that.”
“Because he wanted to force me to help. A pretty cold move.”
“He knows you’re the kind of person who needs a fire under his ass to get moving.”
Milo felt his good humor draining away. “He uses a name Interpol has on its lists, a name that both the Germans and the Chinese can connect to me. That puts my family in danger.”
“You and that damned family. Milo, the Chinaman doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your family. That’s why you ended up with a bullet in your belly, and they didn’t.”
Milo rubbed his face. The fact was that all that had come before-Xin Zhu’s elaborate operation to kill thirty- three men and women around the globe-had been provoked by the murder of his son, an event Tourism was only distantly responsible for. Xin Zhu shouldn’t care about Milo’s family, but he had long ago proved himself unpredictable.
None of this concerned Leticia. Despite losing the title, she still thought like a Tourist. He guessed that she would think that way until she died-which, given her current trajectory, could be anytime.
He opened his wallet, counted out three tens, and placed them on the table. “Nice to see you again, Leticia.”
She watched him stand and take his box of baklava. “Well, you know how to get in touch with me.”
He didn’t reply; he only walked out of the bar.
Outside the Camp Friendship facility, as he felt the martini eat at his insides and thought about what he’d learned and not learned while drinking it, Gabi broke off from a trio of nannies to join him. “Hallo,” she said.
“Hallo, Gabi.”
In German, she said, “I’m proud of myself. Took one day to convince my masters that their brats should be in day camp. I don’t know if I could have taken a summer of them every day.”
He smiled at that; then she pointed at the nannies she’d been talking to. “Malaysian, French, and Romanian, I never thought I’d be in a place so international in my life. I picked up dry cleaning from a Greek woman, bought groceries from some Vietnamese, paid bills to an Indian clerk, and was just now getting chatted up by a big Chinese father.”
“Chatted up?” he asked.
“Ja,” she said, then turned, scanning the spare crowd on the sidewalk. “Well, maybe he wasn’t a father, after all, and just wanted
… well, you know.”
Milo, too, found himself scanning the street, looking for a Chinese man posing as a father, trying to convince himself that it was nothing to worry about. The possibility of the famously large Xin Zhu hanging out in Brooklyn was too unbelievable even to consider.
Over dinner, Tina complained that, now that she was back home, Penelope wasn’t answering her phone. “Was I too much of a you-know-what with her?”
“I don’t know what,” said Stephanie, her eyelids now a pale purple.
“You were fine,” said Milo.
“I said I don’t know what.”
Though he made no mention of Leticia Jones, in bed he told Tina that a little more information had come his way, and it only reinforced his belief that not only was Alan engaged in a foolishly dangerous plan, he had also been trying to manipulate Milo into taking part. “He used one of my old names,” he finally admitted.
“What do you mean, used it?”
“He used a passport with my old work name to check into the Rathbone Hotel.”
She shook her head in an expression of irritable confusion, as if he’d just spoken backward. “But… why?”
“Just that. To pull me in.”
“He thought that would work?”
“It almost did,” he said, for during dinner, watching his daughter’s discolored eyes, he’d been overcome by the feeling that he’d sidestepped a bullet. “But it was reckless,” he told her. “What pisses me off is that people can connect the name to me, thus, to you and Stef.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“The Chinese?”
Again, he nodded.
She went silent, then turned to look at the foot of the bed. “I could kill that bastard.”
There wasn’t much more to discuss, but that didn’t stop Tina from prodding him throughout the night with irritated questions, most of which he couldn’t answer. At one point, as he was drifting off to sleep, she said, “They train you to do that, right?”
“What?” he groaned, raising his head from the pillow.
“Sleep. Sleep when things around you are falling apart.”
“Sure,” he said after a moment. “It’s important.”
“It’s inhuman,” she said.
9
In the morning, he got up early and made coffee, then helped Stephanie work on her eyelids; they were nearly ink free, but her ego was still bruised. He didn’t see Gabi at Camp Friendship, but as he was leaving he saw a large Chinese man, standing alone on the other side of the street-big boned, with a mole on his cheek-that might have been Gabi’s admirer. He wasn’t looking at Milo, though; he was looking at the grounds, where children were gathering around a teacher. Though there were similarities, this was not Xin Zhu-he was thirty years too young.
Despite his desire to abandon it entirely, when he got back to the apartment he began to research the path that Alan had taken from New York to London, via Seattle, Vancouver, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Amman. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he checked the week of Drummond’s travel, beginning June 9, searching in vain for public events along the route that might shed some light on his purpose. The best theory he could come up with was that the path was entirely evasive and Alan was trying to shake a tail.
His phone rang at precisely eleven, shocking him out of the claustrophobic world of the Internet, and when he checked the number he noticed the Washington, D.C., area code before remembering that he’d been expecting this call.
“Mr. Milo Weaver?” said Stephen Rollins’s secretary.
“Yes, yes. That’s me.”
“I have Director Rollins on the other line for you.”
“Right. Thank you.”
There was a snap, then three clicks. Then silence. Milo waited but heard nothing from Mr. Rollins. “Hello?” he said.
“Mr. Weaver,” said a man’s voice. It was heavy and tired-sounding, and there was an accent he couldn’t quite place. “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes, it’s about someone named Dennis Chaudhury. I wanted to verify that he’s one of your employees.”
A pause. “Yes, I can verify that. Mr. Chaudhury works for me. Was there anything else?”
“Well, yes. I would like some evidence that you, Mr. Rollins, are actually working for the Central Intelligence Agency. Where’s your office?”
Another pause. Milo wondered if the man had someone else in the room with him. “One oh one West Thirty- first Street, Manhattan.”
Now, it was Milo who paused. Until two months ago, that had been the address of the Department of Tourism-which had been shut down. Had it reopened? Was Dennis Chaudhury a new Tourist? He doubted it-hardly anyone had wanted Tourism to continue; it had been shut down with glee. More likely, the building had simply been reassigned. “Does the department have a name?”
