“It almost did,” he said, for during dinner, watching his daughter’s discolored eyes, he’d been overcome by the feeling that he’d sidestepped a bullet. “But it was reckless,” he told her. “What pisses me off is that people can connect the name to me, thus, to you and Stef.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“The Chinese?”
Again, he nodded.
She went silent, then turned to look at the foot of the bed. “I could kill that bastard.”
There wasn’t much more to discuss, but that didn’t stop Tina from prodding him throughout the night with irritated questions, most of which he couldn’t answer. At one point, as he was drifting off to sleep, she said, “They train you to do that, right?”
“What?” he groaned, raising his head from the pillow.
“Sleep. Sleep when things around you are falling apart.”
“Sure,” he said after a moment. “It’s important.”
“It’s inhuman,” she said.
9
In the morning, he got up early and made coffee, then helped Stephanie work on her eyelids; they were nearly ink free, but her ego was still bruised. He didn’t see Gabi at Camp Friendship, but as he was leaving he saw a large Chinese man, standing alone on the other side of the street—big boned, with a mole on his cheek—that might have been Gabi’s admirer. He wasn’t looking at Milo, though; he was looking at the grounds, where children were gathering around a teacher. Though there were similarities, this was not Xin Zhu—he was thirty years too young.
Despite his desire to abandon it entirely, when he got back to the apartment he began to research the path that Alan had taken from New York to London, via Seattle, Vancouver, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Amman. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he checked the week of Drummond’s travel, beginning June 9, searching in vain for public events along the route that might shed some light on his purpose. The best theory he could come up with was that the path was entirely evasive and Alan was trying to shake a tail.
His phone rang at precisely eleven, shocking him out of the claustrophobic world of the Internet, and when he checked the number he noticed the Washington, D.C., area code before remembering that he’d been expecting this call.
“Mr. Milo Weaver?” said Stephen Rollins’s secretary.
“Yes, yes. That’s me.”
“I have Director Rollins on the other line for you.”
“Right. Thank you.”
There was a snap, then three clicks. Then silence. Milo waited but heard nothing from Mr. Rollins. “Hello?” he said.
“Mr. Weaver,” said a man’s voice. It was heavy and tired-sounding, and there was an accent he couldn’t quite place. “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes, it’s about someone named Dennis Chaudhury. I wanted to verify that he’s one of your employees.”
A pause. “Yes, I can verify that. Mr. Chaudhury works for me. Was there anything else?”
“Well, yes. I would like some evidence that you, Mr. Rollins, are actually working for the Central Intelligence Agency. Where’s your office?”
Another pause. Milo wondered if the man had someone else in the room with him. “One oh one West Thirty-first Street, Manhattan.”
Now, it was Milo who paused. Until two months ago, that had been the address of the Department of Tourism—which had been shut down. Had it reopened? Was Dennis Chaudhury a new Tourist? He doubted it—hardly anyone had wanted Tourism to continue; it had been shut down with glee. More likely, the building had simply been reassigned. “Does the department have a name?”
“Of course it does, Mr. Weaver,” Rollins said. His voice was different now, relaxed, the odd accent heavier. As if he’d given over a small piece of his secret and now felt free to share anything. “But I’m not sure you could pronounce it.”
“Try me.”
“Guojia Anquan Bu,” said Stephen Rollins.
To stop himself from slipping off his chair, Milo shot out a hand to catch the edge of the table. Guojia Anquan Bu; Guoanbu; the Chinese Ministry of State Security. He was finally able to place Rollins’s accent. He tried to speak, but it was difficult. He cleared his throat. “Who is this?”
“I think you know, Mr. Weaver, but I think that perhaps you’re too proud to admit that you know.”
His hand felt the fear first. It took the phone away from his ear, holding it at a safe distance, and the thumb stretched over the keypad to hang up. He stopped it, though, and forced the phone back to his face. He said, “What’s going on.”
Xin Zhu said, “Mr. Chaudhury believes you only know what you’ve told him about Alan Drummond’s plans, but I’m not convinced. I asked him to give you my phone number. I knew you would call eventually.”
