The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  5

  Alexandra Primakov had been a lawyer by trade, and for the first half of her adult life she’d settled into a properly structured life in London with regular hours at the law firm of Berg & DeBurgh and a steady stream of lovers she kept at arm’s length. It suited her, always knowing where she would be, and when, fifteen years ago, her father convinced her to abandon her life of stability to join his intelligence operation hidden in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the United Nations, her one demand had been that she would stay in London.

  For she was of two minds. On the one hand, she was, and would always be, Yevgeny Primakov’s daughter, and like him she would always be attracted to the grand aims of the Library; at the same time, though, she was the daughter of the late Ekaterina Primakov, for whom stability and repetition had been the only route to happiness. These two influences cursed her with a mild schizophrenia, and she knew she would never really be satisfied with the choices she made. A man or a dog? As soon as she chose a mutt from the animal shelter, she would begin to wonder about the man who might have taken its place. Oddly, the idea of getting both never occurred to her, and this was one of the many reasons that, by her forties, she had neither.

  From a small rented office in the Overseas Development Institute on Blackfriars Road, she took care of the legal intricacies of international intelligence from a structured place. She did travel, of course—the librarians sometimes got into trouble, and when it couldn’t be taken care of remotely she would fly to Kuala Lumpur or Kinshasa in order to assess the situation and approach officials with the legal weight of the United Nations behind her. A couple of days in too-warm offices sitting across from small-minded bureaucrats, and then she was back in her Hampstead flat, toying with the perpetual dilemma of either buying a dog or finding a husband.

  So when Milo, six years her senior, called from Manila to ask her to take over the Library’s Zürich office “just for a few days,” she resisted.

  “Can’t they run it themselves?” she asked.

  “Probably,” Milo said, “but I don’t think it would look good.”

  “They’re not children.”

  “You’re right,” he said, “but if something goes wrong, I’d rather have you there, in the apartment, with Tina and Stef.”

  There it was. He wasn’t asking her to come as a necessary part of the Library but as the comforting auntie for his family. She tried not to be insulted but was anyway, and thinking about the kind of husband her brother had become convinced her that she had never really wanted to marry. A dog it was. As soon as she got back from Zürich she would visit the RSPCA.

  So she’d flown down on a morning Swissair, and Noah waited in a Library Mercedes to drive her to the Weavers’ two-floor apartment in Oberstrass, half of an old Habsburg villa on Hadlaubstrasse. It was good to see Tina. She’d always gotten along with her brother’s wife better than she’d ever gotten along with him, and when she’d met their spunky daughter she’d seen a little of herself in young Stephanie. That, perhaps, was when she’d started to consider the idea of a family, but never strongly enough to actually do anything about it. And by now, at forty-two, her chances, rightly or wrongly, felt like they were slipping away.

  Though she stayed in the guest bedroom and took breakfast with Tina and Stephanie, most of her time was spent at the office in Escher Wyss, on the other side of the Limmat River. It was a large second-floor apartment with a kitchen and five rooms. One was full of electronics, a second full of documents, while the third acted as Milo’s—and now her—office. There was a fully appointed bedroom and another office used by the two reference librarians, Kristin and Noah. Kristin was previously an assistant for the Canadian ambassador to the UN, and Noah, back in 2005, had been a mathematician her father had found working for a French environmental group. Kristin was in her midthirties, Noah in his fifties, Alexandra the buffer between them.

  She missed her little office in the ODI, and the silence, and the way that there was no one to push back against her decisions. Here in Zürich, young Kristin seemed suspicious of her very presence, often saying, “Why don’t we wait until Milo gets back?” Noah was less contrary but felt the need to show that he was the person in the room with the most knowledge. For example, when a request came in from a librarian in Cairo for permission to cultivate a source in Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate, Noah delivered a lengthy soliloquy on the history and extent of the Mukhabarat’s use of dangles to flesh out foreign spies. Kristin listened intently and finally said, “Why don’t we wait until Milo gets back?”

  And Alexandra thought, I’m going to get a big dog.

