“We need complete access.”
Beside Milo, Alan leaned back in his chair and sighed loudly.
“What does that mean?” Milo asked.
“It means you give us the files,” Hilmar Jonsson cut in, his face pink.
“The database,” said Pak Eun-ju of South Korea. “Give us our own access. We no longer wish to receive piecemeal information from you.”
“Christ,” Alan muttered.
Milo opened his hands. “Let me be sure I understand this. You want unredacted access to the entirety of the Library’s files.”
“Yes,” Almeida said.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Of course you fucking can,” said Jonsson.
Alfred Njenga raised a finger for patience. “Milo,” he said. “Every penny you spend comes from us. There are no other countries in the world that would be stupid enough to make a deal like the one we’ve made. Yevgeny—he convinced us. Some of us here, some of our predecessors. But after sixteen years we believe it’s time to renegotiate the terms of our support.” He exhaled through his nose. “It’s an entirely reasonable request.”
Milo scanned each of their faces, seeing in their expressions that they were of one mind. While he’d expected something like this, he had underestimated their unity. So he took a breath, thought, and said, “Do you know why my father set up the Library this way?”
“Because he wanted control,” Almeida said, a smile on her face.
“Sure,” Milo said. “He always liked control. But that wasn’t the reason. He didn’t trust any of you.”
Silence. Jonsson frowned deeply, and even Almeida’s smile faded away. The rest settled back into their diplomatic cocoons, watching.
“Yevgeny knew that if you had complete access to the files, the Library would die within a year, possibly its employees, too. The Library, he understood, could only exist if it was secret. It can’t exist if anyone outside of this small circle knows it exists. It can’t exist in the outside world.”
“You think we don’t know this?” Jonsson demanded.
“If you knew it,” Milo countered, “then you wouldn’t ask for this. If you knew it, you would understand that as soon as you had open access to the Library, and put that intelligence to use, people outside this small circle would grow curious. How did you learn this, or that? America would start peeking into your files, start triangulating intelligence, and realize that you’re getting your information from a third party. Then the big nations add two and two and realize that all of you are using the same organization. Where on earth would all of you have come to the same trough to drink? Well, maybe on the thirty-eighth floor of the United Nations Headquarters—maybe there? And then…” Milo shook his head. “And then America and Russia and France and the UK—they figure it out. And they shut down the Library before you can say ‘It’s your world.’”
Milo leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. Ending with the UN motto was a rhetorical flourish, but he didn’t care. The important thing was that their faces, that wall of unyielding expressions, had cracked. Said Bensoussan, maybe the smartest of the bunch, had taken on a reflective pose. Jonsson had had the wind knocked out of his anger, but he was still bubbling inside. Almeida pursed her lips, staring at the surface of the conference table. Pak Eun-ju, though, wasn’t ready to be dissuaded.
“We appreciate your concern, Mr. Weaver. Frankly, though, we’d hoped that you would have shared less of your father’s paranoia. After a lifetime in the KGB, he could be excused for it. But you grew up in a different time.” She sniffed. “The fact is that this isn’t a negotiation. We are your investors, and we expect more from our investment. I understand that this might be a shock to you, though I don’t know why it would be. And you don’t have to answer yet. Take a few days to think it through. See it from our perspective.”
“I’ve done my thinking,” Milo told her. “The answer is no.”
“Jesus, Milo.” That was Gaston Majerus of Luxembourg, speaking for the first time. “You have no oversight. No transparency. You give us chicken feed for the millions we invest, and you don’t even share the information evenly. You can’t just say no.”
Milo focused his next words on Majerus, speaking slowly so that he would understand. “In 2008, a foreign power discovered not only the existence of my CIA department, but also the identities of its field officers. They killed almost every one of our field agents.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. If anyone got access to the Library database, we would be open to precisely the same kind of violence. I’m not putting my people in danger. The answer is no. Tomorrow it will be the same.”
