The Nearest Exit

1

Hasad al-Akir nodded politely at the fat old woman. As this night was like all other nights, she didn’t even acknowledge him as she lumbered past the counter to the wall of refrigerated glass doors in the back. There were plenty of customers he conversed with, whose names and backgrounds he knew, customers who even addressed him as Herr al-Akir and asked how his family was. Not this one. Despite her appearing every working evening punctually at seven and buying the same bottle of Rheinland Riesling and a Snickers candy bar, their conversation never broke from the same routine.

Guten Abend, Frau.

Her answer: an indecipherable grunt.

That will be ten euro sixty.

No reply, no smile, nothing to suggest a man was even standing in front of her. Only the exact-change deposit on the counter, sometimes a ten-euro bill with fifty and ten cents, sometimes a precollected pile of coins, but always exact. Then she’d pocket the candy bar, grab the bottle by the neck, and ignore his farewell as she shuffled her enormous weight out the door.

Tonight, though, would be different.

Ekhard Junker, his sweets distributor, had raised the price of their Snickers bars five cents. So tonight, after six months, she would put down too little money with those plump, gnawed fingers, and Hasad would have the pleasure of informing her that she’d paid too little.

This, at least, would be something.

He had lived in Munich since the mideighties, arriving with a wave of Turkish laborers that came to do those jobs the West Germans considered beneath them. Construction, mining, recycling collection, staffing convenience stores. For a long time, Hasad had regretted his decision to leave Ankara. The Bavarians were a petty, closed race of pale bigots. The money he sent back to his parents and wife couldn’t be ignored, though, so he stuck it out, finally sending for his family in 1992. By that time, Germans from the East were taking over previously Turkish jobs-nothing was beneath those Ossis-and many of his friends talked seriously about returning home. Not Hasad. Unlike his friends, he hadn’t pissed away his earnings on liquor and nightclubs. He’d saved, and began scouring the Süddeutsche Zeitung for property. He was going to run his own business.

When he finally settled on this store in Pullach, an industrial suburb south of Munich, the building had been empty a year. The owner, a clever Bavarian who’d decided he was too good for the service industry, tried to squeeze as much as possible out of Hasad, but he clearly didn’t know what he was in for, because the art of negotiation is a Turk’s birthright.

It wasn’t all anise and cinnamon, though. After two years, in late 2001, chilly tall men from the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, whose headquarters was just up the street, began visiting. They checked and rechecked his immigration papers, the deeds to his business, and his financial spreadsheets. They asked about his friends, sometimes flashing photographs of dour-looking Arabs, wondering if he, or someone he knew, might be under the sway of radical Muslim clerics.

Over the years, as his business blossomed (he’d opened a second location on the eastern edge of Munich last year, run by his son, Ahmed), their visits became less frequent, their expressions steadily more apologetic. “Just the way it is,” one of them, a soft-spoken German Muslim, admitted. “When you’re this close to the center of operations, you’ve got to expect it.”

In the last half year, though, they’d left him alone. Either they were finally convinced of his loyalty or they no longer cared. For that same amount of time, he’d nightly faced this obese, mute woman who was now trudging back to him, the chilled Riesling in one hand, a Snickers bar in the other. He gave her the same nightly smile of welcome, and as usual she ignored it.

In all honesty, she annoyed him more than those tough guys from the intelligence service ever had. Looking into her weary, grouchy face, cheeks covered in downy hair that made her almost mannish, he couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive in youth. Add to that a personality of indistinct grunts and a genetic inability to smile-no. He couldn’t imagine that any man had ever loved this woman. She had a haircut like a young boy’s, trimmed around the ears, and unplucked, shabby eyebrows. She was the type who drank her white wine and chewed her candy and fingernails in a dusty house full of cats and cat hair, whose only enjoyment came from insipid German soap operas.

She placed the wine and candy on the counter and reached into her cheap, plastic-looking purse for the money.

“Guten Abend, Frau,” Hasad said, smiling as he typed the items into the register.

Her grunt, as ever, said nothing as she plopped down a small pile of coins. Hasad counted the money, fingers dancing. She reached for her supplies, and he cleared his throat, raising a warning hand.

“Moment, Frau. As you can see,” he said, pointing at the register’s display, “the price is ten sixty-five. It’s the Snickers. It’s more expensive now.”

She raised her heavy-lidded eyes to the display, then turned to him. “When did this happen?”

Her voice, surprisingly, was high and melodic. He had to fight the urge to shout, Success! Instead he said, “This morning, the distributor raised his price. I have no choice but to do the same.”

“Oh.” She nodded, perhaps confused, then went back to her purse.

As prescient as he’d been so far, Hasad couldn’t have predicted what followed.

The front doors slid electrically open as a young, broad-chested man in a suit jogged in, out of breath. Hasad recognized him from those old question-and-answer sessions. One of the ruder interrogators, who wore his authority with about as much humility as an Ankara cop-which is to say, with no humility at all.

Instinctively, Hasad raised his hands, but the man didn’t even notice him. He instead went to the woman.

“Director Schwartz. Sorry to bother you, but there’s a situation.”

Unlike this damp-faced visitor, Frau Schwartz-no, Director Schwartz-wasn’t in a rush. She was rooting around for Hasad’s five cents. “What kind of situation?” she said into her purse.

“Gap.”

She looked up at the man, who was a head taller, and blinked. Hasad would later reflect that she seemed angry, though at the moment he was too busy dealing with his shock. The obese alcoholic with all the cats was the boss of these tough young men.

She said, “You have five cents?”

The man colored and groped in his pockets.

She turned to Hasad with an apologetic smile. Were it not for the strange, unnerving way that expression twisted her features, he would’ve been elated. “I’m sorry, Herr al-Akir. I have to run. But this gentleman will pay the balance.” She grabbed her wine and Snickers and walked directly out to the parking lot, where she climbed into the rear of a waiting BMW.

There was a sudden clap as the man banged a five-cent coin on the counter. At that moment, the car roared off, and he stared, aghast. They had left without him.

Hasad didn’t even notice the money. He was consumed by a single thought: She knew my name.

“Well?” said the man. “My receipt?”

2

As the BMW turned back onto Heilmannstrasse, Erika Schwartz stared at the small, mustached man sitting next to her in the backseat. “Well?”

Oskar Leintz had a printed page in his lap that was almost destroyed by nervous folding and unfolding. “She’s dead.”

“When?”

“Body was found a half hour ago.”

“In Gap?”

“Outside. On the way to the airport. The French agent is dead, too.”

“Press?”

“Too late. They’re already running with it.”

While Oskar and Gerhardt, the driver, showed their papers to the guards manning the reinforced concrete gate, she took out her cell phone, and by the time they reached the modern building known as the Situation and Information Center, she had finished with Inspector Hans Kuhn of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei. “I don’t get it,” he kept repeating. “It makes no sense.”

“Of course it makes sense,” she snapped. Despite their long-standing friendship, the Berlin detective’s mawkish helplessness could be irritating. “We just don’t know the logic behind it yet.”

“But a girl. Fifteen years old…”

“That only limits the possibilities, Hans, which is good for us.”

The call had come that morning. Adriana Stanescu had found a way out of her captors’ small mountain cabin north of Gap, France, in the Hautes-Alpes département. She’d stumbled into town and chanced upon a farm couple who gave her their phone. Her call home was a particular surprise for Inspector Kuhn, who, as a veteran Berlin cop, had given up hope. For a week there had been no ransom calls, and so he’d gone with the textbook, which told him there was no hope. Adriana Stanescu’s kidnapper was a sexual predator, and by now she’d been shipped off somewhere, neutralized by drugs and violence, or she was dead. He’d only stayed with the Stanescus because of the publicity. If he dropped the case of an immigrant’s abducted child, the press would crucify him.

So he was there, with the Stanescus, when Adriana called. Remarkably, the girl was levelheaded enough to give a quick chronology: Kidnapped in Berlin by a man who pretended to be her father’s coworker: late thirties, dark hair. Transferred to a white van-Mercedes, she thought-and taken to France by three men, German, Spanish, and Russian. Held in the mountains. She’d escaped through a broken window.

He’d told the farmers to take her to the Gap police station, then asked Erika to liaise with the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire-DST-to fly her to Berlin.

“Who’s going to cover the costs?” Erika had asked.

“We can do that, if necessary.”

“It might be,” she told him, looking for an excuse not to be involved. “You know, the Gap police can take her to the airport without having their hands held. Why the production?”

“It just feels wrong,” Kuhn had explained, clearly frustrated that this was the best answer he could offer. She understood, though. According to Adriana’s story, there had been no rape, no attempt at rape, just three men keeping watch over her in France. Yet none of the men, according to her, were French. Nor were they Moldovan.

Why?

So Erika had done as he asked and called her DST contact and received the promise that by morning Adriana would be back home, with an escort.

It had kept her busy all day, distracted from more important business, and she had looked forward to nothing more than her nightly Riesling and Snickers. Now, this.

Because she moved so slowly, Oskar led the way up the steps, through the metal detectors and down the long corridor to Schwartz’s office in the back. He had turned on the lights and powered up her computer by the time she arrived, still clutching the wine and candy. She settled behind her desk and cleared away the day’s excess papers. Most were printouts of desperate e-mails from Belgrade worrying about the safety of their embassy. In light of the smoldering shell that was left of the American embassy from the previous night’s riot, they wanted to close down, but she had advised against it. The Serbs, despite history, had no problems with today’s Germany; it was America they hated, the way a poor child envies and hates a rich cousin who has taken something from him. Their hatred masked a long-standing love. Toward today’s Germans they felt nothing, and so there was nothing to worry about. The embassy had not been pleased with her explanation.

She looked through her top drawer, pushing around loose pens and paper clips and rubber bands before she gave up and ordered Oskar to find a bottle opener and a glass. “Two, if you want some.”

“No, thank you.”

“As you like.”

Once he was gone, she unwrapped her Snickers and checked the Reuters feed on her browser. A DST agent, Louise Dupont, had been found dead in her car from an accident. The fool hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. Much farther down the road, Adriana Stanescu’s body had been found by French police in the woods.

She pulled up the file on Andrei and Rada Stanescu, which had been updated over the last days as their faces had graced more and more periodicals. A taxi driver and a factory worker. They had arrived in Germany legally two years ago, a move facilitated by Andrei’s brother, Mihai, a baker who spent his spare time volunteering for the German branch of Caritas, the Catholic organization that worked for human rights and against poverty around the world. Caritas had recently been putting pressure on the EU to loosen its immigration policies, and she imagined that was why Mihai volunteered. According to a file she pulled up, Adriana’s uncle had been twice arrested in the last six years for helping easterners slip illegally into Germany. That, certainly, would merit further examination.

She got details of the girl’s murder from a phone call to Paris and Adrien Lambert, a French contact in the DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. Though Lambert’s agency was not specifically responsible for the Stanescu case, he had already assembled the information in his Boulevard Mortier office, expecting her call. Stanescu’s neck had been broken by hand. The killer knew his way around a neck, he said, and had completed the task with one movement. Gap police had found the mountain cabin in which Adriana had been held. Forensics was working the place over, but it had been cleaned professionally, and they held out little hope. The cabin was owned by François Leclerc, a plumber from Grenoble who was on vacation in Florida with his family. He had no idea who would have been using his place.

“And you believe that?” Erika asked as Oskar returned with a plastic cup and a corkscrew and proceeded to open the bottle.

“More than I believe you,” said Lambert, “when you tell me you don’t know anything about this.”

“Believe it, Adrian. We’re all wandering in the dark.”

After hanging up, she sipped the wine Oskar had poured, took a bite of her Snickers, and peered through her assistant as if he weren’t there. She ran through what she did know. An immigrant girl kidnapped, no ransom requested. In a country with Germany’s racial tensions the kidnapping wasn’t unthinkable, nor was the lack of ransom. It was unthinkable that, for a whole week, the girl had not been harmed or killed.

So the crime was neither sexually nor racially motivated. The girl had escaped by her own means, and someone felt her death was so important that this person was willing to take out a French civil servant as well.

Or was that a coincidence? Had Louise Dupont had an accident, died, and then the girl, with the kind of ill luck you only find in Greek myths, had run into a local psychopath? She doubted it, but the facts did not rule it out, so it remained.

If not, then one of the three men holding her had done it. The German, the Spaniard, or the Russian. Why, though, had they let her live unmolested for a whole week? Did that suggest the involvement of another party? She couldn’t be sure of anything.

She drew back.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Stanescus at all. What if Adriana had, say, witnessed a murder, and the killers took her to keep her quiet? There would have been an argument about what to do with her, a schism among criminals. She’s let go by one of them, while another tracks her down and silences her.

Then what about the unknown man, late thirties, dark hair, who first captured Adriana, before these other three took her over?

Unnerved by the small eyes fixed blindly on him for so long, Oskar said, “You’re doing it again.”

A pause, eyes wide. “Doing what?”

“That stare. You’re freaking me out.”

She blinked finally, smiled, then looked at her desk. “Sorry, Oskar. I promise to work on my manners. In the meantime, would you please ask Gerhardt to go see Herr al-Akir? He can bring someone to drive my car back and…” She gazed at Oskar. “And we’ll need another bottle of Riesling. This is going to take all night.”

Image

She returned to the beginning. She called Hans Kuhn again to ask about police cameras in the area of the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where Adriana had disappeared.

“You think that didn’t occur to me over the last week, Erika?”

“I’m just asking a question.”

He sighed. “We had some protests last year. The Turks thought we were targeting them, so the order came down to remove a bunch of cameras. We kept one at the corner of Mehringdamm and Gneisenaustrasse, but some kids screwed with it a month ago. The city won’t repair them until the next budget comes through.”

“Those are busy streets. There had to be some witnesses.”

“Four thirty in the afternoon-it was so busy that no one noticed. Besides, they don’t trust us pigs.”

“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Hans.”

Oskar returned with her car keys and a second Riesling and asked if she wanted him to stay around. She didn’t. His company would just distract her, and he clearly wanted to get home to his girlfriend, a Swede he’d recently become infatuated with.

Once he was gone, she began her reading. It was a technique she’d not so much learned as fallen into decades ago when her gaze had been focused across that opaque border into the ironically named German Democratic Republic. She’d had to learn what was happening there not by direct observation but by inference. Crop reports, crime statistics, train schedules, export flows, and the sometimes panicked messages sent by lonely informers marooned on that side of the Curtain. In such a situation, little can be taken at face value, and Erika had learned to gather her intelligence from the cracks between the questionable facts that reached her desk. She learned to let her mind drift from the central subject in slow outward circles, making dubious connections along the way that would be held up against other dubious connections to gradually create a jigsaw picture that could be rearranged, pieces dropped out or repainted, until, eventually, enough pieces remained that the larger picture could be gleaned.

She didn’t need to hear what the office wits said to agree that she’d stumbled on this technique as a way to make her life a little easier. She’d been a big woman since the seventies, an obese one since the fall of the Wall, and as her desk life slowly grew to encompass her entire life, her body continued to grow until reading was the only feasible technique left to her.

After finishing the files directly related to the case, she took her initial, small leaps outward. She remembered, first of all, that a recent World Bank report had placed Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, at the top of the immigrant remittances list, a dubious honor for any country that received more than 36 percent of its gross domestic product from those who had emigrated and sent cash back to their families. This fact made humans Moldova’s most valuable export.

Did the Stanescus send money back home? She made a note to check on it.

These days, the Moldovan mafia spent much of its time stealing German cars to sell back home, and trafficking women westward, which was far more profitable. While there was no reason to connect the Stanescus to these criminals, she didn’t want her sense of propriety to limit the broadness of her survey, so in addition to the BND files on the subject she tracked down recent articles in Der Spiegel, Stern, and Bunte, refamiliarizing herself with that tiny, troubled country.

Much of its history she already knew. Stalin had carved the area known as Bessarabia out of Romania in 1940, then absorbed it into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. For the rest of his rule, deportations were commonplace, sending Bessarabians to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. In the late forties, due largely to the Soviet quota system, a famine spread through the country, and in the fifties the deported and dead were replaced with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. To help suppress the desire to rejoin Romania, Soviet scientists talked up the independence of the Moldovan language, which, unlike Romanian, was still being written in Cyrillic. This reminded Erika of Serbs and Croats who for political reasons insisted their languages were utterly different-while to the rest of the world they sounded pretty much the same.

After its 1991 independence, and despite protests from the government based in Chisinau, Russian troops remained in the breakaway region of Transnistria, just across the Dniester River, to “protect” its population of imported Russians. This self-proclaimed Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic fought a brief 1992 civil war to gain autonomy. Its sovereignty was only recognized by itself; the international community still considered it a region of Moldova, though a lawless one run by criminals with a GDP of drugs, guns, and flesh.

The Stanescus were not from Transnistria, though; they were from the north of the country.

She returned to Mihai, the uncle. In 2002 he’d been arrested on the Austrian border, driving a truck with a Moldovan family-husband, wife, and two children-hidden in the rear. A prosecutor in the case pushed for kicking him out of the country, but by then Mihai was a full-fledged German citizen. Six months in Moabit Prison and a ten-thousand-euro fine was the best he could manage.

One would have thought that this would end Mihai’s smuggling activities, but he was picked up again in 2005 with a young couple entering Germany from the Czech Republic. Again, they were Moldovan, and in the case that followed it turned out that they’d only paid him seven hundred euros-a sum that only covered the gas and bribes along the way. The defense made a talking point of this, and the jury became convinced that he had committed his crime solely out of conviction, not for profit. He was let off with a twelve-thousand-euro fine and no jail time.

She would have preferred that he was a profiteering smuggler who sent his cargo on for slave labor or prostitution-that kind of man could be understood and dealt with-but Mihai Stanescu was the worst type. He was a believer, and this was an age in which believers were to be feared.

With a sinking feeling, she realized that reading alone would not solve anything. She would have to talk with the Stanescus.

She made the call, and a young-sounding woman answered in a groggy singsong, “Hejsan.”

“Oskar, please.” When he came on, she apologized for waking them, then gave the bad news. “I’ll need you to be my driver tomorrow.”

“But it’s Saturday.”

“Yes, Oskar. It is.”

“Where?”

“Berlin.”

He sighed loudly. With a five-hour drive ahead of him, his entire weekend was shot.

“If you want,” she said, “you can bring along your little Swede. Maybe she’d enjoy a road trip.”

Oskar hung up.

3

She knew the rumors would begin in the morning. Oskar wouldn’t spread them, but the janitors would eagerly discuss the two empty bottles of Riesling in her wastebasket, because even the janitors had clearance to judge. By the time the bulk of the staff returned on Monday the rumors would grow to a level of truth that would have to be investigated, so that those above her-and besides Teddi Wartmüller, her direct superior, they were innumerable-could decide whether to graduate the rumors to a higher level or demote them. Not even demotion would make them vanish; instead, all rumors were filed away in case of future need.

So, if only to limit potential dissemination, she collected the bottles and plastic cup and slipped them into an overnight bag she kept in the closet and rolled it out past the night guards to the parking lot. It was two in the morning, and she drove very carefully out the gate, past Herr al-Akir’s closed store, through the thickly wooded Perlacher Forest, and on to home.

She spent Saturday morning sleeping off the wine in her bilevel, on a gentle green lane of secluded houses populated by successful businessmen, other BND administrators, and a few foreigners from the European Patent Office. Along the street, security cameras mounted on streetlamps made sure they slept easily.

When she woke at noon, she instinctively took a plastic bowl out of the cabinet and searched for the bag of cat food-for Herr al-Akir had been partially right. Erika Schwartz had owned a single tabby, but a week earlier she had discovered his corpse by the back door. Even now, a week later, she would get halfway through the ritual of feeding Grendel before realizing she’d thrown away the cat food, and then remembering why.

She’d been suspicious because the cat’s body looked twisted by poison, but the BND forensics section explained that it had been twisted by cancer, not foul play. Despite the fact that she didn’t mix with her neighbors enough for them to build a grudge, she still maintained her suspicions.

Oskar picked her up at two with his Volkswagen, and during the drive up the A9 she used his BlackBerry-she still hadn’t succumbed to those ubiquitous beasts-to continue her online reading. Sometimes Oskar cut in, and she was obliged to fill him in on the little she had. “No, it’s not a pedophile ring. She wouldn’t have escaped in the first place. Even if she had, I don’t see how they could have tracked her unless they had a foothold with the French police.”

“It’s not impossible.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I suppose it’s not. We’ll have to keep it in mind.”

He smiled, pleased to have added something to the cloud of possibilities. So she decided to dampen his enthusiasm, just a little. “We’ll meet later on at the hotel. First, you’ll drop me off at Hans’s place, then go on to Gneisenaustrasse.”

He blinked. “Gneisenaustrasse?”

“Look for cameras. The police camera isn’t working, but there are bound to be shops with some kind of security.”

“Wonderful.”

“Don’t be down, Oskar. You’ve got a lifetime with the Swede ahead of you.”

He dropped her off at Hans Kuhn’s apartment over in Pankow, and she declined Kuhn’s offer of a drink. She wanted to know about the Stanescus. “What were your impressions?”

“Simple,” he said, sipping on a whiskey that dampened the ends of his white mustache. “Decent enough, very earnest. I was there when the child called. Their hearts were on their sleeves. I’m sure they’re not involved.”

“And the uncle?”

“Mihai?” He rocked his head. “The brains of the family. Tough, too. But he’s a German citizen; he knows the lay of the land. The parents have that vague confusion all new immigrants have.”

“Maybe I should talk to them now,” she said, feeling impatient.

“They just received their daughter’s body.”

“Then they’re emotional. It’ll make an interrogation easier.”

“Interrogation? Christ, Erika. Give them a break. Talk to them tomorrow, after they get back from church.”

“Churchgoers?”

“Bulgarian Orthodox on Krausenstrasse. There aren’t any Moldovan churches here, and the closest Romanian church is in Nuremburg, so they make do.”

“It’s late, anyway.”

Hans Kuhn raised his glass. “And you’re being rude. Now, have a drink.”

Four whiskeys and a dish of Mecklenburg cod later, Erika was ready to leave. It wasn’t the alcohol or the overdone fish that soured her but the awkward emotional scene Kuhn put her through. Teary-eyed, he said, “I was sure she was dead. Convinced. I’d had a week for it to settle in. Then she wasn’t. God’s own miracle!” He raised his glass while his tongue rooted around in his mouth. “Then, once more. Dead. So much worse. Why couldn’t she have just died in the first place?” Later: “I hate my job.”

His guilt flickered into fits of anger, and he made unwise predictions about what he would do to the men who had kidnapped her, once he had them. That’s when she knew it was time to leave. She called a taxi, which took her to the Berlin Plaza Hotel in Kurfürstendamm, and, before checking in, bought a Snickers from a nearby convenience store. She ordered a bottle of Pinot Blanc from room service.

She had finished the Snickers and was halfway through the wine when Oskar knocked on her door. She had spent the preceding hour avoiding all thoughts of the case by using her deductive skills on a television crime series starring a handsome cop and a dog that had a kilometer more charm and brains than his master. To her embarrassment, she still had no idea who the killer was.

She unlocked the door and paused to examine the bright red bruise around Oskar’s left eye, which seemed to reset all his features, making him look a few years younger. It was a curious effect. Coagulated blood marked a split in his eyebrow.

“You going to invite me in?” he said testily, then waved a shopping bag, heavy with a box that, through the thin plastic, she could see was a new Sony video camera. “This should at least entitle me to a free drink.”

She drenched a washcloth in hot water and set to cleaning off his face with the rough hand of an inexperienced caregiver. He winced and finally took it from her. He got up, one hand clutching the plastic cup of room-temperature wine, the other pressing the cloth to his brow. She took out the contents of his bag-one new video camera (“which I expect to be reimbursed for”) and a single mini DV cassette marked in quick black handwriting, 15-2-08, 16-21.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I should get a commendation.”

“I’ll buy you your own bottle next time. Now, talk.”

Funnily enough, it was a camera store, Drescher Foto, which sold a sketchy mix of antique and new video, 16 mm and still cameras stacked alluringly in the window. “They all pointed to the side, so you could see how pretty they were. Except one, up high in the corner. It pointed out to the street, and a little red light on it glowed. The owner had set up his own security system.”

“Very nice,” she said as she tipped the bottle for examination; it was empty. “Want me to call down for another?”

“Please.”

After she’d made the call, she settled back on the bed while he took a seat at the desk, which looked out over Berlin’s busy nightlife; shouts and car engines rose up to them.

“Of course,” he said, “Drescher Foto was closed. So I checked the list of names for the apartments overhead.”

“Let me guess: There was a Drescher residing in the building.”

“You should be a detective, Fraulein Schwartz.”

“Was he happy to meet you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Herr Drescher turned out to be a recluse, dividing his time between his shop and a filthy apartment stacked to the ceiling with mini DV cassettes and four televisions for watching the world pass by his store. Paranoid, perhaps, because at first he wouldn’t let Oskar come up. “I told him where I was from, and that seemed to cause more trouble than it solved. I had to finally threaten him with a search warrant-which, given what’s probably on some of those cassettes, worried him more than anything else.”

“I can imagine.”

After a conversation stalled by long silences and evasions, Herr Drescher finally admitted to having the tape from that day. Oskar asked if, when he heard about the missing girl, he had considered showing the tape to the authorities. All he would say was, “It’s none of my business. I keep to myself.”

Looking around the apartment, full of dirty plates balanced precariously on columns of cassettes, Oskar had no reason to doubt it.

“So we sat down and looked at it together. As you’ll see, the quality’s excellent, and it’s all time-coded. Better than that, there’s a perfect view of the entrance to the courtyard.”

“And?”

He got up and started unboxing the video camera. “And I’ll see if I can hook this thing up to the television.”

As he settled on the floor and took out the camera and instructions and the pages of obligatory, multilingual warnings, she said, “So when did he hit you?”

“Drescher?”

“Yes, Drescher.”

He touched his brow, grinning. “The light in his stairwell doesn’t work. I would have told you immediately, but you might not have let me in.”

“You tripped and fell.”

“I’d like to see how well you negotiate those stairs.”

It took about fifteen minutes-

Oskar, despite his boyish love of modern technology, wasn’t adept at using it-and during that time room service delivered another bottle of Pinot Blanc with two wineglasses. The young girl who brought it up seemed amused at first by the scene in front of her: wine for two, an enormous old woman, and a scrawny, mustached man in his thirties sitting on the floor. Then she noticed the video camera and the man’s swollen eye, and her amusement seemed to turn to disgust; she was gone before Erika could dig out a tip.

Oskar had cued up the tape back at Drescher’s, at 16:13. The camera didn’t shoot straight across Gneisenaustrasse but at an angle, so that it could take in the store’s front door. From that angle the foreground included the sidewalk, parked cars, and the swish of traffic speeding past bare trees lining the median. The background was dominated by the apartment building and its wide courtyard entrance.

“There he is,” said Oskar, pointing to a black BMW turning into the courtyard.

She squinted at the hazy image, then reached for her reading glasses. “Did you get a license number?”

“It’s clearer on the way out.”

He fast-forwarded to 16:27, when a man emerged from the courtyard, checked his watch, and tried to look inconspicuous. He kept his head slumped between his shoulders, so that his face was hard to make out, but Erika guessed he was in his late thirties or early forties, 180 to 190 centimeters tall, dark-haired. Not heavy. Just like half Europe’s male population.

Erika was momentarily shaken when the man seemed to look directly at the camera, at her, and she said, “Does he see the camera?”

“I noticed that, too,” Oskar said as he took a sip of wine. “I don’t think so. I think he’s looking at this car.” He touched, in the foreground, the dark blue, almost black, front hood of some unknown make of automobile.

Between then and 16:37, the man disappeared from view again before reappearing and looking to his right, taking note of something and disappearing again. Among assorted people passing on the street, Erika spotted Adriana Stanescu. After all the photos that had been pasted across Europe over the last week, she didn’t need to see her in close-up to know. Tall for her age, almost swaggering with the public confidence that consumes pretty teenaged girls. She briefly considered telling Oskar that, many, many years ago, she had been as pretty as this Moldovan girl, then wondered why she would consider it, particularly when Oskar wouldn’t believe her.

As she passed the courtyard, the man stepped out again and spoke to her. She didn’t stop immediately, but with the man’s second statement she paused and turned to him. Then he-and this struck her as remarkable-took a card out of his pocket and showed it to her. Business card? Driver’s license? Then she remembered-he’d pretended to be her father’s co-worker, which would require some ID. Even then Adriana hesitated, and Erika dug her chewed nails into her palms, muttering, “Good girl. You’re no one’s fool.”

History had already written this story, though, which made it all the more difficult to watch. The man stepped aside to let her in first and then followed.

“It’s fast,” said Oskar, finishing his glass.

It was. Three minutes later, at 16:45, the BMW rolled slowly out to the street. One driver, no visible passengers. It turned right and left the frame.

“Just a sec,” said Oskar.

The BMW reappeared on their side of the street, heading in the opposite direction toward Mehringdamm. Then it was gone.

“Watch this,” said Oskar.

“Watch what?” she asked, a sudden depression filling her.

Then she saw it: The blue car in the foreground, an Opel with Berlin plates, pulled out into the traffic and drove in the same direction.

“Oh,” she said.

They went through the tape two more times, Oskar making note of the most crucial time code: 16:39, when the man’s face was most visible. At that moment he was speaking with Adriana, his head raised to show what an open, friendly person he was.

At 16:46, as he headed toward Mehringdamm, they got a clear shot of the BMW’s tags, which Oskar noted along with the Opel’s tags at the tail end of 16:47.

By the time she called the Berlin office for an all-night courier, it was nearly one, and she was finally feeling a buzz from the wine and the realization that they were very close to something important. The courier brought an envelope, in which they put the cassette and a note asking the Pullach office to use its face-recognition software to identify the man talking to the girl at 16:39. She doubted they would come up with anything-the software was notoriously buggy-but at least they could clean up the image.

The courier sealed the envelope in their presence and predicted that it would arrive by seven in the morning. He, too, seemed to note Oskar’s black eye, the empty wine bottles and glasses, and the video camera, but he was too well trained to show his emotions.

4

Erika knew surprisingly little about the Orthodox Church, most of her understanding coming from a single conversation she’d had in the eighties with a Romanian informer who had come to Vienna to discuss the terms of his employment. He’d been a professor of sociology, or whatever Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist regime chose to call that field of study, and he was trying to explain why his price was so high: The Romanian mind was too conspiratorial for him to be able to do anything safely.

Her job that day had been to keep his fee as low as possible-the West German economy was raging, but pressure from the Greens was throwing all future BND budgets into question.

The professor had been a talker; she could hardly get a word in at all. A stream of sociocultural lessons poured from his mouth. On the subject of the conspiratorial Romanian mind, he started with the obvious variable: the Securitate, the regime’s feared secret police, which, according to rumors Erika didn’t believe, employed in some fashion a quarter of the population. When he saw this didn’t sway her, he turned to religion and democracy.

He said, “Democracy functions in Protestant nations. It barely functions in Catholic nations. It doesn’t function at all in Orthodox nations.”

It was a troubling statement, as West Germany’s boisterous ally on the other side of the Atlantic based its entire Cold War philosophy on the notion that all nations and cultures could, and should, embrace democracy.

“It’s about independent thinking,” the professor explained. “How God’s word is interpreted. You Protestants, you believe that all it really takes is a Bible to work through who God is and what He wants. The Catholics read on their own, but they require a pope to help them through the difficult parts. They can’t absolve themselves of sin; the Church has to do that for them.”

“And Orthodoxy?”

He smiled. “An Orthodox church represents the link between the earthly and the spiritual. The dividing line is at the front of the church, at the iconostasis. Medieval images of Christ and the saints gaze out, as if heaven is on the other side of the screen, and the Holy peer through. Judging. Then it happens. The priest steps behind the screen into the sanctuary. After a little while, he steps out again to share what he’s learned. You see?”

Erika, worried over the time and money already devoted to this questionable source, said, “No. I don’t see.”

“Where does truth come from?” he asked rhetorically. “For Protestants, it comes from self-examination. For Catholics, from assisted examination. For Orthodox Christians, a man of importance steps behind a screen, talks to God in secret, and comes out to tell you what God wants. It works the same way with politics. Politics for us is a dark, smoky room where a few important people come to an agreement. Afterward, they step out into the morning light and tell the masses that, say, they now live in a communist country. Or that they live in a capitalist one-it doesn’t matter. What matters is that my people will never believe that they’ve taken history into their own hands. That’s not reality for them. In our reality, democracy will always be an illusion.”

