An American Spy

13

He had eight hours to think. It was, objectively, plenty of time to find answers, or at least to reorient himself and place things in their proper perspective. However, by the time they landed at Frankfurt at ten in the morning, forty-five minutes late, nothing felt better in any sense of the word. Clearer, perhaps, but no better.

As they had begun to soar up the Atlantic coast, Milo had taken a short nap, because by then it was required. He’d gotten no sleep with his father’s corpse lying beside him on his bed, and a day of skipping around the metro area with Leticia and too many margaritas had pummeled him no less than the final exertion of beating Dennis Chaudhury. As Leticia plugged into the airline’s entertainment system, he closed his eyes and was soon asleep. And in a park. Holding his daughter’s hand, then running with her.

“You need another drink, baby?” Leticia asked when he woke with a start, swinging his hands.

Airplane. Leticia. Atlantic far below. A drink was the last thing he needed. He closed his eyes again and tried to think rationally. Like a Tourist.

His most urgent goal was to divide everything into what he did know, what he suspected, and what he did not know at all. From those things, hopefully he could come up with a plan of action.

He knew, for instance, that his family was no longer under his protection. He suspected that they were being held by Xin Zhu, though he only had the man’s word for that-he’d seen no objective evidence of it. Yet at the same time, he could not afford to decide it was not true, for to do that and be wrong would be a disaster.

Among the things that were beyond his knowledge was how far Xin Zhu would go to make sure Milo remained under his power. Obviously, the last thing he would want to do would be to kill Tina and Stephanie and let Milo know about it-in that case, he would lose control of Milo completely. However, death is only one sort of threat. Xin Zhu could easily hurt them or mutilate them and feel free to let Milo know about it, for Milo’s only recourse would be to work harder.

With this in mind, there was only one plan of action concerning his family: He had to play along, and if he had the chance to undermine the man, it would have to be done in such a way that Xin Zhu would never find out.

It was important to settle this first, because his terror over his family’s situation was blocking him up. He could think of nothing else. Even after he’d dealt with it, though, it still took a while and an airline sandwich to begin to move on.

He said to Leticia, “Is anyone looking for Alan?”

“The whole world’s looking for Alan,” she said without hesitation.

“Is that why we’re going to Jeddah?”

She shook her head. “We’ve got more important things to do than look for that turncoat.”

“Why do you call him that?”

Leticia sighed, then leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Milo, Alan Drummond made himself a threat as soon as he walked out of the Rathbone Hotel. And he knows it. But he doesn’t care. Since then, we’ve had all our red flags going for him. MI-5 has his vitals. Embassies are listening. Not a whisper. He’s good, it turns out. You know he got the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“He’s more than just an administrator,” she said after a moment, “and he’s no idiot. He’s got enough spy craft to elude us all.”

“To what purpose?”

She shrugged. “All I know is that his operation is running counter to my operation, and that’s a problem.”

“And what happens when he’s finally found?”

“That depends on him, doesn’t it?”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“You’re very sensitive, aren’t you?” she asked, then smiled. “No, I’m not going to kill him. If I’m ordered to, I’ll have to be given some pretty persuasive evidence. Like, that he’s actually working against us. Or for the Chinese.”

“I doubt that,” Milo said.

“You never know.” She tapped his forearm with a long nail. “Any of us could be.”

For all of her elusiveness, Leticia was at least verifying the story Irwin and Collingwood had told him. While a plan of attack may have originated with Alan, some sort of schism had occurred between him and Collingwood, Irwin, and Jackson. The disagreement had been so strong that Alan had felt the need to disappear completely, jeopardizing not only the others’ operation but also his wife and Milo’s family.

Once the trays had been taken away, Milo said, “How do you know that it’s better to work for Irwin than for Alan?”

“Excuse me?” she asked, turning to get a better look at him.

“There are two plans here,” he said. “Irwin and Collingwood’s, and Alan’s. You said you don’t know the scope of either one. So how do you know that it’s not better to throw your lot in with Alan?”

She licked her lips, thinking a moment. “Milo, have you taken a good look at Alan lately?”

“He’s unbalanced.”

“That’s a nice word for it. Don’t get me wrong-I like Alan-but would I put my life in his hands?” She shook her head. “Look, Milo, you’re giving yourself a headache with all this thinking. I suggest you go back to sleep.”

Two plans, he thought as she put on her headphones again. He knew-or he suspected-that Alan’s plan was built on revenge, while the others had something else in mind, perhaps hidden in the obscure folds of foreign policy. Whatever Alan was up to, it was problematic enough that Collingwood had sent out a worldwide alert for him.

Here, he tried to separate himself from his prejudices. No matter how mad Alan had become, Milo leaned naturally toward his side, for on the other side was Irwin. Though Milo tried to keep his distance from terms like “good” and “bad,” he knew that he was naturally putting such labels on these opposing sides. Then, of course, there was Xin Zhu.

