An American Spy (28 page)

With this in mind, there was only one plan of action concerning his family: He had to play along, and if he had the chance to undermine the man, it would have to be done in such a way that Xin Zhu would never find out.

It was important to settle this first, because his terror over his family’s situation was blocking him up. He could think of nothing else. Even after he’d dealt with it, though, it still took a while and an airline sandwich to begin to move on.

He said to Leticia, “Is anyone looking for Alan?”

“The whole world’s looking for Alan,” she said without hesitation.

“Is that why we’re going to Jeddah?”

She shook her head. “We’ve got more important things to do than look for that turncoat.”

“Why do you call him that?”

Leticia sighed, then leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Milo, Alan Drummond made himself a threat as soon as he walked out of the Rathbone Hotel. And he knows it. But he doesn’t care. Since then, we’ve had all our red flags going for him. MI-5 has his vitals. Embassies are listening. Not a whisper. He’s good, it turns out. You know he got the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“He’s more than just an administrator,” she said after a moment, “and he’s no idiot. He’s got enough spy craft to elude us all.”

“To what purpose?”

She shrugged. “All I know is that his operation is running counter to
my
operation, and that’s a problem.”

“And what happens when he’s finally found?”

“That depends on him, doesn’t it?”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“You’re very sensitive, aren’t you?” she asked, then smiled. “No, I’m not going to kill him. If I’m ordered to, I’ll have to be given some pretty persuasive evidence. Like, that he’s actually working against us. Or for the Chinese.”

“I doubt that,” Milo said.

“You never know.” She tapped his forearm with a long nail. “Any of us could be.”

For all of her elusiveness, Leticia was at least verifying the story Irwin and Collingwood had told him. While a plan of attack may have originated with Alan, some sort of schism had occurred between him and Collingwood, Irwin, and Jackson. The disagreement had been so strong that Alan had felt the need to disappear completely, jeopardizing not only the others’ operation but also his wife and Milo’s family.

Once the trays had been taken away, Milo said, “How do you know that it’s better to work for Irwin than for Alan?”

“Excuse me?” she asked, turning to get a better look at him.

“There are two plans here,” he said. “Irwin and Collingwood’s, and Alan’s. You said you don’t know the scope of either one. So how do you know that it’s not better to throw your lot in with Alan?”

She licked her lips, thinking a moment. “Milo, have you taken a good look at Alan lately?”

“He’s unbalanced.”

“That’s a nice word for it. Don’t get me wrong—I
like
Alan—but would I put my life in his hands?” She shook her head. “Look, Milo, you’re giving yourself a headache with all this thinking. I suggest you go back to sleep.”

Two plans, he thought as she put on her headphones again. He knew—or he suspected—that Alan’s plan was built on revenge, while the others had something else in mind, perhaps hidden in the obscure folds of foreign policy. Whatever Alan was up to, it was problematic enough that Collingwood had sent out a worldwide alert for him.

Here, he tried to separate himself from his prejudices. No matter how mad Alan had become, Milo leaned naturally toward his side, for on the other side was Irwin. Though Milo tried to keep his distance from terms like “good” and “bad,” he knew that he was naturally putting such labels on these opposing sides. Then, of course, there was Xin Zhu.

The problem with this—with taking sides at all—was that their fight was not his concern. His only concern was getting his wife and daughter back, and all of his efforts had to be focused on that. He was no longer an employee of the federal government.

He needed help, he thought as he slipped a blue ballpoint with the airline’s logo into his pocket. He was caught between too many sides, Chinese and American, each of which had its own interests that, eventually, could cost him more than he was willing to lose. So far, he’d asked two people for help, and in each case it had failed, but that didn’t mean that he shouldn’t continue to try.

As they entered Frankfurt Airport, he watched for security cameras, which were easy enough to spot. They were everywhere. He and Leticia cut through the crowd of travelers toting bags and dragging children and, among the shops in the main terminal, found the toilets, each with a security camera watching the entrance.

