The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  “It’s not an option right now, okay?”

  “Bring everybody,” she suggested, obviously reading his mind. “The Wi-Fi here is great.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “You really think we’re safer without you around?”

  She knew the answer to that, so he changed the subject. “How’s Dalmatian treating you?”

  “I don’t think he’s used to being around women; he always looks embarrassed.”

  “But is he being careful?”

  “Very. He confiscated Stef’s phone on the drive here.”

  “She must be pissed.”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  Milo had confiscated her phone plenty of times in the past; he could imagine. “Just a few more days. Then I should have a better idea what’s going on. I’ll come then.”

  “Sure, Milo,” she said doubtfully.

  When he came out to the main room, Noah and Kristin were working opposite each other at a long table, their computers surrounded by printed pages, portable hard drives, and multiple burner phones they’d brought from Zürich. “Anything from our guest?” Milo asked.

  Noah shook his head, only half listening, and Kristin said, “He doesn’t like the coffee. And he doesn’t want to help.”

  “What about Usurov? Still no connections between her information and his?”

  Kristin shook her head.

  “Strange,” he said.

  “More than strange,” Kristin told him. “Why isn’t Diogo Moreira on her flash drive? That was her obsession when she went at Keller.”

  With each new discovery, the questions only seemed to collect. “Give me his list?”

  Without looking away from his computer, Noah held up a stapled copy of Keller’s list. Milo took it to the bedroom, where Joseph Keller was sitting at a table by the window, writing in a notebook.

  “Hey,” Milo said.

  Keller looked over his shoulder and turned to face Milo.

  “Want to go through some names?”

  Keller shook his head. “What did I tell you? I don’t know them. They weren’t part of my job. I dealt with organization-level finances—the macro, not the micro. The question is: When are you going to let me go?”

  Milo had to remind himself that Keller had lived more than a month in captivity. Paris, Algiers, Zürich, and now Milan. He’d twice been smuggled between Europe and Africa. It was only reasonable that he would react unreasonably, his mood swinging from self-pity to anger and vindictiveness. Understanding, though, didn’t make him easier to live with. “We’re all stuck here,” Milo told him.

  “Really?” Keller snapped. “What kind of protection can I expect when you’re too scared to go outside?”

  It wasn’t just the claustrophobia of captivity, Milo told himself. Keller had spent the last month despising himself for leaving his family behind. They were fine—while Leonberger had been unable to get eyes on them, Kristin had tracked down Daniel Keller’s Nexus account and showed Keller that his son was still posting happily about his school days—but that didn’t negate the fact that Keller had abandoned his family. When he snapped at Milo, it was a way to shift the blame elsewhere. Milo understood that, but Keller was close to becoming more trouble than he was worth. Not just him, but his thirty-two pages as well. Nothing in them shed any light on the elephant they were hunting.

  The worst thing, though, was how useless Milo himself was starting to feel. Leticia had flown to Shanghai, where she and Poitevin would follow up on Liu Wei, the developer who signed million-dollar checks for Boko Haram. Alexandra was back in London to run down the UK’s Red Notice against Keller, while Alan was trying to get a handle on the extent of Tourism in America. Kristin and Noah were working to tie together Keller’s list and Anna Usurov’s just-decrypted flash drive. Everyone was accomplishing things, while Milo was stuck protecting an unhelpful and unappreciative man.

  “You know what?” he said, and Keller cocked his head, noting the change in tone. “Go.”

  “What?”

  “You need money? No problem. I’ll ask Kristin to book a plane ticket. Where to? Back to Moscow?”

  Keller’s mouth fell open, and he shook his head.

  “London, then.”

  “Wait,” said Keller.

  Out in the main room, Milo grabbed Keller’s jacket from a wall hook, then opened the lockbox and took out two thick bundles of twenties. Noah and Kristin stared but said nothing. He returned to the bedroom and tossed the money and jacket on the unmade sheets. Keller looked confused.

  “No need to wait,” Milo said. “You’re obviously not happy here.” When Keller didn’t move, he said, “What’s the problem?”

