The Last Tourist
Page 3
In the darkness I found a light switch on a timer, and in its bright glare the stairwell was surprisingly cool, dark, and clean. The banister shook when I touched it, so I left it alone as I ascended to the second floor. Off to the left a family was making noise, and a radio played a Haifa Wehbe hit. Weaver’s apartment—identified by a handwritten 4 on the door—was to my right, and when the timer ended darkness fell. I stood blind, listening to the high melody of Arabic pop but hearing nothing from behind number 4. Then I stepped forward and knocked three times.
Silence. I considered walking away. A man exiles himself in Western Sahara—that means he’s not interested in talking. And from what little I knew from the file, and from the mysterious nuggets Collins had given me, Milo Weaver wasn’t the kind of man who would talk if he wasn’t interested in talking.
But I stayed, if only because I didn’t want to return to those warm, dusty streets so quickly. I knocked again and said, “Hello?”
To my left, a door opened, spilling light into the stairwell, and a small girl peered out at me. The noise and aroma of a family meal wafted out with the Arabic dance music, then an indecipherable father’s shout; the child shut the door. Then number 4 opened quickly, accompanied by dim light, and a sunburned face peered out at me. A scatter of bristle, some of it gray, reached to his cheekbones, and there was gray around his ears. Big, bruised eyes. Looking nothing like his photos, yet exactly like his photos. Sandals, linen pants, a light-colored shirt he was still buttoning.
“Milo Weaver?” I said.
A pleasant enough smile crossed his face, and with a voice rough from disuse, he said, “Well, you certainly took your time.”
6
“You expected me?” I asked.
Milo Weaver blinked a few times, as if he were just waking up, then glanced at his wristwatch, saying, “Of course.”
I hesitated, then stuck out a hand. “Abdul Ghali.”
He didn’t take it, but he did step aside and open his hand to a small room stocked with a mattress, a column of a dozen books, a sink, a hot plate, and a small table with two chairs. There was a door that presumably led to another room, but it was closed.
“Take a seat,” he said.
I settled at the table, discovering that one of the chair’s legs was shorter than the others, and this instability kept me from relaxing.
“And put the gun and phone on the table.”
I got up again and reached behind myself to take the Colt out of my waistband. Laying it on the table, I felt a sense of relief—that, at least, was out of the way. Then I placed my personal phone next to it.
“Unlock it?” Weaver asked, and I used my thumbprint, then handed it back. He looked at the screen, swiped to the next page, and his eyes widened. “Shit—Nexus?”
“What?”
He ignored me, then pressed on the application and deleted it.
“Hey!” I shouted involuntarily, but he didn’t care about me or my conversations with my son. He just powered off the phone and set it back on the table.
“Is that your only one?” he asked.
I’d forgotten about Collins’s phone, and while I might have bluffed my way through it, something told me that it wouldn’t be the right move. I handed it over and watched him disassemble the flip phone and remove its battery. I held up both hands. “Want to search me?”
Weaver didn’t answer. He went to the stack of books and took a pack of Benson & Hedges off the top. He lit one with a Zippo and, as an afterthought, offered the pack; I shook my head. As he smoked, he stood looking down at me. He made no move to relocate the pistol farther away; nor did he speak. He seemed to be measuring me with his eyes.
“I have some questions,” I said finally.
“Did you draft them?”
I shook my head no.
“Who? Foster?”
“I don’t know who drafted them,” I said, not knowing who Foster was. “I saw your file, but most of it was redacted.” He just stared, so I went on. “All I gathered was some of the outlines—your work history, your family. Your connection to the Massive Brigade.”
“Massive Brigade?” he asked, seeming surprised. “Really?”
“Are you denying it?”
He shook his head. “But I haven’t been in touch with them for a long time.”
There—that had to be a lie. I looked closely, trying to find tells in his face and hands, in his posture. Some kind of baseline to use for his other answers. But I found nothing. Hoping for another chance, I thought of question eight: “What about Joseph Keller? Can you tell me what happened to him?”
Weaver stiffened, closing up. He took a drag.
“Look,” I went on, “this is not my usual gig. It’s the first stamp in my passport for years. I just need to ask these questions, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
But Weaver only stared at me, sucking on his damned cigarette, blinking from the smoke.
I said, “They’ve been looking for you since October. You vanished. Then you showed up on their radar. Here, in Laayoune. The edge of the world. And I was called in.”
“Why you?”
“Me? Language. Background.”
“What background?”
“Sahrawi.”
He nodded, then looked toward the window and its closed blinds, as if alerted to a sound, but there’d been nothing. “They’ve been good to me,” he said toward the window. “The Sahrawi.”
“A hospitable people,” I said, then regretted it. I sounded like a tourist guide.
Weaver didn’t seem to notice. He just turned back to me and said, “Office?”
“Africa desk. Langley.”
“But why you? What are you bringing to the table?”
