“Now it’s we, is it?”
“It’s always been we,” he said.
In Freiburg im Breisgau they stopped at Jacques’ Wein-Depot, where Milo searched the shelves and picked up an expensive bottle of Riesling from the Mosel region; then they entered the Black Forest, where snow-adorned branches closed in around them, dimming their path. As the sun set, they arrived at the small city of Schramberg, cut through with mountain streams, shop windows celebrating its famous Junghans watch factory.
It was an attractive city, but they didn’t linger, instead pushing north, back into the mountains and eventually turning onto an unmarked gravel driveway that snaked at an incline through the trees, lit only by their headlights. Milo drove slowly, foot on the brake, then stopped midway down the winding road when a man stepped out of the snow-covered foliage in a heavy white coat. He held a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun in one hand and showed them the palm of his other. A white coiled wire grew from behind his right ear and disappeared into his collar. Milo rolled down the window, kept his hands visible on the wheel, and waited for the suspicious guard to approach.
In German, the man said, “You took a wrong turn. Back up.”
“Please let her know that Milo Weaver is here.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the guard said, shaking his head. “Put the car in reverse.”
“Tell her Milo Weaver needs to speak with her.”
The guard frowned, seeming very pissed off. “Your name is Milo Weaver,” he finally said, speaking very clearly. “Who is your colleague?”
“She’s my sister. Alexandra.”
“Alexandra Weaver?” the guard asked.
“Jesus,” Alexandra muttered. “We’ve been here before.”
“Alexandra Primakov,” Milo told the guard.
“Alexandra Primakov,” the guard repeated, enunciating each syllable for the benefit of whoever was on the other end of his earpiece. And while that person figured out what to do, the guard held still, his eyes sweeping across the windshield to eye Alexandra, and then he looked behind them, along the driveway, in case they had brought friends. Though of course he would know already, since the woods were littered with cameras. Eventually, the guard lowered the gun to his side and said, “Slowly. If you speed you will be killed.”
Milo rolled up his window and continued around two turns to reach a large wooden house that, in the traditional style, was three-quarters sloping roof. Untraditionally, most of the roof was covered in solar panels, and a pair of spotlights illuminated the parking lot in front.
Two more figures in heavy coats approached their car, a man and a woman, their Heckler & Kochs fitted with forty-round box magazines and long suppressors—he guessed they didn’t want the neighbors to be disturbed by any late-night mass murder. When he and Alexandra got out of the SUV, leaving their pistols behind, Milo grabbed the wine bottle and held out his arms as the soldiers patted them down. They were taken around the side of the house to a door of reinforced steel. The woman knocked, and the door was immediately opened by the white-haired, enormous woman who, many years ago, had been a senior official in the Bundesnachrichtendienst and had, along with her deputy Oskar Leintz, tortured Milo in her basement in Pullach, just south of Munich.
“Milo,” she said, her accent thick and coarse from too much abuse. “You have survived.”
“As have you, Erika.”
Erika Schwartz’s skeptical gaze took in Alexandra for a moment, and she said, “You know, darling, you’re looking more and more like your father.”
Alexandra smiled cryptically.
“Are they here?” Milo asked.
Pointedly not answering him, Erika said, “Is that wine?”
The soldiers sauntered away as Erika Schwartz stepped back so they could enter. That was when Milo noticed she was using an aluminum quad cane, which she hadn’t had back in October, and when they followed her through the narrow dark-wood corridor he saw how difficult walking had become for her. Her weight had always been an issue, but the drinking certainly hadn’t helped.
“Are they here?” he asked again.
“Soon. You can open that bottle in the kitchen,” she said, then led Alexandra into the living room.
Milo searched through stuffed drawers to find a rusting corkscrew and blew out three dusty glasses. When he got to the living room, he found Alexandra standing close to the wall, looking at old photographs as Erika relaxed in her large comfy chair, narrating them. “Helmut Kohl was much smarter than people knew—one-on-one, he was formidable. But, as with any truly intelligent person, talking to the masses was an issue. And there—1969, with Willy. Now that man, he made the SPD.” She shook her head. “And now they’re gone—Willy, Helmut the Older, and Helmut the Younger. And what are we left with? Technocrats.”
