The Last Tourist

by Olen Steinhauer

  He heard someone clearing his throat over the speakers. It was Oskar, at the podium. Fucking Oskar Leintz. And fucking Erika Schwartz.

  Beyond the podium, Francis had walked over to the glass door to the courtyard stairs and pushed it open. Smoke began to creep inside. He was so calm. They were all so calm. Then Haroun and the man they had known as Joseph Keller burst inside from the corridor, followed by Leticia and Poitevin. Then the others. They looked at the bodies and then the open courtyard door, where white smoke billowed inside, almost swallowing Francis. The outside world, it seemed, had vanished.

  “Excuse me,” said Oskar, now holding the mic. “Please. Everyone please calm down.”

  They didn’t calm down, so he went on, louder this time.

  “What you have just seen is a shot across the bow. So that you understand the seriousness of our proposal. Northwell is over. Your contracts with them are void. Understand: If any of this is revived, we will not arrest you. We will murder you.”

  Someone, somewhere in the crowd, was weeping loudly.

  Oskar raised a finger. “One more thing—this is important. You will be questioned. You will all have the same story. It is this,” Oskar went on, pointing at the door where Francis stood: “Two members of the Massive Brigade came through there and killed these people. One was a woman named Ingrid Parker. They did not give a speech. They did not say a thing. They opened that door, walked in, committed murder, and left. The savages.”

  Milo looked down at Foster. Her eyes were still open, flicking around, confused, and though her mouth moved nothing came out.

  Oskar turned to Li Fan and Vetrov. “I think that covers it. Yes?”

  Li Fan shrugged, and Vetrov nodded, but his eyes were on the third row, where Sergei Stepanov was standing at the edge of the crowd with two other Russians. Stepanov’s face seemed to contain worlds: anger and confusion and fear. Slumped in a chair not far away, Oliver Booth looked as if he’d been tranquilized.

  “Okay,” Oskar said, and laid the mic back on the podium with a clank. Francis joined him, and the four intelligence officials left the room together. Haroun Ghali, stunned, only watched them pass.

  Leticia, perhaps also in shock, even opened the door so they could leave. Then she came over to Milo, squatted next to him, and said, “She’s dead.”

  He looked down at Grace Foster’s corpse. Around them, everyone started making their way out of the room in a hurry. They were quieter than he would have imagined, each only interested in their own escape.

  “Alex?” he called, looking around, and quickly saw his sister standing against the wall, arms around herself, vacant. Dalmatian maintained a respectful distance, but his swiveling, careful eyes showed that he was still on the job.

  “Come on,” he heard. Leticia was offering a hand. He let her help him stand.

  “I’m pissed off, too,” she said, “but maybe this was the only way.”

  He exhaled, shaking his head, watching CEOs file past him. The room was emptying quickly. The remaining Tourists, unsure of what to do, were also leaving. Two dead bodies, that was all it had taken. And despite the outrage bubbling up, Milo knew Leticia was probably right.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  AFTERWORD

  THE LAND OF DISSIDENCE

  1

  I did not get my Starbucks venti the next day, nor the day after that. Instead, after the police converged on the Congress Center and we were allowed to leave the hotel, Mel and Sally hustled me to a black SUV, and Samuel drove us all the way to Zürich, where a private plane was waiting. In the air there was little conversation. Mel and Sally conferred between themselves and talked on satellite phones, Sally eventually turning to me to say, “Did you hear the news?”

  “No.”

  “The government shutdown is over.”

  That meant nothing to me.

  When we landed, they brought me directly to Langley, where I was questioned periodically for hours in a cell located in a part of the building so deep in the basement that I hadn’t known it existed. How, they asked, did I know? How had I known what was going to happen? That I figured it out mere seconds before it occurred didn’t seem to faze them.

  I’m an analyst, I told them. It’s what I do.

