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Georgia Republican Harlan Pleasance was the one who really dropped the bomb, back in April 2006. He headed the second special investigation committee, which, based on the results of the first committee the previous month, focused on money trails. With access to the CIA budget (a secret since the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act), Senator Pleasance wondered aloud how the Company could fund, for example, the recently uncovered ten-million-dollar gift to the unlikely named
It was an open secret within Langley that, while all this might be true, there was no human way to discover it from the existing paper trails. Another agency was feeding Senator Pleasance his information. Most believed it was Homeland, while others—and Milo was part of this group—believed it was the National Security Agency, which had a much older, historic beef with the CIA. It didn’t matter, though, because the public didn’t care where the information came from. The facts were just too enticing.
Whatever began the steady bloodletting, it was Pleasance’s discovery that turned it into a public, and international, massacre. First, the embarrassed Germans rolled back their historic support and shut down many joint operations. Then it became a race. Fresh special committees demanded financial records as minor politicians took a stab at national recognition, while Langley began incinerating hard drives. Louise Walker, a typist, was arrested for this, and after a lengthy meeting with her lawyer became convinced that the only way out was to give a name. That name was Harold Underwood, a low-level bureaucrat. Harold was also assigned a convincing lawyer.
So it went. Eighteen months from beginning to end, resulting in thirty-two arrests: seventeen acquittals, twelve jail terms, two suicides, and one disappearance. The new CIA director, whose approval was rushed through the nomination hearings, was a tiny but vociferous Texan named Quentin Ascot. In front of the Senate, on elevated heels, he made his position clear. No more black money. No more operations that hadn’t been approved by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. No more cowboy antics at Langley. “No more rogue departments. It’s a new world. We serve at the pleasure of the American people, who pay our bills. We should be an open book.”
The Company’s collective groan could be heard around the world.
The four secret floors of offices on the Avenue of the Americas, stocked with Travel Agents who focused on the running of, and assimilation of information collected by, Tourists based in all the populated continents, was (behind closed doors) considered a prime target for the inevitable cuts. Director Ascot, it was rumored, wanted to relieve the world of Tourism altogether. He claimed that Tourists, with open-ended resources and no need to collect receipts, would bankrupt the Company. But since he didn’t have enough internal support to erase the clandestine department, all he could do was slowly chew it up.
Milo learned of Ascot’s first tentative steps when he arrived at LaGuardia from Tennessee and met Tom Grainger in the airport security office. The old man had sent away the “rent-a-cops,” as he called most non-Company personnel, and through a two-way mirror they watched crowds jostling at the luggage carousel, the irregular flow of travelers along mass transit lines that had in recent years become national threat centers. Both men missed that almost-forgotten time when travel was about arriving someplace new, not about getting through the clunky measures of antiterrorist law.
“They’re starting the postmassacre frenzy,” Grainger said to the glass, a drawn look on his face.
Even by CIA standards, Tom Grainger was old—seventy-one years, most of his white hair lost to the shower drain, his cabinet full of prescription pills. He never appeared in public without a tie.
“The Grand Inquisitor has sent a memo through his under-lings—through Terence Fitzhugh, to be precise. I’m to prepare for executions, he says. Ascot’s predicting a war of attrition, and he’s getting me to take out my own people. It’s slow hara-kiri.”
Milo had known Grainger since 1990, when he’d been invited to become part of the Company’s clandestine world in London, and he knew the old man was always melodramatic when it came to Langley. His secret department in Manhattan was his private dominion, and it hurt him to be reminded that people in another state really pulled the strings. Maybe that was why he’d decided to appear at the airport, rather than wait for morning to talk in the office—no one here could listen to his bitching. “You’ve been through worse, Tom. We’ve all been through worse.”
“Hardly,” Grainger said dismissively. “One-quarter. That’s how much we’re losing. He’s giving me the heads-up. Next year we’ll work on one-quarter less funds, which’ll barely cover operational costs. I’m supposed to decide which Travel Agents get pink slips, and which get transferred to more public departments.”
“And the Tourists?”
