But was he making the right move? What if Sofia Marinov showed up as soon as he drove off? He guessed they would sit watching her until, eventually, they gave up on him and put Sofia Marinov into the back of their car.
He stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, then turned to look behind himself. No one had left the bar yet. The light changed, but he didn’t cross; instead, he turned back and took a position at the corner of the apartment block, leaning against the wall and lighting one of Usurov’s Marlboros. In this area of town, there was nothing strange about an old man smoking on a street corner, waiting on nothing in particular.
It took ten whole minutes and two cigarettes for it to occur to him that something was indeed wrong. Sofia Marinov had not arrived, but two more men had. Hands shoved deep into their bomber jackets, so like the others’, they’d looked around as they went into the bar. No one came out. Then his phone rang. He checked—it was Marinov’s number.
“Are you lost?” asked Sofia Marinov.
“Um, running late. You said La Bohème, right?”
“Yes. The corner of Nakhimovsky and Profsoyuznaya.”
“Are you there?”
A pause, then: “Yes, I’m there.”
A chill went down his spine as he imagined her in some small room with more of those guys in bomber jackets, maybe tied up, the phone held to her ear. He said, “Five minutes,” and hung up. He pocketed the phone and hurried away, not waiting for the light to cross the big road and find his car. His mind whirred away, thinking through what they knew. They had his phone number, which meant they had his name. Which meant they had his car tags and, probably, his location. How did they not know his face yet? Luck, probably. Sometimes you got it.
So. What to do?
Shed everything.
He halted a couple of meters from his car and looked around. Up Profsoyuznaya, he saw the red M of the metro. Behind him, the door of La Bohème opened and one of the bomber-jacketed men stepped out to light a smoke.
Leonberger walked toward the metro station and disassembled his phone, pocketing the pieces. He didn’t look back again—that bar was dead to him now—and trotted down the stairs to take the long, narrow tunnel back again to the Profsoyuznaya subway platform, passing old grannies and chattering children as he wondered where he’d made his mistake. Had he made a mistake? Maybe this was a trap that had been laid last month, as soon as they killed Anna Usurov. Kill her and wait for people to come ask questions.
He needed to get out of town. South, ideally, to Bryansk, where he knew steelworkers who would keep him safe for a while. Long-term plans were beyond him; he only needed to find a place to hole up.
He caught the southbound train, which would take him to the end of the line at Novoyasenevskaya, where he would hustle over to the Butovskaya line at Bitsevsky Park, then ride to the terminus at Buninskaya Alleya. A lengthy walk north to the MSK rental desk, and with luck he’d be driving down the Ukraine Highway by five o’clock.
Easy, right?
It seemed so. He made the transfer to the Bitsevsky Park station, where a colorful mural of people with horses stared down at him, and by the time he reached Buninskaya Alleya he was quite sure that no one on his train was even aware of his presence. It wasn’t even ten-thirty yet, and he walked the half hour to the MSK desk without breaking a sweat. There was the pleasant stretch of green beside the highway, then the forest of tower blocks that reminded him of his youth, of growing up in concrete suburbs that, back then, were new and exciting and devoutly Soviet. Now they were how everyone lived in a city that had burst out of its seams and spilled all over the neighboring countryside. He picked up a bottle of Borjomi water from a kiosk and offered a Marlboro to an attractive woman buying a magazine. She laughed but otherwise ignored him. He didn’t care. The sun was bright over Bulevar Admirala Lazareva, and he was almost out of Moscow.
He had to wait behind an out-of-towner with a Petersburg accent, but not long, and the clerk who served him, a girl in her twenties, found him another Volkswagen Golf. When she asked, he lied, telling her he would be taking it to St. Petersburg. He hesitated when she asked for his papers, but only briefly, and as soon as she typed in his information he began running a mental clock. How long before that information was processed through the system and available to whoever was looking for him? Because he had to assume they were government. If they weren’t, then he had nothing to worry about, but it paid to assume the worse.
He was behind the wheel by eleven-thirty, and he drove back down Admirala Lazareva, passing the towers full of families. Ten minutes later he was on the Ukraine Highway, plotting where he would exit to reach the smaller access roads. He was fine. Everything was fine.
Then he heard the siren and saw the lights. A militia car was speeding up the highway from behind. He pulled to the slow lane to let it pass, and caught his breath when it pulled up beside him. There were two cops inside, and the one in the passenger seat—just a kid, really—pointed at him and signaled for him to pull over.
Leonberger smiled grimly at him, understanding everything.
The people after him were not private individuals; they were representatives of the Kremlin. When they took him away, he understood, he would never see the outside of his cell. He would not be told why—even his curiosity, by now raging in him, wouldn’t be satisfied. By now they would have taken a hard look at his bank accounts, and someone would have noticed some funny little Swiss account that he’d unadvisedly tapped a couple of years ago to put a down-payment on his overpriced apartment in Arbat. And of course by now they’d noted Elena and Nadia. Of course they had. Which meant they had something to hold over him.
He’d spent his whole life serving these people, and when power changed hands he’d endeavored to maintain his loyalty. But they’d changed too much, and he’d done the best he could and still failed. No, he didn’t want to pull over and let those children in their uniforms take him away.
