The Nearest Exit

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Tourists? Enough. Luck isn’t always on our side.”

  That struck Milo as an entirely banal way to explain away the deaths of human beings, but he set aside his annoyance and turned to the window as they merged onto a highway, heading out of town.

  “Last year,” Drummond said, “when things went sour for you, was there anyone outside the department who knew the details of what happened?”

  “Janet Simmons, a Homelander-she learned a lot. I don’t think she got the whole story, but she’s smart enough to put some things together.”

  “We’ve vetted her,” Drummond said. “Is that all?”

  Yevgeny Primakov knew everything, but that was a treason he didn’t feel up to admitting. “She’s the only living person. She and Senator Nathan Irwin.”

  “The senator knows everything?”

  “Of course. He was the one behind the Sudanese operation.”

  “You know this?”

  “No real evidence, but yes, I know it.”

  A pause. “Senator Irwin’s the only one keeping the department alive. I don’t think we need to worry about him. We can thank him for any operational budget we still enjoy.”

  Milo realized with dismay that the senator was quite possibly Drummond’s government sponsor, the friend who had landed him his new job in Tourism. But all he said was, “Do all these questions have a point? Sir?”

  Drummond cleared his throat. “Look, Hall. I didn’t call you here to play around with you.” He produced a looser smile, to show how human he was. “I called you because you did an excellent job in Berlin. I had my eye on you, you know.”

  “So did the Germans.”

  “You keep saying that. Did they have the German flag plastered across their foreheads?”

  “German haircuts.”

  “Well, I hope they didn’t take useful notes.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t.”

  “Good,” he said, then looked at his hands, which Milo noticed were unusually red. “I knew it was going to be a hard one. For someone like you.”

  “Hard, how?”

  “It being a girl.”

  Milo tried to appear bored. “The job itself was child’s play.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. And the other job, the financial work?”

  “Should be wrapped up by the end of the week.”

  “Good. Because it raised some eyebrows in Manhattan when you requested that six hundred grand.”

  “You have a pen and paper?”

  “Check the armrest.”

  Milo opened the leather armrest that separated them and found two bottles of Evian, a stereo remote control, and a pen and pad. He wrote down a twenty-one-digit code, and when he handed it to Drummond he wondered what kind of circulation problem caused his redness. Another medical question. “Here’s the account’s IBAN. Money should be there by Thursday. Harry Lynch knows how to withdraw it without leaving fingerprints. Is Harry still around?”

  Drummond looked confused. He still hadn’t learned the names of his underlings at the Avenue of the Americas.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Milo. “I just need one thing from you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The name and number of the insurance adjuster working on the E. G. Bührle theft.”

  Drummond got him into focus. “Oh.” He nodded, finally understanding. “Very good. I’ll send that to your phone.” He ripped out the page and folded it into his shirt pocket, thinking this over, then muttered, “It’s a pity.”

  “Pity?”

  “That we have to do this. This kind of thing. But Ascot wants to run Tourism into the ground. Bleeding us, at a time when oil prices are driving airfares into the sky.”

  “So that’s what this is about. Keeping the department running.”

  “We do what we must to stay alive.”

  Milo considered asking if it was worth it, keeping alive a secret department that even Quentin Ascot, the CIA director, wanted to erase. It was a moot question, though: All government departments work on the basic understanding that their existence is enough reason to continue existing. Out the window was the blackness of countryside.

  “You going to tell me where we’re going?”

  Drummond followed his gaze. “Two weeks ago, in Paris, the embassy got a walk-in.”

  “French?”

  “Ukrainian. Name’s Marko Dzubenko. He was in town as part of an entourage for their internal affairs minister. He’d been in town only three days when he came to us.”

  “Employer?”

  “SSU,” he said, referring to the Security Service of Ukraine. “He made no secret of it, particularly once the staff threatened to kick him out of the building. He wanted us to know he was an important defector.”

  “Is he?”

