An American Spy (24 page)

“People like Nathan Irwin?” he asked, remembering what Xin Zhu had told him.

Leticia seemed to consider ignoring the question, but then cocked her head. “Somebody’s been doing some thinking.” She paused. “Unlike me, Irwin doubts conversions. Unlike me, that man don’t like you. See what I mean?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be there?”

“With bells on.”

“Something for the imagination,” she said, then gave him an address. She came closer and kissed his cheeks. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Milo turned to open the roof-access door for her, but she was already walking off, stepping up onto the raised edge, and leaping down to the next rooftop. He wondered how many buildings she had to go before reaching a jimmied access door that would take her to the street.

When he returned to the table, Yevgeny was quizzing Tina about where she would like to live. “Anywhere in the world. Forget your job. Forget about money entirely. Where do you imagine is your ideal home?”

The question seemed to fluster her. “God, I don’t know.”

“Hawaii,” said Stephanie.

“Excellent choice,” said Yevgeny.

Milo said, “How about—”

“Not you,” Yevgeny cut in. “You’ve seen too much anyway. I’d like to know what a sophisticated American woman dreams of.”

Tina took the question seriously, pouring wine as she mulled it over, then said, “Costa Rica? That’s supposed to be wonderful.”

“Interesting,” Yevgeny said approvingly.

“No,” Tina said, shaking her head. “Geneva.”

“Even better. You’ve never been to my apartment there, and I think that should be remedied.”

“We’re moving to Switzerland?” asked Stephanie.

Yevgeny smiled, looking at Milo, who didn’t smile. He didn’t like the idea of them hiding out in Yevgeny’s Geneva home. It was
known
.

After dinner, Tina asked a question that, strangely, she had never posed before, “What do you
do
at the UN?”

“Milo knows this. I work for the financial section of the Security Council’s Military Staff Committee.”

“Which makes him an accountant,” said Milo.

“Which makes me an administrator,” Yevgeny said. “I’m a mess with numbers.”

“So that’s what you do?” Tina pressed. “You manage a team of accountants?”

“Something like that, but they’re an excellent group, and they hardly need my attention. I have an enormous amount of free time.”

“That’s it? You check in with them occasionally, and travel in leisure the rest of the time?”

“Anyone would be lucky to have my job,” Yevgeny said, aiming his words at Milo.

“I’m jealous,” Tina said.

Yevgeny leaned across the table and placed his hand on hers. “Then leave this fool and run off with me.”

“Can I bring Stef?”

Stephanie went to bed wearing her bracelet, and all three adults had a hand in tucking her in. Afterward, Milo brewed coffee, and Tina told Yevgeny about Alan and Penelope. She told everything she knew, which was little, and added that that afternoon she’d gone by their apartment on her lunch break.

“Why?” asked Milo.

“I still can’t find her.” To Yevgeny, she said, “But you know all this, right?”

Yevgeny looked at Milo, then shrugged.

“And?”

“And I’m in contact with people in London, looking into this. I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Milo doesn’t either.”

“He walked out of that hotel.”

“He used one of Milo’s old work names,” she said after a moment. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he really has gone crazy.”

Yevgeny considered that, as if it were an angle that hadn’t occurred to him, then shook his head. “No, he’s just American.”

Tina blinked at him as Milo set down the cups. She said, “What does that mean?”

“Nothing really,” he said. “It’s just that Americans . . . well, they’re distinctive in the developed world, aren’t they?”

“Are we?”

Yevgeny smiled. “Of course. Your people still believe in Utopia. Maybe because it’s part of your founding myth, the search for the perfect home. In the twenty-first century, Americans still think it’s possible to have a society in which a level of civility is constant, where a perfect balance of control and freedom can be maintained. It’s quaint. Try a few hundred years of war and civil strife on your own land, and see how much of your faith remains.” He paused, but they were still waiting. “Alan Drummond’s failures have shown him the flaws in his own utopian dreams, and that’s a terrible thing to face. Traumatic. When it happens to America—when, for example, a small band of desert lunatics brings down two enormous towers, proving that America’s sense of security was always an illusion—the country lashes out. It snaps. There’s an irrational side to it, something wild. No one likes to be shown that their core beliefs are wrong, particularly when those illusions fuel their only happy dreams. So when America’s dreams have been bruised, the nation comes on like an express train. God help anyone standing in its path.”