“Fine,” Majerus said, still calm. “Then I’m afraid we have to reject your budget in its entirety.”
“What?” Alan said, leaning forward, hands on the table. “You don’t fucking know—”
He stopped because Milo had held up a hand. This was Alan Drummond now, quick to anger, the polar opposite of the administrator he’d once been.
Milo said, “I suggest you rethink your position.”
Gaston Majerus’s eyes narrowed, noticing the easy confidence Milo was trying to display.
“You’re right about my father—he was paranoid. In the deepest recesses of the Library he set up a small section devoted to patrons. It’s automatically updated every month. It was his protection against a coup. Since 2002, we’ve never needed to use the information.”
Milo stopped. He could have gone on, because he had looked at those files, which chronicled misdeeds and crimes by not only the patrons themselves but the presidents and prime ministers of the countries they represented. But he didn’t need to go into all that, because each of these people knew their own weaknesses better than he did. Beside him, Alan had calmed again, an impolite grin spreading across his face. He was enjoying this.
“Wait,” said Jonsson. “You’re blackmailing us?”
Milo looked back at him, feigning surprise. “Didn’t you just blackmail me? I’m not sure what you expected.” He turned to look at Majerus. “Don’t tell me this is a surprise. Don’t tell me anyone here is surprised.”
But they all were … except, perhaps, Said Bensoussan, who was fighting back a smile of amusement.
“You don’t have to answer yet,” Milo said, rising from his chair. Alan followed suit. “Take a few days. Think it through. See it from our perspective.”
12
“Got more in the godown, you want to wait,” the vendor told Leticia as she turned the used phone over and popped the lid off to examine inside.
“No,” she said. “This will work. Charger?”
He handed over a plug and cable. “You want SIM?”
“What do you have?”
“I got jetso for you.”
“You got what?”
“Discount.”
“Just tell me what you have, okay?”
The Temple Street Night Market was full of the noise of Hong Kong hagglers and the heavy aroma of fish frying. Her eyes ached from the intensity of the fluorescent stall lights. Above her head red globe lamps shone down on crowds hunting for cheap electronics.
This was the third vendor she’d talked to, having walked away from the first two, and her head was starting to hurt from all the haggling. But she knew the routine, even if her Cantonese wasn’t good enough to catch all the nuances. She was hungry, too. The little rat-infested dump she’d found in Wan Chai had no kitchen, but that was the trade-off for fifty dollars a night and no record of your visit.
The vendor ducked behind his table and came up with an international SIM in plastic packaging. “Coverage?” she asked.
“Excellent.”
“I bet,” she said, and turned the package over to read the networks it used. “Tell me about your jetso.”
She assembled the phone while waiting in line to order a plate of shumai, wondering where she would go next. Hong Kong was just a pit stop to get her bearings before she found a better place to hole up; she w
ouldn’t stay long enough to have to bother with the stress of black-market gun shopping. Tomorrow, then, she would move on to Phnom Penh, or she could stay in Kowloon with an old lover, if he hadn’t broken down and gotten himself married.
Her second concern—no less important than the first, but slightly less imperative—was who the hell her shadows were working for. She had ideas, more ideas than she could wish for, but if she didn’t narrow it down, she would never figure out how to neutralize the threat.
The only things she really knew about them were their legends, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young of London. While it turned out they weren’t working for Milo Weaver, they worked for someone, and that someone had been tasked with keeping an eye on her.
Had that been their aim? Just keep tabs on Leticia Jones? Or had they been waiting for a chance to do something to her? Age and wear might have dulled her wits, but at least she’d been smart enough to not hang around and find out.
A pretty girl in a chef’s hat passed her a steaming paper plate and throwaway chopsticks, and she slowly ate the pork dumplings as she walked back through the market, eyeing stalls for other items that might make her travels a little easier.
