The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Tell me, Ted. Why is Liu Wei sending money to Boko Haram? How does kidnapping little girls help Tóuzī?”

  Ted shrugged. “That’s beyond my pay grade.”

  She smiled at him. “And here I was thinking you were the captain.”

  She heard movement and looked over to see Patchouli straighten suddenly, put a finger to his ear, and leave the room in a hurry. Ted either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He stepped right up to her, and when he leaned close and gently reached out to her face she steeled herself. With a thumb, he wiped some sweat from her cheek. Very seriously, he said, “Leticia, it’s time to talk. It’s time for you to tell me everything.”

  “I don’t know much, Ted. Remember, I’m stupid.”

  He smiled, then walked slowly around the chair until he had disappeared behind her. “Milo Weaver and the Library aren’t worth dying for.”

  Ted was right. But Ted and Northwell International weren’t worth dying for either. The dilemma now wasn’t how to survive this office. It was how to die with the least amount of embarrassment.

  “So you think you know about Northwell?” his voice said.

  “Sure. Rent-a-soldiers.”

  He leaned close, his breath wet and warm on the back of her ear. “We’re much more than that, Ms. Jones. People hear us coming, they run.”

  She stopped herself from laughing—that was how Tourists thought of themselves, back in the day. “You’re not magic.”

  “Magic,” he hummed into her ear. “Maybe you’ve got some of that black girl magic I’ve been hearing about. Think I’d find some if I—” In a remarkably fast move, he grabbed the hair at the base of her skull, squeezed it tight, and with his other hand brought a knife to rest against her cheek. Her hair follicles ached, and the knife, which was cool at first, quickly warmed to the temperature of her hot skin. He whispered into her ear: “If I dig deep, will I find some magic?”

  Despite her fatalism, and her conviction that she would never leave here, Ted’s ham-fisted threat was disheartening. She could make peace with death, even find some dignity in it, but damn—she really didn’t want this asshole to be the one who finally took her out.

  Then she heard—heard because she couldn’t turn her head to look—the door open and a group of people enter. Among them, she smelled Patchouli. The grip on her head dropped away, and she turned to see Patchouli with two more Chinese men and a Chinese woman, who snapped in Mandarin at the American. Her accent wasn’t easy, but Leticia made out This isn’t your country.

  “Who gives a shit about countries anymore?” Ted asked in English. “Who the fuck are you?”

  35

  Alexandra had to drive north two and a half hours to reach Salperton in the Cotswolds, where Sir Edward Acton lived in semiretirement on farmland that had been in his family for three generations. Lord of the manor, so to speak, though she was struck, as she drove up the pitted, wet road to the mansion, by how the English seemed to take dilapidated as a model design choice. How much would it cost to bring a bricklayer in to fix the crumbling walls and lay down a bit of asphalt so visitors’ transmissions didn’t prematurely expire?

  But it wasn’t an aesthetic choice, not really. It was the fear of having a home that looked new, the fear of looking like new money, a crime far worse than the insider trading Alexandra and her colleagues had defended Sir Acton against those many years ago.

  Though he was in his midsixties, he looked much as he had nearly two decades ago. The only sign of those extra years was the care in his movements. Almost wariness. The same could not be said of his speech, which had become blunter.

  “I didn’t like your defense. I told Freddy as much. Demanded he take you off of the team.”

  This wasn’t news to her. Frederick Berg, the Berg half of Berg & DeBurgh, had passed Acton’s complaints on to Alexandra with one of his Freddy’s-feeling-guilty expressions. Of course, the defense had been a group decision, and Freddy had brought her in at the last moment, but because she was the only woman on the team, Acton had zeroed in on her for blame. “You didn’t serve any jail time,” she reminded him. “We considered that a win.”

  “Some things are worse than jail.”

  They were sitting on the cracked stone veranda, bundled in coats, and a young man in a white shirt brought them biscuits and hot tea that quickly went cold. Their view of the hills was obscured by an ancient barn that had partially collapsed. As far as she could tell, the Actons had no animals. She said, “But you were guilty, Sir Edward.”