“Angela Merkel?” Alexandra asked.
“Ha!” Erika spat, plainly disgusted by the advance of history, so Milo served her the first Riesling, then Alexandra, who sipped it and made a face.
“What’s wrong, dear?” Erika asked. “You prefer red, I suppose. For the heart. Healthy drinking is an oxymoron. Come. Sit.”
“How is your health?” Milo asked.
“My doctor won’t let me eat Snickers anymore. The fascist.” As Milo settled into a stiff chair, she turned to him and changed her tone: “You were right.”
“About what?”
“Katarina Heinold reserved a room in Davos for Thursday.”
Milo sighed, one turncoat patron now unmasked. It was why he’d stayed away from all of them, even Said Bensoussan. “Has anyone questioned her?”
“Not yet.”
“What about Beatriz Almeida?”
“No sign. Yet.” Erika sipped her wine, savoring it. “Foster and Halliwell reserved two rooms in the Belvédère.”
“For Thursday?”
She shook her head. “Apparently they want to attend the Forum itself. My question, however, is: What are you planning, Milo? They’re gathering. Many will be there by Tuesday. Sergei Stepanov, like Katarina and Oliver Booth, arrives Thursday. But I still don’t know what you expect. We cannot tell the Swiss to pick them up, and Oskar is refusing to breach Swiss sovereignty. Where does this go?”
“Did he set up our meetings?”
“Reluctantly. The first one is tomorrow. Britain.”
“I’ll take it,” Alexandra told Milo. “You can stay a little longer.”
“I don’t want you going alone,” he said.
“Poitevin’s already there,” she reminded him. “He’ll back me up.”
“China will be tricky,” Erika said wearily. “We were unable to find Xin Zhu—he seems to have vanished. So we had to settle for a contact in the Second Bureau.”
“Shit,” Milo said, an involuntary snap. “The Second Bureau is in bed with Northwell.”
Erika frowned. “Did you tell us that?”
“I told Oskar,” Milo said, trying not to let his anger take over. “What happened to Xin Zhu?”
“We don’t know. He has gone dark.”
This felt like the worst news of all. Northwell had had three months to decrypt the Library’s files, and while they’d never used Xin Zhu’s name, the Second Bureau could have run down the clues until they found the common denominator. “He might be dead already,” Milo said.
That earned a moment of silence, until Erika showed off a crooked grin, “Or maybe I’ll have to make up a bedroom for Xin Zhu, too.”
What had gotten into the old woman? The Erika Schwartz he’d known, all the way up to her staged death and secret retirement in 2015, had been one of the most reticent people he’d ever met. Gloomy silence, a cutting word, and then an order that had a fifty-fifty chance of spelling Milo’s doom. This Erika was as curmudgeonly as the old one, but she was almost … joyful. Was this what retirement had done to her? Had losing the burden of daily responsibilities changed her that much? Or had she already dipped into today’s bottle of Riesling before they showed up?
“Talk to Oskar about this—he is watching her,” Erika said, then a vague smile entered her face as she watched Alexandra. “So much like Yevgeny.” She held out her now-empty glass. As Milo refilled it, she said, “Do you know why your father invited Germany into the Library?”
Milo knew, or thought he knew, but wanted to hear her opinion on the matter. “Tell us.”
“Because no one trusted him. Iceland, Kenya, Ghana? An old KGB hand asks them to trust him with their money. Promises new levels of intelligence. What would you think? So he came to me. Did you know that?”
“To you?” Alexandra asked; Milo, too, was surprised.
“He understood that even though the Library was to serve marginalized countries, it would never get off the ground if it didn’t have a senior member already committed. At the time, you’ll remember, the Americans had gotten us into Afghanistan and were starting to feed us questionable intelligence about Iraq. So the Library could be useful for Germany as well. That is why I met with Gerhard Schröder and convinced him to help your father. And once Germany was in, the others lined up.” She drank, then pursed her wet lips. “You know, this situation is the same. You are trying to gather countries that do not trust you. They hardly trust each other. You need a senior partner, and as much as it pains me to say it, Germany will not do. If you cannot convince the Americans to join your crusade, then I do not expect the others to commit.”
