He finally said, “You know, it really is good to see you. Back in Spain, I was terrified you’d end up dead. By us, or by them.”
“Them?”
“Your friends. The Library.”
“I’m with the Agency.”
He furrowed his brow. “Isn’t the Agency working with the Library?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, not wanting to be the sentimental fool who let family milk him for information.
He looked like he didn’t believe me. He said, “Working with the Library would be a bad proposition. Word is Milo Weaver and Ingrid Parker are joined at the hip. She’s apparently in the neighborhood.”
I wanted to tell him about Ingrid Parker’s doppelgänger, but I didn’t. Because he wasn’t my brother anymore. He was one of them. A decade-old decision had placed us on opposite sides of a divide that not even blood could bridge.
“Uh-oh,” Haroun said, rising from the stool. He looked across the restaurant to where Samuel was stumbling out of a corridor, hand on his head, looking as if he’d just woken. Haroun grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “I love you, brother. Please. Go home. You don’t belong here.”
And then he was gone, hurrying toward the lobby.
Samuel found his balance and sprinted past me, chasing Haroun. They were both gone—I could, I suspected, walk out of there—but I didn’t move. I was shook. Again. But not from being face-to-face with Haroun. No. I was shook because of one small thing he had said. Both of our lives had been irrevocably altered by the same promise: You will understand how the world really functions. You will become intimate with secret knowledge scratched onto the stone tablets that run civilization. Haroun and I were the same.
Not just us, I realized, but Sally and Mel. Paul. Milo Weaver, Alexandra Primakov and Leticia Jones—all of us, in each of our secret societies, had been promised infinite knowledge. The Massive Brigade, too—Martin Bishop had promised the same thing, and Ingrid Parker continued that tradition. The BND, GRU, Guoanbu. Not just knowledge but power, the ability to shape human history. Each group, in its own way, promised the same thing. We had all been seduced completely. And we had all been lied to.
Yet we still fought. In our blind devotion and fear—or was it pride?—of admitting ignorance, we devoted our lives to empty promises and even died for them, along the way abandoning those we loved. Haroun had abandoned his family, Milo’s was under a death sentence, and mine … were they any less abandoned as I sat in a Swiss bar having spoken to my dead brother?
Samuel returned, gasping, from his vain chase. He dropped onto his stool heavily, wiped sweat off his upper lip, and reached for his glass before realizing it was empty. “Who the fuck was he, Abdul?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice surprisingly cool and measured. “What happened to you?”
“He attacked me in the goddamn bathroom.”
Only now did I notice the red mark on his right temple. Tomorrow that would be a nasty bruise.
“I think he might’ve knocked me out,” Samuel said. “How long was he here?”
“Just a minute,” I lied. “He was ranting to me about the one percent.”
Samuel looked over his shoulder at the exit. “How did that nut even get in the hotel?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but was thinking, You don’t know anything, I don’t know anything, Haroun doesn’t know anything. I picked up my drink, then set it down again when I saw that it, too, was empty.
“Listen,” Samuel said, now sounding like he really wanted to be my buddy. “If anyone asks…”
“We had a drink, and you never left,” I said, and he finally relaxed.
15
The lonely Restaurant Clavadeleralp had been packed up since September, so Milo was taking chairs off tables and arranging them in the large dining area. Kurt, Oskar’s surviving agent, a bearded tough with big, morose eyes, worked on other tables while Oskar stood by the wall-sized windows, his arm in a sling. Outside, the snow-covered ground sloped downward along this side of the Clavadeler Alp, lit by the moon and the glow of the restaurant’s lights.
Given that he had lost two of his men that morning and taken a bullet in his shoulder, Oskar was remarkably steady. Maybe steadier than Milo, who was starting to feel this was all heading toward disaster. He’d sat for an hour with Alexandra in their little room, trying to talk her through the trauma of witnessing murder. This was something she’d never really had to deal with in the Library, and in the end she’d settled on what Milo considered the most constructive reaction: “We need to ruin these people.”