“Aha! Too many. That’s the gist of it. Twelve slots for the whole of Europe, working around the clock, and yet I’m supposed to get rid of three of them. Bastard. Who does he think he is?”
“Your boss.”
“My boss wasn’t there when the planes came, was he?” The old man rapped a knuckle on the glass. A boy standing nearby turned to frown at the noisy mirror. “I guess you weren’t either, were you? You never did visit the old office … no.” He was fully engaged in his memories now. “You were still a Tourist, just barely, and we were sitting at our desks, drinking Starbucks, as if the world wasn’t preparing to explode.”
Milo had heard all this before, Grainger’s endless replay of September 11, when the former secret CIA office at 7 World Trade Center collapsed. It didn’t happen immediately, because the nineteen young men who hijacked four planes that morning didn’t realize that by hitting one of the smaller towers they could wipe out an entire Company department. Instead, they went for the glory of the enormous first and second towers, which gave Grainger and his staff time to flee in panic before the main targets crumbled, bringing number seven down with them.
“It was Beirut times fifty,” said Grainger. “All of Dresden stuffed into a few minutes. It was the first wave of barbarians coming to sack Rome.”
“It wasn’t any of those things. Is this what you needed to talk to me about?”
Grainger turned from the glass and frowned. “You’re sunburned.”
Milo leaned against the LaGuardia security supervisor’s messy desk and looked down. His left arm, which had hung out the driver’s side window, was definitely a different tone. “You want to just wait for my report?”
“They’ve been calling like mad,” said Grainger, ignoring the question. “Who’s this Simmons bitch?”
“She’s all right. Just angry. I would be, too.”
Through the window, luggage clattered down a conveyor belt as Milo outlined his conversation with the Tiger. “He wanted me to track down the people who stuck him with HIV. Terrorists, he thinks. Sudan connections.”
“Sudan. Great. But all he had for you was this one name. Herbert Williams. Or Jan Klausner. It’s pretty sketchy.”
“And the Hirslanden Clinic. He was there under the al-Abari alias.”
“We’ll look into it.”
Milo chewed the inside of his cheek. “Send Tripplehorn. He’s still in Nice, isn’t he?”
“You’re better than Tripplehorn,” said Grainger.
“I’m not a Tourist. Besides, I’m due in Florida on Monday.”
“Sure.”
“Really,” said Milo. “Me, the family, and Mickey Mouse.”
“So you keep telling me.”
They watched passengers press closer to the carousel, knocking into each other in an exhausted panic. To Milo’s annoyance, his boss sighed loudly. He knew what that meant, and that knowledge told him why Grainger had taken the trouble to come out to LaGuardia—he wanted to railroad Milo into another trip. “No, Tom.”
Grainger peered at the travelers, not bothering to reply. Milo would wait him out. He would stay silent, not even pass on the revelation that the Tiger had come from the ranks of their own Tourists. If it was true, Tom already knew it, and had kept this information from Milo for his own reasons.
Almost sadly, Grainger said, “Think you can head out tomorrow afternoon?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Ask me where.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tina’s on the warpath. I missed Stephanie’s show.”
“Not to worry. I called an hour ago with a personal apology for sending you out. I took the responsibility on my own shoulders.”
“You’re a real saint.”
“Sure I am. I informed her that you were saving the free world.”
“She stopped believing that long ago.”
“Librarians.” Grainger sniffed at the travelers. “You should’ve listened to me. There are absolutely no odds in marrying smart women.”
Truth was, Grainger actually had given him this advice a week before he and Tina married. It had always made him wonder about Terri, Grainger’s now-deceased wife. “Might as well tell me about it,” he said. “But no promises.”
Grainger patted his back with a heavy hand. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
8
It took them most of the sunset hour to reach Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood Milo had grown to love over the last five years. When they were apartment hunting, Stephanie still just a baby, Tina had been immediately taken by the brownstones and upscale cafés, the cozy, soft-edged world of dot-com kids and successful novelists; it took Milo a while longer.
