The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  “I’ll just fly to Milan.”

  “No,” he said. “We don’t need to draw attention to this city.”

  “Oh,” she said, a note in her voice as she got it. “Say hi to the girls for me.”

  She had him. The path to Zürich would take him past Locarno, close enough to Tina and Stephanie to make a visit obligatory. He would leave soon and spend the night.

  As he was looking for milk for his coffee, Noah came in and placed a sheet of paper on the counter. On it was a page from The Punch, a Nigerian daily newspaper, from August 2017.

  NEW RUSSIAN FACTORY PROMISES JOBS was the headline, and below it was a photo of the Nigerian interior minister shaking hands with a man in his forties identified as Yuri Kozlov, regional manager of MirGaz.

  “That’s the land purchase?” Milo asked. “The twenty-two acres?”

  “Forget about the land,” Noah said, and pointed to the Russians and Nigerians crowded in the background of the photo-op. He touched his finger to an old man, sad looking, a big gray face he’d only met once but could still identify immediately.

  “That’s Kirill Egorov,” Milo said.

  “Gold star.”

  They moved to the kitchen table and sank down. “Part of his official duties?”

  Noah shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he was ordered to head south to assist the deal. Happens all the time. Or maybe Egorov was connected to MirGaz in a way we don’t yet understand.”

  Milo sighed heavily. Why couldn’t anything just be simple? He took the information to Keller’s room and found the accountant sitting at the desk with a book, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “It takes me away from here,” Keller said. “Makes all this seem small.”

  Keller knew nothing about Egorov and MirGaz and Nigeria, and his ignorance no longer frustrated Milo—he’d made peace with the man’s uselessness. “I’m going to leave in a while. I’ll be back in the morning. Want me to pick up anything?”

  “Decent coffee,” Keller said.

  Milo grinned. “Thank you, by the way.”

  “For what?”

  “For not going really crazy. I know captivity is hard. But we’re close to figuring things out.”

  Keller shrugged. “Are you really close?”

  “I think so.”

  He closed his book on the bedside table. “Did you want me to look at Anna Usurov’s information? Maybe I’ll see something.”

  “Sure,” Milo said. “That might be helpful.”

  As he left Keller’s room, Kristin waved him over to her computer. She’d done a background check on Grace Foster and laid it all out on a spreadsheet. Born 1974, raised in Minnesota, Vassar College, Harvard Law, divorced, no children, a stint in a Boston firm before a post-9/11 move to Langley for eight years until returning to the private sphere in 2009.

  “What am I focusing on?” he asked, feeling as if the fatigue of so many hours looking at words had made him stupid.

  “Ex-husband,” said Kristin.

  His gaze returned to the marital data and stopped. Married for six years to Anthony Halliwell. Halliwell, founder of Northwell International.

  “Jesus.”

  Noah looked up from his computer and asked something that, in that moment, felt like a non sequitur: “What did Foster do in the CIA?”

  Milo’s eye moved to the relevant paragraph. “OIG.”

  “Office of the Inspector General,” Noah said. “They would have been responsible for getting rid of the Tourism records.”

  “Oh,” said Kristin.

  For a moment, no one said a thing; then Milo looked at Kristin’s screen, searching for something. He said, “Alan told us the files were cleared out in December 2008. Foster resigned the next month.”

  “Wait,” Kristin said, holding up a hand. “Are you suggesting she took the Tourism files and…”

  “… and gave them to her ex-husband,” Noah said. “To Northwell.”

  Milo covered his face in his hands, the world suddenly shifting beneath his feet. Was it really that simple? That clear? The only way to know was to say it aloud and see if Noah and Kristin could poke a hole in it. “This was never about one country reviving Tourism,” Milo said slowly. “Northwell is Tourism. It’s a private enterprise.”

  “An international enterprise,” said Noah.

  Milo felt like he needed to sit, to let the idea sweep over him, but he feared that if he sat down he would never get up. Northwell as the new Tourism. And MirGaz? “MirGaz is its client.”