Erika nodded at this, if only to be polite, then realized she still didn’t have her answer. “And this is why you want double what we offered?”

“My dear, in a world where all important things are run by men behind closed doors, those outside would kill their own mothers to gain the favor of those on the inside. They will turn in anyone who smells vaguely off and even those who smell of roses. You see, I don’t have to work for you to risk my life; all I have to do is take the train back to Bucharest. You’re not only paying for my cooperation; you’re paying for my return.”

Nearly a quarter of a century later, Erika tried to align that assessment with the St. Tsar Boris the Converter Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the southeastern district of Neukölln, just below Kreuzberg. She stood in the back, the heavy smell of incense filling the gloomy air as the liturgy was almost hummed by a white-bearded man with a black cap and robes. The worshippers seemed to focus more on their hands, clutched in prayer, and most of them stood, which made her feel better hidden.

She had spotted the Stanescus early on. They were near the front with Adriana’s uncle, Mihai. Other pale-faced worshippers had embraced them in their time of need, and despite herself she felt a brief warmth at the thought that here it didn’t matter that the Stanescus weren’t Bulgarian; they were just grieving parents, which anyone could understand.

Then she cut the distracting thought from her head and stepped forward to get a better look. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find here inside the church, but she’d been in her particular line of work for so long that there was always the possibility she’d recognize a person of interest. None of these faces were part of her extensive memories, so she left.

She stepped out into the cool morning light and joined Hans Kuhn, who was waiting by the car. Inside it, Oskar tapped the wheel to the rhythm of a hip-hop CD he’d brought along.

By the time the worshippers began to spill out onto the sidewalk, she and Kuhn had gone through two coffees apiece from a sausage vendor, and she had eaten two käsewurst. She sent Kuhn ahead so she could finish wiping greasy cheese off her chin.

He returned with all three Stanescus. Andrei and Rada were small people who seemed smaller the nearer they were to Erika’s large frame. Both were in black, as was Mihai, the only one with dry eyes. It was Mihai who spoke first.

“Leave them alone, all right? Can’t you see they’ve been through enough?”

As if he’d said nothing, Erika introduced herself to the parents and offered a hand that would have taken rudeness to refuse; Andrei and Rada were not rude. Mihai, however, ignored her hand and went on. “They received their daughter’s body yesterday. My niece! Have some respect.”

“We have new information,” she told them and produced a printed-out image from the videocassette that Pullach had cleaned up and e-mailed that morning. “Do you recognize this man?”

Mihai grabbed the photo first, full of energy. Then he shook his head and passed it to Andrei, muttering something in Moldovan. Neither the mother nor father recognized him either.

“I think this is the man who took Adriana,” she explained.

Rada Stanescu began to cry, and her husband held her closer, an arm around her shoulders. “We answer your questions. Later, yes? Please.” Andrei had a pleading quality to his voice, and Erika remembered again why she hated going into the field.

“I understand,” she said, then turned to Mihai. “Perhaps you can spare a few minutes?”

He wasn’t as accommodating as his relatives, but as he watched his brother and sister-in-law walk away, he shrugged. “You can always take me down to the station if I refuse, yes?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then I don’t have to answer a thing.”

“In which case, I’d be very curious why you wouldn’t.”

Mihai blinked rapidly, perhaps a sign of an upcoming lie, perhaps not. “You know what I do for a living?”

“You’re a baker, and you help people move here.”

He smiled. “Yes, and no. It seems I spend most of my time answering police questions about the people I help. If pressed, I would have to say my main occupation is answering questions.”

“Then you’re experienced,” Erika said and opened a hand toward the car; Oskar was already starting it up. “Shall I occupy you a few minutes?”

Despite his attitude, Erika liked Mihai Stanescu. He was abrupt, to the point, a quality Erika herself was often accused of. He, like his brother, was a small man, but heavier and with an excess of dark hair that grew too quickly on his face and spilled out under his neck when he took off his tie in the Kreuzberg coffee shop they settled on. Erika ordered espresso, but wished she hadn’t when Mihai ordered Trendelburger Feuergeist-“fire ghost,” an aptly named clear liquor she felt she could use right now. When she stared at his shot glass too long, he raised an eyebrow. “You are paying for this, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good.” He swallowed it all in one go, then said, “Who’s the bastard?”

She glanced at Hans Kuhn near the doorway-she’d asked him to stay back. “You didn’t meet Inspector Kuhn before?”

“Not him.” He tapped the table with a stubby finger. “The one in the picture. The one who took my niece.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How sure are you about him?”

“We have him on video talking to her just before she disappeared.”

His cheeks and forehead flushed; then he waved to the waiter for another Feuergeist.

“So?” said Erika.

“You’re the one with the questions, right?”

“You know what questions I have.”

That seemed to throw him. He leaned back and took her in with his eyes, then leaned forward again. “You want to know if I have any suspicions.”

“Yes.”

“If I did, I’d tell you.”

“Then tell me about Adriana. Why her?”

“How should I know?”

“Because you do,” she said. She’d been sure of it from the moment he started protecting her parents; he had the guilt of knowledge all over him. “Adriana Stanescu. Fifteen. Moldovan, like you. None of that is exceptional, but there was something special about her. It’s why she was taken. You tell me what makes her special.”

The second Feuergeist went down slower than the first as he considered his answer. He set down the half-empty shot glass. “I have my own demands.”

“Of course you do.”

“Silence. What I tell you-it’s not for the public. Can you promise me this? It’s only to help you do your job, nothing else. Because this is one case I’d like to see you solve.”

If his information proved valuable, the truth was that its public dissemination wouldn’t be her choice. The decision would move up to the second floor, and her opinion would be relegated to one of many blabbering voices that could be-and usually was-ignored. “I can promise this,” she lied.

He drank the rest of his Feuergeist to steel himself, then began to speak.

It didn’t take long, and when he was finished he didn’t wait for her to end the conversation. He simply stood and walked out past Hans Kuhn, who waited for some sign from Erika. She gave none. She couldn’t move from her seat, could only stare ahead into the empty distance, thinking what a truly miserable world she lived in. She flagged down the waiter and ordered a double shot of Feuergeist. Sometimes the world hardly seemed worth saving at all.

5

She and Oskar were on the A9 again, heading back to Munich, the winter sun setting off to their right. She’d told Mihai’s story once, a quick summation, and Oskar’s foot had weakened noticeably, so that now they were crawling in the passing lane. She suggested he speed up or move, so he switched to the right lane and even used his signal, which was in her memory unprecedented.

“Tell me again,” he said.

She took a breath, the Feuergeist making a small fire in her gut. “Adriana came to Germany four years ago, two years before she arrived with her parents. She was eleven at the time. Mihai wanted me to understand, so he described the poor little village they came from, that it’s riddled with despair and alcoholics and for a teenager it’s a curse of nothingness. He attributed Adriana’s stupidity to optimism, and I suppose that’s right. A modeling agency came to town. They said they were from Hamburg, but there’s no telling. They were looking for new talent, fresh faces. They told the girls that if they were chosen to work for them, there would be an official contract, and the company would take care of the passport and visa paperwork. Adriana didn’t tell her parents-she knew what they would say. They, unlike her, were patriots. They had no desire to leave or see their daughter leave Moldova. So she went with a girlfriend to the audition, in a rented warehouse on the edge of town. Two days later, she returned to find out she was one of five or so girls who’d been chosen. Her girlfriend, Mihai explained, was sick with jealousy.”

They passed a sign for a gas station, and Erika asked him to pull over. As soon as he’d parked, she was out the door, lumbering toward the station’s clean, modern store. Oskar considered following, but instead stared through the windshield at the barren fields beyond the highway. What was most unbearable about these stories was that they always began the same way-a modeling agency, a scout for secretarial work, a company finding nannies for rich Western children-and very soon you knew where they would end up. Yet despite the repetition, no one ever learned.

She returned with a bottle of cheap white wine with a screw top, but no Snickers-he suspected the story had killed her appetite. She settled into her seat, gasping for air, and said, “Sorry-did you want something?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Good.”

He merged onto the highway but returned to the passing lane. His foot was working better, and he wanted to get back to Munich as soon as possible.

“Where was I?” she said.

“She’d gotten the modeling job.”

“Yes,” Erika said as she unscrewed the wine, the cap’s aluminum seam popping. “All the successful contestants sat for photographs, gave their names and addresses, and then the agency left town. A week later, they returned with fresh passports and told the girls they had five hours to collect their stuff and get to a bus in the center of town.

“There were other girls already on the bus, girls from nearby villages. By the time they reached the border with Romania, there were probably a total of thirty or forty. Though Adriana couldn’t have known this part, you and I and Mihai all know that their long border stop was for bribes. They crossed Romania, stopped again, crossed Hungary. They reached the Austrian border.”

She took a long draft from the wine bottle. Oskar waited.

“You know, we like to think we’re better than those easterners, but all it takes is a little money. Money is the great equalizer, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it is.”

After another sip, she said, “They arrived in Hamburg two days later. They were herded off the bus into a warehouse in the more dangerous part of St. Pauli, gave up their passports, and were told that a lot of money had been invested in them. As soon as they paid it back, they would be free to start their modeling careers. Then, one by one, they were raped.”

She took another swallow and spoke to the road ahead.

“There was a man and a woman who worked together, looking over the girls and making notes on a clipboard. They were deciding which girls would go where. Adriana was shipped to a whorehouse outside Berlin. This, according to Mihai, was a sign that they liked her looks. The occasional government functionary made it to their establishment and would pay well for an eleven-year-old as pretty as she was. Not so fast.”

Though on this stretch of the A9 there was no speed limit, Oskar hadn’t realized he had slowly accelerated to something far above any safe speed. He let off the gas and glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said, then noticed she was already halfway through her bottle. “Maybe you should slow down, too.”

Erika followed his gaze. She wedged the bottle between her thighs and rested her hands on her knees. “One of the worst curses for anyone in our profession is imagination. We should all be born without it.”

“Go on.”

“Is there any need?” she asked. “You know what happened next. Five to ten men a night, and if they paid enough-and most did-they could do with her what they liked. Adriana was checked after each visit, because a bruise would cost the visitor extra. Adriana made a lot of money for them. But then…” Unconsciously, she removed the bottle from between her thighs and held it near her lips. “She was lucky, wasn’t she? She had an uncle who had been in Germany for years, a man who was familiar with the criminal classes. He got a call from his brother, that Adriana had gone missing. He’d learned from her jealous girlfriend that she was modeling in Germany. And while Andrei was too much of a villager to understand a thing, Mihai immediately understood. He did his homework. Among the immigrants he helped out, some had contact with the flesh road. They tracked her to Hamburg, and then to Berlin. And then…” She paused again, ignoring the bottle. “I didn’t ask him why he didn’t just call the police. I think I know why, but it would have been good to hear it directly from him.”

“He doesn’t trust cops.”

“Yes, but that’s not it. It’s his brother. Adriana’s father is a dunce, and if the police raided the place and sent her back to Moldova with an escort, then he would learn what had happened to his daughter. Mihai wanted his brother to remain in blissful ignorance. He still wants it-that’s why he demanded silence from me. It’s why he took matters into his own hands four years ago. He approached the men who ran the Berlin house and made them an offer. If they gave up this one girl, then he would give them the use of his bakery to launder money. They thought he was crazy and suggested a counteroffer. They would give him the girl if he gave them his shop. He would continue to run it, but for a salary, and all profits would be deposited into their bank.”

These were the details she’d skipped on her initial telling, and Oskar waited impatiently for Mihai’s reply. “Well?”

“What could he do? He signed the ownership papers over to them, then took Adriana back to Berlin. He nursed her until she was fit enough, then smuggled her back into Moldova. It was a secret between them-her parents would continue to believe she’d been pursuing a modeling career.”

Oskar considered that, but however he looked at it, it still made no sense. “Andrei didn’t suspect? No one’s that stupid.”

“I said the same thing. Mihai thinks Andrei suspected but was too horrified to ever ask the question. But he did change. A month after her return, he called to ask if Mihai could help them get papers to move to Germany. He wanted to do it, he said, for Adriana, because if she could run away to go to Germany, then leaving was very important to her.”

“The man lives with blinders.”

“Don’t we all,” said Erika. “When I asked Mihai for names, he seemed very nervous-it was the first time during our talk that he was. But he gave me one. Rainer Volker, the man who owned his bakery. Ring a bell?”

“No. He doesn’t own it anymore?”

“He’s dead now, so he doesn’t own a thing,” she said wistfully as she gazed at the gray sky ahead of them. “His name didn’t ring a bell with me either, but when we got into the car, I remembered him from a piece in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Last month-first week of January, I think. Rainer Volker was found shot to death down by the Elbe. You know what the article said he was?”

“I don’t know.”

“A philanthropist.”

6

Radovan Pani ć had been home less than a week, making arrangements for his mother’s cancer treatments in Vienna, when he learned from a friend in a smoky Novi Beograd café that the parliament of Kosovo, the Serbian province they had fought a humiliating war to keep, was holding a vote on independence that coming Sunday. Radovan, distracted by the details of the Zürich heist and finding a visa for his mother, had stayed away from newspapers.

The result was a foregone conclusion, because the Serb-dominated northern region of Kososvo was too much of a minority to hold any sway. Had there been a public referendum, they might have all boarded buses to offset the vote, but since it was a parliament vote the only idea anyone had was to send buses of Kalashnikovs.

As Sunday grew nearer, his more optimistic friends pointed out that the results didn’t matter. Kosovo had already declared independence before, in 1990, and only Albania had recognized it. This time around, no one would, because Article 10 of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1244, which had ended the Kosovo War, gave Kosovo “substantial autonomy” within Serbia, which negated the possibility of real independence.

“That’s historical record,” said one, clutching his cigarette in a fist. “Internationally recognized. Go ahead and let them play their game. They’ll end up with egg on their faces.”

The optimists weren’t worried. The others-and they were far more numerous-included friends and most of the politicians he heard on television. The world, they reminded him, had long ago singled out Serbs for eternal punishment. They adored the Muslims in Kosovo because they had been fooled by their crying women and those alleged mass graves. The Americans, who after 9/11 should know better, would once again let their stupid political correctness get the better of them.

Radovan preferred optimism. With a mother being slowly eaten by cancer, it was the one stance that could give him some measure of peace. However, he was also a career criminal who knew the world didn’t always bow to your optimism. The result of the vote that chilly Sunday one week ago was no surprise to anyone. What followed was.

Afghanistan was the first to recognize the Republic of Kosovo. Then Costa Rica and, of course, Albania. There were jokes, because sovereignty is only as strong as the nations that agree with it. Then France said yes. The French president was of Hungarian stock, and Hungarians hated Serbs more than most, so perhaps it was an anomaly. Breaths were held. Turkey-more Muslims, so what else could you expect? Then, in Dar es Salaam, George W. Bush, that ignorant cowboy, said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”

Exhale.

By then Radovan had settled most everything with his mother’s Austrian visa and had a final appointment for the following Monday. So, with her blessing, he took to the streets with his friends and shouted and raised his fists. They cursed the UN and the USA and sang Orthodox hymns and war songs. Each night, exhausted and pleased with themselves, they got drunk and told their Kosovo stories. Some had been there for the fighting, and Radovan drank in their tales of burning villages and Muslim terrorists and tracking down soldiers who had gone MIA. Others were amateur historians-most Serbs these days were amateur historians-who could recite a litany of dates that tied the region more tightly to the Serbian breast. The 1389 battle against the Ottomans on Kosovo Polje-Kosovo Field, or the field of the black birds-figured heavily in any discussion, so that any Serb could, and would, proclaim that they had been fighting for Kosovo for the past six hundred years, ever since that first gloriously lost battle.

When a crowd is convinced it has been truly wronged, little can stop it from smashing windows and pulling up sidewalks. When the injustice reaches back into medieval times, and the humiliation has lasted six centuries, then the anger is buoyed by religious fervor. You break glass not only for yourself but for all who have come before you, and when, on Thursday night, one of your comrades, a functionary with the Radical Party, suggests a visit to the American embassy, there is no choice but to go.

All Radovan’s ancestors hung behind him, watching with pleasure as he went to give a history lesson to the monolith nation that thought history was something you only read about in books. History, his lesson would say, was the blood that kept you alive. History separated you from the beasts. This was tonight’s lesson.

It was beautiful. The ease of their entry was breathtaking, for the marines guarding the unassuming building on Kneza Miloša drew back like troublemakers hoping that in the rear of the room the teacher wouldn’t notice them. Then the windows were shattered, drunk professors scaling the facade, legs flailing at the sills as they slid inside. They ran cheering through the narrow, dark corridors of the empty building, banging against locked doors that likely held the darkest secrets of the American empire, and when they couldn’t get them open someone-Dejan? Viktor?-decided the best way was to burn it down. If there are no students, then what use is the schoolhouse? Perhaps in the morning, when the students see the pile of ashes, they just might understand.

By the next day, though, no one understood, and their own policemen collected them in the streets and knocked down apartment doors looking for the professors of history. One died in the embassy fire, consumed by smoke, but Radovan didn’t know that one. Some Bosnian rounded up with him said the dead man was a martyr, but with a crushing hangover accentuated by the cold morning light, Radovan couldn’t be sure of anything.

Now, the Sunday after the vote, he was still here: a group cell in the Belgrade District Prison on Bačvanska ulica.

Occasionally, policemen arrived to take away this or that prisoner for questioning. The ones who returned said they were asking who had organized the attacks on the Croatian and American embassies, as well as the attempted attacks on the Turkish and British embassies, but the pressure depended on which interrogator you got. Some didn’t care for those mysteries and just sat discussing minor offenses, like the trashed McDonald’s and other stores along Terazije.

So far, no one had asked him a single question, and he wanted out. He’d grown sick of the stink. He’d watched the testosterone overflow and fights break out. Some skinheads had smuggled in a couple of knives, and two Bosnians had been cut already. More importantly, tomorrow he was expected at the Austrian embassy, and at this rate he wouldn’t get questioned until the middle of the week. So when one of the skinheads was returned to the cell, grinning, Radovan flagged his escort. “Tell Pavle Ðord-evi ć that Radovan Pani ć has information for him.”

He’d seen Pavle Ðorð-ević in the unheated entrance when he and ten others were dragged in to join the crowd of young men that now numbered about two hundred. He’d known Pavle in high school, though to call them friends would have been a stretch. He’d punched Pavle’s face when both were fourteen, and the policeman’s long nose still made a slight detour halfway down to his lips. But it was the only name he knew.

The cop pretended to ignore his request, and after he left some of the Bosnians began to hassle him-who was he planning to give up? He stood his ground and told them that a well-known Novi Beograd gangster was his boss. It was enough for them to give him breathing room.

Hours later, around six thirty, he was led to an interview room, where Pavle sat smoking a Marlboro and scratching his broken nose. He ignored Radovan’s attempts at reminiscing and pocketed his cigarettes when Radovan made a move for them. He spoke as if he’d been awake for a week straight. “I don’t have time for your bullshit, Radovan. Get to the point.”

“I’ve got information. Let’s make a deal.”

“What kind of information?”

“The good kind. The kind that gets you a promotion. You agree to let me go, and it’s yours.”

“You’re going to tell me who organized the burning of the American embassy?” Pavle grinned. “That information won’t get me promoted. It might just get me a bullet in the head.”

“It’s got nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with Belgrade. No one gets in trouble except some foreigners.” He paused. “In particular, an American.”

Pavle exhaled smoke, then after a moment placed his Marlboros back on the table. Radovan took one and waited for Pavle to light it. “Go on,” said the cop.

“Do we have a deal? I’ve got to get out. Family business.”

“If it’s as good as you say, then sure.”

“It is, Pavle. Believe me.”

7

The request came in the form of a morning e-mail with a red priority flag, asking her to please come to Conference Room S on the second floor for a 10:00 A.M. meeting. It had been sent by Teddi Wartmüller’s secretary.

The second floor was a rarity for Erika. She kept to her office on the ground floor, and when the directors of the various departments wanted to talk, they came to her. There had always been a silent understanding in this, since the second floor was where they stocked the French wines and the ten-year-old single malts for serious intelligence bureaucrats poring over policy dictates and making serious decisions. Such important people required their meals be delivered and their drinks poured; it was a place Erika Schwartz did not belong.

She’d been invited not merely to the second floor but to the most esteemed and contentious of the conference rooms. Each department had been tapped to pay for S’s renovation more than two years ago. They paid for the Spanish leather upholstery, the Italian cabinets, and the long conference table made of Finnish oak and fitted out with its own laptops and cameras for conference calls displayed on an enormous plasma television at the end of the room; at the other end, windows with electric blinds surveyed the grounds. The inevitable argument over funding this monstrosity had finally uncovered the true purpose of S, which was to impress the Americans. This, of course, was before the CIA’s Afghan heroin scandal shut down most of their joint operations, but construction had continued anyway. Since the room’s completion last year, not a single American had entered Conference Room S, nor had Erika.

The irony was deeper, because Room S was only a stopgap before the entire building moved to the new headquarters in Berlin, which, according to recent estimates, would be finished by 2011. Even though the move was still at least three years off, the arguments and deals over who would get corner offices had been going on ever since Gerhard Schröder’s security cabinet decided five years ago to centralize the BND in Berlin. This, too, was a debate Erika had been left out of.

As she prepared for the trip upstairs, her suspicions running in various unproven directions but self-consciously dwelling on those two empty wine bottles from Friday night, Oskar wandered in, his eye looking only a little better. “Any word on the face recognition?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I can call down.”

“Don’t rush them.” She used the edge of the desk to pull herself up, then took a few steps forward. Her feet were sore from the weekend, and she wondered miserably if she was going to have to buy a cane. That, really, would be the end.

She went alone to the elevator, and on the second floor young assistants with folders sped past her to their important duties. Room S, on her right, was locked, but through the blinds she saw four people positioned around a hectare of oak. The laptops were packed away.

Her heart sank. Standing around the head of the table, sipping coffee from a china cup, Brigit Deutsch and Franz Teufel were laughing at one of Teddi Wartmüller’s bad jokes, while Berndt Hesse, the one friendly but unexpected face in the room, sat nursing his cup as if no one were there. She knocked, and Berndt looked up and said something to Brigit, who pressed a button on the table to unlock the door.

“Erika!” Wartmüller announced as she came in. His cheeks were unusually red today, belying a long-lost youth that had been crushed by his rigorous climb to the top of Berlin’s intelligence apparatus. Not that his wild ways had disappeared entirely, though-the world of rumor had a special corner for stories of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual escapades. A devout bachelor since a late-seventies divorce, he’d over the years let slip innuendoes about key parties, exotic clubs, and boys, though no one ever knew if they were true or only to embarrass guests.

“Please,” said Wartmüller, waving his hands around. “Sit down and I’ll have Jan bring some croissants.”

“Just coffee, please,” she said as she shut the door and gradually made it to a seat on Berndt’s side-he gave her a clandestine wink.

Wartmüller pressed another button and ordered a fresh round of coffees, then clapped his hands together. “We’re all here, then.”

Brigit and Franz took seats on either side of Wartmüller like, Erika thought, synchronized dancers. They were his twin acolytes-Wartmüller always kept two young apprentices to play off one another-and between them, in the middle of the table, was a single yellow file. Yellow-a departmental work order.

Jan, an elegantly attired Pole who’d come with Room S, arrived carrying a tray. He collected the empty cups and replaced them with steaming coffees, then left. With a twinkle in her eye, Brigit went to a cabinet at the end of the room. She took out an untouched bottle of Asbach brandy and said, “I’m going to spice mine up. Anyone else?”

A trick, Erika thought. She covered her cup with a hand, wondering if they’d actually gone over security footage just to find out how much she was drinking. Had things really become that petty? “Straight for me, thanks,” she said.

Brigit, unfazed, cracked open the bottle and poured a healthy dose into her own cup.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Wartmüller said, giving Brigit a mock glare, “we can get to it. Erika has had a busy weekend.”

Talking as if she weren’t in the room was another Wartmüller technique, a very effective one.

“Perhaps she can tell us what she’s been up to?”

She saw no reason to lie, so she didn’t. As she talked, though, another part of her wondered how they’d learned about her activities-from their faces, none of what she said was news. She was confident enough of Oskar’s loyalty not to question it now, but perhaps poor, emotional Hans Kuhn had been cornered.

Then again, she had nothing to hide, so perhaps their source didn’t matter.

“Would you call this investigation a personal favor for your friend the policeman?” Wartmüller asked.

Berndt cut in, speaking his first words. “Favor or not, I think this falls under your jurisdiction.”

Erika appreciated the interruption. Back in West Germany, during that other time, she and Berndt had been confidantes of a sort. Once foreign policy had been reassessed after ’89 and each was forced to find new specialties, they had kept up contact. She remained in intelligence, while he moved on-she couldn’t quite call it up-into politics.

She said, “As Berndt points out, it did seem to fall within our scope. Yes, Inspector Kuhn called me because of our friendship, but I took it on because I considered it our responsibility. That’s why I felt free to use our resources.”

Wartmüller grinned. “Oskar Leintz-he’s one of our resources. Looks to me like you’ve been getting the poor boy into trouble.”

“He had an accident on some stairs.”

“I’ll bet.”

As this seemed to be his cue, Franz reached for the yellow file and pushed. It slid down the long table toward Erika but stopped halfway. Berndt had to get up and reach out to drag it the rest of the way. Because they worked as two sides of the same person, Brigit did the speaking for Franz. “This is part of your investigation?”

Inside the file was a still from the Berlin video. The man, clear from the excellent image reconstruction, had heavy, tired eyes but otherwise looked fit. Handsome in an entirely anonymous way as he talked to Adriana. She turned it over and scanned the next page, important details leaping out at her. The BMW the kidnapper had driven had been reported stolen and subsequently found, abandoned and clean, in the Tempelhof parking lot. The Opel driven by the kidnapper’s possible shadow had been rented by an American, whose name they had no record of. Then she saw that the face-recognition software had found a name: Milo Weaver. American. Last known employer: Central Intelligence Agency.

Despite the elegant surroundings, she said, “Scheisse.”

“Indeed,” Brigit said into her spiked coffee.

His point made, Wartmüller returned to the second person. “I’m beginning to wonder if you’re objective enough for this job, Erika. You do seem obsessed with the Americans.”

There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when the intelligence she offered on the Americans could be taken at face value. No longer. That had ended with Afghanistan, poppy fields, and processed heroin making it all the way to Hamburg.

She’d discovered the trail in late 2005, more luck than detective work, while tracking suspected terrorists who turned out to be simple drug barons. Yet the foil-wrapped bricks they brought into the EU had begun life in fields of Taliban prisoners guarded by the U.S. Army. The bricks were sold on to packagers and then distributors in Europe. All run by the CIA to fund things that its masters in Congress chose not to pay for, or didn’t know existed.

She’d brought the information to Wartmüller immediately, and his initial reaction had been the same as hers: disbelief, followed by outrage. She’d even been impressed that a man like him could still feel outrage. He praised her work and told her she would be a crucial part of the nasty job they were going to pull on the cretins at Langley.

A week passed, then two, and she finally got another appointment with him-his schedule had suddenly become full. The outrage was gone, replaced by the stoic pragmatism that she’d expected in the first place. Yes, they were all outraged, he explained, but it had been decided that the greater good needed to be served. In this case, the greater good constituted the reams of excellent intelligence the CIA shared with them as it battled terror around the world. “It’s a matter of keeping your head, Erika.”

Maybe Erika had been at fault-two years later she still couldn’t be sure. In her own estimation, she had kept her head, even as she arranged a slim package of evidence and, in a London pub, handed it off to a representative of Senator Harlan Pleasance, a Republican who was running a committee investigating CIA finances. Pleasance, she knew, was eager for the national spotlight and would squeeze the maximum use out of it. Which was what he did. The story spread like a pandemic, and in the face of protests Berlin had no choice but to condemn the CIA and sever many of its joint operations. Which was why Room S had never been used for its intended purpose.

Wartmüller figured it out, of course. Though no physical evidence could convict her of leaking classified information, she was the only possible source. Evidence has only a slight advantage over rumor, and Wartmüller had spread the story around the intelligence community: Watch out for Erika Schwartz. She’s corrosively anti-American.

Now here she was again. She had a CIA employee on tape kidnapping a Moldovan girl who had spent an unimaginable period suffering nightly multiple rapes in a foreign land that later became her home.

“I’ve talked to Dieter,” Wartmüller told her. “He’s happy to take over the case.”

Dieter Reich was one year away from retirement, with an undistinguished history that had earned him a basement office. “Sir, I don’t think Dieter can-”

“It’s done,” said Brigit, and Franz nodded to remove all doubt.

She looked at Berndt, who seemed to be avoiding her face. “Well, Berndt? Is there a reason you’re here to witness this?”

He swallowed and stared at his hands, still clutching his coffee cup. “I’m the one who brought the order, Erika. It’s direct from Berlin. No one wants you mixing with the Americans anymore. They wouldn’t stand for it.”

“They? The CIA, you mean?” It came out louder than she had planned, and she felt sweat collecting on the back of her neck. “Well?”

“Yes,” he said while the others just stared. “We can’t afford to piss off the Americans any more than we already have.”

“And Reich?”

“Their suggestion,” he said, an involuntary twitch playing around his left eye. “They feel like he’s someone they can work with.”

8

She spent the rest of the morning in her office, researching Milo Weaver, once of the Central Intelligence Agency. As of last year, according to what information they had, he had been dismissed from his supervisory position in a New York office (the purpose of which was murky) under suspicion of financial misconduct. For this, he’d spent a month and a half in prison until his name was, also according to the file, cleared. Since then, Milo Weaver had been unemployed, living in Newark, New Jersey. He was separated from his wife and daughter, who lived in Brooklyn.

None of this was familiar, but she still felt a pang of something like familiarity. Had she met this man before? She didn’t know the face, though something in those heavy eyes nagged at her. The name? Milo was not so uncommon in the East, but this man was a westerner…

There was only one record of him being in Europe recently-Budapest. She found this not from his file but by cross-referencing reports from various European sources. In December, Johann Thüringer, a German journalist who made occasional reports to the military’s intelligence office, the ANBw, from his home base in Hungary, reported that a stringer for the Associated Press, Milo Weaver, had arrived looking for Henry Gray, another journalist, American, who had disappeared. Interesting, but of little use to her now.

At noon, the BND operator forwarded a call to her. It was Andrei Stanescu, Adriana’s father. He’d said so little in Berlin that at first she didn’t recognize his soupy accent, but she did recognize the desperation in the gasps between his labored German words. “What I like to know is the name, please. The name of this man what kill Adriana.”

She lied. She said that they still didn’t have anything on the man. When he asked why his face wasn’t in the world’s newspapers, as his daughter’s face had once been, she began to stutter. Literally. She couldn’t quite get the lies out in a convincing manner. So she pushed responsibility away entirely. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanescu, but I’m no longer heading the investigation. You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Dieter Reich.”

After getting rid of the Moldovan, she called on Oskar, who had been sipping coffee in the break room, chatting up the girls from the second floor for information. “Anything?” she asked.

“Wall of silence.”

“I want to know where Milo Weaver has been during the last few months, and where he is now. Can you do that?”

Oskar had the energy of youth and the temerity to think all doors were open to him. In this case, he would have to reach the basement-level room that tapped into U.S. satellite communication, which kept real-time track of border stations across the world and the passports that crossed them. “Sure,” he said, “but Teddi will know. An hour, maybe two-but he’ll know. Is it really worth it?”

“How do you mean?”

He frowned at her desk, perhaps wondering if he was overstepping some line.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

“Why not just let it go? It’s barely even our jurisdiction. Let Dieter have it.”

She considered that, because it was a good point. Erika had enough to deal with. Why fight for a case no one wanted her on? Perhaps it was this, finding out it had to do with the Americans. She was living up to the role they had all imposed on her, of the slavering anti-American.

No. It was Adriana. It was knowing all she’d been through.

“The way I see it,” she said, “I can either do my job, or I can retire. I’m not quite decrepit yet.”

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he shrugged. “Well, in an hour or two he’ll know.”

“By then,” she told him, “I’ll be back on the case.”

Her self-confidence was more than delusion. Before her fall from grace, Erika had devoted numerous hours to investigations directed at members of the BND itself. Occasionally, when rumors became too prevalent, she was called in to assess their factual basis-a position that had earned her no new friends. Twice her investigations had ended in dismissals, once in jail time, and once in suicide-yet in that last case her research finally cleared the man in question.

