Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“Anyone behind me?” Milo asked.

Einner shook his head, then shut the curtains.

“How’d you get me out?”

“Ask Drummond. I assume he’s got a German contact.”

“Why Myrrh?”

Einner looked around as if confused, then picked up the bottle. He took a corkscrew from the room’s minibar and began working on it. “Get the glasses.”

Milo unwrapped a pair of plastic cups from the bathroom. They drank.

“Well?”

Einner finished his wine and refilled the glass, then shook his head. “Politics. It’s always politics.”

“Who?”

“Nathan Irwin.”

“I sure hope you brought some blow.”

Everything, Einner explained, had gone to shit three days before, on Monday, when the Chinese representative to the UN made direct reference to what had happened the previous year in the Sudan. “That operation.”

Milo recalled his last voluntary television memory, in Warsaw. “I saw it on the BBC.”

“So did Irwin, and if anyone can smell an approaching scandal, it’s a senator. He knew his career could be on the chopping block. He cornered Drummond. Demanded to know how it had gotten out. Drummond had to admit to the mole investigation.”

“I bet he didn’t take that well.”

“You’d win that bet. He’s upset enough that the Chinese know about the Sudanese operation, but apparently that’s not the only pie Irwin had his finger in. So he’s taken over the department. Drummond’s now his errand boy. Irwin recalled everyone to New York to be debriefed and given new legends and go-codes.”

“What about you?”

“Drummond thought you might need someone to hold your hand.”

They drank until late, Einner running down for another bottle, but Milo never mentioned that he wouldn’t be boarding the plane in the morning. There was no point to it. Einner was there to hold Milo’s hand; he was there to make sure Milo made it back home safely.

When, after midnight, Einner left for his own room, Milo considered just leaving right then. He knew Einner, though, knew he was a good Tourist who could probably track him down before he got out of Austria. So he let him hold his hand all the way to the gate, where they sat separately, waiting for the flight attendants to announce boarding. Milo stood with his boarding pass in hand and gave Einner a nod to go first. He hung around the rear of the line until Einner had disappeared down the jet bridge to the plane; then he walked back out through security. He first found an ATM and withdrew the machine’s limit of five hundred euros, then walked to the Hertz rental counter. As he waited for the keys, his phone rang.

“Where the hell are you?”

“Sorry, James. I’ve got something to do before heading home.”

He didn’t sound angry, just amused. “And you couldn’t’ve asked me along?”

“You wouldn’t’ve let me go.”

“You know who I’ve got to call now, right?”

“Go ahead. I’ll leave the phone on for a half hour. Tell him I’ll be expecting his call.”

Einner hung up. By the time the phone rang again, Milo had reached the A4 that led, with a name change, all the way to Budapest. Drummond said, “What the hell’s going on, Hall?”

“You tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“There should be something in the files. Back in December, someone used my name in Budapest. My real name.”

“So?”

“You’re still new, Alan. Maybe you don’t realize what a no-no that is. Someone uses my real name, then other people can track it to my family. It’s simply not done.”

“Then come on back,” said Drummond. “We’ll figure out who did it.”

“Not during a freeze, we won’t. And later, I won’t have a chance.”

“Why not?”

Milo pulled into the slow lane behind a big rig. “Theodor Wartmüller.”

“What?”

“It was you, Alan. It was you the whole way.”

“You’re making no sense, Hall. What did the Krauts do to you?”

“I didn’t remember at first,” Milo said, “but then it came to me. Theodor Wartmüller. In December, one of my first jobs was to mail a package to him. I didn’t know what was inside, but now I do. Photographs of him with Adriana Stanescu, in bed. It was us. We’re the ones who blackmailed him, and then we swooped in to save him in exchange for favors.”

Drummond made some grunting noises, and Milo realized that it was after three in the morning there. “Can we talk this through later?”

“There’s no point, Alan. We set up Wartmüller by setting up the girl. Then we killed her.”

“Hold on a minute,” Drummond said, and Milo heard movement on the other side and a muffled voice, perhaps female. Walking. He was leaving his wife to find some privacy. A door closed; then he came back on. “It wasn’t my watch, Hall. You know that. Mendel set it up. I told you before-I’ve had to spend all my time cleaning up his mess. From what I gather, we monitored the whorehouse for some time and collected pictures of various German politicos before letting the police shut down the operation. Then Mendel used you to send those photos, which were to get us back in with the BND. Really,” he said, “no one even told me this when I took over the department. I didn’t know a thing about it until Wartmüller called me directly, asking us to get rid of Stanescu. Had to backtrack to figure out what he was even talking about, and I made my decision.”

“It was the wrong decision.”

“I don’t like it either, but we got plenty in return.”

He merged into the eastward flow of traffic, which was lighter than the westward flow. “Just tell me, then. Who actually pulled the trigger?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out on your own.”

“It was us, yes?”

“Yes, Milo. It was us. Wartmüller learned of your failure, so I had to send someone else. Someone with a little more loyalty.”

“Someone with fewer scruples.”

“A Tourist.”

“Einner?”

Drummond didn’t answer.

“This is why I won’t have time later to find out who was using my name in Budapest. Because I’m finished. I quit.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I really am, Alan. Find your mole on your own, and enjoy working for Senator Irwin. I hear he gives a brutal Christmas party.”

Milo switched off his phone, then steered with his knee as he took it apart. He was careful about it, because he didn’t want to have a wreck. He didn’t want anything to go wrong-he’d had enough of that.

When, just over the Hungarian border, he tried to withdraw forints from an ATM, the machine told him the transaction had been denied. He’d expected this, which was why he’d taken out euros in the airport, but he’d hoped that Drummond would drag his feet. The truth was that he actually liked the man and believed his excuses. Drummond had arrived in a department already so morally twisted that he’d had no choice but to follow suit until old cases were settled. Milo had hoped that Drummond might empathize enough to let him keep his cards a little longer. He was wrong.

Despite what Schwartz had learned from her source, Milo had last been to Budapest four years ago, in 2004, under his real name. He’d brought Tina and two-year-old Stephanie for a vacation. It was Tina’s first visit to the land that once lay behind the Iron Curtain, and she was taken by the imperial architecture rising through the bright late-summer light. She’d puzzled over the language-gyógyszertár, the Hungarian word for pharmacy, had particularly stunned her-but fell in love with the grandiose bridges crossing the Danube.

As he came gradually into town, open fields were replaced by huge shopping centers-IKEA and Tesco-where, despite his money situation, he stopped to pickup a cheap change of clothes, losing sixty euros all at once. The stores were soon replaced by sooty Habsburg buildings that, under the winter sky, held less charm than they’d had in the summer of 2004. It was still light when he crossed the Danube from Buda to Pest and checked into the Ibis Budapest Centrum’s tiny, nondescript room. He would have chosen an upscale hotel along the water, but his money wouldn’t last long. Besides, he was alone now, and wanted to maintain as low a profile as possible.