An American Spy (31 page)

“Why would you help me?”

“Because it’s nearly four in the morning, and no bars are open. I’ve got time on my hands.”

Drummond turned slowly, looking around the room, taking in the open bag and the folded clothes and a magazine—the
Economist
—on a bedside table. On its cover stood two men, American presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, under the headline
AMERICA AT ITS BEST
.

“Unless it’s necessary for your purposes,” she said, “I’d leave everything. No need to draw attention to yourself when you walk out.”

He nodded, then went to the clothes and began to dress. “You have a car?”

“My friend does.”

“I’ll walk out of here on my own, but you can pick me up somewhere else that’s convenient. By convenient, I mean a dead zone.”

She thought a moment, remembering various streets that hadn’t yet been equipped with Transport for London CCTV cameras, then told him an intersection in Hammersmith.

Later, as she and Francisco sat in his chilly Toyota, waiting for the man who would never come, it would occur to her that Alan Drummond knew from that moment in the hotel room that they wouldn’t see each other again. He’d come around too quickly. The question, though, was: Why had he come around at all? She hadn’t threatened him, and she’d had no intention to. All she’d wanted was to know if Milo was there or not. Much later, when she knew most of the story, she understood that she’d simply arrived at an opportune time, and Alan Drummond was smart enough to know when to change his plans; he was brave enough to make immediate decisions.

She texted Francisco, asking for another ten minutes for the cameras, then left Alan Drummond and went through the lobby, nodding agreeably at the tired bellboy, pulled up her hood, and walked back down Charlotte Place. She took a right on Goodge before Francisco, breathing heavily, caught up with her. “So?”

“So let’s go to Hammersmith and wait for him.”

“It’s not your brother.”

“It’s someone who doesn’t give a damn about my brother.”

A moment or two later, Francisco said, “I never gave much of a damn about my brother, but after he died I felt differently. That’s the tragedy of human love.”

He sometimes did that, taking some stray statement as an excuse to reveal a sentimental piece of personal history, and she’d always understood this as an attempt to draw her into a closer relationship. She’d heard enough of Yevgeny’s warnings about his agents to know better. She said, “Where did you park your car?”

By five, when they were both yawning incessantly and knew that Alan Drummond wasn’t ever going to show up, Francisco started to drive, and she called Yevgeny in Geneva, taking him through the chain of events and semirevelations. “Two possibilities: Either he walked on us, or someone picked him up. I’m pretty sure he walked.”

“But what was he doing there?”

“Wouldn’t say. He knows what he’s doing to Milo, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.”

“Is he an imbecile?”

She’d considered that possibility as well. “He claims there are two parties watching him, though he wouldn’t say more. Other people, he says, are pulling his strings.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

She didn’t bother answering. Nana was touchy this morning.

He said, “We’ve got a lot of other things to deal with now, but let’s keep an ear to the ground about this.”

“You’re going to call Milo?”

“No need to trouble him yet.”

“But he’s causing
us
trouble. It’s only fair.”

“Fair?” he said, as if the word were new to him.

2

Erika Schwartz didn’t believe that the man in London was Milo Weaver—it was just an identity, after all, but it was an identity that had been used by the disbanded Department of Tourism, and so it demanded investigation. She’d placed a flag on the name months ago, so on Friday, the day after Sebastian Hall checked into the Rathbone, BND-Berlin notified her that the identity was in London. She requested a photo and was told they would work on it.

Her first impulse was to call Milo Weaver directly and clear this thing up. While he probably didn’t know all the answers—who, really, ever did?—she might be able to strike him off the list of possible players. If, of course, he was interested in ever speaking to her again.

Possible players in what? She had no idea, but after the games she’d played with Leticia Jones and Hector Garza in April, she felt sure that this was connected.

Instead of Weaver, she placed a call to someone she contacted so rarely that she had to dig through her notebooks to find the number. The old Geneva phone was out of service, so she checked through the database until she found the current personal mobile number for Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Primakov of the United Nations.

