An American Spy

8

It was instinct, reaching into his pocket and, with one hand, popping the battery out of his phone. Not looking at her was instinct, too, as was the sudden attention he gave to his peripheral vision as he climbed to his feet and disembarked at Union Square. As he crossed Fourth Avenue to the park, to his left the enormous Metronome gushed white clouds, the time reading 13:54.

There was no point looking back. Leticia-or Gwendolyn, or Rosa-would approach him after she’d made sure he wasn’t being tailed. So he followed the edge of the park north, past some huge outdoor party full of young people and patrolling police, to East Seventeenth, where he popped a Nicorette and headed down into the W Hotel’s Underbar. After the sunlight, his eyes had to adjust to the darkness to take in the couples scattered throughout. He headed directly to the bar. A distractingly attractive bartender asked how he was doing; he told her he was doing well. He’d noticed no real problems after Wednesday’s vodka tonic in the Drummond condo, so he decided to take another step. “Ketel One martini, please. Dry. Straight up. Two olives.”

“A man who knows what he wants,” she said as she turned to find a glass.

“Actually, make it two. I’ve got a friend coming.”

Leticia arrived five minutes later and took the stool beside him without saying a word. She wore a light indigo blouse that, in better light, showed off the brand of her brassiere, and her hair hung in loose loops to the top of her neck. Milo slid one of the martinis to her.

“Gosh, mister. Isn’t this rather forward?”

“I like your hair, Gwendolyn.”

She leaned in and kissed his cheek, smelling of almond oil. “Baby, I’ll always be Leticia to you.”

The bartender was giving them a smile, so they moved to a small table near the wall and settled close to each other. “You didn’t see anyone, did you?” he asked.

She took a sip and crinkled her nostrils. “Mmm. That’s good.”

“Was there somebody?”

“Male. Five-six. Hundred eighty pounds, give or take.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Was he Company?”

“Probably.”

“Good. He’ll live.”

He felt an urge to lecture her, but it was beyond repair now. She was still acting like a Tourist-reckless and definitive. “You want to tell me?”

“It was easy.” She raised her left hand, fingers flat, her long painted nails reflecting the low lights. “See the side of my hand?”

“Alan. Tell me about Alan.”

Leticia dropped her hand and, as she took another sip, scanned the dim bar. She set down her drink. “That wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my job to be his bodyguard.”

“Leticia.”

She touched the stem of her glass. “He told me you were out.”

“I was never in.”

“Well, he thought he could get you in.”

“By using my name? He was wrong.”

“But now you want in.”

“No, I don’t want in. I just want to know what’s going on. He’s not dead; I know that.”

“That makes one of us,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean, baby, is that him disappearing wasn’t part of any plan I knew of.”

Milo considered that for a moment, sipping his martini. “Then why don’t you tell me about the plan you did know of?”

She blinked slowly at him; her eyes, he realized, perhaps for the first time, were enormous. “He came to me about a week and a half after the massacre… a few days before you were shot. He didn’t have it together yet; he wanted to bounce ideas off of me, see what I could add.”

“He wanted revenge.”

“He didn’t know what he wanted. Not yet. Then you were shot-he blamed himself for that. Then he got reamed by Langley and lost his job. Later, he started fighting with his wife. You see? This Chinaman closed down his life. Not just Tourism but the whole shebang. So, yeah. He wanted revenge. Wouldn’t you?”

“There’s a difference between what I’d want and what I’d do.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” she said and, beneath the table, stroked his knee with one fingernail.

He pulled his leg away. “Go on.”

“You need to lighten up.”

“Just tell me what’s going on.”

She shrugged, leaning back. “Second week of April, he calls me. He’d learned some new things. One: Xin Zhu got married last summer. Two: What he did to us was completely unsanctioned by Beijing. Three: Xin Zhu is teetering on the edge of dismissal. He’s weak, says Alan. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be.”

She took another drink, and Milo waited.

“You know me-I’m no genius. I don’t get it. The man’s weak now; what’s that to us? So Alan goes on, as if to a child, and tells me that with this information we know what is on Xin Zhu’s mind. Once you know someone’s obsession, you know what he’s going to do.”

“He thought that was enough of an edge?”

“It was something.”

“So Alan was going to run an entire operation against him with.. what? A few Tourists? You and-who? I know Zachary Klein was out. Jose Santiago? He, or someone like him, met with Alan before he disappeared.”

Leticia blinked again, more slowly. “Tran Hoang came in, too.”

“So Alan had three people, and he expected to bring down a colonel with a private department in the Guoanbu’s Sixth Bureau-someone who, despite his troubles, might be one of the most powerful people in Chinese intelligence?”

“He’s got three Tourists.”

“You’re not Tourists anymore.”

“Don’t underestimate us, Milo. You of all people should know better.”

“I’m just trying to understand. He has no network, no signals intelligence-more importantly, no open-ended budget.”

“He has more than you’d think.”

“Like what? Turkestan militants?”

Leticia’s face went cold. “Where’d you hear that?”

“The Company guys you beat up.” He leaned closer. “Would you really be that stupid?”

“We’re not doing anything with the Uighurs.”

“What about the Youth League? Alan was interested in them. After all, the Company’s already supplied them with weapons.”

