Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

She lied. She said that they still didn’t have anything on the man. When he asked why his face wasn’t in the world’s newspapers, as his daughter’s face had once been, she began to stutter. Literally. She couldn’t quite get the lies out in a convincing manner. So she pushed responsibility away entirely. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanescu, but I’m no longer heading the investigation. You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Dieter Reich.”

After getting rid of the Moldovan, she called on Oskar, who had been sipping coffee in the break room, chatting up the girls from the second floor for information. “Anything?” she asked.

“Wall of silence.”

“I want to know where Milo Weaver has been during the last few months, and where he is now. Can you do that?”

Oskar had the energy of youth and the temerity to think all doors were open to him. In this case, he would have to reach the basement-level room that tapped into U.S. satellite communication, which kept real-time track of border stations across the world and the passports that crossed them. “Sure,” he said, “but Teddi will know. An hour, maybe two-but he’ll know. Is it really worth it?”

“How do you mean?”

He frowned at her desk, perhaps wondering if he was overstepping some line.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

“Why not just let it go? It’s barely even our jurisdiction. Let Dieter have it.”

She considered that, because it was a good point. Erika had enough to deal with. Why fight for a case no one wanted her on? Perhaps it was this, finding out it had to do with the Americans. She was living up to the role they had all imposed on her, of the slavering anti-American.

No. It was Adriana. It was knowing all she’d been through.

“The way I see it,” she said, “I can either do my job, or I can retire. I’m not quite decrepit yet.”

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him, but he shrugged. “Well, in an hour or two he’ll know.”

“By then,” she told him, “I’ll be back on the case.”

Her self-confidence was more than delusion. Before her fall from grace, Erika had devoted numerous hours to investigations directed at members of the BND itself. Occasionally, when rumors became too prevalent, she was called in to assess their factual basis-a position that had earned her no new friends. Twice her investigations had ended in dismissals, once in jail time, and once in suicide-yet in that last case her research finally cleared the man in question.

In 1998, Dieter Reich had ended up under her microscope, and now, ten years later, she pulled up that file-or the copy she had kept for her personal records-and refreshed her memory.

BND minders had noticed weekend purchases on Reich’s credit card in Aalsmeer, just south of Amsterdam. There were dinners and clothes and, most importantly, hotel rooms with double beds. Reich had been married for fifteen years, and during those weekends his wife, a Czech named Dana, had remained at home.

That he was having an affair was not the issue. The issue was that he had not reported his mistress’s name for vetting. So Erika took care of it herself.

Haqikah Badawi was a thirty-year-old Egyptian graduate student of economics at the University of Amsterdam. She had met Reich during one of his trips to Brussels in 1996, when she was interning with the EU public affairs office, and by the next year he was visiting her whenever he could come up with a work-related cover to fool his wife.

Badawi came from a respectable and progressive Cairo family that had made its money in that indefinable industry called import/export. Her student friends, though politically active, showed no real sign of radicalism, and she wrote occasional articles for the weekly European Voice, where a friend was associate editor. Bright, erudite, and attractive-the only question, which Reich himself was psychologically unable to ask, was why she opened her legs to an unexceptional German bureaucrat who was twenty-five years her senior.

It took three weeks and a hated trip into the field for Erika to realize that the impossible had happened: This Egyptian girl was in love with Dieter Reich. Though no real explanations could answer this paradox, from their conversation she inferred that Reich reminded her of a beloved uncle back in Cairo. Erika returned to Pullach bewildered but satisfied that while Reich should be reprimanded for his secrecy, nothing should be done to get in the way of his liaisons.

However, the damage had been done. Two weeks later Badawi herself broke off the affair, explaining that she’d realized (Erika got this from an intercepted e-mail) that there was something infantilizing about her role in the relationship, and she didn’t want to live through her thirties pining over a father figure. It was time for her to grow up.

Erika didn’t know if Reich knew about her visit, or suspected (as she did) that her conversation with Badawi was the catalyst for her to reconsider their relationship. Reich showed no sign of animosity in the office, even as his life shrank suddenly, his international affair dead. As far as she knew, he and his wife were getting along wonderfully.

There was no joy in this, but in the present situation it felt necessary. The Americans had suggested Reich because they knew he would cut off his own hand before doing anything to risk his pension. Berlin also knew this but was too scared to dispute the suggestion. So she would have a talk with Dieter Reich. He would continue to head the case-she didn’t care who got credit-but he would allow her to assist. If he refused…

It was all here in the Badawi file, because what Reich could never have predicted was that on September 11, 2001, the world would change, dragging a variety of ambivalent people into the extremes. Badawi had been one such convert who, like Erika, felt the Americans had too much of a hand in things that didn’t concern them. Badawi, however, lacking any real power to effect change, returned to Cairo just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and became a member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, considered a terrorist group by the Egyptian government, the European Union, and the United States-which since 1993 had held its blind leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in a federal prison. There was no telling what pieces of German intelligence had crossed their pillow and made it eventually to ears in Egypt.

By one, when Oskar returned from the basement, she had settled on her plan of attack. He closed the door behind himself, and she noticed a folded sheet of paper in his hand, and that, below his puffy eye, his cheeks were very red. “Did one of the secretaries slap you again?”

Oskar leaned so that the edge of the desk cut into the meat of his palms, the paper held tight between two fingers. “Three things. One: Milo Weaver-or, at least, his passport-wasn’t in Europe when Adriana was kidnapped. As far as we can tell, his passport hasn’t left America since last summer.”

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was still disappointing. “What about Budapest?”

“No record of it,” he said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. Then he grinned the way he did when he hoped he might shatter Erika’s cool exterior. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I can see you’re burning to put me in my place. Number two?”

“Milo Weaver hasn’t been in Europe recently. But Sebastian Hall-he’s been around for months.”

“Who?”

He unfolded the page to display a police sketch of a man who looked for all the world like Milo Weaver.

“That’s…?”

“Exactly. As Sebastian Hall, Milo Weaver robbed the Bührle Museum a few weeks ago.”

“The Bührle? How did this come in?”

“Face popped up on the Interpol list fifteen minutes ago, and I was downstairs to see it. Sebastian Hall, American. Seems he made the mistake of adding a Serb to his crew.”