The Tourist (6 page)

"Just trying to make conversation," said Roth, rubbing the back of his skull. "That's why I'm here, you know. To see you." Instead of questioning that, Milo went for the door. He could at least squelch Roth's one voiced desire by removing himself from the room.

"Where are you going?"

Good--he sounded worried. Milo tapped the door, and one of the deputies started working the lock.

"Wait!" called Roth. "I have information!" Milo jerked the door open as Roth again called,
"'Wait!'"
He didn't slow down. He left the room and kept moving as the deputy pushed the steel door shut.

3

The sultry noontime heat swallowed him as he fooled with the new Company-issue Nokia he was still learning to master, finally finding the number. Between a parked blue-and-white and the dead shrubs around the station, he watched as storm clouds began to fill the sky. Grainger answered with a sharp "What
is
it?"

Tom Grainger sounded the kind of irate people are when they've been abruptly woken, but it was nearly noon. "I'm verifying it, Tom. It's him."

"Good. I don't suppose he's talking, is he?"

"Not really. But he is trying to piss me off. He's seen a file on me. Knows about Tina and Stef."

"Jesus. How'd he get that?"

"There's a girlfriend. She might know something. They're bringing her in now." He paused. "But he's sick, Tom. Really sick. I'm not sure he could make a journey."

"What's he got?"

"Don't know yet."

When Grainger sighed, Milo imagined him kicking back in his Aeron chair, gazing out his window across the Manhattan skyline. Faced with the dusty pale-brick buildings along Blackdale's main street--half of them out of business but covered with Independence Day flags--Milo was suddenly jealous. Grainger said, "Just so you know--you've got one hour to make him talk."

"Don't tell me."

"I'm telling you. Some jackass at Langley sent an e-mail off the open server. I've spent the last half hour fending off Homeland with makebelieve. If I hear the word 'jurisdiction' one more time, I'll have a fit." Milo stepped back as a deputy got into the police car and started it up. He returned to the station's glass double doors. "My hopes are with the girlfriend. Whatever game he's playing, he won't play by my rules until I have something on him. Or if he's under duress."

"Can you put it to him there?"

Milo considered this as the police car left and another parked in its place. The sheriff might turn a blind eye to rough treatment, but he wasn't sure about the deputies. There was something wide-eyed about them. "I'll see once the girl's here."

"If Homeland hadn't been shouting at me all morning, I'd tell you to break him out and bundle him for shipment. But we don't have a choice."

"You don't think they'll share him?"

His chief grunted. "It's
me
who doesn't want to share. Be a good boy and let them have him, but whatever he says to you is only for us. Okay?"

"Sure." Milo noticed that the mustached deputy getting out of the car was Leslie, the one who'd been sent to pick up Kathy Hendrickson. He was alone. "Call you back," Milo said and hung up. "Where's the girl?" Leslie held his wide-brimmed hat in his hands, nervously rotating it.

"Checked out, sir. Late last night, couple hours after we released her."

"I see, Deputy. Thanks."

On the way back inside, Milo called home, knowing that at this hour no one would be there to pick up. Tina would check the messages from work once she realized he was running late. He kept it short and concise. He was sorry to miss Stephanie's performance, but didn't overplay his guilt. Besides, next week they'd a l l be together in Disney World, and he'd have plenty of time to make it up t o his daughter. He suggested she invite Stephanie's biological father, Patrick. "And videotape it, will you? I want to see." He found Wilcox in the break room, having a fight with the soda machine. "I thought you kept to lemonade, Manny." Wilcox cleared his throat. "I've had it up to here with lemons." He wagged a chunky finger. "You let that slip to my wife, and I'll have your ass on a platter."

"Let's make a deal." Milo came closer. "I'll keep your wife in the dark if you give me an hour alone with your prisoner."

Wilcox straightened, head back, and peered down at him. "You're talking
alone-
alone?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you think that's a good idea?"

"Why not?"

Sheriff Wilcox scratched the back of his flabby neck; his beige collar was brown from sweat. "Well, the papers are eating you guys up. Every day there's another yokel shouting about CIA corruption. I mean, I know how to keep
m y
mouth shut, but a small town like this . . . "

"Don't worry. I know what I'm doing."

