The Tourist

1

He knew from the beginning how it would end, despite all the fear and doubt brought on by the strict prison regimen. It was tailor-made to encourage doubt in anything involving the outside world, even an old Russian fox. The prison said: At this hour, you wake; at that hour, you eat. Midday is time for physical exercise in the Yard. In the Yard, your mind may begin to wander outside the walls, to postulate and speculate on what might be happening at that very moment, but you're soon disrupted by the minutiae of prison socialization. A Latino gang suggests basketball isn't your game, a black gang tells you this is its bleacher. The skinheads explain that you'll run with them, because you're a brother; you're white. If, as Milo did, you reject them all out of hand, claiming that you belong to none of their cliques, then your wandering mind is again sucked back inside the walls, devoted to staying alive.

Over the first three weeks of Milo 's month-and-a-half incarceration, there were three attempts on his life. One was by a bald fascist who thought his hands were weapons enough, until Milo crushed them in the bars of a neighbor's door. On two separate occasions others came at him with knives made of sharpened dining utensils, while their friends held Milo still. They landed him in the infirmary with his chest, thighs, and buttocks marked up.

Two days later, the second attacker, previously a hired fist for a

Newark crime syndicate, was discovered dead-quietly suffocated, not a print on him-under the black gang's bleachers. A wall of silence sprang up around Milo Weaver. He was a thorn in their side, they said among themselves, but sometimes it's best to just let a thorn stay where it is, lest it start to infect.

Periodically, Special Agent Janet Simmons came to visit. She wanted to verify details in his story, sometimes about his father, sometimes focusing on Tripplehorn, whose body had been discovered in the Kittatinny mountain range, west of Lake Hopatcong. He asked about Tina and Stephanie, and she always said that they were fine. Why didn't they come to see him? Simmons became uncomfortable. "I think Tina feels it would be difficult for Stephanie to take."

After three weeks, while he was resting in the infirmary to repair some wound or other, Tina finally came. The nurse wheeled him out to the visitation room, and they talked through phones, separated by bulletproof plastic.

Despite the circumstances (or because of them? he wondered), she looked good. She'd lost a few pounds, and that accentuated her cheekbones in a way he'd never seen before. He kept touching the separator window, but she wouldn't be lured into this mawkish expression of desire. When she spoke, it was as if she were reading from a prepared statement.

"I don't understand any of this, Milo. I don't pretend to. One moment you tell everyone that you murdered Tom, and the next moment Janet Simmons tells me you didn't. Which one is the lie, Milo?"

"I didn't kill Tom. That's the truth."

She grinned. Perhaps the answer was a relief; he couldn't tell anything from her face. She said, "You know, the funny thing is that I could take that. If you killed Stephanie's godfather, I really could take it. I've kept a big store of faith in you for many years, and I could believe that you killed him for the best of reasons. I could believe murder was justified. You see? That's faith. But this other thing. Your father. Father, Milo. Jesus!" Whatever prepared statement she had was crumbling now. "How fucking long were you going to wait to tell me about this? How long before Stephanie found out she had a grandfather?"

"I'm sorry about that," he said. "It's just… I've lied about it since I was a kid. I lied to the Company. After a while, it was as good as the truth to me."

There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn't crying. She wouldn't let herself break down, not in the visiting room of a prison in New Jersey. "That's not good enough. You understand? It's just not good enough."

He tried to change the subject: "How's Stef? What does she know?"

"She thinks you're on a job of some sort. A long-term job.”

“And?"

"And, what? You want me to say she misses her daddy? Yes, she does. But you know what? Her real father, Pat, has risen to the challenge. He picks her up from the sitter's, and he even cooks. He's turned out to be a pretty good guy."

"I'm glad," Milo said, though he wasn't. If Patrick made Stephanie happy, then that was fine, but he didn't trust that Patrick would remain around long enough. He was not a constant kind of person. Despite himself, he asked the worst imaginable question: "Are you and he…?"

"If we were, it wouldn't be your business anymore. Would it?"

That was really all he could take. He started to stand, but the knife wound in his chest barked back. Tina noticed the pain in his face. "Hey. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said, hung up the phone, and called for a guard to help roll him back to the infirmary.

On September 10, a Monday, he got his final visit from Special Agent Janet Simmons. She told him that, finally, the evidence had been pieced together. She wouldn't say why it had taken so long. The blood in Grainger's house had matched the corpse found in the hills. She'd pulled in some favors with the French and gotten a DNA match connecting the corpse to the bottle of sleeping pills in Angela Yates's Paris apartment.

"I don't understand, Milo. You were innocent. You didn't kill

Grainger or Angela. As for the Tiger, I still don't know what to think."

