Each also had another message, sent twenty minutes before the Myrrh code. Jones’s read:
L: Stanley Wallis, Kasr el Madina Hotel, Cairo. Total silence.
The L stood for liquidate, and “total silence” meant that Jones should disassemble her phone and refuse all outside communication until the job was done. Klein’s message was identical, though it pointed him to Peter Schiffer, Hotel Belle Epoque, Bern.
Drummond verified that Stanley Wallis and Peter Schiffer were Tourists, muttering under his breath that Schiffer was the new work name for James Einner. Then he got down on his knees, sat, and lay back, flat on the grimy tile floor, eyes shut. “Holy shit,” he said to no one in particular. “He’s making us kill ourselves.”
Irwin, Milo noticed, was in a near-fetal position in his chair, eyes open and round. Only Jones and Klein, the two Tourists, seemed to be holding it together.
Even Milo felt himself starting to lose it. Throughout the world at that moment, thirty-seven men and women had just received orders to murder one another. Any time now the killings would begin, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
Drummond sat up but remained on the floor, looking as if he’d just woken. He sighed loudly. “So, Milo. Is he still your hero?”
Milo wasn’t listening. He wanted to be far away. He wanted to be home. He took out Drummond’s phone and dialed an international phone number, and by the third ring Erika Schwartz picked up.
“It’s done,” he told her. “Alan will mail the tape. For Wartmuller, go to Lugano, to this address,” he said and gave her a street and number. “Garage number six, combination 54-12-35. It’s probably not what you expect, but with a little creativity you can end his career with it.”
Schwartz said, “You sound terrible, Milo. There were problems?”
“Oh, no, Erika. Everything’s just fine.”
“Then perhaps you can give me the final thing you promised.”
“The final thing?”
“The name of her killer.”
Milo had forgotten. He rubbed his eyes. “I’ll do that-but I don’t think it’ll do you any good now.”
“Why not?”
13
On all the continents they began to move, drawn by words on small screens. An L followed by a name, and each name received the reverse order, to take out the one coming to see him. On a large screen on the twenty- second floor of the building on the corner of West Thirty-first and the Avenue of the Americas, the red spots on every continent shifted, and then, over hours, pairs converged. They left cities to find new cities, and those in the countryside and in places with no names sought out the crowded centers.
In the office, the late-morning light spilling in, they watched and zoomed in on individual cities like spectators to a disaster who morbidly replay the same tape over and over again. A red spot moved closer to another red spot until they were atop one another, and then one moved away, leaving behind a blue spot. Then nearby-never farther than a half mile from the point of contact, and sometimes in the same place-the original spot stopped and turned blue.
“Who’s doing that?” asked Irwin, wiping at his nose with Kleenex he’d stolen from a cubicle. “One kills another, and who’s killing the first one?”
No one bothered to answer him.
Out in the field of cubicles Travel Agents made desperate calls to hotels in the world’s cities, asking to speak to people who never answered their room phones or the knocks on their doors. They knew what total silence meant.
Hanoi, Jerusalem, Moscow, Johannesburg, London, Cairo, Tokyo, Mexico City, Seoul, Dhaka, New Delhi, Brasilia, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Tashkent, Tehran, Vancouver, Phnom Penh, Bern.
In Cairo, there was no joining of spots. Just a red spot inside the Kasr el Madina that turned blue. Milo asked Drummond to zoom in on Bern, then smiled sadly as he saw that Peter Schiffer, once known as James Einner, was in Marians Jazzroom on Engestrasse.
Milo used another computer to find the club’s Web site. There was a phone number. He called, and after three rings a woman picked up. A trombone wailed in the background. In German he explained there was an emergency. An accident. The wives of two men in the club had been seriously injured. Could he please talk to Peter Schiffer and James Einner? The woman was hesitant. “We’re packed.”
“Really,” said Milo. “This is an emergency.”
He could hear her shouting the names. There was a break in the music that helped her project across the small club that Milo knew so well. Minutes passed, and finally she picked up again and said, “I’m sorry, but they’re not here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, man. I’m sure.”
But there he was, in the rear corner. He wouldn’t answer, though. He followed orders too well. “One last thing.”
“Better be quick.”
“Please write down a message. They’ll be there. Give it to either one of them.”
“What’s the message?”
“Myrrh.”
“What?”
He spelled it for her. “And put my name on it. Milo Weaver.” He spelled that, too.
He returned to the others mesmerized by the spots changing colors in Drummond’s office. Irwin was in a chair, his face in his hands. Drummond was hypnotized, keeping score. Klein and Jones stood back a few paces, watching wryly, though when Jones spoke there was no humor in her voice. “That’s seventeen. There-Brasilia-eighteen.” She looked at Milo. “All this because someone’s kid died?”
He didn’t answer her; no one did.
Milo stood beside Drummond, who made a soft whimpering sound each time a spot changed color. He sometimes zoomed back so that the world became pockmarked with red blemishes slowly overwhelmed by blue. The scales tipped, the blue winning, but that didn’t slow the color’s brutal forward march. Milo kept his eye on Switzerland. Bern.
Red.
Red.
Red.
While he stared he remembered another of those insipid rules of Tourism that had come from his own pen:
A TOURIST KNOWS FAILURE BETTER THAN HE
KNOWS HIS MOTHER
Which was what Peter Schiffer, or James Einner, read at that moment.
He was sitting in Marians Jazzroom, pressed into the soft purple couch that ran the length of the back wall, hardly even listening to the trio on the bandstand-drums, bass, trombone. He squinted in the dim light, reading the pamphlet that he’d spent two months tracking down. Malmo, Toulouse, Milan. Now Bern, where the handwritten child’s notebook had been hidden behind this very seat.
He’d discovered it before the club began to fill up for the seven thirty show, so distracted by his search that he wasn’t even concerned by the order he’d received some hours before-L: ZACHARY KLEIN. WILL COME TO YOU AT BELLE EPOQUE. UNTIL COMPLETE, TOTAL SILENCE. While he had followed the order by disassembling his phone, he wasn’t about to sit around in his hotel, even one as pleasant as the Belle Epoque, when the Black Book was within his reach.
