The Nearest Exit (8 page)

“Yeah?” he said irritably.

“Riverrun, past Eve.”

“And Adam’s.”

“Nice job, Hall. We’ve even heard of it over here. The family’s been hounding the police.”

“I’m glad you’re pleased.”

“None of us can figure out where you put her. In Kreuzberg?”

“Ask me no questions, Alan.”

“I am asking you, Sebastian.”

The lie came out smoothly because it had been practiced. “There was a second car in the courtyard. That’s where I put her. After your Germans left me at the Tempelhof gate, I doubled back. I picked up the car and drove her out to the countryside.”

“What Germans?”

“The ones you sent to watch over me.”

Drummond paused, perhaps wondering about the uses and misuses of irony. “You lost me. I didn’t send anyone.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

“It might matter. If someone’s following you—”

“No one’s following me now.”

Another pause. “Where are you?”

It was a pointless question, as Drummond’s computer charted the location of all his Tourists’ phones. “Antwerp.”

“You’ll be heading back to Zürich now?”

“Yeah.”

“First thing when you arrive, drop by the Best Western Hotel Krone. There’ll be a letter for you.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Listen, I’ve got things to prepare.”

“Won’t take long, Hall. Trust me on that. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be done in no time.”

The line went dead.

From hotel to hotel, the trip took nearly nine hours, placing him in the Best Western’s arid lobby by six Sunday evening. He drove most of the way in a Toyota he’d picked up on an Antwerp side street using his key ring, then dumped the car just over the Swiss border in Basel, wiped it down with a towel he found in the trunk, and took an hour-long train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof, where the previous night’s snow had blackened into mud.

He gave his Tourism name to a demure desk clerk with tight, tired eyes and received an envelope with
SEBASTIAN HALL
scribbled across it. As he headed back to the front doors, he realized he was being watched by a man and a woman, placed strategically at opposite ends of the lobby, wearing matching dark suits, one clutching a
Herald Tribune
, the other an
Economist
. They watched him stop at the doors, where he read the note. One word:
Outside
.

He found a spot on busy, cold Schaffhauserstrasse, beyond the reach of some inconspicuous security cameras at the next corner. The two lobby watchers didn’t follow him out.

It only took five minutes. A gray Lincoln Town Car made wet sounds through the dirty snow as it pulled up to the curb. The back door opened, and a man not much older than him—maybe forty—peered out. That now familiar voice said, “Riverrun, Hall. Get inside.”

He did so, and as the car started moving again Drummond said, “We finally meet like civilized people.” He gave a tight-lipped smile but made no attempt to shake hands.

He was young for a Tourism director, and his dark hair was long enough to be pulled back behind his ears—far from his time in the marines. He had reading glasses in his shirt pocket and a broad, all-American chin.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Milo said, watching the lights of Zürich pass by. “You in town just to see me?”

“You’d like to think that,” said Drummond, still smiling. “No—Kosovo’s proclaiming its independence soon. I’m in for a little discussion with some representatives.”

“Should be heated.”

“You think so?”

“Depends on our policy. Serbia won’t take it sitting down. At least Kosovo waited until the Serb elections were finished. If they’d done it beforehand, the nationalists would have swept the vote.”

The smile vanished. “I wasn’t too sure about you, Hall. I got some wind about you causing major havoc last year. Enough that I wouldn’t have brought you back. You’re too . . .” He snapped his fingers, but the word wouldn’t be summoned. “Your Tourism career ended seven years ago with—the reports tell me—a breakdown. Then you moved into administration and—I’m just being honest here, you understand—and your record in the Avenue of the Americas was not particularly stellar. As for the way it ended . . .” He shook his head. “Well, you were accused of killing Tom Grainger, my predecessor.” He squeezed his lips together and cleared his throat. “Anything to say about all this?”

Milo didn’t have much to say, because, looking into Drummond’s smug face, he lost all desire to impress the man. He tried anyway. “I was cleared of those charges.”

“Well, I
know
that. They do let me see files now and then. It was another Tourist who killed Grainger.”

“Yes.”

“Now, that Tourist—him, you killed.”

“You seem very well informed, sir.”

“I’ve got facts, Sebastian. Plenty of them. It’s the messiness that troubles me. A Tourism director dead. A Tourist. Not to mention Terence Fitzhugh, the Senate liaison . . .
suicide
, if you trust the files.”

“Angela Yates,” said Milo.

“Right. An embassy staffer. She was the first to go, wasn’t she?”

Milo nodded.

“All this messiness. All this blood. With you at the center of it.”

Milo wondered if he’d really been summoned to Zürich to be accused of murder again. So he waited. Drummond didn’t bother speaking. Milo finally said, “I guess you’ll have to ask Mendel why he brought me back.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“Something about budgets.”

Drummond stared at him, thinking this over. “Messy or not, you’re enough of a pro to be let in on a few things. Last year’s budget problems have intensified, and Grainger turning up dead did nothing for us in Washington. It seemed to echo all our enemies’ arguments. That we’re irresponsible and expensive, financially and in terms of human lives.”

“Sounds about right, sir.”

“Sense of humor. I like that. The point is that by now when we lose a Tourist we don’t have the resources to replace him. In Mendel’s estimation, you had at least been trained before, and all it would take was a relatively cheap catch-up course.”

“I was cut-rate.”

Drummond grinned.

“How many have we lost?”

“Tourists? Enough. Luck isn’t always on our side.”

That struck Milo as an entirely banal way to explain away the deaths of human beings, but he set aside his annoyance and turned to the window as they merged onto a highway, heading out of town.