In 1998, Dieter Reich had ended up under her microscope, and now, ten years later, she pulled up that file-or the copy she had kept for her personal records-and refreshed her memory.

BND minders had noticed weekend purchases on Reich’s credit card in Aalsmeer, just south of Amsterdam. There were dinners and clothes and, most importantly, hotel rooms with double beds. Reich had been married for fifteen years, and during those weekends his wife, a Czech named Dana, had remained at home.

That he was having an affair was not the issue. The issue was that he had not reported his mistress’s name for vetting. So Erika took care of it herself.

Haqikah Badawi was a thirty-year-old Egyptian graduate student of economics at the University of Amsterdam. She had met Reich during one of his trips to Brussels in 1996, when she was interning with the EU public affairs office, and by the next year he was visiting her whenever he could come up with a work-related cover to fool his wife.

Badawi came from a respectable and progressive Cairo family that had made its money in that indefinable industry called import/export. Her student friends, though politically active, showed no real sign of radicalism, and she wrote occasional articles for the weekly European Voice, where a friend was associate editor. Bright, erudite, and attractive-the only question, which Reich himself was psychologically unable to ask, was why she opened her legs to an unexceptional German bureaucrat who was twenty-five years her senior.

It took three weeks and a hated trip into the field for Erika to realize that the impossible had happened: This Egyptian girl was in love with Dieter Reich. Though no real explanations could answer this paradox, from their conversation she inferred that Reich reminded her of a beloved uncle back in Cairo. Erika returned to Pullach bewildered but satisfied that while Reich should be reprimanded for his secrecy, nothing should be done to get in the way of his liaisons.

However, the damage had been done. Two weeks later Badawi herself broke off the affair, explaining that she’d realized (Erika got this from an intercepted e-mail) that there was something infantilizing about her role in the relationship, and she didn’t want to live through her thirties pining over a father figure. It was time for her to grow up.

Erika didn’t know if Reich knew about her visit, or suspected (as she did) that her conversation with Badawi was the catalyst for her to reconsider their relationship. Reich showed no sign of animosity in the office, even as his life shrank suddenly, his international affair dead. As far as she knew, he and his wife were getting along wonderfully.

There was no joy in this, but in the present situation it felt necessary. The Americans had suggested Reich because they knew he would cut off his own hand before doing anything to risk his pension. Berlin also knew this but was too scared to dispute the suggestion. So she would have a talk with Dieter Reich. He would continue to head the case-she didn’t care who got credit-but he would allow her to assist. If he refused…

It was all here in the Badawi file, because what Reich could never have predicted was that on September 11, 2001, the world would change, dragging a variety of ambivalent people into the extremes. Badawi had been one such convert who, like Erika, felt the Americans had too much of a hand in things that didn’t concern them. Badawi, however, lacking any real power to effect change, returned to Cairo just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and became a member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, considered a terrorist group by the Egyptian government, the European Union, and the United States-which since 1993 had held its blind leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in a federal prison. There was no telling what pieces of German intelligence had crossed their pillow and made it eventually to ears in Egypt.

By one, when Oskar returned from the basement, she had settled on her plan of attack. He closed the door behind himself, and she noticed a folded sheet of paper in his hand, and that, below his puffy eye, his cheeks were very red. “Did one of the secretaries slap you again?”

Oskar leaned so that the edge of the desk cut into the meat of his palms, the paper held tight between two fingers. “Three things. One: Milo Weaver-or, at least, his passport-wasn’t in Europe when Adriana was kidnapped. As far as we can tell, his passport hasn’t left America since last summer.”

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still disappointing. “What about Budapest?”

“No record of it,” he said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. Then he grinned the way he did when he hoped he might shatter Erika’s cool exterior. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I can see you’re burning to put me in my place. Number two?”

“Milo Weaver hasn’t been in Europe recently. But Sebastian Hall-he’s been around for months.”

“Who?”

He unfolded the page to display a police sketch of a man who looked for all the world like Milo Weaver.

“That’s…?”

“Exactly. As Sebastian Hall, Milo Weaver robbed the Bührle Museum a few weeks ago.”

“The Bührle? How did this come in?”

“Face popped up on the Interpol list fifteen minutes ago, and I was downstairs to see it. Sebastian Hall, American. Seems he made the mistake of adding a Serb to his crew.”

“No need to be racist, Oskar.”

“Sorry,” he said through a smile. “But I thought you might like to know the third thing.”

“I think I would.”

“Mr. Hall just arrived in Warsaw, from London, an hour ago. Another couple hours, and we’ll have the hotel and room number.”

Erika blinked at him. It was excellent work, but Oskar was too easily charmed by his successes. “You’re going there, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. “As soon as my boss is put back on the case.”

“Right.” She groaned to her feet. “Give me a minute.”

Once she reached Dieter Reich’s dusty basement office, it only took seven minutes-more time had been spent getting there. She made her case concisely. All it took was a suspicion of helping the enemy for not only this case but his career to slip from his hands. An early dismissal, and then his entire pension would be called into question. “It would certainly be hard on Dana. The loss of money, of course, but the details of the affair-it would crush her, I imagine.”

By the time she returned to her office, she desired nothing more than a long bath to wash off the dirt, and Oskar misinterpreted her expression as failure. “Ask the motor pool for something reliable,” she told him. “Dieter will okay it.”

“How did you do it?”

She took a long time to settle back into her chair. “I put on the clothes of the kind of people we hate.” She stared a moment at her desk, then peered up at him. “The trouble is, they fit rather well.”

9

Despite the fact that, at thirty-two now, Oskar Leintz had been only fourteen when the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, he would remain, for the rest of his life, an Ossi living in the West. It was a fact he was never able to forget, particularly when he traveled back to Leipzig for family gatherings. His parents still considered Munich a foreign city.

He sometimes wondered if this in-betweenness, or this lingering outsider status, was why Erika Schwartz had plucked him out of the training center in 2000 as her personal assistant. When he asked, she joked, “You looked like you could lift things, which is really all I need. Someone who can lift things.”

Things like you? he’d wanted to ask, but at that point he still had no idea how good she was. Her name had come up among the other students, no more than rumors about an obese, caustic woman who could take a stack of files and ferret out a mole and turn him into a triple agent, all without leaving her desk. It took a while before he finally believed the rumors.

At various points during their eight years, he had wondered if accepting the position had been career suicide. Others even mentioned it to him. Franz Teufel, probably acting for Wartmüller, approached him after the CIA heroin scandal-a liaison position had opened up in Berlin, and perhaps Oskar was interested? When he said he wasn’t, Franz gave him an opaque lesson on the biorhythms of bureaucratic careers. “They max out, lose their internal drive, and after a while simply collapse. Schwartz has had her time, Oskar. There’s no need to be on hand to witness the collapse.”

Was it loyalty, misplaced or not, that compelled him to remain Erika Schwartz’s manservant?

Perhaps, but more than that Oskar tended to believe that he had chosen the right side, and that in the end, despite evidence to the contrary, Erika’s camp would be victorious. Whatever that meant.

He signed out a gray Mercedes and was on the road by three. Though the drive would take as much as twelve hours, flying was impossible, both because of what would be done with Milo Weaver and because Weaver’s fate had to be kept from their superiors. As he drove, he made two calls. Following Erika’s suggestion, he contacted Heinrich and Gustav, two Leipzigers he’d known from the BND academy, both of whom had been useful for other under-the-radar operations. They promised to meet him at an OMV station along the E51, and when he arrived they were waiting with thick jackets, sunglasses, and cheerful smiles.

The first leg took five hours, heading north toward Potsdam, then turning east. After nine, they stopped in Frankfurt an der Oder and ate rushed meals of ready-made sandwiches and jogged around a bit to stretch their legs, then continued into Poland, taking turns at the wheel so everyone could nap in the back. That last dismal stretch after ŁódŹ was the worst, and just before Warsaw they topped off the gas tank and verified that all the lights were working-a Polish cop pulling them over for a broken blinker would have been a disaster. Then they continued into town and parked as close to the Marriott as possible.

As they took the stairs up to Weaver’s room, Oskar had to talk himself down. Over the last hour his adrenaline had begun to kick at him as he remembered that video clip. This man, the girl, and the report of a professionally broken neck. Then the footage he’d seen over the previous week of the miserable parents making their inept televised plea, and later seeing them in the flesh outside the Bulgarian church. These memories coalesced into a hatred that surprised him, and he had to whisper to himself to make sure he didn’t kill this CIA man.

Before entering, he measured 30 mg of liquid flurazepam hydrochloride into a syringe. Gustav found the switch to turn off the hall lamps, while Heinrich used a homemade skeleton keycard on the lock. They entered slowly, and in the light from the television the two helpers nearly laughed at the sound of Weaver’s snoring, but Oskar didn’t. He took in the form on the bed, half dressed, stinking of alcohol and cigarettes, his nose swollen from what must have been a fist. Then he noticed the soft-core pornography. He shut the door.

When they struggled with him, Oskar considered making a mistake. It was a thought that came and left quickly, but while it remained he felt some comfort in it. Pull the plunger on the syringe to add a little air, and then let God decide whether or not the bubble should kill this killer of children. When Erika cornered him about it later, he could admit his mistake and point out that it had been dark in the room.

Afterward, as the American weakened and the agents began to wrap him in his sheets, Oskar settled beside him on the bed. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to kill you yet.”

“You’re German?” Weaver muttered, his voice slurred.

“Yes, I am.”

Weaver said something short and utterly indecipherable before losing consciousness completely.

As the men finished their job, Oskar collected the items on the bedside table. A keyless ring, sunglasses, a wallet and passport full of the name Sebastian Hall, an iPod, and a cheap-looking Nokia, which he was careful to disassemble before they went anywhere.

10

When Milo woke hours later, the world would not remain still long enough for him to focus in the darkness. A high whining noise enveloped him. He was folded up in a cramped fetal position, arms behind him, and in pain from some ungodly mix of hangover and whatever he’d been injected with. No matter what he did he couldn’t stretch out, the world wouldn’t stop shaking, and that high whine wouldn’t stop. That’s when he knew: He was in the trunk of a car.

He choked for breath as it all came back, that brief consciousness and the three Germans, lit by a television with naked women rolling across the screen.

Panic is best dealt with by locating yourself, with as much specificity as possible, in both geography and time. It was at least morning, he knew, because dim light bled through the seams of the trunk. Though he stank of other things, there was no urine smell-his bladder hadn’t yet emptied. So he doubted it was afternoon.

Geography: He was on a highway, and, given the number of times the car shifted, changing lanes, it was a busy enough road. He guessed that he was on the E30, the highway leading westward from Warsaw.

When had he been taken? Bed by eleven, and then-how long did Polish television play porn? Until three or four, he guessed. He’d been taken at the latest by four. Sunrise was around six thirty, so they’d been traveling for at least two and a half hours, probably more. They were in Germany or the Czech Republic by now.

He could be wrong-they might have driven east-but the man with the bruised eye and the mustache had admitted to being German, and so he supposed they were taking him to Germany. If he was wrong, it didn’t matter. All he wanted was to control the panic.

Yet even though he’d given himself a place in time and space, his blood-sapped, frigid hands still twitched, because he couldn’t shake the thought from his head: This is how she felt. This is how she felt when I kidnapped her.

Later, when the trunk opened, gray light and cold air spilled in. It was an overcast day, the sky visible only straight up; to the left and right were the sides of big rigs the car had parked between. He was in his coat-someone had dressed him-and around the coat was a white sheet. He blinked up at the mustached man looking down at him, chewing gum, and felt an urge for some Nicorette. Or Dexedrine.

“I’m an American citizen,” he said in his most American voice. “You can’t just push me around.”

“Of course not,” said the German. He peered over the top of the car and behind himself, then settled on the bumper. Milo, folded into the trunk, considered ways he might kick the man, but none would work. “You want water?”

“I want some answers.”

“And water?”

He was cool, this German, so Milo nodded. “I’m parched. Some aspirin, too, if you’ve got it.”

He did. One of his partners, a huge man, appeared and held Milo’s head at an angle so he could swallow some bottled water; then the mustached one slipped two paracetamol between his lips. More water. When it was done, Milo’s chin was drenched and cold.

It was a roadside stop, and they were hidden between trucks to avoid easy detection. The one who’d lifted his head lit a cigarette, and in the distance Milo saw the third one-a small, wiry guy-standing at the end of the trucks watching the road. They were waiting for something.

“Food?” asked the mustached one.

“I’ll just throw it up.”

“Probably right.”

“You want to tell me why I’m here?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, then stood but didn’t walk away.

“I’ve got to pee.”

“You are a big boy. You can hold it.”

“Any Nicorette?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve been using nicotine gum, but I’m out. Any chance you have any?”

The man frowned, thinking this over, then shook his head. “We’ll get you some cigarettes.”

“I’d prefer not to start again.”

“You think that matters at a moment like this?” he asked, his expression suggesting he was truly curious about it.

“Forget it,” said Milo. “Why don’t you shut the door and let me get some sleep?”

The man smiled at that, then closed the trunk. Milo regretted his joke.

Less than five minutes later it opened again, and behind the mustached man, between the trucks, a small van had pulled in backward, its rear doors open to reveal a wheeled hospital cot locked into place. The EU license was German-he’d been right about their direction. “Time to get up, Mr. Weaver.”

“Mr. What?”

The man stared at him, and Milo grinned.

“Now I get it-you’ve got the wrong guy! My name is Hall. Sebastian Hall. Listen,” he said, not really believing this would work, “I don’t know who you are. Just cut me loose. I won’t say a thing, and you can go find this Weaver character. I mean, you don’t want the wrong person, do you?”

The man’s morose expression didn’t change. “Milo Weaver, Sebastian Hall-it’s all the same to me.”

His two friends helped Milo sit up, then lifted and moved him to the cot. There was nothing smooth about the transfer-this wasn’t their regular occupation-and Milo’s head bumped against the door frame as they tried to climb inside with him. He said, “Slowly now, fellas.” Neither answered.

Now that they were taking them off, he could see that his ankles had been bound by PlastiCuffs, which they cut with Swiss Army knives as they strapped his legs into the cot. Then they pushed him into a sitting position and undid his hands, the blood rushing coldly back into them. They tingled and hurt. The men pushed him flat again and stretched more straps tightly across his chest and around his wrists.

The whole process took about three minutes, and the mustached man joined him in the back of the van as the others closed and locked the windowless doors from the outside. There wasn’t much space, so the man settled on the floor beside Milo as the van started up and began to roll. Soon they were back on the highway.

“You going to tell me anything?” asked Milo.

“No. And I’ve got another syringe in my pocket in case you insist on talking the whole way.”

11

When, at three that afternoon, she heard the knock on her door, Erika was reading up on the international sex trade. Once she’d decided on what to do with Milo Weaver, she made sure to cease her in-office investigation of him, because every site and document she looked at was logged in the central database. However, instead of returning to what she was supposed to be working on-namely, the backgrounds of two Iranian nationals applying for asylum-she found herself drawn to the industry that had set Adriana Stanescu’s life moving along its particularly atrocious path.

It was bleak. Part of the reason sexual slavery continues unabated is that imagining it is so abhorrent to most people that they choose instead to ignore it. Imagining the travails of someone like Adriana led to upset stomachs. Law-abiding citizens preferred the knowable crimes of murder and robbery to the unknowable of slavery. This silence on the issue only encouraged the industry to thrive.

So it was almost a relief when Tomas Haas interrupted her. The young analyst from the basement-level surveillance center had been at Pullach nearly a year and was one of the few with whom she chose to exchange words. “Good afternoon, Tomas.”

He wasn’t smiling. “Fraulein Schwartz, we’ve spotted a van at your house.”

“A van?” She let herself appear concerned. “Markings?”

“Toledo Electrik GmbH.”

“Oh!” She smiled and touched her breast. “You had me scared. No, that’s nothing. There’s a problem with the circuit breaker-it keeps switching off in the middle of my shows. I gave Toledo a set of keys.”

“Would you like someone to check on it? To be sure.”

“No, I’ll call the electrician,” she said, picking up her office phone. “Thanks.”

Once he was gone, she called the number of a throwaway cell phone she’d bought the previous night and left inside her house. Oskar answered on the third ring. “Toledo Electrik.”

“Yes, this is Erika Schwartz. Do you have someone at my house right now?”

“Schwartz… here it is,” he said and rattled off her address.

“That’s it.”

“Should take an hour or so. We’re mailing the bill, right?”

“Exactly. It looks like it won’t be a problem?”

“No problems yet, ma’am. We’ll let you know if anything comes up.”

“Thank you.”

Image

The rear doors opened to reveal a woody bilevel, and when he was brought out he saw that they were surrounded by gangly birches and broad elms, stripped of leaves, creating a black web through which he could just make out other houses that made him think of American planned communities. Large homes set far back behind tended lawns, clean automobiles in the driveways. He could only see these things when he looked hard, though, which meant that anyone looking in would simply see four men getting out of a van with-he now saw-the markings of an electrical repair company. From their perspective, the man in the center of the group would be walking with his hands clasped behind his back; the new set of PlastiCuffs would not be visible at all.

There were no guns involved, just a light, almost comforting, hand on his back, while the little man with the mustache hummed some song. He was clearly the boss, and it was he who unlocked the front door, typed the security code into the alarm, and pocketed a cell phone sitting on a fragile-looking end table beside the door. “Come in,” he said. “We’ll soon have you out of those restraints.”

It was all so polite that Milo began to sweat profusely.

They went downstairs, where the man turned on some lights and found, beside a spare bathroom, a heavy security door with a keypad. He typed the code with a flat hand, fingers covering the pad so it was impossible to tell the combination, then pulled open the door to reveal stairs heading deeper into the earth.

A couple of decades ago, he would have called it a fallout shelter. Times had changed, though, and these were now referred to as panic rooms, but the function was the same. A secure place where one could survive for days or weeks with no need of the outside world. Along the walls were shelves of provisions-canned food, soap, bottles of water. A refrigerator beside an electrical generator. A propane stove. There was a television/VCR combination, a radio, and a shelf of books. Two small monitors, now black, were assumedly connected to CCTV cameras observing the grounds. Two lounge chairs, one sofa, and a dining table. Against the stone wall in the back of the room, a single cot with fresh bedding. On the concrete floor beside it were two rolls of duct tape.

The mustached man gazed at cans of soup while the other two removed Milo’s cuffs and took his coat. “You needed to urinate?” he asked.

“Desperately.”

The man nodded in the direction of a small door, and the other two led Milo to it. Inside was a spotless toilet, but no sink. It was a small space, but both his guards squeezed in behind him, peering over his shoulder, hands on his back as he relieved himself. He pulled the chain to flush, then raised his hands. “Can I wash?”

Neither answered. They pulled him out and led him to one of the chairs. The mustached man, still reading the cans, said, “Are you hungry perhaps?”

“Could use some coffee.”

“Yes. So could I. Heinrich? Nehmen Sie auch einem?”

The block of muscle looked up from Milo. “Ja, danke.”

The mustached man turned to the wiry one. “Dann also für alle?”

The wiry one nodded and trotted upstairs.

Their exchange, figuring out how many coffees were needed, struck Milo as amusing. Nothing else did. He was in a secure basement from which he would never escape unless they let him leave. He was here for as long as they wanted, and in here they could do anything they desired. No one would hear a thing.

Heinrich took the chair across from Milo as a phone began to ring. The mustached man took out the cell phone he’d taken from the foyer and said, “Toledo Elektrik.”

A conversation followed. He got the name Schwartz, that something would take about an hour, and that a bill would be mailed. And Frau-ma’am-he was talking to a woman.

He pocketed the phone again and said to Heinrich, “In Ordnung.”

Heinrich looked relieved, though the mustached one didn’t seem concerned either way. He held Milo’s coat folded over his arm and paced the room slowly, peering at everything as if he’d never been here before. Perhaps he hadn’t. His free hand searched Milo’s coat pockets, coming up with receipts and lint. He stuck the receipts in his pants pocket and tossed the coat on the bed. “You should make yourself comfortable,” he said. “It’ll be some hours before things get started.”

“What, exactly, is going to get started?”

“Conversations.”

“When your boss gets home from work?”

The man stared at him.

“This is his house, isn’t it? Or her house. Your boss’s.”

“All that matters to you is that this is the easy part. Have some coffee, something to eat. Get over that headache… does it still hurt?”

“A little.”

“Heinrich.”

Heinrich half-rose from his chair and, with a large flat hand, struck Milo across the temple. It felt like a wooden board and rekindled the pain that had, until then, been subsiding. He cradled his head in his hands and stopped himself from shouting an obscenity. “What was that for?”

“For nothing,” the man said as he passed behind Milo. “I’m not a big believer in the carrot and stick. It’s fine for mules, but for people? No. Much too predictable, and anything that predictable can be manipulated. The unpredictable stick-that’s much more useful because there is no clear answer to it.”

Milo raised his head, half of it pulsing sorely, and could feel his damaged nose dripping blood onto his lips. “I think I understand,” he said.

“Good.” The mustached man sat on the sofa, just beyond Heinrich. He used a remote control to turn on the television against the wall. “My boss, as you say, isn’t entirely comfortable with modern digital technology. So we have this.” He pressed play, and the embedded VCR began to whir, flickering grainy images on the screen, the buzz of static, then voices. News items. A German newscaster. The image of a girl, Adriana Stanescu. A camera ranging over mountains, then a mountain road, the scene of a wreck, a path into the forest. Then again. Another newscaster-Spanish-and more of the same. And more: childhood shots of Adriana, swimming with her parents, a young birthday. Now Dutch. Then Italian. French. Moldovan. British. German. American. Polish.

It went on, in languages he couldn’t even identify, with scenes of the mother breaking down on camera, screaming, her stoic husband hollow-eyed behind her. The occasional angry person-on-the-street giving an opinion. It lasted for over an hour until it faded to black and the mustached man pressed STOP and then REWIND. As it whirred loudly, he said, “Heinrich,” and another board struck Milo’s temple.

“Jesus! Cut it out!”

He started to rise, but Heinrich pushed him down again. The mustached man retrieved one of the rolls of duct tape and tossed it smoothly to Heinrich, who began to strap Milo in the chair.

There was nothing to be done. This had all been planned ahead of time-the hard hand, the video, and even his eventual outburst. They knew what they were doing.

The VCR clicked loudly. Then they all looked up as their missing member trotted down the stairs holding a tray with large, steaming coffee cups. Milo wondered why it had taken so long to make them, then realized it hadn’t. The man simply knew he wasn’t to interrupt the videotape.

“Excellent!” The mustached one got to his feet. “What kind?”

The wiry one began passing out cups. “There was a bag of Starbucks grounds. Ethiopian.”

“Starbucks?” He seemed confused. “How about that? You know their coffee, Mr. Weaver?”

“Intimately.”

“Delicious,” he said and sipped from his cup, then leaned back. “Too hot for me. Heinrich?”

Heinrich was holding two cups-one for him, one for Milo. “Very hot,” he said, then looked over at the mustached man. Heinrich seemed to interpret his superior’s silence as an order. He poured a little of the steaming coffee onto Milo’s chest. It burned straight through his shirt, but he didn’t shout out this time, only grunted. Heinrich set down the cup and began to drink from his own.

The mustached man took his coffee to the stairs. “I think Mr. Weaver would like some more television.”

The one who’d brought the coffees used the remote to start the VCR playing again. Newscaster. Adriana. Barren trees.

“Let’s make sure we remember every image on that tape, yes? There’ll be a quiz later.”

The man with the remote laughed lightly, and Heinrich smiled. The mustached man left them alone as Adriana’s mother wept uncontrollably on-screen.

None of this, really, was a surprise. Just as he tried to keep himself grounded, his interrogators would only be interested in keeping him off balance, and for the next five minutes he felt himself slipping. Then the man with the mustache made his first mistake. As a Dutch newscaster with dour features discussed Adriana’s murder, he quietly came down the stairs, holding a crumpled slip of paper that had come from Milo’s pockets. It wasn’t a receipt. Heinrich paused the video.

“Excuse me,” he said as he unfolded the paper. It was hotel stationery. “I was just curious-who wrote this?”

Honestly, Milo said, “I’ve never seen it before.”

Heinrich’s open hand crashed against the side of his face. Milo took a labored breath.

“I’m telling the truth.”

“I know,” the man said, then brought the paper over for him to read.

The world was too blurry for him to read a thing. “Closer, please.” The man obliged, and he could now see that it was from the Cavendish, London. Below the name, in sweeping letters, he read:

Tourism, like Virginia,

is for lovers.

Turn that frown upside down, man.

It was followed by a smiley face.

Despite himself, Milo began to laugh. James Einner had a wonderfully idiotic sense of humor.

“Well?” said the man.

“I wish I knew,” he said. “It’s kind of lovely, isn’t it?”

Heinrich struck him again, but he hardly felt it.

“Who’s it from?”

“A secret admirer, I guess.”

12

She made sure to follow her routine and visit Herr al-Akir’s shop for her Riesling and Snickers. She’d noticed a change in his demeanor the previous evening, and it had taken her a moment to realize that it was the result of Friday’s irregularity. That idiot who had run in to collect her, foolishly calling her Director Schwartz. That was the only explanation for the heavy stare that flickered away nervously when she turned to meet it. Tonight was the same. The Guten Abend, Frau, then nervous silence as she trudged to the back to collect her wine. She placed her ten sixty-five on the counter and watched him tap at the register. “Herr al-Akir,” she said, “did the gentleman give you the five cents last week?”

He blinked three times, then nodded. “Yes. Your account is settled.” He handed over her receipt.

“Is there anything wrong?”

He shook his head eagerly. “Everything is very fine.”

“Perhaps you have a question for me.”

He seemed stunned by the suggestion. “No. No questions.”

She tried for a smile, even though she knew the effect her smiles had on strangers. “Good evening to you, then.”

Back in the car, she put Herr al-Akir out of her mind and focused on the road. It had been a quiet day. She had waited for a visitor from the second floor-not Wartmüller himself, of course, but perhaps some intermediary-to wonder to her face how she’d gotten Dieter Reich to keep her on the Stanescu case. But no one said a thing to her; in fact, she got the pleasant feeling that the second floor had been abandoned.

Though they’d exchanged no significant words since that three o’clock phone call, she had seen Oskar at the office. He came in after four looking exhausted and worked on his computer, filing nondescript vetting reports and running some of Erika’s errands. They had decided beforehand that nothing about Milo Weaver would pass between them in the office, no matter how safe they considered themselves. Which was why he stayed behind briefly when she left at seven thirty. While Erika visited Herr al-Akir, Oskar drove his own car into the Perlacher Forest and waited for her to pick him up.

He looked frigid by the side of the road, his Volkswagen parked out of sight, and once inside he fooled with the heater until it blew loudly. “You took your time,” he said.

“Had to pick up my Riesling.”

“I think you have a drinking problem, Erika.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Watching videos.”

“Nothing broken, I hope,” she said, because she had noticed the underlying hatred in Oskar once he had learned of Adriana Stanescu’s past. He was looking for someone to blame, and Milo Weaver was as good as anyone.

“Not yet. But we’ve still got time.”

Image

He knew something was happening when Heinrich, after receiving a call, got up and turned off the television. Milo had watched and listened to Adriana Stanescu’s multilingual story for, he estimated, four hours. Four hours duct-taped to a chair facing the video loop. Even now, with the television black, he kept seeing the grainy family photos, the stunned father and screaming mother, and the bare branches that led to her final resting spot in the mountains of France.

Of course, with repetition everything dulls, and the panic he’d felt during the first and second viewing had waned so that by this fourth (or was it fifth?) viewing he was more interested in his ability to predict the actual phrases and emotional outbursts. A memory game; a distraction.

The mustached man descended the stairs first, looking cold and perhaps ill. In his hand was a bottle of white wine. Then, much more slowly, a breathtakingly heavy woman followed him down. She gripped the wooden rail, making no effort to hurry herself, until she finally reached the concrete floor and looked around to get everything in focus. Her salt-and-pepper hair, thick and untidy, was chopped into a pageboy cut. When she got Milo into focus she started forward again and settled on the sofa, legs splayed, breathing heavily. “Mr. Weaver,” she said, producing something like a smile that could easily have been a sneer. Her accent was thick. “Welcome to Germany.”

The mustached man, no longer the authority in the room, began to open the wine bottle, using the Swiss Army knife that had been used to remove Milo’s cuffs.

The woman he assumed was Frau Schwartz said, “Heinrich, perhaps Mr. Weaver would like something to drink.”

“My name is Hall.”

“Perhaps Mr. Hall would like something to drink.”

Milo gestured with his chin at the coffee stains down his shirt. “I think I’ve had enough, Miss Schwartz.”

“Someone made a mess,” she observed. “Maybe we can get your hands free-it would be easier that way.”

“Yes,” said the mustached man, leaving the bottle. He clicked the corkscrew back into place and worked open a blade. He began to cut through the duct tape.

“Heinrich,” she said, nodding at the open bottle. “Why don’t you bring us two glasses from the kitchen?”

Heinrich headed up the stairs.

“Don’t cut him, Oskar,” she said, and Milo finally had a name for the mustached man.

For a while Schwartz just watched him, while Oskar worked on the duct tape. She produced that plastic smile again. “Mr. Weaver-no, please. Let me use that name. I am Erika Schwartz-that’s my real name, too. Have you some knowledge of me?”

Now that he had the first name, he recalled a fragment of biography from his previous life in administration. An antagonistic BND director who, to the Company’s delight, was being slowly sidelined within German intelligence. “No. I sell insurance for a living-are you in the business, too?”

She placed her swollen hands together, as if praying. “Let’s step back a moment. Milo Weaver, thirty-seven years old. Employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.” She held up a hand when Milo started to protest. “Until last year, you were in administration, and your records were semipublic. So we know some things about you. You have an apartment in Newark, New Jersey. You have a family-a wife, Tina, and a daughter named Stephanie-who live in Brooklyn. But you haven’t seen them much recently because you’ve been traveling in Europe under the name Sebastian Hall. Except for one known instance, in December, when, under your real name, you went to Budapest.”

Budapest? Then Milo got it. She was slipping in a piece of fiction to see if he would refute it, thus proving that the rest of her story was true. She really was good. “I don’t know who this guy is, but yes, I’ve been traveling in Europe. It’s called establishing a client base, Miss Schwartz. It’s what you do when you want to sell health insurance to expats.”

“Of course. And in Budapest, you were a journalist for the Associated Press. You can go through all the stories you like, Mr. Weaver, but I do know who you are. So what’s the point? You could waste time-that’s always possible. You could live in the hope that if you stretch out your silence your people will finally come to collect you, or they’ll pressure my people to let you go. But listen to me, Mr. Weaver, because this is important: No one knows you’re here. Your people don’t know. My people don’t know. No one would imagine that I know anything about your whereabouts. They won’t even ask me. So this can last a few hours, a few days, or even months.” When she paused, her breaths came out loudly, as if speaking so long had been an exertion. “It’s all the same to me. But it won’t be the same to you.”

As Heinrich returned with two glasses, Milo wondered again about Budapest. Was she really making it up? Heinrich filled the glasses with what Milo could now see was Riesling and gave one to Schwartz. She sipped it and made a pleasant expression. “It’s really very good. From Pfalz. Go ahead.”

Milo accepted the second glass. She was right. It was cold and crisp and soothed his sore throat. He drank slowly, watching Oskar, Heinrich, and Erika Schwartz. The third man was somewhere behind him.

Schwartz said, “I’m not unreasonable. You should know that. Though I believe you killed Adriana Stanescu, the method of her death is less interesting to me than the reason for it.”

“I’ve done a lot of questionable things in my life,” Milo told her, “but I never killed any girl.”

“You did kidnap her. Of that there’s no doubt.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Oskar, can you please show Mr. Weaver to Mr. Weaver?”

Oskar went to the television. He ejected the tape, then found another unlabeled one among a short stack and slipped it in.

There it was. With a date and a time code and-there-Milo himself, waiting for her. Looking at the camera, or-no. He was looking at the blue Opel tailing him. The Opel was in the foreground, while Milo…

She was tall and full of life, and seeing it from the outside filled him with self-disgust. There he was, the cretin who stepped out and said Entschuldigung, then showed off his fake ID. Then led her to her doom.

When Oskar stopped the tape, Milo was out of breath. He could hardly manage the words “That’s not me.”

“No?” she said, unfazed. “Oskar?”

