The Nearest Exit (50 page)

“What?”

He spelled it for her. “And put my name on it. Milo Weaver.” He spelled that, too.

He returned to the others mesmerized by the spots changing colors in Drummond’s office. Irwin was in a chair, his face in his hands. Drummond was hypnotized, keeping score. Klein and Jones
stood back a few paces, watching wryly, though when Jones spoke there was no humor in her voice. “That’s seventeen. There—Brasilia—eighteen.” She looked at Milo. “All this because someone’s kid died?”

He didn’t answer her; no one did.

Milo stood beside Drummond, who made a soft whimpering sound each time a spot changed color. He sometimes zoomed back so that the world became pockmarked with red blemishes slowly overwhelmed by blue. The scales tipped, the blue winning, but that didn’t slow the color’s brutal forward march. Milo kept his eye on Switzerland. Bern.

Red.

Red.

Red.

While he stared he remembered another of those insipid rules of Tourism that had come from his own pen:

A TOURIST KNOWS FAILURE BETTER THAN HE
KNOWS HIS MOTHER

Which was what Peter Schiffer, or James Einner, read at that moment.

He was sitting in Marians Jazzroom, pressed into the soft purple couch that ran the length of the back wall, hardly even listening to the trio on the bandstand—drums, bass, trombone. He squinted in the dim light, reading the pamphlet that he’d spent two months tracking down. Malmö, Toulouse, Milan. Now Bern, where the handwritten child’s notebook had been hidden behind this very seat.

He’d discovered it before the club began to fill up for the seven thirty show, so distracted by his search that he wasn’t even concerned by the order he’d received some hours before—
L
:
ZACHARY KLEIN
.
WILL COME TO YOU AT BELLE EPOQUE
.
UNTIL COMPLETE
,
TOTAL SILENCE
. While he had followed the order by disassembling his phone, he wasn’t about to sit around in his hotel, even one as pleasant as the Belle Epoque, when the Black Book was within his reach.

Someone knew he was here—the barmaid had called out both his work names—but not even that mattered. He maintained his
absolute silence and continued to read as the woman shouted rudely above the horn solo. Einner glanced at her irritated face (someone on the phone in her hand was insisting), then returned to reading.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he thought of the book, but he supposed it wasn’t the kind of thing you could digest in one reading. Some of the advice seemed strangely pedestrian, while other bits made him pause and think back over his own actions. Did he, as the Black Book stated was crucial, know empathy? He wasn’t sure.

Did he know failure better than he knew his own mother?

No. He hadn’t failed enough to be so familiar with it, but the Book had words even for his situation:

If you’re new to the game and have only known success, you won’t want to hear this. Sure, you’ll think, some Tourists run into failure, but there’s always a chance I’ll be that lucky one who slips between the blades.

You’re wrong. Sometimes you’ll end an operation having achieved all your objectives, only to learn—maybe years later—that you failed in some unknowable way. In fact, it’s more likely you’ll fail as often as you succeed.

It was, like a lot of the Book, depressing stuff, and he ordered a locally distilled grappa to cut the edge off of it.

Don’t be dismayed; you’re still better than most agents. On average (based on a classified 1986 study) a Tourist succeeds 58% of the time, whereas a regular Clandestine service Operations officer succeeds 38% of the time. You’ll be happy to note that FBI agents tend toward the 32% range, though the KGB—in 1986—had a success rate of 41%. Although the numbers for MI-6 agents have never been released, the State Department estimates something in the high thirties, while as of 1995 (according to a leaked French report) DGSE agents had an appalling success rate of 28%.

As a Tourist, there is only one way to deal with failure—treat it as if it were success.

On his left, an attractive blonde sat waiting for her boyfriend to return from the bathroom. She was bored with the music, had been for their entire stay, while her boyfriend—a sandy-haired twenty-something who was all elbows—had bounced and bobbed to the rhythms like a spastic duck. It was the season for the International Jazzfestival Bern, and there were a lot of his type around. The blonde leaned toward Einner and said in German, “You come a club to read?”

He gave her a smile. “I come to pick up girls, but the only good-looking one here has a date already.”

“Really? Where is she?”

He maintained his smile until she blushed, pleased. He finished his drink and left, feeling warm and whole and decided to walk back to the hotel rather than calling a taxi. If this poor, doomed Klein was waiting for him, then so be it. He walked up Engestrasse, then crossed the bridge over the railroad tracks to reach Tiefenaustrasse and continued toward the Aare, where he passed the occasional wanderer and necking couple along the banks of the river. He pressed his hands into his pockets, the chill refreshing after the stuffy club, and remembered a story from the Book, the bleakest one.

True story, Tourist. Listen up.

There was a man who, if legends were allowed in our profession, would have been the Paul Bunyan of Tourism. Sixteen years of continual work—seven years longer than a Tourist’s life expectancy—and even the opposition admitted that he did his work with panache. He had friends on their side, friends who’d do anything for him, even as he worked to destroy them. He had an exceptional life, a woman in every port—though he stuck to airline stewardesses because they were the only ones who could relate to him. They understood that he had no base, no home, and that his country was his feet.

Airline employees are the only ones who get that—remember.

After sixteen years he decided it was time to turn in his spurs. He’d collected enough scars for three grandfatherhoods full of stories, and he’d put away enough money to buy a small island. But it was love that really did him in, as it does most of us.