  Drummond shrugged theatrically and settled against the far door. “Only if he’s trustworthy, and for the moment I don’t believe anything he tells us. Not until we know more about him. At this point we’ve just got the basics. Forty-six years old. Kiev University-foreign relations. Joined the secret police when he was twenty-four, then moved into intelligence after the Russians left. Paris was a coup for him-his previous trips were to Moscow, Tallinn, Beijing, and Ashgabat; that’s in Turkmenistan.”

  “I know where Ashgabat is.”

  “Of course you do. But it was news to me.”

  “What rank is he?” Milo asked.

  “Second lieutenant.”

  “Not so bad. Why does he want to leave?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Drummond. “According to him, it’s personal gain. He’s being stifled at home, skipped over for promotion, while the new capitalists are making millions. He says capitalism has cheated him. From the looks of his accounts, it’s at least passed him by.” Drummond pursed his lips. “He wants a new life in America, but what does he have to buy it with? Marko’s trips were trade based, and that’s largely what he had for us. Ukrainian trade secrets?” He smiled again. “The man actually thought that would buy him a life in America!”

  Alan Drummond’s mirth lasted a few seconds longer than expected, then drained away when he saw his guest wasn’t encouraging it. Milo said, “Well, there’s a reason we’re sitting here talking about him. And it’s not Ukrainian exports.”

  “It’s not,” Drummond muttered. “He spent a while giving us reams of useless information, most of which we had already. He saw we were fading fast. So he panicked and pulled out his wild card. He said that there’s a mole in the Department of Tourism.”

  Silence followed, the engine rumbling beneath them. “Did he actually say those words?” asked Milo.

  “He knew about the department and specified the mole was there.”

  While the department liked to think of itself as existing in a parallel universe of absolute secrecy, Milo knew a few people who had figured out its existence-but they had been allies and friends. “The Ukrainians have someone inside? It’s hard to swallow.”

  Drummond shook his head. “Marko claims it’s a Chinese mole.”

  “Chinese?”

  “The Guoanbu.”

  Milo stared at him.

  “Short for Guojia Anquan Bu, their Ministry for State Security.”

  “I know what the Guoanbu is,” Milo said, irritated. “I’m just confused.”

  Drummond ignored his confusion for the moment. “When he mentioned Tourism, as you can imagine, the agent in charge of his interrogation was baffled. No idea what Marko was talking about. So he went up to the embassy’s security director, who was just as baffled. In fact, he was going to write Marko off as a nut job and dump him somewhere, but to cover his ass he sent a query to Langley. It landed on the assistant director’s desk, and he came directly to me. Gleefully, I might add. A mole is just the kind of thing Ascot would happily use to hang us. So I sent one of ours to talk to him, and we shipped him here.”

  “Why not to the States?”

  “He’ll get there eventually,” said Drummond.
“I want you to listen to him first.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because his story concerns you and everything that came raining down last July. And the only thing in the files on it is one single-spaced page that goes out of its way to not say a thing. Which makes me a fucking ignoramus.”

  “Really?” Milo asked, not sure he could trust that Drummond was so ill informed.

  “Believe it,” he said sourly. “Dzubenko has told me a novel compared to the haiku I was handed when I took over.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Milo, raising a hand. “How does a Ukrainian second lieutenant learn about a Chinese mole in a secret CIA department? How does this make any sense?”

  “Luck,” Drummond said. “Over the last few years, the Chinese have been pouring agents into the Ukraine, and Marko spent some time with them. He doesn’t like them very much.”

  “And they told him about their mole? Come on, Alan. Besides, the Chinese almost never invest in long-term double agents.”

  “I know this,” he said, “but don’t be so quick to doubt it.”

  Milo peered out at the blackness again, then looked at Drummond. “I’m getting a sick feeling of déjà vu. Last year a friend of mine was accused of sharing secrets with the Chinese. It wasn’t true, and maybe if I’d known that from the start she wouldn’t be dead now.”

  “This was Angela Yates?”