Milo remembered Chaudhury saying,
I just think you’d like to stay off my boss’s radar
.
His dry mouth made his words hurt in the back of his throat. “I don’t know anything else.”
“What about Leticia Jones? She certainly knows more than either of us do.”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“She beat one of my people senseless on her way to meet you. She knows enough to make sure no one is listening. What did she share with you?”
“She told me that they’re going to bury you.”
Another pause. “How?”
“She didn’t tell me, because I don’t want any part of it.”
“But she would tell you if you did want to be part of it.”
Milo said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“I have a proposition, Mr. Weaver. Once in the past you said that you admired my work; now is your chance to be a part of it.”
Milo had said that once, but it had been a long time ago, and said in confidence. He tried to remember if he’d said it in front of the man had who turned out to be Xin Zhu’s mole, but he couldn’t focus. “I was delusional,” Milo said. “I’ve gotten over it.”
Xin Zhu made a noise, either a wheeze or a laugh, and Milo noticed a faint digital echo, the kind that sometimes accompanies transatlantic calls. “You must understand my position,” he said. “I am here, attempting to the best of my abilities to do my job, and then it comes to my attention that someone wants to do me harm. Not just me, but harm to my country—to the security of my country. What do I do? What would you do?”
Milo didn’t answer.
“You would do the same thing I’ve done. Try to find out who wants to do you harm, and how.”
“Not why?”
“I know why. Because Americans are obsessed with revenge.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
“Is it?”
“You killed thirty-three people to avenge your son’s death. That’s shockingly vengeful.”
“Simply because Americans are obsessed with revenge does not mean that I am not. One does not contradict the other, does it?”
Milo stood and shook out a leg, trying to ease the tingling, “What does Alan Drummond say? You have him, of course.”
“I wish I did,” said Xin Zhu. “Ms. Jones doesn’t have him?”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“I don’t think either of us believe he’s dead. Your father certainly doesn’t.”
Milo wondered if they had been following him or following Yevgeny, or if they had simply read the SMS his father had sent, arranging lunch. That would’ve given them a full day to wire the Byblos table and fill all the other tables with customers. He said, “I don’t know either way.”
“Another thing for you to discover. I never had any plans to touch a hair on Alan Drummond’s head.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s true, Mr. Weaver. He decided to break our agreement. Had I chosen to reprimand him for this, I would have killed his wife, not him.”
“Penelope?”
“It was her life he was risking by doing what he did.”
“What did he do?”
“He ignored my instructions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. But for now let’s discuss how you can uncover the facts.”
“No,” said Milo. “First, you’ll tell me why you think I’ll help you.”
“Maybe because you once helped a dead man, who also happened to be your enemy, to uncover the identity of his murderer. Mr. Sam Roth, otherwise known as the Tiger.”
“Get yourself killed, and I’ll be happy to find the murderer.”
“That joke is in poor taste, Mr. Weaver.”
“Tell me about your relationship with Alan.”
“Simple. I discovered he was engaged in a plan to, at the very least, smear my reputation. I convinced him of the error of his ways. He began to work with me to undermine the plan.”
“Why didn’t he just stop it?”
“Because he was not the only person involved. Leticia Jones, for example. Senator Nathan Irwin.”
“Irwin’s involved?” Worse and worse. A year ago, Irwin had tried to have Milo killed.
“As I told you, Americans are obsessed with revenge, none more than politicians. There are two more conspirators from your old employer. A retired Directorate of Operations officer named Stuart Jackson, and Dorothy Collingwood, who works in the National Clandestine Service. Perhaps you know them?”
Milo didn’t, and said as much.
Xin Zhu sighed. “But you understand now. Alan Drummond could not simply tell these three powerful people that the plan was canceled, therefore his job was to make sure it failed.”
“He double-crossed you?”
“You could say that.”
“The camera was yours. The one in Alan’s office.”
“Of course. Upon our instructions, he placed it there himself. It turned out that he did very little work in his office.”
Enough time had passed so that the shakes had lessened, and Milo had lost the feeling that he was under a great weight. He said, “Listen, Zhu.”