The immediate problem, of course, had been the disaster at the stables. There was the traumatized proprietress, Agota, and a couple of workers who had been around the rear of the building when the firefight occurred. There were five dead bodies—two Tourists of unknown origin, two BND officers, and a deputy ambassador to the United Nations. The only stroke of luck was that all the fighting had faced a wide field of grazing cows and horses, and the few buildings in sight were abandoned for the season. So Oskar and Kurt had brought the bodies inside and sat with Agota until a cleanup team from Munich arrived a little after two. In the meantime, Milo came to retrieve Alexandra and found Agota and her two workers sitting calmly in a back room with Oskar. “We have made arrangements,” he assured Milo. “The Swiss are always amenable to deals.”
Now Oskar held up a wireless camera with his good arm. It was no bigger than a matchbook. “Where do you think?”
Milo looked around the open space and up at the exposed rafters. “High enough for a good angle. We need as much coverage as possible.”
“Kurt,” Oskar said, and when his agent looked up he said in German, “A ladder, please.”
They had prepared three long tables in the center of the dining room with space for a couple dozen chairs. When Kurt returned with an old, paint-spattered ladder, Milo climbed it and lodged the camera on a beam, while Oskar used a tablet computer to check the image, calling directions to Milo. They adjusted it until, eventually, the shot took in three quarters of the restaurant, the prepared tables square in the center.
“Should we set out water?” Oskar asked.
From the kitchen, they brought out six glass bottles of San Pellegrino and three towers of glasses. Once everything was arranged, Milo stepped back and had a good look at it all, then checked the image on the tablet again. “That’s it.”
Outside, they left Oskar’s Mercedes parked by the restaurant, then trudged through the darkness, crunching snow as they pressed into the mountain wind, heading up the incline to the nearby Schaukäserei Clavadeleralp. Both were owned by the same family, which had been happy to rent the shuttered restaurant and cheese-making house to Oskar for “a party for foreigners.” Foreigners could only mean guests of the Forum, so the owners had asked an exorbitant price, and it had taken a while to haggle them down. At the center of the Schaukäserei was a large vat, long since cleaned out and covered, and a full kitchen that, during the warmer months, was open to tourists and hikers. Now, though, the place stank of rotten milk, and the cold pressed through the walls.
“No lights,” Milo said when Kurt eyed an electric panel full of switches. “And no heat.”
“How long?” the German asked, sounding disappointed.
Oskar checked his watch. “Half hour until eight.”
“The others know not to come, right?” Milo asked.
“Relax,” said Oskar.
And so they waited, bundled tight, sometimes pacing in order to keep their blood flowing. Kurt kept checking his SLR camera and its telephoto lens, while Milo checked the tablet to be sure the signal from the matchbook camera made it this far; the picture remained bright and clear. Oskar sat next to him by the window, looking down at the restaurant twinkling in the dark. “This is a long shot,” he said.
“Everything we’ve done is a long shot,” Milo said. “It’ll give us nothing, or it’ll give us a lot.”
Oskar grudgingly agreed, and together they watc
hed the restaurant, foggy breaths spilling from their mouths. “I am still unsure about you,” Oskar finally said. “Erika—she is a believer in history. She has history with you, and that means something to her. I am a believer in the present. What you were is not necessarily what you are.”
“Do you think I’m setting you up?”
Oskar rocked his head. “I would not put it past you. Or,” he added with a little flourish, “I would not put it past the person you were. I am still trying to understand the person you seem to be.”
“How?”
“The old Milo Weaver would walk up to Grace Foster and Anthony Halliwell and put bullets in their heads.”
Milo considered that. Was it true? Maybe. But the old Milo would have at least convinced himself that he had no other options. Violence was what was left once he’d run out of other plays. At least, that’s what he had always told himself. He said, “Let’s say we did murder Foster and Halliwell. What takes their place? Who is Halliwell’s second in command? Or maybe MirGaz and Nexus and Salid take over the operation. Maybe IfW. We don’t know.”