  “Its patron,” said Kristin. “So is Salid Logistics.”

  “And Nexus?” Milo asked.

  Kristin nodded.

  “And its banker,” Noah said, “is Oliver Booth at IfW.”

  Kristin was pacing, tapping a ballpoint pen against her chin. She said, “If you were running a private army of Tourists, what would you fear most?”

  “The same thing we fear,” said Milo. “Exposure.”

  “But the risk to them isn’t as great as it seems,” Noah cut in. “CIA pays attention to anything that threatens US security. The GRU does the same for Russia. MI6, MSS—all the same. Their operations are spread so thinly across the globe that any single intelligence agency isn’t going to put together the big picture.”

  “Exactly,” said Kristin, excited now. “That’s exactly it.”

  Both men looked at her.

  “National agencies aren’t a threat,” she said. “But if Northwell was aware of the Library—an organization that looks at the world holistically—then we would be perceived as its biggest threat.”

  “You gave the patrons Keller’s names,” Noah said to Milo. “One of them—maybe more than one—passed this on to Northwell. Northwell realized you had Keller, which is why Foster tried to kill you.”

  “I think we know which patron,” Kristin said.

  Milo exhaled. “Beatriz Almeida.”

  It was a lot to take in, and Milo had trouble sorting through the ramifications of it all. He would have to leave it to his two geniuses to distill it all into a report for little minds like his own. He gulped down half of his coffee. He was trembling, but not from caffeine.

  “One more thing,” Kristin said as he gathered his keys. “Outside the US, Nexus is the most popular messaging app in the world. They advertise absolute anonymity. But what if they put in a back door? What if these new Tourists have access to the largest tracking system in human history?”

  “Then we’re fucked,” said Noah, and Milo couldn’t find a reason to disagree.

  38

  “I am from the Guojia Anquan Bu,” the small Chinese woman said, her voice sharp.

  Ted didn’t bother to hide his fat knife, still warm from Leticia’s cheek. “And?” he asked, unafraid. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  What Leticia found shocking about this exchange was that the American acted as if he were the put-upon one, when he was on Chinese territory, faced with the authority of Xin Zhu’s Ministry of State Security. He was either a fool or backed up by some powerful people. The woman said, “She has information we need.”

  That took some of the air out of the American, and he shook his head. “I’ll need her back afterward.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But first I take her.”

  He looked like he was going to fight this, but the woman’s hard stare convinced him to step back and raise his hands, the knife still in one, as if he had nothing to do with Leticia. She approached and looked Leticia over once, seemingly disgusted, then nodded at her two men, who used their own knives to cut her free.

  It was only in the elevator, when the woman made a call, that she began to understand. Leticia made out fragments—

  … can’t be allowed to do this …

  … I don’t care if Wu is allied with—

  Of course not. The plane will leave soon.

  Then they were exiting to the parking garage, hustling Leticia into the backseat of an old Mercedes, the woman joining her. When they drove out to the bright street,
in what looked like the Pinghu neighborhood, the woman hung up and looked at Leticia. “You are stupid, you know?”

  “Am I?”

  “But lucky. Tell Milo Weaver this is what generosity looks like.”

  “You work for Xin Zhu.”

  “I work for China.”

  Leticia looked out the window. “What kind of information do you need from me?”

  “From you?” She barked a short laugh. “You have nothing for us. Milo Weaver already gave it to us.”

  Now she understood—Milo had traded to get her out of China. She couldn’t help but appreciate that. “Why are you letting Northwell walk all over you?”

  The woman crossed her hands over her knee, considering her answer. “Northwell has friends in the Foreign Bureau.”

  Of the many Chinese bureaus, the Second Bureau, aka the Foreign Bureau, was a good place to invest in friends. “Come on,” Leticia said. “You’re the Sixth Bureau. Nobody fucks with you.”

  A faint smile passed across the woman’s face, then disappeared. “These days the Central Committee is more enamored with the Second.”

