Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

"What?"

"Something about this never felt right. If Angela was passing secrets to Herbert Williams, then why did she meet him in the flesh? That's not how you do it. You meet once, set up a dead drop, and never see each other again. That's Spying 101."

Einner considered this. "Some do meet face-to-face."

"Sure," said Milo. "If they're lovers, or associates, or friends. But Angela wasn't this man's lover. And she was too smart to risk exposure like that."

They both stared across the field of faces around them, running through this. Some faces stared back-children, old women, and: there. Milo straightened. The dirty-blond woman with the swollen eyes. She was some distance away, beside one of the curved bubble-windows, smiling distractedly, but not precisely, at him. The handsome man beside her wasn't smiling.

Milo wondered, stupidly, why they always showed up at restaurants.

"Wait here," he said and walked toward the couple. The woman's smile dissipated. She said something to her partner, who put a hand under the lapel of his jacket, as if he were packing heat. Perhaps he was.

Milo stopped several feet short so the man wouldn't feel the need to take his hand out of his jacket. To the woman, he said, "Did you assemble a good report? Want my flight plan?"

This close, he could see a light sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks. She spoke English well, but with a heavy accent, so he had to pay attention to each word. "We have plenty of information now, Mr. Weaver. Thank you. But perhaps you can tell me-who is your friend?"

All three of them turned to look at the cafeteria table, but Einner had already disappeared. "What friend?" Milo asked.

The woman cocked her head and blinked at him. She reached into her pocket and took out a leather identification booklet. A yellow card inside identified the woman as an SGDN officer attached to the DGSE, or the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure – external security. As he got to her name-Diane Morel-she snapped the ID shut. "Mr. Weaver, the next time you come to France, I hope you'll get in touch with us."

He started to say something, but she was already turning and, with a nod at her partner to follow, heading down the corridor.

Milo walked back toward the table, worrying over this, then spotted Einner behind a family of Orthodox Jews. They met among the seats in between.

Einner stared at him, round-eyed. Milo held up a hand. "Yeah, I know. I'm losing it."

"But how do you know her?"

"She and her buddy were the ones following me."

"Why?"

"Just keeping an eye out for trouble."

Einner stared down the corridor at their dwindling forms. He turned to Milo. "Wait a minute. You don't know who that was, do you?"

"She's a DGSE agent. Diane Morel. The ID looked fine.”

“DGSE?"

Milo finally placed a hand on Einner's shoulder and forced him into a plastic chair. "What's the big puzzle, James?"

Einner opened his mouth, closed it, then said, "But that's Renee Bernier."

"Colonel Yi Lien's girlfriend? The novelist?”

“Yeah. I've seen all the pictures."

Instinctively, Milo stood, but it was too late. The French agents were gone.

The eight-hour flight was without turbulence, and he was able to catch about three hours' sleep before landing at JFK a little after noon on Saturday. Once he'd endured the long line at passport control, he rolled his carry-on through tired crowds and out the front doors, then stopped. Leaning against a black Mercedes with tinted windows was Grainger, arms crossed over his chest, staring at him. "Need a lift?"

"I've got a car," Milo said, not moving.

"We'll take you to it."

"We?"

Grainger made a face. "Come on, Milo. Just get in the car."

The other half of "we" turned out to be Terence Fitzhugh from Langley, which explained Grainger's mood. The assistant director of clandestine operations was settled uncomfortably behind the driver's seat, his long legs just fitting in. After Milo had put his bag in the trunk, he was invited to join Fitzhugh. Grainger had been relegated to chauffeur, and Milo wondered if Fitzhugh was sitting behind him as protection against potential snipers.

"Tom tells me there was a problem in Paris," Fitzhugh said once they were under way.

"Not a problem. Many problems."

"More than Angela Yates getting killed?"

"Turns out your Chinese colonel, the one who had the memo, was being worked by the French." He peered up at Grainger, who was watching them in the rearview. "Lien's girlfriend, Bernier. She's DGSE. Real name, Diane Morel. Whatever she was doing with the colonel, French intelligence was getting its share of his hard drive."

"Is that some crude innuendo?" said Fitzhugh.

"You know what I mean."

"Tom? Why the hell didn't we know this?"

Grainger was focused on the traffic leading out to the parking lots. "Because the French didn't tell us."

"Did we tell them we were interested in the colonel?"

Silence.

Fitzhugh let it go and returned to Milo. "So. We shell out for airfare and an expensive hotel, and all you've got for us is bad intelligence and a dead employee?"

"More than that," Milo said. "Angela's supposed contact-Herbert Williams-he's the same cutout the Tiger dealt with. The same man who ended up killing the Tiger. Angela wasn't giving him anything; I think he was shadowing her."

"Better and better," Fitzhugh mused, tapping the back of Grainger's seat. "Any good news for me, Milo? I'm the one who has to go back to Langley and talk up Tourism. I'm the one who has to show them what kind of excellent work is done at the Avenue of the Americas. I could, of course, report that the office is full of idiots who don't know a DGSE agent when they see one and confuse a shadow with a contact, but I fear they'll decide it's time to cut the department entirely."

Milo rubbed his lips before answering. One of the virtues of Tourism is the individual agent's overall ignorance. All the Tourist need know is the content of his orders. Since leaving the field, though, Milo had grown weary of this continual self-justification to bureaucrats like Fitzhugh. "Listen," he said, "the problem's not with our operation. Without Einner's work, we wouldn't have extra photos of Herbert Williams. And without Angela's work, we wouldn't know that the Tiger was paid through a bank in Zurich by a man named Rolf Vinterberg."

"Vinterberg? Who the hell's Vinterberg?"

"It's an alias, but it does put us that much closer to whoever was paying the Tiger. Also, Angela came across a Sudanese radical who actually saw the Tiger delivering Mullah Salih Ahmad's corpse to his backyard."

"I see," said Fitzhugh, nodding. "So the president of the Sudan hired the Tiger. See? That's intel."

"We don't have anything on the president. In fact, I don't think it was him. Neither did the Tiger."

"Now I'm really fucking confused," said Fitzhugh.

"Think of it this way," Milo said in his most professorial voice. "We're looking for the person who killed the Tiger. I think that same person killed Angela and is responsible for killing Mullah Salih Ahmad."

Fitzhugh stared at him, unblinking, as he processed this. Grainger turned into the Lefferts Boulevard B parking lot, neck craned. "Where's your car?”

“Let me out here."

Grainger parked between two rows of dusty cars, but the conversation wasn't over yet. Milo waited until Fitzhugh, having considered the matter carefully, said, "He's dead, Milo. The-look, I'm not going to call him the Tiger. That's just stupid. Give me one of his names."

"Samuel Roth."

"Okay. This Sam Roth-he's dead. Now, I can take this information to Langley, but to them it's a cold case-it's Homeland's cold case. Who paid him, who killed him-to Langley, that's all moot. It won't give the president a boner. To give the president a boner, they'll want something active to pass on. What they want is for us to stop the bad shit before it happens. The whole world thinks it knows who killed this mullah, so spending money to prove this wrong isn't exactly priority. Besides, the world's a better place without that fucking mullah. Got me?"