They each put back two shots before Milo said, “Is this when it happened? You got the story at the embassy?”
“Hell no! You think Xin Zhu’s a complete idiot? That was the next week. I get a call from him, and we head out to Tak-Tak, one of his favorite clubs. Usually, guys like him, they’ll end up at the Budapest Club, maybe Zair, but Tak-Tak? Shit, I’d never been there. But Zhu walked in like a king. They know him there. It’s the one place he can go where he’s the only slant-eye. We get a booth in the corner where we can watch the girls and talk in private. Then he starts drinking. I like to drink-don’t misunderstand me-but this Chinaman puts them away. Unbelievable. I guess because he’s so big he can take it.”
“So he wasn’t drunk?”
“Oh, he was drunk. Easily. He just didn’t pass out.”
“Did you?”
“For a few minutes, yeah.”
“And he talked to you.”
“Like we were brothers. Want to know what I think? I think the fat bastard is lonely. I mean, he can’t really trust anyone under him, and he’s afraid of those above him. So he works his intrigues all by himself.”
“He told you this?”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
“But he told you about his intrigues.”
“A little, yeah. But it wasn’t until the end of the night, when he was really wasted, that he told me this thing that’s got your friend excited. About the mole he’s been running in the fucking-secret American Department of Tourism.”
“Tell me about that, please.”
“Certainly,” Dzubenko said. He raised his shot glass, then drank. “When I told Zhu he was making this up to impress me-really, Department of Tourism? What kind of name is that?-he immediately broke it down. The administration of the Department of Tourism is organized into seven subject areas. One supervisor and nine Travel Agents for each section.” He grinned. “I stopped him there-Travel agents? I said. That’s when he told me they were kind of like analysts, collecting information from Tourism’s field agents, who are called Tourists. There are sixty- three of these guys, these Tourists, spread around the world.”
Sixty-three-not even Milo knew that number. Drummond could verify it later.
“He said that the Department of Tourism was the dirtiest part of America’s filthy intelligence machine.”
“And he said he had a mole in this secret department?”
Dzubenko nodded and held out his empty glass; Milo refilled it.
“He offer any evidence of this?”
“Well, I’ve got some experience in this sort of thing. Learning what’s true and what’s not.”
“I imagine you do.”
“Sure. I knew that with this fat fucker the best thing was to play on his vanity. I told him he was a liar. I told him no one would have a secret department with that kind of name, certainly not the Americans. They’d call it Alpha Bravo. Or Operation Free-Fucking-Eagle. Something like that. We had some girls with us by then-so we talked in English-but in Russian I’d tell the girls he was a big fat liar. You see what I was doing? I was using his manhood to get the evidence from him.”
“Extremely clever,” said Milo. “I suppose he rose to the challenge.”
“You suppose right. First he made me swear to keep my mouth shut-this was just for me. Then he told me about one of the Tourism Department’s operations, in the Sudan. One that was supposed to cripple China’s oil supply. This was back in July, and-get this-it all surrounded the Tiger.”
“The Tiger?” Milo asked, feigning ignorance.
“Come on! You know, that famous assassin. The one who killed the French foreign minister a while back. He was hired by the CIA.” Dzubenko shook his head. “Now, Zhu started with this, which made me doubt him right away, but then he slowly told me the whole story.”
“Which is what you’ll do for me right now.”
For the next hour, Dzubenko told it as he remembered it. He told it the way one tells a story he’s had to repeat often in recent days, playing with red herrings and side characters, knowing that the essential focus will not be lost. He began with the assassin, Benjamin Harris, otherwise known as the Tiger, and his surrender to a man from the department named Milo Weaver, with a message: Someone has killed me with the HIV virus, and I want you to find him. “But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Not for any Company agent, least of all someone from this fucking- secret department.” Dzubenko was right about that; it hadn’t been enough to get Milo moving. It had taken more. It took the untimely death of an old friend, Angela Yates, and its connection to the Tiger, to make him act. Dzubenko took a drag off his Marlboro. “People are all the same. We need a personal reason to get our asses off the couch.”
He told how an agent in the Department of Homeland Security decided Milo was responsible for Angela’s death, and he had to go on the run. “From Disney World-can you believe it? He was there with his old lady and his kid. Tina, that’s the wife’s name. The daughter was called Stephanie. He had to leave them behind and go black.”
Dzubenko knew about the other players: the Tourist James Einner, the Russian businessman Roman Ugrimov, Diane Morel from French intelligence, and the Tourist Milo had killed, Kevin Tripplehorn, aka, many other names. He knew that it all connected to an attempt to destabilize the Sudanese government by blaming the murder of a radical cleric on the Chinese, who had significant oil interests in that country. Zhu told Dzubenko that the murder itself was one thing-the mullah had been a pain for everyone-but the riots that followed were the real crime. Eighty-six is the official number, Zhu told him, but more died. Innocents. Even a few of our own people, working in the oil fields. There was no need for that.
Zhu knew, further, that the plot had been instigated by Thomas Grainger, then head of Tourism, now deceased, as well as Terence Fitzhugh, also deceased. Both of whom had been directed by a certain senator, Nathan Irwin of Minnesota.
“That was a fuck of a messy month. Don’t get me wrong-we have plenty of messy months ourselves, but we expect a little less bloodletting from the CIA. I mean, you guys have a real budget. It should lead to less corpses, no?”
“It should,” Milo said, all the feeling drained from his limbs. This man knew everything.
“But there was one thing Zhu couldn’t figure out, and it irritated him. This Weaver guy. He was the one who figured out what was going on, and as a result everyone wanted him. Homeland Security wanted him for murder. The Company wanted him dead so the story wouldn’t get out. But this man, Zhu said, he lives the most charmed of lives. He survived. That really confused him. He said Weaver spent a couple months in prison, and his marriage fell apart, but he did survive. Now, not only was he still living and breathing, he was even working for his old employer again. He wanted to know how he pulled off that trick. You know what I told him?”
“I don’t,” said Milo, “but I’d like to know.”
“I told him this Weaver character was obviously working with the bad guys himself. Because the bad guys are the only ones who ever survive. Zhu thought that was pretty funny.”
The truth was that Yevgeny Primakov had helped him stay alive, and it struck him that the question of whether his father was a good guy or a bad guy was just a matter of perspective.
He’d had enough. It wasn’t just that the Chinese knew ninety percent of what had happened last year; it was simply hearing it again, described so vividly, and the way Dzubenko’s words brought back all those mixed feelings of confusion and anger and despair. He stood and offered a hand. “Thanks, Marko. You’ve been a big help.”
“So now will you move me to Wisconsin?”
“Wisconsin?”
“I have a cousin who lived there for two years. The most beautiful place on earth. The best women, too.”
“I didn’t realize,” said Milo. “We’ll see what we can do. You need anything else?”
Dzubenko looked at the full ashtray and the vodka bottle. “Another carton. Maybe some tonic water for mixing-my stomach’s starting to hurt.”
“Maybe you need some food instead.”
“Tonic’s fine.” He picked up the television remote. “It’s good, you know.”
“What?”
“Your Russian. Not that teach-yourself-Russian bullshit most of you Company guys use.”