  Milo nodded.

  After a moment’s reflection, Drummond said, “Listen to what he has to say. I don’t want to believe it either, but if his story checks out, then I’m going to have to clean the department. It’s not the way a new director wants to spend his opening weeks, but I won’t have a choice.”

  Milo’s hand twitched; he was catching Drummond’s itchy agitation. “Well, then? Who is it? Don’t tell me he held that back.”

  “He has no idea. From his story, it could only be in administration. A Travel Agent, most likely. Not a Tourist.”

  Milo rubbed his knees. Travel Agents collected and sorted intelligence from Tourists and tracked their positions. A mole among their ranks could pass on anything. “Who else have you called in?”

  “Just Tourists. Our driver, and some extra help-I got them from the war on drugs. I’ve also collected some folks from other departments for analysis and background checks. I’ll get you their phone numbers before sending you off again.”

  “Am I going somewhere?”

  “You’re always going somewhere, Sebastian. If your chat with him works out, you’ll be checking on some of the Ukrainian intel Marko’s been giving me. It might not be outstanding stuff, but it’s another way to vet him, and if it isn’t legitimate it’ll give me extra reason to doubt the mole story.”

  “I’m not much of an interrogator,” Milo admitted. “You should call in John. He’s rough, but he gets results.”

  Drummond stared at him a moment, as if shocked by the suggestion. “This guy came to us. I’m not going to have John fit those electrodes to his tits just to hear him scream.” He sniffed. “Really, what was the department like before I came along?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Milo said, then took a box from his pocket and dry-swallowed two more Dexedrine.

  8

  Despite a broad stomach and thinning black hair, Marko Dzubenko was a young-looking forty-six. He wore a faux-silk shirt with rolled-up sleeves, the collar open to expose an Orthodox cross buried in chest hair, watching the German edition of Big Brother as he chain-smoked. The only sign of age lay in the gray stubble that ran along his jaw-line.

  Milo stuck out a hand as he approached. “Good evening. I’m here to ask some questions.”

  His handshake was hot and dry. Instead of returning the greeting, Dzubenko shook a smoldering Marlboro at the television. “Great show, no?”

  The television camera was angled high in a corner of a kitchen, and two pretty twentysomethings were arguing. “Never got around to watching it.”

  “Great show,” he repeated. “I am for the Melly. I would easily do her.”

  “Marko?”

  “Yeah?” he said to the television.

  Milo picked up the remote and turned it off. Dzubenko rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Motherfucker. I am already answer you fuckers’ questions, okay? Twenty fucking times!”

  Suppressing the urge to strike him, Milo switched to Russian. “And you’ll continue to answer the questions, or we’ll beat you, sodomize you, then dump you naked in the bad part of Mogadishu.”

  Marko’s head jerked back as if he’d been slapped; then he smiled and put out his cigarette. “Finally. Someone who speaks Russian with balls. Want a cigarette?” He lifted the pack.

  Milo preferred his Davidoffs but knew how sharing cigarettes created an instant bond between Slavs. He produced his lighter and lit Marko’s first, then his own.

  He settled on a chair that he recognized from old trips with Tina through IKEA. Then he recognized the sofa Dzubenko sat on. In fact, the whole lower floor of this two-story farmhouse outside Frauenfeld, not far from the highway, had been fitted with that Swedish company’s functional furniture. Around the house lay acres of cold, flat field, empty save for four Company guards with infrared binoculars. Upstairs, in a room the size of a closet, Drummond was watching them through video monitors. By morning, he would have a transcription of the whole conversation, with English translation.

  “So, Marko. I hear you’ve got a story about the Chinese for us.”

  The Ukrainian stared at the black television and shrugged. “They tell you about all the hot Kiev information? Man, you can worry about the Chinese all you want, but it’s the Kievskaya Rus’ you should really worry about.”

  “Trust me, we are worried. But I’m here about the Chinese. You want to tell me how a man like you learns of a secret Chinese plot?”

