The Tourist

“Even if I wasn’t, I doubt we’d get the money for a proper investigation. That’s the level of purgatory we’ve entered.” When he saw the doubt in Milo’s face, his tone softened. “No, Milo. It was an accident. Head-on, and the other driver was killed, too.”

Milo finally opened the file. A couple of sheets of printed facts and a photograph—a mug shot of a fat Chinese man in a People’s Liberation Army colonel’s uniform.

“The Brits discovered it,” Grainger said. “Well, ‘discover’ is a strong word. They were lucky bastards. All routine, apparently. Six was keeping an eye on the opposition.”

In Milo’s experience, MI6 didn’t have the manpower to keep an eye on each foreign diplomat in the country, even ones as important as the one in this photo—Colonel Yi Lien—but he didn’t interrupt.

“The trip wasn’t strange. The colonel took the ferry over to France every weekend.”

“No Chunnel?”

“Fear of closed spaces—that’s in his file. So he does the ferry, then drives on to a little cottage he’s got in the Brittany countryside.”

“Bought under his name?”

Grainger reached for his computer’s mouse, but he was sitting too far back and had to drop his foot in order to reach it. “Of course not. Under a …” He clicked twice and squinted at the screen. “Yes. Renée Bernier. Twenty-six, from Paris.”

“Mistress.”

“Budding novelist, it says here.” Another click. “She uses the place to write, I suppose.”

“And meet with the colonel.”

“Everybody’s got to pay rent.”

“Walk me through this,” said Milo. “Colonel Yi Lien takes the ferry over to his French chalet. Spends the weekend with his girl. Then he boards the ferry. And drops dead?”

“Not dead. Heart attack.”

“And MI6 is there to resuscitate him.”

“Of course.”

“And they go through his bag.”

“What’s with the attitude, Milo?”

“Sorry, Tom. Go on.”

“Well, the colonel’s a paranoid sort. Doesn’t trust anyone in his own embassy, and for good reason. He’s sixty-four, unmarried, with a declining career. He knows that pretty soon someone’s going to suggest it’s time to pack up for Beijing, and he doesn’t want that. He likes London. He likes France.”

“And why wouldn’t he?”

“Right. But since he trusts no one, he keeps his laptop with him at all times. Big security risk. So our friends in MI6 took the opportunity, on the ferry, to copy his hard drive.”

“Very resourceful.”

“Aren’t they?” Grainger clicked his mouse again, and his printer, buried in the bookshelf alongside a row of untouched antiquarian books, hummed as it spat out a page.

“And Colonel Lien? What happened to him?”

“Irony of ironies. He was recalled to Beijing not long after the heart attack.”

Since Grainger wasn’t going anywhere, Milo retrieved the printout.

It was an interoffice memo from the U.S. embassy in Paris, top secret. A relay from the ambassador to Frank Barnes, the head of the Diplomatic Security Service in France, concerning new guidelines in dealing with the Chinese ambassador to France, who would temporarily be monitored by a three-man team.

“And Six just shared this with us for free?”

“They’re our special friends,” he said, smiling. “Actually, one of my personal special friends passed this on to me.”

“Does your special friend think Angela passed this on to Lien? Is that what Six thinks?”

“Calm down, Milo. All they did was pass on the memo. The rest, we figured out on our own.”

Like Tina, Milo still couldn’t believe that Angela Yates, “poster girl for Us-Against-Them,” would give away state secrets. “Has this been verified? The ferry; the heart attack?”

“Like I told you yesterday,” Grainger said with theatrical patience, “Yi Lien’s coronary made the British papers. It’s public record.”

Milo dropped the memo on Grainger’s desk. “So what’s the evidence?”

“That paper went through three sets of hands. The ambassador and Frank Barnes, of course. And the embassy’s chief of security. That would be Angela Yates. We’ve cleared Barnes, and I hope you won’t demand an exegesis of the ambassador.”

He’d already listened to this overview yesterday in Grainger’s car. But now, the physical reality of the memo was making him queasy.

“When was the last time you saw Yates?”

“About a year. But we’ve kept in touch.”

“So you’re still on good terms?”

Milo shrugged, then nodded.

“Good.” Grainger looked at his mouse—it was a bulbous thing with a blue-lit scroll wheel. “Did you and she ever …?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Doesn’t matter. I want you to give her this.” He opened a drawer and took out a black, thumb-sized flash drive, five hundred megabytes. It clattered on Milo’s side of the desk.

“What’s on it?”

“A mock-up report on Chinese oil concerns in Kazakhstan. The kind of thing they’ll want to see.”

“I don’t know, Tom. You may have cleared Barnes, but you still haven’t convinced me Angela’s to blame.”

“It’s not your job to be convinced,” Grainger told him. “You’ll find out more from your contact. Trust me, there is evidence.”

