The Nearest Exit (5 page)

Stefan pulled the ticket clerk out from behind her counter and forced her down beside the guards as Milo checked for patrons. There were only two left—an elderly couple in the first room. They stared at him, baffled.

While Radovan kept watch over his prisoners, Milo and Stefan took out their wire cutters. The first snip set off a piercing alarm, but this was expected. Ten minutes, he had figured, minimum. A Monet, a van Gogh, a Cézanne, and a Degas.

With their heavy glass covers, the paintings were unwieldy, so it took both of them to hustle each to the van, while Radovan paced menacingly. Seven minutes into it, Milo tapped Radovan’s shoulder. They all withdrew.

Giuseppe laid on the gas.

This, of course, was the easy part. Four paintings worth over a hundred and sixty million dollars in less than ten minutes. No corpses, no injuries, no mistakes. Face masks, the minimum of conversation, and a white van out of town.

Giuseppe kept to the speed limit while behind him Radovan and Stefan slipped the burlap bags over the paintings and chatted about details of the job, the way they might discuss pretty girls they’d met on vacation. The expressions on the guards’ faces, the ticket clerk’s admirably shaped ass, the old couple’s strange air of ease as they watched the robbery take place. Then, without warning, Stefan leaned forward and vomited.

He apologized, but they’d all been through enough jobs to know there was often one person whose nerves finally took control and emptied him completely. There was no shame in it.

Giuseppe got them out of Zürich proper by a confusing sequence of turns he had charted out beforehand. Only once they’d reached the eastward road to Tobelhof did the rigor relax, and for a brief minute they had a peaceful view of the forest rising toward the peak of Zürichberg. A moment of naiveté, as if this peace could be theirs. They passed through Tobelhof’s scattered farms, and by the time they reached the urban landscape of Gockhausen, the feeling was gone.

They reentered the forest on the far side of the town and took a left onto an unused dirt road where, a half mile in, a VW van and a Mercedes waited for them in a clearing. They got out and stretched. Radovan gave a Serbian curse of glee—“Jebute!”—before they transferred the paintings to the VW. Giuseppe doused the interior of their white van with a canister of gasoline.

Milo removed a soft leather briefcase from the trunk of the Mercedes. Inside was six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of used euro bills in small denominations, divided into three Tesco grocery bags. If asked, he would have explained that they’d been liberated from a drug dealer in Nice, but no one asked. He distributed the bags and shook their hands. He thanked them for their good work, and each told him to call whenever he had another job. Milo wished Radovan luck with his mother. “It took a long time,” said Radovan, “but I’ve finally got my priorities straight. This money will pay for whatever she needs.”

“You sound like a good son.”

“I am,” he said without a hint of modesty. “As soon as a man loses touch with family, he might as well put a bullet in his own head.”

Milo gave him an appreciative smile, then shook his hand, but Radovan wouldn’t let go.

“You know, Tante, I don’t really like Americans. Not since they bombed my hometown. But you—you, I like.”

Milo wasn’t sure how to take that. “What makes you think I’m American?”

A big grin filled Radovan’s face. It was a familiar one, that knowing and vaguely condescending smile prevalent among Balkan men. “Let’s just say your German accent is lousy.”

“Maybe I’m English. Or Canadian.”

A laugh popped from Radovan’s mouth, and he slapped Milo’s arm. “No, you’re American, all right. But I won’t hold it against you.” He reached into his pocket and handed over Milo’s worn passport. He winked. “Sorry, but I like to know who I’m working with. Tschüss.”

As Milo watched the Serb proudly join the others at the car, he thought how lucky they both were. Had he lifted something that could have connected Milo to his real name—not this Sebastian Hall passport—Radovan wouldn’t have made it out of this forest, and he didn’t feel up to killing anyone today.

Once they were gone, he reversed the VW a few more yards away, then walked back and lit the van’s upholstery with his Zippo, leaving the doors open. He lit a Davidoff for himself and waited until the red flames had spread, turning blue as they began to melt the dash, filling the interior with poisonous smoke. He put the cigarette out on his heel, tossed it into the growing inferno, then returned to the VW and drove away.