  Only after two days of this did they finally call a taxi and send me home. Rashid was at school, and in answer to Laura’s anxious questions I took her hand and walked her into our bedroom. I sat her down, put my head in her lap, and wept.

  When she asked about Haroun, I shook my wet face against her thigh and told her I’d been wrong. Haroun was not alive. He had died in 2009 in Mauritania. “I’m never leaving again,” I told her.

  Though Sally and Mel never returned, Paul periodically took me from my desk to answer more questions from plain-faced white men. Their questions diverged into territory that was unfamiliar to me. For example, they wanted to know what Milo Weaver knew about Nexus’s relationship with CIA. I didn’t know. What I did know—and I repeated this—was that the murders at Davos had nothing to do with Milo Weaver or the Massive Brigade. Though they claimed to agree with me, in government press releases the administration blamed only the Brigade for the chaos. The witnesses, after all, unequivocally backed up that story. Switzerland promised greater security at next year’s Forum, and President Trump claimed that his administration had tightened the screws so much that the Brigade had had no choice but to head to Europe. “They’re weak on security over there. So weak. We’re so much stronger on security than the last administration.”

  A week later, a Massive Brigade bomb erupted inside a suite in the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, the fire and smoke destroying half of the residential spaces. Luckily, no one was killed. The president had left just a few hours earlier for Bethesda, Maryland, for his annual physical examination.

  Something they never asked me about, oddly, was Haroun. They never asked if he’d contacted me—perhaps they were monitoring me and knew he hadn’t—or what I knew about his life. So eventually I started to bring it up myself. “What happened to the Tourists? What happened to my brother?” They frowned and looked at their notes and told me that this was beyond the purview of their expertise. “And the Library?” I pressed, only to watch my interrogators feign ignorance.

  One question they did answer was: “What happened to the snipers?” It had bothered me for a long time, the way the people in blue and red were able to take over the Congress Center’s roof without resistance. It was one of those small details that an analyst can’t let go. They told me that the snipers had been found after the event, drugged and tied up just inside the rooftop access door. Neither had been able to identify their attackers.

  Eventually, over the space of weeks, I revealed almost everything to Laura but said nothing about Haroun. I didn’t have it in me to tell her what he’d become. She absorbed each fragment of the story like little blows to the body, then threw a series of smart, pointed questions back at me. Each, it seemed, required me to reveal more, and I eventually would have to stop her and say, “Later, okay? I can’t give it to you all at once.” After years of me telling her nothing, this arrangement was more than she could have hoped for.

  By late February, she knew almost all of it. She understood why, that first day back, I furiously deleted Nexus from all our devices. And as she learned more, she began treating me differently. The mistakes that would once anger her, the ones I still committed, no longer evoked her wrath. She was patient, perhaps seeing me differently. Not as a better person, but as one, perhaps, who needed a little more guidance. And knowing that she understood me better, I made an effort to be more open, allowing her to help me along the way. I was often in awe of her wisdom.

  “What matters,” she told me one night, “is that you know you’re doing right. As soon as you feel like what you’re doing—for the job, or in your personal life—is actually wrong, it’s time to leave.” A part of her was echoing her Communist father’s suspicion of my employer, but she wasn’t her father
, just as I wasn’t mine. She said, “I’d rather struggle with the mortgage than have your spirit broken.”

  And then, in late March, behind the headline news of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report implicating the president in ten instances of obstruction of justice, we learned that Sergei Stepanov, head of MirGaz, had been arrested in his Moscow apartment on charges of tax fraud. In April, the Berlin offices of Investition für Wirtschaft were raided as part of an extensive money laundering investigation, and Germany was demanding the extradition of Oliver Booth from the UK as part of it. London, reports suggested, was leaning toward handing him over, even as catastrophic Brexit negotiations were breaking down.

  I had to look hard to find the news about Salid Logistics. The Oman conglomerate was being taken to court under antitrust laws. Economic analysts were surprised by the move but opined that the company would be broken up within the year. Tóuzī’s demise didn’t even make American papers. Two of its Shanghai managers were arrested, and within days the offices were simply shuttered.