Oskar reached into his jacket and removed a standard 10 by 15 cm photograph and held it up for Milo to examine. Milo in the doorway to that courtyard, talking animatedly with Adriana Stanescu. The image was cleaned up; it was undeniable.

Oskar waited until he’d had an eyeful, then put it away.

“Photoshop,” Milo said, his breath back now. “Special effects. I don’t know why, but you’re trying to frame me.”

“You’ve been busy. The week before kidnapping her, you robbed an art museum in Zürich. That, of course, is how we came across your work name.”

The gears turned in Milo’s head. Radovan Panić, who had lifted his passport. Goddamned Radovan and his family-centered morality.

“So we know who you are. We know of at least two of the crimes you’ve committed. We know you work for the CIA-or, at least, you did work for them until last summer, when you spent a couple of months in jail. I won’t even ask about that-that’s how unobtrusive I am. I only want to learn about Adriana Stanescu. I want to know why you were ordered to kill her.”

He slumped and looked at the glass in his hand. He could dig it into Oskar’s little eye, but by that point Heinrich would be on top of him, beating him senseless. Then it would all begin again, this time strapped into that cot.

Time-that was what he needed. Time to think through it all. Anything would do, just as long as it bought him another hour.

He said, “No one ordered a thing.”

“You did it for the fun of it?”

“I have a problem. I killed her for my own pleasure, but it didn’t feel like I thought it would feel. It was…” He dropped his glass, the shattering sound making everyone jump, then began to weep quietly into his hands.

Schwartz grunted, then smiled. She gripped the arms of her chair and pushed herself to her feet. “Oskar, let’s go upstairs. Mr. Weaver needs more time for reflection.”

Oskar stood up, but Milo didn’t drop his act. Once they were at the stairs again, Schwartz turned back. “Heinrich, Gustav-could you help Mr. Weaver with his thinking?”

“Jawohl,” said Heinrich, getting up to switch the videotapes back again. Milo heard the springs make an awkward noise as Gustav rose from the cot.

13

“What do you think?” Erika asked once they reached the second floor. The climb had winded her, so Oskar helped her to a sofa near the window. Neither of them turned on a lamp, and they sat in darkness.

“He’s a professional liar.”

“Well, that’s obvious, Oskar. He knows he’s not fooling us with that sad pervert act. We know too much. Did you see his face? The surveillance video threw him.”

“Do you have anything to eat?” he asked.

“Chicken in the refrigerator. Bread on top. Make two, will you?”

As Oskar made chicken sandwiches in the semidarkness of the kitchen, she stared into the middle distance, a few feet short of a Tawaraya Sōtatsu print of Japanese demons. She’d always hated the painting, but it had been a gift from the Japanese embassy, and it was important to display her few gifts. At this moment, she even appreciated having the Sōtatsu, because such an abysmal work couldn’t distract her from the problem of how to approach Milo Weaver.

Annoyingly, she again felt that vague familiarity. It was in his facial features, and in his resolute obstinancy. But from where? She wasted time on this, going back over the past twenty years, but she was sure: She’d never met this man before. So she set it aside and returned to the problem.

It was a classic interrogation conundrum: How much does the subject know of what you know? Is it better to feign more knowledge or less? Is it better to share more or less?

That Weaver came from an allied agency made it no easier. At some point she would let him go, and there would be repercussions. Though she wasn’t particularly concerned for her own position-she was, after all, already on the way out-there was no reason for this escapade to end Oskar’s career. There was also Wartmüller himself. A political animal, yes, but essentially a good man. She didn’t think her actions would taint him directly, but in Teddi’s eyes the future of their relationship with the Americans was of paramount concern. Sitting in front of the Sōtatsu, with an American in her basement, she could admit that, despite her apprehensions, it might be true.

Milo Weaver’s attempts to obfuscate had told her one crucial thing: He was working for someone. Either he was still a CIA asset, or he was an ex-Company man working with organized crime. Either way, he was protecting an organization of some sort by taking the blame upon himself.

But was he really, though? That head-in-the-hands routine had been just that: a routine. No one really could have believed it. So perhaps by confessing so poorly he was in fact professing the truth-that he, in fact, was a lone murderer-and supposed his obvious act would throw them off.

No. She didn’t get the sense that this man thought so far ahead, or so deeply.

Or-and this was the problem with thinking too hard about anything truly unknowable-was this all part of his act? Was Adriana perhaps beside the point, a diversion while he protected something else?

Now the one detail she felt she had learned from this initial interview dissolved before her.

Erika was no novice when it came to interrogations, and she knew that the question of his allegiance had to be answered, even if the answer was wrong. Interrogations are fluid, but they exist in time, moving steadily forward. When they stall, rot sets in. Decision is the only way to keep them moving forward. Either Weaver still worked for the CIA, or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then he had gone private, and under different names had expanded his self-employment to include art heists, kidnapping, and murder.

If he did still work for the CIA?

In that case, she asked herself, what kind of agent would be involved in such a spectrum of illegal activity? What kind of Renaissance man was dropped off the Company books and sent to travel around Europe with no known home base? There really was only one answer, but it was difficult to swallow.

She’d heard the rumors ever since the early seventies, when she began in the business, and a quarter of her country lived under a different name and regime. There had been a spate of disappearances: East German agents who had set up shop in Bonn, West Berlin, and Hamburg. One moment they were living their lives in full view of the Federal Republic’s surveillance men, then they weren’t. They were usually agents of known interest to the Americans, and when Erika tried to find out their fates she was always frustrated by the cleanest crime scenes she had ever come across. She discussed the phenomenon with her boss; his later career was annihilated by an uncovered Nazi past, but at that time he was held in high respect. He took a cursory glance at her notes and muttered, “Tourists.”

“They weren’t tourists, sir.”

“They certainly weren’t, Erika,” he said, then lit his pipe and proceeded to tell her of the legend that had spread during the decade following the fall of Berlin, of a secret sect of American agents that required none of the comforts of normal humans. No steady identity, no home, no moral center beyond the virtue of work. “What Hitler could have done with men like these,” she remembered him saying.

They were called Tourists because they were as connected to the world as a tourist is to the countries he visits-which is to say, they were not connected at all. They appeared and then disappeared. While her boss described these men-and the occasional woman-in awed tones, Erika found herself disappointed by his gullibility.

“Don’t be absurd. It’s called disinformation. It’s the open secret that makes you fear them.”

“I used to think that, too,” he said, then told a story. Berlin, August 1961. On the twelfth, a Saturday, he and his colleague found a dead American along the border with a Minox and handwritten notes. The camera contained photos of an outdoor garden party, with, among other guests, DDR president-or, as he was officially called, chairman of the council of state-Walter Ulbricht. The notes said that they were gathered to sign an order to close the border and construct a wall. “So we knew it hours before it happened. We took it to our CIA friends that night, but they were more interested in the corpse of their agent.”

“Why?”

“Because they had no idea who he was. Since no one could identify him, we decided not to act on the information. It might have been another Bolshevik trick. By midnight, when they closed down the border, we realized it wasn’t. The little quirks of history are fascinating, aren’t they?”

“How does this connect to Tourists?”

“Well, we didn’t know what to do with the body. The Americans were still claiming it wasn’t theirs. It certainly wasn’t ours. So we started showing his photo around. Next thing we knew, we had five more names. Two from the Russians, one from the Brits, another American name, and a German name. Then, a surprise-the CIA’s London station chief, of all people, showed up and demanded the body. Swept the thing away, and every time we requested information about it, we were asked, Who are you talking about? The man who took the body was Frank Wisner, the rumored founder of the Department of Tourism.”

“That proves nothing.”

“Of course it doesn’t. If it did, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. It’s funny, though-each of this man’s assumed identities had a price on its head. The Russians wanted both names for murder, the Brits wanted theirs for forgery, and we wanted ours for industrial sabotage. A wide range of talents for a single man.”

Thirty-five years later, that conversation came back to her as she considered the range of crimes that could be attributed to this one person.

Either Weaver no longer worked for the CIA, or he did. If he did, then he looked and smelled much like a fabled Tourist. Which was why, only minutes later, Erika nearly died.

They were eating dry chicken sandwiches in the darkness when she asked what they’d found on Weaver when they picked him up. “A phone, but clean,” said Oskar. “No phone numbers in the memory. It’s nothing special.”

“You expected secret gadgets, maybe?”

He shrugged, then wiped a crumb from his chin. “There was a bag. Clothes, mostly. Pills-Dramamine, things for the bowels, pain relievers, that sort of thing. A key ring.”

“Keys?”

He shook his head. “It’s got a car remote on it, but no actual keys. An iPod, but all that’s on it is music. David Bowie, actually. The man seems obsessed.”

“Pockets?”

“Receipts. From London, mostly. A couple Polish ones. And a personal note written on hotel stationery.”

“Love letter?”

Oskar reached into his pocket and handed over the note. “I don’t think he knew it was there. He seemed surprised when I showed him. He laughed.”

She turned the slip so that it caught the streetlight from outside. She read, then read it again and felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “What does he say about it?”

“He says it’s kind of lovely.”

She read it a third time, then folded it and recited it from memory: “Tourism, like Virginia, is for lovers. Turn that frown upside down, man.” She shook her head, unable to control the wild, involuntary grin, and then swallowed. She wasn’t paying attention, though, and a rough wedge of chicken lodged in her esophagus.

“What?” said Oskar.

She waved her hands, pointed at her throat, and tried in vain to speak. Oskar rushed over. She felt the oxygen leaving her body, her arms going cold. Oskar got behind her and pushed her up, grunting, then wrapped his arms around her layers of fat and jerked his fist into her stomach, or thereabouts, several times. A slimy piece of chicken shot out of her mouth and landed on the rug. She gasped as Oskar came around to check on her.

“Thank you,” she managed.

“You’re all right?”

“Do you believe in fate, Oskar?”

“No.”

His pragmatism was coming along just fine. “Good. Let’s find out what kind of Tourist our friend is.”

14

When Erika Schwartz finally returned with Oskar, Milo was feeling disgusted with himself. She’d given him what he’d aimed for-time, an extra hour to think over his predicament. Yet he’d come up with nothing, and found himself dwelling on the irony of his situation: At a time when the Department of Tourism was worried about a Chinese mole, it was because of Adriana Stanescu that he’d been captured.

That’s because you serve them, the little voices. You’re a fool.

Schwartz settled across from Milo. Her cheeks and forehead were red, and he wondered if stairs really were that hard on her. What kind of health was she in? Might a few well-placed words bring on a heart attack? Oskar, too, seemed flustered. Perhaps they’d been arguing-another thing that might work to his advantage.

She said, “I will act based upon my suppositions, while my suppositions will be based on my limited knowledge. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

“Sure.”

Schwartz opened her plump hands. “For the moment, we’ll set aside the events in Zürich. Let’s stay with Adriana. My supposition is that you were asked to kill her. Maybe you were asked to kidnap her, and then the order was changed-the distinction doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is that, like any hired gun, this was probably all you knew. The name of the victim, perhaps the method of disposal. Simple facts, from which you could improvise as you wished, so long as the orders were followed.”

Milo stared at her, a blank slate. Then: “This is crazy. When my embassy finds out-”

“Please,” she said, raising a hand. “As I’ve made clear, what interests me is the why of her murder. Not the how. The who, I hope, will become clear once I know the why.” She blinked, as if confused. “I did make that clear, yes?”

Milo didn’t answer, but Oskar said, “I believe you did, Erika.”

“Good.” She crossed her hands in her lap and then, noticing crumbs, flicked them away. “So what I’m realizing now is that you, Mr. Weaver, won’t be as much help to me as I’d hoped. You’re a killer, which means it’s not your purview to know the why of your orders. I also doubt you know anything about the girl you killed. Which is why I’m going to tell you about her.” She smiled. “Don’t get me wrong-I don’t think anyone as versatile as yourself will have his heart softened by a story or two. I just think it’s a good thing for humans to know the full measure of their actions. Does that sound pompous?”

“Certainly not,” said Oskar.

Something upstairs had convinced her to try this new angle. Maybe it was guesswork, or just the acute senses of an experienced interrogator, but she had decided to tell Milo the one thing that he had been desperate to know: the story behind Adriana Stanescu. So he said, “It sounds very reasonable.”

“Excellent,” said Erika. “It took some digging, but I had help from Adriana’s uncle, Mihai. He, you have to understand, isn’t like us. He doesn’t have the apathy-is that the right word?” Milo didn’t answer, so she went on. “Mihai doesn’t have the apathy that we from intelligence are full of-the apathy toward individuals that our job requires. No, Mihai Stanescu is sentimental to the extreme, particularly when it comes to his dead niece. He doesn’t understand-as you and I do-that good little girls and boys must sometimes disappear when important things require it. Because, really, Milo-despite all the claptrap from priests and politicians about the value of the little children, the fact is that the world doesn’t change when they die. The value of the dollar remains the same. Your American Idol doesn’t lose ratings. The stores remain fully stocked. And children disappear all the time.”

Though he held on to his stolid expression, Milo wondered where she was going with this. It wasn’t just a story.

She said, “Take, for instance, the so-called tragedy of sexual trafficking. Thousands of women and children-and let’s not soften the blow with vagaries; they’re sometimes as young as six months-disappear every week and end up in whorehouses, sold as sexual slaves, or videotaped for Internet sites. They are abused, raped, tortured and sometimes killed for the pleasure of a certain demographic. Does this change the value of the euro?” She shook her head, and her discomforting smile reappeared. “Certainly it does not. People like you and me, we understand this.”

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What could she read in Milo Weaver’s face? Very little. Either he truly was a pro-she’d decided to set aside the term “Tourist” for now-or he had no idea where her monologue was heading next. Perhaps he really didn’t know Adriana’s past.

“A case in point. Of one such girl who went through what the media would certainly call a tragedy if they caught wind of it. But, really, Stalin aside, tragedy is when thousands of people are killed, and when their deaths bring down financial institutions-that’s tragedy. This is more… I don’t know. A blip in the moral universe? Something like that, though for people like us, there really is no moral universe, is there?”

Milo looked like he was going to answer, but didn’t. Oskar stared at the side of his head. Heinrich and Gustav were mesmerized by her speech; she almost expected them to start taking notes.

“Ah, well, the story,” she said. “It began in Moldova, as you’d expect. At that time Adriana was only eleven.”

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Milo listened. Despite himself, he paid attention to every word, every digression, and, worse, all the physical details. Erika Schwartz described the design on the scarf Adriana wore when she boarded the bus headed west, and though he knew this was a detail she probably couldn’t know, it remained with him anyway, all the way through to the warehouse in St. Pauli where the initial rapes occurred, to the Berlin apartment where she was used many times a night. The scarf was decorated with flowers shaped into paisleys. She had not used the mawkish word “tears,” but she didn’t need to. He knew that a paisley looked like the drop of salty water that forms at the corner of a child’s eye, and the image just wouldn’t leave him.

Because in the end Milo Weaver wasn’t outside the moral universe, no matter how well the Company had trained him. Once, when he had been a younger Tourist, he had lived without empathy. That had held him in good stead for the first seven years, from 1994 until 2001. He had stayed alive because of it. But once he’d left to build a home, he couldn’t escape the continual reminders that his universe had become imbued with morality-bathing his infant daughter’s fat, squirming body, later walking her to school and listening to her rambling stories, making curry for his wife, vacuuming on the weekends. Simply taking out the trash every other day had reinforced a moral responsibility that he’d had to learn bit by bit. It hadn’t been a smooth transition; he’d screwed it up many times during those first years, but even his wife’s patience had taught him new lessons.

By the time Owen Mendel asked him to return to Tourism, he was too far gone. Tourism is for the young, the unmarked. Tourism is for the fatherless and childless. Milo was no longer any of these things, which was why he knew he was doomed, eventually, to failure.

Yet he was also aware. He knew why Erika Schwartz was telling her story, and why she was telling it in the way she was. She knew that he had a child. She knew how to get at him.

Knowing hardly helped, though. As he realized the full breadth of Adriana Stanescu’s cursed life, the air kept leaving his body, and his stomach seemed to collapse upon itself. He even felt paisley-shaped saltwater building up, but he willed his eyes dry and said nothing. That was important. He focused his emotions elsewhere, on the traffickers. When he felt his eyes dampening, in his head he beat these faceless creatures senseless. But their very facelessness lessened the effect. So he drew from his memory one Roman Ugrimov, a Russian businessman who had once killed his own underaged lover, pregnant with his child, in order to prove a point. There, then, was someone real, someone he knew. So he went at the old man with his bare hands and crushed him slowly, as he never had in reality.

Was that enough? No, because Adriana’s story was bigger than a few lecherous individuals. She hadn’t been snuffed out by people as much as she had been cursed, from the moment of birth, by secret organizations. Her misery had been predestined.

He almost gave up. A large part of him wanted to throw up his hands and tell Schwartz everything she asked for, then return in disgrace to New York. It was another way of quitting Tourism. He could confess his weakness to Drummond and wait for the pink slip. Then the exit interviews. The discovery of his treasonous relationship with his father. The quiet bullet in the back of the head.

When she finished, Erika Schwartz offered another of her disturbing smiles and clapped her fat hands together like a child. “She was saved! Really, Mihai was a saint, or at least that’s what the media would call him if they got hold of the story. But you and I know better, don’t we? He was a chump. He gave up his own business for the life of a stupid little girl who shouldn’t have gotten on that bus in the first place.”

He wanted to shout Enough! but didn’t. Instead, he stared at her blue eyes and tried to keep his throat open and clear. He managed a single, brief sentence. “It’s a terrible story.”

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Erika watched him, admiring his coldness while hating it. Was this Tourist a lover, or not? “Terrible in its own way,” she said, “but if your name isn’t Stanescu, what difference does it make?”

He blinked his red-rimmed eyes, which were the only outward sign that the story was having a real effect. Then he cleared his throat. “I suppose you’re right. It happens every day. At least she was rescued.”

“Exactly,” she said, “but you know easterners-they don’t learn. You have to pound even the simplest lessons into their heads. Her parents, though they didn’t know the whole story, knew that she wanted to go to Germany. So they applied for a visa. And, finally, Adriana was in the West. Like every other kid, she went to school and made friends. She was foolish enough to think she had a life ahead of her. She thought that the past could remain past. Then, well, you came along. Didn’t you?”

He considered his answer. “Does anyone here have a cigarette?”

“Sounds like someone’s giving up,” said Oskar.

“Gustav,” said Erika, and the small man took out his pack, lit one, and handed it to Weaver. He didn’t seem to like the taste at first, but by the third drag was inhaling heavily.

He finally said, “I’m my own man, Miss Schwartz. Yes, I used to work for the Company, but that was a while ago, and I certainly wasn’t ever a secret agent-or whatever you think I am. You people are obviously convinced I’m something I’m not. I was just an analyst-I read magazines, mostly. It was the financial stuff that got me in trouble. They drummed me out, which was fine with me, but the pension plan was terrible. So I went into insurance-that’s something everyone needs, right? Well, not as many people as you’d think. Expats seem to think they’ll live forever. Or maybe they didn’t trust me. I’m starting to wonder about that. Can people see in your face that you’re a murderer? I mean, is it marked on there?”

It was disappointing. Would withholding the cigarette have made a difference? Probably not. It had just given Weaver a moment to reweave his idiotic story. She stood and gazed down at him. “Why don’t you watch some television? Heinrich, Gustav-please make sure he doesn’t doze.”

They nodded their assent, and she walked slowly up the stairs, Oskar behind her, impatient. No one said a thing, least of all Milo Weaver. She was starting to despair about her whole plan. Then she heard Rada Stanescu weeping on the television. It gave her hope.

15

Erika slept upstairs in her bedroom, while Oskar took a downstairs guest bedroom. Heinrich and Gustav took turns on the cot, allowing Milo to stretch out on the sofa, but even though they had cut off the sound the video loop of Adriana Stanescu’s media coverage greeted him whenever he opened his eyes.

In the morning, drinking coffee in the kitchen, Erika mused over whether or not to have another talk with Weaver before work. She decided against it. As she told Oskar, “This man will expect a morning chat-and I’ll lay odds that over the night he’s come up with something clever, some piece of information he’ll share with me. Something about our operations, maybe. Some information that looks like a favor. When I follow up on it, it will alert his people. So I won’t even go downstairs. I don’t want to be tempted.”

“What do we do with him?”

“Show him videos until I get back. I want him to remember every frame.”

Once Oskar had passed on the order to Heinrich and Gustav, Erika drove him back to his car in the Perlacher Forest, and they arrived at work fifteen minutes apart.

Everything she did felt like busywork. Even her noon conference call felt like busywork, and that included Berndt Hesse and the minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. They discussed two topics: Sunday’s news that Fidel Castro had retired from power, and the minister’s conviction that the controversial Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons should be reprinted by German newspapers-an issue that couldn’t raise Erika beyond a dull ambivalence.

The one thing that provoked emotion was the BND operator telling her that Andrei Stanescu was on the line for her. She told the operator to please tell him she was out, and to refer him in the future to Dieter Reich. Again, the stutter hit her, and the operator said, “Could you please repeat that last bit?”

She had sent Oskar off to wait in the forest and was preparing to leave when she heard a voice. “Erika? Want to take a walk?”

She looked up from her desk, surprised to find Teddi Wartmüller filling the doorway. Surprised he had condescended to visit her office instead of summoning her to his. He was looking as elegant as ever, a black overcoat hiding his long frame, but he was tired, too. “Right now?”

“I’d appreciate it. I’m off to a black tie dinner in an hour.”

“Black tie?”

“American consulate, and they don’t appreciate lateness. Grab your coat. I’m dying for a cigarette.”

He waited patiently, watching her close the folder she’d been browsing and then work her way into a standing position.

He peered around the office. “Oskar not in?”

“Interviewing some new applicants.”

“Anything promising?”

She shrugged as she slipped into the vast quilted coat that hid her own frame. “Too early to know.”

“That’s how it always is,” he said pointlessly, then stepped aside so that she could leave the office first. As they continued down the long corridor, he remained behind her, which gave her the unsettling sense that she was being shadowed. He said, “This should only take a few minutes.”

“It’s no problem at all.”

They nodded at the front-door guards hovering around the metal detectors and crossed the empty lane to a small park on the edge of the grounds lit in the early evening darkness by lamp poles amid the trees. By the time they arrived, Erika was out of breath, and he suggested they share a nearby bench. She was very aware of her own weight when the bench creaked and sagged and Wartmüller had to take the far end lest he slide into her.

“So,” she said.

“Yes,” Wartmüller answered, then peered across the shadowy grounds. He licked his teeth and took out his Marlboros. “It was a nice trick, cornering Dieter like that, but I don’t think that’s the way we should be running things here.”

“No?”

“No. And I’d like you to give back the American.”

“American?”

He lit a cigarette, taking his time. “Milo Weaver.”

“Oh, Milo Weaver,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

Wartmüller pursed his lips and gave a disappointed tsk-tsk. “Please, Erika. He’s in your basement. Oskar is probably tending to him now. I certainly hope he’s not damaging the man-he’s not, is he?”

Erika didn’t answer. Had she let something slip? Perhaps all it had taken was a bit of suspicion and a review of the neighborhood security tapes-the excuse for the van had probably been weak. Perhaps Weaver had been visible from the road when they transferred him into the house. Or maybe Gustav had stupidly stepped outside for a smoke. “Listen, Theodor. If I did have Milo Weaver, I wouldn’t keep him in my house. I’d use one of our nice, secure cells.”

He continued to smoke, staring into the distance. “You want to play it this way, fine. Don’t admit a thing. Remember that I’m a friend. I’m not interested in undermining your career. I simply want the man set free-no paperwork on this at all. I’ve also received assurances that the Americans won’t seek retribution. Just make sure he’s in one piece, okay?”

She stared hard at the side of his face. “The Americans talked to you about him? Are they the ones who say I have him?”

“Do you really think there’s anything you can do without the Americans knowing, Erika? If they really want to know? We have a staff of six thousand. The CIA? At least twenty thousand. Not to mention their technology: A satellite can follow you home and take pictures of your house, while the infrared watches you go to bed.”

“That’s ludicrous, and you know it.”

He flicked away his cigarette. “Don’t ask me how they know. To someone my age, it’s all magic. Just know that they know, and please give them back their man. None of us can afford their wrath just now.”

Erika watched him head back to the building. She breathed in the cold. She wasn’t prone to cursing, but at that moment a stream spewed from her. Then she got up and put all her frustration into stamping out Wartmüller’s smoldering cigarette.

She bought her wine and Snickers from Herr al-Akir, making no effort to ease his anxiety, then picked up Oskar. He began with his complaints, but she cut him off and explained the situation.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “So fast?”

“We made a mistake. We were stupid.”

“How long do we have?”

“Until tomorrow afternoon, I’d guess. Any longer and they’ll send GSG 9 to knock down my door. Probably burn down the house while they’re at it.”

“So can we do it my way now?”

“We beat him, and he’ll just tell more stories.”

“If we don’t, he won’t say a thing.”

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He was taped into the chair again when Erika Schwartz descended the stairs holding wine and two glasses, but something was different. She moved faster, and there was an air of confusion about her, or panic. She began from the beginning again, with the simple questions. Why did you kill Adriana Stanescu? Who do you work for?

It had been a long day with these two men who sometimes took random pops at him as he watched the Stanescu story over and over, but it had also given him time to think. The truth was that he and Erika Schwartz were seeking the same answers. They were both disgusted by what the Department of Tourism had done, and both needed to know what could possibly justify it. Milo had received a vague answer from Drummond, but it wasn’t enough, and it wouldn’t be enough for Schwartz either, so he didn’t bother telling her.

His silence now seemed to upset Schwartz. A look of despair overcame her, and she turned to Oskar. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,” she said, then got up and settled on the sofa. “Go ahead.”

Oskar stood. “Gustav, why don’t you give Mr. Weaver a cigarette?”

While Gustav lit one, Heinrich tugged at Milo’s dirty shirtsleeves until his forearms were exposed, and Milo closed his eyes. He’d known it might come to this, but he’d expected a longer wait.

Gustav had done this before. He blew on the cherry before each touch and knew how much pressure to use so that the burn went deep but the cigarette didn’t go out. He was an expert of sorts.

Milo screamed a few times, but worse than the pain was the stink. The sulfurous smell of his hair melting, then the flesh, like charcoal. His stomach convulsed, but there wasn’t enough food in him to follow through on the action. Then he screamed again.

In their business, no one wasted time or energy pretending something didn’t hurt. Facts were facts, and denying the truth of pain was a wasteful show of braggadocio. Their business had no time for braggarts.

“Talk,” Oskar said after five burns, as he used a paper towel to roughly mop up the blood lest it stain the furniture.

Oskar was blurry through his tears; Schwartz, beyond him, was reclining. He couldn’t focus enough to see her expression. “Who’s doing it?”

“Excuse me?” said Schwartz.

“This. Who’s making you rush this? You were doing well before. You were taking your time. You even had me convinced you had all the time in the world. But it’s changed, hasn’t it? Someone’s telling you to get rid of me.”

“Gustav,” she said. “I think Mr. Weaver could use another smoke.”

Milo stiffened, though his face went slack, waiting for the pain. Gustav blew on the end of the cigarette while Heinrich again held the arm still, and when he placed another burn among the red and black spots Milo screamed freely. It was all so damned professional.

Oskar waved a wisp of smoke from his face and leaned closer. “Talk.”

From the sofa, Schwartz explained, “Mr. Weaver, we may be rushed, but we have all night. Gustav has a carton of cigarettes in his bag.”

Milo stared at his taped knees. He heard Gustav blow on the cigarette behind him, but when he looked up the man was stepping back, sticking the cigarette between his lips.

Milo said, “It was for you.”

“Me?” said Schwartz.

“The plural you. German intelligence. I don’t know what department, just German intelligence. Adriana was killed so that the Company’s relationship with German intelligence could continue.”

While Oskar stared doubtfully, Erika Schwartz squinted at him. “What does that mean, Mr. Weaver?”

“No one defined it for me. Now that you’ve told me her background, I can make some guesses. I think you can, too.”

He could tell from her face that she was already ahead of him.

“It’s why I asked you,” he said. “Who told you to get rid of me?”

She wasn’t listening. He knew what she was thinking, because he’d had a whole day to think it over. She was thinking that a girl with a history like Adriana’s meant nothing to an organization. Not to the CIA, not to the BND, not even to the human traffickers who’d already gotten their money’s worth out of her. Adriana Stanescu only meant something to an individual, or a few individuals. The kinds of individuals who took trips to questionable clubs to find gratification in the sweat and allure of anonymous, illicit sex.

“Erika,” he said, and even he was surprised by the softness in his own voice. “Tell me who your boss is. Tell me who wants us to stop talking to each other.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she got to her feet and walked to the stairs and ascended without a word. Her three men seemed confused by the sudden lack of direction, and Gustav settled on the cot to finish his cigarette. Heinrich sat on the vacated sofa but didn’t look at Milo. Oskar remained standing, staring at the empty stairwell. Then he followed her up, carrying the wine and glasses she had forgotten.

16

In the morning, she asked Oskar to stay behind. She would call within the hour with instructions, and in the meantime Weaver should be allowed to rest. The videos had ended last night, and they had even dined together in the panic room. She had let him shower in the house itself with Heinrich as company. Though no more information was exchanged, Weaver spent dinner asking questions before realizing that she would not answer. Primarily, he wanted to know Theodor Wartmüller’s identity.

When she arrived at the Pullach office she rolled slowly through the parking lot. There-his bright red MINI. She took her time hobbling to the building and emptied her pockets into a small plastic basket before walking through the metal detector. It blipped, and with the guards’ magic wand they discovered a ballpoint pen that had slipped through a hole in her pocket to settle in the lining of her quilted coat. When one offered her back the metal items she’d removed, she asked to keep the basket for a little while. With a wry grin, the guard told her that that was fine.

She placed the basket on her desk and, without sitting, called up to the second floor. Wartmüller was in, she was told, but on another line. She asked if he would please call her as soon as he had time.

As she waited she found herself unable to do a thing. She turned on her computer and stared at the blue start-up screen but still didn’t sit. When her desktop appeared, she didn’t even bother checking her e-mail, only gazed at the artistic flower photo that was the background to her daily work. Her phone rang.

“Erika? I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

“Outside, if you don’t mind.”

“Now?”

“If that’s at all possible.”

He considered it. “Not too long, though. I’ve got a conference call with Berlin soon.”

“Then you could probably use a cigarette.”

“Probably right, Erika.”

She returned to the front-door guards, who expected her to hand over the plastic basket, but she hadn’t brought it. All she did was stop a few feet short of them and turn around to face the corridor. When Wartmüller appeared, tapping the filter end of a cigarette against his knuckle, they shifted, suspecting now that they were in serious trouble.

“Hello, Erika.”

“Theodor.” She turned to the guards and pointed at the metal detector. “Is this still on?”

They nodded-of course it was on. Regulations required it to be on.

“Good,” she said and walked through it. The light above her head flickered green. Wartmüller continued around it. “You saw that, sir?”

“Sure,” said Wartmüller, frowning. “You really are an oddball, aren’t you?”

She smiled and continued through the door he held open.

As they crossed the road, heading to the park, Wartmüller began to talk about the party at the consulate. There had been an American musician there, over on a Fulbright grant to research Swabian folk music. So that’s what he played. “Unbelievable! I mean, none of us would listen to that stuff for money, but can you imagine being forced to listen to it sung with one of those flat midwestern accents? Jesus, what were they thinking? Next time I’m getting you an invitation. You’ll only believe it if you see it with your own eyes.”

It was the friendliness that grated on her. That catty camaraderie was Wartmüller’s best weapon. It had the nasty effect of making everyone feel like a partner in this man’s worldly ways. It made her feel a partner in everything he did, and only now did she fully understand what that meant.

He lit a Marlboro as she settled on the same bench from yesterday, then sat beside her. “So,” he said.

“You want him quiet,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You want Milo Weaver sent away so he won’t fill in the blanks of Adriana Stanescu’s murder. You want… yes,” she said and nearly smiled, then stopped herself. It had come to her before, but now she felt sure. “Blackmail, I suppose. That’s really what provokes these things.”

“It must be too early for you, Erika. You’re not making sense.”

“You have a history,” she told him. “An open history. The rumor mill is full of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual adventures. Not all of them are legal, are they?”

He grinned around his cigarette. “Please, Erika! You’re embarrassing me!”