  Realpolitik, Leticia thought, and in real time. “Can you tell me anything about Tóuzī? What they’re doing on Sakhalin Island? Why they’re messing with Nigeria?”

  The woman tilted her head curiously, then: “On Sakhalin, they are building a new school for Northwell. Those boys who took you are from the local Beijing school. International Defense Institute.”

  “They study hard,” Leticia said. “So arrest them.”

  The woman shook her head but didn’t elaborate. Anthony Halliwell’s Second Bureau friends were really making things hard for the Ministry of State Security. It was difficult to imagine how a Western company in China could be considered more important than the MSS. How much money had to exchange hands for that to happen?

  “You mentioned Nigeria,” the woman said.

  “They’re funding Boko Haram.”

  The woman blinked rapidly, as if the gears in her head had suddenly started moving at light speed. “Where?”

  “Borno district.”

  The woman spat a violent Chinese curse, then, in English: “The pipeline.”

  “What?”

  “CNPC—China National Petroleum Corporation. We are preparing to build a pipeline from Niger to Chad.”

  “And?” Leticia asked, not getting it.

  “Look at a map,” the woman said, her face very serious.

  Leticia sighed, trying to see the map of Nigeria in her head, but they were approaching the airport, and she didn’t know how much time she had left. She said, “MirGaz bought twenty-two acres on the Gulf of Guinea, but not for drilling.”

  The woman waved a hand. “It is the same as on Sakhalin. Training camps. More soldiers.”

  “They’re expanding.”

  “Everywhere,” the woman said as the car approached the terminal. “I believe your friend has your ticket. They are holding the plane for you.”

  “Friend?”

  She rocked her head but only said, “Do you need anything else, Ms. Jones?”

  Leticia grinned. “How about one of those plastic guns?”

  The woman did not find her amusing at all. “Just leave, okay?”

  They let her out at the curb and drove off, but Leticia didn’t fool herself into thinking she’d been left alone. In addition to the cameras, the Guoanbu certainly kept a few full-timers at Pudong International. The Second Bureau, of course, had its own people, too, and all of them, no doubt, watched her search the big hall until she spotted Poitevin leaning against a café counter, lighting up when he saw her. And they certainly took a photo or two as she sidled up beside him and said, “Why the hell are you still here?”

  “I wasn’t going to leave you behind.”

  “I would have.”

  “You’ve been working alone for a long time, haven’t you?”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shook his head. “Come on.”

  They were waved through security, and as they hustled through the terminal Poitevin told her that after calling Milan he’d made it back to the hotel just in time for Xin Zhu’s men to pick him up. Like her he’d been packed into a van, but unlike her he hadn’t been asked anything. Just held on ice for a long time as they drove slowly through town until, finally, his captors received a phone call and brought him to the airport with instructions on which flight to take—Swissair direct to Zürich.

  Once they were seated in economy, Leticia called Zürich and appreciated the relief she heard in Noah’s voice. Milo wasn’t in the office, but he would get word to him. “He’ll be here when you get back,” Noah said. “Stay safe.”

  As they reversed out of the gate, she looked out the window and remembered what Xin Zhu’s agent had said. She pulled up a map on her phone. She found Nigeria and looked around it, to the east, where Niger and Chad lay. She shook her head. Why hadn’t she seen it before? The CNPC’s oil pipeline running from Niger to Chad went right by the Nigerian border—right by Borno State.

  “Disruption,” she said aloud.

  “What?” asked Poitevin.

  She yawned into the back of her hand. Outside, the earth was starting to move. All those girls, their fates sealed by people willing to ravage them in the hopes of disrupting someone else’s oil business. She shook her head. “I thought I was cold. Jesus.”

  39

  He was in a swirl of black and white, of tuxes and gowns and jewelry that half the thieves in Manhattan would have given their right arm just to touch, and a live quartet’s bright classical music that helped everything glitter, yet the only thing Alan really noticed was the skinny man with the sun-dried face who stood awkwardly in a white suit that Penelope had picked out for him. Occasionally the preternaturally tall bankers and financiers stepped up to loom over him and shake his hand and speak rapidly to him before breaking off and returning to their own kind, leaving him again looking entirely out of place, even though, as Penelope had said, all of this was for him.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he saw Heeler’s number. “Hey.”