He was asking the question I hadn’t been able to answer myself. Familiarity with Arabic or Sahrawi culture might be a plus for this job, but it certainly wasn’t a requirement. Why not send Collins across town? After a day of pondering I had convinced myself, immodestly, that I had been recruited for some intangible virtues Paul had been too reserved to point out in front of Sally and Mel, but whatever those virtues were they were so hidden that not even I could find them. I told Weaver, “I’m bringing myself to the table.”
Understandably, he wasn’t impressed.
“So will you play ball?” I asked.
Another smile swept across Weaver’s face. He wiped at his dry lips. “Sporting metaphors. Haven’t heard one in a long time.”
I waited, but he didn’t follow up. “So?”
“You found me here,” he said finally, “so you’ll find me anywhere.”
“Certainly.”
“Maybe,” he corrected.
I looked around at the mottled walls that might not have seen a fresh coat of paint since they were built. “You can give it a try,” I told him. “Say the word, and I’ll walk out of here. I’ll tell them you’d already left town. But then, in a month or two, I’ll come knock on your door again. Me or someone else. Just do us a favor and choose someplace like Cannes, or Bermuda.”
This time, Weaver’s smile was open and full. He approached the table and took my gun and placed it on the stack of books along with the cigarettes. The titles of the books, I saw, were in three languages—French, English, and Russian. Weaver came back and sat down opposite me. “Shoot.”
“Isn’t that a sporting metaphor?” I asked.
Weaver wagged an index finger at me and grinned.
I had memorized the questions while sitting in my cubicle at Langley, and although the first question, asking where he’d been since October, was a fine way to begin, I instead chose number fourteen. I leaned my elbows on the table, which proved as rickety as the chair, and said, “They’d like to know the origins of your investigation.”
“What investigation?”
“I don’t know. I’m assuming you know.”
“That’s a big one,” Weaver said, indirectly admitting he did know what investigation I was referring to. “Quite a commitment.”
He cocked his head, regarding me. “Bad interrogation style. You’re supposed to start with the small, easily disproven questions.”
“I didn’t realize this was an interrogation,” I told him, and watched, slightly put off, as he laughed quietly to himself.
“Every human exchange,” Weaver said, “is an interrogation.”
I wasn’t going to debate the point, so I just said, “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Go ahead.” When I started to get up to go for my phone he said, “Not that,” went to the kitchenette, and picked up something I hadn’t noticed before, a digital voice recorder.
“You prepared for this,” I told him.
He handed me the device.
“You knew I was coming.”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I sent for you. For someone like you.”
It was more than a surprise; it was a shock. Everyone I’d spoken with believed they were on top of this situation. We’d believed we were way ahead of this man.
Or maybe we were, and Milo Weaver, like any good spy, was just a talented showman.
“Why would you send for me?” I asked.
“Because we’re out of time.”
“Out of time for what?”
“For what comes next.”
It was an annoying answer, so I turned my attention to the recorder. As I got my bearings with it, he said, “Okay, then. You know about Tourists, right? The Department of Tourism?”
The way he said this, I knew that I should know, and that it had nothing to do with tourist expenditures or the annual count of visitors to the United States. I shook my head and pressed RECORD.
He considered me, blinking slowly. “Really—why did they send you?”
My earlier reasoning—language, culture, some unnamed personal virtue—felt less and less plausible. But we weren’t going to get anywhere with him mocking my ignorance. “I do know about the Library,” I said.
He just looked at me, waiting.
“I know it is, or was—its status isn’t clear—an intelligence service hidden inside the United Nations. I know that your father created it, and that you took it over. And at some point you changed the rules. The Library became an active player. This, I’m told, led to its downfall.”
That seemed to take the air out of him. “Is that the way they see it?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know. This is just from one source.”
He settled into a chair. “Maybe that’s right. Maybe it is all on me.”
“So you’re admitting the Library did engage in active measures?”
He looked into my face, then nodded. “In 2009 I took an active measure when I decided to save Martin Bishop’s life. We know how that turned out, but I guess I didn’t learn my lesson, because four months ago I tried to save Joseph Keller’s life.”
“Then you killed him,” I said.
His smile was so sad. He shook his head slowly and said, “Joseph Keller never had a chance, Abdul.”
And then everything exploded.
7
The bedroom door—or what I had assumed to be a bedroom door—burst open, and a woman stepped through. She wore the kind of bright-colored robes that my own relatives wore when they felt alienated from their culture, but her skin was much darker. Bright eyes flashed, and when she spoke I was surprised to find no accent. At least, no accent from the African continent.
“It’s time,” she said to Weaver.
He sat straight, more alert than at any moment since I’d arrived. “That was fast. How many?”
“Two, maybe more. I recognized my old friend from Hong Kong.”
“What?” I asked.
As he abruptly rose from his chair, Weaver said, “We have to move. Once I saw you I knew they’d come in to close it down. But I thought we’d have at least twenty-four hours.”