“Nobody’s talking to them either.”

“I hope not. They’ll go for any plan, no matter how half-baked, just as long as it involves fire.” Milo paused, waiting, but she offered nothing more. “So, if it’s not them, tell me how he was going to bury Xin Zhu.”

She took a longer drink this time, until all that was left was a puddle of vodka. She pulled out the wooden skewer and bit off an olive. As she chewed, she scanned the bar again but only said, “You in or out?”

It took a moment to wrap his head around that question. “You mean it’s still on?”

She arched a brow. “When did we ever drop an operation because someone stepped out for a minute?”

“You don’t know where he is anymore.”

“Reminds me of my ex-when he left, my friends thought I should stop everything.”

She was being coy, and he didn’t understand why. The man who had been coordinating the operation had disappeared, yet she felt confident enough to keep moving forward. It wasn’t blind loyalty-Tourists were seldom afflicted by such a thing, particularly when their department didn’t exist anymore. He said, “Alan wasn’t running this, was he? You?”

She shook her head. She was enjoying his confusion.

“Who?”

“In, or out?”

“Out. Definitely out.”

She shrugged as if this were no surprise, then ate her last olive.

“Alan suggested he still had Company contacts. Does that mean it’s a proper operation?”

“If you’re in, you get the information, and we can call on you when we like. If not, then not.”

“He used my Tourist name. I think that entitles me to a few answers.”

Looking at the puddle in her glass, she considered his request. Again, she sighed. “You know why he did that.”

“Because he wanted to force me to help. A pretty cold move.”

“He knows you’re the kind of person who needs a fire under his ass to get moving.”

Milo felt his good humor draining away. “He uses a name Interpol has on its lists, a name that both the Germans and the Chinese can connect to me. That puts my family in danger.”

“You and that damned family. Milo, the Chinaman doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your family. That’s why you ended up with a bullet in your belly, and they didn’t.”

Milo rubbed his face. The fact was that all that had come before-Xin Zhu’s elaborate operation to kill thirty-three men and women around the globe-had been provoked by the murder of his son, an event Tourism was only distantly responsible for. Xin Zhu shouldn’t care about Milo’s family, but he had long ago proved himself unpredictable.

None of this concerned Leticia. Despite losing the title, she still thought like a Tourist. He guessed that she would think that way until she died-which, given her current trajectory, could be anytime.

He opened his wallet, counted out three tens, and placed them on the table. “Nice to see you again, Leticia.”

She watched him stand and take his box of baklava. “Well, you know how to get in touch with me.”

He didn’t reply; he only walked out of the bar.

Outside the Camp Friendship facility, as he felt the martini eat at his insides and thought about what he’d learned and not learned while drinking it, Gabi broke off from a trio of nannies to join him. “Hallo,” she said.

“Hallo, Gabi.”

In German, she said, “I’m proud of myself. Took one day to convince my masters that their brats should be in day camp. I don’t know if I could have taken a summer of them every day.”

He smiled at that; then she pointed at the nannies she’d been talking to. “Malaysian, French, and Romanian, I never thought I’d be in a place so international in my life. I picked up dry cleaning from a Greek woman, bought groceries from some Vietnamese, paid bills to an Indian clerk, and was just now getting chatted up by a big Chinese father.”

“Chatted up?” he asked.

“Ja,” she said, then turned, scanning the spare crowd on the sidewalk. “Well, maybe he wasn’t a father, after all, and just wanted

… well, you know.”

Milo, too, found himself scanning the street, looking for a Chinese man posing as a father, trying to convince himself that it was nothing to worry about. The possibility of the famously large Xin Zhu hanging out in Brooklyn was too unbelievable even to consider.

Over dinner, Tina complained that, now that she was back home, Penelope wasn’t answering her phone. “Was I too much of a you-know-what with her?”

“I don’t know what,” said Stephanie, her eyelids now a pale purple.

“You were fine,” said Milo.

“I said I don’t know what.”

Though he made no mention of Leticia Jones, in bed he told Tina that a little more information had come his way, and it only reinforced his belief that not only was Alan engaged in a foolishly dangerous plan, he had also been trying to manipulate Milo into taking part. “He used one of my old names,” he finally admitted.

“What do you mean, used it?”

“He used a passport with my old work name to check into the Rathbone Hotel.”

She shook her head in an expression of irritable confusion, as if he’d just spoken backward. “But… why?”

“Just that. To pull me in.”

“He thought that would work?”

“It almost did,” he said, for during dinner, watching his daughter’s discolored eyes, he’d been overcome by the feeling that he’d sidestepped a bullet. “But it was reckless,” he told her. “What pisses me off is that people can connect the name to me, thus, to you and Stef.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“The Chinese?”

Again, he nodded.

She went silent, then turned to look at the foot of the bed. “I could kill that bastard.”

There wasn’t much more to discuss, but that didn’t stop Tina from prodding him throughout the night with irritated questions, most of which he couldn’t answer. At one point, as he was drifting off to sleep, she said, “They train you to do that, right?”

“What?” he groaned, raising his head from the pillow.

“Sleep. Sleep when things around you are falling apart.”

“Sure,” he said after a moment. “It’s important.”

“It’s inhuman,” she said.