“Last year,” Drummond said, “when things went sour for you, was there anyone outside the department who knew the details of what happened?”

“Janet Simmons, a Homelander—she learned a lot. I don’t think
she got the whole story, but she’s smart enough to put some things together.”

“We’ve vetted her,” Drummond said. “Is that all?”

Yevgeny Primakov knew everything, but that was a treason he didn’t feel up to admitting. “She’s the only living person. She and Senator Nathan Irwin.”

“The senator knows everything?”

“Of course. He was the one behind the Sudanese operation.”

“You know this?”

“No real evidence, but yes, I know it.”

A pause. “Senator Irwin’s the only one keeping the department alive. I don’t think we need to worry about him. We can thank him for any operational budget we still enjoy.”

Milo realized with dismay that the senator was quite possibly Drummond’s government sponsor, the friend who had landed him his new job in Tourism. But all he said was, “Do all these questions have a point? Sir?”

Drummond cleared his throat. “Look, Hall. I didn’t call you here to play around with you.” He produced a looser smile, to show how human he was. “I called you because you did an excellent job in Berlin. I had my eye on you, you know.”

“So did the Germans.”

“You keep saying that. Did they have the German flag plastered across their foreheads?”

“German haircuts.”

“Well, I hope they didn’t take useful notes.”

“I’m sure they didn’t.”

“Good,” he said, then looked at his hands, which Milo noticed were unusually red. “I knew it was going to be a hard one. For someone like you.”

“Hard, how?”

“It being a girl.”

Milo tried to appear bored. “The job itself was child’s play.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. And the other job, the financial work?”

“Should be wrapped up by the end of the week.”

“Good. Because it raised some eyebrows in Manhattan when you requested that six hundred grand.”

“You have a pen and paper?”

“Check the armrest.”

Milo opened the leather armrest that separated them and found two bottles of Evian, a stereo remote control, and a pen and pad. He wrote down a twenty-one-digit code, and when he handed it to Drummond he wondered what kind of circulation problem caused his redness. Another medical question. “Here’s the account’s IBAN. Money should be there by Thursday. Harry Lynch knows how to withdraw it without leaving fingerprints. Is Harry still around?”

Drummond looked confused. He still hadn’t learned the names of his underlings at the Avenue of the Americas.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Milo. “I just need one thing from you.”

“What’s that?”

“The name and number of the insurance adjuster working on the E. G. Bührle theft.”

Drummond got him into focus. “Oh.” He nodded, finally understanding. “Very good. I’ll send that to your phone.” He ripped out the page and folded it into his shirt pocket, thinking this over, then muttered, “It’s a pity.”

“Pity?”

“That we have to do this. This kind of thing. But Ascot wants to run Tourism into the ground. Bleeding us, at a time when oil prices are driving airfares into the sky.”

“So that’s what this is about. Keeping the department running.”

“We do what we must to stay alive.”

Milo considered asking if it was worth it, keeping alive a secret department that even Quentin Ascot, the CIA director, wanted to erase. It was a moot question, though: All government departments work on the basic understanding that their existence is enough reason to continue existing. Out the window was the blackness of countryside.

“You going to tell me where we’re going?”

Drummond followed his gaze. “Two weeks ago, in Paris, the embassy got a walk-in.”

“French?”

“Ukrainian. Name’s Marko Dzubenko. He was in town as part of an entourage for their internal affairs minister. He’d been in town only three days when he came to us.”

“Employer?”

“SSU,” he said, referring to the Security Service of Ukraine. “He made no secret of it, particularly once the staff threatened to kick him out of the building. He wanted us to know he was an important defector.”

“Is he?”

Drummond shrugged theatrically and settled against the far door. “Only if he’s trustworthy, and for the moment I don’t believe anything he tells us. Not until we know more about him. At this point we’ve just got the basics. Forty-six years old. Kiev University—foreign relations. Joined the secret police when he was twenty-four, then moved into intelligence after the Russians left. Paris was a coup for him—his previous trips were to Moscow, Tallinn, Beijing, and Ashgabat; that’s in Turkmenistan.”

“I know where Ashgabat is.”

“Of course you do. But it was news to me.”

“What rank is he?” Milo asked.

“Second lieutenant.”

“Not so bad. Why does he want to leave?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Drummond. “According to him, it’s personal gain. He’s being stifled at home, skipped over for promotion, while the new capitalists are making millions. He says capitalism has cheated him. From the looks of his accounts, it’s at least passed him by.” Drummond pursed his lips. “He wants a new life in America, but what does he have to buy it with? Marko’s trips were trade based, and that’s largely what he had for us. Ukrainian trade secrets?” He smiled again. “The man actually thought that would buy him a life in America!”

Alan Drummond’s mirth lasted a few seconds longer than
expected, then drained away when he saw his guest wasn’t encouraging it. Milo said, “Well, there’s a reason we’re sitting here talking about him. And it’s not Ukrainian exports.”

“It’s not,” Drummond muttered. “He spent a while giving us reams of useless information, most of which we had already. He saw we were fading fast. So he panicked and pulled out his wild card. He said that there’s a mole in the Department of Tourism.”

Silence followed, the engine rumbling beneath them. “Did he actually say those words?” asked Milo.

“He knew about the department and specified the mole was there.”

While the department liked to think of itself as existing in a parallel universe of absolute secrecy, Milo knew a few people who had figured out its existence—but they had been allies and friends. “The Ukrainians have someone inside? It’s hard to swallow.”