The Nearest Exit (7 page)

“For the proletariat?”

“Wipe that smile off your face. It’s the social contract you’ve broken. Not that you care, and not that they care in the Avenue of the Americas. Whose idea was it?”

Milo had seldom seen him so angry. “Mine. I needed to collect money. This was the easiest and quickest way I could think of.”

“Easiest and quickest?” Primakov let out a rare but bitter laugh. “You’ve got a Degas, a Monet, a van Gogh, and a Cézanne—the biggest art heist in Swiss history. How do you expect to sell those off? You think no one’s going to notice?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Oh yes,” said the old man. “I’ll let you worry about it, because to you those paintings are just a pile of money.” He shook his head. “If I’d raised you, you’d know better.”

“If you’d raised me, Yevgeny, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

They returned to the plan. Its initial steps had never been in question—Primakov agreed that Milo’s scheme to lure Adriana into the courtyard between her school and her father’s taxi was suitable enough. The question was what would follow, and how quickly Primakov could arrange things on his side.

Very quickly, it turned out. As a man who commanded his own intelligence unit hidden within the folds of the United Nations’ baroque superstructure, who could act with relative freedom because so few knew his office even existed, Yevgeny Primakov only needed to make two calls.

They decided to put the plan into effect that afternoon.

Milo filled his coffee-bitter stomach with garlic chicken from a Chinese diner, then picked up a ten-year-old BMW 3 Series with enough trunk space from outside a drab office block in Berlin-Mitte. It took about forty seconds for the Company-issue remote on his key ring to find the right combination; the car bleeped and unlocked. He slipped inside, pulling the door shut, and forced open the panels around the ignition tumbler with a screwdriver he’d lifted from Lukas Steiner’s apartment, connected the cables, then used the screwdriver to turn the ignition. He pulled out into the Berlin traffic. Hopefully the job would be done before anyone noticed the car was missing.

He was in Kreuzberg by four, parked inside the courtyard on Gneisenaustrasse. The apartments that looked down on his BMW were full of young professionals, most of whom would be at work. For fifteen minutes, he sat behind the wheel, waiting. When a retiree wandered in to use the trash bins, he lay down as if searching for something that had dropped under the passenger seat.

By the time the students were released from their imprisonment at four thirty, he had used a T-shirt to wipe down the seats, steering wheel, gearshift, and handles and then taken his position by the courtyard entrance. The broad street, cut down the middle by a median of leafless trees, was packed with shops, and nearby he noted a small Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant, the Chandra Kumari, its strong scent filling the street. Then, farther down and across the street, he spotted a navy blue Opel sedan with Berlin plates and two Germans inside, looking intensely bored.

It was that, the look of boredom, so intense that it could only be fake, that caught his eye. Then the familiarity. It took about a minute to figure it out: Earlier in the week, while surveying the Imperial Tobacco factory where Rada Stanescu worked, he’d seen that same car. The same two men who, from their dress, hair, and glasses,
looked German. One young—late twenties—the other somewhere past fifty. The same men. The same boredom.

He fought the impulse to jump back into the safety of the courtyard. Instead, he glanced at his watch and thought it through. Only two people knew where he was—Yevgeny and his new master, Alan Drummond. Of them, only Drummond had known where he was earlier in the week.

Alan Drummond still didn’t trust him, and so, rather than assign another Tourist or depopulate a curious embassy, he had asked the Germans to run a casual surveillance.
No, not a terrorist, just a potential problem. All we need is a report on his movements
.

This, of course, was another level of the vetting. If the Germans saw him molesting a schoolgirl—or worse, killing her—they wouldn’t sit idly by as the crime was committed. Drummond, like any manipulator, was raising the stakes of his final exam. Whether or not Milo had the stomach for the job was one thing; Drummond also wanted to know that he had the chops for it.

Despite a fresh wave of anxiety that tickled the Chinese food in his guts, this changed nothing. If the plan went properly, his minders wouldn’t prove more than a distraction, Alan Drummond be damned.