Yevgeny reached for his glass, looking suddenly embarrassed. Milo remembered similar speeches from his teenaged years, living with him and his family in Moscow. Back then, he’d been adolescent and angry enough to fight the old man on every point. Now, Milo only said, “Well.”

“As for Alan Drummond,” Yevgeny said quickly, then cleared his throat. “I can only imagine that he’s lashing out in a similar fashion, and believes in his fight so deeply that he’s willing to drag others, like Milo, into it.”

Milo tensed when he heard crashing footsteps on the stairs, but then he heard the voice of their neighbor, Raymond, coming home drunk. “Christ, that guy’s loud,” Tina said, reading half of his mind, then looked at Yevgeny. “That sounds a bit harsh.”

Yevgeny blinked, confused.

“About America. Do you really think we’re that naïve?”

“Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “Milo’s sister, Alexandra, thinks America is full of xenophobes. That’s something I’d never suggest.”

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Tina said definitively.

“Maybe you should invite her here. Show her what she’s getting wrong.”

Though she’d never met Milo’s younger Russian sisters, Tina seemed to like that idea. Milo didn’t. He’d spent too many years keeping that other life under wraps to be comfortable, even now that it was in the open, with Alexandra, the sharp London lawyer, invading his home. Alexandra had tried to insinuate herself a few years ago, meeting Milo at a restaurant and staking out her claim: She deserved to know about his life. Milo had done his best to make it clear: You’re part of my old life; this is my new life. To her credit, she took it with good humor, even confessing,
Sometimes I wish I could do the same thing to our family. Kudos.
There was no antagonism—he had no fight with Alexandra or the younger Natalia—but he found the prospect of complicating his life by the addition of more family members unbearable. Having Yevgeny around was enough of a chore.

Now, though, he could tell that Tina needed this—she needed to know more about her husband’s family—so he said, “Maybe I should give her a call.”

Later, Milo walked Yevgeny down to Seventh Avenue, where Francisco was waiting. All Yevgeny said as they shook hands was “I know you didn’t mean what you said up there, but you really should call your sister. She would appreciate it.”

Milo just nodded.

In bed, he told Tina that he would have to go to D.C. in the morning, and that she would have to pick up Stephanie from camp. “Is that doable?”

“I’ll find a way,” she said quietly, then placed a hand on his chest. “Why D.C.?”

He’d considered saying that he had a job interview, which would have been easiest, but he was sick of lying to her. By being partly honest now, he could temper his guilt over the bigger lie she would discover once either Janet Simmons or Yevgeny appeared the next night to take them away. He said, “It’s just a day trip, and it’s to find out some more about Alan.”

“Someone in D.C. knows?”

“I think so.”

“Then he wasn’t just crazy, was he? He was working with someone.”

Though he admired the connection she’d just made, he wished she hadn’t made it. “Anything’s possible,” he said. “Did you enjoy Yevgeny?”

“He’s an oddball, but I like him. And I
do
like the idea of taking a vacation in Geneva. Don’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?” he asked, though the last time he’d been in Geneva he’d fought another Tourist and tied him up in his hotel room. That same Tourist later killed fifteen-year-old Adriana Stanescu, and was then killed himself during Xin Zhu’s annihilation of the department. Geneva was the last place he wanted to return to.

11

Milo took the subway to Penn Station and boarded the 10:00
A
.
M
. Acela Express for D.C., thinking not of his destination but of the street corner he’d come from, where he’d taken Stephanie to day camp. Had she felt his anxiety? Had she noticed the lingering hug he’d given her, the one she’d had to push to escape from? He’d wanted to leave something for her, some small gift or word of warning, but anything out of the ordinary could lead to disaster, and so he’d plastered the smile to his face, kissed her, and sent her on her way.

