An American Spy (15 page)

“I have a feeling they actually checked my references.”

“If the department were still together we could’ve given you an excellent CV.”

“Watch out for yourself, Alan.”

“Invite Pen over, she’s probably lonely.”

Penelope was out of town for the weekend, visiting her brother in Boston, so she didn’t come for dinner until Monday evening. Milo noticed that she did have the look of a lonely person, humorless and quietly desperate for their company. Having Stephanie around throughout dinner didn’t help, and the girl’s explanation for the lack of tomatoes in the salad Tina had rustled up—“Mom thinks we’ll all die if we eat tomatoes. They’ve got fish in them.”—only left Penelope confused.

“Fish?”

“Salmon,” Stephanie said authoritatively.

“Salmon
ella
,” Tina corrected, “and I didn’t say we’d die. It’s just not a good idea to take chances. Over two hundred people have gotten sick—did you know?”

“No,” Penelope said into her lettuce. “I didn’t hear that.”

Conversation couldn’t really begin until Stephanie was gone, so once she had been packed off to bed they took positions around their guest. Tina sat beside her on the couch, while Milo took the chair across from her. It reminded him miserably of the interviewer he’d faced off with last week, when he’d known from the second question that they wouldn’t call him, yet stuck out the entire interview in order to seem
professional
. He slipped some Nicorette into his mouth, then said, “Where’s Alan? I talked to him, but he didn’t tell me where he was.”

Penelope shrugged and began on her fresh glass of wine.

“You’re not keeping in touch?”

“He hasn’t called me, if that’s what you mean. Maybe he’s finding himself a girlfriend.” She turned to Tina. “One can hope.”

Milo felt at a loss, so he let that sit and waited for Tina to take over, but all she did was stare back at Penelope, smiling sadly. He was outside for the moment, these two women staring at one another like melancholy lovers, and he wondered if Tina really had told him everything about their conversation. Perhaps she had found something to sympathize with in Penelope’s sudden lack of love for her husband.

Finally, Penelope turned to him. “I’m the one who did it. I kicked him out. That was . . . Sunday? Yeah. A full week ago. He told me he had to go on a trip, so I told him not to bother coming back. I’d had enough.”

“Enough of what?”

“The secrecy. The moods. All the things you can put up with if you really love your husband.”

Tina was staring at him. It was an indecipherable expression—did she want him to shut up? He saw no reason to stop, so he said, “Alan thinks he can set things right once he gets back. He told me that.”

Penelope nodded.

“You think that’s right?”

Penelope raised her glass to her lips.

It felt like a few interrogations he’d run. Coy silences, self-conscious smirks. In those situations, he’d felt the urge to slap the person in question, but now he simply felt confused. What, really, were they trying to get out of her? The key to a failed marriage?

Later, when the women had cracked their second bottle (Milo stuck to tonic water), Penelope turned the questions around. “You should tell me, Milo. What happened in March?”

“You know. The department was shut down. Alan blames himself.”

“Should he?”

Milo seldom thought in terms of blame, or tried not to, and now he had to take a moment to go through the sequence of events that had led to that computer screen and its flickering dots. If the blame had to be put on any one person, he would hand it to Senator Nathan Irwin, but there was no reason to tell Penelope about that. He shook his head. “No. The failures were in place before he took the job, and by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do. But Langley blamed him, which is why he’s having such trouble finding a job.”

“No,” Penelope said. “That’s his fault. He hasn’t even tried. He’s spent all his time in his office, or the bathroom, plotting the end of the world. So you tell me. What happened that screwed him up like this? He’s not the same man he was before he took that damned job.”

Milo wasn’t sure how much Penelope knew, nor how much she should know. He’d shared more than was appropriate, or even legal, with Tina, but Penelope . . . The fact was that she had gotten rid of her Company man, and who knew what she might decide to say in the midst of an acrimonious divorce? He knew far too little about Penelope Drummond.

So he kept to the minimum of facts. “The department wasn’t made redundant, and it wasn’t closed down. It was liquidated. In the space of two days, nearly all of Alan’s field agents were killed. The way Alan puts it, the department had been running well for sixty years. He took over, and it was wiped out in sixty days.”