“You call me by my first name. Very intimate.”
Milo hesitated, realizing that Xin Zhu was right. Chinese names end with the given name, yet Milo, Alan, Nathan Irwin . . . they had simply fallen into the rhythm of calling him Zhu. He had no idea why. “Xin Zhu,” he said. “I wasn’t going to fly around the world for Alan, and I’m not doing it for you. You’ve got plenty of people to take care of this.”
“I don’t think Leticia Jones or Nathan Irwin would trust my employees. No, Mr. Weaver. It has to be you.”
“Well, it won’t be.”
“Please,” said Xin Zhu, “open up your computer.”
Milo’s laptop was already open in front of him. “Okay.”
“Now go into the browser and type the following IP address.”
Milo typed the four numbers, separated by periods, that Xin Zhu dictated. The computer stalled a second on a white screen, working to load two videos. “What is this?”
“It will just be a moment,” Xin Zhu said, then, to someone else, spoke a short phrase in what Milo suspected was Mandarin.
As the elements of the videos appeared one after the other, two 4 × 3 rectangles lining up horizontally, he saw that both were streaming videos, live feeds. Then, nearly simultaneously, both loaded and began to play.
On the left, the camera moved with the motion of a body; it was hidden on someone around chest-height, filming the interior of a large library Milo knew well. Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, where Tina was the director. The person who wore the camera walked past the service desk, past rows of computers occupied by students, and into a short corridor of offices to the furthest door on the left. The cameraman’s hand appeared and knocked beside the label identifying the office of the library’s director. There was no sound, just a second’s pause, and then the hand opened the door to reveal Tina inside, behind her desk, reading glasses low on her nose over a stack of forms, looking at the cameraman inquisitively. She spoke her side of a conversation.
On the right, the camera did not move. It was attached to something in the corner of a room. There were books here, too. Children’s books. There were toys, and sitting in a circle with a woman in her forties who clapped her hands while singing were fifteen children obediently singing along. Surprisingly, he noticed Sarah Lawton first, with her prim blond hairdo and a ballerina outfit, before seeing, two children away, Stephanie. She looked bored and irritable.
Xin Zhu’s voice said, “You see now?”
Milo could feel nothing. His hands, legs, and even his head had gone numb.
“This is not how I like to run things, but you should keep it in mind as you do your work.”
Milo whispered, “This is what you did to Alan.”
“Alan thought he could get out of it by leaving his wife. By driving her crazy with his bad behavior, then running. He was wrong.”
Remembering Tina’s unanswered calls, Milo said, “You have Penelope.”
“No,” Xin Zhu answered quickly. “Harming her will not make Alan Drummond reappear. Remember, though, that I’ve learned a lesson about being too generous, and I won’t repeat my mistakes. Remember that we can get to them anytime we like. Please don’t force us to do anything so radical.”
Milo remembered Chaudhury saying,
I prefer to call him by his proper name. God
.
After vomiting in the toilet and washing out his mouth, he felt as if everything had been purged from his body. His organs, his fear, his soul, and even his love. His emotions weren’t actually gone, just shoved into a little box in some far corner of his psyche, put out of the way, to be dealt with later. The surprise was that he could, after months, achieve this so quickly. He wanted to tell Tina,
They train us for this as well
, but he would tell her nothing. He would renege on the oath of honesty he’d given her, and while his excuses might be valid, he knew he was placing himself on the slippery slope back to complete deception.
Though he didn’t know from where, he knew that he was being watched or listened to as he called Leticia’s special number and said, “It’s Milo,” and hung up. It was 11:46. He put on a light jacket, then left the apartment.
Walking north on Seventh toward Flatbush, he tried to find his shadow, but it was a busy time of day, the stores open and full, and he found himself succumbing to racial profiling anytime an Asian face passed. There was no reason to think that Xin Zhu would be using his own people for this; he could hire whomever he wanted. Someone like Chaudhury, or the black man in the too-heavy coat who was trailing him on the other side of the street. Anyone, he realized, could be wearing a camera in his or her shirt or blouse.