  “So?”

  “And you’d done a lousy job covering up for yourself. The only other option was to attack the investigators who’d uncovered it, and TransBank didn’t want to play dirty.”

  Acton shook his head. “What a difference time makes, eh? Manners have gone out the window.”

  “You got off with a fine,” she reminded him.

  “There were protesters.” He pointed. “Right out by the gate. Labour communists. Angry at me for not moving to prison. Did they come after you?”

  She shook her head.

  He frowned as if she’d made his point and said, “It looked bad.”

  She wanted to say, It made you look exactly as you were, but held her tongue.

  “I read your piece in The Telegraph,” Alexandra told him. “About Oliver Booth. You called him a traitor for his position on Brexit.”

  “Oliver Booth was a traitor then, and he remains one.”

  “But he wasn’t the only person in favor of leaving the European Union.”

  “Of course not. But he was one of the few who would willingly take that public position and represent it as the position of TransBank, when he knew Brexit would destroy the company. The shareholders were beside themselves.”

  “Then how did he justify it?”

  “The same way everyone did—invented statistics and made-up facts. But the board wasn’t made up of the rabble, you understand. And Oliver wasn’t some backwoods nationalist. Every year he goes to Davos to brush shoulders with the foreigners. The man made no sense.”

  “You could have voted him out.”

  He rocked his head. “Yes, of course. But we didn’t think the referendum would go the way it did, did we? No one did. And if the referendum failed, we would have had an enormous public fight for no good reason. You see? When the market smells blood, it attacks. No one wanted their shares to plummet.”

  “And then the referendum did pass.”

  Acton rubbed his forehead, now looking as if the years had finally caught up with him. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  He sipped his cold tea. “Many of us wanted to vote him out. Others felt this would be rash. Again, in all honesty, they were driven by short-term fear for their shares’ value. Maybe the effect of leaving the Common Market wouldn’t be as drastic as we’d feared.”

  “Which camp were you in?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, waving it away, and she felt like she had her answer. “The important point is that the effects of the referendum passing were as bad as we’d imagined. Our European clients began pulling out, as did the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese. The UK’s banking laws are some of the most welcoming in the world, and for decades we’ve been the world’s access point to the Common Market. That was going to end, and so they simply moved to the mainland.”

  Alexandra had heard plenty of stories like these. The looming deadline for Brexit, set for the coming March, was like a curtain hiding the future. No one knew for sure what post-Brexit Britain would look like, and there wasn’t a business on earth that liked uncertainty.

  “So,” he said with a sigh, “we finally gathered everyone at headquarters and voted Oliver out.”

  “Really? I didn’t know.”

  He smiled thinly. “No, I’m sure you didn’t. The problem was that we had waited too long. When presented with the vote, he put his lawyers in motion to stall us, and at the same time he presented to the board an offer from a German bank to buy us out.” H
e shook his head. “Germans! Bloody travesty.”

  Alexandra had spent last night looking through all of this and at least had the public history down. She said, “Investition für Wirtschaft.”

  “Investment for Economy,” he translated. “IfW. There was an uproar. Then Oliver produced a preliminary outlook he’d commissioned. At the rate our clients were leaving us, within six months our shares would drop by half. IfW, he told us, did not have access to these numbers, and if we acted quickly they would never see them until it was too late. Either sell now and keep our shirts, or wait and lose them.”

  “And that worked?” she asked.

  “It was close,” Acton said, rubbing his cheek as he remembered. “One-vote margin. Within a month the Germans owned us.”

  “A month? That’s fast.”

  “Indeed. The bastard had been laying the groundwork long beforehand. Within a week he was on the IfW board.” He grunted. “What Hitler hadn’t been able to do by bombing us every day for eight months, IfW accomplished in days, with the help of their own Lord Haw-Haw. If you’ll excuse me.”

