An American Spy

3

“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

Milo scratched his freshly shaven cheek, took a long, unsettling look at Redman Transcontinental Human Resources Administrator William J. Morales- just call me Billy, all my friends do — and settled an ankle on his knee. An afternoon headache had struck, like a bad reminder of the previous night’s wine with Penelope, even though he hadn’t drunk anything. “How do you mean?”

“You know,” said Morales, waving a hand around to signify a word he couldn’t find. “Where are you at? Family life, work life. Financial security?”

“How should I know?”

Morales blinked at him. “It’s an imaginative exercise, Milo. No one’s going to come back to test you in a decade. You just say where you’d reasonably like to be.”

It wasn’t Morales’s fault-these sorts of questions were preordained. He’d heard them so many times over the last month at so many private security consultancies, and had even answered them with his vanilla line- Well, I see myself in a more secure position, in a job I love, but with time on the weekends to spend with my family — but so far that hadn’t made a dent in his employment prospects. So he would try a new tact: honesty.

“You never know. Someone might show up in ten years. Ask how your life measures up to your plans. These tests come up all the time. You fail, you get pistol-whipped and two bullets in the back of the head.”

William J. Morales let a twitchy smile slip into his face, then pushed it away. He moved some papers on his desk; he glanced at his open laptop. “Look, if you don’t have an answer, that’s fine.”

“I’ve got lots of answers, Billy. I just tend not to dwell on them, because I know how easily they can disappear. These days, I worry about the next step. It’s hard enough keeping that straight, much less thinking ten steps, or ten years, ahead.”

Minutes later, as he left the building, popping a Nicorette and taking the corner under the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn side, he noticed a small man in a denim shirt on the opposite sidewalk. The man glanced at him and put away his phone. Milo tugged his tie loose, considering his numerous failures in that interview, and tried to ignore both the man and the swelling of gas in his injured gut; he needed to find a toilet.

Milo expected him to cross the street to meet him, but the man in denim just walked parallel, pretending to have no interest, and perhaps he didn’t-perhaps, Milo thought, it was just his famous paranoia. That was when another man-thin, dark-skinned, wearing a full suit that had to be uncomfortable in the heat-fell into step beside him and said, “Milo Weaver?”

Milo didn’t slow down, just waited until the newcomer had repeated himself before saying, “Yeah?”

“Can I have a word?”

“I’ve got an appointment.”

“It’ll just take a minute.”

“I’m already late.”

The man did an extra skip to keep up. “This is important, Mr. Weaver.”

“So’s my appointment.”

“It’s about your friend, Alan Drummond.”

Milo slowed, taking a better look at his shadow. Young, thirty or more. Mixed South Asian ancestry, maybe Indian. Sideburns. Fashionable-geek glasses. “What about him?”

“We should probably talk in private.”

Milo stopped. In the distance he could see the York Street subway stop that would lead to home. “I don’t have time to go to your office. Talk to me here. Start with who you are.”

“Oh, of course,” the man said, patting his pockets with a bony hand until he found a leather badge wallet. He opened it like a book. On one side, an eagle-topped badge told Milo that this man was a “special agent”; on the other, a laminated Homeland Security photo-ID gave the holder’s name as Dennis Chaudhury, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Will that do?” Chaudhury asked as he folded it again.

“You can buy those things online.”

Chaudhury looked briefly confused, then smiled. “Christ, you people don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“What people?”

“Company people.”

As they spoke, the man in the denim shirt crossed to their sidewalk and lounged in front of a pharmacy. Milo pointed down the street. “You have between here and that subway station.”

“But Mr.-”

“I’ll walk slowly.”

With the first few steps, Dennis Chaudhury was left behind, but he jogged to catch up and said, “Your friend is gone.”

Milo stopped again, feeling the sun beating down on him. “Gone?”

“Disappeared. In London. From the Rathbone Hotel.”

“That’s called missing, not disappeared. How long has he been missing?”

“Since Saturday.”

Milo’s stomach grumbled, and he wondered if this guy could hear it. He said, “Alan leaves your sight-well, not your sight. MI-5’s sight?”

Chaudhury shrugged.

“He escapes his minders for three lousy days, and you call him gone?” Milo started walking again. “You’re really hard up for work, aren’t you?”

Chaudhury’s voice followed him. “We think he’s been kidnapped.”

“What makes you think that?” Milo asked without looking back.

“I don’t know. Maybe that someone turned off the hotel’s surveillance cameras. By the time they were on again, he was gone.”

