Friday, then checked out Saturday morning, even though she had reserved three nights. That in itself isn’t so strange, but as a matter of course we ran her papers and came up with… well, with nothing. Her American passport looks legitimate, but we’ve got no record of her entering the country. If she’s been living here a while, we have no record of her renting a place, driving a car, or anything.”
Freddy didn’t sleep over again, but they talked regularly, carefully avoiding promises. When she left town on Wednesday, though, she made the mistake of promising to call him when she got back to town. “When’ll that be?” he asked, but she didn’t have an answer for him.
From the Marylebone apartment in London, and, from Wednesday, the fourth-floor El Raval studio in Barcelona (where she’d come to talk with an agent who’d bought information from a Basque turncoat), she gathered source intelligence on New Scotland Yard’s investigation into the disappearance of Sebastian Hall. She also listened to her father share occasional tidbits from his old sparring partner, Erika Schwartz.
On Saturday morning, she took an express train to Geneva and used spare keys to get into her father’s apartment, five floors above the BHI bank on the Quai du Mont-Blanc, overlooking the harbor. She spent only a few weeks a year here, shuttling more often between Library-owned residences in London, Hong Kong, and Mexico City. Before going out again, she showered and changed, then did some work, first sending orders for two agents-one in Tokyo, the other in Kampala-to withdraw from their jobs. Each was being watched by the local police. She directed them to the Lisbon and Bologna safe houses, so the secretaries could debrief them fully.
She’d arranged dinner with an intelligence officer from the U.S. consulate who had, in the past, been friendly. Over plates of salad and foie gras de canard at the Brasserie Baloise, however, she watched the signs of his friendliness contract.
“So I asked around,” he said finally. “This guy, Drummond, was canned months ago. Whatever he’s doing, you can’t pin it on us.”
“I’m not trying to pin anything on you, Steve. I just wonder why Scotland Yard is looking for him, and why he was traveling on a passport connected to an art heist.”
Steve popped a liver-smeared toast into his mouth and chewed loudly. He was one of those Americans, the ones who couldn’t help but do everything loudly. “I wish I could help you, Alex. Really.” Then he leaned back, laying one arm over his stomach.
His face said little, but his body had spoken volumes from the moment he entered the restaurant, and she knew that while what he was saying might be technically true-he really might wish he could help her-the bigger truth was that there was an elephant in the room that he was desperate not to draw attention to. She said, “They told you to stay away from it, didn’t they?”
He suddenly noticed his defensive posture and turned his hands palms up. “They? Is that the conspiratorial They? I asked about him and just came up cold.”
There-the skin pulling back at the temples-now he was lying. “Okay, Steve. Forget about it.”
He smiled, perhaps from relief, and grabbed another toast. “Alex, don’t tell me this has to do with United Nations fiscal oversight. Every time we talk, you’re asking about something that has nothing to do with your office.”
“Of course not,” she said, winking. “I work for al Qaeda.”
Afterward, when she reported to Yevgeny, the old man said, “I think it’s time to talk to Milo. I’m flying out tomorrow.”
“It was time to talk to Milo a week ago. I don’t know why you waited.”
“You should come. Just a few days. Public service, and a little time with Milo’s family. I know Tina would love to meet you.”
“Another time,” she said.
“Did you know he’s looking for a job?”
“No, Nana. I didn’t. Have you made your pitch yet?”
“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just take the position,” he said, so she hung up.
4
It was, of course, a disaster from the start. On that Wednesday morning, Lester, one of Erika’s five-man team watching Weaver, woke with chills-he’d picked up a summer flu. Worried that it would spread, she ordered him left behind as the remaining four met with Yevgeny’s men-only two: Francisco, a Spaniard, and Jan, a Czech. That made six, when Erika had wanted eight, minimum. She made sure that Gilen, her most experienced, led the team as they sat in a double room of the Kings Hotel on Thirty-ninth Street in Brooklyn, settling on the details. Yevgeny came and went, apparently forced to keep to some UN-related dates. He seemed, Gilen reported, petrified of discovery-and old. Gilen asked Erika more than once if she really trusted this frail, trembling man’s intelligence, “because if we fuck this up, someone’s bound to trace it back to us.”
“Then don’t fuck it up.”
Was the risk worth it? As the hours crawled along, she wondered. What, really, did “everything” mean to Yevgeny? Certainly, it didn’t match the dictionary definition, but it meant a lot. It meant answers to old mysteries that had plagued her, answers that could turn up some bad eggs in the BND. It meant an eye into Yevgeny’s own UN department, and its secretive operations. It meant, perhaps, an eye into the mystery of Yevgeny Primakov himself.
Was all that worth the embarrassment of a failed extraction? What if Tina and Stephanie Weaver put up a fight? Even if Yevgeny was there to explain it to them, how much did they trust Milo’s father? How much did Milo trust him?
By 1:00 P. M., New York time, Gilen reported that they had settled on the extraction route from the Weavers’ home on Garfield Place, as well as the method of transport-the trunk of a Chevrolet Malibu station wagon, and then the rear of a laundry van-and the approach and withdrawal from the premises. Yevgeny wanted the Weavers taken to a house in southern Connecticut, and from there he could manage the next leg of their escape, though he refused to share details with Gilen. Erika told him not to force the issue.
She did, however, call Yevgeny after listening to Gilen’s summary. Why, she asked the old Russian, did the Weaver family have to be taken by force?
“Because speed is of the essence.”
“Then go up and tell them to put on their shoes and follow you outside. You do have enough sway with them for this, don’t you?”
“They won’t be alone. They’re being watched.”
“By whom?”
Hesitantly, Yevgeny said, “The Chinese.”
It wasn’t often in her line of work that situations laid themselves out in parallel lines and then started to converge, but whenever that happened she felt that rare rush of aesthetic pleasure that reminded her why she had devoted her life to such an unrewarding career. Patriotism perhaps played a role-she wasn’t sure-but it paled in comparison to the joy of seeing puzzle pieces fit together. She said, “Alan Drummond was after Xin Zhu, and now Xin Zhu is after Milo. You aren’t going to keep pretending that Milo is an innocent in this, are you?”
“I don’t know what his role is, Erika, not really. But he needs my help. I owe him.”
“You owe him for what?”
“For my shortcomings as a father,” he said, and from the tone of his voice, she even believed him.
“Is this really just a story of revenge, Yevgeny? Alan Drummond sets out to take vengeance for his department? He drags Milo into this, and then Xin Zhu has no choice but to protect himself by… by what? By threatening Milo’s family?”
Again, he remained silent, his way of saying yes. Or probably.
“I would do the same thing as Xin Zhu,” she said. “You would, too.”
His silence now wasn’t an affirmation of anything, she knew; it was his inability to think of an answer. She was reaching for a moral point, which was of course irrelevant. Yevgeny wasn’t interested in arguing who was right and wrong. If pressed, he probably wouldn’t know. Yevgeny was acting entirely on loyalty, which seldom served anyone well.