  In her downtime, which she was surprised to find there was a fair amount of, she read reports and watched videos from New York of the First Consultation of the Liechtenstein Initiative, the first in a series of UN meetings aimed at doing precisely what its full title said: the Liechtenstein Initiative for a Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. The UN wasn’t known for ambiguous titles, not even for the individual presentations: Timea Nagy’s “Follow the Money,” Kofi Annan’s “Fighting Child Slavery—A View from the Frontlines,” and the antitrafficking organization Polaris’s “How Do Traffickers Use the US Financial Services Industry?”

  That evening, she taught Stephanie how to kill someone by slamming the heel of her hand up into the base of the nose, pushing bone and cartilage directly into the brain. Before leaving in the morning, Stephanie tried it out again, shoving her wrist high.

  “What’s that?” Tina asked.

  “Self-defense,” Alexandra said quickly.

  “In case Halifa gets rough,” Stephanie said as she grabbed her bag.

  “You’re not hitting anyone,” Tina said, serious. “Hear me?”

  Flipping through Nexus messages, Stephanie said, “I hear ya.”

  Once she was gone, Alexandra apologized, but Tina blew it off. “Milo’s already showed her plenty. If she wasn’t so well behaved, she’d be in jail for murder.”

  As much as she liked Tina, Alexandra found her enigmatic. How could she have stayed with Milo, particularly through their New York years, when she learned that Milo had hidden his entire history from her? The best she could figure was that Tina maintained an intensity of loyalty bordering on the psychotic. She’d even given up a career as an administrator in an actual library in order to live obscurely in one of Europe’s duller banking capitals, where the uptight young men had taken to proto-fascist haircuts—long on top and shaved around the sides.

  “I never thought I’d like it in Zürich,” Tina said over coffee. “But I do—it’s calm, you know?”

  “Not boring?”

  “I used to dream of boredom.”

  Boredom as the big dream. But wasn’t that the kind of life Alexandra, too, loved most? Predictable, repetitious. Her little ODI office and men she never kept long enough to fuck with her schedule.

  “It wasn’t always easy,” Tina said reflectively. “You know, I read this interview with Simone de Beauvoir. The paradox of life, she said, is that you spend all your time trying to be rather than just exist. But eventually, you look back and realize that you never actually succeeded. All you did was exist. Life isn’t some solid thing that builds up behind you. It’s just a series of days that vanish one after the other.”

  “Jesus,” Alexandra said. “That’s depressing.”

  Tina raised her coffee cup and smiled. “No, Alex. It’s freeing.”

  The conversation was interesting enough for Alexandra not to hurry to the office, instead settling in for a long talk that shifted to the framework of feminism that Tina had grown up with. “Is it wrong,” she asked, “that I’m only really at peace when I know my daughter is safe and healthy? No,” she said, answering herself. “It’s not.”

  “And when she leaves home for good?”

  “Then I guess I find something else.”

  It was midday when Alexandra finally drove across the Limmat, the conversation still swirling in
her head even as she reached the building in Escher Wyss and typed her code to get inside. She made her way up the narrow stairs leading to another keypad-protected door, behind which she found Noah clambering out of his overpriced desk chair and hurrying over to her.

  “We just got a report in from Algiers,” he said.

  “Something wrong with Milo?”

  “Uh, no,” Noah said. “But he needs to hear about this.”

  6

  Milo had nearly drifted to sleep in the gloom of the fetid apartment, half dreaming of Leticia’s belief that it was up to them to change the course of history for the better, and his own conviction that neither of them deserved that kind of power, when his ringing phone shocked him awake. It was Alexandra.

  No hello or greeting, just “Emergency. Exfil.”

  “What?” Milo asked, sitting up. “Why?”

  “We just learned Kirill Egorov is dead.”

  A chill went through Milo. “How did he…?”

  “Unknown. Next flight out will take you to Tripoli. From there you can make New York.”

