The Nearest Exit

by Olen Steinhauer

  He was in Kreuzberg by four, parked inside the courtyard on Gneisenaustrasse. The apartments that looked down on his BMW were full of young professionals, most of whom would be at work. For fifteen minutes, he sat behind the wheel, waiting. When a retiree wandered in to use the trash bins, he lay down as if searching for something that had dropped under the passenger seat.

  By the time the students were released from their imprisonment at four thirty, he had used a T-shirt to wipe down the seats, steering wheel, gearshift, and handles and then taken his position by the courtyard entrance. The broad street, cut down the middle by a median of leafless trees, was packed with shops, and nearby he noted a small Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant, the Chandra Kumari, its strong scent filling the street. Then, farther down and across the street, he spotted a navy blue Opel sedan with Berlin plates and two Germans inside, looking intensely bored.

  It was that, the look of boredom, so intense that it could only be fake, that caught his eye. Then the familiarity. It took about a minute to figure it out: Earlier in the week, while surveying the Imperial Tobacco factory where Rada Stanescu worked, he’d seen that same car. The same two men who, from their dress, hair, and glasses, looked German. One young-late twenties-the other somewhere past fifty. The same men. The same boredom.

  He fought the impulse to jump back into the safety of the courtyard. Instead, he glanced at his watch and thought it through. Only two people knew where he was-Yevgeny and his new master, Alan Drummond. Of them, only Drummond had known where he was earlier in the week.

  Alan Drummond still didn’t trust him, and so, rather than assign another Tourist or depopulate a curious embassy, he had asked the Germans to run a casual surveillance. No, not a terrorist, just a potential problem. All we need is a report on his movements.

  This, of course, was another level of the vetting. If the Germans saw him molesting a schoolgirl-or worse, killing her-they wouldn’t sit idly by as the crime was committed. Drummond, like any manipulator, was raising the stakes of his final exam. Whether or not Milo had the stomach for the job was one thing; Drummond also wanted to know that he had the chops for it.

  Despite a fresh wave of anxiety that tickled the Chinese food in his guts, this changed nothing. If the plan went properly, his minders wouldn’t prove more than a distraction, Alan Drummond be damned.

  Adriana Stanescu, it turned out, was not a stupid girl. Despite being ashamed of her parents’ professions, she knew, as most children do, which of her parents’ commands made sense. Not speaking to strangers, for instance-Adriana had been taught that one. When Milo said, “Entschuldigung,” Excuse me, she only hesitated in midstep, then continued. He tried again. “Adriana. Your father, Andrei, told me to pick you up. He’s stuck over in Charlottenburg.”

  When the girl stopped, her little backpack, emblazoned with a manga superhero, bounced against her thin back. She turned to him. “Who are you?”

  She was a clean-cheeked beauty, beautiful in an entirely different way than his own daughter, but that made it no easier. “Günter.” He took out the Alligator Taxi ID, on which he’d pasted his own picture. “Look, all I know is Andrei said you’d prefer if I parked out of sight. Maybe you’d be embarrassed by the taxi, I don’t know. Anyway,” he said as he shot a thumb over his shoulder, “I’m right in there if you want me to drive you home.”

  Adriana considered her choices, and perhaps it was the shame of her embarrassment, the fact that even her father’s co-worker knew about it, that made her nod. “Okay. Danke.”

  He politely let her go first, a gust of sweet children’s perfume filling his nose as she passed. He watched the Japanese cartoon character bounce as they entered the courtyard and left the Germans’ field of vision. He slipped on a pair of leather gloves. Though coffee and lunch had cleared away his hangover, he still felt sick, and that little animated creature-what was it? a mouse? a dog?-just made him queasier.

  Once inside the courtyard, facing three parked cars, Adriana stopped and turned around. “Where’s your taxi?” She wasn’t afraid, just curious.