The sheriff pursed his lips, deforming his big nose. "Matter of national security, is it?"

"The most national, Manny. And the most secure." When Milo returned to the cell, Samuel Roth sat up as if he'd been waiting for this chat, a sudden wellspring of energy at his disposal. "Hello again," he said once the door had locked."Who showed you my file?"

"A friend. An ex-friend." Roth paused. "Okay, my worst enemy. He's seriously bad news."

"Someone I know?"

"I
don't even know him. I never met him. Just his intermediary."

"So he's a client."

Roth smiled, his dry lips cracking. "Exactly. He gave me some paperwork on you. A gift, he said, for some trouble he'd put me through. He said that you were the one who ruined the Amsterdam job. He also said you were running my case. That, of course, is why I'm here."

"You're
here,"
Milo said, reaching the center of the cell, "because you beat up a woman and thought she wouldn't pay you back for it."

"Is that what you really think?"

Milo didn't answer--they both knew it was an unlikely scenario.

"I'm
here,"
Roth said, waving at the concrete walls, "because I wanted to talk to Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Only you. You're the only Company man who ever actually stopped me. You've got my respect."

"In Amsterdam."

"Yes."

"That's funny."

"Is it?"

"Six years ago in Amsterdam, I was high on amphetamines. Completely strung out. I didn't know half of what I was doing." Roth stared at him, then blinked. "Really?"

"I was suicidal. I tried to walk into your line of fire, just to finish myself off."

"Well," said Roth, considering the news. "Either I was never as good as I thought, or you're so good you could beat me blind and drunk. So . . . it stands. You have even more of my respect now. And that's a rare and wonderful thing."

"You wanted to talk to me. Why not pick up a phone?" The assassin rocked his head from side to side. "That, as you know, is unverifiable. I would've been handed to some clerk for an hour, answering questions. If he didn't hang up on me, he would've called Tom--Tom Grainger, right?--and then the whole department would be involved. No. I only wanted you."

"Still, there are easier ways. Cheaper ways."

"Money doesn't mean anything anymore," Roth said patiently. "Besides, it was fun. I had to give one last chase. Not so difficult a chase that you'd lose me, but not so easy that the FBI or Homeland Security would stumble across me when I arrived in Dallas. No, I had to set up a trail outside the country that you--because you've been responsible for my case these last years--would be watching. Then I had to lead you around this enormous country. I'd hoped to make it all the way to Washington, or even to your home in Brooklyn, but it wasn't to be. A lot of things weren't to be. I wanted to go
further.
I wanted to really make you work."

"Why?"

"If I had the time," Roth explained, "I'd be elusive with you, because it's a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he's told. Each agent needs to beat it out of his subject, or, better yet, discover it on his own, without the subject ever realizing he's slipped up. But, sadly, there's no time. It has to be little Blackdale, and it has to be direct, because I won't be around by tomorrow."

"Going somewhere?"

Again, that smile.

Milo wasn't ready to believe this. It was pride, of course, balking against the idea that someone had for the last three days been leading him by the nose. "And Kathy Hendrickson?"

"She only knows that I paid her well for her performance. Yes--and for her bruises. She doesn't know why. Really, she knows nothing," he said, then gasped his way into a retching cough. Once it passed, he looked at his hand. "Oh." He showed his blood-speckled palm to Milo. "Faster than I'd hoped."

"What is?"

"My death."

Milo stared at the Tiger's face, at what he'd wanted to believe were the symptoms of a difficult run through the southern states. Bloodshot eyes, fatigue, and the skin itself. That yellow pallor wasn't from the fluorescents.

"Diagnosis?"

"AIDS."

"I see."

The lack of sympathy didn't faze Roth. "I talked to some doctors in Switzerland--the Hirslanden Clinic, Zurich. You can check on that if you like. Look up Hamad al-Abari. Those mountain Germans are smart. Some new procedure they've got to examine the rate of growth through the T-cell count--something like that. They can figure out when the HIV virus got in me. Five months ago, it turns out. February. That places me in Milan."

"What were you doing in Milan?"

"I met my contact. The intermediary I mentioned before. He goes by the name Jan Klausner, but he can't speak decent German or Czech. From his accent, he might be Dutch. Midforties. His red beard is the only real thing about him."