  “You know I can’t go,” Keller said. “They’ll kidnap me.”

  “No, Joseph. They’ll kill you. That’s what they’ll do.”

  Keller sank deeper into his chair.

  “But the question,” Milo said, “is: Who are they? Who wants you dead, Joseph? Because as a result of my decision to protect you, I have to hide out, away from my family, and send my people off on jobs that might get them killed. Did you know that one of my people already died in Moscow, trying to find out what happened to you?”

  Keller looked surprised. “What?”

  “This is no picnic for us either, Joseph.”

  Keller rubbed the side of his neck, as if something hurt. Milo sat across from him on the bed. “If you ever want to get out of this situation, you have to help us. The list you took is so important that people are willing to kill to get it. Russians, Americans. Maybe others. Now they’re trying to kill us, too. If we don’t know why the list is important, then we’ll be stuck in this apartment for the rest of our lives.”

  Keller stared, and for a moment Milo sensed tension. Keller flexed his fists, the tendons in his wrist rising. Then he relaxed and nodded. “Okay,” he said as Noah looked into the room.

  “It’s Alan.”

  Milo followed him out and picked up the satellite phone from the table. “Alan?”

  “It’s not the US of A.”

  There was relief in that news, and as he listened to the story of how the Tourism files had been placed in storage a decade ago, he found himself struggling with the question: If Tourism wasn’t American anymore, then what was it? “What’s your feeling?” Milo asked.

  “My money is on Moscow.”

  “Mine, too,” Milo said. “Particularly after Leonberger.”

  “But it may be more complicated than that,” Alan said, then told him about the influence of Gilbert Powell on the American Red Notice for Keller.

  “Nexus?” Milo asked. “You’re not making this any simpler.”

  “Sorry about that. And to make matters worse, did you see the news from Portugal?”

  Alan told him about the arrest of Diogo Moreira, and together they cursed Beatriz Almeida.

  When he hung up, Kristin handed him a folder of reports. “Preliminary assessments of names.”

  “From Keller’s list?”

  She shook her head. “Anna Usurov’s. I’m building another document from Keller’s list, but it hasn’t led anywhere yet.”

  Milo nodded, weighing the hefty document in his hand, not looking forward to reading it all. “Headlines?”

  “I filtered out the Putin hit-pieces, and a lot of what’s left is obvious—people bribing, people getting paid. What’s weird, though, is that a lot of them seem to be shooting themselves in the foot. Look.” She took the file from his hands and turned to page 16, a single-page report on Philippine shipper Eduardo Ramos, paid 250,000 euros by MirGaz.

  “MirGaz?” Milo asked.

  “Yeah. But Ramos isn’t on Keller’s list, just here.”

  As Milo scanned the page, something nagged at him. Then he saw it: Asia-Wide Transport. “This is the company that went bankrupt after pirates sank their ships.”

  “That’s right. Ramos had hidden the damage from his shareholders, and once it became clear the company was tanked, he came
to the table with a buyout offer from Salid Logistics.”

  “From Oman,” Milo remembered from his time drinking in Manila as Typhoon Mangkhut raged outside.

  “Exactly,” she said. “The shareholders had no choice but to accept the offer, and Eduardo Ramos was hired by Salid Logistics to run their Western Pacific region. Essentially, he got a bigger job after ruining Asia-Wide.”

  Milo frowned, trying to see how everything connected. MirGaz pays a Philippine shipper to … what? Hide the damage pirates were doing his company? That would only make sense if MirGaz then swooped in to buy them out. But they hadn’t; Salid Logistics had swooped in. “What does Sergei Stepanov have to gain from this?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “Could Stepanov have been paying Ramos to do something else? Something we don’t see?”

  “Maybe,” Kristin said, “but for a quarter million I’d expect to find something that benefits either MirGaz or Russia in a big way. MirGaz doesn’t ship anything down there. There’s nothing.”

  “Are there a lot like this?”

  “Enough of them. It’s creepy. Now look here.”