Farther south on the A2, which would eventually take him to Milan, his phone vibrated on the passenger seat. He didn’t need to see
PRIVATE NUMBER
on the screen to know who it was.

However, the voice was not Owen Mendel’s. It was deep yet airy, like an educated man still clutching onto his progressive youth. The code, though, was the same.

“Riverrun, past Eve.”

“And Adam’s,” he answered. “Who are you?”

“New, that’s what. Alan Drummond. And you, I believe, are Sebastian Hall.”

“What happened to Mendel?”

“Temporary placement, until they found me. Rest assured that I’m here to stay.”

“Okay.” Milo paused. “This isn’t just a call of introduction, is it?”

“Please. I don’t do those. I’m right to business.”

“Then let’s get to it.”

This Alan Drummond, his new Voice of God, told him to go to Berlin, to the Hotel Hansablick. “The instructions are waiting for you.”

“You know I’m in the middle of something.”

“I should hope you are. Just take a few days.”

“No clues?”

“I think you’ll find it self-explanatory.”

Two hours later, in a suburb north of Lugano, he transferred the paintings to a garage he’d rented the week before and secured with a combination lock. Because of their weight, it took a while. There was a single fluorescent light overhead, and in its surreal glow he took a moment to examine the paintings uncovered. It was a shame, because according to the plan he’d cobbled together only two of them would return to the world. He lit another Davidoff and tried to decide which would survive and which would not, but couldn’t. Count Ludovic Lepic and his two daughters gazed back accusingly because they believed they would never be seen again, and perhaps that was true. Degas had immortalized them in oils nearly a century and a half ago, and at some point a master of industry had picked them up and his estate had hung them for all to see. Next week, with a bit of gasoline and this Zippo, they, or two others, would vanish, as if they had never been.

He locked up and drove on, leaving the Swiss southern Alps for the industrial Lombardy plains. The air outside his window was cold and clean, but in the late-night Italian darkness he could see nothing of the peaks behind him. It was past midnight when he reached the wet, tungsten-bright streets of Milan, and on Viale Papiniano he wiped down and abandoned the VW. He caught an hour-long night train to Bergamo, then a shuttle bus to Orio al Serio Airport, which had an eight-thirty flight to Berlin, the earliest one in the region. He’d left his last tote bag in a Zürich Dumpster before joining his crew for the job, and now carried only what filled his pockets—his pills, Davidoffs, passports, cash and cards, cell phone, and a single keyless key ring with a small remote. He boarded with his Sebastian Hall passport and took a seat over the wing beside a tired teenaged boy. He popped two Dexedrine to stay awake. Once they were in the air, the boy said, “Vacation.”

“Excuse me?”

The teen, an Italian with impeccable English, grinned. “The
song you’re humming. ‘Vacation,’ by the Go-Go’s.” He was clearly proud of his knowledge of a song forgotten by most people by the time he was born.

“So it is,” Milo admitted. Then, despite the drugs rattling his nerves and the flash of those answering-machine voices laughing in his head, he passed out.

They’d called in early November to ask if he’d be interested in returning to the field. “Your record is excellent, you know.” That had been Owen Mendel, full of baffled praise—baffled because he didn’t know why this excellent Tourist, who’d even moved on to six years of administration, had been kicked off the Company payroll. Mendel had obviously been left with a severely edited file. “It’s up to you, of course, but you know what kind of budgeting pressure we’re under these days. If we could get some experienced people like you in the field, we just might make it.”

A nice sell. The Company wasn’t doing him a favor; he was the Good Samaritan.

He’d known, from the moment he heard Owen Mendel’s voice, exactly what would follow. Yevgeny had prepared him. “You’ll say yes, of course, and after some refresher course you’ll be vetted by the jobs you do. A few weeks. We’ll make no contact during the probationary period.”

A “few weeks” had grown into three months. Even the great Yevgeny Primakov, secret ear of the United Nations, hadn’t figured on that. Nor had he figured on the kind of job that Alan Drummond, Mendel’s successor, would assign him in Berlin: a final, impossible vetting.