Adriana Stanescu, it turned out, was not a stupid girl. Despite being ashamed of her parents’ professions, she knew, as most children do, which of her parents’ commands made sense. Not speaking to strangers, for instance—Adriana had been taught that one. When Milo said, “Entschuldigung,”
Excuse me
, she only hesitated in midstep, then continued. He tried again. “Adriana. Your father, Andrei, told me to pick you up. He’s stuck over in Charlottenburg.”

When the girl stopped, her little backpack, emblazoned with a manga superhero, bounced against her thin back. She turned to him. “Who are you?”

She was a clean-cheeked beauty, beautiful in an entirely different way than his own daughter, but that made it no easier. “Günter.” He took out the Alligator Taxi ID, on which he’d pasted his own picture. “Look, all I know is Andrei said you’d prefer if I parked out of sight. Maybe you’d be embarrassed by the taxi, I don’t know.
Anyway,” he said as he shot a thumb over his shoulder, “I’m right in there if you want me to drive you home.”

Adriana considered her choices, and perhaps it was the shame of her embarrassment, the fact that even her father’s co-worker knew about it, that made her nod. “Okay. Danke.”

He politely let her go first, a gust of sweet children’s perfume filling his nose as she passed. He watched the Japanese cartoon character bounce as they entered the courtyard and left the Germans’ field of vision. He slipped on a pair of leather gloves. Though coffee and lunch had cleared away his hangover, he still felt sick, and that little animated creature—what was it? a mouse? a dog?—just made him queasier.

Once inside the courtyard, facing three parked cars, Adriana stopped and turned around. “Where’s your taxi?” She wasn’t afraid, just curious.

This was the hardest part, the messy part. He’d toyed with the idea of telling her everything, but she wouldn’t believe him. Of course she wouldn’t. She would put up a fight, scream, bolt into the street. She no doubt remembered the story of Natascha Kampusch who, surviving eight years of imprisonment after being kidnapped at the age often, had finally found a way to escape just two years ago.

The only answer was force. So when she said, “Where’s your taxi?” he smiled and raised an arm to point. As she turned to look again, he stepped closer, clapped a hand over her mouth and nose, and reached an arm around her stomach to grab her right elbow. He lifted her high, her legs kicking, muted squeals leaking from between his gloved fingers, but she was small enough for him to carry to the BMW as he sought a point four inches down from her elbow, a pressure point called Colon 10. Once by the trunk, he kept up the pressure, squeezing her stomach, pressing the nerve in her arm, and cutting off her air. Any one of these points, if dealt with violently, could have knocked her out, but he didn’t want to hurt her. So he did all three at once, until her kicks slowed and she fainted.

He turned her limp body around and listened to her breaths. He
pried open her eyes—bloodshot, but okay. She would be unconscious for no more than ten minutes.

With her body over one arm, he popped open the trunk and laid her inside. He quickly used a roll of duct tape to seal her lips and bind her feet and ankles. Once finished, he made a mistake: He paused to look down at her again. He took in her entire length, folded carefully into the trunk, and his stomach convulsed. He slammed the trunk and ran to the driver’s side. He got the door open and threw himself across the seat. He waited, but in the end his stomach was stronger than Stefan’s had been.

From his first
Entschuldigung
to this moment, two minutes had passed.

He backed out of the courtyard, made a U-turn at the next corner, then drove south. At the intersection of Gneisenaustrasse and Mehringdamm, he passed an Alligator Taxi with Andrei Stanescu behind the wheel, looking at his watch. In the rearview, the Opel sedan pulled slowly into the road and kept a steady distance behind him.

It took fifteen minutes to reach Tempelhof Airport’s long-term parking lot. By then, Adriana had awakened, as he had expected she would, but during the fast drive down the B96, he hadn’t heard a thing. Only when he slowed at the entrance and stopped to take an automated parking ticket did he hear her kicking against the walls of her tiny prison. His stomach went bad again, but he kept it under control, and once he’d parked, the sound of her struggling seemed incomprehensibly loud. He got out, leaving the car unlocked and the screwdriver in place. He followed her noises to the trunk. He took out his wallet and flipped through it as if counting cash, but said in German, “Adriana, it’s going to be okay. Nothing will happen to you. In a few minutes someone else will take you out. Go with him. He’s here to protect you.”