  She turned to page 30 in the dossier: In 2017, Skorost Endeavor, a Singapore-registered shell company that Noah had identified as a cutout for MirGaz, had bought twenty-two acres in Lekki, Nigeria. “This parcel of land is right on the Gulf of Guinea. Beachfront property in the free trade zone. MirGaz walks in and, with government approval, purchases half a kilometer of waterfront property.”

  “Oil?”

  She shook her head. “They haven’t filed for drilling rights, even though the Niger Delta is peppered with rigs. No one knows what’s going on at the site. But what’s interesting,” she said, turning to the next page, which was a photostat of a patent application with drawings of cylinders and propellers, “is this. Skorost bought this patent back in 2015.”

  “What is it?”

  “An industrial-sized drone with some new kind of propeller. Look here.” She pointed to a column on the top right, listing Nexus Technologies as the primary applicant for the patent.

  Milo rubbed his face, thinking back to Alan’s intelligence on Gilbert Powell, founder of Nexus. “So MirGaz and Nexus are using the same cutout. One for beachfront property in Africa, the other for patents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other companies using Skorost?”

  “Not many,” she said. “MirGaz, Nexus, the shippers from Oman—Salid Logistics—”

  “Tóuzī?” he cut in, remembering Leticia’s investigation.

  “Yes, actually. They used Skorost for a land purchase on Sakhalin Island.”

  “Okay,” Milo said, and for the first time in a while felt like things might be coming together. They were dealing with transactions on a global scale, run through a handful of cutouts like Skorost. It was a start. “Fill in Leticia—she’ll want to know about Tóuzī and the Nigeria angle.”

  “I did that hours ago,” Kristin said, making him feel even more useless than before.

  To his surprise, Milo found Keller still at the desk, but now looking over his list, carefully going through names. Discarded on the bed was the notebook he’d been scribbling in earlier. He’d been drawing caricatures of Milo, Noah, and Kristin. They were very good.

  “Do you have something?” Milo asked.

  “No,” Keller said. “But I’m trying.”

  “Thanks.” Milo sat on the bed. “Tell me—have you ever heard of Skorost Endeavor?”

  Keller furrowed his brow. “Skorost? What’s that?”

  “A Singapore-based company doing things for MirGaz, Nexus, and a couple of other companies.”

  “Nexus? You mean the social media company?”

  “Yes.”

  “But my kids use that.”

  Milo raised his hands. “I don’t know what it means, but both companies are using Skorost. Nexus for patents, and MirGaz is buying land in Nigeria. Any idea why?”

  Keller shrugged. “Oil?”

  “Maybe, but they haven’t asked for drilling rights. Not yet, at least. We’re also finding MirGaz is paying out money that seems to benefit companies that MirGaz has no stakes in. Oman, for instance. A shipping company called Salid Logistics.”

  Keller thought a moment. “Where did you get this?”

  “From someone who was collecting information for years.”

  “Who?”

  “Anna Usurov,” Milo said.

  Keller’s face stuck, the muscle in his jaw tightening, and Milo feared the memory of that night at the Moscow Ritz might throw him into another funk. After a moment, Keller whispered, “But she’s dead. Isn’t she?”

  “We found her research.”

  Keller only nodded.

  “Why would Sergei Stepanov pay out this kind of money to benefit other people?” Milo asked. “What’s the connection?”

  Keller looked down at Milo’s fist, which still clutched Usurov’s information. “Let me see.”

  “Just tell me, Joseph. What’s the connection between Stepanov and Nexus and Salid Logistics?”

  Keller folded his hands in his lap, raising his eyes from the file. “MirGaz is global. Okay? Sergei goes to Davos every year. Drinks with titans of industry from all over the world. They make deals. It gets complicated. You’re just missing the connections. Maybe I can find them.”

  “Poitevin,” they heard, and turned to see Noah in the doorway gripping the satellite phone.

  Milo came over and put it to his ear. “Yes?”

  On the staticky line from Shanghai, Poitevin sounded out of breath. “It’s Kanni.”