“There was a place in Berlin. Very expensive. You could go there and be assured of confidentiality. You weren’t the only one-no. Politicians and directors, businessmen. Actors, maybe. A who’s-who of the sexually deviant rich.”

He exhaled smoke and knotted his brows. “That’s what the dance with the metal detector was about, wasn’t it? You wanted me to know you’re not wired.”

“Exactly.”

He thought about that, going through his options.

She said, “There was a girl at the club. You were being blackmailed with photos of her and you, yes?”

He didn’t answer.

“So you asked your friends in the CIA to get rid of her.” She paused. “Of course you would do that. You couldn’t kill her yourself, and if you’d asked one of us to do it-even Franz or Brigit-we would ask why. And we both know how rumors get around the office.”

“Yes,” he said distantly. “We do.” He took a long drag.

“Theodor,” she said. She made her voice as soft as she could manage. “I just want to understand.”

He flicked away some ash, but the movement was clumsy, and the whole cigarette tumbled to the ground. He sighed. “This hasn’t been going on so long. Just since December.”

“Of course it hasn’t,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.

He patted his jacket and came up with his crumpled pack. He took his time lighting another one. “A letter. To my home. A package, really. It contained a letter and photographs. It asked for money to be transferred to an offshore account. The photos were stills from a video-that was obvious. Me and a girl in bed. The light was poor, but it was clear enough who I was, and who she was. She was very young-too young. That was obvious, too. I could still remember that night, and I knew that on the video it would look like…” He took another drag. “It would look like I was forcing myself on her.”

“Like you were raping her.”

“Something like that.”

“And the girl was Adriana Stanescu.”

Wartmüller stared at the ashy end of his cigarette. “I didn’t know her name. This was a private club. Berlin. I wasn’t the only customer. It was-at least, it was supposed to be-extremely confidential. Like you said. It had a reputation for this. I believed, as did the other customers, that I had no reason to worry.” He shook his head. “For that price, confidentiality should have been assured.”

Erika looked past him to where a figure moved along the edge of the park. An old woman with a tiny dog. What was an old woman with a dog doing on the grounds? She said, “When was this?”

“December. I told you.”

“No. The night with the girl.”

He exhaled. “Four years ago? Something like that.”

“And who sent the extortion letter?”

“That was the question, wasn’t it? I had our lab go over the envelope, but I wasn’t about to show the letter or the photos.”

“Of course.”

“Mailed from Berlin. No recognizable prints. Address from a laser printer-nothing to tell from that. So I went back to the club myself. The thing had been shut down. I backtracked and found out who had been running the club back then.”

“Rainer Volker.”

Wartmüller halted in midsmoke. “You are good, aren’t you?”

“Was he the one?”

“Before I got a chance to talk to him, I got a call from one of my American contacts.”

“Who?”

When he exhaled, smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Owen Mendel. Turns out they had been watching Volker. They learned what he was up to, that he was blackmailing me. It wasn’t their business, really, but Mendel understood that I couldn’t take care of it through BND channels. He offered an exchange of services.”

“An exchange?”

“He makes my problem go away, and in return I lobby for a little more cooperation with the Americans. The cooperation that was lost, mind you, because of your obsession with Afghan heroin.”

The woman and dog had left Erika’s field of vision, but then a young couple began to cross the park in the opposite direction. That’s when she knew-it was Brigit, suspicious Brigit, keeping an eye on her mentor with some of the extra staff.

Wartmüller continued, “The Americans knew that Volker was blackmailing me, and they even knew the name of the girl in the photos-Adriana Stanescu. All this trouble, over a Moldovan!” He shook his head. “Very quietly, they took care of Volker.”

“Killed him.”

“Yes. But quietly. I thought it was done. Just to be sure, I did a search on this girl, this Moldovan. Somehow she’d gotten a visa and was living up in Berlin. I started to think. Soon, we’ll all be up in Berlin. It was too easy to imagine-me on the street every day, my photo appearing in the newspaper. Really, there were a hundred ways for this girl to look up one day, raise her finger, and point. For her to start screaming.” He rubbed his face, which despite the cold was damp. “It began to drive me crazy. I called Mendel, but it turned out that he’d left the Company and I was passed on to some other guy. Alan Drummond. We talked turkey, as they say. After conferring with his people, he promised to get rid of my anxiety if he could start seeing some results from my side.” Wartmüller paused. “I told him thank you very much.”

“Did he?”

Wartmüller cupped his ear. “Eh?”

“Did he see results from your side?”

He shrugged. “Hamburg, primarily. You know about that operation. But there were some other things in Cologne and Nuremberg. Rwanda, too.”

Erika considered whether or not to say it aloud, because both of them knew it already, but her anger got the better of her. “That’s treason.”

“Is it?”

“Unless you got clearance to pass on that information. Did you?”

He pursed his lips, then changed position, and it struck her that Wartmüller had passed through the emotional stages very quickly and come out the other side. “Listen, Erika. I’ve been in this game as long as you have. You’re good-we both know that. You’ve connected the dots and ended up with me. Really, though, what do you have? Suppositions. Rumors, at best. Trust me: You’ll find nothing else. I’ve made sure of that.”

Now he was doing it, giving voice to the fact that both of them already knew. She had an American spy’s single line-It was for you… German intelligence-the tragic history of an immigrant girl, and the involvement of a secret department across the ocean that would never open up its files for her perusal. She had nothing, but she wasn’t about to admit that. The best she could do was fan his anxiety. “The photos of you came from a videotape, which is still out there.”

He shook his head. “The Americans destroyed it.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

He wasn’t going to take the bait, not yet. “You lie like a politician, Erika. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.” He stood and squashed his cigarette beneath his heel and looked down on her. “I’ve got that conference call.”

She didn’t bother watching him walk away. Instead, she took out her cell phone and called Oskar. “It’s your mother,” she told him. “Send your friend home immediately.”

“Is that all?”

“Just do it, and I’ll be in touch.”

“Of course you will,” Oskar muttered. He sounded very disappointed.

17

It was a simple enough transfer, but even Milo, eye-strained from two days of television and sore down his burned arm, could see that they were worried. Oskar led the way while Heinrich followed; Gustav had left earlier. They didn’t blindfold him or bind his wrists, just walked with him out Erika Schwartz’s back door and down the woody incline of her yard to a dried creek bed that separated properties. They followed it to the left-north, Milo thought, then wasn’t sure-and passed the occasional high security fence and signs warning trespassers away from the homes of important people.

“No cameras?” Milo asked after a while.

Oskar rocked his head while, behind, Heinrich stumbled in the undergrowth. “Here, no. At each end, where the roads are, yes. We’ll have to be careful there.”

“You could have just taken me out the way you brought me in.”

“Unfortunately, this is the only way to assure your safety.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

Oskar stopped and looked back at him, hard. He didn’t need to say a thing. They went on.

They reached a residential road where a quaint stone arch spanned the creek, and Oskar pointed out the cameras. There were three-one on the stones, two in the trees-so they remained in the woods and continued fifty yards up the road. They waited until a white van with the insignia of a Karlsfeld plumbing company pulled up to the side of the road. Gustav was behind the wheel. Heinrich took the passenger seat; Oskar joined Milo in the rear.

The drive took about an hour and a half, and during that time Oskar slowly relaxed. He never warmed to Milo, but neither did he seem to view him as a tactical enemy. The distinction was important. Then his phone rang, and he answered it, grunted a few times, and handed it to Milo. “It’s for you.”

“Hello?”

“Theodor Wartmüller,” Erika said. “He’s the one who ordered your release.”

“Thanks,” Milo said, then waited. Only silence followed, and in that silence he realized he knew the name Wartmüller, but wasn’t sure where from. “Do you have it covered?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Have you got the whole story?”

“Enough of it.”

“You have evidence?”

More silence followed. No, she didn’t have the evidence to arrest the man.

“If I can, I’ll help.”

“Why?”

“You know why. You know I didn’t hurt her.”

“I don’t know anything, Mr. Weaver.”

“Was it blackmail?”

“Of course.”

Then Milo hesitated, because he finally remembered why he knew that name. “When?”

“What?”

“When was the blackmail?”

“Do I get the sense you know something?”

“I need details if I’m going to help you.”

“December.”

Milo felt a wave of acid climb into the back of his throat. He swallowed it down. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

She sighed, and Milo thought he heard wind-she was outside, away from ears. “I don’t think I need to tell you anything. You can ask your own people.”

“I’ll do that. And I’ll find a way to pass on anything that looks useful.”

“Let’s hope I don’t need anything from you.”

“Let’s hope,” said Milo. “One last thing.”

“Yes?”

“Budapest. You told me I’d been in Budapest, but I hadn’t. Were you making that up?”

She sounded surprised. “We have it through a source. You were there, all right. Not just a writer-you also claimed to be a doctor and a film producer.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know?”

“Please. It’s important.”

“You were looking for an American journalist named Henry Gray. He’d just come out of a coma and had disappeared. You apparently plagued his girlfriend, who’s also a journalist.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Zsuzsanna Papp, I think. Hungarian. Works for Blikk.”

“Did I find this Henry Gray?”

“Not as far as we know. All we know is that you were there some days, asking around, then disappeared.” She paused. “Is someone out there using your name?”

“Thanks, Erika. I’ll be in touch if I can help.”

He returned the phone to Oskar, who grinned oddly as he hung it up. It was no more comforting than his boss’s smiles. In English, he said, “So Mr. Weaver is going to help us. Excuse me if I’m not filled with the hope.”

When they finally stopped a little before noon, they were in the center of Innsbruck, across the Austrian border. “The train station is a block that way,” Oskar said, pointing, then handed over Milo’s wallet, disassembled phone, key ring, and iPod, along with two hundred euros in small bills “to get you closer to home.” He made no move to shake hands, so Milo didn’t either, but when he passed the cab he waved to Gustav and Heinrich. Gustav, confused, waved back with a smile.

The Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof was stocked with stores and cafés. After looking over the departures schedule, he bought a fresh gauze bandage for his forearm, a bottle of orange juice, and a large sandwich of cold cuts, which he ate outside, staring at the Friday lunch crowds and the gray traffic pushing through Südtiroler Platz. Once he was finished eating and had wrapped his arm in the bathroom, he put his phone together again, powered it up, and went to a café to wait. As soon as he sat down, the phone vibrated for his attention. A message: Myrrh, myrrh.

Never in his career had the universal return code been sent. It meant that Dzubenko’s various stories had checked out, a Chinese mole was assumed, and the entire department was closing down.

If there was a surprise in all this, it was only that he didn’t give a damn anymore.

Things could change so quickly-a department could panic and call back all its agents, and one of its agents could hear a single name, Theodor Wartmüller, and decide that the department itself no longer deserved to exist. Let it go down in flames, he thought.

Still, he followed procedure, if only because it was second nature. He didn’t call in, because Schwartz could easily have wired his phone to send her any numbers he dialed, and no one called him, because his reappearance might simply mean that another agency had control of the phone. He also avoided pay phones, since he couldn’t be sure that Schwartz hadn’t warned the Austrians of his arrival. He wanted to trust her, but that wasn’t really an option.

He ordered a caffè latte and settled in for the long wait, which turned out to last four hours. During that time, he drank coffee and wandered the claustrophobic streets around the train station, peering into windows selling liquor, chocolates, and aids for sexual gratification. He plugged into his iPod and found himself listening to Bowie’s Low, that desperate-sounding voice saying, “Oh, but I’m always crashing in the same car.”

It was around three when, on his way back to the station, he saw James Einner walking briskly toward him. There was a smile in his eyes, but nowhere else, and as they passed one another he only said, “Check the window,” and continued on. Three doors down, on a windowsill, he spotted a cheap Nokia; it was already ringing.

“Lovely to hear from you,” Milo said into it as he continued back to the station.

“You being watched?”

“Doubtful, but with this many cameras around they don’t need to leave their laptops. Where am I going?”

“Vienna, then Dulles. I’ll be on the plane with you. You see the recall message?”

“Why the panic?”

There was a pause. “We’ll talk about it in Vienna. The Eurotel at the airport. I’m bringing the drinks,” he said and hung up.

Milo bought a first-class ticket to Vienna’s Westbahnhof and dozed briefly as the landscape turned black. Occasionally, his forearm throbbed, but he didn’t feel like checking for infection, and during a particularly stinging session he noticed a dark-skinned man-midthirties, long sideburns, fit, glum-enter the car and move slowly along, touching seat backs as if counting them. As he approached Milo’s seat toward the rear, he glanced briefly into Milo’s eyes and dropped a gray Siemens onto the empty seat beside him. Milo stared at the phone, then glanced back, but the man was already exiting the car.

It was common enough in his line of work to gradually collect cheap phones, but it didn’t usually happen so quickly. Milo left the phone where it was and peered out at the night, the train gradually overtaking the lights of a distant city. Then the phone rang a monotone beep-beep, and he answered it but said nothing.

“Misha, it’s me.”

“You’re here?”

“The front of the train. You met Francisco?”

“He’s charming. How did you find me?”

“You think your boss is the only one who keeps track of your phone? Really, Misha.”

He sounded very pleased with himself, so Milo hung up. He kept the phone on his knee and noticed that they had finally passed the town-no lights were visible at all. He waited until the phone had rung seven times before picking up again.

“You’re angry,” said Yevgeny.

“Think so?”

“Listen, son. I take full responsibility for Adriana.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“But what I said before was true. It was my fault, but not my intention. She got away, and someone else killed her. One of your Tourists, I’d guess.”

Milo knew he was right. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Yevgeny. I’m done with you. I’m done with all of this.”

The old man didn’t answer immediately. He was likely considering what technique would best keep hold of his precious source. “Okay,” he said finally. “You’re done with me. I’ve failed you. Let me redeem myself. You know I can help. What’s your new project?”

Involuntarily, laughter shook through Milo’s frame; his arm throbbed. He had to set the phone down until he had control of himself. He lifted it to his ear. “Sorry, Yevgeny. Your tenacity is hilarious. I’m not going to tell you what I’m doing now.”

“Fine,” he said in a tone that Milo remembered from his teenaged years-abrupt, insulted. “Don’t tell me a thing. Still, because of Adriana, I do owe you, and I intend to repay that debt.”

The old man was serious-that, too, was a tone he knew. Various favors crossed his mind-find me a new job was high on the list-but then he remembered his father’s particular range of knowledge and networks. “Okay. Here’s something. Find me everything you can on a Chinese colonel in the Guoanbu, Xin Zhu. I’ll need it as soon as possible.”

Yevgeny sighed, the barely satisfied exhale when he had finally gotten his way. “I can do that without a problem. It would help to know what exactly I’m looking for.”

“You’re looking for everything,” Milo said, then hung up again and placed the phone on the empty seat. Within five minutes, the dark man had worked his way back through the car; the phone left with him.

18

By eight thirty he was in Vienna, boarding a taxi on Europaplatz, outside the Westbahnhof. He hadn’t seen the dark man again, nor his father, and guessed they had disembarked earlier.

At Vienna International, he used a Sebastian Hall MasterCard to buy a ticket for the next flight to Washington, which wouldn’t leave until 10:50 A.M. He walked over to the arcade of airport stores, passing cafeterias and newsstands and a music store to reach the pharmacy at the far end, where he used Erika Schwartz’s money to buy two boxes of Nicorette. He chewed so vigorously that it provoked hiccups again. He picked up a fresh change of underwear, socks, a new shirt, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and antiperspirant. He was still hiccupping when he reached the curb.

Though he saw James Einner follow him out to the shuttle that would take him to the Eurotel, he made no sign of recognition. Einner let his bus go without boarding.

The room was bleakly cheap and small but functional. He took a shower and dressed in his dirty clothes. He left his four-day beard untouched, but in the mirror noticed among the chestnut tones several white hairs. It was all so disappointing.

Einner made no jokes when he arrived, and that was also disappointing. He marched past Milo and placed a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon on the desk. He pulled back the curtains enough to look down on the parking lot.

“Anyone behind me?” Milo asked.

Einner shook his head, then shut the curtains.

“How’d you get me out?”

“Ask Drummond. I assume he’s got a German contact.”

“Why Myrrh?”

Einner looked around as if confused, then picked up the bottle. He took a corkscrew from the room’s minibar and began working on it. “Get the glasses.”

Milo unwrapped a pair of plastic cups from the bathroom. They drank.

“Well?”

Einner finished his wine and refilled the glass, then shook his head. “Politics. It’s always politics.”

“Who?”

“Nathan Irwin.”

“I sure hope you brought some blow.”

Everything, Einner explained, had gone to shit three days before, on Monday, when the Chinese representative to the UN made direct reference to what had happened the previous year in the Sudan. “That operation.”

Milo recalled his last voluntary television memory, in Warsaw. “I saw it on the BBC.”

“So did Irwin, and if anyone can smell an approaching scandal, it’s a senator. He knew his career could be on the chopping block. He cornered Drummond. Demanded to know how it had gotten out. Drummond had to admit to the mole investigation.”

“I bet he didn’t take that well.”

“You’d win that bet. He’s upset enough that the Chinese know about the Sudanese operation, but apparently that’s not the only pie Irwin had his finger in. So he’s taken over the department. Drummond’s now his errand boy. Irwin recalled everyone to New York to be debriefed and given new legends and go-codes.”

“What about you?”

“Drummond thought you might need someone to hold your hand.”

They drank until late, Einner running down for another bottle, but Milo never mentioned that he wouldn’t be boarding the plane in the morning. There was no point to it. Einner was there to hold Milo’s hand; he was there to make sure Milo made it back home safely.

When, after midnight, Einner left for his own room, Milo considered just leaving right then. He knew Einner, though, knew he was a good Tourist who could probably track him down before he got out of Austria. So he let him hold his hand all the way to the gate, where they sat separately, waiting for the flight attendants to announce boarding. Milo stood with his boarding pass in hand and gave Einner a nod to go first. He hung around the rear of the line until Einner had disappeared down the jet bridge to the plane; then he walked back out through security. He first found an ATM and withdrew the machine’s limit of five hundred euros, then walked to the Hertz rental counter. As he waited for the keys, his phone rang.

“Where the hell are you?”

“Sorry, James. I’ve got something to do before heading home.”

He didn’t sound angry, just amused. “And you couldn’t’ve asked me along?”

“You wouldn’t’ve let me go.”

“You know who I’ve got to call now, right?”

“Go ahead. I’ll leave the phone on for a half hour. Tell him I’ll be expecting his call.”

Einner hung up. By the time the phone rang again, Milo had reached the A4 that led, with a name change, all the way to Budapest. Drummond said, “What the hell’s going on, Hall?”

“You tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“There should be something in the files. Back in December, someone used my name in Budapest. My real name.”

“So?”

“You’re still new, Alan. Maybe you don’t realize what a no-no that is. Someone uses my real name, then other people can track it to my family. It’s simply not done.”

“Then come on back,” said Drummond. “We’ll figure out who did it.”

“Not during a freeze, we won’t. And later, I won’t have a chance.”

“Why not?”

Milo pulled into the slow lane behind a big rig. “Theodor Wartmüller.”

“What?”

“It was you, Alan. It was you the whole way.”

“You’re making no sense, Hall. What did the Krauts do to you?”

“I didn’t remember at first,” Milo said, “but then it came to me. Theodor Wartmüller. In December, one of my first jobs was to mail a package to him. I didn’t know what was inside, but now I do. Photographs of him with Adriana Stanescu, in bed. It was us. We’re the ones who blackmailed him, and then we swooped in to save him in exchange for favors.”

Drummond made some grunting noises, and Milo realized that it was after three in the morning there. “Can we talk this through later?”

“There’s no point, Alan. We set up Wartmüller by setting up the girl. Then we killed her.”

“Hold on a minute,” Drummond said, and Milo heard movement on the other side and a muffled voice, perhaps female. Walking. He was leaving his wife to find some privacy. A door closed; then he came back on. “It wasn’t my watch, Hall. You know that. Mendel set it up. I told you before-I’ve had to spend all my time cleaning up his mess. From what I gather, we monitored the whorehouse for some time and collected pictures of various German politicos before letting the police shut down the operation. Then Mendel used you to send those photos, which were to get us back in with the BND. Really,” he said, “no one even told me this when I took over the department. I didn’t know a thing about it until Wartmüller called me directly, asking us to get rid of Stanescu. Had to backtrack to figure out what he was even talking about, and I made my decision.”

“It was the wrong decision.”

“I don’t like it either, but we got plenty in return.”

He merged into the eastward flow of traffic, which was lighter than the westward flow. “Just tell me, then. Who actually pulled the trigger?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out on your own.”

“It was us, yes?”

“Yes, Milo. It was us. Wartmüller learned of your failure, so I had to send someone else. Someone with a little more loyalty.”

“Someone with fewer scruples.”

“A Tourist.”

“Einner?”

Drummond didn’t answer.

“This is why I won’t have time later to find out who was using my name in Budapest. Because I’m finished. I quit.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I really am, Alan. Find your mole on your own, and enjoy working for Senator Irwin. I hear he gives a brutal Christmas party.”

Milo switched off his phone, then steered with his knee as he took it apart. He was careful about it, because he didn’t want to have a wreck. He didn’t want anything to go wrong-he’d had enough of that.

19

When, just over the Hungarian border, he tried to withdraw forints from an ATM, the machine told him the transaction had been denied. He’d expected this, which was why he’d taken out euros in the airport, but he’d hoped that Drummond would drag his feet. The truth was that he actually liked the man and believed his excuses. Drummond had arrived in a department already so morally twisted that he’d had no choice but to follow suit until old cases were settled. Milo had hoped that Drummond might empathize enough to let him keep his cards a little longer. He was wrong.

Despite what Schwartz had learned from her source, Milo had last been to Budapest four years ago, in 2004, under his real name. He’d brought Tina and two-year-old Stephanie for a vacation. It was Tina’s first visit to the land that once lay behind the Iron Curtain, and she was taken by the imperial architecture rising through the bright late-summer light. She’d puzzled over the language-gyógyszertár, the Hungarian word for pharmacy, had particularly stunned her-but fell in love with the grandiose bridges crossing the Danube.

As he came gradually into town, open fields were replaced by huge shopping centers-IKEA and Tesco-where, despite his money situation, he stopped to pickup a cheap change of clothes, losing sixty euros all at once. The stores were soon replaced by sooty Habsburg buildings that, under the winter sky, held less charm than they’d had in the summer of 2004. It was still light when he crossed the Danube from Buda to Pest and checked into the Ibis Budapest Centrum’s tiny, nondescript room. He would have chosen an upscale hotel along the water, but his money wouldn’t last long. Besides, he was alone now, and wanted to maintain as low a profile as possible.

He visited one of the many café-bars along Ráday utca, which had been renovated to better accommodate the increase in prosperous customers, then ordered an aperitif of Unicum, that mysterious herbal liqueur Hungarians pretend has medicinal qualities. In the rear of the bar were three computers with Internet access.

Very quickly, he tracked down a biography of Henry Gray posted on a blog with the dubious name “Random Looks Inside the Inside” that focused on news items backing up its conspiratorial worldview. Additional information came from a more professional source-the American Society of Journalists and Authors-and a personal essay from 2005 penned by Gray himself. He even found a Budapest address for him, on Vadász utca.

Gray was a Virginia native who in his teens began traveling on student exchanges-Germany, Yugoslavia-and had quickly been bitten by the travel bug. By the time he was twenty-five, he had turned to freelance journalism and packed a suitcase. Thinking, no doubt, of Hemingway and Henry Miller, he flew to Paris, where he failed to find any regular work. This was in the early nineties, when the Balkans were exploding, so he packed again and headed for Belgrade, but the climate for Western journalists wasn’t favorable. After the Serb secret police, the UDBA, kicked in his door and held him for an hour in the local militia station, Gray fled north to the relative tranquility of Budapest, where he could report on the entire region from a safe distance.

His reputation was built largely upon one piece, reprinted in many major newspapers, on the airbase in Taszár, Hungary, unimaginatively named Camp Freedom. There, the U.S. military trained three thousand Free Iraqi Forces, which they hoped would make their upcoming invasion look like natives returning to reclaim their birthright, rather than Western imperialism. Like the name of the camp, it was a failed exercise in optimism.

Many of the other clippings he came across, besides mundane pieces on trade deals in Central Europe and the Balkans, were less impressive: “The 9/11 Conspiracy-What the Commission Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “One World Government-Does It Represent You?”

Yes, there were mainstream articles attributed to Gray, but they drowned in the mass of his conspiracy pieces littering the Net. He took on bottled water companies, which had, assisted by the American government, convinced the world that they should be paying for what nature considered a free resource. He speculated on the Bilderberg Group, an annual secretive meeting of influential business-people and politicians that, according to him and some similarly minded people, were working steadily toward the implementation of a world government. Gray had no doubt that the CIA was behind 9/11, a proposition that Milo, despite his ambivalence about his soon-to-be-ex-employer, found unbelievable. Not because someone at Langley couldn’t have dreamed it up-some were paid solely for their ability to dream up the unthinkable-but it was unimaginable that the Company could have pulled off such an enormous ruse without getting caught; its track record wasn’t encouraging.

In the end, the picture he gained of Henry Gray was of a paranoid, rootless investigator into conspiracies, who hoped that they might someday explain away the dissatisfaction of his own life. People like that were a dime a dozen. Which raised the question: Why did someone using Milo’s name want to find him?

Even with such opinions, Gray would have friends in Budapest, because expat circles, particularly journalistic ones, are tiny. Milo gathered a list of British, Canadian, and American stringers based in Budapest, with addresses and phone numbers.

Though Schwartz had said Gray had been in a coma, Milo found very little to back this up beyond a brief mention in a sidebar of the August 8 edition of the Budapest Sun: “Local journalist Henry L. Gray is in serious condition in Péterfy Sándor Hospital after a fall.”

Of Gray’s girlfriend, Zsuzsanna Papp, there was little. He found some of her Hungarian-language articles for the tabloid Blikk. These, as far as he could tell, covered the tensions between the nationalist Fidesz party and the socialist MSZP party, which now held shaky power.

Then he ran across Pestiside.hu, a satirical English-language news outlet on all things Hungarian, which spent as much time ridiculing the Hungarian character as it did the expats that filled its capital. February 28, 2008, yesterday: “Journo-Stripper Ends Humiliating Sideline; Quits Journalism.”

Fans of Zsuzsa Papp’s biting Blikk commentaries on political targets such as right-wing nut job Viktor Orbán and fey communist liar Ferenc Gyurcsány will soon have to discover their political opinions unaided. According to Blikk management, Papp has left the paper in order to pursue her first love, undressing in front of drunk English hooligans at the 4Play Club. Who ever said there was no such thing as journalistic integrity in Hungary? Not us.

20

In the morning, he took a bus to Oktogon Square, where he mixed with Saturday pedestrians around the gray Central European intersection. They leaned against the wind, smoking or hurrying to the next warm café. Milo faced the winds along the boulevard that marked a Pest-side circular route cut in half by the Danube, then turned right onto Szondi utca. Szondi was less kept up than the boulevard, and years of soot lodged in its crevices, but the buildings had an undeniable charm.

Number 10, one block in, was hidden by scaffolding swathed in black plastic netting to avoid tools falling on pedestrians’ heads. It wasn’t the only building undergoing renovation, and when he looked he saw these occasional black masks all the way down the street. He checked the buzzers and pressed the one with parkhall stamped on it. After a moment, a weary “Igen?” sounded over the speaker.

“Mr. Terry Parkhall?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry to bother you. My name’s Sebastian Hall, and I’m looking into the disappearance of an associate of yours. Henry Gray. You think you could spare a minute?”

“You press?”

“No.”

There was a moment of static. “Then what are you?”

“A private investigator. Gray’s aunt, Sybil Erikson, hired me.”

“I didn’t know he had an aunt.”

“A lot of us have them, Mr. Parkhall.”

The heavy front door buzzed, so Milo pushed it open as Parkhall said, “Third floor. Take your time; I’m not dressed yet.”

The stairwell was a mess of dust and chunks of concrete and loose steel pipes left behind by construction workers out for the weekend. He mounted the stairs and tested the railing, but it wouldn’t hold a child if it came to it, so he continued up with his hands clasped behind his back.

He’d settled on the cover story during his walk here. Originally he’d thought that introducing himself as a new freelance journalist would do the trick, but on reflection realized that this would take too long-inevitably the way to greet a newcomer is to take him out and get him roaring drunk, not to answer questions about a missing colleague. Nor would honesty work-this man might have met the previous Milo Weaver, and wouldn’t believe that he had been fooled before. So a private investigator came to mind, and an aunt that would take days for Parkhall to realize didn’t exist.

There were two doors on the third floor, both with barred steel gates on the outside, but only one of these was open, so he stepped up to it and rapped on the wooden door. “Mr. Parkhall?”

From behind him, a male voice. “Wrong way.”

He turned to see a tall, thin man in a robe and pajama pants standing behind the bars opposite, rubbing his disheveled hair. He went to Parkhall as the door he’d knocked on was unlocked and an old woman peered out. “Mi van?”

“Nincs,” Parkhall said with a wave of his long fingers. “Bocsánat, Edit.”

As Parkhall unlocked his gate, Edit locked her own door, filling the stairwell with the echo of locks being turned. They shook hands, but Parkhall didn’t let him in that easily. “You have some kind of ID?”

“I left my investigator’s license in the hotel. Passport do?”

Parkhall shrugged, then examined the Hall passport to his satisfaction. Milo followed him into a large living room decked out in IKEA and a muted television playing BBC News. The place had been nicely renovated from what must have been a ubiquitous chopped-up communist apartment. Parkhall grabbed a coffee and two pills from the coffee table and swallowed them. “Hangover. You’ve had Unicum?”

“Sure. It’s not bad.”

“Just remember moderation, or you’re in for a world of hurt.”

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’ve had enough already.”

Parkhall flopped onto his couch. “Go ahead. Sit down.”

Milo kept his coat on and took a chair. “This should just take a few minutes. I mean, I have the background already. Gray was in the hospital before he vanished, wasn’t he?”

Parkhall nodded. “How did he end up in a coma?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve got conflicting reports. I’d rather hear what you, as a journalist, have to say.”

Parkhall shrugged. “According to him, an intruder in his apartment threw him off his terrace. Back in August.”

That was unexpected. “Did the police find the intruder?”

“You’ll have to ask them. As far as I know, they didn’t.”

“I’m visiting them next,” he lied. “So why ask me?”

“It’s good to cover your bases.”

A smile slipped into Parkhall’s face. “Particularly with Hungarians.”

“What about Gray? Did he have any idea who did it? Or was it just a random break-in?”

Parkhall considered him a moment, then stood up with his mug. “Sure you don’t want some coffee? I’m getting a refill.”

“Twist my arm. Thanks. Black.”

Milo followed him to the kitchen doorway. “What about Gray?”

Parkhall was filling the cups from a French press, and when he turned his expression was pained. “Henry has a lot of ideas-theories.

He’s that kind of journalist. A theory about everything. Conspiracy theories.”

“I saw a few things he wrote,” Milo admitted. “Kind of weird. To me, at least.”

“To the rest of us, too,” Parkhall said as he handed over a cup and they returned to the living room. “Honestly, the guy was a bit of a joke with us. That tsunami that wiped out Indonesia a few years ago? We were out drinking, and I joked that I’d heard of a document proving the CIA was behind it. Weather experiments. Everyone laughed except Henry-I mean, he really bought the story!”

“Unbelievable.”

“Yeah. So if you asked him who tossed him off his terrace, there’s only one possible answer, and it’s the one he spouted about as soon as he woke from his coma. The CIA had tried to kill him.”

“He told you this?”

“Called me after he woke up. Thought I would write something for the Times on it. Pure delusion.”

Milo set down his coffee. “Any reason the CIA would want him dead?”

“It’s called hubris, Mr. Hall, and Henry has it in spades. According to him, he received a letter that would have blown the CIA apart. The CIA knew he had it, so they decided to liquidate him. The guy really should be writing thrillers.”

Milo shared a polite laugh over that, then drew a serious face. “Any idea what was in this letter?”

“God’s own mystery. Disappeared when he was tossed off his terrace. When I asked what was in it, he said he couldn’t tell me. Know why?”

“Why?”

“He didn’t want them coming after me, too. Shocking!”

“But then he disappeared, didn’t he?” Milo said, trying to stay on topic. “Isn’t anyone worried about him?”