“It’s better than doing nothing, don’t you think?”
Milo sighed. “Maybe it’s worse.”
Oskar chewed the inside of his mouth. “It might put fear into them. Right now, Northwell does not fear us at all.”
Milo looked at him, and in the moonlit darkness the German’s face was gaunt and drawn.
“There,” Kurt said from the other side of the room. He raised his camera and pressed the long lens against a window that faced the road crisscrossed with ski tracks. A black sedan was coming slowly, its chains biting into the snow.
Oskar pulled out a pair of binoculars, and they all stood in the darkness watching the car pass and head toward the lights of the restaurant, eventually parking beside Oskar’s Mercedes. Three figures got out, and Oskar climbed onto a low table to get a good look over the slope of snow. “It’s the Second Bureau,” he said.
The three figures spoke among themselves, and one pressed a hand to the hood of Oskar’s Mercedes, checking for warmth; then they went inside. Milo woke the tablet and watched as the three Chinese men—among them Chen, who had met with Leticia—entered the restaurant and took off their hats, carefully looking around. Milo tapped a button and began to record.
The men were quiet at first, warily poking around. One opened a bottle of San Pellegrino, filled a glass, and drank. In Mandarin, they began to talk.
“Kurt,” Oskar barked, and the agent hurried over to listen.
“They’re wondering where we are,” Kurt said. “The skinny one doesn’t like it. The one with the water is telling him that he’s paranoid. I think he’s the boss.”
“Keep listening,” Milo said as he handed the tablet to Kurt. “Let us know if they say anything important.” Then he walked to the other end of the room, rubbed his arms, and bounced, looking outside at the blue snowy field. He didn’t expect anything incriminating from the Second Bureau on their own. He just needed them to stay in that restaurant long enough for—
“He’s making a call,” Kurt said.
“Who?”
“The one with the water.”
“Who’s he calling?”
“It’s…” Kurt listened. “I don’t know. But he’s agreed to stay ten more minutes.”
“Damn.” The only way Milo could stretch out their stay would be to walk over to the restaurant himself, but that was more danger than he wanted to face. He squinted down to the line of black pines, then to the road that came from town. No headlights, no heavy vehicles. It would be a wash, and now his only worry was Leticia.
“Milo,” he heard, and when he turned he saw Oskar at the opposite window, looking east, up the hill. Milo saw it, too: seven skiers in black, a loose group gliding slowly down the hill, converging. Strapped to their backs, Milo saw once they were closer, were submachine guns; their heads were covered in black balaclavas. Eventually, they came to a halt behind the restaurant, by the cars. They squatted as one, unclipping the skis from their boots, pulling their guns around into their hands, and then they split up on either side of the restaurant.
“Oh, shit.”
Milo glanced over to see Kurt, hands white with cold, recording everything with his SLR. Oskar squatted on the table with the tablet, and Milo joined him. They watched the three Chinese men wandering around, arguing in Mandarin. The fat one finished his water.
Milo looked out the window, and from this vantage he could see four of the Tourists creep around to the front of the restaurant, where the big panoramic windows offered breathtaking views and a strategic weak spot for anyone hiding inside. Then the Tourists disappeared around the edge of the restaurant. The snow in front of the building lit up with the flash of automatic fire, and when they heard the thump-thump-thump-thump, three startled Chinese men in the little tablet screen jumped and jerked and fell as the window shattered from the hail of bullets that filled the room.
It was fast—no more than a minute—but the destruction was complete. Chairs, hit by stray bullets, had flipped. Three glass water bottles had shattered. Red bits of human—garish pink spots in the video feed—were scattered across the tables. And then there was silence. Instinctively, Milo and Oskar crouched lower, bringing the bright screen down with them, and in it they watched four hooded figures enter, guns at their sides. In English, they heard:
“Where are the rest?”