This had become her life in the last year, wandering cities at night, picking up things she’d left behind. A disposable life was how she described her existence when the dark mood came over her, usually after midnight in some dead-end motel where her grasp of the language was tenuous. For a while, she’d fought the darkness by drinking herself to sleep, and it usually helped, at least until the dawn showed up. It had gotten bad in Tromsø, Norway, in January, when she’d been following up a lead, and the polar night meant that the dawn never came. That was when she’d been visited by the woman who called herself Joan, who’d sat across from her at the Bastard Bar and told her she was wasting her life. Leticia had drunk a lot by then, and at certain points she wondered if Joan was a mirage, an echo of her old job wrapped in the cloak of Joan of Arc, her childhood hero. That blend of faith and stupid bravery had been the only thing young Leticia Jones had been able to look up to.
Might Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young have been sent by Joan to keep tabs on the ex-Tourist who didn’t want to come home? Maybe, though it seemed like a lot of expense just to know where Leticia was. More likely, they were from some country that she’d pissed off over the years.
And how had they found her? The same way Milo had, through the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, where people weren’t known for their ability to keep secrets? Or had she exposed herself while working her personal project, the job no one was going to pay her for? Had they caught her tracking payments to Boko Haram via the global banking world? Were bankers on her tail?
No, it was something old. That was the problem with living so long. All you ever did was add to the army of enemies who were pissed off at you. Jesus, she was past forty, having collected fifteen years’ worth of enemies—it could be anybody.
She passed through the market gate, and the crowd, now relegated to the narrow sidewalk, grew claustrophobic along Jordan Road. She’d done it again, been distracted by too many thoughts, and had headed the wrong direction. She ate her last dumpling and turned abruptly around to work her way back against the press of locals and tourists and …
Oh, shit.
There, maybe thirty feet ahead of her, was Mr. Gary Young himself. Dark skin, blunt North African features. Their eyes met, and though he turned to look away in a fluid motion, betraying no surprise at all, they both knew the ruse was over now.
Over the space of the next second, Leticia debated which way to go. Turn back around and run? Where to? If they’d found her here, they certainly knew about the Maai Fei Fat Inn. Mrs. Gary Young might already be there, discovering that Leticia hadn’t left anything in her room, because she’d learned her lesson in Wakkanai. Move forward, and see if Gary ran away? Maybe, but what if he didn’t? Was Leticia ready to deal with whatever he was packing?
As the second ended, she turned back and pushed ahead toward Shanghai Street, where she would head left, across the street, and work her way toward China Ferry Terminal to find out what bus or boat could take her where.
It was a plan, and not a terrible one—a doable one—but it quickly fell apart when she saw Mrs. Gary Young not ten feet ahead of her, wearing a baggy jacket, the kind women wear to hide curves or small armaments.
Leticia spun left and threw herself into the six-lane road, a wail of horns and bumpers bearing down on her as she sprinted toward the other side. A truck nicked her left heel, but she let the force of it spin her 360 degrees and just kept going, hopping over the potted plants in the median and galloping through gridlock on the other side.
A quick glance back told her that the surprise of her escape hadn’t done much to help her. The missus was jumping down from the median, while her old man was halfway across the far lane.
No worries. She pounded down the sidewalk, around the corner 7-Eleven, and went at full speed, swerving into the road to avoid the slow-moving crowds. Bookstores and clothing outlets and aromatic restaurants and parked scooters flashed by, and when she eventually turned right on Austin Road her lungs were on fire. At the next corner she snuck another glance and saw that both of them were still there, maybe five stores back. And they didn’t look like they were hurting. She was only halfway to the terminal. She wasn’t going to beat them to it.
So she ran past three narrow storefronts and leapt into the alleyway next to the brick façade of Park Tower. She threw her back against the filthy wall and swallowed air. When they emerged onto Austin, in her direction, they would be faced with two possible routes—one down Austin, passing her alley, the other across the street and up Scout Path. They would have to either make a decision or split up. This was her Hail Mary pass.