As he spoke, he watched her face for signs, and by the time he finished he was sure that she’d known none of this.

“How many?” she asked.

He hesitated, but saw no reason for evasion now. “Thirty-three.”

Her face went slack. “Thirty-
three
?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well.”

Tina sat in silence, picking at her fingernails. She knew the story. She also knew that their deaths had been orchestrated by a Chinese intelligence officer, though he’d never told her his name.

Penelope finished her wine, then unconsciously wiped at her lip, reminding him of her husband. “That’s why he’s obsessed.”

“Yes.”

“And . . .” She frowned at the coffee table, then focused on Milo’s eyes. “And are you helping him?”

Tina was watching him again, expectant.

“I’m trying to get him to let it go.”

“Thirty-three people? Is that something anyone can let go of? Could you?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing Alan can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Someone should be arrested,” Penelope said.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Tell her,” said Tina.

Milo blinked at her. “What?”

Tina sighed, then grabbed the open wine bottle between them and began topping off their glasses. “Tell her what you told me. About China.”

“I’m not sure—”

“Please,” Penelope cut in. “Tell me about China.”

Tina knew what she was doing, but she didn’t care. Things like national secrets and government bureaucracies, for her, paled in comparison to a woman sitting on her couch being ruined by her husband’s deterioration. He wondered what Alan Drummond would do in his position, then knew: Alan would become rude and sullen, climb to his feet, and leave. If Milo did that, Tina would simply turn to Penelope and tell her everything she knew. He could at least make sure she didn’t mix up the facts.

He stood up. “Come on, Pen. Let’s go to the roof.”

“Roof?”

“I had to do the same thing,” said Tina.

Penelope wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. “Why?”

“Bugs,” said Tina. “My husband is paranoid.”

3

“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

Milo scratched his freshly shaven cheek, took a long, unsettling look at Redman Transcontinental Human Resources Administrator William J. Morales—
just call me Billy, all my friends do
—and settled an ankle on his knee. An afternoon headache had struck, like a bad reminder of the previous night’s wine with Penelope, even though he hadn’t drunk anything. “How do you mean?”

“You know,” said Morales, waving a hand around to signify a word he couldn’t find. “Where are you at? Family life, work life. Financial security?”

“How should I know?”

Morales blinked at him. “It’s an imaginative exercise, Milo. No one’s going to come back to test you in a decade. You just say where you’d reasonably like to be.”

It wasn’t Morales’s fault—these sorts of questions were preordained. He’d heard them so many times over the last month at so many private security consultancies, and had even answered them with his vanilla line—
Well, I see myself in a more secure position, in a job I love, but with time on the weekends to spend with my family
—but so far that hadn’t made a dent in his employment prospects. So he would try a new tact: honesty.

“You never know. Someone might show up in ten years. Ask how your life measures up to your plans. These tests come up all the time. You fail, you get pistol-whipped and two bullets in the back of the head.”

William J. Morales let a twitchy smile slip into his face, then pushed it away. He moved some papers on his desk; he glanced at his open laptop. “Look, if you don’t have an answer, that’s fine.”

“I’ve got lots of answers, Billy. I just tend not to dwell on them, because I know how easily they can disappear. These days, I worry about the next step. It’s hard enough keeping that straight, much less thinking ten steps, or ten years, ahead.”

Minutes later, as he left the building, popping a Nicorette and taking the corner under the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn side, he noticed a small man in a denim shirt on the opposite sidewalk. The man glanced at him and put away his phone. Milo tugged his tie loose, considering his numerous failures in that interview, and tried to ignore both the man and the swelling of gas in his injured gut; he needed to find a toilet.

Milo expected him to cross the street to meet him, but the man in denim just walked parallel, pretending to have no interest, and perhaps he didn’t—perhaps, Milo thought, it was just his famous paranoia. That was when another man—thin, dark-skinned, wearing a full suit that had to be uncomfortable in the heat—fell into step beside him and said, “Milo Weaver?”