  This was the hardest part, the messy part. He’d toyed with the idea of telling her everything, but she wouldn’t believe him. Of course she wouldn’t. She would put up a fight, scream, bolt into the street. She no doubt remembered the story of Natascha Kampusch who, surviving eight years of imprisonment after being kidnapped at the age often, had finally found a way to escape just two years ago.

  The only answer was force. So when she said, “Where’s your taxi?” he smiled and raised an arm to point. As she turned to look again, he stepped closer, clapped a hand over her mouth and nose, and reached an arm around her stomach to grab her right elbow. He lifted her high, her legs kicking, muted squeals leaking from between his gloved fingers, but she was small enough for him to carry to the BMW as he sought a point four inches down from her elbow, a pressure point called Colon 10. Once by the trunk, he kept up the pressure, squeezing her stomach, pressing the nerve in her arm, and cutting off her air. Any one of these points, if dealt with violently, could have knocked her out, but he didn’t want to hurt her. So he did all three at once, until her kicks slowed and she fainted.

  He turned her limp body around and listened to her breaths. He pried open her eyes-bloodshot, but okay. She would be unconscious for no more than ten minutes.

  With her body over one arm, he popped open the trunk and laid her inside. He quickly used a roll of duct tape to seal her lips and bind her feet and ankles. Once finished, he made a mistake: He paused to look down at her again. He took in her entire length, folded carefully into the trunk, and his stomach convulsed. He slammed the trunk and ran to the driver’s side. He got the door open and threw himself across the seat. He waited, but in the end his stomach was stronger than Stefan’s had been.

  From his first Entschuldigung to this moment, two minutes had passed.

  He backed out of the courtyard, made a U-turn at the next corner, then drove south. At the intersection of Gneisenaustrasse and Mehringdamm, he passed an Alligator Taxi with Andrei Stanescu behind the wheel, looking at his watch. In the rearview, the Opel sedan pulled slowly into the road and kept a steady distance behind him.

  It took fifteen minutes to reach Tempelhof Airport’s long-term parking lot. By then, Adriana had awakened, as he had expected she would, but during the fast drive down the B96, he hadn’t heard a thing. Only when he slowed at the entrance and stopped to take an automated parking ticket did he hear her kicking against the walls of her tiny prison. His stomach went bad again, but he kept it under control, and once he’d parked, the sound of her struggling seemed incomprehensibly loud. He got out, leaving the car unlocked and the screwdriver in place. He followed her noises to the trunk. He took out his wallet and flipped through it as if counting cash, but said in German, “Adriana, it’s going to be okay. Nothing will happen to you. In a few minutes someone else will take you out. Go with him. He’s here to protect you.”

  If it weren’t for the duct tape, Adriana Stanescu might have shouted German or elaborate Moldovan curses at him, but all he heard was wordless moans and three sharp kicks of her bound feet against the inside of the trunk. He ran to catch an airport shuttle arriving at a nearby stop. Just beyond the stop, the Opel had pulled into a space but kept idling. At the sight of Milo running toward the bus, the car backed out again. He moved to the rear of the half-full bus and watched the sedan follow him to the airport.

  6

  Milo had nearly expected failure, but since any good Tourist’s travel plans are often thrown awry, failure didn’t concern him. In fact, a part of him wished for it-perhaps at the airport ticket booth (had there been a person handing out tickets), or in the parking lot (had the German shadows decided to check his car before shadowing the bus). If failure stopped him in his tracks, he could end the pointless game. Not only this particular job, but all jobs, forever.

  It didn’t fail. The Germans followed him to the mostly empty airport-it was scheduled to close down later that year-
and took notes as he bought a ticket for the next departing flight, to Dortmund. He depended on his Sebastian Hall papers too much to risk them, so he used his emergency documents-a U.K. passport that gave his name as Gerald Stanley, resident of Gloucester.

  They watched him wait for the 6:50 P.M. departure. Out in the lot, he knew, his father parked beside the BMW, opened the trunk, and with the help of some friends transferred the struggling girl to another car in order to save her life.