“Ah, hell,” Parkhall muttered. “I mean, the boys like him all right, but…” He frowned, thinking through his words. “But life hasn’t gotten much worse with him gone, if you know what I mean. No, we’re not worried, because we know he’s just holing up somewhere, maybe in Prague, maybe Belgrade, with a bottle of vodka, waiting for the heat to blow over. An extended bender, probably. We’ve all had them.”

Milo nodded agreeably. “Listen, I heard something-maybe just a rumor-that just after he disappeared someone else came looking for him. A man.”

“Milo Weaver,” Parkhall said with some enthusiasm. “Nice guy. Works for AP, you know.”

“AP?”

“Associated Press.”

“Right, of course. I have a feeling I’ve met the guy before, but I’m not sure-can you describe him?”

“Sure. Blond. Tall. What else? Blue eyes-vivid blue. Jesus. Sounds like I’m describing a girl I’m hot for, doesn’t it?”

“Exactly,” Milo said. While it wasn’t much of a description, it was a start. “Speaking of girls, didn’t Gray have one? A Hungarian girlfriend?”

“Zsuzsa!” Parkhall exclaimed, sitting up. “If you believe him, they did sleep together, but ‘girlfriend’ is a stretch. Now, she was worried about him. Spent a while poking around. Zsuzsa’s all right, but she got obsessed to the point that she lost her job.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Maybe. But she takes her clothes off now for much better money.” He paused. “If you want to know about Henry, she’s the one to talk to. When you see her you’ll understand why none of us could believe he actually got her in bed. Me, maybe. But Henry?”

“That good, huh?”

“Better. Listen,” Parkhall said, straightening. “If I can get rid of this damned headache, maybe you and I should go see her. She’s dancing tonight at the 4Play. If you go alone, she’ll think you’re just some pervert… or from the Company. Which is the same difference.”

“Thanks,” Milo said. “That would be really kind of you.”

21

On the surface, Milo and Henry Gray were not so different. To an outside observer, Milo realized with despair, they might just look the same. Both viewed the world with a paranoid eye, were prone to sudden disappearances, and chose to leave their friends in the dark in order to protect them-this was what Milo had done to his wife. In the hours leading up to his eight thirty rendezvous with Parkhall, though, he concentrated on their differences.

While Gray puzzled over Masonic symbols to back up his conspiratorial premises, Milo looked at facts to find the connection, if any, between them, and then built up his theories. This distinction, though small, was crucial: For someone like Gray, Occam’s Razor did not exist, for his logic was already corrupted by assumptions. Milo’s, hopefully, began with as few assumptions as possible.

So he examined the facts at hand by breaking into Gray’s dusty Vadász utca apartment. He browsed Gray’s extensive collection of books (nonfiction with a small shelf of international thrillers), the elaborately renovated kitchen (which suggested a budding chef), the unopened box of twenty condoms in the bedside drawer (Gray lived in hope), and an enormous plasma television.

He called the closest major hospital, the Péterfy Sándor Kórház, and like his namesake claimed to be an American doctor interested in Henry Gray’s medical records. After being passed to someone who spoke English, he was told that Gray and all of his records had been forwarded to the Szent János Kórház last year. He took the number 6 tram across the Danube to Buda and visited the St. János grounds, but the doctors were gone, and the few nurses who spoke to him were too busy to help. They told him to come back on Monday.

So he returned to Pest and drank caffè lattes at the Peppers! restaurant in the Marriott, overlooking the quay against the steely Danube.

Again, the facts: In August, while Milo was in a prison in upstate New York, Gray received a letter that contained something that could do damage to the CIA. Soon afterward, someone tossed him off his terrace and stole the letter. It was a curious method of disposal, but he supposed the agent in question-there was nothing yet to prove it was a Tourist-thought it would look like suicide.

Gray proved more resilient than expected. By December, he not only woke up but was soon able to walk out of the hospital and disappear.

You don’t begin with assumptions; you begin with facts. A paranoid journalist’s delusions are proven right when someone tries to kill him. What does he do when he’s finally able to walk?

He runs.

Then, days later, someone calling himself Milo Weaver came looking for Henry Gray.

Presumably, this was the same man who had tried to kill Gray. Once Gray woke, he returned to Budapest to finish the job.

Why would he use Milo’s name? It made no sense.

Milo was back at Oktogon Square by eight twenty, in front of the Burger King. Parkhall was fifteen minutes late but made no apologies, instead explaining that being late to meetings was an obligation of life in Budapest.

First, they went around the corner to Ferenc Liszt Square, where, between a statue of the famous composer and the music academy, restaurants and cafés faced off, vying for business. They went to the upscale Menza, a restaurant with orange-toned retro decor, where Parkhall introduced him to a table of four friends.

Milo wasn’t comfortable advertising his presence with such a large group, but soon realized that the entire table was drunk. They’d spent the day in the Rudas bath house, then moved through three bars until, famished, they had ended up here. None of them were lively enough to investigate Sebastian Hall’s credentials, or even rouse themselves at the mention of the 4Play Club and the chance to see Zsuzsa Papp naked. So Milo turned the conversation to Henry Gray.

The other journalists, it turned out, felt much the same way Parkhall did about Gray. The Canadian, Russell, referred to him condescendingly as “a gifted amateur.” Johann, the German, questioned the word “gifted.” There was an English stringer, Will, and an Irish radio reporter, Cowall, who was apparently between jobs-according to Parkhall, he’d come to Budapest “to find himself.” Only Cowall felt sympathy for Henry Gray, but his day of drinking had deepened his sour mood.

“We make fun of him, yeah? We all get a good laugh out of his crazy ideas. But what happens? You can come up with any explanation you like, but the fact is someone did toss him off his terrace, and expected the fall to kill him. It nearly did. Whether it was the CIA or the Hungarian mafia or the Russians or just some lunatic-it doesn’t really matter. Someone was after him.” He paused, staring sickly at his plate of goulash. “Goes to show. Even paranoid people get it right now and then. It’s the law of averages.”

“Christ,” said Russell. “If I’d known you’d be such a downer I wouldn’t have invited you out.”

“Oh, well,” Cowall said halfheartedly, then stood and walked out of the restaurant without looking back.

“He didn’t pay for his goulash,” Will said, unbelieving.

“I’ll cover it,” Milo said.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Johann, his German accent very faint. “Cowall, I mean. He’s no good with his alcohol. Besides, his opinions don’t mean much-he’s a devout member of the Church of the SubGenius.”

“Spent too much time in college,” said Parkhall. “Like he never left.”

Milo ate Cowall’s heavy goulash, hoping to dull the drinking he would do at the club, and probed for more theories about Gray’s whereabouts. No one knew, nor did they particularly care. They were too exhausted to feel anything. He paid Cowall’s portion of the bill, calling it Company expenses, and he and Parkhall jumped a tram farther down the boulevard to the 4Play.

“Well, hello, hello,” Parkhall said to the large bald doorman.

Throughout his life, Milo had found himself in a surprising number of strip clubs. They were ideal for money laundering, their profits constant because men all over the world are willing to pay for a glimpse of bare female skin. His first visit, to a Moscow club, had been Yevgeny’s eighteenth birthday present-and each one since took him back to that June night in 1988 when he’d felt little arousal, mostly just shame and a childish love.

It was, like many of the stores and vacation dachas his father took him to, a KGB-only place. Inevitably, the best-looking dancers worked there, and Yevgeny was dismayed by the look on his face. “Why the attitude, Milo? Come on. This is your day.” But his father’s encouragement and the steady stream of mixed drinks made no dent in his misery as he looked over these beautiful girls from all over the Russian Empire who had, he imagined, run into some kind of trouble that had left them with no alternative than to take off their clothes for lascivious secret policemen. Lust was overcome by sympathy and pity.

He fixated on one, a morose-looking brunette his father told him was Siberian, and felt an absurd desire to take her away and save her. Misinterpreting his interest, Yevgeny called her over and ordered a private dance in one of the back rooms, promising a tip if she sent him back a man.

How did Yevgeny know that his eighteen-year-old son was still a virgin? He worked for the KGB, and those people knew everything. Or maybe he was just old enough to know that the most secretive, bitter teenagers were still unfamiliar with that one thing that makes life most interesting.

He could still smell the acrid smoke and lubricant from that velvet-curtained room, where she showed him everything and then began to unbutton his pants. He knew what he had to do-he had to tell her to stop, to talk with her about her family, about what had brought her to this terrible end, and help her find a way out-but he could not move. Afterward, when she collected the tip from Yevgeny, he overheard her say in her harsh Novosibirsk accent, “Sweet kid you got there.” Milo felt his heart cease beating.

Zsuzsa Papp, though, evoked none of those missionary feelings. When she came over to kiss Parkhall’s cheeks, she walked like someone who’d been to prep schools all her life. Confidence and entitlement and, with the kiss, a vague whiff of solicitude toward her inferiors. Somehow she filled out her floor-walking costume-a black miniskirt, red silk blouse, and platform shoes-without looking like a whore.

“Come to unwind, Terry?”

“Absolutely. And to bring someone who wants to meet you. Sebastian Hall.”

She settled her condescending eyes on Milo. Below them, high cheekbones showed a faint flush. “A fan?”

“Soon to be, I’m sure,” Milo said as he shook her limp hand. “I’m a private investigator. Looking for your friend, Henry Gray.”

The flush in her cheeks neither expanded nor contracted. “Someone’s hired you?” Her tone suggested that this was unlikely.

“An aunt,” Parkhall informed her. “What’s the name?”

“Sybil Erikson. From Vermont.”

A smile fixed itself to her face as she said, “Just a second,” and led Parkhall a few feet away. As they talked, Parkhall became flustered, making excuses for Milo’s presence. Then Zsuzsa returned wearing the same smile. “Why don’t you buy a private show? Otherwise we stay out here, and I’ll have to look like I’m chatting you up.”

A private dance, it turned out, cost fifty euros, or fourteen thousand forints, for fourteen minutes. She led him by the hand around tables and the main stage to a booth sectioned off by a heavy curtain, and he felt as if it were twenty years ago. There was a single plush chair, which she told him to sit in, and she took a moment to catch the rhythm of the ballad from the main room. She began to dance.

“Listen,” he said, raising his hands. “You don’t need to do this. I just want to talk.”

Without breaking her movements, she said, “You gay?”

“No.”

“Well, you paid for it,” she said as she slipped out of her blouse like a candy bar losing its wrapper. “I never cheat anyone.”

She was left in a black lacy bra and the miniskirt, and then she unwound the skirt to reveal a very small black thong. He could only think of one way to make her stop, and unlike twenty years ago he now had the courage to speak.

“I lied,” he said.

“What?”

“The story about me being a private investigator. It’s not true.”

She lowered her arms so they half-covered her bra. Smile gone. “What’s your name again? Sebastian?”

“No. It’s Milo Weaver.”

She cocked her head, as if he’d tapped her cheek. “Milo Weaver?”

“A couple months ago someone came here claiming to be me. I’d like to know who he was.”

Zsuzsa waited, staring with big eyes, giving no sign she knew anything about any of this.

He said, “You’re probably confused-I would be, too. And I can’t give you much more than my word. This guy who was pretending to be me-he was looking for your friend Henry. I think he’s the same guy that tried to kill him back in August. I think he’d come back to finish the job.”

Her face twisted, and she stepped back.

Milo started to get up-“Want to sit?”-but his movement provoked her to raise her arms in a defensive motion, so he settled back down.

“James Einner?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“The man who tried to kill Henry. Before he attacked Henry, he said his name was James Einner. Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” Milo lied.

“But you know who he works for.”

“I have suspicions.”

“CIA?”

“Very likely.”

“So do you. You did. You used to work for the CIA.”

“That’s true.”

She breathed through her nose so loudly that he could hear it over the music. “It’s about the letter, isn’t it?”

“I think so. But I don’t know what was in the letter. I don’t even know who sent it.”

She said, “Thomas Grainger.”

Milo stared hard. “Grainger sent Henry a letter?”

“You know this man.”

Milo tried to get the facts straight, the timetable. By the time he was in jail in August, when Gray received the letter, Grainger had been dead for weeks. “He was a friend. He’s dead now.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“The letter said that if Henry received it, it meant that he was dead.”

Milo wasn’t looking at her; instead, he was staring at his own knees, assembling and reassembling the known facts, which were still too few. Then her platform shoes stepped into his field of vision. She said, “Is Henry dead? Did that man kill him?”

Milo looked up, and Zsuzsa’s mascara was bleeding at the corner of her eye. “I don’t know. You haven’t heard from him?”

She shook her head.

“Where did he go? How could he just disappear? He’d have to have resources.”

“He told me nothing. He wanted to protect me. He just told me he would go away for a while, and that I should only answer questions from Milo Weaver.”

“From me?”

“Or that other guy. I don’t know the difference anymore.”

“Why me? I don’t get it.”

“The letter,” she said as if he were dense. “Thomas Grainger’s letter said that Henry could only trust Milo Weaver, because Milo Weaver was already looking into it.”

“It?”

“The story he told Henry. About the CIA and the Sudan and Tourists.”

Milo stared hard at her. “That’s what the letter was about?”

“Henry said we would be like Woodward and Bernstein. Or maybe I said that. We were going to write the story together.”

Milo considered just how much she’d been through in the last half year. Her boyfriend was tossed off a terrace, put in a coma, then revived only to disappear immediately afterward. During those few days before he vanished, he must have talked endlessly about CIA conspiracies, China, and assassinations in the Sudan. And Tourists. Because of her obsessive search for him, she’d lost her newspaper job and now spent evenings stripping. At least it was safer than international intrigues. Until now. A new Milo Weaver had stormed her safe haven.

Her tears had disappeared, and she’d fixed the mascara smear without him noticing. She was looking at a clock on the wall. “Your fourteen minutes are up.”

“I’ll buy fourteen more.”

“No way. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Anything I can say to convince you?”

“Nothing,” she said. Without making a show of it, she unclipped her bra and slipped out of it, standing over him so that he was watching her breasts from below. She bent slightly to remove her thong, gingerly unhooking it over her heels, then stood straight, hands on her hips, staring down at him, showing off the geometric perfection of her sculpted pubic hair. It was, he reflected later, the pose in which she might feel most powerful when dealing with a man. It worked, because a trembling weakness slithered through him.

“You paid for it,” she said, then collected her discarded clothes and walked naked out through the curtain.

22

He found Parkhall up against the stage, grinning wildly at a pair of blondes gyrating across one another like Greek wrestlers, sharing a bottle of baby oil. To Milo, he said, “Fantastic, isn’t she?”

“Which one?”

“Zsuzsa, you idiot. My God. How a loser like Henry Gray got on with her… it’s a mystery for the ages.”

“I’m heading out,” Milo said, but he didn’t leave. Parkhall convinced him to buy a ludicrously priced bottle of Törley champagne, which they shared with a girl named Agí, who turned out to have an in-depth knowledge of European economics. Parkhall went into interview mode, as if she were a government finance minister, and Milo had a suspicion that Agí was going to show up in one of his Times pieces as a “parliament member speaking under condition of anonymity.”

The champagne went down weakly, so Milo ordered a gimlet. A gaggle of loud English hooligans in the front got on his nerves, and the sight of so much flesh left him with a vague but lasting impression of skin covered in fingerprints, like overused shot glasses.

The American-run 4Play Club, he learned from Parkhall, marketed itself to non-Hungarians for the simple reason that Hungarians wouldn’t pay as much for what they had to offer. There were other clubs in town, but most were dark and potentially dangerous fleshpots run by the Russian mafia, where you would receive an outrageous bill, and then big men would walk you all the way to the cash machine. The majority of the customers were young Englishmen, part of the weekend vacationer boom made possible by cut-rate European airlines. Since it was often cheaper to fly to and get loaded in Eastern Europe than to spend a weekend drinking at London pubs, some cities had become flooded with these kids bursting with beer and itching for fights. They had done so much damage to Prague that laws had been passed to keep them out. Now the hooligans had discovered Budapest.

James Einner, he thought. Of course they’d sent James to get rid of Henry Gray. He was the only living Tourist, besides Milo, who knew anything about the Sudanese operation.

James had only been following orders, just as Milo had only been following orders when he mailed a package to Theodor Wartmüller that resulted in the death of Adriana Stanescu. When James returned in December to finish the job, he’d remembered the letter-only trust Milo Weaver-and used that name. Knowing all this did nothing to curb Milo’s anger. He drank and watched the endless parade of flesh and, though he would soon leave it, hated everything to do with his lousy business.

At twelve thirty, Zsuzsa appeared onstage to the unbridled joy of the MC, who referred to her as a “shining example of Hungary’s national product” before mixing in Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” The English boys seemed to agree.

He watched the entire performance, about halfway through realizing he was hypnotized by it. She moved to the off-beats rather than the drums, and it created the illusion of a movie that’s gone slightly out of sync. By the time she was down to her heels and thong, his eyes were red and tired, and he closed them. As he faded, an unexpected memory came to him: his and Tina’s first visit with Dr. Bipasha Ray, back in September.

It had been during a downpour, and he’d had to run from the train, coat over his head, to make it on time. Tina’s car was parked outside the therapist’s Long Island residence, and when the doctor opened her door Milo saw Tina sitting dry and composed on the couch, watching him closely. Examining him. He wasn’t sure why until he looked into Dr. Ray’s face.

He didn’t know what he had expected. Some elderly Indian specialist, perhaps, or some awkward social outcast. Bipasha Ray, who was actually Bengali, looked like a Bollywood film star, breathtakingly gorgeous. Rounded chin, blue eyes between her impossibly dark lashes, a summer dress. Her toenails-later, they would refer to her as “the barefoot therapist”-were painted bright red. He shook her hand and came inside, apologizing for dripping on the hardwood floor, and for the rest of the visit felt as if Tina were inspecting his every interaction with her.

The next day when they met for lunch, Tina seemed almost outraged by Dr. Ray’s beauty. “I wonder how many marriages she’s ended. I mean, couples come in, their relationship fragile, and I’ll lay odds half the men fall in love with her by the third session.”

“Erotic transference?” he’d asked and wondered if he might have a problem with that. He never did. How could he? The therapist’s beauty, and Tina’s close, continual watch, kept him guarded at all times. He didn’t have the time or energy to fall in love with Dr. Ray.

A change in music woke him, and he drowsily paid his tab, realizing that Parkhall had put all his drinks on it. He reached the door before Parkhall caught up with him. “Hey, man. Where you going?”

“Hotel. I’m beat.”

“Well, you did something right. Zsuzsa wants a word with you.”

Milo didn’t feel up to that mix of seduction and scorn. “She can find me at the Ibis.”

Parkhall looped an arm over his shoulder. “You don’t get it, do you? She wants a word with you in the private booth. You lucky cunt.”

It took another fifty euros-he was nearly broke now-but soon he was in the same place where they’d talked before, and Zsuzsa was already waiting. She was dressed for home, the makeup cleaned off, her hair up, and a fur-lined coat hanging from the back of the chair, where she sat. “All right, Mr. Weaver,” she said, her arms crossed tightly. “Now you.”

“Now me what?”

“The clothes. Off with them.”

“For this I pay fifty euros?”

He did as she asked, thinking of mothers who tell their children to always leave the house wearing clean underwear. He paused when he was down to his T-shirt and underwear, but she flicked a long, painted nail and waited until he was completely naked. He felt cold, and wondered how the girls took to the iffy heating here, if they complained, or if the exertion of dancing made it bearable. He thought of a lot of things to avoid speculating on how he looked.

“Why is your arm bandaged?”

“I burned myself cooking.”

“Okay,” she said. “Put them back on.”

“What was that?” he asked as he stepped into his underwear.

“Checking for a gun. Or a wire.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Weaver. I do remember your name from that letter, and I remember a man who used your name. But you? Maybe you’re James Einner.”

Milo had gotten one leg into his pants. “If you don’t trust me, then why are we here?”

“One thing I’ve learned is that I’ll never find Henry on my own.”

Milo buttoned his shirt.

“When I was dancing, it occurred to me that I’m going to have to trust someone. Why not you? I like your face.”

“Thanks.”

“Your body’s a joke, but your face is almost believable.”

“Oh,” he said.

“This is hard for me,” she said philosophically. “I’m shaking. See?”

She showed a slender hand, but in the dim light it looked perfectly still.

“And I lied.”

“You lied?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t trust you at all.”

“Then why-”

She raised her hand in a silencing motion. “He said to trust you. He called me. Just now, just after I danced.”

“Who’s he?”

“Who do you think, Mr. Weaver? Henry.”

He stared at her. “You’ve been in contact with him all this time?”

She shook her head but didn’t say anything. Briefly, she focused on some point between them, thinking. She said, “I was starting to believe he was dead-and then he calls.”

“Now? Why now?”

She snapped out of it and shrugged. “It’s a coincidence, isn’t it? The other time you showed up just after he’d woken. Now, he calls the same night you’re here. Remarkable.”

Remarkable, yes, but Milo didn’t believe in a coincidence like this. James Einner had arrived in town because he had learned that Gray had woken. That was cause and effect. It was explainable. But Henry calling while Milo was in town? “What did Henry say?”

“He said he’s done.”

“Done with what?”

“His work. It’s done.”

“The story? He’s done with that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I’m just happy he’s alive.” She didn’t sound happy, though.

“It’s good news.”

She looked at him, the corner of her lip rising slightly. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Sorry. But it is good news, for us both.”

“What do you have planned?”

“I just want to talk to him.”

“And then?”

“And then leave. I’ve got a family I want to return to.”

She smiled and said, “That’s charming.”

“Now you’re patronizing me,” Milo said as he kneeled to tie his shoes. “Can I meet him?”

She considered that. Henry had told her to trust him, but Zsuzsa was the one with the power now, and she seemed to be toying with it, estimating its weight. “I’d like to see him first.”

“Why don’t we go together?”

She shook her head, then grabbed her coat. “Tomorrow at Moskva tér. You know where it is?”

Milo had passed through Moscow Square on his way to St. John’s Hospital. “Yes.”

“Go there at two o’clock, and he’ll come to you.”

“How will he find me?”

“Unlike me, he knows what the real Milo Weaver looks like.”

It was a kind of answer. Milo stood. “Thank you.”

With awkward formality, he shook her hand and thanked her again. He gave her a few minutes so she wouldn’t suspect he was following, then left the club by keeping close to the wall, far from Parkhall, who was laughing uncontrollably with two girls, both his hands occupied under the table.

23

He woke with a mild hangover and a sore arm but left the hotel quickly. He was down to less than a hundred euros, which he changed into forints and used to buy breakfast from a bakery on Batthany Square, on the Buda side of the river. He considered writing an e-mail to Alan Drummond, to assure him that he would return soon, and to ask for a meeting with James Einner, but decided against it. He could think of no reason for putting Drummond’s mind at ease. Then, as he was finishing his coffee, he noticed, out on the street, a man in his fifties, thinning on top, wearing a heavy overcoat and smoking beside a closed travel agent’s office with sun-bleached posters of Egypt and Rome.

With the Gray meeting just a few hours away, it was easy to forget that there were more things going on. The shadows from Berlin and London, whom he’d never identified. Perhaps they were working for the Chinese, perhaps for the Germans. Or maybe Drummond was a liar, and they were working for him. Whoever they were, he didn’t want them around when he met with Gray.

He paid his tab and descended into the subway without looking back. He took a train to Deák Ferenc tér, then switched to the Millennium Railway-the world’s second-oldest subway-that took him back to Oktogon. Again, he joined the crowds on that busy square and worked his way around to Szondi, but continued past number 10, keeping an eye on the scaffoldings with the curtains of plastic netting. It was Sunday, and the construction workers were still gone. There-on the right side of the street was a particularly messy site, with loose steel bars that had yet to be pieced together. He parted the netting and went inside, grabbing a heavy, meter-length of pipe, and stepped into the cavernous, dirty foyer. He waited.

He didn’t know how long it would take, but he was willing to wait as long as necessary. In the end, it took a half hour. During that time, two residents left the building, and each time he took out his battery-less cell phone and spoke German into it, pretending to be an investor wondering where his workers were. Then, a little after twelve thirty, his shadow entered the building.

There was a moment-less than a second-when he had to examine the face from his squatting position. He didn’t want to brutalize some innocent Hungarian. In that moment the shadow, too, recognized him. Milo was prepared, the pipe already drawn back, and as soon as he registered the heavy jowls and deep-set eyes, he put all his effort into the swing. The hollow end of the pipe made a faint whistling sound as it arced along the low path, just below the knee. A muted thump and crunch as the shin cracked.

There was no dramatic pause. Milo followed through with his swing, only briefly slowing on impact; then gravity took over, dropping the man to the ground, the tails of his trench coat catching on the pipe as the screaming began, filling the old Habsburg entryway.

At first, there was nothing intelligible from the screams, and Milo straightened and held the pipe like a shotgun aimed at the man’s head. He waited. Certainly some residents would be waking to the sound, suddenly interrupting their lunches, but he ignored that. He stared at the man’s twisted, screaming face.

He knew, of course, that this was just a man hired for a job. A simple job that Milo himself had done many times. Milo felt nothing. This was just collateral damage.

He squatted again as the screams became more intelligible. Oh Jesus fuck, my leg! My leg! American. The man held on to his shin, as blood spilled between his fingers. Milo got close to his bucking face and shouted, “Who do you work for?”

“Jesus Fucking H. Christ!”

“Who do you work for?”

The curses continued, and Milo dropped the pipe and grabbed the lapels of the trench coat and dragged the man deeper into the foyer, close to the stairs. A long trail of blood streaked the dirty tiles. He worried the man was going to pass out, so he slapped him twice, hard, and repeated the question. He didn’t get an answer, but the shouting ceased as the man fumbled with his wet, flopping shin and moaned softly.

It had been a mistake. He could see that now. He went back for the pipe, then squatted by his head. “Listen to me. Are you listening?”

Finally, the man registered him with his eyes. He didn’t answer, but the eyes were enough. Milo held up the pipe. “I’m going to brain you unless you tell me who you’re working for.”

“Global. Security.”

Global Security was one of the smaller security firms that had received government contracts to ease the military strain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hired guns, which told him nothing. “Who hired you to follow me?”

“How should I know?” the man shouted. His face was wet with tears.

A woman’s voice shouted from above: “Mi történik legyöz ott?” Milo dropped the pipe, and as the clattering noise filled the building he started going through the man’s pockets. The man didn’t fight back. Finally, he found the cell phone and began running through the call logs. “What’s his name?”

“I told you, I don’t know!”

“Your boss. What’s the name of your boss?”

“Cy!”

There it was-cy-three calls in the last two days. Milo called the number and waited until a male voice with a southern accent said, “You lose him again, Raleigh?”

“No, he didn’t lose me,” said Milo. “He’s right here.”

“Shit,” said Cy.

“Listen, I’ve broken Raleigh’s leg, but he’s not telling me what I need to know. Maybe you can. Otherwise, I’m going to kill him.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Who’s hired you to keep tabs on me?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

Milo picked up the pipe and swung it against Raleigh’s broken leg. As the echoes of his screams started to fade, Milo returned to the phone. “You’ll tell me now, Cy. Otherwise, Raleigh dies right here. Then, over the next week, members of your family start disappearing. At the end of the week, I come for you.”

The boss made a sighing sound. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?”

“You’ve caught me in a very poor mood.”

“Fuck,” said Cy.

“Én hívja a rendőrséget!” called the upstairs voice.

A half hour later, Milo was back in Buda, joining the crowded, steep subway escalator up to Moscow Square as he chewed Nicorette. Faces passed him heading down into the earth, a whole range of faces, all the varieties of Caucasian. His anger had left, and with it the adrenaline shakes. Now all he felt was a stoic animosity. Why hadn’t he figured it out before? Who would give a damn about where Milo Weaver was at any time? Not the Chinese, and not the Germans. Alan Drummond didn’t need to track him all over the place. There was only one person who cared about what Milo was up to. Senator Nathan Irwin. He lived in fear that Milo would sit up one day and present the evidence that tied the senator to last year’s Sudanese debacle. Irwin, like any careful politician, was covering his ass.

For the rest of today at least, Irwin would have to depend on guesswork.

Moscow Square had the intense feel of a transportation hub. Teenagers met in small groups, others walked quickly to buses and trams, and small, dark men in leather jackets sold things from rickety tables and from beneath their jackets. There was something seedy about this open, triangular space, and the smell of fried food and the incessant traffic around its border just added to that feeling. The one blessing was an unseasonable warmth in the air, a premature spring day.

He browsed a magazine stand and walked the circumference of the square, stolidly ignoring vendors who approached with cell phones, Easter trinkets, shoes, and books. For the benefit of blue-clad Hungarian policemen, he kept moving. On one side, traffic jammed the roads leading around old buildings with billboards for McDonald’s, Raiffeisenbank, and Nespresso, with an enormous George Clooney taking a pleasing sip. The other side rose precipitously to Castle Hill, where tourists boarded squat electric buses to take them all the way up into that rarefied district.

A little before two, he chose a spot near the steps leading up to the castle road, stuck his hands in his pockets, and let his slack face be seen from as many angles as possible. No one seemed to notice him, or care. Everyone was heading somewhere or selling something.

Henry Gray approached from behind, trotting down the steps in a light, airy manner that was decidedly not Hungarian. “Sorry I’m late,” he said without any sign that this was a potentially life-threatening rendezvous; it threw Milo. He stuck out a hand, and Gray took it casually, a single pump before releasing.

He was in his midthirties: narrow face, dark sideburns, thinning on top. His green eyes looked as if they had been put on with CGI. Three-or four-day beard. He looked like a hundred other young expats.

“And you are?” Milo asked to be sure. “Henry Gray. And you’re Milo Weaver. You look just like your photographs.”

“My photographs?”

“Yeah,” he said as he pointed across the square and began to walk, “but your nose wasn’t so fucked up.”

24

Milo walked with him along a crowded crosswalk to a small, busy side street that led to a mall-Mammut Mall, with its signature woolly mammoth logo. “I used to go to the pubs when I first came. Sörözős. Dark, gloomy places. After a while they just tire you out. Then the cafés. The bonus there is all the pretty girls, and nowadays the coffee is actually good. But that’s tiring, too-there’s always some social aspect to it. Now, it’s easiest to just go to the mall for a drink.” Gray smiled, as if he hadn’t had a chance to speak with an American in a while. “Moved all the way to Central Europe, just to become a suburbanite!”

They took escalators to the third floor, then crossed a glassed-in bridge over another street to enter the modern half of the mall, where overpriced restaurants tempted shoppers. Gray headed directly to Leroy’s, the darkest of the bunch, full of smoking women and their overdressed hangers-on. Gray ordered a mojito, so Milo ordered the same, and as they waited Milo cut into another monologue about the virtues of shopping malls. “Why’d you disappear, Henry?”

“Disappear?”

“From the hospital. You didn’t even tell Zsuzsa where you were.” Gray considered that, then smiled when the waitress returned with two tall drinks stuffed with fresh mint, lime, and long brown straws. He took a sip and said, “What do you think? You think that when I woke up I’d just go back to my life like everything was fine? This guy, he meant to kill me.”

“You mean James Einner.”

“You know who he is?”

“I can probably find out.”

“Good. Good.” Another sip. “Anyway, James Einner messed up. I knew that. And sooner or later he was bound to find out that I’d woken up. What was I going to do? What would you do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Me, I’m a journalist. If I can’t track stories, I don’t want to keep living. It’s the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I want to do.”

“So what did you do?”

Gray wrapped his lips around the straw and arched his brows. “You don’t know already?”

“All I know is, you got a letter from an old friend of mine, Thomas Grainger. Then this other guy, James Einner, tried to kill you. When you woke from your coma, you disappeared, and someone showed up looking for you, pretending to be me. Maybe it was Einner, maybe not. Then, yesterday, you called Zsuzsa while I was at the club, looking for you. How did you know I was there?”

“That was a coincidence. I didn’t know you were there. Not for sure.”

“So what triggered the call?”

“I told her. I was done. I’d finished my story.”

“And you told her to trust me.”

“Of course I did. The letter said to trust you.”

“The one from Thomas Grainger.”

“Exactly,” Gray said, then smiled. “I see what you’re thinking. If some other guy showed up pretending to be you, how could I be so stupid as to sit with you now?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s a good point.”

“I’m not entirely gullible,” he said with satisfaction. “First, the photograph-I know you are who you say you are. Of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe Grainger didn’t know you as well as he thought he did, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s why I’ve got backup.”

“Right now?”

He nodded, then glanced around. There were enough people in the restaurant and just outside in the mall itself that his backup could be anywhere. “They’re good at hiding,” he said.