Family life was a different beast from what he’d known before—unlike Tourism, it actually was life. So he learned. First, to accept, and after acceptance came affection. Because the Slope wasn’t about the nouveau riche torturing café workers with elaborate nonfat coffee specifications; Park Slope was about Milo Weaver’s family.
The Tiger had called him a bourgeois family man. In that, at least, the assassin had been right on the mark.
At Garfield Place, he climbed out of Grainger’s Mercedes with a promise to talk the next morning in the office. But he knew, as he mounted the narrow interior stairs of their brownstone, that he had already made up his mind. Family man or not, he was going to Paris.
At the third floor, he heard a television. When he rang the bell Stephanie shouted, “Door! Mom, door!” Then Tina’s quick footsteps and, “Coming.” When she opened it, she was buttoning her shirt. Once she had him focused, she crossed her arms over her breasts and in a high whisper said, “You missed her show.”
“Didn’t Tom talk to you?”
He tried to come in, but she wouldn’t step out of the way. “That man will say anything to cover for you.”
It was true, so he didn’t dispute it. He just waited for her to make up her mind. When she did, she grabbed his shirt, pulled him close, and kissed him fully on the lips. “You’re still in the dog house, mister.”
“Can I come in?”
Tina wasn’t truly angry. She came from a family where you didn’t hide your anger, because by venting it you stole its power. That’s how the Crowes had always done it in Austin, and what was good enough for Texas was good enough for anywhere.
He found Stephanie in the living room, splayed on the floor with a pile of dolls, while on television cartoon animals got into trouble. “Hey, girl,” he told her. “Sorry I missed the show.”
She didn’t get up. “I’m used to it by now.”
She sounded more like her mother every day. When he leaned over and kissed her head, she wrinkled her nose.
“Dad, you stink.”
“I know, hon. Sorry.”
Tina threw a tube of moisturizing cream at Milo. “For that sunburn. Want a beer?”
“Any vodka?”
“Let’s get some food in you first.”
Tina boiled ramen noodles—one of the five things, by her own admission, that she knew how to cook—and brought out the bowl. By then, Stephanie had warmed to Milo’s presence and climbed up beside him on the sofa. She gave a rundown of the other performers at the talent show, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the utter injustice of the winning performance—Sarah Lawton’s rendition of “I Decide.”
“But what about yours? We worked on it for weeks.”
Stephanie tilted her head forward to glower at him. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Why?”
“Because, Dad. No one understands French.”
Milo rubbed his forehead. He’d thought it was a fine idea, his child performing a Serge Gainsbourg hit. It was unexpected. Innovative. “I thought you liked that song.”
“Yeah.”
Tina took the far end of the couch. “She was incredible, Milo. Just stunning.”
“But I didn’t win.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “One day you’ll be running the New York Philharmonic, and Sarah Lawton will be serving up fries at Fuddruckers.”
“Milo,” warned Tina.
“I’m just saying.”
A crooked smile filled Stephanie’s face as she gazed into the distance. “Yeah.”
Milo dug into his noodles. “We’ve got it on video, right?”
“Father couldn’t get it in focus. And I’m too small.” That was how Stephanie differentiated the men in her life: Patrick was Father; Milo was Dad.
“He told you he was sorry,” said Tina.
Stephanie, not in a forgiving mood, climbed to the floor to rejoin her dolls.
“So?” said Tina. “You going to tell me?”
“This is good,” Milo said through a mouthful of noodles.
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Tom’s sending you off again. That’s why he called—to soften me up. He’s the least subtle CIA man I’ve ever met.”
“Now, wait—”
“Also,” she cut in, “I can see the guilt all over your face.”
Milo peered over his bowl at the television. The Road Runner was defying gravity once again, as Wile E. Coyote suffered the fate of the rest of us, the ones chained to the laws of physics. Quietly, he said, “I need to go to Paris. But I’ll be back by Saturday.”
“You don’t do that kind of work anymore.”
He didn’t answer. She was right, of course, but over the last year he’d disappeared on more and more “business trips,” and Tina’s worries had found voice. She knew enough about his life before they met to know that that man wasn’t the kind of husband she’d signed up for. She’d signed on with the person who’d left all of that behind.