This, too, was a Geneva number, and she was lucky to find him in—the man, she knew, traveled more than most of her agents, bouncing from country to country according to the UN’s whims. “ ’Allo,” he said, but didn’t bother stating who he was.

“It’s your oldest girlfriend, Yevgeny,” she said in English.

“By how long we’ve known each other, or by the year you were born?”

“Both,” she said, not bothering to hold back her smile. She’d never succeeded in any of her schemes to trap him during the Cold War, though their occasional safe house meetings had been entirely cordial. After the war, they periodically met up at German-Russian friendship conferences, drank wine together, and shared war stories that were, by then, a little less classified. Despite all she knew about him and the things he had done, he was an incredibly charming man. “You sound healthy,” she said.

He laughed at that. “Well, my voice is my one asset. The rest is for science. You still sound like a lovely little girl.”

From their first meeting, he had teased her about her high-pitched voice, which had never matched her girth. “Just as long as you keep your eyes shut.”

“Congratulations, by the way, on your promotion.”

“Can we talk over this phone?”

“I should hope so,” he said. “My boys spent an entire month tinkering with it.”

“Which boys would those be?”

“Neighborhood kids.”

She said, “Did you hear about the little mystery in London? Someone named Sebastian Hall. I think the name’s familiar to you.”

“At my age everyone’s an acquaintance.”

“You know, of course, who the name was once used by?”

“Actually, that hadn’t come across my desk yet.”

“Your son,” she said.

“My son?”

“Milo Weaver.”

Yevgeny paused then, perhaps wondering if he should deny it, for though they had discussed his murdered wife, Ekaterina, and his two daughters, Natalia and Alexandra, Milo Weaver’s name had never been uttered, nor had the name of Milo’s mother, Ellen Perkins. Still, she wouldn’t make such a stab if she didn’t know the facts, and he was aware of this. “How long have you known?” he asked.

Since 1979
, she wanted to say but couldn’t. One advantage to never mentioning Milo Weaver had been that she could hide the fact that she had been the last person to interrogate his mother before she killed herself in a German prison. So she said, “I’m not calling to dredge up history, Yevgeny. I’d just like to know what you know about this. Sebastian Hall was one of Milo’s known work names, and I’d like to know why someone is using the same blown identity when all it’s going to do is point fingers at your son.”

She could hear his labored breaths before he spoke, and briefly—irrationally—she worried that he was having a stroke. When he finally spoke his voice was clear and composed. “I’m sorry, Erika. I don’t know much at this point. You’re right, though—its connection to Milo is . . . well, it’s curious. I can keep you updated as I learn more.”

“Thank you. And I’ll do the same.”

“Doubtful, but I live in hope.”

She didn’t receive a photo of Sebastian Hall until late Saturday, many hours after he’d disappeared from the hotel, and when she opened her e-mail from Berlin she was surprised to find the face of Alan Drummond staring back. Then she learned that he was gone, and that the hotel cameras had been sabotaged.

By Monday, Sebastian Hall’s disappearance was a subject of public inquiry in Britain, and on Wednesday, a report came in from New York. It turned out that Alan Drummond’s wife, Penelope, had had dinner with Milo and Tina Weaver. They were social. Also on Wednesday, and more importantly, Oskar finally received the Rathbone Hotel’s guest list from his English contact, a list that made her tooth ache. Gwendolyn Davis, a.k.a. Leticia Jones, had been in the hotel at the same time. As had Gephel Marpa of Free Tibet, but she didn’t understand the importance of that until Oskar said, “Marpa
lives
in London. Why was he at the hotel?”

When Yevgeny called her late Thursday afternoon, she brought up the interesting hotel guests and got the irritating feeling that none of this was news to him. Then she shared what she had been able to learn about Alan Drummond’s movements around the world, from New York to Seattle, to Vancouver, to Tokyo, Mumbai, Amman, and London. It turned out that Yevgeny had known about Mumbai, and he told her that Drummond had been seen exiting the Mumbai airport, though no one had followed him. Eventually, he said, “I talked to Milo on the phone today. He doesn’t know anything about this.”

