The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  I was cold, and I had to urinate, but Weaver explained over the wind that we didn’t have time to stop. We couldn’t know how close they were—all we knew for sure was that they were following.

  “Who?” I demanded. “What the hell is a Tourist?”

  Weaver wiped at his nose, then checked his fingers, presumably for blood, but it was too dark to be able to see anything. He moved to where I was being jostled against the back of the cab and leaned close so I could hear him above the engine. “In my day, years ago, Tourists served as the sharp end of American foreign policy. We were headquartered in Manhattan.”

  “I never heard of them.”

  “That was the idea. We had some notable failures, but more often than not we did all right. And we kept our secret until a decade ago, when the department was closed down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was wiped out. Dozens of Tourists killed by our rivals in China, all in the space of twenty-four hours.”

  I rubbed my aching forehead and wondered if I was going to be sick. The noise and constant bumping through potholes, and now a story of mass murder by the Chinese. “You were one?” I asked.

  “For a while. Then I moved into administration.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t,” he said, “but you don’t have to.”

  He was right. All I had to do was listen and remember, so that at some point in the future—a point that was growing increasingly distant—I could sit down with Paul and Sally and Mel and spill the entire story. It was their job to understand.

  “Wait,” I said. “If it was closed down, who was shooting at us?”

  “All I said was that it had been shut down, not what happened later.”

  I looked out into the night, eyeing the moon. I could make out craters. This was not where I was supposed to be. “Why all this?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you just come to DC and tell your story? Dial a phone? Send a fucking email?”

  He didn’t answer at first, and when I looked over I saw he was also staring at the moon. He said, “Everything would be intercepted. Any call. Any email. Letters.” He shook his head. “Me.”

  “Then send someone else.”

  He shook his head again. “I can’t put them at risk.”

  “Of what?” I demanded. When he didn’t answer, I said, “Who cares if they intercept an email?”

  “Because they can’t know what I know. And they can’t know who I’m telling it to.”

  “Who are they?”

  “We’ll get to that,” he said, and his answer angered me so much I couldn’t even speak.

  At the Moroccan frontier, we blew through what seemed like a ghost village, a scattering of buildings and a single gas station; then we were back in the desert. Though it felt like forever, only an hour and a half passed before we were pulling into the coastal town of Tarfaya. I could make out wide, dusty streets and single-story buildings in the occasional streetlight. Faraway dogs barked. Though I’d never visited Tarfaya, I had an image of it from Haroun’s emails when he’d taken a day trip there. The cafés with their molded plastic chairs, the long, deep beach, and the rowboats tied up along a rocky port. And people: grizzled men chain-smoking over thimbles of coffee, robed women with piercing, beautiful eyes, and children smeared with the grit of childhood kicking soccer balls in the streets. Now the town was asleep and empty.

  At the gate to the port, a policeman stopped us, and the woman behind the wheel had a short conversation with him that I couldn’t make out. Eventually the cop stepped around to smile at me and Weaver as he slipped some bills into his shirt pocket, then glanced at the empty space around us as if we weren’t there. He grinned like someone who’d been well paid for his blindness. He wandered away, and we began to move.

  We finally climbed out along the water’s edge, where fishing boats bobbed in a cramped line along the port’s narrow peninsula. I looked in vain for a bathroom, then peered deep into the blackness of the Atlantic. I remembered what Haroun had called Tarfaya: The end of the world.

  From one of the fishing boats came a man as white and out of place as Weaver, who nodded in my direction. “What about him?” he asked in what sounded like a German accent.

  “He’s coming with us,” Weaver explained.

  “Christ. Phones? Signals?”

  “He’s clean.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  Weaver shook his head. “We don’t have time.”

  The man, still angry, pointed at me. “This way.”

  I looked at Weaver, who nodded, so I followed the man up the path to the piers. “I don’t have anything,” I said, trying to reassure him, but he didn’t answer. He just kept walking down the gangplank. Only the one boat was running, its engine grinding and gasping unconvincingly.

  “In the water,” said the man.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  I knew what he wanted, and why, but I decided to stand my ground. “No.”

  With disconcerting speed, the man grabbed my lapels and swung, using centrifugal force to propel me off the edge and into the cold water. It was deeper than I’d thought, and I was submerged completely. When I came up, chilled to the bone, the man was on his knees, peering down at me.

  “Stay there a moment,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  He smiled, giving away the reason for his perpetual frown—his teeth were small, discolored nubs. He turned to look at the black woman running down the gangplank toward us. At that moment, I felt the warm release of my bladder emptying into the murky Atlantic, bringing on a mix of relief and shame.

  “He’s clean now,” he called to the black woman, then turned back to offer me a hand. “Come on.”

  I didn’t move, only treaded the dirty water. When the woman reached us, she said to him, “Griffon, you’re taking the truck to Ben Khlil.”

  “No, Kanni, I am not.”

  “You want them to be waiting for us?”

  He withdrew his hand and stood up. “Fine. I’ll see you in Switzerland.”

  As he skulked off she squatted and held out a hand to me. “He’s a dick,” she said as she caught my hand and tugged. “But he’s our dick.”

