Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Nothing was perfect; nothing had ever been. The new go-codes, for instance, were impossible to remember. Six-digit numbers. So each time he called a Tourist he had to pull out the abused list from his top drawer, which listed everything: work name, phone number, go-code, and reply code. If he wanted to call one while he was outside of the office, he had to hightail it back to the Avenue of the Americas, go up to the twenty-second floor, and unlock his office and then the damned drawer. Irwin and his aides insisted it was the only secure way to run things, and they were probably right, but it made Drummond’s job that much more impossible.

Still, he’d survived-they’d all survived-and there was a certain satisfaction in that. He was starting to believe he could survive for a good long while in the Department of Tourism.

To celebrate his new lease on life, and to apologize for having missed a lunch date with his wife for a last-minute powwow with visitors from the Department of Defense, he’d reserved a table for two at Balthazar, Penelope’s favorite restaurant. He and Penelope had a long, known history of blowing a significant amount of their income on expensive restaurants. He couldn’t help it-seeing Penelope’s joy when a goat cheese and caramelized onion tart was placed before her made it all worth it. For the truth, which was so rare in his circles that admitting to it publicly would have been social suicide, was that he loved his wife deeply and thanked God that his undeserving ass had ever been blessed with her.

Lost in these embarrassing thoughts, he settled into a black Ford in the basement garage. Jake was behind the wheel; Jake, who had just returned from a holiday in Miami with his family. Drummond asked about the weather down there, and how the family was doing, and when his phone rang and he saw it was Irwin he considered not taking it-but the man was still technically his boss. “Sorry, Jake. I have to take this.”

“No worries, sir.”

Drummond raised the separation window. “Hello, Nathan.”

Nathan Irwin skipped the greetings. “What’s this about Hang Seng Bank?”

“It’s taken care of.”

“One of their CEOs gets his laptop stolen, and the next thing we know HSBC is selling all its options?”

“What did you think they’d do with the information?”

“Sit on it. That’s what I thought they’d do. I’ve got friends at Hang Seng, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know you were going through all our active case files.”

“You expect me to just sit around on the twenty-second floor twiddling my thumbs? I want a sit-down with you on this Hang Seng deal. Try to salvage something from it.”

“In the morning, Nathan. You know where to find me.”

The senator hung up, leaving Drummond with a bad taste in his mouth.

Jake stopped beside the tower at 200 East Eighty-ninth Street, and Drummond collected his briefcase and climbed out, showing an open hand in farewell. As the Ford sped off, he nodded at the old doorman whose name he never remembered.

The doorman apparently knew who he was. “There’s someone waiting for you, sir.”

“Yes?”

He nodded at the long couch in the foyer, and Drummond suddenly lost his appetite. Milo Weaver got up to meet him. He wasn’t smiling.

“You could’ve called beforehand,” Drummond told him. “Not sure that’s a good idea.”

“How did you find out where I live?”

“It’s not a state secret, Alan.”

Drummond frowned, then looked at the elevator. He wanted to ignore him and take that elevator straight up to the sixteenth floor, to Penelope, but Weaver had the wild-eyed look of someone who wouldn’t be ignored. “So why the hell are you here?”

“Can we talk upstairs?”

“Absolutely not. I’m not having my wife get friendly with you.”

“Right. Wife,” Weaver said, as if he’d forgotten this important detail. He looked over Drummond’s shoulder at the doorman, who had returned to the sidewalk but watched them carefully through the glass doors.

“The place isn’t bugged, Milo.”

Weaver nodded, then wiped at his nose, a move that covered his mouth as he spoke. “We were wrong, Alan. There is a mole, and he’s been in place for a while.”

“You’re a fucking nut, Weaver.”

Milo shook his head, his heavy eyes full of conviction. Drummond knew then that a quiet dinner with Penelope was now a vain hope. Maybe Weaver had been right all along-the world really did revolve around him.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12

TO THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2008

The argument had come to Milo all at once in a voice that his mother would have known. Big. The bigger voice that would never lie to him.

It proved that, no matter what Tina or Bipasha Ray thought, he really had been listening to his wife.

I even take it a step further sometimes and think that maybe his genius lies in the fact that the original cover, the first one I’ve peeled off and thrown away, that that’s the real one. That I’ve long ago abandoned what really is Milo Weaver. That it’s somewhere in the trash and I’ll never find it again.

How had the sequence of thoughts played out? He wasn’t sure. “Genius”-that word had probably made him think of Xin Zhu, whom he still admired deeply. Zhu had been on his mind anyway, for over the last days elements from Yevgeny’s file had come to him unbidden at unpredictable times. Like in the middle of couples therapy, at the mention of the word “genius.” Tina had planted the seed: A genius gives you the real story with the first layer of cover, so that once you’ve discarded it, it’s no longer viable.

Then he remembered her saying, How much time has to pass before your life stops being classified, huh? It never occurs to you that by then it might be too late.

Time. Too late.

The inverse: too early.

He recalled Marko Dzubenko and his drunken time with Xin Zhu. On the Chinese New Year, February 7.

But there was one thing this Zhu couldn’t figure out, and it irritated him. This Weaver guy. He was the one who figured out what was going on, and as a result everyone wanted him. Homeland Security wanted him for murder. The Company wanted him dead so the story wouldn’t get out. But this man, Zhu said, he lives the most charmed of lives. He survived. That really confused him. He said Weaver spent a couple months in prison, and his marriage fell apart, but he did survive. Now, not only was he still living and breathing, he was even working for his old employer again. He wanted to know how he pulled off that trick.

Then Henry Gray, on Sunday, March 2:

We’d had a ton of progress over the last week…

What kind of progress?

Well, we learned what happened to you, for instance.

What happened to me?

You survived, didn’t you? Grainger’s letter told us you were investigating, but we weren’t sure if you were one of the casualties or not. Everyone wanted your ass, after all. You got out of prison and went to live in New Jersey-we knew that-but then you disappeared, and we didn’t know until this week that you really were still alive.

How’d you figure that out?

Ask Rick. He came in with the information.

The timing was wrong. Xin Zhu already knew about Milo’s return to Tourism, but he waited until that last week with Gray to let the journalist know what he had been aware of all along.

He remembered that part of Xin Zhu’s technique was to become the kind of man you would like. For Gray, he was a serious and angry spy. For Dzubenko, he was a drunkard and a womanizer. What if he’d done the same to Milo? Because he did like Xin Zhu, a brilliant spymaster with an acute sense of humor, that quality so lacking in their business. What if Milo’s Zhu wasn’t the real one either?