Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“Talk to Drummond. He’ll tell you I’m done.”

“Will he?”

“I’ve quit.”

Irwin raised his brows to show how interested he was. “Now, that’s something.”

“It certainly is.”

“And how does that affect us?”

“It shows how uninterested I am. I no longer care about anything that happens in this world. I’d call it a tempest in a teacup if so many people didn’t get killed.”

“Tempest in a teacup?” Irwin grunted his amusement. “I’ll have to tell that to the other guys on the committee.”

“Tell them what you like. I just want you to know that we-you and me-we’re finished. Here. Now.”

“So you can go back to your lovely family? To Tina and Stephanie?”

Two and a half feet between his hand and the senator’s neck. “Something like that.”

Perhaps reading Milo’s mind, Irwin leaned back. “Two things, Milo. First is that this doesn’t make me feel any better. Why do you think you were even brought back into Tourism?”

“Shortages.”

“Shortages, sure, but Mendel was my man, and I’m the one who made sure he brought you back in. Why do you think I did that?”

Milo went for his drink again. He didn’t like where this was going. “So you could keep an eye on me.”

“Very good. During Mendel’s tenure I could find out where you were at any moment. Now that this kid’s running things and sticking to procedure, I have to pay out of my own pocket for people to track you. Which brings me to the second thing.” Irwin reached into his jacket and brought out a six-by-four color snapshot. He placed it on the damp bar. It was of Milo in Berlin, standing at a courtyard entrance, talking with a pretty Moldovan girl. “I believe they refer to this as the money shot.”

Milo almost slipped off the bar stool, but didn’t. Then he almost strangled the senator. But didn’t.

“I’ve shelled out a lot on these private dicks, but with this I can finally call them off.” He reached into his jacket again and took out another picture. “This one’s the coup de grace.”

It certainly was. Milo and Yevgeny Primakov inside the Berliner Dom, beneath a painting, discussing the future of Adriana Stanescu. He hadn’t seen the shadows-they must have mixed with the Bavarians, just as Yevgeny had.

“Your father, yes?”

Milo didn’t answer.

“You know, before taking over the department, I was largely ignorant of what it did. Of course, I knew the broad strokes, and sometimes I stepped in when I wanted to personally oversee an operation. Yes, yes-like the Sudanese one. Otherwise my only real function was making sure it received the funds it needed to keep working. My ignorance was protection-for myself, and for the department. No one likes to perjure himself on the floor of Congress. But for the last few days my clearance has shown me everything. Everything. It’s like Pandora’s box, the records of the Department of Tourism. Some of it makes even me queasy. Particularly this,” he said, shaking the photograph before slipping it back into his jacket. “I see a man talking with his father; then the image shifts completely when I read the file. I learn that immediately afterward you kidnapped that girl and then went out of your way not to kill her. The sequence of events becomes clear, and it occurs to me that you not only didn’t do your job, but you brought in a foreign national-a representative of the United Nations, no less-to help thwart your orders.” He paused. “You shared all the details of your job with your father and asked for his help. Yes?”

Still Milo didn’t answer.

“I think we understand each other,” said Irwin. He lifted his Scotch to his lips.

The senator wasn’t gloating, not quite. He was just trying to make himself understood. If Milo ever made an attempt to get back at him, the senator would quickly make him Europe’s most wanted man. If that wasn’t enough, he would have Milo arrested for treason.

That was how a senator protected himself in today’s world. It proved that Nathan Irwin was still a terrified man, and no matter what he said, the surveillance would continue for a good long time, even after he’d washed his hands of Tourism.

Despite the worries that had plagued him, Milo survived his time in that blank cell on the nineteenth floor. Because of his short tenure as a Tourist, the exit interview lasted only five days, and John’s questions were, particularly compared to their last session in July, when Milo had been accused of murdering Thomas Grainger, gentle. He could sense the open honesty in most of Milo’s answers. When the story reached Berlin, though, John paused and backtracked and sniffed; something was wrong. He began to seek out individual hours. Six to eight in the evening on Wednesday the thirteenth. Nine in the morning on Friday. John seemed troubled by Milo’s unprecedented Christian feelings, him heading to the Berliner Dom to seek out spiritual advice about a hit he wasn’t sure he could go through with. Of course John was troubled; Milo’s file stated his religious beliefs as “none.” Finally, after John put it to him that all his hours, as a Tourist, were owned by the Company, and that therefore he required complete honesty, Milo said, “Well, I guess there’s no reason to hide it anymore.”

“To hide what?”

“Stefan Hassel. I knew him from the Bührle job. We met to set up the Adriana Stanescu kidnapping. Ask Drummond-he already knows.”

“The kidnapping?”

“Yes.”

Later, when they’d dealt in excruciating detail with his stay at Erika Schwartz’s and his subsequent search for Henry Gray, John returned to Stefan Hassel. Milo had more stories ready.

On the last day, John became chatty. They’d worked together often during the previous years, when people needed to be brought down to these cells and interrogated, but the fraternity he showed was still surprising. The best he could figure was that Drummond or Irwin had told him he could relax.

“They’re all gone now, you know.”

“They?”

“The Tourists. New names, new covers, new go-codes. New phones, even. It’s a relief. You ever had to oversee the interviews of thirty-eight people at once? It’s a pain, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

John even smiled-a rare event. “Okay. There’s one last thing I want to go over. You told me before that you admired Xin Zhu because of the cleverness of his scheme.”

“Yes-but not just because it was clever. There are a lot of clever people in the world. What I admire is the fact that no one was hurt, not directly. All he did was bruise some egos. Don’t you admire it?”

“What I feel doesn’t matter. We’re talking about you.”

“What you’re asking is if I admire him so much that I might work for him in the future. That’s what you’re hinting at, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. But… you might as well answer your own question.”

“First I’ll need to know what kind of health plan he offers.”

“Ha ha, Milo. Good one.”

Before he was released on Monday, he sat down beside a machine on a table in a locked closet. Though it looked a lot like an old sewing machine, John assured him that it was in fact magnetic in nature. He swiveled it out so that it pressed hard against the top of Milo’s left shoulder, then typed a code into a keypad on the rear. There was no sound, no movement, nothing to tell Milo it had even been plugged in, but John swiveled it back into place and said, “Congratulations. You’re no longer being tracked.” They shook hands at the elevator, where John said, “I’d say don’t be a stranger, but be a stranger,” and when he boarded the doorman made that elusive statement comprehensible by informing him that he no longer had clearance to board this elevator ever again.