  9

  Shivering down in the filthy hold, wrapped in a blanket, I rocked back and forth with the beat of the waves and the clatter of the engine as we headed out into the Atlantic. A single bulb swung from a wire, stretching and shifting shadows in the pungent space, the constant movement keeping me off balance. The struggling engine moaned. My head was full of questions, but the fear that had gripped me back in Laayoune was starting to recede. Not because I was less afraid, but because I was exhausted from the breakneck speed of our escape and my jet lag finally catching up with me.

  What I wanted was to be dry, to lie down in a hotel bed—any hotel, anywhere in the world—and call Laura. I wanted to hear about whatever trouble Rashid had caused that day, and maybe even discuss our marriage. Not come to any great conclusions or make big decisions, but simply speak about it, openly and honestly. Instead, I was chained to a man I didn’t trust, a man who was involved with domestic terrorists, as people called Tourists tried to kill us—all to listen to a story that I feared would take days to get told. A story that might only be made up of lies.

  Unbelievable.

  When he came down the steps, dipping his head to avoid a concussion against the steel frame, Milo Weaver gave me a smile and reached out to switch off the light. He became a silhouette then, lit only by the moon through the open hatch, a form moving around the hold until he finally settled on the long, low bench beside me. He said, “Need more blankets?”

  I shook my head before remembering he couldn’t see me. “No, I’ll survive.”

  “Let’s hope,” he said.

  Both of us had to raise our voices to be heard above the engine.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “First? Arrecife.”

  “Canary Islands?”

  �
��Then a ferry to Spain. Once we make it there, everything’s taken care of.”

  “Everything?” I asked. “What the hell is going on?”

  He gave me silence for a moment, and I saw his silhouette turning to peer in the direction of the steps, and the moon outside. “Well, I’m trying to save both of our lives. And the lives of a bunch of other people.”

  “That’s not an answer,” I told him.

  “You’re right. How’s that recorder?”

  “Shit,” I said. It was in my jacket, and when I used the blanket to pat it dry, I was sure it was ruined. But a press of a button brought up the small, bright screen.

  “Good,” said Weaver.

  We both turned when the engine went dead and footsteps sounded on the stairs. The woman who’d driven us out of Laayoune and pulled me out of the water in Tarfaya—Kanni, apparently—stopped halfway down the stairs and squatted. “They’ll be here in five.”

  “No worries?” asked Weaver.

  She shook her head. “But I can’t get Griffon on the line.”

  Weaver touched his face, rubbing, then stood up. “Come on, Abdul.”

  I followed him up to the deck, where a cold, salty-tasting wind knocked us around. In the direction of Africa there was darkness. To the west Spain’s Canary Islands glowed, bright even during the off-season. That was when I noticed, cutting through the lights, a black shape approaching. “You see it?” I asked, but Weaver was already looking in that direction.

  It turned out to be a fifty-foot sailing yacht that pulled up silently beside us. On the deck were two young men, one Japanese and another who spoke French with a Moroccan accent. Kanni threw over our line, and with a little effort we all climbed onto the yacht. The Japanese man shook Weaver’s hand and spoke to him quietly, then climbed into the fishing boat. Within ten minutes, we were on our way toward Arrecife, the Moroccan at the wheel, while the fishing boat headed back to the continent. Weaver and I returned to the hold and pulled the window blinds shut. The light here was fluorescent, and there were cushioned benches to stretch out on.

  “They all work for you, then?” I asked.

  He scratched at his stubble, noncommittal.

  “For the Library?”

  He finally focused on me. “The Library is no longer.”

  “Looks to me like it is. All these people, they work for you.”

  He shook his head. “As soon as it became known, it stopped existing. If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it … well, the Library is the opposite of that. Yes, some of the old librarians have stuck with me, but they won’t forever.”

  “What about your family? Where are they?”

  He grimaced but said nothing.

  “A wife and daughter. It’s question eleven.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek. “I’m not answering that.”

  “Are you going to tell me more?”

  “We don’t have time now. Soon.”

  I accepted that because I had no choice. In truth, now that much of the fear had fallen away, I was able to see Weaver with clearer eyes than before, and he irritated the hell out of me. He acted as if I were another of his Library employees, a stenographer who had been summoned to take down his precious thoughts.

  But that wasn’t the situation at all—not really, was it? He had been hiding from us, and the idea that he had summoned me was delusion. He was a professional liar, and it was quite possible that he’d lied so much that by now he was lying to himself.

  I’d met his type in the corridors of Langley, as I occasionally drifted into the periphery of interagency skirmishes. Political motivations, though rare, occasionally did raise their heads, more so since 2016, and it brought out the worst in people. Black was white, and patriotism was treachery. Some had the gift of coloring the truth just enough to make it look like a lie, and to carefully prune a lie until it passed the smell test and became accepted truth, not just to the intended audience, but also eventually to the liar himself.

  10

  It was still dark when we pulled into Arrecife, and up on the hill the lights from flat-faced houses twinkled down at us. The Moroccan went to speak with the harbormaster while the three of us found an all-night café along the stone harbor. In Spanish, Kanni ordered a round of espressos, and we sat at a plastic table on plastic chairs and looked out at the water. When the Moroccan arrived, he gave Weaver a nod, swallowed his coffee, and headed off again.