“But if Yi Lien’s gone, then …”

“Networks always survive recalls, Milo. You know that. What we don’t know is who’s at the top of the food chain now.”

Milo looked at Grainger’s hairless scalp, thinking this over. It was a simple enough matter, and he was glad to be brought in; he could at least make sure they dealt fairly with Angela. But the Company didn’t work like that—it didn’t buy international air tickets because it felt like being fair. He was being brought in because Angela trusted him. “How long will it take?”

“Oh, not long,” Grainger said, pleased the subject had changed. “You fly there, meet her, and hand over the drive. The story is that she’ll hold it for a contact named Jim Harrington who’ll arrive in Paris on Monday to pick it up. That’ll give her”—he raised his hands— “if, of course, it is her—only two days to copy it.”

“Is Harrington real?”

“He’s flying to Paris from Beirut. He knows what to do, but he doesn’t know why.”

“I see.”

“You’ll get it done in no time. Hop an evening flight and be back home by Saturday morning.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

Milo knew why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he’d missed his coffee that morning, nor that he was feeling an acute desire for a cigarette. It wasn’t even the miserable fact that he was preparing to set up a friend for treason—that only made him sick. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Tiger?”

Grainger, looking very innocent, said, “What about him?”

“That he was one of ours. That he was a Tourist.”

The old man’s expression lost its innocence. “You believe that?”

“I’ve spent the last six years tracking him. Don’t you think this piece of information might have helped?”

Grainger stared at him for about ten seconds, then rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Let’s talk when you get back. Okay? We don’t have time for it now.”

“The story’s really that long?”

“It is. Your plane leaves at five, and you need to type up some explanation of the Blackdale fiasco that doesn’t make us look like complete idiots. Also, put in all your receipts—I’m not paying for undocumented expenses anymore.”

Milo grunted an affirmative.

“I’ll tell James Einner to expect you. He’s your liaison in Paris.”

“Einner?” said Milo, suddenly awake. “You really think we need a Tourist for this?”

“Overkill never killed anyone,” Grainger said. “Now go. Everything’s been forwarded to your terminal.”

“And the Tiger?”

“As I said. When you get back.”

10

Milo had always felt comfortable in large airports. It wasn’t that he loved to fly—that, particularly after the Towers, had become an increasingly unbearable experience with its various secure levels of undress. The only things he enjoyed forty thousand feet above sea level were the cleverly packaged airline meals and the day’s music choices on his iPod.

Once he was on the ground again, though, in a properly designed airport, he always felt that he was wandering through a tiny city. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, was properly designed. Its striking sixties architecture—what designers in the sixties imagined a beautiful future would look like—made for a strangely nostalgic utopia of crowd control architecture and consumer pleasures, reinforced by the soft ding over loudspeakers followed by a lovely female voice listing the cities of the world.

Nostalgia was a good word for it, a false nostalgia for a time he was too young to know. It was why he loved Eurovision winners from 1965, the unreal Technicolor of those midcareer Bing Crosby films, and (despite his promises to the contrary) the perfect pair of a Davidoff cigarette and a bracing vodka, served at an airport bar.

He hadn’t wandered Charles de Gaulle in years, and he soon realized things had changed. He passed a McDonald’s and some bakeries, settling on the vaguely precious La Terrasse de Paris. There was no bar, instead a cafeteria-style area where he searched in vain for vodka. The only things available were small wines—red and white. Frustrated, he settled on four deciliters of some chilled mass-market Cabernet that cost nine euros. His plastic cup, the cashier told him, was complimentary.

Milo found an empty table by the rear wall, bumping into backs and luggage on the way, and settled down. Six in the morning, and the place was packed. His cell phone sang its irritating song, and it took him a moment to find the thing in his inner pocket. PRIVATE NUMBER. “Yeah?”

“Milo Weaver?” said a thin, wiry voice.

“Uh huh.”

“Einner. You landed all right?”

“Well, yes, I—”

“New York tells me you’ve got the package. Do you?”

“I hope so.”

“Answer yes or no, please.”

“Sure.”

“The subject takes lunch every day at twelve thirty precisely. I suggest you wait for her outside her place of work.”

Feeling more desperate for his nostalgic interlude, Milo looked for an ashtray; there was none. He tapped out a Tennessee-bought Davidoff, deciding to ash into the cup and drink the wine from the bottle. “That’ll give me time to nap. It was a long flight.”

“Oh, right,” said Einner. “I forgot how old you are.”

Milo was too stunned to say what his mind muttered: I’m only thirty-seven.

“Don’t worry, Weaver. We’ll have you out of here in time for your vacation. I don’t even know why they bothered flying you in.”

“We done?”

“I understand the subject is an old friend of yours.”

“Yes.” Milo took a drag, losing his grip on his sense of humor, while someone nearby coughed loudly.