“It’s Collins,” I said as I, too, stood. “He told me he would just keep an eye on me, but…” Realizing that Collins had played me, I even said, “I’m sorry.”
Weaver wasn’t listening. He ran around the room, collecting items he stuffed into his pockets.
“Let’s move it,” said the woman, impatient, then looked behind herself into the far room before turning back to eyeball me suspiciously. “He coming?”
“Yes,” Weaver said as he snatched my pistol—Collins’s pistol—off the stack of books.
“Wait,” I said, because the prospect of running off with them was, well, crazy. I had come to sit down and have a conversation, not flee from people who were probably my Agency colleagues.
“Do you want the story, or not?” Weaver asked pointedly.
“Yes, of course. But—”
“Then come.”
There was force in his voice, enough to get me moving, but I didn’t yet leave the room. I thought of Laura, and how she was sitting at home thinking that her husband had flown off first class to have some fun with men of power, leaving her to be the milkmaid to our son. What would she say now? What would she advise?
Don’t go.
“Look,” Weaver said, his patience wearing thin. “You don’t know who they are. You think they’re your friends, but if they’re who I think they are, then they’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill all of us.”
“Milo,” said the woman.
Weaver held out my pistol, grip first. “Please.”
And that was all it took, the magic word. A request rather than an order, and it was enough to cut through my indecision. I took the pistol and followed them into the next room, which turned out to be another apartment that led to a low door in the cracked wall that took us to a very narrow set of concrete steps leading down into cool darkness.
The woman took the lead, and I followed Weaver. They moved quickly, with an urgency I hadn’t thought Weaver had in him. At the bottom of the stairs the woman pushed open a door, letting in moonlight along an empty alleyway. They hurried toward the far end, where a white pickup truck was parked, and as I chased them past old broken furniture and pails and trash cans I noticed something glint to my left. At first glance I didn’t register what it was, but after two more steps my brain put it together. I halted abruptly and turned to look. Spread out against the stone wall lay Collins. The left side of his head was a mess, what I would later understand to be an exit wound, but I recognized him by the other half of his face and his blood-soaked clothes. The Texas Tech cap had been blown against the wall.
“Wait!” I called.
Up ahead, Weaver stopped and turned back to me, but the woman kept going.
“It’s—” I couldn’t get the word out.
Weaver’s gaze moved between me and Collins’s body. “Now you understand,” he said.
“I don’t understand anything.”
Weaver raised his head, looking past me. “Run, Abdul.”
“What?” I looked back, and at the far end of the alley a man appeared. Not a local—he was as pale as Weaver and wore a suit. He started to run toward us, a long-barreled pistol in his hand.
“Run, Abdul.”
I ran straight toward Weaver, who took his own pistol out of his jacket and, as I passed him, fired twice, loud explosions just behind me. I didn’t look back, just kept running toward the white truck, which was idling now in a cloud of carbon monoxide.
“Inside!” Weaver shouted, and I leapt into the rear of the truck, landing hard against the steel bed. Weaver banged down next to me. “Go!” he called, and the truck began to move.
As I was still catching my breath, Weaver scrambled into a crouch and aimed his pistol out the back. Flat, shadowy buildings passed, and occasional children gazed at our truck. Then, maybe thirty yards away, the man we’d seen before emerged from the alley, pistol raised and firing at us, the shots muffled by a suppressor. Milo fired back, the noise cracking in my ears. But the man didn’t stop; he kept running at full speed, f
iring. No bullets hit, but the shooting continued until Weaver was out of ammunition and we had taken the next corner.
When he turned and settled into the bed of the truck, breathing heavily and watching me with an indecipherable expression, I said, “Are we going to the UN compound?”
He shook his head no.
“But aren’t you—”
“I suppose they came from the UN compound,” he said between breaths, then turned to look out the rear again. “Only way they got here so fast.”
This made no sense to me. “Wait,” I said. “Who the hell were they?”
“Remember I mentioned Tourists?” he asked. “The Department of Tourism?”
“That was a Tourist?”
He rocked his head, back to looking like the laconic man I’d met a half hour earlier. “Or something like one,” he said.
The buildings fell away to reveal desert. We were out of the city, and I was so confused.
“Why was he shooting at us?”
Weaver didn’t seem to hear me. He raised his head and looked out the back, where a few rusting cars trailed along far behind us. Then he turned and frowned at me. “Now I know why they sent you.”
“What?”
“You’re expendable.”
8
The shock took a while to fade. The idea that the Agency considered me expendable, yes, but more than that I couldn’t shake the image of Collins, tossed against that stone wall, the way his head had lost its form. His broken body stuck with me as we drove north, into the wide black desert that had been a home to my people, but to me looked like the antithesis of home, a terrain that left nowhere to hide. Just above our heads, the moon followed us.