floor. He looked older than he did on television, but Milo expected that this was true of everyone. The lighting here wasn’t advantageous, and there was no makeup team. The truth was that Irwin looked terrified-which, Milo thought, he should be.
“The problem,” Irwin said, “is that for you to run the operation, you’d have to know its whole scope, and I’m certainly not ready for that.”
Milo had expected resistance-in fact, he’d expected more. Yet he knew from Xin Zhu that Irwin was just one of three players with a hand in this operation, and so Irwin’s vote was not definitive. Milo said, “Tell me, then. What role did you imagine for me?”
“I imagined nothing. Leticia brought you in. You’re here now so that these sorts of decisions can be made.”
“By you?”
Another smile cracked the senator’s features; then he nodded at the stairs. “Come on.”
It was a narrow staircase, and along the wall were three framed photographs of small children, black-and- whites from the late fifties or early sixties. Milo wondered who they were, but didn’t ask; he doubted Irwin knew. At the top, they turned left and entered a small bedroom in the rear of the house, but there was no bed, just a table and four wooden chairs, and tightly laced curtains covering the window. There had been a bed-an imprint remained in the carpet-and there was a dresser and an old vanity, but he noticed all this later. Upon entering, his attention was taken by the well-dressed middle-aged woman sitting at the table with a plastic bottle of Evian. Her hands were crossed in her lap. She watched Milo enter, then stood up, offering a hand. “Hello, Mr. Weaver. My name is Dorothy Collingwood.”
Of the National Clandestine Service, he thought as he took her small hand, but he said, “You’re not a senator, too, are you?”
She laughed lightly. “Please! I wouldn’t take Nathan’s job for all the gold in Christendom.”
“Then you must be Company.”
“I must be,” she said, smiling, and returned to her chair. “Actually, I’m NCS.”
He felt odd, standing in a dusty Georgetown bedroom with a well-regarded politician and a Company official. Irwin had been in Washington for nearly fifteen years, and he imagined that Collingwood was relatively new to her job-he’d never heard her name before. He wondered if she’d gotten in over her head.
“Is this it?” asked Milo. “Just the two of you?”
“There’s a third,” said Collingwood, “but he couldn’t make it.”
Stuart Jackson, Milo thought.
Collingwood waved at the chairs, and Milo sat to her left. Irwin sat across from Milo, to her right. Milo said, “I’m here to help. With Alan gone, you’ve got to be hurting.”
“Do you think we’re hurting?” Collingwood asked, but she was looking at Irwin, who shook his head. “Nathan thinks we’re doing fine. So you can go home.”
Milo looked at her a moment, then at Irwin, who stared passively until, unexpectedly, his left eye twitched. It meant nothing beyond the fact that this was a man under a lot of stress. Milo said, “Leticia thinks differently.”
“People on the ground always do,” said Collingwood. “You’ve been around long enough to know that.” She took a long drink of her Evian.
“She asked for my help.”
“Without consulting us,” said Irwin.
Milo was no longer sure why he was here. He knew why he was here, but not why they had bothered to meet him. “It’s up to you,” he said. “I’m just puzzled. I understand Alan. He was personally humiliated by Xin Zhu, and he became obsessed with revenge. You, too,” he said to Irwin, “to a degree. Xin Zhu planted someone in your office, so you can’t feel very good about that. But you,” he said to Collingwood, then paused. “I may be wrong, but I doubt you also have a personal gripe with Xin Zhu. You’re approached by a man-Alan, I assume-who’s been made unstable by his desire for revenge and… and what? You actually decide to go along with it?” He shook his head to show how ridiculous that was. “I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
“So that’s your narrative?” she asked after a moment. “A simple tale of revenge, a boy’s game of tit for tat?”
“An eye for an eye,” Irwin suggested.
Neither said anything for a moment, waiting, until Milo said, “So it’s a lot bigger than revenge.”
“Of course it is,” said Collingwood.
“And you’re not going to tell me.”
She shook her head. Irwin just stared.
Collingwood said, “Listen, Mr. Weaver. What you see here-a couple of bureaucratic monsters running some agents from a dusty room-that’s only part of the story. We didn’t originate it; we inherited it. Now we’re here to help wrap up the storyline. Do you understand?”
“Not really,” he said. Irwin, he knew, had come into the world of espionage via his position on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. However, senators and ranking CIA officers didn’t sit around in dusty safe houses-they hired other people to do that. The people who populated safe houses were there to protect the identities of politicians and ranking officers who were pulling the strings; in this case, the situation was reversed. Whatever was going on here, these people were desperate to keep it to a select group, which didn’t yet include Milo.
“Sorry for the mystery,” she said, “but that’s all you’re getting. Now it’s your turn to explain yourself.”
Milo had spent most of the train ride going over his own narrative, because that’s all this was-a narrative. As with any interrogation there needed to be a surface storyline and an underlying one. Ideally, a third one would make it more convincing, but he didn’t think he would need that. “I didn’t want to get involved,” he said. “I think you both know that. Alan tried to bring me in before he ran off. Then, when I talked to Leticia, she tried as well.”
“And you said no both times,” Irwin pointed out.
“Of course. I don’t like this world. I haven’t for a long time. Nevertheless, I didn’t realize Alan would be so persistent. He made sure the decision was out of my hands.”
“The name,” said Collingwood.
Irwin said, “What name?”
“The one he used in London before he disappeared,” Milo said. “It was my old work name, in Tourism.”
Irwin looked over at Collingwood; this was news to him.
Milo said, “He used a name that is known to both the Germans and the Chinese, known to be mine. Eventually, one or the other country is going to start pointing in my direction.”
“Then take a vacation,” said Collingwood, matter-of-factly. “Pack up your family and rent someplace in Florida for a few weeks, until this blows over. I can give you some phone numbers.”
Irwin rocked his head. “It’s an idea, Milo.”
Milo smiled grimly. “Sure. I’ll skip town and leave it to the two of you. To Leticia and Jose and Hoang. I’m sure that, after a couple of weeks, you will have bent over backward to make sure I’m not part of the fallout when whatever you’re doing explodes.”
Collingwood said, “Nathan, I do believe he doesn’t trust us.”
“If I’m in,” Milo continued, “there’s a chance that I can control the damage so that my family remains untouched.”
Milo waited while Irwin bobbed his eyebrows and Collingwood took another drink of water. After a moment, she said, “So you’d like us to bring you in, simply so that you can protect yourself?”
“And his family,” said Irwin. “Never forget his family.”
“That’s part of the reason,” said Milo. “The other part is that I can help you.”
“Of course he can,” Irwin said, a little loudly. “He’s the finest Tourist ever produced! A prince among men!”
Milo gave him a look, then turned back to Collingwood. “I know Xin Zhu better than anyone on your team. I’ve had access to reports you haven’t seen. I know how he thinks.”
Irwin said, “That didn’t save all those Tourists, did it?”
“That was a lack of information. I wasn’t told that his son had been killed in Sudan. Had I known, we could have saved them.”
“What about these reports?” asked Collingwood. “Why haven’t we seen them?”