Milo didn’t slow down, just waited until the newcomer had repeated himself before saying, “Yeah?”

“Can I have a word?”

“I’ve got an appointment.”

“It’ll just take a minute.”

“I’m already late.”

The man did an extra skip to keep up. “This is important, Mr. Weaver.”

“So’s my appointment.”

“It’s about your friend, Alan Drummond.”

Milo slowed, taking a better look at his shadow. Young, thirty or more. Mixed South Asian ancestry, maybe Indian. Sideburns. Fashionable-geek glasses. “What about him?”

“We should probably talk in private.”

Milo stopped. In the distance he could see the York Street subway stop that would lead to home. “I don’t have time to go to your office. Talk to me here. Start with who you are.”

“Oh, of course,” the man said, patting his pockets with a bony hand until he found a leather badge wallet. He opened it like a book. On one side, an eagle-topped badge told Milo that this man was a “special agent”; on the other, a laminated Homeland Security photo-ID gave the holder’s name as Dennis Chaudhury, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Will that do?” Chaudhury asked as he folded it again.

“You can buy those things online.”

Chaudhury looked briefly confused, then smiled. “Christ, you people don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“What people?”

“Company people.”

As they spoke, the man in the denim shirt crossed to their sidewalk and lounged in front of a pharmacy. Milo pointed down the street. “You have between here and that subway station.”

“But Mr.—”

“I’ll walk slowly.”

With the first few steps, Dennis Chaudhury was left behind, but he jogged to catch up and said, “Your friend is gone.”

Milo stopped again, feeling the sun beating down on him. “Gone?”

“Disappeared. In London. From the Rathbone Hotel.”

“That’s called missing, not disappeared. How long has he been missing?”

“Since Saturday.”

Milo’s stomach grumbled, and he wondered if this guy could hear it. He said, “Alan leaves
your
sight—well, not your sight. MI-5’s sight?”

Chaudhury shrugged.

“He escapes his minders for three lousy days, and you call him
gone
?” Milo started walking again. “You’re really hard up for work, aren’t you?”

Chaudhury’s voice followed him. “We think he’s been kidnapped.”

“What makes you think that?” Milo asked without looking back.

“I don’t know. Maybe that someone turned off the hotel’s surveillance cameras. By the time they were on again, he was gone.”

Again, Milo slowed to a stop and turned back. Chaudhury was some distance behind him, hands on his hips, oblivious to the people passing him on the sidewalk. He said, “We’re waiting for more from Five, but it’s hard getting anything out of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re assholes, Mr. Weaver.”

It was an unexpected answer, and Milo caught himself smiling.

“Truth is,” said Chaudhury, “it was Scotland Yard that initially figured out something was weird. Disappearance was one thing, but he was using a fake name that they had already tied to a crime. Kind of ridiculous, using a blown name, kind of crazy.”

“What was the name?”

“Sebastian Hall.”

Milo bit his tongue to control his lips. He felt the urge to scream, but said, “Who do you think has him?”

“We don’t know,” Chaudhury said as he walked up to Milo, “but you might—you’re a friend of his.”

“What makes you think that?”

He was close enough to whisper. “Dinner parties.”

Milo bit deeper into his tongue, then said, “You’ve been watching me?”

“Him, not you.” A pause. “Should we be watching you?”

“What about Penelope?”

“The wife?” he asked, shaking his head. “You’re the first one we’ve approached about this. I was hoping you’d have a simple explanation for us.”

Milo looked past him to the one in denim, who’d moved to a newspaper dispenser. “Listen. I do have an appointment I have to keep. Can we talk this evening?”

“As you like, Mr. Weaver.”

Once he was underground, squeezed in among warm bodies and holding on to a metal loop, feeling the grumble of his bowels, he let his sore tongue go and cursed sharply. That Alan had gotten himself kidnapped was one thing—it was bad but, given his state of mind, almost inevitable. That he’d done this using the name Sebastian Hall was something else entirely. He had used Milo’s old work name, in order to force Milo’s involvement.