It was five days after the Zürich job, a little before nine on Friday morning, and he stood on the cold, gusty grounds in front of the Berlin Cathedral. He was caught in the funk of a muddy post-drunk anticipation, trying hard not to look like a vagrant, but it was difficult. All night he’d sought solace in a vodka-based honey liqueur called Bärenfang, but it had only added to his sickness. The rumble of rush-hour traffic rolled toward him; a tour bus with Augsburg plates swerved onto Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and gasped to a stop not far away.

A white spongy envelope had awaited him, and once he’d gotten it from the Hansablick clerk in exchange for a tip, he’d taken it with him on a long walk, a subway ride, and another walk to a dusty, nondescript pension in Friedrichshain, a bohemian district of what used to be called East Berlin.

Two photographs, from different angles, of a pretty olive-skinned girl, blond from a bottle. Girl: fifteen years old. Adriana Stanescu, only child of Andrei and Rada Stanescu, Moldovan immigrants. On the reverse of one photo:

L0 2/15

Kill the child, and make the body disappear. He had until the end of the week.

He’d burned the instructions Monday, and since then shadowed the Stanescus, examining the details of their lives. Rada Stanescu worked at the Imperial Tobacco factory, while her husband, Andrei, drove under the banner of Alligator Taxi GmbH most evenings. They lived in Kreuzberg among Turkish families and gentrifying Germans, not far south of Milo’s pension.

What of the girl, Adriana, who’d been scheduled to die? He’d followed her to the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where her friends were a mix of German and Turkish students. He’d found nothing out of the ordinary.

Don’t ask
—another Tourism rule. If a girl is to be killed, then she is to be killed. Action is its own reason.

He began walking to the cathedral’s ticket office, where the Bavarians from the bus were beating their hands, sending up clouds of breath, waiting for the window to open.

Each morning, Andrei Stanescu dropped off his daughter one block from her school. Why one block? Because (and he read this from her expressions, from the shame in her father’s face) Adriana was embarrassed that her father was a taxi driver. Between the drop-off point and school, along Gneisenaustrasse, were six apartment-building entrances and the always-open car-sized entrance to a courtyard. In the afternoon, she returned to him along that same route, always alone. The courtyard, then, was where it would have to happen. If it happened at all.

Every Tourist has a past, and Alan Drummond knew all about those two things that, had the budgets been more favorable, would have barred Milo from Tourism: his wife and daughter. Drummond knew that this seemingly simple task would be more difficult for him than storming the Iranian embassy in Moscow.

Clearly, his suspicions had been right—the department still didn’t trust him, and all the jobs that had come before were mere preparation, a three-month incubation before his rebirth into Tourism. An extended test, really, culminating in job nine: an envelope, gray Berlin skies, and the desire to snuff himself rather than see this little job through.

If he’d had no daughter, would it have been easier? He made a conscious decision to not dwell on that, but his brain ignored him. He wondered, foolishly, how many evil acts it takes to make a person evil. Six? Eighteen? Just one? How many had he committed?

What does the Bigger Voice say?

Stop.

He needed to know why. Why Adriana Stanescu had been condemned to death.

He’d picked through their garbage, tracked down bank accounts, took some time to shadow the Stanescus’ acquaintances, working around the clock. The only spot on their records was an uncle, Mihai, who worked in a bakery near the Tiergarten. He’d twice been arrested for bringing Moldovans illegally into Germany. A human
smuggler, but small-time; otherwise, why would he rise at four each morning and not leave work until after four in the afternoon, flour dusting his hair and stuck to all his hard-to-wash spots?

By all appearances, the Stanescus were precisely what they seemed: a hardworking immigrant family with a lovely teenaged daughter.

Yet even as he investigated, he prepared. On Wednesday, he visited a bar not far from Alligator Taxi’s central office and struck up a conversation with Günter Wittinger, a young driver who’d been with Alligator only one year. He’d introduced himself as someone looking to break into the business, someone who needed advice. Despite what Radovan had said, his accent was good enough for this to work. Six beers later, Sebastian lifted Günter’s Alligator ID, then slipped out while the man was in the toilet.