Don’t turn the page. It gets better.

“Better” was a poor word to describe what followed, he thought as he passed an old man on a bench, gloved hand propped atop a cane beside his knee. Einner gave him a welcoming nod, but the man didn’t seem to notice him. He, too, was elsewhere.

He forgot, this Tourist. He forgot that what we do, everything we do, sticks to us. He bought that house in the city, then a second one in the Rockies. He married that last stewardess who, fortuitously, had also tired of all the air miles.

And they did it. Five years went by. There was a child, then a second. His old comrades tried now and then to get in touch, but he sent them away. This was a new life, unlike all the little lives he once lived in all those cities. Some friends worried; they warned him that it wasn’t that easy. It couldn’t be.

“But it is,” he told them, and returned to his soft bed with his soft wife and children and acres of peace.

Then, five years, seven months, and six hours into this grand experiment of living, he wakes in a sweat. His wife, dozing beside him, is no longer his wife. She’s reverted to a Face. Just a Face. Like the ones he remembers from all those airports and train stations and bus terminals, it’s filled with every possibility of betrayal. Because that’s what Faces are to the Tourist. Each Face is an opportunity to be caught, turned
in, tortured, ransacked, slugged. Betrayed. It’s the sweet paranoia that keeps us alive.

James Einner had been a Tourist for three years. He liked his job. He enjoyed that sweet paranoia that kept him alive. To say he enjoyed the killing would have been a stretch, but there was real pleasure in planning a murder and, more importantly, assembling the escape plan. He enjoyed gaining people’s confidence, and the adrenaline rush when someone let slip the crucial secret nugget that, had he not been working so well, never would have slipped out of their lips. They were all Faces, sure, but they were people, too. Adversaries demanded some level of respect, even when he was about to kill them. Even when they did that one thing that brought him no pleasure, and in fact cut him off at the knees: begged for their lives.

This can’t be happening, right? What about those five wonderful years? He goes to look in on his children. Children. At least they don’t betray. But he remembers a job in Tangier, another in Beirut, a bad time in Delhi. Cities where they use children to carry explosive devices and messages and collect information. Everyone betrays. That’s the nature of living. And children, they’re just more Faces.

So he goes down to the basement, where he keeps his guns locked up, and grabs the old Walther PPK that was his protection of choice in the old days. Then he takes them out. One by one. And it’s a mess. It’s a damned shame. Once it’s done, he knows, because violence has cleared his head again. He remembers that he ignored their screams as if they were the statistical screams of passengers in a plummeting jetliner.

His friends were right; they all were. But a Tourist is vain, particularly retired ones, and this one can’t bear to stay around and admit his error. He sucks on the Walther that once was his best friend.

On both banks the city rose up, and he headed back inland, finally reaching the art deco Hotel Belle Epoque. He preferred modern monstrosities, but an acquaintance in Paris had suggested the place. The acquaintance, however, was obviously more of an art lover than he was.

He collected his key from the charming girl at the front desk, who told him there had been no visitors. However, there had been one phone message. She handed it over.

“Any idea what this means?” he asked the girl.

She had no idea—the caller had said he would understand—and as he took the stairs to his room he worked over what to do. Return yet again? It seemed impossible. The mole had been disproved, and he had been ordered to wait for a contact. But what if his cell phone had been compromised? Perhaps that order had been a ruse? Either way, one or both of the orders were wrong.

The hair he’d slipped into the door was still where he’d left it, so he went in and turned on the television instinctively. There was only one thing to do—call in and get Drummond himself to issue his order. So he lowered the volume on the television and picked up the hotel phone. There was a knock on his door. He put the phone back in its cradle and took a revolver out of the closet and said, “Yes?”

“Seven two six oh three nine.”

Einner looked down at his gun and slipped it into his waistband. He opened the door to find a small Asian man—not Chinese; Malaysian, perhaps—looking sternly back at him as he said, “Four two—” He didn’t get any further. The man was holding an old Croatian pistol, a PHP, with a short suppressor screwed into it. He pulled the trigger, and the force of the bullet in his stomach knocked Einner back a few steps. There was no pain, not yet, just a weight in his gut that made it hard to reach around to the small of his back to get at his revolver. Nevertheless, he tried as the man took a step forward and shot him once more in the forehead.

His vision went first; then everything began to shut down. But death, like love, is relative. In those final seconds so much can come, and like a judgment he never even knew he had made against himself, his last thoughts replayed a road and trees to the south of Gap, France. The accident he’d set up. Finding the French agent dead against the steering wheel, the girl in shock. Offering his help. Carrying her to his SUV. Her saying nothing. Stopping again and telling the girl that they needed to get out. “A friend lives right through there. Through those trees. He’s a doctor.” Then carrying her because her legs weren’t working well enough. Her slow questions, and the smell of her surprisingly pungent sweat. Holding his breath and thinking only of the next step. Walking, until he saw the two trees, crossed, as if they’d been waiting for years just for this. “Sit down here a sec. I need to rest.”

“Where is this house,” she said flatly.

“Right through there,” he said, and when she looked away he stepped close and reached out, but she had already turned back, eyes large. Thinking only of the next step, he turned her away again and lifted her up and grabbed her jaw and pulled sharply until the crack came and his legs were liquid and he fell with her and all was finished.