Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

The clientele of Loretta's was evidenced by the pickup trucks and big rigs gathering heat around it. She parked between two rigs, waited until six, and walked through the hot dust and into the restaurant.

He wasn't among the crowd of construction workers and truckers getting their hands dirty on the picnic tables, so she went to the window and ordered a brisket plate, biscuits and gravy, and ribs from a pink-cheeked girl who, after taking her money, gave her a number. She found a free table among the chatter and laughter of the sweaty, sunburned men, ignoring their intense but friendly stares.

She watched the highway and the dusty parking lot through the screened walls, waiting, but didn't see him. Then he was right behind her, saying, "It's me," and touching her shoulder. His cheek was suddenly beside hers. She grabbed his face and kissed him. The tears, too, had crept upon her unawares, and for a moment they only hugged; then she pushed him back to get a look at him. He looked tired, baggy-eyed, pale. "I worried you were dead, Milo."

He gave her another kiss. "Not yet." He glanced out at the lot. "I didn't see anyone following you. How did you get away?"

She laughed and stroked his rough cheek. "I've got a few tricks up my sleeve."

"Twenty-seven!" the girl at the window called.

"That's us," said Tina.

"Stay here." He went to the window and returned with a tray overflowing with food.

" Where've you been?" she asked when he'd settled beside her. "Too many places. Tom's dead."

"What?" Her hand on his arm squeezed tight. "Tom?" He nodded, lowering his voice: "Someone killed him.”

“Someone… who?”

“Doesn't matter."

"Of course it does! Did you arrest him?" she asked, then wondered if that was a stupid thing to ask. Despite the years she'd spent with a Company man, she really knew nothing about his work.

"Not really. The guy who pulled the trigger-I had to kill him."

She closed her eyes as the stink of vinegary barbecue sauce overwhelmed her. She thought she might be sick. "Was he trying to kill you? This guy?"

"Yes."

Tina opened her eyes and stared at her husband. Then, overcome again, she grabbed him and squeezed. He was here, finally, and she felt the kind of consuming love that fills you with the desire to eat your loved one, a feeling she hadn't felt since their courtship. Her teeth grazed his stubbly cheek, which was wet from tears she could taste. His? No-he wasn't crying.

He said, "The point is, everyone will think I killed Grainger. I'm on the run now, but once they've made up their minds, there won't be a safe place in the country for me."

She got control of herself and pulled back, her hands still on him; his hands were on her. "So, what now?"

"I've spent days thinking about that," he said, strangely matter-of-fact. "Every way I turn it, I can't figure out how to solve the problem. The Company wants me dead."

"What? Dead? Why?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, but before she could protest, he added, "Just know that if I show my face again, I'm dead."

She nodded, trying to mirror his logical composure. "But you were collecting evidence before. Did you get it?"

"Not really."

Again, she nodded, as if these things really were part of her world, things she could actually grasp. "So what's the answer, Milo?"

He took a raspy breath through his nose and looked at the untouched food. To it, he said, "Disappear. Me, you, Stephanie." He held up a hand. "Before you answer, it's not as hard as it sounds. I've got money hidden away. We've got new identities-you got the passports, right?"

"Yes."

"We can go to Europe. I know people in Berlin and Switzerland. I can make a good life for us. Trust me on this. Of course, it won't be easy. Your parents, for instance. It'll be hard to visit them. They'll have to come to us. But it can be done."

Despite his slow speech, Tina wasn't sure she had heard him right. An hour ago, the worst news she could imagine was that Milo had been injured. She'd nearly collapsed, imagining that. Now, he was telling her that, as a family, they should disappear from the face of the earth. Had she really heard him right? Yes, she had-she could tell from his face. Her answer came out before her brain had a chance to process it: "No, Milo."

He'd been crying since Sweetwater, a half hour back. For the first hours of driving, there had been no tears, just red, stinging eyes. He wasn't sure what had finally triggered them. Perhaps the billboard advertising life insurance, with the Midwestern family smiling back at him-happy, insured. Maybe that was it. It didn't matter.

What really struck him as the sun set up ahead, turning to flame against the flat, arid West Texas landscape, was that he hadn't actually been prepared for what happened. Tourists survive by foreseeing unexpected eventualities and preparing for them. Maybe his oversight meant he'd never been much of a Tourist in the first place, because he never even considered the possibility that his wife would refuse to vanish with him.

He went through her excuses. At first, they didn't have anything to do with herself; it was all about Stephanie. You can't just tell a six-year-old her name's something else and she's going to lose all her friends, Milo! Though he hadn't posed the question, he should have asked if it was worse or better than having her dad disappear. He hadn't asked it because he was afraid of the answer: Well, she does still have Patrick, doesn't she?

Finally, she admitted that it had to do with herself as well. What would I do in Europe? I don't even speak Spanish well!

She loved him, yes. When she saw how her refusal was killing him, she kept grabbing his face and kissing his flushed cheeks and telling him just how much she loved him. That, she insisted, wasn't the issue, wasn't even a question. She loved Milo completely, but that didn't mean she would ruin their daughter's life in order to follow him across the world, spending years looking over their shoulders for some hit man. What kind of life is that, Milo? Think about it from our perspective.

Well, he had, hadn't he? He'd imagined them with Stephanie at Euro Disney, finishing their aborted vacation with laughs and candy and no more interruptions from the cell phone. The only difference was that they used different names. Lionel, Laura, and Kelley.

Now he knew why the tears had finally reached him: It was the realization that she was right. Grainger's death had rattled him, turned him into a desperate dreamer, imagining that the soft-edged world of Disney could be theirs.

Milo had been too in love with his fantasies to realize how childish they were.

And now, where was he? In the desert. It went out in all directions-flat, two-toned, empty. His family gone, his one real ally in the Company dead, killed by his stupidity. There was only one ally left to him in the world, someone he never wanted to call, whose calls he always dreaded.

At Hobbs, just over the New Mexico border, he stopped at a generic gas station/convenience store with peeling white walls and no air-conditioning. The fat, sweating woman behind the counter sold him quarters and directed him to a pay phone in the rear, by the canned soups. He dialed the number he'd memorized back at Disney World, then put in all his quarters.

"Da?" said that familiar old voice.

"It's me."

"Mikhail?"

"I need your help, Yevgeny."

Terence Albert Fitzhugh stood in what had once been Tom Grainger's twenty-second-floor office. No longer. Through the ceiling-high windows behind the desk lay a vista of skyscrapers, the canopy of the urban jungle. Beyond the blinds on the opposite wall lay a field of cubicles and activity where all the young, pale Travel Agents made sense of Tourist chatter, culling it into slim Tour Guides that eventually made it to Langley, where other analysts produced their own policy-ready reports for the politicians.