He smiled and nodded at them but pressed hard on the accelerator. He could see the young cop shouting. The little boy’s window was down now, and his red face puffed up as he shouted and pointed. Leonberger gave him a wink, then turned sharply left, colliding with the police car at high speed. The cops spun off to the left, out of his field of vision, but so did he. The little Golf skidded and, as he tried to regain control, it hit something in the road and flew through the air, high and true, spinning.
26
When Milo woke, cotton mouthed and weak, he was surrounded by women. Tina and Stephanie and, behind them, Alexandra and Leticia Jones—who, it turned out, hadn’t been a fever dream. He should have been surprised, but this somehow felt right, that all of them would be there. His head hurt, but the pain had been pushed some distance away by whatever drugs he’d been filled with.
“Hey,” he said, and smiled.
“Dummy,” said Tina.
Stephanie shot her a look. “Mom.”
“He promised he’d stay out of trouble. Milo, you promised.”
Alexandra pressed forward. “How are you?”
“I hurt.”
“Good,” Tina said, then leaned close and kissed his forehead.
“Leticia,” Milo said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be nice to me,” Leticia said. “If it wasn’t for you, I could have gotten her. Now I’m stuck here, watching over you and your family.”
“You don’t need to,” Alexandra said over her shoulder. “We have people.”
“Then why weren’t they waiting at the airport for him?”
Gradually, that mellow feeling of being surrounded by women faded. He was having trouble keeping track of the back-and-forth, and when the doctor came and told them to keep it down it felt like protection. Only Stephanie remained above the fray, gripping his hand and looking silently at some point over his head, her mind moving through whatever emotions were taking hold of her. He squeezed her fingers and gave her a smile that she returned, but sadly.
The doctor explained what everyo
ne else already knew—he’d been poisoned with aconite.
“Wolfsbane,” Stephanie blurted. “It’s what they used to kill Emperor Claudius.”
“We were lucky to discover it,” said the doctor.
Once the doctor had checked his vitals and proclaimed that he would live, Alexandra followed her out to take calls, and Leticia went to the chair to watch over him from a distance.
“You going to tell me?” Tina asked him.
“A woman poisoned me.”
“She told me that,” Tina said, nodding at Leticia. “That’s why she won’t leave the room. But I want to know why. I want to know who she is.”
“Little Miss?” Milo said. “Can you give us a minute?”
“No,” said Stephanie, squeezing his hand tighter. “I’m seventeen, Dad. I’m not a little anything.”
Milo looked to Tina, who arched a brow as if to say, Don’t ask. “Okay, then,” he said after a moment. “She works for my old office.”
“Tourism?” Tina asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought that was history.”
“Apparently not.”
Stephanie shifted, eyes on him, but she didn’t look confused. Just curious.
“Why you?” Tina asked.
“I don’t know.” Milo raised his head an inch to see Leticia looking at her phone. “How did you end up there?”
Not looking up from her screen, Leticia said, “I wasn’t there for you. I was there for her. Then you went and collapsed, and I lost her. Thank you very much.”
“Sorry.”
Leticia shrugged.
To Tina, he said, “She saved my life.”
Stephanie looked over her shoulder at Leticia, her expression softening slightly. She was impressed by Leticia Jones, as well she should be.
“So what do we do now?” Tina asked.
The enormity of what had happened was only now dawning on Milo, though Leticia had seen it immediately. The Department of Tourism had decided to target him, and if the department was half as ruthless as it had once been, then that meant that the full force of the American machine was bearing down on him and would not let his wife and child stand in its way.
“We hide,” Milo said, and in Tina’s face he saw what those two little words meant. Flashbacks to worse times, to paranoia, fear for her child’s safety, and a time when she didn’t completely trust her husband.
Leticia was already standing up, pocketing her phone. “No. We go after them. You’ve got the staff.”
“We’re ignorant,” Milo said, trying to sit up. “All we would do is make things worse.”
She didn’t like that answer, he could tell. Unused energy, a by-product of fury, coursed through Leticia. She wanted an object to point all that energy at. Instead, she pointed at Milo. “You better not get me killed, old man.”
It was a long night. Alexandra called for two nearby librarians—Dalmatian and Samoyed—to take Tina back to the house to choose what couldn’t be left behind, while Stephanie and Leticia remained in the hospital with him. His daughter had questions, and Milo tried to stay awake in order to answer them. It was a strange feeling, opening up to her for the first time about things that she’d never shown an interest in, even though, more than once, they had altered the course of her life. Stephanie listened quietly to it all—Tourism, his secret UN department, working off the grid, gathering intelligence, the Library. “It sort of makes things make sense,” she said.
“What things?”
“You know. Like the guy who shot you.”
She’d been six when a distraught man had arrived at their Park Slope apartment and, in a rush of anger and tears, shot Milo point-blank. “I’m still so sorry you had to see that.”
“I see everything,” she said.
“You do.”
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “Does that mean I should become a spy?”
“Never.”