“Who?”

“The Chinese.”

It felt like the kind of non sequitur a conspiracy theorist like Gray would make; then it didn’t. “Why the Chinese?”

“Because that’s who I went to, all right?”

“After you woke up?”

“When your own country is trying to kill you, it’s not called treason. It’s called survival.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

Gray looked like he didn’t believe Milo, but it didn’t matter anymore; he had backup, after all. “I woke in that hospital, and I knew that as soon as James Einner figured out I was alive, I was dead. Days, weeks, whatever. In the end, dead. I couldn’t go to the Hungarians, because they would just hand me to the CIA. And what did I have? Nothing, except a story. Einner might have stolen the letter, but he couldn’t take this,” he said, tapping his skull.

“After months in a coma, you remembered it all?”

“Not all. Fragments. Zsuzsa remembered more than I did. We worked together on it before I left.”

“Before you disappeared.”

“Yes.”

“So by the time you disappeared you had something of value to give the Chinese.”

“Exactly.” Gray chewed the end of his straw. “I got the hell out of the hospital and went to Benczúr utca. I went to the front desk of the embassy and asked for political asylum. I was passed on to someone who took down my story.”

Milo followed the brown straw from Gray’s pursed, damp lips down to the forest in his glass. Gray had gone to the Chinese-what were the odds? Milo said, “You gave them the whole story right away?”

“Pieces. The important pieces-the Sudan, the Tiger, the mullah. I wanted their protection for the rest. I told them I’d be staying at the Marco Polo-it’s a hostel in town. Took them two days, then I got a call. They wanted to meet me, but not at the embassy. They gave me some address out in Budakalász. That’s north of here. I took the tram and then walked a while. They picked me up on the way and drove me someplace completely different.”

“They were careful.”

“Of course they were. I was important to them.”

Milo noticed pride in Gray’s voice. “Where did you go?”

“South. Budaörs, off the M1. There was a fat guy there. Chinese-they were all Chinese. We talked.”

“Name?” Milo said through a suddenly dry mouth.

“He told me to call him Rick. It was a joke-he wanted me to know that the Chinese people really could pronounce the letter r.” He grinned-clearly, Gray liked Rick. “Knowing his real name wouldn’t do either of us any good. It didn’t matter to me-I was just afraid for my life. Rick wanted to help me. I would tell him all I knew about this story-everything I could remember from the letter-and he would help me do the research in safety. This was crucial. Only by publishing the story would I be safe.”

Milo didn’t answer. He rested his chin on his knuckles, trying to digest the sequence. Gray told the Chinese about the Sudan. Why? Because Milo’s own friend, Tom Grainger, had written a letter. That letter would have stayed with Gray were it not for James Einner and his botched murder-and it wouldn’t have been sent in the first place had Nathan Irwin not ordered Grainger’s execution.

Where, really, did the blame lie?

As if reading his mind, Gray said, “I’m not going to make apologies, you know. It’s you people who put me in this situation.”

“I’m not asking for apologies,” said Milo. “Go on.”

“Well, that’s what we did. I wrote down everything I remembered from the letter, and he worked with me to remember what I’d forgotten. He had some interrogation techniques-no waterboarding, nothing like that, just mind tricks, free association. When I remembered something, he would leave and go to verify details along the way. When I had trouble, he’d prod me with things he knew-secret things-to see if they brought up more information.”

“Until you had reconstructed the whole letter.”

“Yes. And he was angry. Rick was. He didn’t know about the operation in the Sudan, and I could see how pissed off it made him. People say the Chinese are inscrutable, but that’s bullshit. They’re as hot-tempered as the rest of us.”

“Did he say anything? That he was going to take revenge?”

“You’re not listening. I’m his revenge. My story-it’s going to bust open the Department of Tourism. Expose it. Rick says that for a department like that, the only real threat is exposure. We don’t even need to show people how bad it is, just that it exists. Then the politicians and journalists will do the rest of the work. Pick it apart until there’s nothing left of it. But we have to prove it exists.”

It was eerie how perfectly that echoed Drummond’s own fears. “So how do you prove it exists?”

“Elbow grease. Work. They hooked up the safe house with broadband, and I got to work. Wasn’t easy-it’s taken two months. Rick came back from his trips with new information to help out.”

“What kind?”

“Financial records, biographies of some of the players. Thomas Grainger, for instance. I learned all about him. Angela Yates, your friend who was killed. You.”

“What did you learn about me?”

He grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yes,” Milo said without smiling. “I would.”

Gray’s smile disappeared. “The usual. Family, the job-that you used to be one of those Tourists but had moved into administration-and that you were the one guy who had been interested in uncovering what happened in the Sudan. That it cost you your family, and your freedom. In some ways, of the two of us I’m the one who got off light.”

Milo leaned back, not liking the easy way Gray placed them both in the same category. He hated that this man knew so much about him. “How far have you come?”

“Far enough. I’ve already written the first two articles on the department. I e-mailed one to the New York Times this morning.”

That surprised Milo; then it didn’t. It was why Gray was willing to meet him now. He’d already unleashed the Chinese revenge. E-mail was notoriously insecure, of course. By now it would have been flagged and a Company representative would be sitting with the editor-in-chief, ready to make a deal. “They won’t print it.”

“Then I’ll try the Washington Post. And I’ll keep trying until I’ve got a sympathetic ear.” He had the earnest tone of a true believer. “The evidence is there-the fiscal black holes that pay for the department, the links between Senator Nathan Irwin and the oil lobby wanting to push the Chinese out of Africa. It was international-you know that, right? They had help from French oil. It wasn’t just an American plot; it was a Western plot. This is as big as stories come, Milo, and I’m not going to let it go.”

25

The waitress returned, and Gray ordered another round. Milo hardly noticed. He was working his way through everything, feeling paralyzed by the slow buildup of revelations. Rick was, he felt sure, Xin Zhu, the Chinese spymaster. Before following that to its logical conclusion, though, he felt he had to deal with the remarkable coincidence of their meeting now. “Last night, when you called Zsuzsa, did you clear it with Rick?”

“Of course I did. We’d had a ton of progress over the last week, and I was writing like mad. I was exhausted. I wanted to see her again.”

“What kind of progress?”

“Well, we learned what happened to you, for instance.”

“What happened to me?”

“You survived, didn’t you? Grainger’s letter told us you were investigating, but we weren’t sure if you were one of the casualties or not. Everyone wanted your ass, after all. You got out of prison and went to live in New Jersey-we knew that-but then you disappeared, and we didn’t know until this week that you really were still alive.”

“How’d you figure that out?”

“Ask Rick. He came in with the information.”

Milo nodded at this. “So you had all the information you needed, and you wanted to see your girlfriend.”

“But Rick wanted to be cautious. Last night he finally told me it was safe to call.”

“And me? Did he know I was around?”

“What do you think?” said Gray. “Yeah. He said you might be around. And that I shouldn’t worry about you.”

Milo thought a moment, then said, “They’re done with you. You do realize that, right? You’re on your own now.”

Gray shook his head. “I might look like I’m alone and helpless, but trust me-they’ve got my back. They want this story out as much as I do.”

Milo turned to gaze at the crowds in the mall. “They’re not there.”

“These guys are much better than you think.”

Milo stared at him, at the confidence he was working hard to sustain. Gray hadn’t asked the most important question, which was whether or not Milo was working for Tourism again. Either it hadn’t occurred to him, or it had, and he was too terrified to ask. That’s how people worked. They avoided the things that most terrified them, even if knowing could save their lives.

Milo changed tactics. “Why do you think your friend Rick wants to expose the Department of Tourism?”

Gray blinked at his denseness. “Why do you think? To ruin it. To finish it off, so it won’t keep blustering into China’s business.”

“Rick’s a smart guy,” said Milo. “He knows that as soon as you get rid of Tourism, another department will take its place. There’s always clandestine funds available. He gets rid of Tourism, and he loses the one secret he has on the Company. That’s not how a spy works. When you get hold of intelligence, you keep it and use it. You only give it up if you’re forced to do so.”

The lesson was lost on Gray. He raised a hand and patted the air. “Rick’s no more complicated than the rest of us, Milo. He was angry about the Sudan. An angry man isn’t going to fool around with intelligence games.”

Milo doubted that. What Gray couldn’t really know in his bones was that espionage rarely, if ever, provoked wild emotions from men like Rick. Xin Zhu and Alan Drummond and Nathan Irwin-and even Milo himself for a while-worked from behind desks, and, to them, losses and gains were extended mathematical equations. Variables represented trade alliances, corporate influence, nuclear programs, spheres of influence, and the occasional human being. No one could get so upset over math.

“What kind of man is Rick?”

“Physically? Fat, but he carries his weight well.”

“Personality? Is he a joker?”

“Oh, the R joke.” Gray shook his head. “That was his single one-liner during the past two months. This guy doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s like an angry priest.”

“What about women?”

“Never came up, not really. But I get the sense that if he has one it’s a little wife back in Beijing he would never think of cheating on.”

Just the kind of man you’d trust, thought Milo. While Marko’s drunk, womanizing Xin Zhu was tailor-made for him. Milo wiped his mouth to suppress a smile of admiration.

Not just admiration but awe, because he’d followed everything through to its logical conclusion. Zhu had played this brilliantly.

Henry Gray had been used from the start. Thomas Grainger had tried to use him, posthumously, to reveal an operation he had grown disgusted with (disgust was one of the few emotions administrators knew intimately), and then Xin Zhu had used him to collect enough intelligence about Tourism so that he could pretend to have a mole working in it.

Because there was no mole in Tourism, and there never had been.

He couldn’t help it; the smile flowered on his face. Gray leaned forward and said, “What?”

No mole.

Now, everything fell into place beautifully.

It began with a story written by Grainger. The letter would have remained in his lawyer’s office if he’d remained alive. The Company had killed him, though, and so it was sent to Henry Gray. The Company tried to clean up the mess as it too often did-by killing-but there was a mistake. Gray survived, and so did the story of the Sudanese operation run through the Department of Tourism. Again, the Company was at fault, for its attempted murder led Gray straight into the hands of Xin Zhu, a Chinese spymaster who kept Gray around to help with the investigation.

At the beginning, this had probably been the entire plan: Help a journalist humiliate the Company as payback for its reckless interference in Africa.

Then, during one of Xin Zhu’s absences he found himself in Kiev, liaising with the SSU, and learned of one Marko Dzubenko, a blustering lieutenant planning to defect. With the kind of creativity that’s rare among administrators, he asked the SSU to please not arrest Dzubenko-some sort of deal would have had to be struck. Bring him to the next embassy party, will you? In person, pretending to be a drunk blowhard, he gave Dzubenko a story he couldn’t help but use later to buy himself a new life in America.

It was beautiful because it was so clean. In the end Zhu did so little. He helped an American journalist work on a story. He told a lie to a defector. Later, when he decided Tourism needed another kick, he passed along the request for the Chinese ambassador to the UN to deliver a single sentence about the Sudan, then refuse to go into details. Zhu knew that there had been a senator working behind the scenes, and any senator would panic at the possibility that the Chinese held a scandal in their hands.

It was beautiful, too, in that its minimalism reflected the minimalism of the original operation in the Sudan. Kill one man and make it look as if the Chinese committed the murder. Zhu’s plan was even more beautiful because no one needed to be killed, or even hurt, whereas last year’s plot had killed one man initially, resulting in riots in the Sudan that had killed more than eighty; then more died just to keep it quiet. Milo was stunned by the audacity of Xin Zhu’s ingeniousness.

“What is it?” Gray insisted.

“Where’s the house?”

“What?”

“Where’s the safe house? I want to see it.”

Gray considered that, staring past Milo at the diners and shoppers, probably looking for his backup. “Why?”

“Because I’d love to meet Rick,” he said. He really did want to meet Xin Zhu but knew it wouldn’t happen. Not today, at least.

“This might all sound like a joke to you, but you won’t be safe there.”

“Henry, really. I’d love to meet him. Hell, I might even offer him my services.”

“Why are you jerking my chain?”

“I’m jerking nothing.”

Gray considered that, then shrugged and stood up. “I’m not going to be responsible for what they do to you.”

“You’re officially exempt from responsibility.”

Milo paid the bill, then followed Gray back out to the street, where he waved down a taxi. Gray negotiated with the driver while Milo went back and forth over his realizations, checking them off one after the other. He was sure of this.

When Gray turned to look at the cars behind them, Milo said, “They’re not there, are they?”

“What you don’t know could fill the Vatican.”

To reach Budaörs, the taxi driver took the same highway Milo had used to reach Budapest, then exited near the IKEA and ended up in a town of small, clay-tiled houses with muddy yards and new cars. To their left a fallow field opened up, and then a right placed them on a gravel street of new houses, with foreign cars and reinforced concrete gates. They stopped at number 16, and Milo paid the taxi bill with the last of his forints.

“Your last chance,” Gray said as he used a key on the gate.

“No cars,” Milo noted.

“They like public transport. More democratic.”

“Of course.”

Gray rang the bell on the front door, then used another key. No one waited for them, and the first room they entered was stripped down to its bare walls and hardwood floor. Gray stopped, shocked, then ran to the other rooms, finally shouting, “Motherfucker! They took my computer!”

Involuntarily, Milo started to laugh. Xin Zhu had only been interested in sending a message, and Milo was there to receive it: We know who you are and what you did. We can touch you whenever we like.

He took the pieces of his phone out of his pocket and put it back together, walking slowly through the empty rooms. He found Gray coming out of a bathroom, wiping vomit from his lips. He started to say something to Milo but changed his mind.

Milo’s phone rang. He took it to the kitchen.

“Riverrun, past Eve.”

“And Adam’s,” said Milo.

“You’re in some serious shit,” said Drummond. “Irwin’s on the warpath for you.”

“I bet he is.”

“Get yourself back home.”

“I’ll need my credit cards.”

“They’ll be working in an hour, okay?”

“One more thing,” said Milo. “You can unfreeze the department. There’s no mole.”

“What?”

Milo gave him the short version, and though he was doubtful, Drummond said, “What kind of bastard dreams up such a thing?”

“Don’t talk that way about the man I love,” Milo said, then hung up.

26

By the time he landed at JFK, it was Tuesday morning. He drove a rental into midtown and, knowing the lot beside 101 West Thirty-first would be full of employees’ cars, parked in a public lot on West Twenty-ninth and walked over to the Avenue of the Americas, then up the busy sidewalk to Thirty-first. Cameras positioned along the streets surrounding the Department of Tourism’s headquarters tracked his progress, and when he reached the entrance to the inconspicuous brick tower two doormen were already waiting.

In the old days, he would have known these huge men who acted as Tourism’s first barrier against intrusion, and called them by name, but these two had come along after his dismissal, and they were as mute and humorless as their predecessors. There was one familiar face, though-Gloria Martinez, who worked the front desk. She was pretty but stern; this had never stopped Milo from flirting with her in an unending game of proposal and rejection.

The last time she’d seen him, Milo was being beaten to the ground by three doormen in this cold lobby. Now, the look on her face suggested she had assumed him dead, and she showed the maximum emotion her position would allow: “Good to see you again, sir.”

“Ms. Martinez, you are, as ever, a sight for sore eyes.”

When he stopped to be photographed by the computer and stated his name for the microphone, Gloria Martinez didn’t even blink when he said, “Sebastian Hall.” She had only ever known him as Milo.

In the elevator the doormen patted him down, then used a key to access the twenty-second floor. The ride was silent, and Milo watched their stony faces in the mirrored walls.

When the doors opened, he involuntarily caught his breath. This, for six years, had been his daily destination, his nine-to-five. A quietly productive floor of cubicles and computers and busy Travel Agents combing through the intelligence sent in by a whole world of Tourists. Now, though, the most striking thing about the Department of Tourism was its emptiness. The maze of cubicles was still here, but they were empty. In a few, kneeling in mock prayer, technicians fooled with computer cables, tagging and logging hard drives, but they were like sweepers cleaning up after a parade, not even raising their heads to acknowledge the visitors heading to the offices along the far wall.

On the left and right, windows watched over the midpoints of skyscrapers under slate clouds, and ahead of them, through open blinds, was the office Grainger had used when running the department. It had been taken over by Owen Mendel, then the surprisingly young Alan Drummond, and now, behind the large desk, sat a prematurely white-haired man with reading glasses-fifty-five, Milo remembered. It was a familiar face from CNN talk shows and the occasional C-SPAN sleeper. He was a man not used to having to work through such volumes of paperwork, not used to having to lead a mole hunt. Senator Nathan Irwin.

Milo hoped that, for their first meeting, he wouldn’t snap and murder the senator.

Then again, he wasn’t sure what he hoped.

Irwin wasn’t alone in the office. Drummond was leaning back in a chair used for visitors, and two young men in suits stood around, slouched. One muttered into a cell phone and watched the visitors approach, then turned and said something to Irwin, who took off his glasses. All the men watched them enter.

“Thanks, guys,” Drummond said as he got to his feet, and the two doormen withdrew.

Irwin remained seated, so Drummond made introductions. “Nathan, this is Sebastian Hall.”

Irwin blinked at him, then shook his head. “You mean-”

“Yes,” Drummond cut in, “but for security we stick to work names.”

“Of course,” said Irwin. He finally pushed himself up and stretched a large hand across his desk-actually, Grainger’s desk. The department had decided to keep the oak monstrosity after his death.

Milo stepped forward and shook the senator’s cool hand.

“This,” Drummond continued, “is Max Grzybowski, the senator’s chief of staff.”

The blond young man stuck out a hand, smiling goofily. “Pleased to meet you.”

The one with the phone kept whispering into it but raised a hand and offered a salutary smile.

“He’s Dave Pearson, legislative director,” said Drummond, and Milo waved casually back. “They’re Senator Irwin’s personal assistants, and they’ve been given the same clearance as the senator.”

The senator nodded agreeably, then pointed at Milo. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, er, Hall. Have time for a drink?”

“That’s up to Mr. Drummond, sir. I’m due for some debriefing, I think.”

“It’s up to me now,” Irwin said before Drummond could answer, “and I want us to chat before your debriefing. Max, can you take care of it?”

After months on the road, there was something freakishly civilized about what followed. Max took out a BlackBerry. “Four o’clock all right?”

Milo shrugged.

Max said to Irwin, “That way you can still make dinner at six with the Joshipuras. Stout-it’s a bar up on Thirty-third.”

Dave Pearson finally ended his call. “Would you like me on hand?”

Everyone looked at Irwin, who shook his head. “Let’s keep this off the record, shall we, Hall?”

“I’m a big fan of off the record, sir.”

“Four at Stout should work,” Max told them both. “Minimal clientele.”

“You sound like a regular,” said Milo.

“Max is a regular of all the world’s better drinking establishments,” Irwin informed him, then settled back down. “Now, though, I’d like to hear a little more about your theory.”

“My theory?”

“Your theory that there is no mole in Tourism.”

There were no spare chairs, so Milo remained standing. “Sure. But first you have to get your mind around one thing that’s almost nonexistent in our line of work.”

“What’s that?” asked Irwin, and Drummond leaned forward expectantly.

“A sense of humor, sir.”

He took them through it all-Grainger’s letter, the failed attempt on Gray’s life, Gray’s approach to the Chinese, and Xin Zhu’s priming of Marko Dzubenko.

“It sounds to me,” Irwin said once he’d finished, “like you’re fond of this Chinaman.”

“He found a way to throw us into complete disarray and make us fear for our existence-all without harming a single person. We could learn a lot from his way of thinking.”

“Alan, what do you think?”

“About Xin Zhu?” Drummond asked, frowning.

“About the theory.”

Drummond mused on this, tilting his head from side to side. “It holds water. The strange thing, to me, was always that Marko Dzubenko and the Chinese ambassador referred to only one operation. We had to assume the Chinese had wider knowledge but preferred to only let this one out in order to pressure us. It was poker, and we had to assume they weren’t bluffing.”

“So now you’ve decided they were.”

“The Budapest safe house,” Milo cut in. “That’s what settled it for me. After helping him for months, they cut Gray off completely in the space of an afternoon. Took all his research with them. They’re not interested in him blowing our secrets.”

“Now that’s something I don’t quite get,” said Irwin. “Why wouldn’t they want to blow our secrets?”

“Because right now Xin Zhu owns that secret. He’s got the upper hand. All this was just to inform us of that fact.”

“Why now?” asked Dave Pearson, leaning against the blinds. Milo blinked at him. “What?”

“Why did they decide to let go of Henry Gray at this moment, rather than later? We’d just started the vetting process. If they’d waited another week, we might have completely gutted the department. It would have really damaged us.”

“It was me.”

“The world revolving around you again?” asked Drummond, smiling.

“Zhu learned I was in Budapest looking for Gray. It was convenient. He even told Gray that I was looking for him, and said he should meet me. He was never interested in ruining us.”

Irwin nodded slowly as it all became clear. “Jesus. The sons of bitches! I’m starting to share your admiration, Hall.” Then he turned to Max Grzybowski. “Make sure no one ever knows I said that.”

“Will do, Captain,” Max said, grinning.

“Let’s not all fall in love with Zhu,” Drummond said, shifting in his chair. “The fact is that his game cost five lives.”

“Who?” asked Milo.

“Recalling Tourists is never foolproof. You pull agents out in the middle of an operation, and some don’t make it. A couple of them were being watched and tried to hurry home too fast. One had to break out of jail to get back; he made it as far as the train yards before the dogs got him. The other two are just dead-no explanation yet.”

Everyone remained silent a moment, thinking about those deaths in far corners of the world.

“So don’t tell me Xin Zhu is some intelligence saint,” Drummond said.

Everyone in the room noticed the disgust in his voice, but Milo was the only one impressed by it.

27

Drummond walked him back to the elevator, and as they waited for it he muttered under his breath, lips unmoving, about the mess Irwin had been causing. “He’s comprehensive. It’s great when you’re going through a federal budget, but not now. I have no idea when we’ll be online again.”

“But it’s done now. Irwin can head back to Congress, and you can get back to work.”

“He’s demanding to oversee the reassignments. His assistants are advising him that if something blows up just after he’s left, he’ll get blamed for it. He’s already entered the swamp, and he wants to make sure he doesn’t track anything back onto the Senate floor.”

Milo glanced back. Irwin and his assistants were huddled together over their game plan. The technicians were far away.

Drummond said, “The Germans didn’t hurt you much, did they?”

“Just my pride. How did you know where I was?”

“When?”

“When I was at Erika Schwartz’s house. They took apart my phone, but you figured out where I was and got to her through Theodor Wartmüller. How?”

Drummond shrugged. “I guess I can share-you’ve got a tracker in your left shoulder.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do,” he insisted. “Since October all Tourists have one. Phone trackers are too easy to bust, or lose. You got yours in training, one of the hundred immunization shots.”

“No one told me?”

“We don’t tell anyone.”

Milo began to reflect on this fact, that every move he’d made had been easily tracked by Drummond on his computer. “Wait. That means you knew where I was after I kidnapped Adriana. You knew I didn’t take her body out into the countryside.”

Drummond stared back at him but said nothing. There was a kind of sadness in his face.

“You didn’t expect me to kill her, did you?”

Finally, Drummond said, “Don’t give yourself a headache. No, I didn’t want her dead, but we had to get rid of her. That’s why I chose you, the only Tourist with a child. I knew that, given a whole week, you’d find some other solution.”

“You could have told me that.”

“Maybe, but I wanted you to hide it from me. If I couldn’t figure it out, then no one else could, either.”

Milo couldn’t speak.

“And you came through-almost. What really went wrong?”

“I overestimated my friends. Then you had her killed anyway.”

“You were her last chance.”

Silence fell between them, and Milo hit the elevator button again. He didn’t know if he believed any of this, or if he just didn’t want to.

“You’re not really quitting, are you?”

“You’ll get my resignation letter by to night.”

“Jesus, Weaver. I need you here.”

The elevator opened, and Milo stepped inside. There was a pleading quality to Drummond’s voice that worried him, but he’d been through this so many times in his head that it was as if the resignation had already been filed. There were so many arguments he could make, but only one mattered: “We set up the girl. Then we killed her.”

“And because of that, we now have an open invitation at BND headquarters. They built an overpriced meeting room-Conference Room S-solely for meetings with us. After a year it’s finally being used. That’s no small thing.”

“Yet not big enough.”

Milo watched the despair grow on Drummond’s face as the doors slid shut. Beyond, one of the senator’s aides-Dave Pearson-was standing at the blinds, watching them.

By the time he was out on the street again, having nodded to the doormen and winked at Gloria, he felt something like freedom. Not freedom exactly, because he knew he would have to work to make it safely through the extensive exit interviews, but he was certainly lighter. It was the release from obligation, a rare and wonderful feeling.

He wanted to call Tina, and even stopped at a pay phone, but changed his mind. Better to go to her later, when he knew he could stay. He stuck a square of Nicorette into his mouth.

Stout was mostly empty, partly because the after-work revelers had moved farther uptown, partly because most of its remaining clientele hadn’t gotten out of work yet. He settled at the extremely long, woody bar and ordered a vodka martini. It was delicious, and he thought over all the vodka martinis he’d had over the last three months, in Moscow, Paris, Podgorica, London, Zürich, Budapest, Berlin, Rome…

While the drink’s name made most people think of Italy, the only place he’d ever had a really good one-big, ice cold, and very strong-was in Manhattan. Though Stout’s version wasn’t nearly as good as, say, the Underbar of the W Hotel on Union Square, it was still leagues ahead of any Florentine café’s, and he gave the bartender-a blonde with a slight harelip-earnest thanks.

The other customers-five in all-were scattered at the tables behind him. One woman with a man, a pair of men, and a man on his own. The male pair, he decided, was Irwin’s contingent, and he was proved right when one of them made a call from his cell, hung up, and seconds later Irwin walked in alone. He went straight to the bar without looking around, settled next to Milo, and summoned the bartender with a snap of his fingers. She hid her annoyance admirably and delivered his Scotch on the rocks with a smile, then moved to the far end of the bar.

“So, Weaver,” Irwin said after taking his first sip. The way he said the name made Milo think of a high school principal beginning yet another session with the class troublemaker. “You do, I believe, know me?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever met, sir.”

“Of me, I should have said. You know of me.”

“I think all politically aware Americans know of you, sir.”

Irwin swirled his drink. “September twenty-eighth, October fifteenth, January seventh. Those dates ring any bells?”

“Afraid not.”

“Those are three dates you accessed files related to me personally. Phone records, my home addresses, details on my foreign trips. You,” he said, wagging a finger, then lowered it and began again. “You seem very interested in me, Milo.”

“I got bored, Nathan.”

The senator grinned.

“No, really,” Milo insisted. “We both know why I should be interested in you. You had two of my friends killed. You tried to kill me. I’m not one to hold grudges, but that’s a lot to bear. Then you had me followed. How is Raleigh, by the way?”

“Raleigh?”

“The shadow I nearly killed in Budapest.”

Irwin’s face went slack, and he wiped at the corners of his mouth, muttering, “So that’s why Cy’s not returning my calls,” and took another drink. “I made a mistake last year. I didn’t know Terence Fitzhugh would start doing things in my name.”

Terence Fitzhugh had been Irwin’s liaison with Tourism, his hand in the department. He, too, was dead. “I’ve seen the call records,” said Milo.

“Oh. Right.” Irwin considered that, then frowned, realizing his lie had been untenable. “And you’re still bored?”

“I’m tired of blaming you. I’m tired of my own anger. I’m also sick of politicians who think they’re patriots.”

“You think I’m a patriot?” The idea seemed to please him. “I think you believe you’re a patriot.”

“And you? Are you a patriot, Milo?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

That seemed to kill the conversation. Both worked on their drinks and glanced at the bartender, who finally wandered over and had to be sent away again. Finally, Irwin said, “I actually liked Grainger. He was a likable guy.”

“He was an excellent guy. There was a lot of blood when he died. I suppose you never looked at the pictures.”

“I took a glance.”

“Just to be sure?”

Irwin shrugged.

“Did you know Angela Yates?”

“Never met her.”

“She was an excellent woman. A fantastic investigator.”

“A lesbian, right?”

“Yes, Nathan. A lesbian.”

Milo was doing it again, measuring distances. Geography, geometry, and time. How long would it take him to reach out, break the senator’s neck, and get away before one of the two men at the table could pull a gun and stop him? He doubted he could do much more than bruise the senator’s windpipe before he was stopped cold. That would have been enough for his mother, he suspected.

No, the math didn’t add up, but it was comforting all the same.

Irwin said, “You know, politics is a funny thing. At first glance, there’s something glamorous about it. Then you look harder, and you start to think that behind all the glamour, all there really is is a world of spreadsheets. budgets and polls and itemized bills. That’s true enough, but the real key to any political success is the ability to read people. If you can read another politician’s real thoughts, then you’ve got something. I’m pretty good at reading politicians. People like you-simple citizens-they’re a cinch. The fact is, you’re not so good a Tourist that I can’t see through you. You’re not done with me at all.”

“Talk to Drummond. He’ll tell you I’m done.”

“Will he?”

“I’ve quit.”

Irwin raised his brows to show how interested he was. “Now, that’s something.”

“It certainly is.”

“And how does that affect us?”

“It shows how uninterested I am. I no longer care about anything that happens in this world. I’d call it a tempest in a teacup if so many people didn’t get killed.”

“Tempest in a teacup?” Irwin grunted his amusement. “I’ll have to tell that to the other guys on the committee.”

“Tell them what you like. I just want you to know that we-you and me-we’re finished. Here. Now.”

“So you can go back to your lovely family? To Tina and Stephanie?”

Two and a half feet between his hand and the senator’s neck. “Something like that.”

Perhaps reading Milo’s mind, Irwin leaned back. “Two things, Milo. First is that this doesn’t make me feel any better. Why do you think you were even brought back into Tourism?”

“Shortages.”

“Shortages, sure, but Mendel was my man, and I’m the one who made sure he brought you back in. Why do you think I did that?”

Milo went for his drink again. He didn’t like where this was going. “So you could keep an eye on me.”

“Very good. During Mendel’s tenure I could find out where you were at any moment. Now that this kid’s running things and sticking to procedure, I have to pay out of my own pocket for people to track you. Which brings me to the second thing.” Irwin reached into his jacket and brought out a six-by-four color snapshot. He placed it on the damp bar. It was of Milo in Berlin, standing at a courtyard entrance, talking with a pretty Moldovan girl. “I believe they refer to this as the money shot.”

Milo almost slipped off the bar stool, but didn’t. Then he almost strangled the senator. But didn’t.

“I’ve shelled out a lot on these private dicks, but with this I can finally call them off.” He reached into his jacket again and took out another picture. “This one’s the coup de grace.”

It certainly was. Milo and Yevgeny Primakov inside the Berliner Dom, beneath a painting, discussing the future of Adriana Stanescu. He hadn’t seen the shadows-they must have mixed with the Bavarians, just as Yevgeny had.

“Your father, yes?”

Milo didn’t answer.

“You know, before taking over the department, I was largely ignorant of what it did. Of course, I knew the broad strokes, and sometimes I stepped in when I wanted to personally oversee an operation. Yes, yes-like the Sudanese one. Otherwise my only real function was making sure it received the funds it needed to keep working. My ignorance was protection-for myself, and for the department. No one likes to perjure himself on the floor of Congress. But for the last few days my clearance has shown me everything. Everything. It’s like Pandora’s box, the records of the Department of Tourism. Some of it makes even me queasy. Particularly this,” he said, shaking the photograph before slipping it back into his jacket. “I see a man talking with his father; then the image shifts completely when I read the file. I learn that immediately afterward you kidnapped that girl and then went out of your way not to kill her. The sequence of events becomes clear, and it occurs to me that you not only didn’t do your job, but you brought in a foreign national-a representative of the United Nations, no less-to help thwart your orders.” He paused. “You shared all the details of your job with your father and asked for his help. Yes?”

Still Milo didn’t answer.

“I think we understand each other,” said Irwin. He lifted his Scotch to his lips.

The senator wasn’t gloating, not quite. He was just trying to make himself understood. If Milo ever made an attempt to get back at him, the senator would quickly make him Europe’s most wanted man. If that wasn’t enough, he would have Milo arrested for treason.

That was how a senator protected himself in today’s world. It proved that Nathan Irwin was still a terrified man, and no matter what he said, the surveillance would continue for a good long time, even after he’d washed his hands of Tourism.