Again, Milo slowed to a stop and turned back. Chaudhury was some distance behind him, hands on his hips, oblivious to the people passing him on the sidewalk. He said, “We’re waiting for more from Five, but it’s hard getting anything out of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re assholes, Mr. Weaver.”

It was an unexpected answer, and Milo caught himself smiling.

“Truth is,” said Chaudhury, “it was Scotland Yard that initially figured out something was weird. Disappearance was one thing, but he was using a fake name that they had already tied to a crime. Kind of ridiculous, using a blown name, kind of crazy.”

“What was the name?”

“Sebastian Hall.”

Milo bit his tongue to control his lips. He felt the urge to scream, but said, “Who do you think has him?”

“We don’t know,” Chaudhury said as he walked up to Milo, “but you might-you’re a friend of his.”

“What makes you think that?”

He was close enough to whisper. “Dinner parties.”

Milo bit deeper into his tongue, then said, “You’ve been watching me?”

“Him, not you.” A pause. “Should we be watching you?”

“What about Penelope?”

“The wife?” he asked, shaking his head. “You’re the first one we’ve approached about this. I was hoping you’d have a simple explanation for us.”

Milo looked past him to the one in denim, who’d moved to a newspaper dispenser. “Listen. I do have an appointment I have to keep. Can we talk this evening?”

“As you like, Mr. Weaver.”

Once he was underground, squeezed in among warm bodies and holding on to a metal loop, feeling the grumble of his bowels, he let his sore tongue go and cursed sharply. That Alan had gotten himself kidnapped was one thing-it was bad but, given his state of mind, almost inevitable. That he’d done this using the name Sebastian Hall was something else entirely. He had used Milo’s old work name, in order to force Milo’s involvement.

Here, then, was the evidence. Alan had truly gone mad, and it had begun with specks on a computer screen, tracking individual murders across the globe. Red dots turning blue. Thirty-three Tourists going from hot to cold.

While helping Alan piece together evidence for the final report, he had learned that most had gone surprisingly quickly, perhaps even painlessly, their executions from unexpected gunshots to the face, surprise knives and wires slicing through windpipes and carotid arteries, and, in a few cases, hit-and-run automobile accidents. Only one went out in flames when the car she was driving down an Afghan road was struck by an Alcotan C-100 antitank missile.

Some-perhaps six or seven-didn’t enjoy a quick exit. They were shot in the stomach and left bleeding in foreign streets for hours or poisoned badly and left suffocating in their hotel rooms. A woman in Mexico City and a man in Vancouver were discovered by generous strangers and carted to hospitals, but within twelve hours, they received visitors who ended their fights.

Of the four who survived, Leticia Jones and Zachary Klein had been on an under-the-radar job with Milo, out of the range of Xin Zhu’s elaborate scheme to make Tourism wipe itself out. In Buenos Aires, Jose Santiago lived because his phone had been ruined by falling into a sink full of his shaving water, and when his assassin arrived, he was quick enough to kill him. In Hanoi, Tran Hoang was lounging in an opium den in Long Bien. He was the off-the-roster Tourist Alan had mentioned-meaning that Xin Zhu hadn’t even known of his existence.

By then, Milo had resigned from the department and could return home, but Alan had had to travel to Langley. Though Director Quentin Ascot claimed to be too busy to attend the meeting, his assistant, George Erasmus Butler, the director’s iron gut, arrived carrying a folder thick with failure. It wasn’t just Alan he’d come to skewer but the entire Department of Tourism.

The fall had made Alan simple, obsessed with revenge. Now, it had gotten him abducted, possibly killed. And it was drawing Milo into something he wanted no part of.

At the Seventh Avenue stop, he took the stairs to the surface and tried Alan’s number. His phone, a voice explained, was no longer in service. As he walked, he called his one contact in Homeland Security and left a message. He continued through the heat to where he waited under a birch tree not far from the loitering nannies chatting among themselves and giving him significant looks outside the Berkeley-Carroll School. A father was a rare enough sight at that hour. One nanny, a recently arrived Swiss girl who’d spent other days flirting with him, wandered over. She was in her midtwenties and painfully blond with wide lips; she enjoyed talking to him in German. “Hallo, Milo.”

“Hallo, Gabi.”

“Letzter Tag, huh?” she said, and it took him a moment to remember that this was, in fact, the last day of school-Alan Drummond was already interfering with his life. Gabi squinted at his face, then began to laugh. “Hast du es vergessen?”

“Of course I remembered,” he muttered in German.