  Milo was on his feet now, snatching his shoulder bag and heading for the door. “Any sign anyone knows about this place?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Okay,” he said as he stepped into the dark stairwell and slammed the door shut behind himself. “I’ll check in from the airport.” He hung up and trotted down the steps, where he pressed the buzzer to unlock the front door and stepped out into the blazing sunlight that momentarily blinded him. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and from the hot whiteness he was able to find shapes—a minivan among the cars, an old woman smoking, two men hurrying across the street toward him. Instinctively he turned the other direction, away from them, but faced a chubby white man in a wide-brimmed hat holding up his hands.

  “Milo Weaver?” the man asked with a thick Russian accent, and once Milo had made sense of the situation the other two men had reached his side of the street and were stepping up behind him. Unlike the one who spoke, these two men were hard, their poorly fitting suits tight over a padding of hard muscle, not doing much to hide the bulge of shoulder holsters. With a parked car on one side and the old stone building on the other, there was no getting away. “Milo Weaver?” the Russian asked again.

  Milo looked past him, to the cracked sidewalk beyond, and felt a rare longing to run.

  “Ach!” the Russian said, his hands waving around. “Of course, you do not know who I am, yes?” He held out a hand to shake. “Maxim Vetrov, vice-consul of Russian Federation in Algeria. And now, I am sad to say, acting consul. I have bad news. Esteemed Kirill Egorov is dead by heart attack. Only one hour ago. But before he dies he asks me to keep meeting with you, Mr. Weaver.”

  His hand remained in the air between them, and, knowing that the two young goons behind him would be able to outrun him in five seconds, Milo took the hand and shook. “Heart attack?”

  “Doctor’s opinion. Kirill was old man. Drinker.”

  “He died at the consulate?”

  “Home.”

  Milo nodded, wondering. Coincidences did exist; they were everywhere. But this one strained credulity. On the very day Egorov was to meet him in order to ask for the kind of protection he could not trust with his own people, he had died. And according to Maxim Vetrov, acting consul, with his last breath Egorov had instructed the people he didn’t trust to come and meet Milo. “So you were with him when he died?”

  “In last moment, yes.” Vetrov rubbed his thick hands together. “Kirill, he insist I come here and meet you.”

  “What did he say we would discuss?”

  A blankness crossed Vetrov’s face, then left it. “He says you tell me. That it is very important secret.”

  Then why don’t you get your people to protect him? Milo had asked Egorov.

  Your father never would have had to ask that question.

  “Listen, Mr. Vetrov, I’m afraid I don’t know anything. Kirill Egorov requested the meeting but didn’t share any details.”

  Pursed lips, then: “I do not think you come all the way to this hot place without details.”

  “I’m very gullible.”

  Vetrov sighed loudly through his nose, shaking his head. “This is stupid,” he said in Russian, then nodded at his men. Milo felt two sets of hard hands grip his arms and pull him back, then off to the right between cars. They were dragging him across the street to a minivan with diplomatic plates. He fought back, but these young men had been trained to grab things and hold them still. They were black belts in it.

  Milo said, “I’m a United Nations official. You’d better let me go.”

  Maxim Vetrov didn’t seem to care. It was apparent that Vetrov wasn’t your run-of-the-mill diplomat; he was one of many GRU embassy plants, a military intelligence officer who didn’t flinch as he watched his men throw Milo into the backseat of the van and climb in with him. Milo looked at each of their blunted faces, wondering which one he might be able to go through, then heard the sound of shouting.

  Outside the driver’s door, three dark-skinned men, their suits tailored a size too big, ran up to Vetrov and spoke rapidly to him. Though it sounded like French, he couldn’t make out their words, but the two men on either side of him looked concerned. The one on his left got out of the minivan to check on it while the one on his right grabbed hold of Milo’s arm with both hands.

  After a moment of conversation, Vetrov flashing his diplomatic papers and looking very put out, it was done. Vetrov and his goon stepped aside while a dark mustached man pulled open the door of the van and said in Berber-tinted English, “Mr. Weaver, you will come with us.”

  The grip on his arm only tightened.

  “Who are you?” Milo asked.

  “I am an officer of the Algerian government, and we wish to have a conversation with you.”