“Don’t let that get in the way.”

Milo suppressed the urge to shout a reply. Instead, he hung up as, a few seats away, a young man started a coughing fit into his hand, glaring at him.

Milo suddenly realized why. Round eyes watched him tap ash into his plastic cup, and he waited for the hammer to fall. It was swift—the cashier, having noticed the crime in action, called over a stock boy who had been crouched by the canned coffee mixtures, and he followed her pointed finger to Milo’s corner. The boy, eighteen or so, wiped his hands on his orange apron as he weaved expertly between tables toward him. “Monsieur, ici vous ne pouvez pas fumer.”

Milo considered standing his ground, then noticed the big sign with the symbol for no smoking on the wall, a few feet from him. He raised his hands, smiling, took one last drag, and dropped the cigarette into the plastic cup. He poured in some of the wretched wine to extinguish it. The stock boy, behind a bashful grin, was relieved not to have to throw this man out.

Grainger had booked him into the Hotel Bradford Elysées, one of those classical, overpriced monstrosities along the Rue Saint-Philippe du Roule that, were anyone to ever audit the books of the Department of Tourism, would be the first thing to go. He asked the front desk for a wake-up call at eleven thirty—about four hours from then—and picked up a Herald Tribune. In the ornate Bradford Elysées elevator, he read headlines. They weren’t pretty.

More car bombs in Iraq, killing eight U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and more riots in Khartoum, Sudan: a photo of a full square of angry men—thousands—waving placard photographs of the dead Mullah Salih Ahmad, a white-bearded holy man with a white taqiyah covering his bald scalp. Other signs in Arabic, the caption told him, called for the head of President Omar al-Bashir. On page eight, he found a single-paragraph story saying that Homeland Security had apprehended a suspected political assassin, whom they refused to name.

Yet the most important news was unwritten: Milo Weaver had arrived in Paris to set up one of his oldest friends.

Mawkishly, he remembered when both of them were young field agents in London. Lots of codes and clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way pubs and arguments with British intelligence about the mess their countries were just starting to make of the postcommunist world. Angela was smart and stable—a near-contradiction in their business—and she had a sense of humor. In intelligence, those three things together are so rare that when you find them, you don’t let go. Given the amount of time they spent together, everyone assumed they were a couple. This served them both. It kept her homosexuality out of conversations, and saved Milo from diplomats’ wives setting him up with their nieces.

For two months after the Venice fiasco, Angela couldn’t speak to him—that’s how much killing her boss, Frank Dawdle, had disturbed her. But the next year, when Milo became simultaneously a husband and a dad to a baby girl, Angela came to the wedding in Texas and showered happy praise on Tina. They had remained in touch, and when Angela came to town Tina always insisted they take her out to dinner.

He lay on the hotel bed without undressing and considered calling Tom. What to say? He’d already argued Angela’s innocence. Should he report that James Einner was a dunce, unequipped to handle the operation? Tom didn’t care what Milo thought of Einner.

The truth—and for a moment it disturbed him—was that, six years ago, as a Tourist, he never would have questioned any of this. The job would have been simple and clean. But he wasn’t a Tourist anymore, and for that he had no regrets.

11

The American embassy was separated from the Champs-Elysées by the long, rigorous Jardin des Champs-Elysées. He parked along Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and walked the length of the park, passing old Parisians on benches with bags of bread crumbs dangling between their knees, luring pigeons, while the midday sun burned hot and moist.

Paris in July is a bleak place to be. The locals have started to flee on their welfare-state vacations, and in their place Japanese, Dutch, Americans, Germans, and Brits stand in lines leading to ticket counters, their necks craned, waving brochures at perspiring cheeks, shouting at errant children. The elderly tourists move in packs, clutching walkers or fooling with wheelchairs, while the young stop periodically to bitch about the hard sidewalks and whisper, surprised, about how many black people there are in Paris.

Most of them, just before leaving home, watched Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance through white-bread streets and are shocked by today’s rues and avenues. Instead of fat old men with mustaches offering slices of cheese with aperitifs, they’re faced with white boys in dirty dreadlocks playing movie sound tracks on beat-up guitars, suspiciously pushy Africans selling miniature Eiffel Towers and models of the Louvre pyramid, and hordes of tourists like themselves, guided by stern elderly French women waving colored flags to keep them on track.

Of course, there was plenty of beauty in Paris, but, given his reason for being there, Milo could hardly see it.

He found a bench at the Place de la Concorde end of the park, facing tree-lined Avenue Gabriel and the embassy at number 2. He gave a smile to the old woman beside him on the bench, surrounded by pigeons. She returned his smile and tossed crumbs at the birds. It was only twelve ten, so he searched his pockets for cigarettes before guilt overwhelmed him and he let them be. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the white wedding-cake building with three uniformed marines in its yard wearing automatic rifles.

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