They discussed the practicalities of going underground. Losing weeks, or more, of school wasn’t a tragedy—Frau Pappan could be talked into some compromise—but Stephanie was more worried about losing her friends, even Halifa. What would they think of her sudden disappearance?
“Why don’t you call them?” Milo asked.
“I can do that?”
“Just don’t tell them what’s really going on. Let’s come up with something better.”
If she didn’t already know, Milo taught her how to lie.
By midnight Tina had returned to the hospital, the back of their Mercedes station wagon so full that the rearview no longer showed the road behind it, and Leticia joined them on the four-hour drive south to Milan, where they maintained an acceptable safe house in Brera. The whole way, Milo remained hunched in the backseat with Stephanie, fighting nausea and trying to keep his eyes open. He was surprised that his daughter had so few concerns. After the initial shock, she seemed to have been energized by this onrush of danger and sudden movement. As if she’d been waiting for something to break through the crust of her boring life. Or maybe Milo was reading her that way because that was how he wanted to see her. Excited, and not terrified.
27
When they arrived at the safe house in the predawn hour, and a dour old Milanese man opened the door for them, Leticia felt a grudging respect for Milo’s organization. Not the details necessarily—as far as she could tell, their security wasn’t much at all—but the unity. Where Tourism, and the life that she’d followed afterward, had been about solitude, the Library felt, even during her short exposure to it, like a team effort. Each person had taken a role without really having to ask Milo what to do, and their roles felt instantly complementary.
Still, though, she searched the apartment and then checked the surrounding streets as Tina helped Milo up the narrow stairs and to bed. The girl, Stephanie, was a surprise. She’d seen kids whose lives had been turned upside down, and more often than not they broke quickly. Mute shock, and then a meltdown. But Stephanie wasn’t in shock. Surprise, yes, but fascinated surprise. When Leticia returned from scouting the neighborhood, the girl asked her if she’d ever killed anyone.
“Yes,” Leticia told her.
“Many?”
“What’s many?”
Stephanie’s wry smile told her all she needed to know about this girl—she was going places.
While the Weavers took the two bedrooms, Leticia lay down in the living room and set the alarm on her phone so she could take twenty-minute power naps. After the second one, which was interrupted by a call from Alexandra back in Zürich, she decided to stay up. With late-morning light streaming in through the lace curtains, she brewed coffee and looked through the meager bookshelves, finding a copy of Dante’s Inferno.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Poor Dante went astray of the straight road. Hadn’t they all?
She heard someone moving in the back of the apartment and stiffened, but when the bathroom door opened and closed, followed by the sound of a man peeing, she relaxed again and waited until Milo stumbled out and headed to the coffee machine. He saw her and smiled.
“How’s the head?” she asked.
“Better,” he said as he poured himself a cup. She waited for him to add some milk, then work his way over to one of the chairs in the living room. He settled in and took his first sip.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he answered.
“Your sister called.”
“Anything?”
“Everyone’s safe. Your … reference librarians?”
“That’s right.”
“Joseph Keller, too.” In answer to his look of concern, she added, “Alexandra filled me in before we left Zürich.”
He looked surprised. “On everything?”
“I think so. Keller is a refugee from MirGaz with a list of international payoffs.”
Milo nodded, apparently accepting his sister’s brea
ch of security.
“She says there’s no sign of anything at your apartment. No one skulking around.”
“There wouldn’t be,” he said. “If they saw Tina packing, they know we’re gone.”
“Alexandra’s wondering if all this is overkill.”
“What do you think?”
“Compared to how we were, back in the day? This is not overkill.”
He nodded, agreeing, then stretched his legs out and yawned. She knew what he would say next, but she would make him ask the question. When he did, though, she didn’t like the way he formulated it: “A week ago you were in Wakkanai, waiting for me,” he said. “Then you’re in Zürich. Are you stalking me?”
“You really think the world revolves around you, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I wasn’t in Wakkanai waiting for a job offer, that’s for damned sure. I was there because I’d gotten a lead from a contact in Tokyo.”
“The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were there to sell them information.”
“It was a trade. My information for theirs.”
“What kind of information?”
She looked at her hands, which still held the Inferno. She tossed it on the coffee table. “Chibok, remember? It bothered me. All those girls, just gone. Forced to convert to Islam, forced to marry militants, forced into slavery. Even after the negotiations and the escapes, there are still more than a hundred unaccounted for. And I’m not just talking about these girls, understand. In 2014 alone Boko Haram kidnapped about two thousand people.”
Milo nodded. Of course he knew this; the UN had stacks of reports on it.
“I wanted to do something,” she said.
“In Japan?”
“I couldn’t walk into the Sambisa Forest, where they had dragged those girls, and singlehandedly rescue each one of them. Now, could I?”
Milo shrugged.
“But others could do it,” she said. “The UK, for example, tracked the Chibok girls soon after the kidnapping and offered to go in and rescue them. Nigeria said no—it was an internal matter. They were afraid, I suppose, of looking weak beside their old colonial masters. As long as the government thought that way, nothing was going to happen. So I saw a possible solution: Convince the government to accept foreign help.”
The Last Tourist Page 16