If it weren’t for the duct tape, Adriana Stanescu might have shouted German or elaborate Moldovan curses at him, but all he heard was wordless moans and three sharp kicks of her bound feet against the inside of the trunk. He ran to catch an airport shuttle
arriving at a nearby stop. Just beyond the stop, the Opel had pulled into a space but kept idling. At the sight of Milo running toward the bus, the car backed out again. He moved to the rear of the half-full bus and watched the sedan follow him to the airport.

Milo had nearly expected failure, but since any good Tourist’s travel plans are often thrown awry, failure didn’t concern him. In fact, a part of him wished for it—perhaps at the airport ticket booth (had there been a person handing out tickets), or in the parking lot (had the German shadows decided to check his car before shadowing the bus). If failure stopped him in his tracks, he could end the pointless game. Not only this particular job, but all jobs, forever.

It didn’t fail. The Germans followed him to the mostly empty airport—it was scheduled to close down later that year—and took notes as he bought a ticket for the next departing flight, to Dortmund. He depended on his Sebastian Hall papers too much to risk them, so he used his emergency documents—a U.K. passport that gave his name as Gerald Stanley, resident of Gloucester.

They watched him wait for the 6:50
P.M.
departure. Out in the lot, he knew, his father parked beside the BMW, opened the trunk, and with the help of some friends transferred the struggling girl to another car in order to save her life.

His shadows tired before boarding began. He imagined that they were going to check out the BMW, but it would now be empty.

Yet by the time he was on the plane, taxiing down the old Tempelhof runway, his surety faded. Would Yevgeny keep his promise? It was a big responsibility: Keep the girl hidden for a month or
two while the police searched for her. The parents could make honest cries of despair, and after the attention had died down Yevgeny would contact them. The child is fine, he would say, but the only way to get her back safely is to keep her a secret, to leave your lives in Berlin and move away—perhaps return to Moldova—under new names, where you can live together in peace. Yevgeny would take care of the particulars—the passports, transportation, visas if necessary—but he would have to be assured of their silence.

A telling detail from their debate had been Yevgeny’s doubt that the girl’s parents would be willing to leave their lives for the sake of Adriana. “Of course they would agree to it immediately, but later, when they’re trapped in some lonely town far from Western civilization, don’t you think they might change their minds? Contact old friends and family?”

It told him that Yevgeny couldn’t imagine sacrificing his own future for the sake of either of his daughters, much less for the out-of-wedlock son who’d caused him more grief, probably, than he had been worth. As his plane crested cloud, Milo wondered if the old man, after some consideration, would realize what trouble this plan was and decide to end all their problems with a bullet.

He would have to see for himself. In a few weeks, he decided, he would demand to visit the girl.

Exhausted, he burned the Alligator ID and his Gerald Stanley papers in Dortmund and spent the night in a hotel as Sebastian Hall. He also put his phone back together, but no one called. In the morning, he bought a change of clothes in the Westenhellweg shopping center, rented a car, and drove through the Ruhr, where industrial and once-industrial cities like Bochum and Essen passed; then the landscape turned to farmland as he continued into the Netherlands. By Saturday afternoon, he’d reached Amsterdam, turned in his car, and boarded a bus heading to Belgium. Only once he’d taken a room at Antwerp’s Hotel Tourist that evening did he pick up some German newspapers. The only sign of Milo Weaver’s trail of destruction was a brief update, on the arts pages, on the lack of progress on the E. G. Bührle theft. There was no mention of Adriana Stanescu—the Berlin police would be waiting seventy-two hours before raising the alarm.

He ate a dinner of beef stewed in red wine with pearl onions, the obligatory french fries, and two half liters of Vondel brown ale. The meal left him tired again, so he climbed up to his meager room. Before sleep came, a cell phone melody jolted him.