  “Ferry doesn’t leave until morning,” Weaver told me. “I need to go talk to someone.”

  “Okay…”

  “Kanni will stay with you.”

  She kept staring out at the sea, as if she hadn’t heard a thing. When Weaver finished his coffee, he stood and stretched, suppressing a yawn. “Maybe you’ll want to get her story while I’m gone. It’s very interesting.”

  I gave her a look, but she still wasn’t looking at me, so I said, “I’d like that.”

  “Good,” Weaver said, then walked off, hands in his pockets, casual, up toward the town.

  “Would you like to tell me your story?” I asked.

  Kanni ran a tongue over her teeth behind her lips and finally looked in my direction. “No.”

  I finished my coffee and tried to get as comfortable as possible in the uncooperative chair. What I wanted, more than Kanni’s story, was a phone to call home. Home, not headquarters—I was suddenly unsure about them. Did I believe I was expendable, as Weaver had said? That I had been sent on such an unlikely mission to keep Weaver occupied until the wet works team showed up? No. There was no way I was going to take Weaver’s word over the Agency’s. But he’d planted a seed of doubt, and that was enough to make me hesitant. Which, of course, was precisely what he’d intended.

  The jet lag was returning with a vengeance, and when I closed my eyes for a moment’s rest I dreamed of a day when Rashid was a baby. During an afternoon nap, he rolled off our bed and hit the floor. He woke, crying, then vomited a little, and fearing a concussion I scooped him up in my arms and with Laura sped the ten blocks to the hospital. Along with fear for my son’s health, I’d feared that this new thing, parenthood, was something I was particularly unsuited for. I feared that eventually I was going to kill the poor child.

  When I woke, back aching, the sun was high over the African horizon, and in the golden light I could finally get a good look at Arrecife’s harbor and the houses in the distance. Kanni was gone, and Weaver was sitting in her place, a phone to his ear, listening somberly to someone. When I sat up, I felt the weight of Collins’s pistol in the pocket of my jacket. How had they trusted me with it?

  On the table was a plastic bowl filled with some kind of paste. It turned out to be bienmesabe, a sweet almond pudding that would have been delicious even if I hadn’t been famished.

  As he listened to the phone, his bleak expression deepening, I thought of his child, Stephanie, who according to the file had been born, curiously enough, on September 11, 2001. Seventeen years old. Almost a legal adult.

  Sometimes your inabilities take time to show themselves, and just when you think you’ve made it, when you’ve muddled your way through parenthood and are ready to release your child into the world, you screw up in the homestretch. Now his child was in hiding. His wife, too. His actions had led to their exile from the world, which in itself was a kind of death. I wondered how that made him feel.

  “That’s our boat,” Weaver said as he hung up, nodding in the direction of a large ferry that hadn’t been in the harbor when we arrived. Birds circled it and cawed loudly. The bleakness in his face dissipated, but only a little. “Like your breakfast?”

  “It’s sweet.”

  “Everything here is sweet,” he said, then pushed himself into a standing position. “Let’s move.”

  I followed him down to the harbor, and we found Kanni waiting among tired-looking European tourists and fishermen drinking beer. She, too, had a phone to her ear, and when we approached she hung up and said to Weaver, “You heard about Gri
ffon?”

  He nodded, that miserable look returning. “Let’s make sure his family’s safe.”

  “On it,” she said, and headed toward the ferry, making another call.

  When I asked what that was about, he rocked his head, considering whether or not to answer, and finally made his decision: “The guy who threw you in the water. Griffon. He drove on to Ben Khlil, but didn’t make it. He was found in the truck outside town.”

  I remembered how, for a moment there, I’d wanted to kill Griffon. “Dead?”

  “I suspect they wanted him alive,” Weaver said somberly, “but he made that impossible for them.” He eyed me as we walked. “Griffon was one of our best. Smart and loyal and airtight ethics. It’s a rare and wonderful combination.”

  “And you’ll take care of his family?”

  Weaver squinted because behind me the sun was bright. Ahead of us, people were climbing the gangplank and driving cars onto the ferry. “As soon as they ID’d him, his wife and two children became visible. We have no choice.”

  Weaver’s family wasn’t the only one to suffer because of his actions. “How long can you hide them?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Weaver said, then opened his hand to usher me onto the gangplank first.

  Unlike the other travelers, Kanni, Weaver, and I were taken by an old sailor with a limp to a locked room near the bridge. Inside was a modest cabin: two cots, a cabinet of drinks, and a tiny bathroom. I excused myself and peed like a racehorse, then washed up and settled in one of the cots. Kanni stepped outside, and Weaver took the other cot and told me to take out the recorder.

  “This ferry takes thirty hours to reach Spain,” he said. “That should be enough time.”

  “For absolutely everything?”

  He leaned back in the cot, cupping his hands behind his head. “No one knows absolutely everything, but the things I don’t have direct knowledge of I can make educated guesses about.”

  “And then?” I asked. “Once you finish telling me absolutely everything?”

  “You report to headquarters, just like you planned. And get back home.”