The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  I just stared at her, unsure what to say. She’d turned the conversation around, made it into a discussion of profit and loss. “Wait,” I said. “This isn’t just about Nexus. Are you going to tell me Northwell’s yearly profits are too good to step on?”

  “We can talk to Northwell back home,” Mel said from her corner. “That’s not a problem.”

  “And what? Ask them to cut it out?”

  “Maybe we absorb them,” Sally said, but I didn’t know if it was a real idea or if she was just thinking aloud.

  “Don’t you just want to go home?” Paul said with a sigh. “Come on, Abdul. Think about Laura and Rashid. None of this is really your concern. It’s not your world.”

  He was lying, even if he didn’t realize it. This was my world, but I hadn’t figured that out until now.

  Everyone jumped when the ding ding of a ringing phone filled the room. It was mine. From my pocket I took it out and saw an unfamiliar Swiss number. I looked at Sally. “You’ll probably want to take this.”

  11

  Milo was idling in front of a BMW dealership on the north end of Davos, at the intersection of four different roads. If they traced his location, he could quickly drive down endless side streets to avoid easy capture. One of the burners he’d picked up on the drive from Schramberg was pressed to his ear, and it rang four times before a woman answered with a hesitant “Hello.”

  “This is Milo Weaver,” he said. “To whom am I speaking?”

  A brief pause; then she said, “You can call me Sally.”

  “Hello, Sally. Is Abdul with you?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And so you know everything now,” Milo said.

  “Everything is a big word,” Sally told him, warming to the conversation. “What we know is what you wanted us to know. To claim we know everything would be silly. Why don’t we meet in person and discuss this more?”

  Milo imagined taking a flight to Washington and heading to Langley and … “You’re already in Davos?”

  “The Congress Hotel. If you like, we can come to—”

  “May I speak to Abdul?”

  Another brief pause, then: “Sure.” He heard the hiss of background noise. He’d been put on speaker.

  “Abdul?”

  Abdul’s tight voice said, “Hey, Milo.”

  There was something wrong. “Did you explain it all?”

  “Yes. They also have the recording.”

  “And what do you think?”

  There was silence for a moment, just the quiet hiss, and Milo imagined some sign language between Sally and Abdul and whoever else was in the room. “They’re weighing cost and benefit,” Abdul said.

  “How are we doing?”

  “Not well.”

  A man’s voice said, “Come on, Abdul.”

  “Maybe,” Sally said, “we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe you should tell us what you have in mind.”

  Milo hesitated, watching bundled couples pass along the sidewalk. Traffic chugged along, but no cops, and no one looked too hard at the car idling in front of the BMW dealership. “First,” he said, “I’d like to know how much you already knew. You sent Abdul to find me, when his brother was working for them. That wasn’t a coincidence. Therefore, you were either already investigating Northwell, or you were working with them.”

  “Why would we work with Northwell?” Sally asked him. “They are anathema to American national security.”

  “Because you thought you could control them.”

  “No,” she said definitively. “In fact, we believed you were running all this. We believed Haroun Ghali was one of your librarians. We believed it was some unholy alliance between your organization and the Massive Brigade. The question we asked was: Why? Why would someone who was once a steadfast Agency officer take his skills to the dark side?”

  “You should ask Grace Foster that question.”

  “I’m sure we will.”

  “Tell me this,” Milo said, eyeing an old woman with a shopping bag. “Has any of my story come up false?”

  “Well, we haven’t had a lot of time to dig into it.”

  “You’ve had long enough to catch any whoppers.”

  “No,” she said. “No whoppers.”

  “Tell him,” he heard—it was Abdul. “Just tell him, for Christ’s sake.”

  The other man said, “Shut—” and the static disappeared; Sally had taken the phone off speaker.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Milo asked. “Something about cost and benefit?”

  He heard Sally give a little breathy laugh of impatience. “I think you understand, Milo.”

  And then he did. It was what Erika had said—why should Germany bring down one of its major banks if the US wouldn’t go after two of its largest companies? “But unless you do something,” he said, “Nexus and Northwell will continue to undermine national security.”

  “We’re just trying to understand before we commit ourselves.”

  “You’re not going to help, are you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can offer you fifteen years of intelligence files.”

  “The Library’s?”

  “Yes.”

  He heard the sound of a body moving, fabric against fabric; then Sally said, “If we help, it won’t be for the Library’s files. It will be for better reasons.”

  “Better?” he asked, surprised by how unenticing that amount of intelligence was to her. Was she really not interested? Or was there some way that not helping was more beneficial? Was she—

  Oh, shit, he thought, then said those words aloud.

  “Milo?”

  He felt stupid. He felt like the innocent in this conversation, which was not how any spy ever wanted to feel. This was never going to work, he realized. “The only way you would turn me down is if you had a better source of intelligence that would be harmed by helping us.”

  “Elucidate,” Sally said calmly.

  “Something very good,” he said. “Like, twenty-four-hour surveillance of one-seventh of the world’s population.”

  Sally didn’t say a thing.

  “How long have you been in bed with Nexus? How long has their app been your eyes and ears?”

