a kind stranger and brought to Vancouver General. It had taken a stern call from him to get her to leave the airport and head to the hospital to finish her job.
There had been one loss, Wang Shi in Buenos Aires, a mistake that was either Zhu’s or Wang Shi’s-he still wasn’t sure. All he knew was that while one target American, his #1, was found in a hotel room, his #2, whose work name was Jose Santiago, got out of Argentina. Wang Shi’s body was found by the police, beaten and shot once through the left eye.
Nearly two months later, he couldn’t help but picture them all again, hotel rooms and pistols in Phnom Penh, in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires, in Bern and Johannesburg and Delhi. He saw a drowning in Tehran, a hospital bed in Vancouver, another in Brasilia, and bodies in fields in Tashkent and Cairo and Moscow. He saw sudden falls from great heights in Mexico City, Seoul, Dhaka, and London. He saw dogs picking over corpses in Hanoi and Tallinn, and in Tokyo he saw a bloated dead woman in a sushi restaurant, killed after hours. He saw an explosion in Afghanistan. Each was its own story, and his curse was that he knew them all. Together they became a great, violent narrative, his hand guiding thirty-three murders across the planet.
Now, he worried as he got up from his desk and prepared to go home to Sung Hui, all those corpses were coming to find him. Yet he felt more alive than he had in months.
PART TWO
FRIDAY, JUNE 6 TO SATURDAY, JUNE 28, 2008
1
“When the world ends, Milo, no one will even notice.”
“You’re drunk.”
Alan set his Heineken can on the flat, pebbly rooftop, then stretched hands and smoldering cigarette above his head, yawning. “Not yet. I’m just saying that when all this finally collapses, it’s going to smell sweet. There won’t be terror in the streets. No blood, no starvation-nothing like that. Just the scent of peppermint.”
“Peppermint?”
“Lemon, caramel, jasmine… peppermint-take your pick. The next day will look the same, maybe a little better. They’ll have no idea that everything important has just died.”
Milo had been drinking tonic water; his glass was already empty. He took a position along the raised edge of the apartment building, as if falling four stories weren’t a possibility. “If you’re trying to sound smart, you’re failing spectacularly.”
A rare breeze swept over them. Alan sucked on his Marlboro, looking like the new smoker he was.
“Here,” said Milo. “Gimme some of that.”
Alan passed the cigarette, and as Milo took a drag, they gazed over rooftops toward Prospect Park. Despite it being a little before midnight, they were forced to wear shirtsleeves. Alan’s wife, Penelope, had dredged up the phrase “global warming” five times that night.
It was three weeks after Xin Zhu’s visit to Qingdao, though neither man knew about that. Nor did they know that, downstairs in the Weaver apartment, their wives were discussing marriage. Later that night, Milo’s wife would relate the entire conversation to him, while Penelope would tell her husband nothing, not for some days at least.
“You really should stop,” Milo said as he handed back the cigarette and took a blister pack of Nicorette from his shirt pocket. He squeezed out a square of the gum and popped it into his mouth. “You’re not even addicted yet. Just quit.”
“Makes me feel in control of something. I haven’t felt that way in a long time.”
“And Pen? What does she think of the new Alan?”
“She says he’s a moron.”
“You guys having problems?”
“Oh, no. That’s the one thing that’s going right.”
Milo didn’t quite believe that. He’d noticed the slow progress of Alan Drummond’s depression over the course of periodic couples dinners that had begun after Milo had returned from the hospital. Alan claimed that that initial invitation had been his wife’s idea, but as soon as they met in the Drummonds’ Upper East Side apartment with Stephanie in tow, Milo saw plainly that it had been Alan’s idea, and he read their future conversations in his ex- boss’s young but dreary face: endings. Their careers, the bloody full stop to the Department of Tourism, and, distantly, their own mortalities.
The truth was that Alan had initiated the dinners because he wanted to jointly lick wounds, but Milo’s only troubling wounds had been physical. After nine weeks, the doctor had pronounced his recovery “remarkable,” but he still wasn’t allowed alcohol. Some gin in his tonic might have made these conversations more bearable.
Unlike Milo, the drunken man wandering his rooftop still saw his future entwined in the intelligence world. Unlike Milo, he hadn’t been shot point-blank by the weeping father of a girl who had been killed by the intelligence world-that could wash away anyone’s illusions about their industry’s virtues. In fact, Milo hadn’t even planned to follow up with his own dinner invitation until they got home that first night and Tina raved about Penelope- She’s funny. And smart as hell. See? That’s the kind of couple friends I’ve been hoping for.
Alan squatted again and lifted his beer. “Did you know that he’s in trouble with his own people?”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Turns out his little massacre wasn’t even sanctioned. He’s weak now.”
“Who told you this?”
“I’ve still got friends, Milo. I’m out, but that doesn’t end friendships.”
Milo wondered who in the Company would be dumb enough to share secrets with someone as bitter as Alan Drummond. Unless he wasn’t really out after all. “Are you still unemployed, Alan?”
“Unemployed, yes. Dead, no. I’ve had a wonderful idea.”
“You’ve had ideas, remember? I vetoed them.”
“Modified. It’s radically modified.”
Milo remembered Alan’s feverish rant, from two weeks ago, about how he could lure Xin Zhu to Japan and assassinate him in his hotel room. Then another one, more ambitious, involving terrorists from the Youth League, who would converge on Beijing during the Olympics with explosives and long-range rifles. He, like Milo, was still a young man, but when he got to raving, he sounded like a man twenty years older, fighting madness. “They were bad plans, Alan. They weren’t the kinds of things that could be modified.”
“Then let’s call it a new plan,” Alan said, standing. “Leticia thinks it’s an excellent plan.”
“Leave that woman alone.”
“I’m telling you, she thinks it’s good.”
“Who else have you been bothering with this? Zachary?”
Alan shook his head. “Zachary Klein has apparently found himself a civilian life. But you know he wasn’t the only other survivor.”
“Jose-”
“Let’s not name names,” Alan cut in. “But there’s also a third, who wasn’t on the Tourism rosters when everything went down. You remember him. My point, though, is that they all agree that it’s an excellent plan.”
Milo turned to give him his attention. “It might be the best plan, but I’m not taking part. I’ve made that clear.”
“Did you know he got married?”
“Zachary?”
“Xin Zhu. Last summer he got married to some sweet young thing and-”
