Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

Milo knocked his head against the wall a second time, and Einner's red-veined eyes bulged as he opened his mouth, trying to speak, but Milo used his elbow again, once, against his trachea. Einner couldn't say a thing. Milo picked up the pistol.

He knew he was hurting the Tourist, but he needed him stunned for a few minutes. He ripped the shower curtain down, rings popping off the rod, and spread it on the bedroom floor.

When he returned, Einner was again struggling to get to his feet, gasping sickly.

"Don't," Milo told him and showed off the gun. Einner seemed to calm down, knowing that he'd be dead already if that was the plan, but panicked again when Milo grabbed the pants crumpled around his feet and pulled him, with a thud, off the toilet and dragged him out of the bathroom. His arms nailed; he moaned; his shirt rolled up to his chest; and a putrid streak of brown marked his path.

That, Milo thought with regret, is the most humiliating part. He pulled off a length of duct tape and bound Einner's wrists together in front of his stomach, then his feet.

Heaving, he dragged Einner onto the shower curtain.

"What," Einner managed.

"Don't worry," Milo said calmly. He folded one side of the curtain over the front of Einner's body, one end covering his face. "What!"

Milo folded back the corner, uncovering the face. Einner was completely red now. It was a primal reaction to the idea of being suffocated in plastic. "You're going to be fine," he said, looking for some way to reassure him as he folded the opposite side of the curtain over his body, so that he was wrapped up. He tore off a length of duct tape with his teeth. "Listen to me, James. I have to leave. But I have to make sure you're not on my tail. Because you're a good Tourist. I don't think I'd be able to shake you. So I have to incapacitate you for a while so I can run. Understand?"

Einner, regulating his breaths, spoke through his damaged larynx. "I get it."

"Good. I don't want to do this-you can believe it or not, whatever you want-but I can't afford to have you follow me."

"What did Ugrimov tell you?" Einner managed.

Milo almost told him, then realized he couldn't. "No, James. I don't want you reporting back to Fitzhugh. Not yet, at least."

Einner blinked wet eyes at him.

Milo placed the short length of tape over Einner's mouth. He got to his feet and used the rest of the roll around the outside of the curtain, from the shoulders to the feet, so that there would be nothing for Einner to pick at with his fingers. As he did this, he had to roll Einner's body a couple of times and lift his feet and shoulders. He tried to be gentle, but he knew there was nothing gentle about plastic and duct tape. And there was nothing gentle about the fact that he'd left the Tourist's pants down, the last of his shit staining the inside of the curtain and his thighs. Einner certainly wanted nothing better than to kill him.

When he was finished, he rolled Einner beside the bed. The Tourist's eyes had cleared up, and above the gray tape they glared at him. Milo showed him the Makarova and put it in a dresser drawer, then pulled the mattress off the bed and set it at an angle, covering Einner and leaving him in a heavy darkness that would muffle any sounds he tried to make as he waited for the cleaning lady to arrive.

In Einner's wallet, he found six hundred dollars' worth of Swiss francs, which he pocketed; he considered taking the keys to the car, but changed his mind. He shut the door without saying anything more, grabbed his knapsack, and left.

At Geneva International, after watching his back through two taxi rides but finding no sign of shadows, he looked over the departures. He was just in time for the 7:30 a.m. Air France Flight 1243, which he bought with the Dolan credit card for nearly three thousand dollars. He jogged to the gate. During the hour-long layover in Charles de Gaulle he felt himself panicking again, looking out for swollen eyes. But Diane Morel wasn't waiting for him.

Once on the next plane, he remembered one of Einner's aphorisms: "Tom calls me, and that's all I need to know. Tom is God when he's on that line."

Tourists never question the why of their orders. God told Tripplehorn to follow Angela Yates around Paris, while Einner innocently took photographs of her. God told Tripplehorn to meet Colonel Yi Lien-for all Milo knew, he'd just asked the colonel for a cigarette. God told Tripplehorn to make a deal with an insidious Russian businessman and deliver monies for passage to various bank accounts; God told him to run a famous assassin and direct him at various people of interest. God told him to replace Angela's sleeping pills with barbiturates. God had even told Tripplehorn to set up a hidden needle in a Milan cafe chair, so that the Tiger, comforted by his faith in Christian Science, would slowly fade away instead of uncovering Tripplehorn's identity.

Tripplehorn was not to blame for any of this. He was simply Job to Grainger's God, and God was the originator of everything.

He landed at JFK Monday afternoon all eyes. But after waiting in the interminable passport line that snaked around stanchions, reminding him of Disney World, Lionel Dolan crossed the border into the United States of America without trouble. He rented a Hertz Chevy from a stiff young man with pimples, and on the curb spun the car keys on a finger and watched travelers lean on oversized bags and discuss prices with New York-harried bus drivers. Taxis came and went. Police officers loaded down with radios and other equipment lurked in the corners. But no one, so far as he could tell, gave a damn about the twitchy man in his late thirties who kept rubbing his jaw and looking around. He went to find his Chevy.

Milo wanted to collect his things from Stinger Storage. That little garage held money, extra credit cards, old IDs, and a variety of useful weapons, just waiting for him. Instead, he drove north to 1-95, out of Long Island toward New Rochelle, then headed west toward Paterson. While that garage was full of promise, he had to assume it had been compromised. He was a fool, he now knew, and he'd probably made plenty of mistakes over the years. Now, no doubt, a few broad-shouldered Company men were there, one behind the payment counter, a few others sitting in black SUVs with the air conditioners running full blast.

He drove quickly, but not in any visibly panicked way, knowing by the time he turned south again, parallel to Manhattan but inside New Jersey, that he only had an hour until Lake Hopatcong. Did Tom know he was coming? He probably suspected. Had Tom requested Company backup? At this point, Milo could admit to knowing nothing. All he could do was drive in such a way that the radar-toting Jersey cops wouldn't pull him over.

Soon, mountains straddled the highway. It had always been a strange feeling, when he and Tina and Stephanie would head out for occasional weekends with the Graingers, to realize how much nature was so close to Manhattan. In the city, it seemed as if the entire world were made of concrete, steel, and glass. The sight of forests was a perpetual surprise. As he had six years ago, driving to Portoroz on the first stage of a journey that ended with Tina and Stephanie, he thought that maybe this was the only place to really know balance, in the mountains.

No, he was too old to believe in the promise of new terrains. What he, as a Tourist, could not have known was that people are geography. Only people give character to nature. Wherever his family was, that was where he belonged.

He and Tina and Stephanie used to drive this road to see both Tom and Terri, when she was still alive. Terri Grainger had been a schizophrenic entertainer, wanting one moment to invite the world into her house for feasts, drink, and good company, and other times wanting only solitude out here, solitude even from her husband. But when she was "on," she was one of the great hostesses, making Tina feel that, in their lakeside house, she could find a subtle replacement for the family in Texas she missed.