  His shadows tired before boarding began. He imagined that they were going to check out the BMW, but it would now be empty.

  Yet by the time he was on the plane, taxiing down the old Tempelhof runway, his surety faded. Would Yevgeny keep his promise? It was a big responsibility: Keep the girl hidden for a month or two while the police searched for her. The parents could make honest cries of despair, and after the attention had died down Yevgeny would contact them. The child is fine, he would say, but the only way to get her back safely is to keep her a secret, to leave your lives in Berlin and move away-perhaps return to Moldova-under new names, where you can live together in peace. Yevgeny would take care of the particulars-the passports, transportation, visas if necessary-but he would have to be assured of their silence.

  A telling detail from their debate had been Yevgeny’s doubt that the girl’s parents would be willing to leave their lives for the sake of Adriana. “Of course they would agree to it immediately, but later, when they’re trapped in some lonely town far from Western civilization, don’t you think they might change their minds? Contact old friends and family?”

  It told him that Yevgeny couldn’t imagine sacrificing his own future for the sake of either of his daughters, much less for the out-of-wedlock son who’d caused him more grief, probably, than he had been worth. As his plane crested cloud, Milo wondered if the old man, after some consideration, would realize what trouble this plan was and decide to end all their problems with a bullet.

  He would have to see for himself. In a few weeks, he decided, he would demand to visit the girl.

  Exhausted, he burned the Alligator ID and his Gerald Stanley papers in Dortmund and spent the night in a hotel as Sebastian Hall. He also put his phone back together, but no one called. In the morning, he bought a change of clothes in the Westenhellweg shopping center, rented a car, and drove through the Ruhr, where industrial and once-industrial cities like Bochum and Essen passed; then the landscape turned to farmland as he continued into the Netherlands. By Saturday afternoon, he’d reached Amsterdam, turned in his car, and boarded a bus heading to Belgium. Only once he’d taken a room at Antwerp’s Hotel Tourist that evening did he pick up some German newspapers. The only sign of Milo Weaver’s trail of destruction was a brief update, on the arts pages, on the lack of progress on the E. G. Bührle theft. There was no mention of Adriana Stanescu-the Berlin police would be waiting seventy-two hours before raising the alarm.

  He ate a dinner of beef stewed in red wine with pearl onions, the obligatory french fries, and two half liters of Vondel brown ale. The meal left him tired again, so he climbed up to his meager room. Before sleep came, a cell phone melody jolted him.

  “Yeah?” he said irritably.

  “Riverrun, past Eve.”

  “And Adam’s.”

  “Nice job, Hall. We’ve even heard of it over here. The family’s been hounding the police.”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased.”

  “None of us can figure out where you put her. In Kreuzberg?”

  “Ask me no questions, Alan.”

  “I am asking you, Sebastian.”

  The lie came out smoothly because it had been practiced. “There was a second car in the courtyard. That’s where I put her. After your Germans left me at the Tempelhof gate, I doubled back. I picked up the car and drove her out to the countryside.”

  “What Germans?”

  “The ones you sent to watch over me.”

  Drummond paused, perhaps wondering about the uses and misuses of irony. “You lost me. I didn’t send anyone.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  “It might matter. If someone’s following you-”

  “No one’s following me now.”

  Another pause. “Where are you?”

  It was a pointless question, as Drummond’s computer charted the location of all his Tourists’ phones. “Antwerp.”

  “You’ll be heading back to Zürich now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “First thing when you arrive, drop by the Best Western Hotel Krone. There’ll be a letter for you.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Listen, I’ve got things to prepare.”

  “Won’t take long, Hall. Trust me on that. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be done in no time.”

  The line went dead.

  7

  From hotel to hotel, the trip took nearly nine hours, placing him in the Best Western’s arid lobby by six Sunday evening. He drove most of the way in a Toyota he’d picked up on an Antwerp side street using his key ring, then dumped the car just over the Swiss border in Basel, wiped it down with a towel he found in the trunk, and took an hour-long train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof, where the previous night’s snow had blackened into mud.