The problem with this-with taking sides at all-was that their fight was not his concern. His only concern was getting his wife and daughter back, and all of his efforts had to be focused on that. He was no longer an employee of the federal government.

He needed help, he thought as he slipped a blue ballpoint with the airline’s logo into his pocket. He was caught between too many sides, Chinese and American, each of which had its own interests that, eventually, could cost him more than he was willing to lose. So far, he’d asked two people for help, and in each case it had failed, but that didn’t mean that he shouldn’t continue to try.

As they entered Frankfurt Airport, he watched for security cameras, which were easy enough to spot. They were everywhere. He and Leticia cut through the crowd of travelers toting bags and dragging children and, among the shops in the main terminal, found the toilets, each with a security camera watching the entrance.

“Don’t make us late,” she said as she wandered into the women’s bathroom.

Inside the men’s, he took out the airline’s ballpoint and ripped a paper towel from the rack. He pressed it flat against the wall, thought a moment, and then wrote in large, clear block letters:

To Erika Schwartz, BND-Pullach-

We Need To Talk. Keep Your Distance.

— JOHN NADLER

He folded the note into his pocket, then stepped out of the bathroom. Leticia was still inside, and he turned quickly, pulling out and unfolding the note, to look directly into the lens of the security camera above him. He held out the note for five seconds, counting, then ripped it in half, and again into quarters as he returned to the bathroom. He continued to tear at it until only small fragments remained, which he flushed down a toilet.

It was Leticia’s idea for them to sit separately on the plane to Jeddah. “They’ll have had time to put someone here to watch us, so we might as well pretend to be elusive,” she said. However, during the five-and-a-half hour flight, neither saw anyone obvious among the thoub suits and white shumaggs and black abayas and hijabs. They landed at 8:00 P. M. and left separately, and after a smooth entrance through passport control, where he stated his intention was tourism, he found Leticia haggling with a limousine driver along the brightly lit ring of Al Madinah Al Munawwarah Road. The night air was warm and full of the Red Sea.

It took fifteen minutes for the limo to deliver them to the Jeddah Hilton, driving through a nighttime cityscape of banks and shopping plazas identified in Arabic and English, and new, clean hotels. He noticed an illuminated billboard with the face of a smiling man in a red shumagg, a mustache, and a wide black goatee-King Abdullah Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques-keeping benevolent watch. By the coast, the hotel towers rose, and between them he caught glimpses of beach, glowing with lamplight. Jeddah was the largest port on the Red Sea, the most cosmopolitan of Saudi cities, and a perpetual resort and convention town. The religious police, or mutaween, held little sway here, though upon arriving at the hotel they heard the nighttime Isha prayers broadcast from speakers in the distance.

Though he hadn’t seen her visit any exchange desks in the airport, Leticia paid for the ride in riyals, and in the hotel she produced two new passports, booking them into a room as Mr. and Mrs. Greene. As they took the elevator up to the tenth floor, where the hotel’s modern lobby rose airily to the roof, she said, “Don’t get comfortable. We’re checking out in the morning.”

“I didn’t see anyone on the ride here.”

“Neither did I,” she said, leaning forward to peer down to the ground floor, “but there was a couple in the airport. They certainly noticed me.”

Milo couldn’t remember any couple, but he knew he could have missed anything. “Locals?”

“White.”

He hoped that they were from Erika Schwartz.

Their room had an expansive view of the beach, the land low and flat, sinking into the sea, and the ships’ lights were like fallen stars floating between them and Sudan. “What time?” he asked.

“Soon.” She began to unbutton her blouse. “I need a shower.”

He took a can of Pepsi out of the minibar.

“You want to join me?”

Despite fourteen hours of travel, she didn’t look worn out at all. Unlike him, she was still living the Tourist life, but looking that alert just wasn’t possible. “What are you taking?”

“That doesn’t sound like a yes to me,” she said, smiling. When he didn’t reply, she said, “Why? You want some?”

He did. Back when he lived her kind of life, Dexedrine had been his stimulant of choice, but right now he would take anything to keep from crumbling. With her shirt hanging open, revealing a lace-edged black bra, she went through her bag. The last Tourist he’d done drugs with had produced excellent cocaine, but Leticia took out a small brown bottle and tossed it over. “Just one. I don’t have many.”

It turned out to be Adderall, used to treat ADD and narcolepsy, and the prescription was for Gwendolyn Davis, the name she had used in London. By the time he’d swallowed one with a mouthful of Pepsi, she was down to her underwear, pretending he wasn’t there, folding her clothes neatly on the corner of the bed, then bending at the hips for no apparent reason. She looked at him over her shoulder with a smile.

“I’ll be in the bar,” he said, taking the soda can with him to the door. “If they lost track of us, my face should help out.”

Unfazed, she straightened. “A face like that never helped anyone.”