She said, “The only problem is that now I have to be with the brats all day long. I don’t know how I’m going to survive.”

“Day camp,” he told her, now remembering more about Stephanie’s life. “It’s not far from here, and it’s nearly the same hours. Tell their parents that all the brats’ friends will be there.”

She brightened visibly at the suggestion as Milo’s phone began to ring.

“Entschuldigung,” he said, and she watched him check the number and take the call.

“Did you call me from jail, Milo?” said Janet Simmons.

“From the unemployment line.”

Self-consciously, Gabi turned back to look at the school, but she didn’t walk away.

“Thank God for little mercies,” said Simmons. “Is it true that someone put a bullet in you?”

“Is that the rumor?”

“It was on the wire a couple months ago.”

“I’m nearly back to normal.”

“And normal for Milo Weaver would be what, exactly?”

“Why don’t you tell me about your life?” he asked. “I’ll lay odds it’s more interesting.”

It wasn’t. In part because of her failed pursuit of Milo a year ago, Simmons had been reassigned to border duty in Seattle. Though the demotion had been rough at first, she’d grown fond of the city.

“You sound happy,” he said.

“Being engaged will do that to you.”

“Well. Congratulations.”

“We’ll pretend that’s why you called me out of the blue,” she said, then added, “Why don’t you tell me why you called me out of the blue?”

“I’ve got an ICE agent asking me questions. Can you check his name and verify he is what he says he is?”

“What does he say he is?”

“A special agent, just like you.”

“Nobody’s just like me, Milo. You should know that. What’s the name?”

She promised to get back to him by the next day, then asked about Tina and Stephanie. As he was trying to answer, children spilled out onto the sidewalk, weighed down by fat backpacks. Gabi waved long fingers at him and gave a wink as she went to meet the two boys she called her brats. In his ear, Simmons told him not to break Tina’s heart, or else she’d be on the next plane to New York with her SIG SAUER. He promised to try his best. Stephanie waved for his attention.

At home, he and Stephanie ordered pizza, briefly assessed the academic year (okay was her opinion), and while she talked online with Unity Khama, a friend from Botswana she had met through a class project (even though it was after 10:00 P. M. in Gaborone), Milo used his own computer to search for Sebastian Hall. The first hit was dated yesterday, Monday, June 16.

An anonymous employee of the Rathbone Hotel had told a Guardian journalist that an American had vanished from his room on Saturday. Nothing particularly strange there, but Scotland Yard had been called in, which was odd. Further questions to hotel management had confirmed the disappearance, but, according to the police, the name was being withheld until the American’s family had been contacted. By Monday, though, a Scotland Yard leak had let the name slip: Sebastian Hall.

Armed with that name, the Guardian journalist had found gold: an Interpol arrest warrant for one Sebastian Hall, dated 25 February, charged with involvement in the notorious E. G. Buhrle art gallery heist in Zurich.

As was well known to Guardian readers, the mystery of the heist had been solved at the beginning of April when, in Munich, Theodor Wartmuller, a ranking member of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, had been caught with the missing paintings in his apartment.

So what, the journalist asked, was Sebastian Hall-assumedly a coconspirator with Wartmuller-doing in London? What had happened to him? Also why, the journalist continued, was New Scotland Yard remaining so quiet on the issue?

Beside the article was a police sketch, from the Interpol Web site, of Sebastian Hall. A face that, when set beside Milo’s, was a nearly perfect match. Without his face to go by, it could have been anyone.

Milo said, “That fucker,” and closed his eyes.

“What fucker?” asked Stephanie. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, clutching a can of Sprite with a straw in it.

“Oh, no one, hon, and don’t ever say that word again.”

Stephanie sipped on the straw, staring at him.

“Something wrong?”

She shrugged, eyes big.

He closed his laptop and came over, squatting to her height. He stroked some hair off her face. “What is it?”

“Nothing, I…”

“Are you worried about me again? Because I’m fine.”

“What’s going on with Pen?”

He thought a moment. “Nothing important, she’s all right, too.”

“But she’s getting a divorce, right?”

“Who said anything about divorce?”

“I heard her talking last night.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

She pursed her lips on the straw so that they turned white. “I couldn’t help it,” she said finally. “She’s loud.”

“Come here,” he said and pulled her closer. “They’re having problems, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting a divorce. People just fight sometimes. Like you and Sarah Lawton. Look at you now! Best friends.”

She grinned up at him, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know, Daddy. Sarah’s starting to get on my nerves again. Maybe I’ll divorce her.”