  “His limo just pulled up.”

  She was stationed outside, on the other side of Fifth Avenue, watching out for Gilbert Powell. “Got it,” he said. “Any sign of others?”

  “Just a bodyguard.”

  “That’s fine. I’m not going to give him trouble. Just need to be available in case he wants to talk.”

  “Well, call if you want backup.”

  “Thanks, Heeler.”

  He hung up and looked around the vast foyer, but Powell hadn’t made it inside yet, so he turned back to the guest of honor. Alan had heard Manuel’s story many times as the plans for the gala had been made in his living room. Manuel Garcia, born in Tamaulipas, had come to America as a child in the seventies, part of the migrant underclass that kept America’s farms working, and when his parents eventually became citizens, he did as well. He also worked the land, marrying and raising two daughters, both in their early teens, and together they would visit Tamaulipas yearly so that his children could see another way of living. The previous summer, his wife and daughters went on their own so he could finish the harvest season, and when they returned his wife’s papers were flagged. She, too, had arrived as a child in the seventies, but her parents had never become legal, and a previously forgotten charge for buying alcohol with a fake ID at sixteen had suddenly appeared on the ICE computer. Manuel’s wife had been redirected to a holding facility in an old Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, and since their daughters were minors they had been detained, too, but elsewhere.

  “They won’t let Manuel speak to them,” Penelope had told him as they dressed for the evening, him pulling on his new jacket. “He can’t afford a lawyer. There’s a pro bono guy down there, and he’s not even sure ICE knows where they are. Can you believe it?”

  He could. And this, tonight, was what it came to: a sad man in an uncomfortable suit whose family had been taken from him.
<
br />   Alan set the glass on a table and headed over to speak to Manuel. If nothing else, maybe he could help the guy relax.

  He was halfway through the crowd when he noticed a tall fortysomething in a blazer and crisp T-shirt talking with Penelope. He stopped in his tracks. Gilbert Powell, who had lunched with Beatriz Almeida and Katarina Heinold and Grace Foster. The man whose social media service, Kristin theorized, gave a new breed of Tourists the power to track almost anyone—a power that in his day Tourists could only have dreamed of.

  As he approached, he heard Powell saying, “The platform is already wildly popular in Costa Rica. I don’t see why we can’t tweak it for the other markets.”

  Penelope looked mildly buzzed, or maybe it was the intoxication of standing so close to a billionaire. She said, “That would be terrific. People like Manuel could get a lock on their families.”

  “Isn’t that the opposite of what you do?” Alan asked, stepping into the conversation. They both looked at him, blank; then Penelope introduced “my husband,” and the two men shook hands. “Alan Drummond,” Alan clarified.

  He couldn’t tell from Powell’s expression if the man knew who he was—how much did they really know about the Library? He only smiled and said, “Sure, our model is anonymity, but it’s a matter of adding a switch in the settings so users can choose to share their locations. We’re working on versions of this. But what’s really interesting is pushing it further—we’ve developed algorithms that can predict location.”

  “Those are in the app?”

  He shook his head. “But they could be added in an update. Imagine—your family can know where you will be at any particular time with, say, eighty percent accuracy.”

  “That’s amazing,” Penelope said.

  “Dictators of the world will be very happy,” Alan said.

  “No,” Powell came back quickly, shaking his head. “You misunderstand. This wouldn’t be automatic, and if it were added you would choose who has access.”

  Alan didn’t trust himself to speak. He felt a strong desire to grab Gilbert Powell and shake him and demand answers. This was out of the question, of course, but the feeling didn’t go away. Powell was connected to a dark, dangerous world that threatened people he cared for, but that wasn’t the only reason. There was also jealousy, seeing the attention Penelope bestowed upon him; was that why he wanted to slap Powell across his smug face? He almost pulled Penelope close, to show his ownership—