  Dzubenko glared at him, as if his word couldn’t be doubted, but said, “Biggest intelligence organization on the planet, so what do you think? Guoanbu. The motherfuckers are all over Kiev now. It’s getting like Chinatown. They know how important we are, how we’re positioned. Russian fuckers on one side, European Union on the other-it all rubs.”

  “Friction.”

  “Exactly,” he said, using his cigarette to point at Milo. “I’ve got respect for them-don’t get me wrong. They spend money on their people, place them all over the world. They’re smart. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it when they take over my hometown and my hard-ass bosses start treating them like princesses they’ve got boners for. Know what I mean?”

  Milo didn’t, not exactly-he hadn’t been in the Ukraine since the nineties, and the Guoanbu hadn’t gained a foothold there yet-but he could imagine. “Look, I’m just surprised the Chinese shared their secrets with a Ukrainian second lieutenant.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Dzubenko. “It was at a party. On Grushevskogo Street.”

  “The Chinese embassy.”

  “Of course.”

  “What for?”

  “What?”

  “Why was there a party?”

  “Oh! Chinese New Year. They’ve got their own, you know.”

  “So do Ukrainians. What date?”

  “Beginning of the month. February 7.”

  “And they invited an SSU second lieutenant?”

  Dzubenko frowned at his cigarette and chewed the inside of his mouth. “You’re trying to get a rise out of me, but it’s not going to work. I’m sure of the rightness of my position.”

  “I’m just trying to understand, Marko.”

  “It was my boss. Lutsenko. Bogdan Lutsenko. He’s a colonel-you can check on that in your files. He was invited, and he asked if I wanted to come along. I said, Why not? But I didn’t know, did I?”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “How it would make me sick to my stomach, being there. And that Xin Zhu would be there soaking up all the attention.”

  “Xin Zhu?”

  “Guoanbu,” Dzubenko told him. “Don’t know his rank, bu
t it must be high up. He’s a fat fucker. Big as a cow. Carries himself like some fucking sheik. Half his entourage were slant-eyes, the other half were my bosses, laughing at all his jokes.”

  “What kinds of jokes?”

  “Russian jokes. China’s full of those jokes, I guess. It didn’t hurt that he told them in excellent Russian. Plays on words, that sort of thing. Had them in stitches. You know what it looked like to me?”

  “What?”

  “Like the defeated fawning over their new masters. That’s what it looked like to me. So I went out on the terrace and started smoking, waiting to go home. I got through two cigarettes before he came out to join me.”

  “He?”

  “Xin Fucking Zhu.”

  Milo allowed an expression of surprise to slip into his features. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “I am not. He brings his fat ass outside. It’s cold, you know, but he’s still sweating. Glowing from all the attention. That’s why he came out-inside, he’d melt. He lights up and we get talking. And the guy is funny, I have to admit. Even drunk-and the guy is really drunk. We talk about Kiev, and he tells me some of the places he likes. Not tourist shit-no. Some of the best clubs, the ones you have to look hard to find.”

  “He goes out dancing?” Milo asked doubtfully.

  “Ha!” Dzubenko spat, imagining that. “Please. He goes out looking for hot chicks, what else? We share war stories about girlfriends. Very funny, that guy. He convinces me to come back in, and I end up staying until after midnight. Fun time.”

  Milo stared at him, waiting, but Dzubenko didn’t seem to want to go on. “Well?”

  “I’m not saying another word until we get some vodka in here.”

  “Sure,” Milo said, then switched to English. “You hear that? Get us some vodka!”

  It took about two minutes. They heard trotting on the stairs, then the door opened just wide enough for Drummond to place a bottle of Finlandia and two shot glasses on the floor. The door shut. Milo poured shots and handed one over. “Budmo.”

  “Hey,” Dzubenko answered, then added in English, “Mud inside your eye.”

  They each put back two shots before Milo said, “Is this when it happened? You got the story at the embassy?”