Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

He was in his midthirties: narrow face, dark sideburns, thinning on top. His green eyes looked as if they had been put on with CGI. Three-or four-day beard. He looked like a hundred other young expats.

“And you are?” Milo asked to be sure. “Henry Gray. And you’re Milo Weaver. You look just like your photographs.”

“My photographs?”

“Yeah,” he said as he pointed across the square and began to walk, “but your nose wasn’t so fucked up.”

Milo walked with him along a crowded crosswalk to a small, busy side street that led to a mall-Mammut Mall, with its signature woolly mammoth logo. “I used to go to the pubs when I first came. Sörözős. Dark, gloomy places. After a while they just tire you out. Then the cafés. The bonus there is all the pretty girls, and nowadays the coffee is actually good. But that’s tiring, too-there’s always some social aspect to it. Now, it’s easiest to just go to the mall for a drink.” Gray smiled, as if he hadn’t had a chance to speak with an American in a while. “Moved all the way to Central Europe, just to become a suburbanite!”

They took escalators to the third floor, then crossed a glassed-in bridge over another street to enter the modern half of the mall, where overpriced restaurants tempted shoppers. Gray headed directly to Leroy’s, the darkest of the bunch, full of smoking women and their overdressed hangers-on. Gray ordered a mojito, so Milo ordered the same, and as they waited Milo cut into another monologue about the virtues of shopping malls. “Why’d you disappear, Henry?”

“Disappear?”

“From the hospital. You didn’t even tell Zsuzsa where you were.” Gray considered that, then smiled when the waitress returned with two tall drinks stuffed with fresh mint, lime, and long brown straws. He took a sip and said, “What do you think? You think that when I woke up I’d just go back to my life like everything was fine? This guy, he meant to kill me.”

“You mean James Einner.”

“You know who he is?”

“I can probably find out.”

“Good. Good.” Another sip. “Anyway, James Einner messed up. I knew that. And sooner or later he was bound to find out that I’d woken up. What was I going to do? What would you do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Me, I’m a journalist. If I can’t track stories, I don’t want to keep living. It’s the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I want to do.”

“So what did you do?”

Gray wrapped his lips around the straw and arched his brows. “You don’t know already?”

“All I know is, you got a letter from an old friend of mine, Thomas Grainger. Then this other guy, James Einner, tried to kill you. When you woke from your coma, you disappeared, and someone showed up looking for you, pretending to be me. Maybe it was Einner, maybe not. Then, yesterday, you called Zsuzsa while I was at the club, looking for you. How did you know I was there?”

“That was a coincidence. I didn’t know you were there. Not for sure.”

“So what triggered the call?”

“I told her. I was done. I’d finished my story.”

“And you told her to trust me.”

“Of course I did. The letter said to trust you.”

“The one from Thomas Grainger.”

“Exactly,” Gray said, then smiled. “I see what you’re thinking. If some other guy showed up pretending to be you, how could I be so stupid as to sit with you now?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s a good point.”

“I’m not entirely gullible,” he said with satisfaction. “First, the photograph-I know you are who you say you are. Of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe Grainger didn’t know you as well as he thought he did, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s why I’ve got backup.”

“Right now?”

He nodded, then glanced around. There were enough people in the restaurant and just outside in the mall itself that his backup could be anywhere. “They’re good at hiding,” he said.

“Who?”

“The Chinese.”

It felt like the kind of non sequitur a conspiracy theorist like Gray would make; then it didn’t. “Why the Chinese?”

“Because that’s who I went to, all right?”

“After you woke up?”

“When your own country is trying to kill you, it’s not called treason. It’s called survival.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

Gray looked like he didn’t believe Milo, but it didn’t matter anymore; he had backup, after all. “I woke in that hospital, and I knew that as soon as James Einner figured out I was alive, I was dead. Days, weeks, whatever. In the end, dead. I couldn’t go to the Hungarians, because they would just hand me to the CIA. And what did I have? Nothing, except a story. Einner might have stolen the letter, but he couldn’t take this,” he said, tapping his skull.

“After months in a coma, you remembered it all?”

“Not all. Fragments. Zsuzsa remembered more than I did. We worked together on it before I left.”

“Before you disappeared.”

“Yes.”

“So by the time you disappeared you had something of value to give the Chinese.”

“Exactly.” Gray chewed the end of his straw. “I got the hell out of the hospital and went to Benczúr utca. I went to the front desk of the embassy and asked for political asylum. I was passed on to someone who took down my story.”

Milo followed the brown straw from Gray’s pursed, damp lips down to the forest in his glass. Gray had gone to the Chinese-what were the odds? Milo said, “You gave them the whole story right away?”

“Pieces. The important pieces-the Sudan, the Tiger, the mullah. I wanted their protection for the rest. I told them I’d be staying at the Marco Polo-it’s a hostel in town. Took them two days, then I got a call. They wanted to meet me, but not at the embassy. They gave me some address out in Budakalász. That’s north of here. I took the tram and then walked a while. They picked me up on the way and drove me someplace completely different.”

“They were careful.”

“Of course they were. I was important to them.”

Milo noticed pride in Gray’s voice. “Where did you go?”

“South. Budaörs, off the M1. There was a fat guy there. Chinese-they were all Chinese. We talked.”

“Name?” Milo said through a suddenly dry mouth.

“He told me to call him Rick. It was a joke-he wanted me to know that the Chinese people really could pronounce the letter r.” He grinned-clearly, Gray liked Rick. “Knowing his real name wouldn’t do either of us any good. It didn’t matter to me-I was just afraid for my life. Rick wanted to help me. I would tell him all I knew about this story-everything I could remember from the letter-and he would help me do the research in safety. This was crucial. Only by publishing the story would I be safe.”

Milo didn’t answer. He rested his chin on his knuckles, trying to digest the sequence. Gray told the Chinese about the Sudan. Why? Because Milo’s own friend, Tom Grainger, had written a letter. That letter would have stayed with Gray were it not for James Einner and his botched murder-and it wouldn’t have been sent in the first place had Nathan Irwin not ordered Grainger’s execution.

Where, really, did the blame lie?

As if reading his mind, Gray said, “I’m not going to make apologies, you know. It’s you people who put me in this situation.”

“I’m not asking for apologies,” said Milo. “Go on.”

“Well, that’s what we did. I wrote down everything I remembered from the letter, and he worked with me to remember what I’d forgotten. He had some interrogation techniques-no waterboarding, nothing like that, just mind tricks, free association. When I remembered something, he would leave and go to verify details along the way. When I had trouble, he’d prod me with things he knew-secret things-to see if they brought up more information.”