said Simmons, slipping on a latex glove and turning it over in her hand.

"What is it?" asked Tina, a little bubble of adrenaline rising at the sight of physical evidence.

"Strange, is what it is." Simmons held it up to the light. "I know the place--big politicians' haunt. It might be nothing though."

"That's pretty bad tradecraft," said Tina. "Leaving something behind." Simmons slipped the lighter into a ziplock bag and pocketed it. "You'd be surprised just how lousy most agents are."

"I wouldn't be," Patrick assured them all, and Tina almost smiled--the poor man was feeling left out.

As she prepared to go, Simmons's phone rang. She took it into the kitchen. Tina caught a momentary, uncharacteristic sound of glee from the special agent's lips. "You're kidding!
Here?
Perfect." When she emerged from the kitchen, though, she was all business again, and after thanking Patrick for his help she pulled Tina into the hall and told her that, in the morning, she'd be meeting with Yevgeny Primakov. Tina's feet went cold. "He's in New York?"

"He'll be at the UN headquarters. It's a nine o'clock appointment. Do you want to meet him?"

Tina considered it, then shook her head. "I need to go to the library, take care of stuff I've let slip." She paused, knowing that Simmons could see through the lie--the truth was that she was terrified. "But maybe later, you could . . . I don't know . ."

"I'll give you a full report. Sound all right?"

"Not really," said Tina, "but it'll have to do."
12

Fitzhugh ate at the same Chinese restaurant on Thirty-third they'd ordered Weaver's takeout from. He chose a table near the back to avoid interruptions, and to ponder the Nexcel message he'd received from Sal.
J Simmons sent request at 6:15 PM to DHS acting director
requesting license to access bank and phone records of
Terence

A

Fitzhugh.

At

present,

request

is

under

consideration.

Over Szechuan chicken, he tried to think through this. It proved what he'd been sensing, that Simmons didn't trust him at all. It was in her tone, the entire way she dealt with him. Interagency rivalries were one thing, but this level of tension . . . she treated him as if he were the enemy. And now, she was asking Homeland's director for access to his records. So he'd nipped it in the bud with a phone call. The request for access, he had been assured, would be denied.

Even so, he felt himself on the defensive, and that wasn't what he needed now. He should be leading the attack in order to control all possible damage by putting away Milo Weaver and ending this investigation. The passport. That was his trump card. He still didn't know who had sent it. Forensics had only produced a single white hair: Caucasian male, aged fifty to eighty, a diet high in protein--but that described half of the intelligence world. He no longer cared who his benefactor was; his only concern was to wrap up this case before Simmons found a way to ruin all their hard work.

His thoughts were interrupted by a stranger who approached and said in French, "It's been so long," reaching out his hand to shake. Fitzhugh, stuck in the mental rhythms of his worries, was caught off guard. Staring up at the handsome, sixty-something face under wavy white hair, he took the heavy hand. Where did he know this man from?

"Excuse me," Fitzhugh said as they shook. There was something familiar in the face, but he wasn't sure. "Do I know you?" The man's smile faded, and he switched to English--not his native language, but spoken in a kind of easy swing. "Oh. Bernard, right?" Fitzhugh shook his head. "You have the wrong person. I'm sorry." The man held up his hands, palms out. "No, my mistake. Sorry to bother you."

The man walked off, and though Fitzhugh expected him to return to a table, he actually left through the front door. He'd been so convinced Fitzhugh was his friend Bernard that he had come in from the street. French? No--in his accent he'd caught Slavic traces. Czech?

Eleven blocks uptown, on the twenty-third floor of the Grand Hyatt, Simmons was sitting on her stripped bed, typing queries into the Homeland database, looking for the record of a Company agent, Jim Pearson. It came up empty. She tried variations on the name, then sent a message to Matthew, her plant inside Tourism, asking him to check the Langley computers, in case Jim Pearson's records hadn't made the trip to Homeland.

While waiting for the answer, she looked for whatever she could find on Yevgeny Primakov. In the morning, she would meet him in the lobby of the UN's General Assembly building, which, as George had put it, was "unfucking-believable." Unbelievable, indeed. From what she read on the United Nations site, Yevgeny Primakov worked in the financial section of the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council, with an office in Brussels. An accountant? She doubted that. Was his presence in New York a beautiful coincidence? Or had he made sure to be there in case he was called upon by the United States to answer questions about his son?

She accessed a secure section of the Homeland site, and her searches turned up a skeletal history of Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Primakov, onetime colonel. He was inducted into the KGB in 1959, and in the mid-sixties began his travels. Known destinations: Egypt, Jordan, West and East Germany, France, and England. When the KGB morphed into the FSB after the fall of the Soviet Union, Primakov stayed on, heading a department of military counterintelligence until 2000, when he retired and began a new career with the United Nations.

They had little more on him, though in 2002 the U.S. representative to the UN requested a background check on Primakov. No reason given, and the resulting report was not available.

During the last years, Homeland had been absorbing FBI files connected to terrorism, past and present. It was within this clerical subsection that she found a single sheet on Ellen Perkins, who was convicted in absentia for being an accomplice in two crimes: the 1968