“Why not?'
Sheriff Wilcox scratched the back of his flabby neck; his beige collar was brown from sweat. 'Well, the papers are eating you guys up. Every day there's another yokel shouting about CIA corruption. I mean, I know how to keep my mouth shut, but a small town like this…'
'Don't worry. I know what I'm doing.'
The sheriff pursed his lips, deforming his big nose. 'Matter of national security, is it?'
'The most national, Manny. And the most secure.'
When Milo returned to the cell, Samuel Roth sat up as if he'd been waiting for this chat, a sudden wellspring of energy at his disposal. 'Hello again,' he said once the door had locked.'Who showed you my file?'
'A friend. An ex-friend.' Roth paused. 'Okay, my worst enemy. He's seriously bad news.”
“Someone I know?'
'I don't even know him. I never met him. Just his intermediary.”
“So he's a client.'
Roth smiled, his dry lips cracking. 'Exactly. He gave me some paperwork on you. A gift, he said, for some trouble he'd put me through. He said that you were the one who ruined the Amsterdam job. He also said you were running my case. That, of course, is why I'm here.'
'You're here,' Milo said, reaching the center of the cell, 'because you beat up a woman and thought she wouldn't pay you back for it.'
'Is that what you really think?'
Milo didn't answer-they both knew it was an unlikely scenario.
'I'm here,' Roth said, waving at the concrete walls, 'because I wanted to talk to Milo Weaver, once known as Charles Alexander. Only you. You're the only Company man who ever actually stopped me. You've got my respect.'
'In Amsterdam.”
“Yes.'
'That's funny.”
“Is it?'
'Six years ago in Amsterdam, I was high on amphetamines. Completely strung out. I didn't know half of what I was doing.'
Roth stared at him, then blinked. 'Really?'
'I was suicidal. I tried to walk into your line of fire, just to finish myself off.'
'Well,' said Roth, considering the news. 'Either I was never as good as I thought, or you're so good you could beat me blind and drunk. So… it stands. You have even more of my respect now. And that's a rare and wonderful thing.'
'You wanted to talk to me. Why not pick up a phone?'
The assassin rocked his head from side to side. 'That, as you know, is unverifiable. I would've been handed to some clerk for an hour, answering questions. If he didn't hang up on me, he would've called Tom-Tom Grainger, right?-and then the whole department would be involved. No. I only wanted you.'
'Still, there are easier ways. Cheaper ways.'
'Money doesn't mean anything anymore,' Roth said patiently. 'Besides, it was fun. I had to give one last chase. Not so difficult a chase that you'd lose me, but not so easy that the FBI or Homeland Security would stumble across me when I arrived in Dallas. No, I had to set up a trail outside the country that you-because you've been responsible for my case these last years-would be watching. Then I had to lead you around this enormous country. I'd hoped to make it all the way to Washington, or even to your home in Brooklyn, but it wasn't to be. A lot of things weren't to be. I wanted to go further. I wanted to really make you work.'
'Why?'
'If I had the time,' Roth explained, 'I'd be elusive with you, because it's a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he's told. Each agent needs to beat it out of his subject, or, better yet, discover it on his own, without the subject ever realizing he's slipped up. But, sadly, there's no time. It has to be little Blackdale, and it has to be direct, because I won't be around by tomorrow.'
'Going somewhere?'
Again, that smile.
Milo wasn't ready to believe this. It was pride, of course, balking against the idea that someone had for the last three days been leading him by the nose. 'And Kathy Hendrickson?'
'She only knows that I paid her well for her performance. Yes-and for her bruises. She doesn't know why. Really, she knows nothing,' he said, then gasped his way into a retching cough. Once it passed, he looked at his hand. 'Oh.' He showed his blood-speckled palm to Milo. 'Faster than I'd hoped.'
'What is?'
'My death.'
Milo stared at the Tiger's face, at what he'd wanted to believe were the symptoms of a difficult run through the southern states. Bloodshot eyes, fatigue, and the skin itself. That yellow pallor wasn't from the fluorescents. 'Diagnosis?'
'AIDS.'
'I see.'
The lack of sympathy didn't faze Roth. 'I talked to some doctors in Switzerland -the Hirslanden Clinic, Zurich. You can check on that if you like. Look up Hamad al-Abari. Those mountain Germans are smart. Some new procedure they've got to examine the rate of growth through the T-cell count-something like that. They can figure out when the HIV virus got in me. Five months ago, it turns out. February. That places me in Milan.'
'What were you doing in Milan?'
'I met my contact. The intermediary I mentioned before. He goes by the name Jan Klausner, but he can't speak decent German or Czech. From his accent, he might be Dutch. Midforties. His red beard is the only real thing about him.'
Milo remembered that file photo of Fabio Lanzetti- Milan, the Corso Sempione, with a bearded man. 'We've got a picture of you two together.'
'Good start.'
'He gave you a job?'
'He's been feeding me jobs for years. Actually, the first one came six years ago, not long after Amsterdam. A surprise. I worried my failure there had made the rounds, that work would dry up. But then Jan showed up. The work was irregular-one or two a year-but it paid well. His last order was for January. A job in Khartoum. Mullah Salih Ahmad.'
Milo thought back. The Sudan. January.
In January, a popular radical cleric known for inflammatory pro-al-Qaeda speeches, Mullah Salih Ahmad, had disappeared. Two days later, his garroted corpse was found in his own backyard. It had been international news for about five minutes, quickly overcome by the continuing civil war in the western Darfur region, but in the Sudan it stayed brutally current, and the blame was placed on the president, Omar al-Bashir, who seldom let critics remain in the limelight, or out of jail. Demonstrations followed, met by battle-gear police with guns. In the last month, more than forty had been killed in riots.
'Who hired you?'
The energy seemed to go out of Roth, and he stared, unfocused, past his interrogator. Milo didn't bother breaking the trance, though he imagined SUVs full of Homeland Security barreling down the dusty Tennessee roads toward them.
Finally, Roth shook his head. 'Sorry. The doctors call it AIDS dementia. I lose track of stuff, forget things. Can hardly walk.' With effort, he swallowed. 'Where were we?'
'Mullah Salih Ahmad. Who hired you to kill him?'
'Ah, yes!' Through a twitch of pain, Roth seemed pleased that he could still find that memory. 'Well, I didn't know, did I? I have this contact, Jan Klausner, maybe Dutch, a red beard,' he said, unaware of his repetition. 'He tells me nothing about who's hiring him. He just pays the money, and that's all right by me. But then t here was the Ahmad job, and Jan's master cheated me on the money. Only paid two-thirds. Klausner says it's because I didn't follow the instructions, which were to brand the body with some Chinese pictograms.'
