Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“Yeah.”

“You heard it? That’s what we’re looking for. And you’ll be reporting it directly to Hall. You have the number? Thanks, you’re a doll.” Einner hung up and opened his arms. “Come praise your betters.”

Milo patted his pockets and came up with Nicorette, feeling inept next to this tech-savvy young man.

Einner said, “Let’s go find some girls.”

They left the park separately and took the tube back into town. Appearing in public together would have broken any number of Tourism rules, so they settled for an indoor party. Milo picked up a new suit, and, even though Einner had said he would bring “something fun,” Milo bought a bottle of Finlandia vodka and another of some very dry Noilly Prat vermouth. He had just showered and dressed again when there was a knock at his door. Einner swept past him and examined the room, then sniffed the steam in the bathroom.

“Where’s the party favors?” asked Milo.

“Am I not enough?” Einner stripped off his coat, which was dry despite the rain outside-he was probably staying in the same hotel. “You just take care of the drinks, old man.”

“Vodka martini?”

“I’d kill you for one.”

Milo mixed them up in glasses in the bathroom, and when he emerged found Einner by the window, the blinds pulled, leaning over the breakfast table. With a credit card he was cutting up sixteen lines of cocaine.

Einner looked up, squinting. “The nose? Will it work?”

“I’ll give it my best shot.”

They sat across from each other at the table and toasted their survival. Einner made a face after his first sip. “Ouch.”

“More vermouth?”

“An olive might help.”

“They were out.”

Einner took another sip, then handed over a rolled ten-pound note. “Try that on.”

Milo stuck to the one swollen nostril with an open passageway, then passed back the note. He wiped his sore nose unconsciously and drank and watched Einner inhale two lines as if this were his morning routine.

“When was the last time you did blow?”

Milo’s memory seemed to be both slow and quick. “Christ, six years ago? No, seven.”

“Aha! Back when you were the great Charles Alexander.”

They’d had this talk before. Milo said, “He was never as good as people would have you think. It’s a myth, just like the Black Book. It keeps Tourists on their toes.”

They did two more lines. Milo mixed more drinks. As he came out of the bathroom, his phone vibrated for his attention. It was a message from the analysts:

Package picked up. Pavlo Romanenko, third secretary political section, Ukrainian embassy, London.

“My lead checked out.”

“Two for two,” Einner said, then refused Milo’s offer of a Nicorette and nodded at the four remaining lines. “Ready?”

“I should take a break.”

“What you should do is quit wiping your nose.”

He hadn’t realized he was doing it. They both laughed; then Einner settled and said, very seriously, “You really think we’re in trouble?”

“With a mole?” Milo frowned at his glass. “Maybe. It’s looking like it.”

Silence followed. Einner then related the story of two Iranians he’d killed a few months ago in Rome. “Direct from Tehran to make local al Qaeda contacts. Typical setup. One, the nervous moneyman. The other a Revolutionary Guard to do the heavy lifting and keep Moneybags in line. I took out the tough one first-the guy hung around his hotel window too much-then went in for the soft target. It turned out I was wrong. Moneybags was as frothing as his guard. Nearly killed me with his hands,” Einner said, raising his own in a pair of claws. “Before I shot him, he asked if I knew why, in the end, his people would win. No, Mohammed. Tell me. His people, he said, still had belief on their side. We, on the other hand, had nothing.”

“How’d you answer that?” Milo asked, curious despite himself.

“How do you think? I killed him.” Einner finished his drink. “I wasn’t about to lecture him on the Black Book.”

Milo left to refill their drinks in the bathroom, wondering about the point of that story. When he returned, Einner was stretched out on the bed, stomach down, his chin resting on the backs of his hands. He took the martini with thanks.

“So why’d you come back?” Einner asked. “You were out of the Company. Grainger was dead, and you’d spent time in the pokey for his murder. You still came back.”

“Maybe I wanted a last fling with adventure. Some fun.”

That provoked a shake of the head. “No, man. You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.”

“Maybe I realized I’m no good at anything else.”

Einner seemed to believe that, then he didn’t. “You’re not that good. Not anymore.”

“To be honest, I don’t know. It was probably a mistake. You heard Drummond. I don’t care what reasons he comes up with, I’ll never regret not killing that girl.”

“She’s dead anyway.”

“Not by my hand.”

Einner sighed loudly. “Sounds like Mohammed was wrong-you, at least, have run head-on into your beliefs.”

Milo felt anxiety slipping through his buzz. “Maybe. But any department that orders a hit like that doesn’t deserve to stay around.”

“You just wander into the spy business yesterday?”

“Come on, James. Even you’ve got limits, right? If you’d been given that assignment-don’t tell me you’d actually do it.”

Einner thought a moment but didn’t answer. He raised himself from the bed, grabbed his martini, and lifted it. “To knowing what to do, and when.” They both drank; then Einner asked, “Did you ever figure it out?”

“Figure what out?”

“Last we talked, I was stewing in my own shit, and you were off to figure out who was assassinating Sudanese mullahs.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“It really was Grainger?”

Milo nodded. “But the orders came from Senator Nathan Irwin. He’s the one who ordered Angela killed, then Grainger, once he’d become a liability.”

“Fucking senators,” Einner muttered, and Milo realized that he’d already known all this. Perhaps Drummond had shared. He just wanted to know what Milo knew. Finally, Einner said, “This man must be on your shit list.”

There was no need to answer that.

Einner cleared this throat. “Let’s finish up this stuff.”

They took turns, then wiped the remnants onto their gums. Milo refilled their drinks, but when he came out again there were eight more white lines on the table. Einner was in one of the chairs, wiping his nose. “I’m close to the Book, Milo.”

“It’s Sebastian. And I don’t believe you.”

“Why not? You found a copy of it. In Spain, you said.”

“I was lying, James. There’s no such thing as the Black Book of Tourism.”

Einner rocked his head from side to side, digesting that. “We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve found clues. I think it’s in Bern.”

“What clues?”

“You think I’d tell you? An unbeliever?”

According to the legend that all Tourists learned at one point or another, twenty-one copies of the Black Book of Tourism had been hidden by a retired Tourist in secret spots throughout the world. The myth of Tourism’s Bible fed into each Tourist’s desire for a single guide to show him the path to survival and sanity and perhaps even morality in a profession that encouraged none of these things. Until last August, it had only been a myth.

Milo, driven by some undeniable desire while in prison, had sat down and written it himself. Not long-maybe thirty pages-but it summed up what he thought such a book should say. He’d later copied it out by hand into twenty-one children’s schoolbooks and, over the first month of his return to Tourism, spread them throughout Europe and Russia. Then, over time, he’d slowly left clues to their whereabouts.