“You asked him directly?”

“He asked me to look into it. I didn’t tell him we already were.”

“You could probably share with him.”

“On Monday, I’ll be in New York. We’ll talk then.”

“Yevgeny?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to tell me about Xin Zhu?”

A long pause. “He’s a colonel in the Guoanbu, isn’t he?”

“The CIA is after him. I suspect that Alan Drummond was in London for that reason. If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, Gephel Marpa might be a good choice for a collaborator.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”

“I’m a big administrator now, Yevgeny. You know how much free time that gives you.”

“What are you interested in knowing about Xin Zhu?”

“What did he do to the Americans? In particular, what did he do to the Department of Tourism?”

That department was another topic they had never discussed before, but she had no doubt that, with a son who had worked there, Yevgeny knew plenty about it. He said, “That department doesn’t exist anymore, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I’m not worried about it, Yevgeny. I asked a simple question.”

“He wiped it out, Erika.”

“Literally or metaphorically?”

“Literally.”

She sucked in air—her suspicion back in April had been right. “Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know who’s running the CIA’s retaliation?”

“I don’t know that there
is
a retaliation.”

“Are you withholding, Yevgeny?”

“Of course I am, but I’m not hiding anything that would help you.”

“Maybe I should be the judge of that.”

On Friday, Erika’s people in New York sent a set of photographs, from Thursday, of Milo Weaver speaking on a Park Slope sidewalk with an unknown man. He had stepped out of a pizza restaurant with his family in order to meet the man, then met him in the same spot a couple of hours later. He handed over something small, and the man gave him what looked like a business card. The man was dark (Northern Indian, an analyst noted, maybe Kashmiri), but they had little else on him. He’d left the second meeting by public transportation, but no one had thought to follow him.

On Monday, she read a report from New York noting that Penelope Drummond had spent the weekend with the Weavers before returning home—someone had broken into her apartment and torn it apart, assumedly searching for something. She had a frustrating conversation with a contact in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service Counterintelligence Center, who played dumb whenever she came near the topic that was on her mind, though in the end she decided that he wasn’t playing at anything—whatever was going on was above his clearance.

She spent Tuesday on other matters—matters that actually concerned the security of the Federal Republic of Germany—and was taken off guard when, at six the next morning, her phone woke her from a deep sleep. Six in the morning, Wednesday—midnight, New York time.

“Did I wake you?”

“Of course, Yevgeny.”

“Do you have anyone in New York, watching Milo?”

She considered lying, but perhaps she wasn’t awake enough because she said, “Yes.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“That could be enough.”

“You sound hysterical, Yevgeny. Are you all right?”

“I need a favor. Do this for me, and I’ll tell you whatever you like.”

“Anything?”

“Anything, Erika. I mean it.”

She sat up in bed, staring at streetlamps through the crack in her curtains. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yes, but he’s not telling me enough.”

“Milo?”

“I need you to perform an extraction tomorrow night. Tonight—Wednesday. Two people, perhaps three.”

“A willing extraction?”

“Once I talk to them, it’ll be willing.”

“I’ll need more people. Five isn’t enough. Do you have more?”

He thought a moment. “I can get three more.”

She tried to shake her head awake but was still fuzzy, and she didn’t like to make compromised decisions. “Can I call you back on this? After I’ve had my coffee?”

“I’d prefer an answer now.”

It was in the way he made that statement, his voice hard yet with an undercurrent of anxiety, that she understood that this was emotional for him. Whatever it was, he hadn’t thought it through objectively enough, and there was only one possible answer she could give him. Perhaps because of the lingering fuzziness, she didn’t see this, nor did she hear the voice inside her that kept saying,
This is none of your business.

“You’ll tell me everything?” she asked after a moment.

“No walls.”

“Then of course I’ll do it.”

3