Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Then, three pages in, he saw a photograph of Senator Nathan Irwin, Republican from Minnesota.

There was nothing truly notable in the senator’s appearance here-he was pictured with a group of other senators looking into the real estate slump that had been causing problems for the last few months-but seeing his smug face did Milo no good. He ordered another martini and considered how much more empty life had become because of this man. Thomas Grainger hadn’t only been his boss and friend; he’d been Stephanie’s godfather, who would sometimes show up at the apartment unexpectedly with gifts and a ruddy smile.

Though theirs had been a long-distance friendship, he’d had a particularly warm connection to Angela Yates. She’d attended his wedding, and their history stretched back to when both of them were young, enthusiastic recruits for the Central Intelligence Agency. She’d even been on hand during that disastrous morning in Venice, when Milo and Tina first met. The day Stephanie was born. September 11, 2001. Angela and Tom had touched so many important moments in his life, and because of Nathan Irwin they were both dead.

In truth, there were only two survivors from last year’s mess-Irwin and Milo himself. They had never met, but each knew the other existed.

Kill the little voices.

It was his mother again, whom he’d only known as an occasional visitor in his childhood. Until he was nine she would visit in the night, fearful of capture as she and her German Marxist comrades spread fear throughout Europe. She came to her son like a ghost, whispering urgent lessons that he was too young to understand and would later seldom follow.

Listen to the Bigger Voice. It’s the only one that will ever be straight with you.

What did the Bigger Voice say now?

It was only later, after he had lost track of his martinis, that he succumbed to that voice and went to look for a Telekomunikacja Polska phone booth. His anger had returned. He had spent too long thinking drunkenly of injustice, and when he shoved in the zloty coins the pad of his thumb hurt. He dialed just as forcefully. It only rang twice before the old man answered with a hesitant, “Da?”

In Russian, Milo said, “You couldn’t stick to our deal, could you?”

“I was wondering when you would call. It’s not like you think. She got away.”

“How hard is it to hold on to a kid?” Milo demanded. “You lose a kid, it’s because you want to lose her.”

“She got away.”

“Bastard. She got away, then you tracked her down and killed her.”

“You’re drunk, Milo.”

“Yes. And you and I are done.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “I did track her down, but she was already dead.”

“Then who killed her?”

“Your people, I’d wager.”

“They don’t know who did it.”

“Is that what they told you?”

Milo considered some replies, but they were all too crude and childish-he didn’t want to be childish with Yevgeny. So he hung up.

He got another drink but was out of Nicorette and had to bum cigarettes off a table of pretty girls with extravagant mascara and matching platinum blond hair. They were talking politics. After an initial wave of curiosity, they soon realized that he was just another drunk American and sent him packing.

“Go to Iraq,” the sexiest one told him, and the others laughed.

He was in bed by eleven, unconscionably drunk, the television on and the spinning room stinking of the cigarettes he’d bought on the way back to the hotel. He briefly flipped to BBC World News, which was full of Fidel Castro’s retirement, and the unanimous election by the Cuban National Assembly of his younger brother, Raúl. The phrase “end of an era” was repeated endlessly. The results of the previous night’s Academy Awards distracted him from those heavier issues.

But they’re all the little voices, his mother said.

After he drifted to sleep briefly his eyelids rose as, on the screen, a tall BBC reporter Milo recognized walked through a park alongside a Chinese man. It was Zhang Yesui, the Chinese ambassador to the UN. Though he moved and spoke with that bland diplomatic nonaggression that to outsiders looks like weakness, his words were pointed. “After learning of the pre-independence discussions between Kosovo and certain current members of the Security Council, it falls on us to suggest that these members should drop their unilateral positions in regard to other nations.”

“I believe you’re talking about the United States,” said the reporter.

“I am. The current policy of intruding on sovereign nations is counterproductive to global peace. We’ve seen it in Iraq and Kosovo and the Sudan.”

“The Sudan?”

Milo blinked, rubbing his eyes.

“It has come to our attention that certain elements within the American government had a hand in last year’s unrest, which killed nearly a hundred innocent civilians. China, along with the United Nations as a whole, considers stability in that region paramount, and it hurts us to find that another member has been undermining our efforts for peace.”

Surprisingly, there was no follow-up question to that accusation, but more surprising was the fact that it had been made at all. Milo watched for a while longer, waiting for some reference to the ambassador’s statement, but it had slipped away, as if it had never been made.

He considered calling Drummond, but Drummond would already be dealing with the fallout. It would be one additional piece of evidence for Marko Dzubenko’s story, and certain politicians-Nathan Irwin, in particular-would be calling him up, demanding answers. For the moment, Milo was grateful he no longer worked in administration.

The worry slipped away as the fatigue caught up to him, and he flipped to a thriller dubbed into Polish and lowered the volume.

He snored so loudly that he sometimes woke himself, and when, a little after three, his door opened quietly and three visitors entered, they exchanged silent smirks over the noise. In the light of the silent television now playing soft-core pornography, they took positions around him.

One grabbed his feet; the other put him in a headlock. As Milo snapped awake they raised him briefly from the bed and slammed him down again. He tried to claw at the one holding his head but was too confused to do a thing. He felt the sharp prick of a needle in his arm.

He continued to struggle, weakening, until his arms first lost energy and then his legs. They were shadows, these men, and behind them the bright television displayed blurred bodies, bare white breasts with smeared pink nipples.

They were wrapping him now, and panic shuddered through him weakly as he imagined plastic, but it was just the bedsheets. He was so tired. He could hardly keep his eyes open. A blur of a man with a bruised eye and what might have been a mustache leaned over him and spoke in heavily accented English. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to kill you yet.”

Milo blinked at him, his vision going fast, his tongue heavy. “You’re German?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Thought so.” He tried to add something else, but his tongue would no longer cooperate.

Hasad al-Akir nodded politely at the fat old woman. As this night was like all other nights, she didn’t even acknowledge him as she lumbered past the counter to the wall of refrigerated glass doors in the back. There were plenty of customers he conversed with, whose names and backgrounds he knew, customers who even addressed him as Herr al-Akir and asked how his family was. Not this one. Despite her appearing every working evening punctually at seven and buying the same bottle of Rheinland Riesling and a Snickers candy bar, their conversation never broke from the same routine.