The Tourist (45 page)
Authors: Olen Steinhauer
Simmons used an imaginary key to lock her lips, then tossed it away.
"Fitzhugh's dead. Body discovered in his hotel room yesterday morning." Milo blinked at her, surprised--but was he surprised? She had no idea. She had read his file and uncovered the hidden nooks of his past, but Milo Weaver was still an enigma. He said, "How about that?"
"Yes. How about it?"
"Who did it?"
"The coroner says suicide. The pistol was licensed to him, and there was a note."
He showed more surprise, and again she wondered. He became serious.
"What did it say?"
"A lot of things. It was a rambling note, bad writing, probably written while drunk. He had a fifth of scotch in him. A lot of it was for his wife. Apologies for being a bad husband, that sort of thing. But he did devote a few sentences to the case. He said he was responsible for Grainger's death. He said he'd been running Grainger from the beginning. Really, all the things Grainger told you. The things you said you didn't believe."
"Are you sure it was suicide?"
"There's nothing to suggest otherwise. Unless you know something else you're not telling me."
Milo stared at the white surface of the table, his breaths audible, thinking. What was he thinking about?
She said, "There's one thing I only figured out late Saturday night, probably around the time Fitzhugh died. It does kind of throw everything into question, and I'd planned on following up on it today."
"What's that?"
"The day after you came back to the Avenue of the Americas, Fitzhugh received an anonymous package--that Russian passport of yours. It was real, but the question he never answered was: Who sent it?"
"I'd like to know that, too."
She smiled. "But you already know, don't you? Your father, Yevgeny Primakov. He sent it so that, if I wasn't already, I would start to question your entire history, find your grandfather, and be led to Yevgeny himself." Milo didn't answer. He just waited.
"It was smart. I'll admit that. He could've sent it to me directly, but he knew I wouldn't trust an anonymous package. Instead, he sent it to Terence, knowing he would be happy to share it. Terence thought it would bury you, but it did the opposite. It led me to Primakov, who just happened to have a photograph of Terence with Roman Ugrimov--Roman, who just happened to be in town, too. Amazing coincidence, don't you think?"
"I think you're imagining conspiracies, Janet."
"Maybe I am," she said agreeably, because a part of her wanted to believe that that's all it was--her imagination. Like Milo weeks before, she didn't like the feeling that she'd been led by the nose. Still, she knew it was true. "There's a certain beauty to it," she said. "Your father sends something that has the potential to expose you as a Russian spy, but instead it leads to evidence condemning Fitzhugh. Your father must love you very much to stick his neck out like that."
"That's ridiculous," said Milo. "How could he know that you'd follow that exact path?"
"Because," she said quickly, the answer already on her lips, "your father knew--if only because you told him--just how bad the relationship between Homeland and the Company is. He knew that if I smelled a mole, I would start to dig deep in order to squeeze the Company. As it turned out, they never had a mole, just an agent with a secret childhood." Milo considered all this while staring at his cuffed hands. "Maybe that's possible, Janet--in your paranoid world, at least--but you never got enough to really nail Fitzhugh, did you? It was all circumstantial stuff. Yet Fitzhugh still shot himself. No one could predict that."
"If he really shot himself."
"I thought you believed he did."
"Fitzhugh," said Simmons, "was too much of an old fox to do that. He would've fought every step of the way."
"So, who killed him?"
"Who knows? Maybe your father took care of that. Or maybe my investigation was making someone above Fitzhugh nervous. He made it very clear in his note that the buck stopped with him. You believe that? Do you believe that Fitzhugh was just a rogue administrator who decided to destabilize African countries in order to disrupt China's oil supply?" Milo's shoulders slumped in an attitude of dejection. "I don't know what to think, Janet."
"Then maybe you can answer a question."
"You know me, Janet. I'm always happy to help."
"What did you do during that week in Albuquerque?"
"Like I said, I drank. I drank and ate and shat and thought. Then I took a plane to New York City."
"Yeah," she said, standing. She'd had enough of this. "That's what I thought you'd say."
The
BEGINNING of
TOURISM
M O N D A Y , S E P T E M B E R 1 0 T O
T U E S D A Y , S E P T E M B E R 1 1 , 2 0 0 7
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 basketbal 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.
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