  He gave his Tourism name to a demure desk clerk with tight, tired eyes and received an envelope with SEBASTIAN HALL scribbled across it. As he headed back to the front doors, he realized he was being watched by a man and a woman, placed strategically at opposite ends of the lobby, wearing matching dark suits, one clutching a Herald Tribune, the other an Economist. They watched him stop at the doors, where he read the note. One word: Outside.

  He found a spot on busy, cold Schaffhauserstrasse, beyond the reach of some inconspicuous security cameras at the next corner. The two lobby watchers didn’t follow him out.

  It only took five minutes. A gray Lincoln Town Car made wet sounds through the dirty snow as it pulled up to the curb. The back door opened, and a man not much older than him-maybe forty-peered out. That now familiar voice said, “Riverrun, Hall. Get inside.”

  He did so, and as the car started moving again Drummond said, “We finally meet like civilized people.” He gave a tight-lipped smile but made no attempt to shake hands.

  He was young for a Tourism director, and his dark hair was long enough to be pulled back behind his ears-far from his time in the marines. He had reading glasses in his shirt pocket and a broad, all-American chin.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Milo said, watching the lights of Zürich pass by. “You in town just to see me?”

  “You’d like to think that,” said Drummond, still smiling. “No-Kosovo’s proclaiming its independence soon. I’m in for a little discussion with some representatives.”

  “Should be heated.”

  “You think so?”

  “Depends on our policy. Serbia won’t take it sitting down. At least Kosovo waited until the Serb elections were finished. If they’d done it beforehand, the nationalists would have swept the vote.”

  The smile vanished. “I wasn’t too sure about you, Hall. I got some wind about you causing major havoc last year. Enough that I wouldn’t have brought you back. You’re too…” He snapped his fingers, but the word wouldn’t be summoned. “Your Tourism career ended seven years ago with-the reports tell me-a breakdown. Then you moved into administration and-I’m just being honest here, you understand-and your record in the Avenue of the Americas was not particularly stellar. As for the way it ended…” He shook his head. “Well, you were accused of killing Tom Grainger, my predecessor.” He squeezed his lips together and cleared his throat. “Anything to say about all this?”

  Milo didn’t have much to say, because, looking into Drummond’s smug face, he lost all desire to impress the man. He tried anyway. “I was cleared of those charges.”

  “Well, I know that. They do let me see files now and then. It was another Tourist who killed Grainger.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, that Tourist-him, you killed.”
>
  “You seem very well informed, sir.”

  “I’ve got facts, Sebastian. Plenty of them. It’s the messiness that troubles me. A Tourism director dead. A Tourist. Not to mention Terence Fitzhugh, the Senate liaison… suicide, if you trust the files.”

  “Angela Yates,” said Milo.

  “Right. An embassy staffer. She was the first to go, wasn’t she?”

  Milo nodded.

  “All this messiness. All this blood. With you at the center of it.”

  Milo wondered if he’d really been summoned to Zürich to be accused of murder again. So he waited. Drummond didn’t bother speaking. Milo finally said, “I guess you’ll have to ask Mendel why he brought me back.”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Something about budgets.”

  Drummond stared at him, thinking this over. “Messy or not, you’re enough of a pro to be let in on a few things. Last year’s budget problems have intensified, and Grainger turning up dead did nothing for us in Washington. It seemed to echo all our enemies’ arguments. That we’re irresponsible and expensive, financially and in terms of human lives.”

  “Sounds about right, sir.”

  “Sense of humor. I like that. The point is that by now when we lose a Tourist we don’t have the resources to replace him. In Mendel’s estimation, you had at least been trained before, and all it would take was a relatively cheap catch-up course.”

  “I was cut-rate.”

  Drummond grinned.

  “How many have we lost?”