bottles-but no cigarette butts; he'd at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he'd collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallasarea Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.
Milo shouldn't have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River's tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn't look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter's July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.
Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn't ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo 's mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox's wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo 's hangover had been pleading for.
Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. 'I will have to get your signature, understand.'
'I'd expect nothing less,' Milo said. 'Maybe you can tell me how you caught him.'
Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn't showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff's face. 'Wasn't us. His girl-Kathy Hendrickson. A N'Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn't like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her.'
'Just like that?'
'Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that's how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car.
'Fabio Lanzetti,' said Milo.
Wilcox opened his calloused hands. 'There you go. We'd just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us.'
It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Israel. Now, he'd been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.
'Nothing more?' he asked the sheriff. 'No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?'
The flesh under Wilcox's chin vibrated. 'That's it. But this guy, Sam Roth… is that even his real name?'
Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. 'Manny, we're not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it's different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where's she now?'
The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. 'Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her.'
'I'll want her, too.'
'Leslie can pick her up,' Wilcox assured him. 'But tell me-your chief said something about this-is that boy really called the Tiger?'
'If it's who we think it is, yes. That's what he's called.'
Wilcox grunted his amusement. 'Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak.'
Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox's homebrew. 'Don't be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?'
'Their president?'
'Foreign minister. And in Germany there was the head of an Islamist group.”
“A terrorist?'
'Religious leader. His car exploded with him in it. And in London that businessman-'
'The one who bought the airline!' Wilcox shouted, happy to know at least this one. 'Don't tell me this joker killed him, too. Three people?'
'Those are the three from last year we can definitely pin on him. He's been in business at least a decade.' When the sheriffs brows rose, Milo knew he'd shared enough. No need to terrify the man. 'But like I said, Sheriff, I need to talk to him to be sure.'
Wilcox rapped his knuckles on his desk, hard enough to shake the computer monitor. 'Well, then. Let's get you talking.'
2
The sheriff had moved three drunks and two spousal abusers to the group cell, leaving Samuel Roth alone in a small cinder-block room with a steel door and no window. Milo peered through the door's barred hatch. A fluorescent tube burned from the ceiling, illuminating the thin cot and aluminum toilet.
To call his search for the Tiger obsessive would have been, according to Grainger, an understatement. In 2001, soon after he'd recovered from his bullet wounds in Vienna and retired from Tourism, Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghanistan, he would spend his time on terrorism's more surgical arms. Terrorist acts, by definition, were blunt and messy. But when someone like bin Laden or al-Zarqawi needed a specific person taken out, he, like the rest of the world, went to the professionals. In the assassination business, there were few better than the Tiger.
So over the last six years, from his twenty-second-floor cubicle in the Company office on the Avenue of the Americas, he'd tracked this one man through the cities of the world, but never close enough for an arrest.
Now, here he was, the man from that embarrassingly meager file Milo knew so well, sitting comfortably on a cot, his back to the wall and his orange-clad legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Samuel
Roth, or Hamad al-Abari, or Fabio Lanzetti-or five other names they knew of. The assassin didn't check to see who was peering in at him; he left his arms knotted over his chest as Milo entered.
'Samuel,' Milo said as a deputy locked the door behind him. He didn't approach, just waited for the man to look at him.
Even in this light, with its harsh shadows and the way it yellowed his skin, Roth's face recalled the three other photographs back at the office. One from Abu Dhabi, as al-Abari, his features half obscured by a white turban. A second from Milan, as Lanzetti, at a cafe along the Corso Sempione, talking with a red-bearded man they'd never been able to identify. The third was CCTV footage from outside a mosque in Frankfurt, where he'd planted a bomb under a black Mercedes-Benz. Each remembered image matched these heavy brows and gaunt cheeks, the pitch eyes and high, narrow forehead. Sometimes a mustache or beard hid aspects of the face, but now his only mask was a three-day beard that grew to the top of his cheekbones. His skin was splotchy in this light, peeling from an old sunburn.
Milo remained beside the door. 'Samuel Roth-that's the name we'll use for now. It's easy to pronounce.' Roth only blinked in reply.
'You know why I'm here. It has nothing to do with your problems with women. I want to know why you're in the United States.'
'What name are
Milo grimaced. He was going to have to go through the motions. At least a change of language would hide their talk from these Tennessee boys. In Russian, he answered, 'I'm Milo Weaver, of the Central Intelligence Agency.'
Samuel Roth looked as if that were the funniest name he had ever heard.
'What?'
'Sorry,' Roth said in fluent English. He raised a hand. 'Even after all this, I still didn't expect it to work.' He had the flat, irregular accent of someone who'd absorbed too many.
'What didn't you expect to work?'
'I'm lucky I even remember you. I forget a lot of things these clays.'
'If you don't answer my questions, I'll hurt you. I am authorized.'
