Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

Milo did.

"What you need to do now is focus on the jihadis who are still alive. The ones who are still a threat to world peace and banking. That's the kind of live bait they want to hear about in Virginia."

"Yes, sir," said Milo.

"Good. I'm glad we see eye to eye." Fitzhugh stuck out a hand, and Milo took it.

Grainger helped him take his bag from the trunk, whispering, "Thanks."

"For what?"

"You know what. For not telling him the Tiger used to work for us. That would really mark the end of things.”

“You promised to tell me about it."

"Tomorrow," Grainger said and patted Milo 's shoulder. "Come by the office and I'll let you read the file. Deal?”

“Sure."

The conversation with Fitzhugh had done nothing to relieve his anxiety, had in fact exacerbated it, so after leaving the airport Milo popped the battery out of his phone, took some turns, and headed farther out on Long Island. He took an exit and parked among dilapidated clapboard houses. For ten minutes, he watched children hanging out on stoops until he was sure no one had followed him. He made a U-turn, then followed another path, looping toward the island's midpoint, where he parked again at a series of narrow storage rooms surrounded by a chain-link fence called Stinger Storage.

Milo had always been a many-key kind of man. He had a key to his car, his apartment, his desk in the office, Tina's parents' house in Austin, and one unmarked key that-were he asked-he would say led to his apartment building's shared basement. In truth, that key opened this storage space.

The key fit, but after so long the lock had clammed up, so it took a moment. Then he opened the door to the deep closet where he kept his secrets.

It was no bigger than a single-car garage, and over the years he'd filled it with items that might, at some point, prove useful. Money in various currencies, credit cards under different names, with driver's licenses to match. Pistols and ammunition. He had

CIA-issued passports that he'd kept after jobs were done, claiming they'd been lost along the way.

In a separate combination safe in the rear of the room were two metal boxes. One was filled with family documents-documentation he'd collected over the years that tracked the life of his mother. His real mother, the ghost-mother he'd never told Tina, or even the Company, about. There were also copies of Company files about his biological father, another secret. For now he wasn't interested in this. He took out the second box.

Inside were documents that had nothing to do with the Company. He'd put them together years before, after reading of a family-husband, wife, and baby daughter-who had been killed in a road accident. He tracked down their Social Security numbers and slowly reintroduced them into society. Bank accounts, credit cards, some small property in New Jersey, and a post office box not far from that little house. Eventually, he ordered passports for all of them with his family's photographs. According to the official documents in that box, the Dolan family-Laura, Lionel, and little Kelley-was alive and healthy.

He slipped the three passports and two credit cards into his jacket pocket and locked everything up. Not until he was on the main road again, near where he had first changed direction, did he slip the battery back into his phone and power the thing up.

He couldn't say exactly why he'd taken this precaution. It was Fitzhugh, he supposed, biting at his heels. Or Angela being suddenly gone, and the unsettling feeling that her death meant a lot more than was visible to the naked eye. The ground had become just a little less secure. He got this feeling sometimes, either from real reasons or simple paranoia, and it calmed him to collect the Dolan papers and know that, at any moment, he and his family could disappear into the anonymous currents of human bureaucracy.

As before, he listened at the door. There was no television, but he could hear Stephanie quietly singing "Poupee de cire, poupee de son." He used his key and set his bag beside the coats, calling in a television-husband voice, "Honey, I'm home!"

Stephanie appeared from the living room and threw herself into his midsection, knocking the air out of him. Tina followed her out, but slowly, rubbing her disheveled hair and yawning a smile. "Glad you're back.”

“Hangover?"

She shook her head and smiled.

Twenty minutes later, Milo was eating leftover stir-fry on the sofa; Tina was complaining about the stink-possibly of cigarettes, though she couldn't be sure-all over him; and Stephanie laid out her plans for Disney World before climbing off the sofa to go search for the television remote. Finally, Tina said, "You going to tell me about it?"

Milo swallowed a final bite of stir-fry. "Let me take a shower first."

Tina watched him groan as he got off the sofa, push past the coffee table, and leave the room. There was something surreal about this, the way that Milo had returned home from a trip where his oldest friend had died, and now everything was back to normal.

She'd met Milo in the most extreme of circumstances-not even her parents knew what had happened in Venice -and suddenly he was just there. No explanations, no apologies. It was as if he'd been waiting for years on that damp Venetian street for her to appear, waiting for someone to devote himself to.

"I'm a spy," he told her a week into their swiftly escalating affair. "Or I was, until the day we met."

She'd laughed at that, but it was no joke. The first time she'd seen him, he'd had a pistol in his hand. She'd assumed he was a cop of some sort, or a private investigator. Spy? No, that had never occurred to her. Well, why, then, did he quit that job after they met?

"Just too much, I guess. Way too much." When she pressed, he admitted something that she had to work a while to accept: "I came close to killing myself a few times. Not pleas for attention, because in that life an attempted suicide doesn't get you any attention. It just gets you retired. No, I wanted to die, just so I could stop having to live. The effort was driving me nuts."

That threw her. Did she want a potentially suicidal man in her life? More importantly, did she want one in Stephanie's life?

"I grew up in North Carolina. Around Raleigh. When I was fifteen, my parents died in a car accident."

At that, her face had stiffened, and maybe it was this tragedy that made her suddenly feel a rush of love for this man who was still, essentially, a stranger. Who, after that, wouldn't be touched now and then by a terrible melancholy, even toy with thoughts of suicide? Before she could put her emotions, and the obligatory apology, into words, he'd gone on, as if he needed to quickly relieve himself of the whole story.

"It was a small family. My father's side had all passed away, and my mother's folks died not long after I was born.”

“So what did you do?"

"I didn't have much choice, did I? I was fifteen, and the state put me in an orphanage. In Oxford. North Carolina, not England." He shrugged. "Not so bad as it sounds. In fact, my grades went up, and I got a scholarship. Lock Haven University. Small school in Pennsylvania. During a student exchange to England, some embassy goons visited me. Brought me to see Tom, who was in London then. They thought I might want to serve my country."

There was nothing inherently wrong with the story, and Tina had never had a reason to disbelieve it. Even if he fudged details here and there, was that really the point?

She had no legitimate complaints about Milo Weaver. He was a secretive man, but that was an inevitable symptom of his job. She knew this when they married. The important thing was that, unlike many men, he made no secret of his love for her and Stephanie. Even when he was away, she knew that he was thinking of them. Though he drank, he wasn't a drunk, and if he snuck a cigarette now and then, who was she to complain? And depression? No-though he sometimes returned from the office sulking from things he couldn't discuss, he made sure it never crossed into their lives. With her and Stephanie, at least, he just wasn't that kind of man.