The Nearest Exit (13 page)

It would weaken Adriana Stanescu’s position with his father, but for the moment he didn’t care. He’d regained that lack of empathy that Tourism drills into you.

Who knew? Maybe by morning he’d be free.

When switching trains at Howard Beach, he gave the rest of his Davidoffs to a beggar, and at JFK he purchased a ticket to Paris with his Sebastian Hall credit card. He joined the line at the security check. In front of and behind him anxious travelers sighed and
grunted as they removed their shoes and unpacked their laptops and undid their belts. Milo followed suit, though he carried no luggage.

Off to the left, propped against a thick column, a television was tuned to CNN. An urban night scene: A familiar-looking building was billowing smoke. He read the rolling newsfeed at the bottom of the screen. It was the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on the previous night. Protesters had broken in and set it ablaze.

As the line brought him nearer, he heard the commentator explain that the riot was in reaction to President Bush’s validation of Kosovo’s independence in Dar es Salaam. There was a sign: KOCOBO JE CPБJA. KOSOVO JE SRBIJA—Kosovo is Serbia. One protester had turned up dead in the building, overcome by the smoke of the fire he’d been setting. Milo hoped that Radovan and his mother were all right.

He passed through the metal detector and received his shoes and disassembled phone (which got an extrasuspicious examination from the X-ray operator), then continued into the international terminal, where he had a coffee to brighten himself up. He put the phone back together, but no one called, so he scrolled through the iPod’s playlist. It wasn’t a random selection of the seventies as Tina had thought, but the entire David Bowie discography, from his self-titled 1967 release until 2003’s curiously titled
Reality
. Not knowing where to begin, he put it on shuffle and soon found himself whispering, “Modern love . . .”

Not until he was at the gate itself did he begin to think something was wrong. It came to him via two faces. One man, he thought, was French . . . or Albanian. The conflicting nationalities seemed to find a shared home in his features as he looked back at Milo with a forced nonchalance. Then the woman—she was standing by a column, talking on a cell phone, gazing at the window near where Milo was sitting. Her face seemed entirely American to him. Neither carried any luggage.

Only two faces, but they did not belong. He saw that in the way they interacted with their surroundings, as if they had no interest in the plane that taxied to the gate. The verification came a half hour later, as he stood in line with the other passengers, shuffling to where
the flight attendants checked passports and tickets. Milo’s attendant ran his ticket through the scanner, which gave back a disappointed tone. She tried it again with the same result, then directed him to the desk, where he was told that, unfortunately, the plane was overbooked. There was another flight leaving in two hours. Would he like to wait for it?

Milo considered protesting, but seeing the man and woman waiting among the now empty seats, he really didn’t care. That’s what hope can do to you.

“Sure,” he said. “I can wait a couple hours.”

Her smile showed that she appreciated his understanding.

As she worked on his new itinerary, he glanced back to see the woman lean down to speak to the man. Her jacket fell open to reveal the grip of a pistol in a shoulder holster. The man twisted in his seat to stare directly at Milo. He stood up. The ruse was over.

Milo thought,
Drummond must really be pissed
.

“Don’t worry about the reservation,” he told the clerk. “I’ll take care of it later.”

She was baffled. “What?”

He was already heading toward the couple, who met him halfway. The woman spoke.

“Come with us, please, Mr. Hall.”

The French-Albanian grunted his agreement, then followed him while the woman led the way through a locked door by a shop full of
NYC
caps and T-shirts and into the secret back corridors of JFK.

Unlike many of the guests these corridors were built for, he wasn’t pushed through with a hood over his head, and for that he was grateful. They took so many turns that, when they finally deposited him in a windowless room with an aluminum prison toilet in the corner, he had no idea where he was. They left him to think over his flaws. There were so many, he didn’t know where to begin. So he thought about Tina, but that inevitably drew him back to his flaws, and Dr. Ray, on whom the marriage now depended. The truth, which Tina had no way of knowing, was that their sessions would never truly work until Milo quit being so dishonest.

His dishonesty didn’t take the form of outright lies but of silence, and it was something Dr. Ray sometimes noted, saying, “Milo? Would you like to add something to that?” Milo would usually answer, “No, I think Tina covered it pretty well,” even when she hadn’t.

A case in point was Tina’s description of how they had met and fallen in love more than six years ago. The story had all the elements of high melodrama. Tina, eight months pregnant and single, in Venice for a last vacation. She meets an older man, a gentleman, who it turns out has stolen millions of dollars from the U.S. government. He brings her along to a meeting that goes disastrously wrong. Milo and Angela Yates, his partner, are there to arrest the man, and a teenaged girl is thrown off a high balcony to her death. Shots fired—Milo is hit twice—and the stress brings on Tina’s labor.

The convergence of all these events made the story absolutely unbelievable, but Milo had no argument with Tina’s retelling of those facts. They happened. It was during the mundane part of the story, the epilogue, that their versions differed. Tina woke in her Italian hospital room to find Milo asleep in a chair beside her bed and saw on the television that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. Milo woke up, and they watched together, and then . . .

“The event, it joined us in a way that nothing else could. Two strangers. We’d just been through a terrible moment together, and then we were witness to something even worse, grander. It tied us together forever. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. We fell in love at that moment.”

“Milo? Anything to add?”

“What could I possibly add to that?” he’d said, though he’d been thinking the same thing he thought every time she retold that story:
That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard
.

Milo stared at the bare walls and felt desire. Not for Tina, or even escape, but for that pack of cigarettes he’d optimistically ditched at Howard Beach.