28

Despite the worries that had plagued him, Milo survived his time in that blank cell on the nineteenth floor. Because of his short tenure as a Tourist, the exit interview lasted only five days, and John’s questions were, particularly compared to their last session in July, when Milo had been accused of murdering Thomas Grainger, gentle. He could sense the open honesty in most of Milo’s answers. When the story reached Berlin, though, John paused and backtracked and sniffed; something was wrong. He began to seek out individual hours. Six to eight in the evening on Wednesday the thirteenth. Nine in the morning on Friday. John seemed troubled by Milo’s unprecedented Christian feelings, him heading to the Berliner Dom to seek out spiritual advice about a hit he wasn’t sure he could go through with. Of course John was troubled; Milo’s file stated his religious beliefs as “none.” Finally, after John put it to him that all his hours, as a Tourist, were owned by the Company, and that therefore he required complete honesty, Milo said, “Well, I guess there’s no reason to hide it anymore.”

“To hide what?”

“Stefan Hassel. I knew him from the Bührle job. We met to set up the Adriana Stanescu kidnapping. Ask Drummond-he already knows.”

“The kidnapping?”

“Yes.”

Later, when they’d dealt in excruciating detail with his stay at Erika Schwartz’s and his subsequent search for Henry Gray, John returned to Stefan Hassel. Milo had more stories ready.

On the last day, John became chatty. They’d worked together often during the previous years, when people needed to be brought down to these cells and interrogated, but the fraternity he showed was still surprising. The best he could figure was that Drummond or Irwin had told him he could relax.

“They’re all gone now, you know.”

“They?”

“The Tourists. New names, new covers, new go-codes. New phones, even. It’s a relief. You ever had to oversee the interviews of thirty-eight people at once? It’s a pain, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

John even smiled-a rare event. “Okay. There’s one last thing I want to go over. You told me before that you admired Xin Zhu because of the cleverness of his scheme.”

“Yes-but not just because it was clever. There are a lot of clever people in the world. What I admire is the fact that no one was hurt, not directly. All he did was bruise some egos. Don’t you admire it?”

“What I feel doesn’t matter. We’re talking about you.”

“What you’re asking is if I admire him so much that I might work for him in the future. That’s what you’re hinting at, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. But… you might as well answer your own question.”

“First I’ll need to know what kind of health plan he offers.”

“Ha ha, Milo. Good one.”

Before he was released on Monday, he sat down beside a machine on a table in a locked closet. Though it looked a lot like an old sewing machine, John assured him that it was in fact magnetic in nature. He swiveled it out so that it pressed hard against the top of Milo’s left shoulder, then typed a code into a keypad on the rear. There was no sound, no movement, nothing to tell Milo it had even been plugged in, but John swiveled it back into place and said, “Congratulations. You’re no longer being tracked.” They shook hands at the elevator, where John said, “I’d say don’t be a stranger, but be a stranger,” and when he boarded the doorman made that elusive statement comprehensible by informing him that he no longer had clearance to board this elevator ever again.

Milo wished Gloria Martinez all the joy in the world before stepping out onto the busy sidewalk. They’d returned all the items he’d given up three months ago upon his arrival-keys, phone, and a wallet with fifty-four dollars-as well as his iPod. No driver’s license, no passport, no credit cards-all his Milo Weaver documents were in his Newark apartment.

He didn’t go to New Jersey. Instead, he took the F train to Fifteenth Street-Prospect Park and then walked to Garfield Place. He reached the door by three, and though he had a key he didn’t use it. He settled on the front steps and sipped some water he’d bought on the way, watching young professionals heading back home. He tried to listen to more Bowie, but the battery in his iPod was dead.

He thought what anyone thinks when one life has ended and another is about to begin. He wondered what shape the new life would take. Not the practicalities, but this other part, the part that lived on the third floor of the brownstone behind him. The part of his life that had provoked him to make dangerous phone calls on his way to commit art heists.

He hadn’t forgotten anything, and Senator Irwin’s threats were still on his mind, but all fears lose their malevolence over time. It can take decades, a few months, or in Milo’s case just a few days. Milo had no interest in taking on the senator. He had what he wanted, and he wasn’t going to do anything to risk losing that.

They arrived a little after six, and while Stephanie threw herself into him and began a lecture on the dangers of him sitting out in the cold-a regurgitation of one of her mother’s speeches-Milo watched Tina for signs. She locked up the car and came around with a wary look. “Something wrong with your nose?”

“I’m accident-prone.”

She nodded as she approached. “When’s the flight out?”

“I got sick of airports.”

She watched him run his fingers through Stephanie’s hair. “You here to break our hearts?”

They ordered Thai takeout and ate in the living room without turning on the television once the whole evening. School was treating Stephanie roughly, it seemed, and later Tina said the teacher blamed her declining grades on their separation. “Half America’s marriages are broken, and this is the best she can come up with?”

“Let’s go meet with her this week. Together.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tina answered.

That’s when the reality of his return to family life hit Milo with the strength of one of Heinrich’s blows. Plans for the future. Responsibilities. It wasn’t freedom he’d been wanting all this time, just a different kind of obligation. Later, after Stephanie was in bed, he even said, “What about Dr. Ray?”

“She tells me she’s kept our Wednesday slot open. You up for it?”

“Absolutely.”

“You know?” she said after a moment.

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s almost as if you never left.”

She didn’t mean it literally-she and Stephanie had, after all, spent half the evening catching him up on the things he’d missed-but in terms of the ease that filled the apartment his first night back, it felt to her as if it were a year ago, before things had begun to go wrong.

Saying all that made her self-conscious, so she pulled back again. “I know, it sounds corny. And really, it’s probably just the initial glow. Tomorrow we’ll be back to the same ol’ same ol’.”

After they made love in the wide bed that felt like a decadent luxury after months of hotels, and he had vaguely explained away the cigarette burns on his arm, Milo went to the kitchen, naked, and poured two Merlots to take back to the bedroom. On his way back, he noticed a thick manila envelope on the table beside the front door. Across it, in black marker, was milo. He checked the door, but it was locked. He opened the envelope.

As they drank, Tina wiped a drop of wine from her breast and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, then thought better of it. Lies had ruined things, and he’d had enough of them. He went to get the envelope and showed it to her. “Seen this before?”

“No. Should I have?”

He rubbed his eyes; his father had placed the envelope while he and Tina were having sex. “It’s from Yevgeny.”

“Looks like work to me.”

“Just something of interest.”

“Well, don’t wait for me.”

“What?”

“You obviously want to dig into it right away.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Not often enough,” she said, then kissed him.

He left her to sleep and went to the living room with his Merlot and a square of the Nicorette he was beginning to suspect had become his new addiction. He opened up the manila envelope and began to read about the life and times of Xin Zhu.

29

“Glad you made it, Milo,” Dr. Bipasha Ray said, showing off a radiant smile he suspected was not entirely honest. They all shook hands, and despite the chilly damp outside Dr. Ray padded to her chair in bare, manicured feet. The pleasantries were dispensed with quickly, beginning with “How has it been between the two of you?” When they both agreed that the last two days had been like another honeymoon, she pursed her lips and said, “Very nice.” She didn’t have to point out that anyone in the world could last two lousy days.

“So, Milo. Anything you can say about where you’ve been these last few months? The few times Tina and I met, she didn’t seem to know.”

“I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you,” he said with a banal smile, but Dr. Ray didn’t seem to find that funny. She was one of the few therapists the department had cleared for staff use, but she’d never had much patience for Company humor, particularly when it utilized the threat of death. “No, I just mean that all I can say is I was moving around a good bit. Working here and there.”

“Working too much to call and check in with your family?”

Milo looked at Tina, who had no expression at all, then back at Dr. Ray. “No, actually. It’s against the rules. It’s not safe to call your family when you’re working undercover. You place them and yourself in unnecessary danger.” He decided against mentioning that he had tried to call a few times.

“Of course,” Dr. Ray said, then brushed at the knee of her jeans. “Does that mean you were in real danger?”

“No, no. Just a figure of speech.”

Dr. Ray nodded, smiling. “Milo, some months ago you were telling Tina that you thought these sessions weren’t the way to take care of your marital problems. Could you expand on that?”

“I’m not sure I said that.”

“You did, hon,” said Tina. “I said I thought it was helping, and you said you didn’t.”

This was starting to feel like an ambush. “Okay, maybe I did say it.”

“So, what did you mean by that?” asked Dr. Ray.

Milo rubbed his arms. The room was vaguely chilly, and he decided that if they wanted to ambush him, he would open himself up to it. He would, for the moment at least, trust that honesty was the path of rightness. He said, “What I meant was that I hadn’t been entirely honest. During those sessions, I mean.”

“What?” That was Tina.

“It’s not so uncommon,” Dr. Ray said generously. “What matters is that you’ve admitted it aloud, and we can move ahead in a more constructive manner.”

Tina said, “Have you really been lying here?”

“Not lying. Just not always opening up completely.”

“Tina, Milo may have good reasons for drawing the distinction.”

“Yeah-to save his own ass.”

“I’m not saving my ass, Tina.”

She didn’t believe him. Their drive here had been pleasant and light, and he wondered if she, in turn, had been dishonest with him, knowing that she and the good doctor would be setting him up. She said, “Just don’t tell me you’re protecting national secrets by lying in couples therapy. How much time has to pass before your life stops being classified, huh? It never occurs to you that by then it might be too late.”

Where was this coming from?

“Tina, let Milo speak. Milo?”

In the silence that followed, he found himself fidgeting with the knee of his pants in some strange solidarity with Dr. Ray. He forced himself to stop, though he knew how it looked, how he looked-awkward and nervous, a man never to be trusted.

After the things he’d done, the places he’d been, what was this? A study belonging to a little Long Island psychologist. But Christ, it felt like one of those cells on the nineteenth floor, with John in a bad mood.

“For instance,” he finally managed, groping for something that didn’t include murder or kidnapping or robbery, “the story of how we fell in love. Back in September, at one of our first meetings, you went through it all right here. Remember?”

Tina nodded. “Of course I remember.”

“It didn’t happen like that. Not for me. I’ve never understood it-what does that even mean, falling in love while watching the Towers fall? I can’t even comprehend it.”

“It’s what I felt. I’m not going to make apologies for my feelings, Milo.”

“That’s right, Tina. We should never apologize for our feelings. Milo, tell us more. We’re listening.”

He looked at each woman again, feeling the distance between him and them increasing, and thought that this was the exact opposite of what therapy was supposed to do. “It didn’t start with love, that’s what I’m trying to say. What I felt was desperation. My life had gone to hell, and I was desperate for something to hold on to. And there she was-Tina, I mean-going into labor right there on the street. I needed something, and Tina was there at the right time.”

“Lovely.”

“Tina, let him go on. Milo?”

“Well,” he said, “when I woke up next to Tina’s bed, and we were watching the Towers on TV, I was more confused than anything else. I didn’t feel close to anybody. You were there, clutching onto me, but it was like I was alone in that hospital room.”

“Alone. I see. I fell in love, and you just felt cold.”

“Don’t misunderstand me-love did come. It just took time. And Stephanie.”

“Stephanie?” That was Dr. Ray, sounding as if he’d finally, after months, said something interesting. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t mean my heart melted when I saw her, not quite. It just struck me that, for the first time in my life, I’d met someone who could do nothing wrong. That’s how babies are. Nothing is their fault. If they cry or throw a fit or shit in your hands-everything they do wrong is your fault. That’s not sentimentality-that’s fact. To be honest, I was awed by this, that any human being could be utterly without guile and menace. It was new to me. It was a shock. I wanted to be near that innocence, to protect it.”

Dr. Ray embarked on one of her favorite pastimes: rephrasing what her patients had said. “So you could say that you fell in love with your daughter before you fell in love with your wife.”

“You could certainly say that.”

“Tina? Anything to say?”

Tina was just staring at Milo, her expression betraying nothing.

“Tina?”

Tina raised both hands in the air, and when she brought them down again in an expression of impotence there were tears in her eyes.

“See?” she said. “This is what I’m talking about. Him falling in love with Stephanie-how come I never heard that before? Christ, Milo. How many times have I told that story? You could have stopped me years ago, before I made an ass of myself.”

Dr. Ray said, “I don’t think you’ve made an ass of yourself. Milo?”

“Of course she hasn’t,” he said.

“Let me tell you something,” said Dr. Ray. “Tina, are you listening? I want both of you to hear it.”

Tina said, “Sure.”

Milo agreed with an “Okay.”

“Though we haven’t met as regularly as we all would have liked, I think I’ve gotten a sense of the dynamic between the two of you. You’ve probably noticed that I use the word ‘listen’ a lot. It’s not because I’m some touchy-feely therapist. I say it because it’s an issue here. You’re not listening to each other. Wait, Milo,” she said, raising a finger at him. “Yes, you’re listening to each other’s words, but you’re not listening to the subtext.”

Both Milo and Tina waited.

“For example, Milo-why do you think you lied about the circumstances of your meeting?”

“I wouldn’t say I lied-”

“Omission is essentially the same thing.”

“Okay,” he said, ready to admit to anything. “I suppose I was afraid of hurting Tina’s feelings.”

“Why?”

“Yes,” said Tina, “why?”

He had to think about that. “I don’t want Tina feeling, I don’t know, disconnected from me. From the idea of our marriage.”

“And what’s the idea of your marriage?”

“That. The story. The myth of how it began,” he said, thinking suddenly of Tourism and how without its myth it would no longer be of any value. Was that really how he thought of his marriage? “No,” he said aloud, feeling confused. “No, that’s not it. What I mean is, whether or not that story is true for both of us, the marriage isn’t affected, because it doesn’t matter how we met. What matters is how we’ve lived together.”

Tina blinked at him. Her eyes were wet. Dr. Ray was unmoved. “You still haven’t answered my question: What’s the idea of your marriage?”

“There is no idea of our marriage,” he said finally. “It simply is.” He wasn’t sure if this was what Dr. Ray was aiming at, but it was all he could manage when cornered.

Tina said, “Stephanie.”

Both looked at her.

“That’s Milo’s idea of our marriage. It’s Stephanie. That’s what he thinks, isn’t it?”

Dr. Ray shook her head. “I can’t tell you what anyone’s thinking. That’s up to Milo to say. Milo?”

Now they were looking at him.

30

Tina stared at his features, waiting, because this felt like a moment of decision. Dr. Ray was good at this. She could take a seemingly happy relationship and with a few questions strip it down like a shitty old car to some lie right in its center. Or some misunderstanding.

She’d noticed this last year, right at the beginning, and more than Dr. Ray’s animal sexiness this was what had frightened her, that she would discover the falseness of their marriage and show it to them proudly, wrecking their lives. Now she was trying it again, pushing them both into a corner where Tina had no choice but to ask the obvious question, and Milo had no choice but to answer.

His cheeks were coloring. He said, “It’s an idiotic question.”

“Is it?” Tina asked. Dr. Ray said nothing.

“Yeah.” He was pissed off now. “How can anyone boil seven years down to a single idea? Of course Stephanie is one idea in our marriage, but do you really think there’s only one? How about sex? That’s one excellent idea in our marriage. And love?” He turned to Dr. Ray. “Our marriage is a hundred different ideas. I’m not going to name a single one.”

“How about trust?” asked Dr. Ray.

“How about it?” he said ineptly.

“Of course a marriage is made of many different ideas, but they have their own biorhythms. Certain ideas come to the fore at certain times. If you listen to Tina, you’ll hear that, for her, trust is very often the primary idea. Her lack of it, in particular. Tina-am I misrepresenting your feelings?”

She shook her head.

“Tina feels as if a large part of your life is a complete mystery to her.”

“Which is why I’ve quit my job,” said Milo.

“And that’s an excellent step,” the doctor said. “But what does that mean? Does it mean that, from this point on, she’s going to start to get to know her husband? That’s impossible if you still can’t share your past with her. You may have quit your job, but that job still possesses the last fourteen years of your life. We are the result of our histories, Milo, not the result of our present.”

This was really annoying Milo; she could see it in the edges of his heavy eyes, in the flushed cheeks, in the quick darting of his tongue. “So now I should open up the history books? That’ll land me in jail and put Tina and Stephanie in serious danger.”

“See what I mean?” Tina found herself saying. “Those national secrets again.”

“They’re a fact of life, Tina.”

“And facts dictate the limits of our behavior,” Dr. Ray said majestically. “But people have their own limits that facts cannot dictate. The question isn’t what you can and cannot tell Tina, but how this makes Tina feel, and how well you can compensate for it.”

“Wait a minute,” Tina said, no longer worrying if she was going to sound stupid. “You said Stef and I would end up in danger, but you weren’t in danger-you said that at the beginning of the session. If you weren’t, then why would we be?”

He rubbed his face. “I was lying, Tina. Of course I was in danger. Those burns on my arm? Someone was using me as an ashtray. There’s just no need for anyone to worry-I got out of it fine.”

Ashtray? The word stuck in her head, and she had trouble seeing past it. “You hear him? Is there no way for you to be honest? Not even here?”

“Tina,” said Dr. Ray, “he’s trying to be honest here. This is real progress.”

It didn’t feel like progress to Tina, though, and she was starting to wonder if Milo coming back home was really what they both needed. That opening lie about danger had been a small one, as insignificant, really, as saying “Fine” when someone asks how you’re doing, but it felt so much bigger. She pressed her hand deep into the sofa cushion. “Is it progress? Because I know how spies work. He’s told me often enough. Cover. You go in somewhere with cover, and when the enemy realizes you’re not that person, you have another cover prepared, just below it. You give that one easily. If they still don’t believe it, you have a third one ready, but you really make them work for it, because otherwise they won’t buy it. If you’re really good, you’ve got another one beneath that, one so deep that it might as well be the real you. How many layers of cover do you have, Milo?”

He looked shocked by her outburst. Or appalled. “None.”

“But you see? You see how he’s got me screwed up? I even take it a step further sometimes and think that maybe his genius lies in the fact that the original cover, the first one I’ve peeled off and thrown away, that that’s the real one. That I’ve long ago abandoned what really is Milo Weaver. That it’s somewhere in the trash and I’ll never find it again.”

She was crying now, and she saw Dr. Ray’s long, toned, lovely arm push a box of Kleenex across the coffee table to her. She took one but didn’t use it, just balled it in her hand and squeezed it.

Dr. Ray said, “Are you listening, Milo? Because this is what your wife is saying to you. She’s here because she wants to find the Milo she fell in love with. It doesn’t have to be the Milo she thought she knew, just a Milo she believes in.”

Milo wasn’t listening to anyone.

Through her blurred vision Tina saw him sit up, stiff, staring ahead. Not at her, or at the therapist, but somewhere else, into the middle distance. Something had landed on him, had squashed him flat. Did he-and this thought made her feel suddenly very dependent-have an insight that would save their marriage? The magic bullet? Christ, it looked like it from his expression. It looked like he had something big. A breakthrough.

“Milo?”

Dr. Ray, while reaching a hand in Tina’s direction, leaned toward Milo, frowning. “Milo, you with us?”

Then, unbelievably, Milo stood up. For the first time in known history, Dr. Ray looked confused.

“What is it, Milo?”

Tina wiped at her tears. “Milo? Hon? What is it?” She touched his arm, but he showed no sign of having felt it.

Then he sat down again, heavily, and reached for her hand. Squeezed it distractedly. To both of them, he said, “Sorry. I’m sorry. Something came to me.”

“That’s good,” said Dr. Ray.

“What?” said Tina.

“It’s not…” he began, then shook his head, leaning back. “It’s about something else. Not about this.”

Flatly, Tina said, “It’s not about our marriage? Then what is it about?”

“It’s-that stuff. All the stuff I’m not allowed to discuss.”

“I have been vetted by your people,” Dr. Ray reminded him. “What you say here stays here.”

“Not this level of clearance,” Milo said coldly. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe I should go.”

“I think leaving now would be a serious mistake,” said Dr. Ray. He nodded obediently, but for the rest of the session was not even there. Tina wished he had left, so that she could have at least become emotional, but when faced with a man like this, a blank-faced automaton absorbed by something so far from the topic of discussion, how could she?

On the way to her car, he broke the silence, but not with anything constructive or even encouraging. “Can you drop me off at the train?”

“Drop yourself off, you self-centered shit,” she said and got into the car. She didn’t bother unlocking the passenger’s side, just started it up and drove away.

31

The man, small and hairy and twitchy, was not German. This Hasad knew for a fact. He arrived driving an old taxi and entered the store with a soft worker’s cap balled up in his fleshy fists covered in too much dark hair and rose on his toes and peered around the empty store before turning to offer Hasad a brief “Guten Abend.” His accent was something eastern, like the Czechs who sometimes stopped by his store on their way to the BND headquarters on missions he was far too patriotic to ask about.

Like some of those Czechs, he dressed in an oversized trench coat, but the material was even worse than what the Czechs wore. Yet his shoes, Hasad noticed, were so well shined that they reflected the fluorescent lamps in the ceiling.

He walked to the rear of the store and began browsing slowly. Sometimes he picked up and examined a candy bar or a bag of chips, but always returned it to its spot.

At first, Hasad worried. The trench coat might have hidden a gun, though before worrying about his life Hasad calculated how much money was in the till. Then, when the man opened and closed his coat quickly three times to fan himself, he realized there were no weapons about the portly body.

He was sweating-that, too, could be seen from a distance. The hair on his head and the bits that emerged from his cheap sweater were glistening with it as he crouched to read the label on a packet of Holland Toast.

He was still going about his research when Frau-Direktor-Schwartz arrived. She nodded to Hasad as she charted her route to the back of the store and collected her Riesling. To his surprise, he saw that she was buying two, and when she turned back to look for her Snickers, she caught sight of the man, who said, “Erika Schwartz.”

She froze. Hasad worried she would drop the bottles, but instead her grip tightened-he saw how her pink fingers whitened from the pressure. Then they relaxed and she said, “Grüss Gott, Herr Stanescu. I didn’t know you were in Munich.”

No answer. From his angle Hasad could see something wild in Herr Stanescu’s eyes, as if he expected that her arrival would bring him great wealth. He was in one aisle while she was in the next, and they spoke over the potato chips. Then the man opened his mouth, but instead of speech a low animal moan came out and he began to weep.

She said, “You should probably go home, Herr Stanescu. We’re doing all we can.”

Stanescu-Hasad finally remembered. The girl from the newspapers, the girl killed by Russians. Then he recognized this man from the photographs-the poor girl’s father, Andrei. He nearly fainted.

Through his sobs, Andrei Stanescu said, “I call him and I call him but he doesn’t answer. Herr Reich isn’t answering.”

“I’m sorry, but I told you before-I’m not on the case anymore. Trust me, Herr Reich is working diligently on it.”

“I need answers-can’t you see? I am dying!”

“You should go home.”

“Where is the man?”

“Herr Reich? He-”

“No!” he shouted, anger suddenly replacing that deep sadness. “The other man! In the picture! The one that kill her!”

“That was a mistake,” she told him, and Hasad noticed that now only one bottle was in her hand, and she held it upside-down, like a club. He moved to the left and, below the counter, gripped a heavy nightstick he kept for emergencies. She said, “It happens sometimes.

Yes, he talked to your daughter, but he had nothing to do with her kidnapping.”

“Don’t tell me that!” shouted Andrei Stanescu. He marched toward the front of the store, toward Hasad, but only stared at Director Schwartz. As he rounded the end of the aisle, effectively blocking her exit, Hasad caught the heady stink of some brandy all over him.

“What are you doing?” Director Schwartz asked calmly.

“I’m sick!” he said. “I am sick of all… of Germans. Of you. You think I am a stupid immigrant what listens happy to all your lies. I’m not. No one cares about a little girl who is killed by the man in that picture. No one!”

“I assure you, Herr Stanescu-”

“Assure, assure! I’m sick of all that assure! I’m dying. You tell me now where is that Russian and I will take care of it myself.”

“Herr Stanescu,” she said, her voice firmer now, “you have to get him out of your head. He was a tourist, asking Adriana for directions. He’s not even Russian.”

That seemed to take some of the wind out of him; from behind, Hasad saw his shoulders sink. “Not Russian?”

“No,” she said gently. “He’s American.”

“American?”

Hasad loosened his grip on the nightstick.

“But then who did it?” Stanescu asked, returning to his pitiful demeanor.

Director Schwartz blinked at him, then pursed her lips. “I’ll tell you what. In the morning I’ll sit down with Herr Reich and go through the case with him. Then I’ll call you at home and tell you everything I’ve learned.”

Andrei Stanescu, defeated, stared at the tiled floor. “I do not believe you.”

“Of course you don’t,” she told him, “but I am being honest. Herr Reich took over the case because it was considered that important. If he’s not answering your calls it’s because he’s busy tracking leads. Tomorrow, I will find out his progress and report it to you. But you have to go. Now. Do you understand?”

He shook his head; he understood nothing.

“In a couple of minutes men are going to come through that door, and if you’re still here they’ll arrest you. When you started yelling I pressed a panic switch,” she said and opened her free hand to reveal a key ring with a button attached to it. “If you’re gone when they arrive, I’ll tell them that pressing it was an accident.”

Stanescu raised his head.

“Do we have a deal?”

He nodded.

“Expect my call around ten. If I haven’t called by eleven, you call me. Okay?”

Andrei Stanescu didn’t nod again, just turned around. In his face Hasad saw not hope but the indistinct despair he knew from his own immigrant circles, often when jobs had been lost or residency applications turned down. He shuffled to the doors, which opened automatically for him, and slipped off into the night.

He hadn’t, until then, realized that he’d been holding his breath. He met Director Schwartz’s eyes as she picked up her second bottle from the shelf and brought both to the counter. “Well,” she said.

“Should I call the police?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He’s just grieving. There’s no need to make his life any worse than it is.”

“You handled that very well.”

“Thank you, Herr al-Akir. But he was never dangerous.”

He began to ring up the wines. “And the Snickers?”

“Not to night. I might try to lose some weight.”

“Good luck with that, Director Schwartz.”

He took her money and watched her head for the doors before calling out, “And the men? Should I expect them soon?”

“Men?” she said, turning back.

“The ones you called.”

“Oh!” She smiled, took out her key ring, and pointed it through the open doors. She pressed, and her Volvo winked in reply.

32

Heading down on the elevator, on his way to meet his wife for dinner, Alan Drummond felt an unfamiliar emotion that Wednesday after noon: satisfaction. It wasn’t the pleased satisfaction of someone who’s just finished a particularly good meal or some fulfilling sexual act, but the satisfaction of someone who’s spent too much time dissatisfied and has finally gone through a twenty-four-hour period largely free of disappointments.

Rebuilding the Department of Tourism had taken only four days. The technicians who had removed the computers and disassembled the cubicles had kept detailed records of where each had come from, and it was just a matter of repeating the procedure in reverse. There were glitches, of course. Human error. A couple of Travel Agents ended up with the wrong computers, but instead of bringing in the technicians again Drummond had them switch cubicles. By then the remaining thirty-eight Tourists had been redeployed, and while most were able to continue their previous assignments, seven had to abandon them and begin new ones. One, though, was less lucky. Her sudden disappearance was badly timed, and when she returned to Jakarta a welcoming committee was waiting for her at Soekarno-Hatta International; twelve hours later she was confirmed dead.

Though the number of Tourists was still dreadfully low, during the four days since their redeployment only that one had been lost, and they’d gained two more from the ranks of the Travel Agents, both of whom were now suffering through training at the Point. The memory of the Guoanbu’s game still haunted him, particularly as he thought of those five Tourists-Stanley, Gupta, Mobuku, Martinez, and Yuan-who had been lost during the Myrrh recall. Among those who were left, though, significant work had been done, and not just the miserable work of keeping the department above water. Two terrorist cells-one Pakistani, one Saudi-had been infiltrated; three nuisances (Syrian, Moroccan, and Palestinian) had been liquidated; a Tourist had acquired choice intelligence about Hugo Chávez’s government during the resolution of the Andean crisis between Ec ua dor, Colombia, and Venezuela; and one Tourist had even saved the lives of two French journalists in Najaf. That was positive work, progress, and it proved that Milo Weaver was a shortsighted fool. Despite his years in administration, Weaver had an incomprehensible misunderstanding of how compromise was necessary in order to do the good work.

The department had even survived Director Ascot, who had gotten wind of the mole hunt from God-Only-Knew-Who. Nathan Irwin dreamed up the lie to save them: “It’s simple, Alan. You tell that bastard that since taking over you’ve grown disgusted by the lax security in the department, and the only way to deal with it was to bring everyone back to New York and give them new identities. You needed the fake mole hunt to justify the recall.”

The fact that the lie worked beautifully had the ironic effect of making him and Irwin partners in crime. Ironic, because Irwin had savagely fought Drummond’s appointment to head Tourism. That was politics for you.

By Friday, though, Irwin and his nosy staff would be out of his hair, and he would be free of the perpetual oversight.

Nothing was perfect; nothing had ever been. The new go-codes, for instance, were impossible to remember. Six-digit numbers. So each time he called a Tourist he had to pull out the abused list from his top drawer, which listed everything: work name, phone number, go-code, and reply code. If he wanted to call one while he was outside of the office, he had to hightail it back to the Avenue of the Americas, go up to the twenty-second floor, and unlock his office and then the damned drawer. Irwin and his aides insisted it was the only secure way to run things, and they were probably right, but it made Drummond’s job that much more impossible.

Still, he’d survived-they’d all survived-and there was a certain satisfaction in that. He was starting to believe he could survive for a good long while in the Department of Tourism.

To celebrate his new lease on life, and to apologize for having missed a lunch date with his wife for a last-minute powwow with visitors from the Department of Defense, he’d reserved a table for two at Balthazar, Penelope’s favorite restaurant. He and Penelope had a long, known history of blowing a significant amount of their income on expensive restaurants. He couldn’t help it-seeing Penelope’s joy when a goat cheese and caramelized onion tart was placed before her made it all worth it. For the truth, which was so rare in his circles that admitting to it publicly would have been social suicide, was that he loved his wife deeply and thanked God that his undeserving ass had ever been blessed with her.

Lost in these embarrassing thoughts, he settled into a black Ford in the basement garage. Jake was behind the wheel; Jake, who had just returned from a holiday in Miami with his family. Drummond asked about the weather down there, and how the family was doing, and when his phone rang and he saw it was Irwin he considered not taking it-but the man was still technically his boss. “Sorry, Jake. I have to take this.”

“No worries, sir.”

Drummond raised the separation window. “Hello, Nathan.”

Nathan Irwin skipped the greetings. “What’s this about Hang Seng Bank?”

“It’s taken care of.”

“One of their CEOs gets his laptop stolen, and the next thing we know HSBC is selling all its options?”

“What did you think they’d do with the information?”

“Sit on it. That’s what I thought they’d do. I’ve got friends at Hang Seng, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know you were going through all our active case files.”

“You expect me to just sit around on the twenty-second floor twiddling my thumbs? I want a sit-down with you on this Hang Seng deal. Try to salvage something from it.”

“In the morning, Nathan. You know where to find me.”

The senator hung up, leaving Drummond with a bad taste in his mouth.

Jake stopped beside the tower at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street, and Drummond collected his briefcase and climbed out, showing an open hand in farewell. As the Ford sped off, he nodded at the old doorman whose name he never remembered.

The doorman apparently knew who he was. “There’s someone waiting for you, sir.”

“Yes?”

He nodded at the long couch in the foyer, and Drummond suddenly lost his appetite. Milo Weaver got up to meet him. He wasn’t smiling.

“You could’ve called beforehand,” Drummond told him. “Not sure that’s a good idea.”

“How did you find out where I live?”

“It’s not a state secret, Alan.”

Drummond frowned, then looked at the elevator. He wanted to ignore him and take that elevator straight up to the sixteenth floor, to Penelope, but Weaver had the wild-eyed look of someone who wouldn’t be ignored. “So why the hell are you here?”

“Can we talk upstairs?”

“Absolutely not. I’m not having my wife get friendly with you.”

“Right. Wife,” Weaver said, as if he’d forgotten this important detail. He looked over Drummond’s shoulder at the doorman, who had returned to the sidewalk but watched them carefully through the glass doors.

“The place isn’t bugged, Milo.”

Weaver nodded, then wiped at his nose, a move that covered his mouth as he spoke. “We were wrong, Alan. There is a mole, and he’s been in place for a while.”

“You’re a fucking nut, Weaver.”

Milo shook his head, his heavy eyes full of conviction. Drummond knew then that a quiet dinner with Penelope was now a vain hope. Maybe Weaver had been right all along-the world really did revolve around him.