  Northwell’s woes took longer to surface. After the murder of its founder, a power struggle erupted. This was complicated by German regulators connecting the company to its IfW investigation. Cued by this, American regulators demanded Northwell’s account books and discovered a discrepancy between assets listed and assets owned, to the tune of half a billion dollars. Though government contracts remained in effect, all other Northwell operations were frozen until everything could be balanced. No one knew when that would be.

  Nexus, on the other hand, blossomed. It continued to take over Facebook market share, so that by the summer analysts predicted half a trillion in revenue by the end of the third quarter. We, though, remained a Nexus-free household.

  Yet with all this news coverage there was no mention of Milo Weaver, Alexandra Primakov, or the elusive Leticia Jones. Certainly there was nothing about the Library—had it really disbanded, as Milo claimed? After Davos, all the Red Notices against Weaver were revoked, though the Interpol database never mentioned why. I scanned reports coming to the Africa desk, searching for any sign of the librarians, or even the Tourists I still feared were out there in one guise or another. But there was nothing.

  2

  In June I was invited to a conference on African security in Paris, in August, cohosted by a private think tank and the UNIDIR—the UN’s Institute for Disarmament Research. The organizer, Dr. Edward Berger, had discovered my little essay in Foreign Affairs on the Sahrawi and asked if I could expand the piece for a half-hour presentation and take part in a panel discussion on cybersecurity that needed a fourth member. “What do they think you do for a living?” Paul asked when I brought it up with him.

  “Freelance consultant. That’s what I told them.”

  “Really?” he asked skeptically, but by the end of the day the trip had been cleared.

  Laura, excited, threw herself into planning every moment of our three days in Paris, and I worked on expanding the five-page published sketch to thirty. The subject—Sahrawi resistance to French and Spanish assimilation—was only tangentially connected to contemporary African security, and I had to work to bring the thesis into line with the present, positing that the resolute, immovable identity of these nomadic peoples virtually assured that the Polisario Front’s push for independence, despite relative peace, would not go away until the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic had been established. I took the paper’s title from the precolonial name for the region used by the sultan of Morocco: Bled es-Siba—“the Land of Dissidence.”

  I spent a long time working on the speech, probably too long for the sparse crowd that showed up in the small conference room of the Hotel du Collectionneur in the 8th Arrondissement. Still, it went well, and after the presentation, I spoke to a few attendees who preceded their criticisms with compliments so that I would better listen, and when they cleared out I saw that one person was still in her seat. She was a young white woman with long dark hair and light features. She had a phone to her ear, but she was staring directly at me, as if having a conversation about me. When I approached to ask if she had any thoughts, she lowered her phone and lit up with a charming smile. “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding like an American who had spent a long time overseas, “but I don’t know much about Africa.”

  “That’s all right. Did you learn anything?”

  “Yeah.” She cocked her head, looking surprised. “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and both of us laughed.

  “Did you know,” she finally said, “that this is the same conference that Kirill Egorov went to?”

  A chill went through me, and I instinctively took a step back. “What?”

  Her head bobbed. “Yeah. He wasn’t a speaker, but he hobnobbed. Then he went and grabbed Joseph Keller and…” She shrugged. “You know the rest.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Do you like parks?” she asked.

  “Uh, sure,” I said.

  “Cool. You know, you should go to the Luxembourg Gardens. Have you been?”

  “I’ve never been to Paris before.”

  Her eyes widened into saucers. “Oh, you must. Big, open space. Bring your family. It’s great. My aunt takes her dog—the French hate it when Max craps there.”

  “Who,” I said again, “are you?”

  She got up and smiled. “Go see the Luxembourg Gardens. Tomorrow morning would be good. Don’t waste your time indoors.”