“Why’s it so important you go to Paris? It’s not like the Company doesn’t have a whole army of goons to send.”
He lowered his voice: “It’s Angela Yates. She’s got herself in some real trouble.”
“Angela? From-our-wedding Angela?”
“They think she’s selling information.”
“Come on.” She made a face. “Angela’s the poster girl for Us-Against-Them. She’s more patriotic than John Wayne.”
“That’s why I need to go,” said Milo, looking up as Wile E. Coyote climbed out of a sooty hole after having plummeted a mile. “Those internal investigation guys—they won’t take that into consideration.”
“Okay. But you’re back by Saturday. We will fly to Disney World without you. Isn’t that right, Little Miss?”
“For sure,” Stephanie said to the television.
Milo held up his hands. “Promise.”
Tina rubbed his knee, and he pulled her close, smelling her freshly washed hair as he gazed at the television. That’s when he realized he’d been wrong: Wile E. Coyote wasn’t subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of us. Against all odds, he always survived.
Tina sniffed, then pushed him away. “Jesus, Milo. You stink.”
9
To visit the tower at the intersection of West Thirty-first and the Avenue of the Americas, you first had to know that you were being tracked by cameras that covered every inch of sidewalk and road around the building. So by the time you entered, you were expected, and Gloria Martinez, the dour forty-year-old Company desk clerk, was ready with your ID. Milo made a sport of flirting with Gloria, and she in turn made a sport of rebuffing him. She knew his wife was, as she put it, half-Latina, and because of this she occasionally thought it important to remind him, “Watch out, and keep sharp things away from your bed.”
Milo accepted this wisdom along with the breast-pocket ID, smiled for the camera attached to her terminal, and promised her, for the third time, “a secret vacation in Palm Springs.” In reply, she drew a cutting finger across her neck.
At the next stage of entry, by the six-pack of elevators, stood three enormous football players they called doormen. These men held the keys that allowed access to the four secret floors, stretching from nineteen to twenty-two, that constituted Tom Grainger’s domain. On this day, Lawrence, a tall, hairless black man, took him up. Even after five years of the same daily grind, Lawrence still waved a metal detector over Milo’s body in the elevator. It bleeped around his hip, and, like every day, Milo pulled out his keys, phone, and loose change for examination.
They passed the nineteenth floor, that eerily sterile interview level of narrow corridors and numbered doors where, when necessary, the Geneva Convention became a joke. The twentieth was empty, set aside for future expansion, and twenty-one contained the extensive library of printed Tourism files, a backup of the computer originals. The doors finally opened on the twenty-second floor.
Were a visitor to accidentally reach the Department of Tourism, he would find nothing out of the ordinary. It was an enormous open-plan office, stuffed with low-walled cubicles where pale Travel Agents hunched over computers, digging through mountains of information in order to write up their biweekly reports—or, in the vernacular, Tour Guides—for Tom Grainger. It had the feel, Milo always thought, of a Dickensian accounting office.
Before 9/11 and the collapse of the previous office at 7 World Trade Center, the Department of Tourism had been divided along geographic lines. Six sections devoted to six continents. Afterward, as this new office was put together and all the intelligence agencies were being scrutinized, Tourism rearranged itself along thematic lines. At present, there were seven sections. Milo’s section focused on terrorism and organized crime, and the many points at which they intersected.
Each section employed nine Travel Agents and one supervisor, giving the Avenue of the Americas (not counting an undisclosed number of Tourists spread around the globe) a staff of seventy-one, including its director, Tom Grainger.
One-quarter, Grainger had said. One-quarter of these people would have to go.
The old man was in a meeting with Terence Fitzhugh, Langley’s assistant director of clandestine operations, who sometimes arrived unexpectedly to address aspects of Grainger’s incompetence. While Milo waited outside the office, Harry Lynch, a twenty-something Travel Agent from Milo’s section, frog-marched a bundle of laser-printed sheets down the hall, stopping when he noticed Milo. “How’d it go?”
Milo blinked at him. “How’d what go?”
