An American Spy
| An American Spy | |
| Milo Weaver [3] | |
| Steinhauer, Olen | |
| Atlantic Books (2012) | |
| Tags: | Milo Weaver Milo Weaverttt |
In Olen Steinhauer’s bestseller
The Tourist
, reluctant CIA agent Milo Weaver uncovered a conspiracy linking the Chinese government to the highest reaches of the American intelligence community, including his own Department of Tourism---the most clandestine department in the Company. The shocking blowback arrived in the Hammett Award--winning
The Nearest Exit
when the Department of Tourism was almost completely wiped out as the result of an even more insidious plot.
Following on the heels of these two spectacular novels comes
An American Spy
, Olen Steinhauer’s most stunning thriller yet. With only a handful of “tourists”---CIA-trained assassins---left, Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can’t let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo’s compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can’t help but go in search of him.
Worse still, it's beginning to look as if Tourism's enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.
With
An American Spy
, Olen Steinhauer, by far the best espionage writer in a generation, delivers a searing international thriller that will settle once and for all who is pulling the strings and who is being played.
AN
AMERICAN
SPY
ALSO BY OLEN STEINHAUER
The Nearest Exit
The Tourist
Victory Square
Liberation Movements
36 Yalta Boulevard
The Confession
The Bridge of Sighs
First published in the United States in 2012
by St. Martin’s Press.
Copyright © Olen Steinhauer 2012.
The moral right of Olen Steinhauer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84887-602-6 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-84887-603-3 (Trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-85789-421-2 (eBook)
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
For Stephanie Cabot,
American agent
Contents
PART ONE: IN THE HOUSE OF SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY
PART THREE: THE HOUSE OF GOOD DEEDS
PART FOUR: PERPETUAL REVOLUTION
PART FIVE: THE AMERICAN EXPRESS
ORDER OF THING
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 TO
THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2008
There had been signs, and it was more a measure of luck than intelligence savvy that Erika Schwartz was able to put them together in time. For instance, the military counterintelligence office, MAD, could easily have left her off the distribution list for their April 17 report on EU-related anomalies—a list they only added her to because they were preparing to ask for the use of an Iranian source in return. When the report came, it would have been easy to miss number 53, an item from Budapest. In fact, she did miss number 53, and her assistant, Oskar Leintz, had to draw her attention to it. He came into her new, large-windowed office on the second floor of the Pullach headquarters of the BND, the German Republic’s foreign intelligence agency, slapping the report against his palm. “You saw the bit from Budapest?”
She’d been sitting, uncharacteristically, with a salad on her desk, staring out the window where, just over the trees, she could see distant storm clouds. Since her promotion two weeks earlier, she still hadn’t gotten used to having a view; her previous office had been on the ground floor. She hadn’t gotten used to having resources, nor to the look on people’s faces when they walked into her office and shuddered, having forgotten that this obese, ill-humored woman now sat at Teddy Wartmüller’s desk. As for poor Teddy, he was in prison. “Of course I saw the bit from Budapest,” she said. “Which bit?”
“You haven’t touched that salad.”
“Which bit from Budapest, Oskar?”
“Henry Gray.”
Of course, she’d seen number 53, but she hadn’t connected the name because she’d only seen it once before, months ago, on another report from the same source, a journalist named Johann Thüringer. Now, with Oskar’s prodding, it returned to her. She opened her copy of the MAD report.
53. JT in Budapest: On the night of 15 April, Henry Gray (American journalist—see ZNBw reports 8/2007 & 12/2007) disappeared. His romantic partner, Zsuzsa Papp (Hungarian), insists he was kidnapped. Her suspicion: either the USA or China. When pressed, though, she refuses to go into details.
“Gray is connected to Milo Weaver,” Oskar helpfully reminded her, now stroking his thin mustache.
“Tangentially,” she said, then noticed that she’d gotten some Caesar dressing on the report. She remembered Thüringer’s observations from 8/2007 and 12/2007. In August, he reported that Mr. Gray had been thrown off the terrace of his Budapest apartment and was in a coma. The December report noted that Gray had woken in the hospital and eventually disappeared on his own. Soon afterward, an AP stringer named Milo Weaver had arrived asking questions about him. Gray had so far eluded the man . . . until now, at least.
She put in a call to a friend in the Hungarian National Security Office, the NBH, but there was no record of Gray leaving the country. There was, however, an old woman’s bedroom-window eyewitness report of someone matching Gray’s description being stuffed, dazed (perhaps drugged), by an Asian (Chinese?) into the back of a BMW on Sas utca, a five-minute walk from Gray’s apartment. Though the witness didn’t understand a word, she recognized English being spoken.
It was through another friend, Adrien Lambert in the French DGSE, that Erika learned that on the same night as the supposed abduction, at Budapest-Ferihegy’s Terminal 1, someone in a Plexiglas-covered stretcher had been loaded into a private twin-engine plane. The aircraft was registered to a Romanian company called Transexpress SRL, a known CIA front. Passengers weren’t listed, and while its destination was noted as Ruzyne-Prague Airport, there was no record of it ever landing there. Henry Gray had, in a bureaucratic sense, vanished from the face of the earth.
The little mystery gave her an itch, and she called Cologne and asked MAD for direct contact with Johann Thüringer. Their immediate yes was a shock. Life on the ground floor, with requests taking weeks to be summarily refused, had steeled her for rejection. Acceptance simply wasn’t part of her worldview.