Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“Yes.”

Primakov sipped his coffee. “This is the problem with the world, you know.”

“Is it?”

“No one thinks about the bigger picture anymore, just his own gain. Robbing an art museum is like robbing a library; there’s no integrity to it. Great art hangs in museums for the betterment of society, for the man on the street.”

“For the proletariat?”

“Wipe that smile off your face. It’s the social contract you’ve broken. Not that you care, and not that they care in the Avenue of the Americas. Whose idea was it?”

Milo had seldom seen him so angry. “Mine. I needed to collect money. This was the easiest and quickest way I could think of.”

“Easiest and quickest?” Primakov let out a rare but bitter laugh. “You’ve got a Degas, a Monet, a van Gogh, and a Cézanne-the biggest art heist in Swiss history. How do you expect to sell those off? You think no one’s going to notice?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Oh yes,” said the old man. “I’ll let you worry about it, because to you those paintings are just a pile of money.” He shook his head. “If I’d raised you, you’d know better.”

“If you’d raised me, Yevgeny, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

They returned to the plan. Its initial steps had never been in question-Primakov agreed that Milo’s scheme to lure Adriana into the courtyard between her school and her father’s taxi was suitable enough. The question was what would follow, and how quickly Primakov could arrange things on his side.

Very quickly, it turned out. As a man who commanded his own intelligence unit hidden within the folds of the United Nations’ baroque superstructure, who could act with relative freedom because so few knew his office even existed, Yevgeny Primakov only needed to make two calls.

They decided to put the plan into effect that afternoon.

Milo filled his coffee-bitter stomach with garlic chicken from a Chinese diner, then picked up a ten-year-old BMW 3 Series with enough trunk space from outside a drab office block in Berlin-Mitte. It took about forty seconds for the Company-issue remote on his key ring to find the right combination; the car bleeped and unlocked. He slipped inside, pulling the door shut, and forced open the panels around the ignition tumbler with a screwdriver he’d lifted from Lukas Steiner’s apartment, connected the cables, then used the screwdriver to turn the ignition. He pulled out into the Berlin traffic. Hopefully the job would be done before anyone noticed the car was missing.

He was in Kreuzberg by four, parked inside the courtyard on Gneisenaustrasse. The apartments that looked down on his BMW were full of young professionals, most of whom would be at work. For fifteen minutes, he sat behind the wheel, waiting. When a retiree wandered in to use the trash bins, he lay down as if searching for something that had dropped under the passenger seat.

By the time the students were released from their imprisonment at four thirty, he had used a T-shirt to wipe down the seats, steering wheel, gearshift, and handles and then taken his position by the courtyard entrance. The broad street, cut down the middle by a median of leafless trees, was packed with shops, and nearby he noted a small Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant, the Chandra Kumari, its strong scent filling the street. Then, farther down and across the street, he spotted a navy blue Opel sedan with Berlin plates and two Germans inside, looking intensely bored.

It was that, the look of boredom, so intense that it could only be fake, that caught his eye. Then the familiarity. It took about a minute to figure it out: Earlier in the week, while surveying the Imperial Tobacco factory where Rada Stanescu worked, he’d seen that same car. The same two men who, from their dress, hair, and glasses, looked German. One young-late twenties-the other somewhere past fifty. The same men. The same boredom.

He fought the impulse to jump back into the safety of the courtyard. Instead, he glanced at his watch and thought it through. Only two people knew where he was-Yevgeny and his new master, Alan Drummond. Of them, only Drummond had known where he was earlier in the week.

Alan Drummond still didn’t trust him, and so, rather than assign another Tourist or depopulate a curious embassy, he had asked the Germans to run a casual surveillance. No, not a terrorist, just a potential problem. All we need is a report on his movements.

This, of course, was another level of the vetting. If the Germans saw him molesting a schoolgirl-or worse, killing her-they wouldn’t sit idly by as the crime was committed. Drummond, like any manipulator, was raising the stakes of his final exam. Whether or not Milo had the stomach for the job was one thing; Drummond also wanted to know that he had the chops for it.

Despite a fresh wave of anxiety that tickled the Chinese food in his guts, this changed nothing. If the plan went properly, his minders wouldn’t prove more than a distraction, Alan Drummond be damned.

Adriana Stanescu, it turned out, was not a stupid girl. Despite being ashamed of her parents’ professions, she knew, as most children do, which of her parents’ commands made sense. Not speaking to strangers, for instance-Adriana had been taught that one. When Milo said, “Entschuldigung,” Excuse me, she only hesitated in midstep, then continued. He tried again. “Adriana. Your father, Andrei, told me to pick you up. He’s stuck over in Charlottenburg.”

When the girl stopped, her little backpack, emblazoned with a manga superhero, bounced against her thin back. She turned to him. “Who are you?”

She was a clean-cheeked beauty, beautiful in an entirely different way than his own daughter, but that made it no easier. “Günter.” He took out the Alligator Taxi ID, on which he’d pasted his own picture. “Look, all I know is Andrei said you’d prefer if I parked out of sight. Maybe you’d be embarrassed by the taxi, I don’t know. Anyway,” he said as he shot a thumb over his shoulder, “I’m right in there if you want me to drive you home.”

Adriana considered her choices, and perhaps it was the shame of her embarrassment, the fact that even her father’s co-worker knew about it, that made her nod. “Okay. Danke.”

He politely let her go first, a gust of sweet children’s perfume filling his nose as she passed. He watched the Japanese cartoon character bounce as they entered the courtyard and left the Germans’ field of vision. He slipped on a pair of leather gloves. Though coffee and lunch had cleared away his hangover, he still felt sick, and that little animated creature-what was it? a mouse? a dog?-just made him queasier.

Once inside the courtyard, facing three parked cars, Adriana stopped and turned around. “Where’s your taxi?” She wasn’t afraid, just curious.

This was the hardest part, the messy part. He’d toyed with the idea of telling her everything, but she wouldn’t believe him. Of course she wouldn’t. She would put up a fight, scream, bolt into the street. She no doubt remembered the story of Natascha Kampusch who, surviving eight years of imprisonment after being kidnapped at the age often, had finally found a way to escape just two years ago.

The only answer was force. So when she said, “Where’s your taxi?” he smiled and raised an arm to point. As she turned to look again, he stepped closer, clapped a hand over her mouth and nose, and reached an arm around her stomach to grab her right elbow. He lifted her high, her legs kicking, muted squeals leaking from between his gloved fingers, but she was small enough for him to carry to the BMW as he sought a point four inches down from her elbow, a pressure point called Colon 10. Once by the trunk, he kept up the pressure, squeezing her stomach, pressing the nerve in her arm, and cutting off her air. Any one of these points, if dealt with violently, could have knocked her out, but he didn’t want to hurt her. So he did all three at once, until her kicks slowed and she fainted.