  “What about her?”

  “Trouble.”

  30

  Leticia cleared border control at Shanghai Pudong International, which proved that the German passport Milo’s people had scrounged up was good enough to get her into China … but would it get her out once she’d dealt with Liu Wei? A question for later. For now, she sailed through customs and found Poitevin waiting at arrivals, looking small and wired in his heavy coat. She remembered him from Tokyo, hovering on the periphery of her meeting with the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office. When she approached, he said, “Where is your luggage?”

  “They lost it in Seoul,” she said, and saw him relax.

  “I’m looking forward to working with you, Kanni,” he said, using the Library cryptonym Milo had handed her before she left; she hated it.

  As they stood in the taxi queue, the cool night breeze off the Yellow Sea washing over them, Poitevin whispered to her that Tóuzī’s office was located in Lujiazui, on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, where new skyscrapers grew wildly.

  Leticia knew Lujiazui; it was the new China, built up since the nineties to overshadow the old financial district of the Bund, that reminder of foreign domination on the western side of the river. As they climbed into an overheated taxi, her phone rang. It was Kristin, calling to tell her about the link between Skorost Endeavor and four companies: MirGaz, Nexus, Salid Logistics, and Tóuzī. “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “We don’t know. But MirGaz purchased twenty-two acres of Nigerian coastal land using Skorost.”

  “Why?”

  “Again, it’s a mystery.”

  “I’ll put it to Liu Wei,” Leticia said, then hung up.

  As the taxi worked its way north, she gazed out the window at the modern city full of afternoon activity. She’d been to Shanghai plenty of times before—any serious Asia work seemed to bring her through Shanghai’s golden streets—but she’d never loved the place. She’d once spent weeks in Xi’an, inland, and compared to that austerity Shanghai was a gaudy whore that had nothing to do with the Chinese culture she’d been fond of.

  The Mandarin Oriental, a block off of the Huangpu, was right in the thick of the action. They were a quick walk from the Times Finance Center, Foxconn, China Minsheng Bank, Huaxia, and, on the fifth floor of the China Development Bank Tower, Tóuzī.

  “I’m going to need a nap,” she
admitted as they got out. “It was a long flight.”

  Poitevin shrugged. “I’ll look around some more. See what I can find.”

  “Whatever suits you,” she said, then went inside to get her key.

  Her room was expansive, with a view of the Huangpu and the watercraft of the rich lazily floating by. She hadn’t stayed in a posh place for nearly six months, and the sheets reminded her why she missed it: the smell. Large-screen TVs and fully stocked fridges didn’t do much for her, but the smell of overpriced soaps and linens made the cost worth it. “I’ll have you,” she told the enormous bathtub, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of the long flight that she’d been pushing back ever since landing.

  When she woke, it was after midnight, the city now a firmament of lights through the window, and the bathwater had gone cold. Someone was banging on her door. She threw on her robe and found Poitevin in the corridor. Looking at his wild eyes, she first thought he was loaded, but he was only excited. “Yanlord Garden.”

  “What?”

  “Yanlord Garden—that’s where he’s staying.”

  It turned out that Poitevin was less inept than he appeared. He’d left the hotel and headed straight to the China Development Bank Tower, where he’d ridden up to the fifth floor and talked his way inside with a story about scouting investments for a Chinese-American billionaire.

  “Did it work?”

  “No. They’re not interested. I just wanted to get inside and note names and faces. There are only three people in their big office—the secretary, a mainlander who kicked me out, and a Pole named Kowalczyk.”

  “A Pole?”

  “Strange, yes? And lucky—he wasn’t hard to pick out of a crowd. So I waited downstairs for him to leave. Followed him over to the riverside, all the way to the Paulaner Bräuhaus, where he met at one of those wooden tables with…” His dramatic pause was a little too self-conscious.

  “Liu Wei,” Leticia said dryly.

  A big smile. “I had a beer, and when they split up I followed Liu Wei back to Yanlord Garden, West Gate. Huge place.”

  “Do you know which apartment he’s in?”