another man-thin, dark-skinned, wearing a full suit that had to be uncomfortable in the heat-fell into step beside him and said, “Milo Weaver?”
Milo didn’t slow down, just waited until the newcomer had repeated himself before saying, “Yeah?”
“Can I have a word?”
“I’ve got an appointment.”
“It’ll just take a minute.”
“I’m already late.”
The man did an extra skip to keep up. “This is important, Mr. Weaver.”
“So’s my appointment.”
“It’s about your friend, Alan Drummond.”
Milo slowed, taking a better look at his shadow. Young, thirty or more. Mixed South Asian ancestry, maybe Indian. Sideburns. Fashionable-geek glasses. “What about him?”
“We should probably talk in private.”
Milo stopped. In the distance he could see the York Street subway stop that would lead to home. “I don’t have time to go to your office. Talk to me here. Start with who you are.”
“Oh, of course,” the man said, patting his pockets with a bony hand until he found a leather badge wallet. He opened it like a book. On one side, an eagle-topped badge told Milo that this man was a “special agent”; on the other, a laminated Homeland Security photo-ID gave the holder’s name as Dennis Chaudhury, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Will that do?” Chaudhury asked as he folded it again.
“You can buy those things online.”
Chaudhury looked briefly confused, then smiled. “Christ, you people don’t trust anyone, do you?”
“What people?”
“Company people.”
As they spoke, the man in the denim shirt crossed to their sidewalk and lounged in front of a pharmacy. Milo pointed down the street. “You have between here and that subway station.”
“But Mr.-”
“I’ll walk slowly.”
With the first few steps, Dennis Chaudhury was left behind, but he jogged to catch up and said, “Your friend is gone.”
Milo stopped again, feeling the sun beating down on him. “Gone?”
“Disappeared. In London. From the Rathbone Hotel.”
“That’s called missing, not disappeared. How long has he been missing?”
“Since Saturday.”
Milo’s stomach grumbled, and he wondered if this guy could hear it. He said, “Alan leaves your sight-well, not your sight. MI-5’s sight?”
Chaudhury shrugged.
“He escapes his minders for three lousy days, and you call him gone?” Milo started walking again. “You’re really hard up for work, aren’t you?”
Chaudhury’s voice followed him. “We think he’s been kidnapped.”
“What makes you think that?” Milo asked without looking back.
“I don’t know. Maybe that someone turned off the hotel’s surveillance cameras. By the time they were on again, he was gone.”
Again, Milo slowed to a stop and turned back. Chaudhury was some distance behind him, hands on his hips, oblivious to the people passing him on the sidewalk. He said, “We’re waiting for more from Five, but it’s hard getting anything out of them.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re assholes, Mr. Weaver.”
It was an unexpected answer, and Milo caught himself smiling.
“Truth is,” said Chaudhury, “it was Scotland Yard that initially figured out something was weird. Disappearance was one thing, but he was using a fake name that they had already tied to a crime. Kind of ridiculous, using a blown name, kind of crazy.”
“What was the name?”
“Sebastian Hall.”
Milo bit his tongue to control his lips. He felt the urge to scream, but said, “Who do you think has him?”
“We don’t know,” Chaudhury said as he walked up to Milo, “but you might-you’re a friend of his.”
“What makes you think that?”
He was close enough to whisper. “Dinner parties.”
Milo bit deeper into his tongue, then said, “You’ve been watching me?”
“Him, not you.” A pause. “Should we be watching you?”
“What about Penelope?”
“The wife?” he asked, shaking his head. “You’re the first one we’ve approached about this. I was hoping you’d have a simple explanation for us.”
Milo looked past him to the one in denim, who’d moved to a newspaper dispenser. “Listen. I do have an appointment I have to keep. Can we talk this evening?”
“As you like, Mr. Weaver.”
Once he was underground, squeezed in among warm bodies and holding on to a metal loop, feeling the grumble of his bowels, he let his sore tongue go and cursed sharply. That Alan had gotten himself kidnapped was one thing-it was bad but, given his state of mind, almost inevitable. That he’d done this using the name Sebastian Hall was something else entirely. He had used Milo’s old work name, in order to force Milo’s involvement.
Here, then, was the evidence. Alan had truly gone mad, and it had begun with specks on a computer screen, tracking individual murders across the globe. Red dots turning blue. Thirty-three Tourists going from hot to cold.
While helping Alan piece together evidence for the final report, he had learned that most had gone surprisingly quickly, perhaps even painlessly, their executions from unexpected gunshots to the face, surprise knives and wires slicing through windpipes and carotid arteries, and, in a few cases, hit-and-run automobile accidents. Only one went out in flames when the car she was driving down an Afghan road was struck by an Alcotan C-100 antitank missile.
Some-perhaps six or seven-didn’t enjoy a quick exit. They were shot in the stomach and left bleeding in foreign streets for hours or poisoned badly and left suffocating in their hotel rooms. A woman in Mexico City and a man in Vancouver were discovered by generous strangers and carted to hospitals, but within twelve hours, they received visitors who ended their fights.
Of the four who survived, Leticia Jones and Zachary Klein had been on an under-the-radar job with Milo, out of the range of Xin Zhu’s elaborate scheme to make Tourism wipe itself out. In Buenos Aires, Jose Santiago lived because his phone had been ruined by falling into a sink full of his shaving water, and when his assassin arrived, he was quick enough to kill him. In Hanoi, Tran Hoang was lounging in an opium den in Long Bien. He was the off-the- roster Tourist Alan had mentioned-meaning that Xin Zhu hadn’t even known of his existence.
By then, Milo had resigned from the department and could return home, but Alan had had to travel to Langley. Though Director Quentin Ascot claimed to be too busy to attend the meeting, his assistant, George Erasmus Butler, the director’s iron gut, arrived carrying a folder thick with failure. It wasn’t just Alan he’d come to skewer but the entire Department of Tourism.
The fall had made Alan simple, obsessed with revenge. Now, it had gotten him abducted, possibly killed. And it was drawing Milo into something he wanted no part of.
At the Seventh Avenue stop, he took the stairs to the surface and tried Alan’s number. His phone, a voice explained, was no longer in service. As he walked, he called his one contact in Homeland Security and left a message. He continued through the heat to where he waited under a birch tree not far from the loitering nannies chatting among themselves and giving him significant looks outside the Berkeley-Carroll School. A father was a rare enough sight at that hour. One nanny, a recently arrived Swiss girl who’d spent other days flirting with him, wandered over. She was in her midtwenties and painfully blond with wide lips; she enjoyed talking to him in German. “Hallo, Milo.”