“Don’t make us late,” she said as she wandered into the women’s bathroom.

Inside the men’s, he took out the airline’s ballpoint and ripped a paper towel from the rack. He pressed it flat against the wall, thought a moment, and then wrote in large, clear block letters:

He folded the note into his pocket, then stepped out of the bathroom. Leticia was still inside, and he turned quickly, pulling out and unfolding the note, to look directly into the lens of the security camera above him. He held out the note for five seconds, counting, then ripped it in half, and again into quarters as he returned to the bathroom. He continued to tear at it until only small fragments remained, which he flushed down a toilet.

It was Leticia’s idea for them to sit separately on the plane to Jeddah. “They’ll have had time to put someone here to watch us, so we might as well pretend to be elusive,” she said. However, during the five-and-a-half hour flight, neither saw anyone obvious among the thoub suits and white shumaggs and black abayas and hijabs. They landed at 8:00
P
.
M
. and left separately, and after a smooth entrance through passport control, where he stated his intention was tourism, he found Leticia haggling with a limousine driver along the brightly lit ring of Al Madinah Al Munawwarah Road. The night air was warm and full of the Red Sea.

It took fifteen minutes for the limo to deliver them to the Jeddah Hilton, driving through a nighttime cityscape of banks and shopping plazas identified in Arabic and English, and new, clean hotels. He noticed an illuminated billboard with the face of a smiling man in a red shumagg, a mustache, and a wide black goatee—King Abdullah Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—keeping benevolent watch. By the coast, the hotel towers rose, and between them he caught glimpses of beach, glowing with lamplight. Jeddah was the largest port on the Red Sea, the most cosmopolitan of Saudi cities, and a perpetual resort and convention town. The religious police, or mutaween, held little sway here, though upon arriving at the hotel they heard the nighttime Isha prayers broadcast from speakers in the distance.

Though he hadn’t seen her visit any exchange desks in the airport, Leticia paid for the ride in riyals, and in the hotel she produced two new passports, booking them into a room as Mr. and Mrs. Greene. As they took the elevator up to the tenth floor, where the hotel’s modern lobby rose airily to the roof, she said, “Don’t get comfortable. We’re checking out in the morning.”

“I didn’t see anyone on the ride here.”

“Neither did I,” she said, leaning forward to peer down to the ground floor, “but there was a couple in the airport. They certainly noticed me.”

Milo couldn’t remember any couple, but he knew he could have missed anything. “Locals?”

“White.”

He hoped that they were from Erika Schwartz.

Their room had an expansive view of the beach, the land low and flat, sinking into the sea, and the ships’ lights were like fallen stars floating between them and Sudan. “What time?” he asked.

“Soon.” She began to unbutton her blouse. “I need a shower.”

He took a can of Pepsi out of the minibar.

“You want to join me?”

Despite fourteen hours of travel, she didn’t look worn out at all. Unlike him, she was still living the Tourist life, but looking that alert just wasn’t possible. “What are you taking?”

“That doesn’t sound like a yes to me,” she said, smiling. When he didn’t reply, she said, “Why? You want some?”

He did. Back when he lived her kind of life, Dexedrine had been his stimulant of choice, but right now he would take anything to keep from crumbling. With her shirt hanging open, revealing a lace-edged black bra, she went through her bag. The last Tourist he’d done drugs with had produced excellent cocaine, but Leticia took out a small brown bottle and tossed it over. “Just one. I don’t have many.”

It turned out to be Adderall, used to treat ADD and narcolepsy, and the prescription was for Gwendolyn Davis, the name she had used in London. By the time he’d swallowed one with a mouthful of Pepsi, she was down to her underwear, pretending he wasn’t there, folding her clothes neatly on the corner of the bed, then bending at the hips for no apparent reason. She looked at him over her shoulder with a smile.

“I’ll be in the bar,” he said, taking the soda can with him to the door. “If they lost track of us, my face should help out.”

Unfazed, she straightened. “A face like that never helped anyone.”