A pair of suits arrived, ignored his request for dinner, and led him out. More hidden corridors, then he was taken outside to where the whine of planes soaked the cold, wet air. A black Ford Explorer awaited them, and he climbed into the back. The two men joined him on either side, and another put the SUV into gear and began to drive.

Questions are only useful when the answers will lead somewhere. In this case, there was no point. He’d jumped the Tourist train, and now he was going to pay for it.

They stopped near one of the domestic terminals, and Drummond climbed into the passenger seat, wearing a disheveled tux. Milo wondered if he’d been dragged from the opera, but it was two in the morning. He didn’t bother looking at Milo, just pointed at the windshield, and the driver got going again.

“You seriously fucked up, Hall.”

Milo didn’t answer; he was serene.

“Did you think we wouldn’t know? That we wouldn’t figure it out?”

Milo cleared his throat; his hunger had subsided. “Did you get the money?”

A pause, then he said, “Yes, we got it. Kudos on a fine job there.” Another pause, longer this time, and when Drummond spoke again he turned to face Milo. “Who do you think you are? Don’t let your
job title go to your head. I knew where you were as soon as you sent that last message from Zürich. We watched you hop the train to Paris, where you lifted a passport, then wander around Charles de Gaulle waiting for your plane. They’re called video cameras. You used the passport of a Monsieur Claude Girard—he looked enough like you for it to work. JFK? Simple stuff. You were followed all the way to Columbia.”

“I didn’t know seeing your family was a crime.”

That was greeted by the rumble of engines and wheels humming across tarmac. Beyond the driver the colored lights of airplanes taxied endlessly in the blackness.

A queer grin filled Drummond’s face. “When I found out who you were meeting, I called off the tail. I’m not an ogre. An employee feels the need to take a day to see his wife, that’s not a problem. You’d finished your work, and the next assignment hadn’t been sent yet. Sure, I was pissed off that you did it behind my back, but you guys are paranoid. It’s to be expected. No. Visiting your wife wasn’t a problem. This,” he said, lifting a gray folder from his lap. “
This
is the problem. Adriana Stanescu.”

“Oh.”

“Who were you working with? Who was holding her?”

Milo looked at the guard to his right, who had a military buzz cut and a wide, clean-shaven jawline. Neither he nor the one to his left carried a gun, which made this somehow less tragic. The doors just beyond them were unlocked. Though he had no plans to make a break for it, he charted possible escape routes, figuring where he had to land blows, and in what order, to get out of here—and in which direction, then, to run, but this geometry of escape was only academic, a way of distracting him from the question.

“Well?”

“Some guys. From the Bührle job.”

“Their names?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

So Milo gave him two names—the German, Stefan, and the Italian, Giuseppe—then changed the subject. “Where did you find her?”

“You don’t know?”

“I didn’t have time to find a safe house, so it was up to those two. Where was it?”

“France. In the mountains.”

“Which ones?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

It does to me
, Milo wanted to say, but Drummond was right. The details were beside the point. He should have known from the start that, once the frustrations of temporary parenthood kicked in, Yevgeny Primakov would cut and run. Let the girl go, and let Milo face the consequences. Perhaps he’d decided that, son or not, Milo’s occasional intel wasn’t worth the trouble.

Milo was struck by another
How did I end up here?
moment, because even in his business it was a strange thing for your own father to cheat you.

He considered giving up the old man’s name. It would end his obligations, making his job so much easier. He could give more, too:
Yevgeny Primakov, my father, is running a shadow agency within the United Nations
. That would certainly ruin Yevgeny’s day.

Milo wasn’t ready for that level of vindictiveness, though. Not yet. Nor was he ready to be turned into a triple agent, informing on Yevgeny, which was the least Drummond would demand.

“Will you put her back?” Milo asked.

“What?”

“Adriana. I failed that test, but there’s no need to make her pay for it. Drop her off somewhere in Berlin and let it go.”

They had reached the end of the tarmac, far past the airport buildings, and the driver turned the Explorer in a long arc and headed back again. Drummond’s grin had returned, and he said to the driver, “Do you hear this guy?”

He rocked his head in a kind of answer.

To Milo, he said, “Test? What are you talking about?”

“Enough, Alan. There was no reason to kill that girl, not unless you had a Tourist you couldn’t trust. Not unless you wanted a last test before you put him on to more serious work.”

“Ha
ha
.” The laugh sputtered forcibly out, and Drummond had
to wipe spittle from his lips. “Christ, the ego on this man! You think I’d kill a teenager just to find out if you were loyal? Do you really think that?”

Milo just stared.

“Jesus, Weaver,” he said, mistakenly letting his real name slip out. “The whole world really does revolve around you, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “No. I knew it would be tough on you, sure, but we wanted her killed for the most excellent of reasons.”

“What’s the most excellent of reasons, then?”

Drummond considered him a moment, then shrugged. “The future of our relationship with German intelligence, if you must know. With her alive, we remain out in the cold. With her death, we’re in.”

The geometry of escape left him, replaced by some weird algebra of cause and effect. “I don’t get it.”

“Because there’s no need for you to get it. I’m not here to connect the dots for you. Just know that what you did put the entire transatlantic relationship in jeopardy.”

“So you’re going to kill her anyway?”

“You haven’t been reading the papers,” said Drummond. “Adriana Stanescu’s body was found only hours ago—late Thursday night, I mean. All of Europe is in mourning, or so the newspapers would have you believe. Me, I kind of doubt most of Europe gives a damn about a Moldovan girl, but I’m like that. I suspect most people, particularly in that racist backwater across the ocean.”

It was too much to keep straight; he couldn’t chart the repercussions of everything he’d just heard. So he said the first thing that came to mind. “Who did it?”