She still held the crumpled paper plate and chopsticks; she dropped the plate and gripped the sticks in her fist, watching the alley’s opening, waiting.
How much time passed? She didn’t know. Just as she had fit an entire argument into one second of panic outside the Temple Street Market, the adrenaline that sustained her warped time, and it seemed as if she stared at the alley’s opening forever, the sticks gripped in her sweating, trembling fist, watching locals saunter by, the tangle of their Cantonese like unsettling music to her ears.
Then Mrs. Gary Young, one hand beneath her oversized jacket, stepped into the opening and looked to the right, directly into her face. Leticia’s fist was already swinging sharply toward the woman’s throat, and it was a testament to her training that the woman parried Leticia with her wrist at the same moment she removed a small automatic from her jacket. As it rose—time, again, was so damned slow—Leticia kicked high at the gun arm, hitting the woman’s elbow hard; the elbow cracked, but the woman’s face didn’t betray any pain. The missus couldn’t, however, seem to point her gun anymore, and she looked surprised by this fact. She tried to grab the gun with her other hand, but Leticia was already back: One hand caught the woman’s free hand while the other swung the chopsticks at her neck.
Then three things happened at once: Leticia’s chopsticks struck the underside of the woman’s chin, knocking her head back and piercing deep into the soft flesh; Leticia pulled Mrs. Young’s wrist up and back, knocking her against the wall; and the woman’s gun hand twitched, pulling the trigger and firing once, wildly, into the alley. At the sound of the shot, people jumped and ran. The woman, now run through, perhaps to her brain, slid down the wall. Blood was everywhere, pumping out of her neck. Someone screamed. Leticia removed the pistol from the limp hand and patted at the jacket until she found something hard. Inside pocket: a phone and a clip of cash and credit card. She pocketed it all and peered out to Austin Road. Gary himself was running toward her at full speed, pistol in his fist, veering around cars, eyes full of malice.
Without thinking any further than the next moment, Leticia rose and pointed the pistol at him. Instantly, he threw himself to the side, behind a slow-moving car, and Leticia turned and ran
up the alley. The sight of her pistol terrified shoppers, who crouched against the wall and put their arms over their heads, waiting for her to pass. When she heard the gunshot, it sounded like it was very far away. But the bright, burning pain in her left arm was right there, right on her. She nearly dropped the gun, but quickly caught it with her other hand and took the next corner.
Keep moving, baby, she told herself.
13
After the long flight from New York to Berlin, he was struck by the anticlimax of standing at the curb of Tegel Airport, chilly under the muted afternoon sun. When the black BMW finally pulled up in front of him, he’d spent twenty minutes watching taxis and families pick up other arrivals, trying not to fall asleep. He put his hands on his knees in order to look through the rear window and found a small, pinched face and toothbrush mustache glowering back at him. He hadn’t seen Oskar Leintz in three years, and that had been for the funeral of his boss, Erika Schwartz, director of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, Germany’s federal intelligence agency. Three years, and it still didn’t feel like long enough.
“Not dead yet?” Oskar asked in his thick Leipzig accent.
“I can never tell one way or the other with you,” Milo answered.
The driver, a woman with a severe bob and lavender lips, smiled with her eyes.
“Inside, Milo.”
Milo reached for the door handle to get in and join him, but it was locked.
“The front!” Oskar called, and Milo found the passenger door open. He got in, sinking into the musty warmth, and the woman began to drive very slowly. “You could thank us,” Oskar said after a few uncomfortable seconds. “A civilian like you, a UN bureaucrat? I don’t have to meet you at all.”
Milo might have shown some appreciation, but he and Oskar had never liked each other. Oskar considered Milo an entitled American, while Milo couldn’t quite forgive him—or Erika Schwartz—for their first meeting, a decade ago, when they had tortured him. He knew it was pettiness, but still.
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