“Something’s not right.”
“You going to call this in?”
One of them took a satellite phone out of his coat and stepped toward the shattered windows. Before he stepped outside to call, he said, “The cunt set us up.”
Milo knew who the cunt was, but he had no way to get in touch with her. So he watched as the man with the phone stepped out through the window frame and made a call they couldn’t hear. Five minutes later, the seven Tourists made their way back around the rear of the building, put on their skis again, and slid down the hill toward town.
16
“What time is it, handsome?”
Pretty, blue-eyed Lance, who had stationed himself in the desk chair with a view not only of Leticia lying on the sofa but of the busy lit-up Promenade in front of the Belvédère, framed by the French doors, sighed and checked his expensive wristwatch. “Quarter till eight.”
Not long, she thought as she stretched out. “You know,” Leticia said, “I used to be you.”
Lance had a preternatural ability to sit in silence, and had been demonstrating it for hours. Now he perked up, just a little. “What?”
“You. A Tourist.”
He blinked dumbly, and she wondered if they even called themselves Tourists. “Have passport, will travel,” she said. “For years, I traveled on the government dime. Making things right. Sometimes making them wrong. It’s relentless. How long you been on the payroll?”
He looked out the windows, considering whether or not to answer, then said, “Two years.”
“A lot of miles?”
He nodded slowly.
“It gets easier,” she said, “before it gets harder.”
Lance frowned at her, and she almost said, You should smile more, but instead said, “Right now, honey, you’re probably pretty high on yourself. You travel the globe and sometimes you hurt people, but the law never catches up to you. You appear and disappear, like magic. And you’re right, it is a little bit like magic. And you are special, just like they tell you. But then, eventually, you start hearing that voice in the back of your head. The one that says there’s no point.”
He shifted, looking uncomfortable. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She gave a good long smile. “I’ll tell you where it happened to me. Cambodia, 2007. Simple thing. Take out a bent politico and disappear. I didn’t take the kid into account.” She paused, remembering, for at this moment she was giving him something real, and she wanted to get this right. “And my first thought, like anybody’s, was collateral damage. We’re not goi
ng to cry about dead flower girls when the drones take out a terrorist’s wedding, right? But then the new thing happened. I started thinking back over the years. How much collateral damage had there been? I even used a paper and pen. Math never lies. And it hit me, finally, that the collateral damage I’d done over the years wasn’t some side job—it was my job.
She watched him think on this, watched him scratch the side of his cheek and look out at the Swiss evening full of fancy dresses and the stink of money. Was he thinking about his own missteps, or the series of decisions that had brought him to this hotel room? She didn’t know, and she didn’t have time to puzzle through his psyche. So she climbed off the sofa. “I think I’ll take a shower. Want to join me?”
He looked briefly shocked, and it gave her pleasure to know that there really was a human under that façade. Then his face relaxed into an appreciative, cocky smile as he measured her body with his eyes. “Another time.”
He really was full of himself. She gave him a wink. “Suit yourself.”
Leticia headed through the wardrobe room and bedroom to find an expansive bathroom with a whirlpool tub, flat-screen TV, and large, sealed window looking back at an empty, snow-covered hillside. She closed the door and turned on the shower, then watched herself in the mirror, searching for lines. She thought about what had brought her to this room, and the choices she had made. In Wakkanai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Laayoune, and here. What was it about her that kept finding trouble? Was this what penance really looked like?
And yet—and yet—she had survived it all. The scar on her arm from Haroun Ghali’s Hong Kong bullet was just part of the terrain of her body, so many nicks and scratches, but nothing that had put her down. That was black girl magic right there.
Though she expected it, Leticia still jumped at the sudden wee-wah of the fire alarm blaring throughout the hotel. She put on her game face and returned to the living room, where Lance was stepping out to the patio, looking for smoke.
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