“We’re working on them.”
“You need to do more than that. China, Russia, Britain—they have listened to all the stories these last three months. While you have been in the desert, Northwell has been spinning tales. That Milo Weaver’s secret intelligence organization is in lockstep with the Massive Brigade. There is evidence, too. Reference points that connect you to those bomb-throwing anarchists.”
“They’re spreading lies to justify going after us.”
“Of course. But the lies are built on known facts. Facts that are not appreciated.” She drank, closing her eyes to better enjoy the flavor, then smacked her lips and said, “There have been sightings. Did you know? Ingrid Parker in Europe. Security agencies on alert. We spotted her ourselves, briefly, in Berlin. There is a photograph of her with one of our own radicals. Everyone is looking for her, Milo, and for you.”
“Germany, too?”
“Looking for you? Of course. We don’t want to let our allies down. Unfortunately, we don’t know where you are.” That crooked smile again. Then it disappeared and she opened her hands. “If you want to survive this week, you must convince America to cooperate.”
“I gave them the whole story.”
“And what do they say?”
“I’ll know on Wednesday.”
She took a deep breath that raised her enormous body a couple of inches, then she exhaled and rubbed the rim of her glass with a blunt finger. “We have done as you asked, Milo. When will you do as we asked?”
“When this is over.”
“You don’t trust us.”
“I can’t afford to,” he said. Whatever history he and Erika Schwartz had, he couldn’t trust that she would follow through on anything after he’d paid for her assistance. She had been waiting, though, for three whole months. She’d sent Oskar to connect with foreign intelligence agencies, convincing them to come to Davos to meet with people they had already been charged with arresting on sight. And by doing so she was risking Germany’s relationships with those countries. So back in October he’d had to promise the only thing he really had to offer: the Library’s collected files, unencrypted.
She finished her glass and held it out to him. Obediently, he filled it. “Now tell me, Milo: What do you think these meetings will accomplish?”
It was a good question, and over the hour it took to finish the Riesling, then open and drain half of another, Erika Schwartz came up with points to consider. For example, they could not simply make a public accusation against the consortium, or against Northwell, because they had no evidence. All they could do was spin a story that had the whiff of bad conspiracy. New World Order. QAnon. George Soros. And, yes, Davos itself. Those stories were always relegated to the darker corners of the internet, where they nurtured their own fringe followings but never—or, rarely—became accepted reality. No—all they had was a scattering of events that, together, looked a lot like Northwell running an illegal army for the benefit of its paymasters, but little tangible to prove it. The through lines connecting the Department of Tourism to Anthony Halliwell and his ex-wife, Grace Foster, and on to MirGaz, IfW, Tóuzī, Salid Logistics, and Nexus, were circumstantial. Not even Leticia’s chain of payments from China to Boko Haram could be used, because it had all been illegally obtained. They had nothing on the fake Joseph Keller who had murdered Kristin and Noah, the New York police had made no headway on Alan’s murder, and Heeler, who had been helping him, had simply vanished. And once Milo disappeared back in October, an anonymous call to Paris police had led to the body of the real Joseph Keller, buried in the suburbs, and the caller identified one Milo Weaver as the killer.
“And we’ll never know what evidence Keller had,” Milo said in despair. “We’ll never know what got him killed. Maybe in those pages there was everything.”
Erika chewed the inside of her mouth, thinking perhaps of her own service’s mistake. If the BND’s irregular had photographed the pages when he’d had the chance in Paris, all of this might have been avoided. Or maybe she was only anticipating another glass of Riesling.
“What we need, Erika, is allies.”
“Allies to do what? Kill them all?”
“Of course not. To stop them. To put them out of business.”
“But how?” she pressed.