  Her continued silence was a clear reply. The CIA had made a deal with Gilbert Powell, probably years ago. Of course they wouldn’t give that up. Not even to stop a rogue army of killers.

  Milo hung up.

  It had gone off the rails so quickly, and he remembered Leticia’s worries when she’d called earlier. She’d been right; this whole plan was held together with Elmer’s Glue and Band-Aids. He put the car in gear and drove out of town, and when he called Leticia she was in Küblis, night-jogging. “I still think it’s crazy,” he said. “But okay. Do it.”

  “America not coming through?”

  “No.”

  She either sighed or gasped from the exertion. “All right, then.”

  “Dalmatian up to it?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Always am,” she said.

  12

  In the morning, Leticia left the car with Dalmatian and took the train to Davos Platz, and during that ride she sent a message to Chen with the original location for that night’s meeting. In Davos, she walked the same path she’d followed before, up Talstrasse and then Kurgartenstrasse, but continuing past the Vaillant Arena. To her right, a media village had been set up in Davos Park, and journalists lined up to have their Dorfseeli Park credentials checked and their bodies scanned before crossing into the secure area. Police and soldiers were everywhere, along with the rooftop snipers, all watching over the foreigners who had invaded this provincial little town.

  At the top of the hill she faced the white, ornate monstrosity of the Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvédère and its long line of flagpoles displaying the colors of ten nations. After a hundred and fifty years, it trumpeted its famous guests—Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Arthur Conan Doyle—
and each year that list grew. The large front lot was full of limousines and expensive sedans, electric cars, and porters who looked calm but, to her jaundiced eye, were clearly ready for a breakdown. She passed through them without notice, headed inside, and looked around the busy lobby. Businesspeople from around the world stared at their phones or stood in private circles laughing. It had the feel of controlled chaos, which, it struck her, the Swiss were very good at.

  As she waited for a free spot in the bar that overlooked Davos through high windows, she kept her head held high, trying to see and be seen. But she recognized no one.

  She camped out for an hour and a half, working her way through two almond milk lattes and a small plate of almond cookies, reading news off her phone and learning more about the day’s Forum panels—climate leadership, cybersecurity, the beginning or end of globalism, AI, the EU and the future of the transatlantic alliance, Venezuela, creating jobs for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and even the epidemic of loneliness. And the guests: the presidents of Afghanistan and Rwanda, the Jordanian prime minister, Germany’s federal chancellor, the Saudi finance minister, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, and private equity giants. She’d been in plenty of important cities over the space of her career, but it struck her that if someone were to place a nuclear device in this little Alpine town during this week, it would have a bigger effect on the world than placing one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  She was watching a live special address by António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, wondering if he even knew what had been happening in Milo’s secret corner of UNESCO, when a female voice said, “Hello, Leticia.”

  She hesitated before raising her head, knowing that the lag would make her look suave and mildly uninterested, but in fact it was a way to prepare herself for what, if she were being honest, she didn’t want to see. And there it was: Grace Foster standing beside her chair, looking fresh and upbeat. A light sprinkling of freckles across her nose made her look like a soccer mom. Standing a couple of feet behind her was the man she now knew was Haroun Ghali, not Gary Young.

  “Hi, Grace. Fancy meeting you here.”

  The bitch smiled at that, then looked around at the full tables. “It’s very busy here. Would you like to go someplace private?”

  Leticia wanted to make a coarse joke but decided against it. She stood, pocketing her phone, and said to Haroun, “Nice to see you again, Gary.”

  He nodded. “Ms. Steele.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  He didn’t reply.

  As she led Leticia in a circuitous route to the elevators, Foster said, “I’m surprised to see you.”

  “Well, we have some things to discuss.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve reconsidered my job offer.”

  “Actually…”

  Foster looked over her shoulder at Leticia with a wry, surprised smile.

  They shared the elevator with three Brazilian businessmen chatting in Portuguese and got out at the third floor. The corridor was very long, and when they finally reached the deluxe suite at the end Foster unlocked the door and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside handle.

  The living room was large and pleasant. Through French doors, two shallow patios overlooked the traffic on the Promenade and the mountains in the distance.

  “So,” Foster said, taking the desk chair. “What brings you here?”

  Leticia settled on the sofa, while Haroun remained by the door to the foyer, leaning against the frame, arms crossed over his chest. “I fucked up,” Leticia said.

  “How?”

  “I put my faith in the wrong person.”

  “In Milo Weaver?”

  Leticia nodded but said, “Look, I’m not here to apologize. I’ve just had a chance to think about what Weaver’s planning, and it doesn’t add up. He thinks he can get other countries to do his work for him. He should know better, but he doesn’t.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Burying you. Burying your ex’s company, Northwell. Burying IfW and MirGaz and Nexus and Tóuzī. He’s smart enough to know the Library can’t do it—even if there were a Library anymore. But he’s not smart enough to know that Germany, China, Britain, and Russia aren’t going to do him any good. They’ll do something, sure. They’ll lean on you guys. But they’ll just bleed you. There’s a lot of money to be made in extortion.”