The two-hour-and-forty-seven-minute journey was delayed by unexpected congestion around Philly, so that he arrived at Union Station at one thirty. He had to rush through the crowd for the Massachusetts Avenue exit. His taxi made good time until a forced detour around a demonstration along Virginia Avenue, and he reached the small, unassuming colonial on Potomac Street NW by ten after two.

The name on the front gate was Washington, and when he rang the bell, the gate was unlocked electrically without a word from inside. He walked up a small parcel of overgrown yard to the front steps and waited a moment to see if he needed to ring the doorbell—he didn’t. It clicked and was pulled open by a small, tired-looking man he’d last seen—in the flesh, at least—looking ill as he came to terms with the fact that one of his aides had been a long-term agent for the Chinese, and that that single oversight had led to the deaths of thirty-three people—thirty-four, counting one of his other aides. This same man had also been responsible for the murders of two of Milo’s friends: Angela Yates, CIA resident in Paris, and Tom Grainger, former Tourism Department head and Stephanie’s godfather. He’d attempted to have Milo killed. Yet here he stood—Nathan Irwin, Minnesota Republican—still breathing and looking healthy. Perhaps sensing what Milo was thinking, Irwin said, “You’re looking in remarkably good health.”

“Well, I’m not dead.”

“Get inside,” said the senator, looking over Milo’s shoulder in a nervous, awkward way.

The interior was modest, with a staircase directly in front of them, and a living room that looked like it had been decorated by a firm of elderly women with a love of art nouveau, but without the budget to achieve their dreams. “We’re alone?”

Irwin shut the door. “Cut the bullshit, Milo. What’s your game?”

“Are we alone, Nathan? Or are some of your aides floating around?”

Irwin winced—it was a childish jab, and cruel, considering how defeated Irwin had been after the discovery—but he recovered. “Of course we’re not alone. We’re never alone. Now, what are you up to?”

Milo wandered into the living room, stroking an elaborately printed chair, catching dust on his fingers. It was an unclean safe house. He said, “I want to know what happened to Alan, and Leticia says the only way I can learn that is to help you out.”

“But you said no to that.”

“Have you never changed your mind?”

“Never,” Irwin said, but when Milo looked at his face, he was smiling. Then the smile went away. “What I want to know is why you changed your mind. We’ve got you pretty well profiled, Milo. You’re as simple as any putz on the street. You like your comfort. You like your family. Now that you’ve finally got both of those things again, I don’t think you would throw them away. Because throwing them away is precisely what you’d be doing, at least temporarily.”

Milo said nothing for a moment. He had reached a china cabinet and found a collection of ceramic pigs from around the world staring back at him with a broad variety of expressions. “Why does any of this matter?” he said finally. “I’m here to help. It’s not like you have an army behind you anymore. It can’t be easy putting something this big together.”

“It matters,” said Irwin. “First of all, you have no idea how big or small this operation is. Maybe Leticia’s our only asset.”

“You’ve also got José Santiago and Tran Hoang.”

A loud exhale. “She tell you that?”

“You’ve got three Tourists, but now Alan’s gone missing. You’re in a bind. What you could really use is a new administrator, and I’ve got the experience.”

“So now you don’t just want to help out. You want to run the operation.”

“Do you have someone else on hand? Do you have someone else who has experience dealing with Xin Zhu?”

“You never actually met the man.”

“Are you working with anyone who has?”

Irwin still hadn’t moved from the entryway but was leaning against the banister leading up to the second floor. He looked older than he did on television, but Milo expected that this was true of everyone. The lighting here wasn’t advantageous, and there was no makeup team. The truth was that Irwin looked terrified—which, Milo thought, he should be.

“The problem,” Irwin said, “is that for you to run the operation, you’d have to know its whole scope, and I’m certainly not ready for that.”

Milo had expected resistance—in fact, he’d expected more. Yet he knew from Xin Zhu that Irwin was just one of three players with a hand in this operation, and so Irwin’s vote was not definitive. Milo said, “Tell me, then. What role did you imagine for me?”

“I imagined nothing. Leticia brought you in. You’re here now so that these sorts of decisions can be made.”

“By you?”

Another smile cracked the senator’s features; then he nodded at the stairs. “Come on.”