Milo nodded at this. “So you had all the information you needed, and you wanted to see your girlfriend.”
“But Rick wanted to be cautious. Last night he finally told me it was safe to call.”
“And me? Did he know I was around?”
“What do you think?” said Gray. “Yeah. He said you might be around. And that I shouldn’t worry about you.”
Milo thought a moment, then said, “They’re done with you. You do realize that, right? You’re on your own now.”
Gray shook his head. “I might look like I’m alone and helpless, but trust me-they’ve got my back. They want this story out as much as I do.”
Milo turned to gaze at the crowds in the mall. “They’re not there.”
“These guys are much better than you think.”
Milo stared at him, at the confidence he was working hard to sustain. Gray hadn’t asked the most important question, which was whether or not Milo was working for Tourism again. Either it hadn’t occurred to him, or it had, and he was too terrified to ask. That’s how people worked. They avoided the things that most terrified them, even if knowing could save their lives.
Milo changed tactics. “Why do you think your friend Rick wants to expose the Department of Tourism?”
Gray blinked at his denseness. “Why do you think? To ruin it. To finish it off, so it won’t keep blustering into China’s business.”
“Rick’s a smart guy,” said Milo. “He knows that as soon as you get rid of Tourism, another department will take its place. There’s always clandestine funds available. He gets rid of Tourism, and he loses the one secret he has on the Company. That’s not how a spy works. When you get hold of intelligence, you keep it and use it. You only give it up if you’re forced to do so.”
The lesson was lost on Gray. He raised a hand and patted the air. “Rick’s no more complicated than the rest of us, Milo. He was angry about the Sudan. An angry man isn’t going to fool around with intelligence games.”
Milo doubted that. What Gray couldn’t really know in his bones was that espionage rarely, if ever, provoked wild emotions from men like Rick. Xin Zhu and Alan Drummond and Nathan Irwin-and even Milo himself for a while- worked from behind desks, and, to them, losses and gains were extended mathematical equations. Variables represented trade alliances, corporate influence, nuclear programs, spheres of influence, and the occasional human being. No one could get so upset over math.
“What kind of man is Rick?”
“Physically? Fat, but he carries his weight well.”
“Personality? Is he a joker?”
“Oh, the R joke.” Gray shook his head. “That was his single one-liner during the past two months. This guy doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s like an angry priest.”
“What about women?”
“Never came up, not really. But I get the sense that if he has one it’s a little wife back in Beijing he would never think of cheating on.”
Just the kind of man you’d trust, thought Milo. While Marko’s drunk, womanizing Xin Zhu was tailor-made for him. Milo wiped his mouth to suppress a smile of admiration.
Not just admiration but awe, because he’d followed everything through to its logical conclusion. Zhu had played this brilliantly.
Henry Gray had been used from the start. Thomas Grainger had tried to use him, posthumously, to reveal an operation he had grown disgusted with (disgust was one of the few emotions administrators knew intimately), and then Xin Zhu had used him to collect enough intelligence about Tourism so that he could pretend to have a mole working in it.
Because there was no mole in Tourism, and there never had been.
He couldn’t help it; the smile flowered on his face. Gray leaned forward and said, “What?”
No mole.
Now, everything fell into place beautifully.
It began with a story written by Grainger. The letter would have remained in his lawyer’s office if he’d remained alive. The Company had killed him, though, and so it was sent to Henry Gray. The Company tried to clean up the mess as it too often did-by killing-but there was a mistake. Gray survived, and so did the story of the Sudanese operation run through the Department of Tourism. Again, the Company was at fault, for its attempted murder led Gray straight into the hands of Xin Zhu, a Chinese spymaster who kept Gray around to help with the investigation.
At the beginning, this had probably been the entire plan: Help a journalist humiliate the Company as payback for its reckless interference in Africa.
Then, during one of Xin Zhu’s absences he found himself in Kiev, liaising with the SSU, and learned of one Marko Dzubenko, a blustering lieutenant planning to defect. With the kind of creativity that’s rare among administrators, he asked the SSU to please not arrest Dzubenko-some sort of deal would have had to be struck. Bring him to the next embassy party, will you? In person, pretending to be a drunk blowhard, he gave Dzubenko a story he couldn’t help but use later to buy himself a new life in America.
It was beautiful because it was so clean. In the end Zhu did so little. He helped an American journalist work on a story. He told a lie to a defector. Later, when he decided Tourism needed another kick, he passed along the request for the Chinese ambassador to the UN to deliver a single sentence about the Sudan, then refuse to go into details. Zhu knew that there had been a senator working behind the scenes, and any senator would panic at the possibility that the Chinese held a scandal in their hands.
It was beautiful, too, in that its minimalism reflected the minimalism of the original operation in the Sudan. Kill one man and make it look as if the Chinese committed the murder. Zhu’s plan was even more beautiful because no one needed to be killed, or even hurt, whereas last year’s plot had killed one man initially, resulting in riots in the Sudan that had killed more than eighty; then more died just to keep it quiet. Milo was stunned by the audacity of Xin Zhu’s ingeniousness.
“What is it?” Gray insisted.
“Where’s the house?”
“What?”
“Where’s the safe house? I want to see it.”
Gray considered that, staring past Milo at the diners and shoppers, probably looking for his backup. “Why?”
“Because I’d love to meet Rick,” he said. He really did want to meet Xin Zhu but knew it wouldn’t happen. Not today, at least.
“This might all sound like a joke to you, but you won’t be safe there.”
“Henry, really. I’d love to meet him. Hell, I might even offer him my services.”
“Why are you jerking my chain?”
“I’m jerking nothing.”
Gray considered that, then shrugged and stood up. “I’m not going to be responsible for what they do to you.”
“You’re officially exempt from responsibility.”
Milo paid the bill, then followed Gray back out to the street, where he waved down a taxi. Gray negotiated with the driver while Milo went back and forth over his realizations, checking them off one after the other. He was sure of this.
When Gray turned to look at the cars behind them, Milo said, “They’re not there, are they?”
“What you don’t know could fill the Vatican.”
To reach Budaors, the taxi driver took the same highway Milo had used to reach Budapest, then exited near the IKEA and ended up in a town of small, clay-tiled houses with muddy yards and new cars. To their left a fallow field opened up, and then a right placed them on a gravel street of new houses, with foreign cars and reinforced concrete gates. They stopped at number 16, and Milo paid the taxi bill with the last of his forints.
“Your last chance,” Gray said as he used a key on the gate.
“No cars,” Milo noted.
“They like public transport. More democratic.”