Before he could answer, voices grew in the entryway, coming closer. Milo recognized the tones instantly and was on his feet, eyes wet in Pavlovian response, even after three whole months, so that when they appeared in the doorway he was ready for them. Tina was shocked by his sudden tight embrace, a shopping bag slipping from her hand, and Stephanie looked stunned, watching her rough-cheeked, dirty father. She even wrinkled her nose when he grabbed her, but then she started crying.
4
The Spanish doctors had assured Leticia that there was no infection, and while warning her that Dalmatian shouldn’t move too much, they had given her the green light to transport him by car. That worked out well until they crossed into France in their rental and his wound started to bleed again. Dalmatian fought with her, insisting he could make it the whole way, but he was being a fool, and as they passed the snowcapped peak of Le Peuil she spotted him gritting his teeth and clutching wet red hands to his wound. So she’d sped to the next town, Vif, just south of Grenoble, and taken him to the emergency entrance of the Alpes Isère Hospital Center. A befuddled French doctor found the broken stitches and bandaged him up, and when Leticia explained that he’d been impaled on a broken railing in Barcelona the doctor sighed and contemptuously said, “Spain.”
Dalmatian was forbidden from traveling for at least forty-eight hours, and the doctor would only discharge him after Leticia made a reservation at an isolated lodge at the edge of the Parc Naturel Régional du Vercors. In the morning, she stepped outside to survey the grounds of what turned out to be a ranch stocked with horses, mules, rabbits, guinea pigs, goats, ducks, and other farmyard animals. She went for a short ride, taking a beautiful stallion named Deck of Cards up to the edge of town to look out for shadows that never appeared. A little before one, the call came, and she gave Milo an update on Dalmatian. He listened soberly, then told her that the meeting the Germans had set up in Davos was not with Xin Zhu’s people, but with the Second Bureau.
“Shit.”
“Don’t go,” Milo said.
“Maybe they want a new deal,” she said, thinking aloud.
“Or maybe they want to kill us, one at a time.”
Anything, she reflected, was possible. “Either way, I’ve got to get to Davos.”
“Be careful.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
When she came back to the room, she brought Dalmatian food from the kitchen, and he ate ravenously, which was a good sign.
“I gotta go,” she told him.
“Let’s go, then,” he said through a full mouth.
“It’s a six-hour drive,” she told him. “Follow me tomorrow, when you’re ready.”
“And let you have all the glory? Here. Help me up.”
They were in the car within the hour, following signs to Geneva, where they skirted around the edge of the enormous lake and ascended into the mountains. For a long time they were silent—neither was much of a talker—until Dalmatian said, “So what do you think? We making it out of this?”
“Well, I am,” she said.
He grinned at that, then: “There are a lot of moving parts. One or two things go wrong, and this boat sinks fast.”
She looked into the rearview at a BMW that had been around for a couple of miles. “If we see the boat leaking, we know what to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Abandon ship.”
He frowned at her, then peered out at the mountain peaks disappearing into the night. Finally, he shook his head. “Someone has to plug the holes.”
“Look, you’re a librarian,” she said. “You’ve been one a long time. I’m not part of any club—I learned my lesson long ago. I don’t let other people’s mistakes take me out.”
Dalmatian grunted, then turned away and said nothing more.
It had been dark for three hours when they finally reached the Hotel Terminus in Küblis, just north of Davos, and settled into a room with two beds and bare-wood walls. Dalmatian was holding together well, but sitting up for so long had exhausted him. He stretched out on his bed, and Leticia bundled up, went outside, and drove south. It took forty minutes driving through sporadic traffic and two very long, beautifully maintained tunnels to reach the parking lot on the outskirts, beside Lake Davos. In the strobe of passing headlights, she walked along the road and caught a bus down to snow-covered Dorfseeli Park, across from another parking lot with a huge tent where journalists registered their credentials for the Forum. She joined the crowds walking down the Promenade, Davos’s shopping street, past yellow and brown apartment buildings and their brightly lit ground floor shops.
The Last Tourist Page 26