  She’d thought he was excusing what he’d called Booth, but he was rising from his chair.

  “Bloody age,” he said, and left her, assumedly to empty his bladder.

  Alexandra gazed out at the barn. The collapsed half looked as if it had been hit by a meteor, but no—it had fallen apart because it had been ignored, the same way people like Acton had ignored the British economy. They hadn’t bothered with the structural supports that kept strangers above water; people like Acton only fretted when the economy stopped working for them and their small circle of friends.

  The thing was, all those backwoods nationalists, the ones he derided—they weren’t stupid. After being ignored for generations, they’d risen up even while the wise men in tweed advised against it. They didn’t vote leave despite the wise men in tweed advising against it but because the wise men in tweed advised against it.

  And now the collapse was gaining steam, and hard truths were coming to light. Men like Acton, once respected on the global stage, were discovering that the rest of the world looked at them the way he looked at that barn—useful not for its structural integrity but for ease of access, for the clout it gave them. Now that the UK economy was crumbling, the world was leaving in a hurry, before the roof collapsed on their heads.

  Why did it never occur to anyone to stay, to raise a fucking ladder and climb up and replace the rotting wood?

  “So you wrote an editorial,” she said when he returned and settled down. “And that’s why you were voted out?”

  Acton shook his head. “No bloody reason to be on the board anyway. Decisions are made in Berlin. Oliver spends half his time there, making decisions for the London office.”

  Alexandra closed her eyes, a thought coming on. Then she opened them. “Tell me—the companies that left TransBank. Where did they go?”

  “To the Continent. I said that.”

  “To IfW?”

  Acton shrugged, eyes big, looking momentarily silly. “Some, yes. That American mercenary outfit—Northwell. That was his oldest client, more than ten years. A few others.”

  “MirGaz?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yes, I believe so.” He thought a moment. “Yes, actually. It was Oliver who had brought both accounts to TransBank in the first place. Them and … what’s that social media company…?”

  “Nexus?” she asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “And then they all went with him to IfW?”

  Acton squinted at her, raising his chin. “Not with, exactly. They moved to IfW after the Brexit vote, before IfW purchased TransBank and promoted Oliver.”

  “All in the space of a month,” she said, “the Brexit vote happens, Booth’s clients move to IfW, and IfW buys out TransBank.” Alexandra was in awe of that timing. Acton, too, seemed stunned, as if this were the first time anyone had laid it out so simply. She looked at him a moment, then said, “Oliver really had been laying the groundwork for a long time, hadn’t he?”

  Manor living had done a job on Sir Edward Acton, distancing him from the realities of the modern world, but it hadn’t quite broken him yet. He sat up and leaned against the wrought-iron table. She finally had his full attention.

  36

  Heeler was one of Alan’s recruits, a thirtysomething Indian-American who had worked for the FBI’s SWAT team until July 2017, when she’d taken part in the well-publicized attack on a Massive Brigade safe house in Watertown, South Dakota—an attack that had gone pear-shaped quickly, resulting in the deaths of nine young people. She’d watched all this with growing disgust, blaming herself for taking part in the raid, and after six sessions with a Bureau therapist decided to resign.

  Alan had gotten her name while at dinner with an old colleague who had entered the Bureau with the new administration. He was a weathered Army veteran who had brought up Heeler in the most scathing terms. “What’s this new breed? Who do they think they are? In my day, you put your nose down and you marched. These days—if I give them orders they’ll have to clear it with their shrinks first!”

  Unlike his old colleague, Alan had a more complex view of the Watertown raid, and the idea that someone had made the hard choice to leave her chosen career was a sign of rare independence in a section devoted to unblinking compliance. So he tracked her down at a job fair in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they spoke for an hour. He probed her psychological and ideological framework, slipping in the interview questions Alexandra had developed years before. Satisfied, he’d given her a phone number to call. “Wait,” she’d said. “I don’t know who you are. Who do you work for?”

