Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

No. She didn’t get the sense that this man thought so far ahead, or so deeply.

Or-and this was the problem with thinking too hard about anything truly unknowable-was this all part of his act? Was Adriana perhaps beside the point, a diversion while he protected something else?

Now the one detail she felt she had learned from this initial interview dissolved before her.

Erika was no novice when it came to interrogations, and she knew that the question of his allegiance had to be answered, even if the answer was wrong. Interrogations are fluid, but they exist in time, moving steadily forward. When they stall, rot sets in. Decision is the only way to keep them moving forward. Either Weaver still worked for the CIA, or he didn’t. If he didn’t, then he had gone private, and under different names had expanded his self-employment to include art heists, kidnapping, and murder.

If he did still work for the CIA?

In that case, she asked herself, what kind of agent would be involved in such a spectrum of illegal activity? What kind of Renaissance man was dropped off the Company books and sent to travel around Europe with no known home base? There really was only one answer, but it was difficult to swallow.

She’d heard the rumors ever since the early seventies, when she began in the business, and a quarter of her country lived under a different name and regime. There had been a spate of disappearances: East German agents who had set up shop in Bonn, West Berlin, and Hamburg. One moment they were living their lives in full view of the Federal Republic’s surveillance men, then they weren’t. They were usually agents of known interest to the Americans, and when Erika tried to find out their fates she was always frustrated by the cleanest crime scenes she had ever come across. She discussed the phenomenon with her boss; his later career was annihilated by an uncovered Nazi past, but at that time he was held in high respect. He took a cursory glance at her notes and muttered, “Tourists.”

“They weren’t tourists, sir.”

“They certainly weren’t, Erika,” he said, then lit his pipe and proceeded to tell her of the legend that had spread during the decade following the fall of Berlin, of a secret sect of American agents that required none of the comforts of normal humans. No steady identity, no home, no moral center beyond the virtue of work. “What Hitler could have done with men like these,” she remembered him saying.

They were called Tourists because they were as connected to the world as a tourist is to the countries he visits-which is to say, they were not connected at all. They appeared and then disappeared. While her boss described these men-and the occasional woman-in awed tones, Erika found herself disappointed by his gullibility.

“Don’t be absurd. It’s called disinformation. It’s the open secret that makes you fear them.”

“I used to think that, too,” he said, then told a story. Berlin, August 1961. On the twelfth, a Saturday, he and his colleague found a dead American along the border with a Minox and handwritten notes. The camera contained photos of an outdoor garden party, with, among other guests, DDR president-or, as he was officially called, chairman of the council of state-Walter Ulbricht. The notes said that they were gathered to sign an order to close the border and construct a wall. “So we knew it hours before it happened. We took it to our CIA friends that night, but they were more interested in the corpse of their agent.”

“Why?”

“Because they had no idea who he was. Since no one could identify him, we decided not to act on the information. It might have been another Bolshevik trick. By midnight, when they closed down the border, we realized it wasn’t. The little quirks of history are fascinating, aren’t they?”

“How does this connect to Tourists?”

“Well, we didn’t know what to do with the body. The Americans were still claiming it wasn’t theirs. It certainly wasn’t ours. So we started showing his photo around. Next thing we knew, we had five more names. Two from the Russians, one from the Brits, another American name, and a German name. Then, a surprise-the CIA’s London station chief, of all people, showed up and demanded the body. Swept the thing away, and every time we requested information about it, we were asked, Who are you talking about? The man who took the body was Frank Wisner, the rumored founder of the Department of Tourism.”

“That proves nothing.”

“Of course it doesn’t. If it did, then they wouldn’t be doing their job. It’s funny, though-each of this man’s assumed identities had a price on its head. The Russians wanted both names for murder, the Brits wanted theirs for forgery, and we wanted ours for industrial sabotage. A wide range of talents for a single man.”

Thirty-five years later, that conversation came back to her as she considered the range of crimes that could be attributed to this one person.

Either Weaver no longer worked for the CIA, or he did. If he did, then he looked and smelled much like a fabled Tourist. Which was why, only minutes later, Erika nearly died.

They were eating dry chicken sandwiches in the darkness when she asked what they’d found on Weaver when they picked him up. “A phone, but clean,” said Oskar. “No phone numbers in the memory. It’s nothing special.”

“You expected secret gadgets, maybe?”

He shrugged, then wiped a crumb from his chin. “There was a bag. Clothes, mostly. Pills-Dramamine, things for the bowels, pain relievers, that sort of thing. A key ring.”

“Keys?”

He shook his head. “It’s got a car remote on it, but no actual keys. An iPod, but all that’s on it is music. David Bowie, actually. The man seems obsessed.”

“Pockets?”

“Receipts. From London, mostly. A couple Polish ones. And a personal note written on hotel stationery.”

“Love letter?”

Oskar reached into his pocket and handed over the note. “I don’t think he knew it was there. He seemed surprised when I showed him. He laughed.”

She turned the slip so that it caught the streetlight from outside. She read, then read it again and felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “What does he say about it?”

“He says it’s kind of lovely.”

She read it a third time, then folded it and recited it from memory: “Tourism, like Virginia, is for lovers. Turn that frown upside down, man.” She shook her head, unable to control the wild, involuntary grin, and then swallowed. She wasn’t paying attention, though, and a rough wedge of chicken lodged in her esophagus.

“What?” said Oskar.

She waved her hands, pointed at her throat, and tried in vain to speak. Oskar rushed over. She felt the oxygen leaving her body, her arms going cold. Oskar got behind her and pushed her up, grunting, then wrapped his arms around her layers of fat and jerked his fist into her stomach, or thereabouts, several times. A slimy piece of chicken shot out of her mouth and landed on the rug. She gasped as Oskar came around to check on her.

“Thank you,” she managed.

“You’re all right?”

“Do you believe in fate, Oskar?”

“No.”

His pragmatism was coming along just fine. “Good. Let’s find out what kind of Tourist our friend is.”

When Erika Schwartz finally returned with Oskar, Milo was feeling disgusted with himself. She’d given him what he’d aimed for-time, an extra hour to think over his predicament. Yet he’d come up with nothing, and found himself dwelling on the irony of his situation: At a time when the Department of Tourism was worried about a Chinese mole, it was because of Adriana Stanescu that he’d been captured.

That’s because you serve them, the little voices. You’re a fool.