Milo remembered that file photo of Fabio Lanzetti--Milan, the Corso Sempione, with a bearded man. "We've got a picture of you two together."

"Good start."

"He gave you a job?"

"He's been feeding me jobs for years. Actually, the first one came six years ago, not long after Amsterdam. A surprise. I worried my failure there had made the rounds, that work would dry up. But then Jan showed up. The work was irregular--one or two a year--but it paid well. His last order was for January. A job in Khartoum. Mullah Salih Ahmad." Milo thought back. The Sudan. January.

In January, a popular radical cleric known for inflammatory pro-alQaeda speeches, Mullah Salih Ahmad, had disappeared. Two days later, his garroted corpse was found in his own backyard. It had been international news for about five minutes, quickly overcome by the continuing civil war in the western Darfur region, but in the Sudan it stayed brutally current, and the blame was placed on the president, Omar al-Bashir, who seldom let critics remain in the limelight, or out of jail. Demonstrations followed, met by battle-gear police with guns. In the last month, more than forty had been killed in riots.

"Who hired you?"

The energy seemed to go out of Roth, and he stared, unfocused, past his interrogator. Milo didn't bother breaking the trance, though he imagined SUVs full of Homeland Security barreling down the dusty Tennessee roads toward them.

Finally, Roth shook his head. "Sorry. The doctors call it AIDS

dementia. I lose track of stuff, forget things. Can hardly walk." With effort, he swallowed. "Where were we?"

"Mullah Salih Ahmad. Who hired you to kill him?"

"Ah, yes!" Through a twitch of pain, Roth seemed pleased that he could still find that memory. "Well, I didn't know, did I? I have this contact, Jan Klausner, maybe Dutch, a red beard," he said, unaware of his repetition.

"He tells me nothing about who's hiring him. He just pays the money, and that's all right by me. But then t here was the Ahmad job, and Jan's master cheated me on the money. Only paid two-thirds. Klausner says it's because I didn't follow the instructions, which were to
brand
the body with some Chinese pictograms."

"Chinese?" Milo cut in. "Why Chinese?"

"Good question, but no one tells me anything. Klausner just asks why I didn't do this. After all, I did have a metalworker make the brands. Sadly, though, the Sudan is not overflowing with expert machinists, and what I got turned out to be made of aluminum. Can you imagine? When I heated them up, the pictograms just melted." He coughed again, as if his body weren't built for so many words at a time. "No Chinese--that was Klausner's excuse for his master coming up short." Another cough. Milo reached into his jacket and took out a small flask. "Vodka."

"Thanks." The assassin took a long swig, which only made him cough more blood across his prison oranges, but he didn't let go of the flask. He raised a finger until the coughs had trickled away, then said, "I better get it out quick, no?"

"What did the pictograms say?"

"Something like:
As promised, the end.
Weird, huh?" Milo nodded.

"I could have let it go, and I considered that. But that's bad business. If people find out I let one customer cheat me, then . . ." He wiped his bloodstained lips. "You understand."

"Of course."

Roth coughed again, less wretched this time. "Anyway, I thought for obvious reasons that it was the Chinese. They've invested billions into that country for oil; they supply the government with guns. They'd want to protect their investment. But then . . . yes. I saw the newspapers. Everyone believed the president had it done. He'd been harassing Ahmad for years. So I had it, right? There was Jan Klausner's master, at least for this job." He blinked a few times, and Milo feared he'd drift off again, but then he was back. "I'm an impulsive worker. In other men that spells defeat, but somewhere along the way I made it work for me. Half-second decisions are part of the job, don't you think?"

Milo didn't dispute the point.

"President al-Bashir, it turned out, was on a diplomatic trip to Cairo. So, impulsively, I flew there. Fancy v i l l a , a l l the security out. But I'm the Tiger, right? I figure a way in. All the way in. I find him in his bedroom--alone, luckily. And I put the question to him:
Omar, why are you
stiffing me?
But listen to me, Milo Weaver. After we've gone through about twenty minutes' rigmarole, I realize he doesn't know anything about this. Did he want Ahmad dead? Sure. The man was a pain in his ass. But did he actually order the killing?" Roth shook his head. "Sadly, no. So, like the wind, I'm gone."