“Tennessee. I caught the radio traffic late Tuesday, and I knew—I knew—that this was our guy. It took a while to verify, but I had a feeling in my spine.”
Lynch felt a lot of things in his spine, a gift Milo was suspicious of. “Your backbone was right, Harry. Great job.”
Lynch glowed with pleasure and ran back to his cubicle.
Grainger’s door opened, and Fitzhugh stepped out. He towered over Grainger as he pointed at Milo with a manila envelope. “Weaver, right?” Milo admitted this was fact, and complimented his long memory—they hadn’t spoken in half a year, and then only briefly. In a show of comradely affection, Fitzhugh slapped Milo’s shoulder. “Too bad about the Tiger, but you just can’t predict these things, can you?”
Grainger, behind him, was noticeably silent.
“But we’re rid of one more terrorist,” Fitzhugh continued, stroking the thick silver hair above his ear. “That scores one for the good guys.”
Dutifully, Milo agreed with the sporting metaphor.
“So, what’s on your plate now?”
“Just Paris.”
“Paris?” Fitzhugh echoed, and Milo noticed a flicker of apprehension in his features. He turned to Grainger. “You got the budget to send this guy to Paris, Tom?”
“It’s Yates,” Grainger informed him.
“Yates?” Fitzhugh repeated again; perhaps he was hard of hearing.
“She’s one of his oldest friends. It’s the only sure way of pulling this off.”
“Gotcha,” Fitzhugh said, then patted Milo’s arm and walked away, singing, “Oo-la-la!”
“Get in here,” said Grainger.
The old man returned to his Aeron, settling against the bright backdrop of Manhattan, and placed an ankle on the corner of his broad desk. He did that a lot, as if to remind visitors whose office this really was.
“What did he want?” Milo asked as he took a seat.
“Like I told you, they’re reaming me over the budget, and then you go and mention Paris.”
“Sorry.”
Grainger waved the problem away. “One thing before we get into this. Your new friend, Simmons, has apparently done a rush-job autopsy on the Tiger. She wants to prove you killed him. You didn’t give her any reason to think that, did you?”
“I thought I was very cooperative. How did you hear about the autopsy?”
“Sal. Our friend at Homeland.”
Grainger wasn’t the only one with a friend in Homeland Security. Milo remembered the hubbub over the president’s announcement, nine days after the Towers, that he was establishing a new intelligence agency. The Company, the Feds, and the NSA lined up to squeeze in as many of their own employees as possible. “Sal” was Tourism’s plant, and periodically Grainger talked with him through an anonymous e-mail service called Nexcel. Milo had used it a few times himself.
“As you suspected,” Grainger continued, “it was cyanide. Hollow tooth. According to Homeland’s doctor, he only had a week or so left to him anyway. However, your prints are all over his face. Want to explain?”
“At the beginning of the interview, I attacked him.”
“Why?”
“I told you before—he brought up Tina and Stef.”
“You lost your cool.”
“I was short on sleep.”
“Okay.” Grainger reached out to tap the oak desktop, referring Milo to an unmarked gray file in the center. “Here’s the Angela thing. Go ahead.”
Milo had to get out of his chair to retrieve the dull-looking folder that showed off the newest Company security technique: Top secret files were now left unmarked, to better avoid attracting interest. He left it closed in his lap. “What about the Swiss clinic?”
Grainger pursed his wide lips. “As he said. Registered under Hamad al-Abari.”
“So you’ll put Tripplehorn on it?”
“We’ve only got eleven Tourists in Europe right now. Elliot died last week near Bern. The rest, including Tripplehorn, are all occupied.”
“Elliot? How?”
“Accident on the Autobahn. He’d been off the grid a week before we finally matched him up with the body.”
Because of security, Milo didn’t know any of the Tourists’ real names, their ages, or even what they looked like—only Grainger and a few others, including Fitzhugh, had that level of clearance. The news of Elliot’s death still bothered him. He scratched his ear, wondering about the man he only knew through a code name. How old was he? Did he have children? “You’re sure it was accidental?”