Helpfully, Milo said, "I didn't kill him either."

"So, okay. You killed no one. And one thing I know for sure is that you never made a deal with Fitzhugh to protect your family- that was just window dressing."

Milo didn't answer.

She leaned closer to the window. "The question follows: Why couldn't you be up-front with me? Why the parade of misinformation? Why did your father have to manipulate me? It's fucking humiliating. I'm a reasonable person. I would've listened."

Milo thought about that. During those hours on the nineteenth floor, he'd wanted to do just that. But, again, he remembered why. "You wouldn't have believed me."

"I might have. Even if I didn't, I would have checked on your story."

"And found no evidence," he said, then remembered what the Tiger had told him two months and a lifetime ago. "I had to be elusive, because no decent intelligence agent believes anything she's told. The only way I could make you believe it was if you discovered it on your own, while thinking that I never meant to lead you to the truth."

She stared at him, perhaps feeling manipulated, perhaps feeling stupid, he didn't know. These days, he knew so little. Finally, she said, "Okay. Then what about this senator? Your father sent a couple guys posing as aides to a senator, Nathan Irwin, who were then posing as Company men. Why lead me to a senator?"

"You'll have to ask him that."

"You don't know?"

Milo shook his head. "I suppose the senator's connected to everything, but my father never told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to trust him."

She nodded slowly, as if trust were a difficult concept to swallow. "Well, I guess it worked, eventually. And tomorrow, once the paperwork's finished, you'll be free."

"Free?"

"You've been cleared, haven't you?" She leaned back in her chair, the phone pressed to her ear. "I'm giving the warden an envelope with some money. Not a lot, just enough for a bus ticket to wherever you're going. Do you need a place to stay?"

"I've got a little place in Jersey."

"Oh, right. The Dolan apartment." She looked at the frame of the separation window. "I haven't talked to Tina in a while. Are you going to see her?"

"She needs more time."

"You're probably right." She paused. "You think it was worth it?”

“What?"

"All the secrecy about your parents. It's put a halt to your career, and Tina is… well, you might have ruined your marriage."

Milo didn't hesitate in his answer, because he'd thought of little else in that prison. "No, Janet. It wasn't worth it at all."

They separated with polite words, and Milo went back to his cell to pack his few belongings. Toothbrush, a couple of novels, and his notebook. It was a small bound pad in which he'd begun to turn myth into reality. On the inside cover he'd scribbled the black book.

Had they bothered to examine it, the guards would've been baffled by the five-digit numbers that filled it-they referenced pages, lines, and word counts from the prison library's edition of a Lonely Planet travel guide. The jaunty tone of the decoded version would have surprised anyone who knew Milo Weaver:

What is Tourism? We know the pitch- Langley will tell you that Tourism is the backbone of their readiness paradigm, the immediate response pyramid, or whatever they've rebranded it this year. That you, as a Tourist, are the pinnacle of contemporary autonomous intelligence work. You're a diamond. Really.

All that may be true-we Tourists are never able to float so high above the chaos to find the order in it. We try, and that's part of our function, but each fragment of order we find is connected to the other fragments in a meta-order that is controlled by a meta-meta-order. And so on. That's the realm of policymakers and academics. Leave it to them. Remember: Your primary function as a Tourist is to stay alive.

2

Among the possessions returned to him upon his release was his iPod. One of the guards had used it occasionally during the past two months, so it was fully charged. On the bus, Milo tried with no success to rouse himself with his French mix. He went through a few seconds each of all those pretty girls who made the sixties look like they might have been fun, ending with "Poupee de cire, poupee de son." He couldn't even manage to listen to all of that one. He didn't cry-that was past now-but these optimistic melodies had no bearing on his life, such as it was, anymore. He scrolled through the artist list and tried something he hadn't listened to in a long time: the Velvet Underground.

That, then, seemed to reflect his world.

He didn't go to the Dolan apartment yet. Instead, he got out at Port Authority and took the subway up to Columbus Circle. He picked up some Davidoffs and wandered directionless through Central Park. He found a bench among other benches and families and children, tourists scattered among them, and smoked. He checked his watch, judging the time, and made sure to put the cigarette butt in a trashcan. Paranoia, perhaps, but he didn't want to be picked up for littering.

He'd noticed his shadow on the bus. A young man, twenties, with a mustache, a thin neck, and a phone from which he sent a number of text messages. He'd followed Milo off the bus and down into the subway, at some point chatting on his phone to give an update to his masters. He didn't recognize the man, but he supposed that in the last month the Department of Tourism would have been gutted and restocked with plenty of fresh faces. The existence of his shadow didn't really bother him, because the Company just wanted to make sure he was put to bed. They wanted no more trouble from Milo Weaver.