  Slipping her phone into the back pocket of her jeans, she walked out of the room, leaving me stunned. Because even though I’d never seen her before, I knew who the girl was. And my guess was proven right the next morning when Laura and Rashid and I took a taxi over to the huge, sculpted park leading up to the Luxembourg Palace and, walking alongside the enormous pool, I saw a tall woman coming toward us in a fashionable scarf, with a dachshund at the end of a long leather leash. My aunt.

  I thought she would pass me—what, really, did we have to discuss?—but she stopped in her tracks and did her best to act surprised. “Abdul? It is you!”

  “Alexandra,” I said. None of this made any sense. Laura noticed my consternation and frowned at me, then turned and stuck out a hand.

  “Hi, I’m Laura.”

  Alexandra Primakov shook her hand vigorously and said, “Alex.”

  “Primakov,” I said to Laura. “I told you about her.”

  Laura inhaled loudly, remembering.

  “And this,” Alexandra said, lifting her dog off the gravel, “is Max.”

  “Oh!” Rashid said, hustling over. “A dog!”

  Alexandra squatted next to him and let him pet the dachshund, which licked Rashid’s hand. “You must be Rashid. Rashid, would you like to walk Max?”

  “Could I?” he asked, glancing up to his mother for assurance. Laura shrugged.

  And, like that, it was arranged. Rashid laughed as Max dragged him in a zigzag path, and Laura, grasping the situation with admirable speed, tagged along after him, shouting instructions Rashid largely ignored, while Alexandra walked with me.

  “Cute family,” she said.

  “Don’t be patronizing.”

  “I’m not, Abdul. They are cute. How’s the conference?”

  I chewed the inside of my mouth, irritated, but played along. “I think my presentation went well. Tomorrow night, I’m part of a panel discussion.”

  “Oh? What’s the topic?”

  “Cybersecurity in North Africa.”

  “I didn’t know you were an expert.”

  “I’m not.”

  She nodded, smiling with her eyes.

  “Where’s Milo?” I asked, tired of the pointless niceties. “Why is his daughter contacting me?”

  Alexandra shrugged. “Coming to Paris was her idea. Milo didn’t like it, but she’s determined when she wants to be.”

  “Wait a minute—did you get me invited to the conference?”

  She squinted in the Paris light. “Milo talked to a friend in UNIDIR.”

 
I felt a tingle of embarrassment and irritation—once again, I hadn’t been drafted into service for my own qualities but for someone else’s use. “Why?”

  Alexandra hesitated, then: “You should understand, Abdul: Our only real mistake in Davos was not getting your people on board. That’s why the others insisted on killing Foster and Halliwell—the risk of the CIA taking over Northwell’s operation was too great. They couldn’t allow it. Not even Milo blames them for that.”

  I took that in, remembering Mel asking about “intelligence officers from the UK, Russia, Germany, and China” meeting secretly in the Congress Center. Those were the ones Milo didn’t blame for double murder. “But that didn’t end it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You’ve seen the news. One by one they’re going down—MirGaz, Investition für Wirtschaft, Salid, Tóuzī—but not because each country wants to attack its own industries. Davos taught Milo a lesson he should have learned long ago: The only way to get the results you want is to shepherd them all the way to their rightful conclusion. And to do that, you can’t be shy about using all the tools at your disposal.”

  I suddenly realized that the news I’d been following for months had been guided by the hidden hand of Milo Weaver. I suddenly saw him differently. I said, “You mean the Library files.”

  She shrugged. “They’re a rich resource. They can be used to convince or cajole. That was always true, but Milo never wanted to use them aggressively. He knows better now.”

  I imagined Milo taking choice items from his files to blackmail this attorney general or that law enforcement czar. Meticulously forcing the advancement of justice all over the world. Active measures, yes, but the kind even he could approve of. “Why?” I asked.

  She looked confused.

  “Northwell was the problem, not those other companies.”

  “You don’t think so?” She shook her head. “They knew damned well what they were paying Northwell for. And they’ll do it again as soon as they get the chance.”