The Nearest Exit (38 page)

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.

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?”