14

In the elevator, he pressed his forehead against the glass, watching the lobby floor rise to meet him, noting faces that turned upward, but none looked familiar. When he got out, moving slowly past businessmen in robes and suits, escorts in Western fashions, and tourists of all nations and attire, he headed first to a lobby sofa and settled down. He didn’t bother looking around, but he made sure he was visible, examining a brochure floor plan of the hotel. After two minutes, he headed downstairs to the Manhattan Sport Diner. He stood at the door, moving his gaze gradually around the place, taking in all the kitschy American memorabilia and the three plasma televisions showing the same soccer game. When a woman with a pen in her pocket asked if he was dining alone, he told her he was just looking for his wife; she must be in another restaurant.

There were plenty to look at: the Vienna, the Al Safina, the Al Khayam Iranian Restaurant, and two terraces—La Terrace restaurant, and the bar at the pool terrace. Only once he’d displayed himself at all these locations did he return to the basement level and, close to the Manhattan Sport Diner, enter a men’s bathroom and go to sit in one of the stalls.

It took three minutes for the door to open and a man to walk past all the stall doors and, finally, choose the one beside Milo. He locked his door, sat down with a stifled groan, and quietly said in what sounded like a local accent, “You’ve got something to tell me?”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“And there’s no reason to know, sir. I heard that the last time you knew someone you nearly killed him in a bathroom. I’m just here to pass on your messages.”

It was enough of an answer. This man was working for Xin Zhu. “Do you have any messages for me?”

“Just a request that you keep your hands off of innocent people such as myself.”

“Tell him,” Milo said, “that tonight I’m meeting someone. I don’t know who.”

There was a pause. “May I ask when you will know this?”

“After the meeting.”

“Yes, of course,” then, “Oh, I forgot. I do have a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“In the Frankfurt airport, what was on the paper?”

“What paper?”

“I do not know. Yet this is the question.”

Milo took an involuntary breath. “Tell him he will have his answer as soon as I speak to Tina.”

“Tina?”

“He knows who that is. In fact, tell him I demand to speak to her in the next twenty-four hours.”

“To this Tina.”

“Yes.”

Milo heard the
scratch-scratch
of a pencil on paper. Finally, the man said, “This is an ultimatum?”

“Yes.”

“And so what is the
then?
If this is not done, then . . . ?”

“I don’t know yet, but I have a rich imagination.”

Scratch-scratch.
“Is that everything? I was prepared for a longer report.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you. Tell him that I’m not trusted yet.”

The man went silent, and Milo waited for more scratching, but he only flushed his toilet, unlatched the door, and left the bathroom. Milo flushed his own toilet and went upstairs to the pool terrace, feeling the Adderall tweak his blood flow and brighten his eyes. The fresh sea air was inviting. He took a lounge chair away from the pool and ordered apple juice from a waiter. Now, after ten thirty, the terrace was only sparsely populated. Most of the guests were having late dinners or turning in, and so when the European couple arrived they stood out. He saw them whisper to one another and make their way to the opposite side of the pool and talk briefly to the waiter. They settled down, the tall blond woman in a slim gown, wrapped in a shawl to protect her bare shoulders from the night breeze, the shorter dark-haired man in a semiformal suit with casual shoes. The man made no pretense of not knowing who Milo was, watching him carefully as he took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and lit one. The woman was typing intently on her BlackBerry. Finally, she sent her message and laid the phone on the tiles beside her.

He had done it, had gained some small measure of control, and this little victory pleased him. He thought of Alan, also under Xin Zhu’s thumb, taking control by starting to smoke, and this reminded him that he hadn’t had a Nicorette in over a day, but he felt no withdrawal. Control, again.

He was starting to get up, to return to the bathroom for another meeting, when Leticia leaned down to kiss his cheek. She was wearing a long summer dress and flat shoes, along with a black fabric shoulder bag. He felt envious—his own clothes were feeling stiff and unclean. “You missed a glorious shower,” she told him.