  Foster looked past her at Haroun, who pinched his lower lip in thought. She said, “What about America?”

  “There’s a seat at the table if they want it.”

  Foster tilted her head. “Weaver’s not that stupid either. He must think he has a winning hand.”

  “Sure he does,” Leticia said. “He’s got Joseph Keller’s papers. They’re convincing, but they won’t make his new allies do what he wants.”

  “He doesn’t know they’re fake?” Foster asked, then grinned.

  “No. Not the fake ones. The originals.”

  The frown that cut a line down Foster’s forehead was the first sign that Leticia’s words were sinking in. “Joseph Keller’s papers were destroyed.”

  Leticia nodded. “Sure. But the Germans had an agent on Keller in Paris. Some irregular. Keller left the papers in his room, so their agent photographed them.”

  “The Germans?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You knew that, right?”

  Behind her, Haroun exhaled loudly, and Foster rubbed her forehead, her cheeks coloring. Their reactions gave Leticia a moment of satisfaction, but she shook her head as if annoyed. “Come on, guys. Don’t make me regret changing sides.”

  Foster straightened, getting a hold of herself. “No matter,” she said. “The Germans have Keller’s document and shared it with Weaver. Yes?”

  Leticia nodded. “I haven’t seen it, but he considers it a smoking gun. He’ll bring it tonight when he meets with the others. Once they’re convinced, they’re going to coordinate themselves in order to bring you down. Like I said, though, it’s not going to go his way. They will thank him for the dirt, then toss him aside. Or worse—probably worse. They know they can’t trust Milo to stay quiet.”

  “You think they’ll kill him?”

  Leticia shrugged. “There’s a strong possibility. If he’d been smart, he would have met them here, in town, but no. He chose the Restaurant Clavadeleralp. Up on the side of a mountain. Kill someone there, no one will know until the place opens again in June.”

  Foster stared at her contemplatively, then asked, “When?”

  “Eight o’clock tonight.”

  Foster nodded approvingly, looking past her to Haroun. “That matches what we heard.”

  “Heard from who?” Leticia asked, though she knew.

  Foster didn’t answer, only said to Haroun, “Is the team assembled?”

  “Yeah,” he said, straightening. “The others are tracking from Zürich. I’ll check on them.”

  “And ask Lance to come here.”

  Haroun nodded and turned to leave, but paused when Leticia said, “I met your brother. Abdul. He’s a good guy.”

  “I know,” Haroun said, turning to look at her coolly. “And he’s here.”

  “Here?” Leticia asked, sounding surprised, though Milo had already told her. “In the hotel?”

  “He’s with his Agency friends. And that’s on you. Whatever you said convinced him to come here.” Then he left.

  “He’s not pleased with me,” Leticia told Foster.

  “Well, you did a job on his friend in Hong Kong. Now you’ve gotten his brother tangled up in this. Want a drink?”

  “It’s not even noon yet.”

  “C’est la vie,” Foster said, and went to open a cabinet to reveal a minifridge. She took out two little bottles of brandy, cracked them open, and handed one to Leticia. They tapped bottles with a dainty clink, and Foster said, “To new beginnings.”

  Leticia felt as if she’d been handed her last drink before execution. But all she needed was to last until night.

 
“How did you get here?” Leticia asked. “You’re pushing papers at Langley, and now you’re running a new generation of Tourists. You were assigned to get rid of the files, weren’t you?”

  “You put that together yourself?” Foster asked.

  “It was a team effort.”

  She rocked her head, as if impressed, and took another sip. “Sure. I was supposed to get rid of all of it. But there isn’t a single volume on the shelf called Tourism that you throw in your bag and take to the vault. There were scattered volumes on specific operations—the old ones hadn’t even been digitized. The digital files could be taken care of in an afternoon. But the paper files? I had to track down cross-references. A 1969 report on Chinese supply lines to North Vietnam references a file about a Tourist assigned to liquidate a Vietnamese colonel. So I’d track that down. And I couldn’t grab them without reading through them. Every day, all day, for two months. That’s when I realized what I was dealing with. It’s in the details. Government is blunt. A hammer. But this—this was brain surgery. And the American government was trying to forget about it. Such a waste.”

  “There’s a reason Tourism was shut down, you know.”

  “Because it lost a single battle,” Foster said. “Because one Chinese colonel was too smart. And because the politicians were too scared to put it together again. All those decades of development, of carefully crafting the perfect secret army—all gone to waste. The problem was never Tourism. The problem was its paymasters. They didn’t have the stomach for it.”

  “But Anthony Halliwell did.”

  Foster smiled at that. “Tony was a shitty husband. But this? This was why he got up in the morning. There was no one else in the world who could really understand it. So, yes, I brought him in. Together, we pored over the records. Together, we analyzed failings and came up with solutions. And it was simple, really: politicians. They were the problem. They’re not interested in strengthening the nation’s bottom line. They’re interested in their own personal gain. But CEOs? They live and die by their bottom lines. In business, the strength of your organization is what defines your power. It’s simple and, in a way, beautiful.”