In his head, Lou Reed sang about shiny boots of leather.

Now, as he walked east along the southern edge of the park, the shadow was a half block behind him. A good agent, he thought. Don't crowd your subject. Milo left the park and, after two blocks, descended into the Fifty-seventh Street station, where he took the F train downtown.

He had time, so he didn't mind that the F was local the whole way, stopping continually on its way to Brooklyn. People wandered on and off, though his shadow, perched by the rear of his car, stayed where he was. The only movement he made was to take a newly freed seat, though he made sure to sit in it when Milo wasn't looking.

Milo finally stood as the doors slid open at the Seventh Avenue stop, and, when he glanced back, he was surprised to see his shadow was already gone. Had he gotten out earlier? Milo stepped onto the platform and felt a bump against his side as someone rushed to get into the train. He looked up as the train doors were sliding shut again. His shadow stared back at him through the scratched plastic windows. In fact, the man was smiling at him, patting his jacket pocket. The train started to move.

Confused, Milo patted his own pockets and felt something new. He withdrew a small black Nokia he'd never seen before.

He took the stairs and approached along Sixth Avenue, hurrying across Garfield. He was lucky-no one called out to him. Finally, he reached the Berkeley Carroll School.

It was nearly time, the streets backed up with cars in a two-block circumference around the school. He ignored the other parents grouped on the sidewalk, chatting about jobs and maids and grades, and found an inconspicuous spot beside a weary, sunstroked elm.

As the school's release bell rang and a visible flutter of movement went through the crowd, the phone rang.

He checked the display and, as expected, it said private number. "Hello?"

"You all right?" his father said in Russian.

Milo didn't feel up to it. He spoke his side of the conversation in English. "I'm still breathing." Across the street, children with adorable backpacks spilled out into the crowd of parents.

"It shouldn't have taken so long," said Primakov. "But I had no control over that."

"Of course you didn't."

"Did they say anything about a job?"

"Not yet."

"They will," his father assured him. "You understand, don't you, that you'll be demoted back to Tourism. It's the only thing they can do. You're cleared of murder, but no company likes to have their failures pointed out to them."

Milo was on the balls of his feet, staring. Among the children he'd picked out Stephanie. Her bob had grown out, so that no physical evidence of her Independence Day performance remained. She really was beautiful, so much more than his prison-stunted memory had allowed. He fought the urge to cross the street and scoop her tip.

" Milo?"

"I know all this," he said, irritated. "And I know to accept the offer. Are you satisfied?"

Stephanie paused, pivoting to look around, then brightened us she saw someone she knew. She ran toward… Patrick, climbing out of his Suzuki.

"Listen," Primakov said into his ear. " Milo, are you listening? I didn't want it to turn out like this. But it's the only way. You can see that, right? Grainger was small, Fitzhugh was small, too. The problem isn't a couple of rogue men; it's institutional."

Patrick had picked her up and kissed her and was walking her back to the Suzuki. Milo spoke in a flat voice: "So what you want is for me to bring down the entire CIA."

"Don't be ridiculous, Milo. That would never happen, and I don't even want it. All I want is a little international cooperation. That's all any of us want. And since you don't want to just take a job with the United Nations…"

"I'm not going to be your employee, Yevgeny. Just a source. And you'll only get what I decide should be known."

"Fair enough. And if there's anything I can do to help you. I can talk to Tina. She could be brought into the circle. She's smart; she'd understand."

"I don't want her to understand."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Her life's too unbalanced as it is. I don't want to curse her with knowing that much."

"Don't underestimate her," his father ordered, but Milo wasn't listening anymore. He'd had a whole week of the old man's words in Albuquerque, his scheming and deal-making. What was he left with now?

The Suzuki was part of the parade of cars carrying children home, and he noticed a gift-wrapped box in the back, for his daughter's birthday.

" Milo? You there?"

But Milo only heard the Bigger Voice, the one that spoke in his mother's strange intonation. Endlessly in that cell on the nineteenth floor, it had told him that everything he was doing was wrong, but he hadn't listened. Now: There goes the last of your hope.

He heard Einner: I’ll bet the Book has something to say about hope.

And he: It tells you to not get hooked on it.

Then it was six years ago to the day, and he was bleeding all over the sun-baked Venetian cobblestones. A pregnant woman screamed, while inside her the child beat and scratched to come out. He'd thought it was the end, but he'd been wrong. All of it-all the things that mattered, they were just beginning.

A strand of Tourist philosophy came to him, and for once he talked back to that disappointed voice that lived inside him: We don't need hope, Mother, because there is no end.

"What was that?" asked Yevgeny.

The Suzuki turned the corner. They were gone.