  “Everyone,” he’d said, using the reply that he’d grown fond of even if it was wildly inaccurate. “I work for everyone.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that if you’re interested, you’ll call that number.”

  A week later, she had, and she now moved fluidly across the continent, taking care of the intricacies of working for everyone.

  Alan was last-minute shopping for a new jacket to wear that night to the Met when, around two, Heeler called. “Big lunch at Sardi’s, private room in the back,” she told him.

  “How big?”

  “Five including her. I sent in photos.”

  “Do we know names yet?”

  “Other than Almeida, I recognized Katarina Heinold and Gilbert Powell.”

  Portugal, Germany, and Nexus Technologies? “Did Katarina look like she’d been convinced of anything?”

  “No idea. But there was a lot of hand-shaking.”

  “I don’t like this,” Alan said.

  “You don’t have to. I’m staying with Almeida.”

  Alan sent a request for Noah to forward Heeler’s photos to him once everyone had been identified, and by the time he had paid for his new blazer and found a taxi on Fifth, his phone pinged with the photos of the sidewalk outside Sardi’s. There was Beatriz Almeida chatting with Gilbert Powell, then Katarina Heinold alongside a woman in a faux-fur coat and glasses, who Noah had ID’d as Grace Foster, a former CIA administrator. With them was a well-dressed and tough-looking man in sunglasses who was “unidentified”—a bodyguard, maybe, or even a Tourist.

  Alan called Milo, and as he talked through the photos, Milo pulled them up in the Milan safe house. “Look, I’m going to see Gilbert Powell at Pen’s event tonight.”

  “He’ll be there?”

  “Signed on last minute. I don’t know if he just happened to be in town, or if it has to do with me. I suppose I’ll see.”

  “Careful,” Milo said, then: “Oh.”

  “What?” When Milo didn’t answer, Alan said, “Everything all right? Keller okay?”

  “Yeah,” Milo said, his voice oddly subdued. “It’s not that.”

  “Well?”

  “This photo,” Milo told him. “Grace Foster.”

  “What about her?”

  “That’s Jane, the woman
who poisoned me. Or Joan, who tried to recruit Leticia for Tourism.”

  Alan felt a cold tingle cross his scalp. He wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Really, Alan,” he finally said. “Be careful tonight. Keep Heeler around you.”

  “Yeah,” Alan said. “Good idea.”

  37

  Alexandra was talking, but he was having trouble listening. He kept turning to the screen of his laptop, where Grace Foster stood outside Sardi’s, smiling, with Gilbert Powell. But he couldn’t focus on that either, for he was worried about Leticia. Finally, he walked over to the kitchen, the phone pressed hard to his ear, and started a pot of coffee. “Sorry, Alex. Say it again.”

  “Okay,” she said, then took an audible breath. “Oliver Booth campaigned for Brexit, knowing what it would do to his company, and when Brexit passed he convinced his big accounts, MirGaz and Northwell and Nexus, to move to IfW. Got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, once the bank was in trouble, he brought in IfW’s offer to acquire TransBank. He painted the board into a corner and gave them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Now Oliver Booth is running TransBank from his IfW office in Berlin.”

  Milo was back now. “That’s what happened with Asia-Wide and Salid Logistics.”

  “Exactly what happened. But instead of Brexit, it was piracy.”

  “Pirates who never took anything.”

  “Sure,” Alexandra said. “And guess where Salid Logistics banks.”

  “IfW.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay,” Milo said, then sighed.

  “What?”

  “There’s something else.”

  He told her about Grace Foster meeting with two of their patrons, along with Gilbert Powell. Foster, once of the CIA, who had tried to kill him on a plane flight to Berlin and tried to recruit Leticia to join this new outfit called Tourism.

  She exhaled loudly. “Alan said the Agency hadn’t started up Tourism again.”

  “Maybe he was wrong,” Milo said. “Catch a morning flight to Zürich, and I’ll pick you up.”