  Through the window, Vetrov made a sign, and the grip on Milo’s arm finally loosened. Milo got out to join the mustached man, and as they headed for an unmarked car parked in the middle of the street Vetrov said, “Good-bye, Mr. Weaver.” The Russian was trying to look smug, as if all this had been part of his master plan, but he wasn’t pulling it off very well. Kirill Egorov would have done a much better job.

  7

  The mustached man was named Mustafa Rahmani. He was small and damp-looking, with dark eyes and tufts of oily black hair hanging down to his thick eyebrows. He was a colonel in the Département de Surveillance et de la Sécurité, he explained patiently as his two associates walked Milo into an office building in some residential neighborhood they’d reached by driving inland. Only when they entered did Milo spot crayon drawings of families under happy suns and realize that it wasn’t an office at all but an elementary school. Only Rahmani and Milo entered the small first-floor room with the lazy ceiling fan and a view of a green courtyard.

  Milo made sure not to look too put out by his second kidnapping of the day. Even though Algeria was one of the twelve countries that secretly contributed to the Library’s budget, he doubted that the DSS would have been happy to learn that its own politicians didn’t consider its intelligence sufficient to keep the nation in step with the West.

  They’d already been through his carry-on, which only held his clothes, and Milo placed his UN identification card on the desk at the front of the classroom. Rahmani examined it closely, then smiled up at his guest. “This is very good.”

  “You don’t doubt it’s real, do you?”

  “Why would I?” Rahmani shrugged and leaned back. “Tell me, why were our Russian brothers pushing you into an automobile?”

  “What did they say?”

  He raised his hands, waving away the question, then spoke at length. “Understand me, Mr. Weaver. We are not interested in angering the Russians. We are a people under threat. These Islamists, they don’t see Algeria on the map. They see the larger Maghreb, and they want to turn all of the countries in the Maghreb—us, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania—into a single caliphate. Crazy, yes? Th
ey do not believe in sovereign national borders. We have been fighting the Islamists since 1991, long before the West even noticed the threat. We cannot afford to make enemies.” He shook his head. “Now we look to Syria and see how well those Russian weapons perform, and we sign a billion-dollar arms deal with Moscow. The battle tanks—they’re so good. Really. And the Russians—they don’t want to anger us either. They spent the Cold War throwing money at Africa for ideological reasons, but now they do it for market reasons. Geopolitical reasons. They want our warm-water ports to park their ships, maybe even warships. And if they position themselves in North Africa, then that keeps France and America out. It is win-win.”

  “I’m very pleased for you,” Milo said, then gave him a smile for good measure.

  “Thank you,” said Rahmani. “But then you show up. On the same day the good Russian consul, Mr. Egorov, dies of a heart attack in his home. You, an esteemed representative of the United Nations, come to our city and go to a little apartment in the middle of Bab El Oued. Then the Russian vice-consul comes to harass you.” He opened his hands. “Surely you see that this is odd.”

  “I thought it was odd as well. Were you following me, or the Russians?”

  A tight-lipped smile. He raised an index finger and wagged it at Milo. “I will tell you something, Mr. Weaver. I will let you in on a secret. While I love our Russian brothers, I cannot say that I trust them all the time. No one is perfect—I understand this. Your own countrymen, too. Americans send mercenaries to fight your wars, and what do they do? Slaughter civilians. We all see it on TV.”

  Milo considered answering but found he had nothing to say.

  “Of course, no one is perfect,” Rahmani went on, “but the Russians…” A shrug. “I suspect that they want to control us the way they control places like Armenia, like Georgia, like Ukraine. So I keep an eye on them. I note strange behavior. For example, the dear departed Kirill Egorov—I met him, you know? A good man. But we watch him, as we must. And a few weeks ago, when he gets back from Paris, his movements, they go crazy! He no longer goes to his neighborhood café for coffee and biscuit each morning. He instead goes to the other side of town for coffee and biscuit. His mistress, who used to come to his house once a week—now she joins him for coffee, and they perform their lovemaking at her home.”