Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

None of this, though, would have come to him had he not read that carefully collated file that his father had broken into his apartment to leave for him. His father, it turned out, knew much more about Xin Zhu than Drummond did, and Milo had stayed up until four in the morning, reading about the fifty-seven-year-old man from Xianyang, near the ancient city of Xi’an, who had been swept up by the Cultural Revolution, then eaten by it as his middle-school education landed him in the Down to the Countryside Movement, which sucked up five years of his life, until 1974, farming wheat in Inner Mongolia. He survived, and upon his return went to work for the Central Investigation Division, moving on to the Guoanbu in the eighties. In 1982, he married Qi Wan (1960-1989), and that same year his only child-a son, Delun (1982-2007)-was born.

A two-year posting in Bonn followed, then under different names he spent three years in Moscow and two more each in Jerusalem and Tehran. He returned to Beijing in 1993 and set up shop within the Sixth Bureau, focusing on counterintelligence, which was where he remained to this day. His wife and son had died prematurely-no causes listed-but he had not remarried. There was one known mistress in Guangzhou. According to the file, he was a moderate drinker and smoked rarely, but when he did he preferred a Hamlet brand cigarillo, manufactured in Japan.

There had also been stories, and while sitting in Dr. Ray’s office one had come to him, while Tina stared hard.

June 1987. According to source ESTER Zhu was asked by Beijing to acquire Soviet troop positions and battle plans in the Outer Manchuria region, which was accomplished within one week. Zhu’s technique, as related to ESTER by another source, was to convince Lieutenant colonel Konstantin Denisov, then based in Ulan Bator, that his wife, Valera, had discovered the identity of his mistress in Moscow. Denisov returned to Moscow immediately, and his second-in-command, Major Oleg Sergeyev-whose assistant, Lieutenant Feodor Bunin, was in the pay of the Guoanbu before his 1989 discovery and subsequent execution-took over. Bunin, now with complete access, passed the information on to his handlers.

“You’re a fucking nut, Weaver.”

“I’m afraid not, Alan.”

Drummond submitted. He took Milo into the elevator and brought him up to the sixteenth floor, and into his life. There was a petite, rather sensual-looking blonde in the apartment, his wife, Penelope, who was unfazed by the surprise visitor. When Drummond introduced Milo and said, “Pen, we’re going to have to use the office for a little bit. You mind bringing us some ice?” she grinned devilishly and replied, “How very fifties, dear.”

Once they were settled in a room that was more like a lounge than an office, Drummond opened up a cabinet and started rattling off the names on the bottles. Milo stopped him at Smirnoff; then Penelope came in with a leather-skinned ice bucket. Milo couldn’t help but smile. “This really is the fifties,” he said to her.

“Golly shucks, it is,” she said, winking. “Thanks, hon,” said Drummond.

Milo apologized again for the interruption and watched her close the door behind herself.

Drummond handed over a glass of iced vodka and said, “Great, isn’t she?”

“Really is, Alan.”

“Flirt with her any more, and I’ll have you erased.” He sat down with his Scotch, not smiling. “Now explain yourself.”

Milo took a breath and began with the time discrepancy, but Drummond blew that off. “One minor detail? Gray probably got it wrong.”

“It makes more sense if you step back and look at everything this way, imagining that Zhu does have a mole. Why, for instance, did he give up on his operation when I arrived in Budapest?”

“You said it yourself. He’d made his point.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. But let’s say his sense of humor isn’t as excellent as I believed. Guoanbu colonels don’t waste all this time-and expense, remember-just to make a point. So what else could he get out of it? If there is a mole, then that means he completed his objectives and wanted Tourism back in operation so that the information he had would be useful.”

“What information?”

“The information on how the department works.” Milo opened his hands, but Drummond didn’t speak, just stared, so he said, “Another curious fact: Zhu knew I was in Budapest. How did he know that? If he wasn’t watching your computer tracking me, then he was hearing it through Global Security, the firm that had tracked me there-and they reported directly to Irwin.”

Drummond frowned. “You’re talking in circles, Milo. Besides, it makes no sense. You don’t protect a mole by raising the specter of a mole. Not unless you’re going to frame someone else to divert suspicion, which never happened. The fact is that we never suspected the existence of a mole in the department until Zhu started to play with us.”

“Of course not. Because there’s no mole in the department. There never was.”

“Jesus Christ, Milo. Make some sense, okay?”

“The mole is on Nathan Irwin’s staff.”

All expression washed out of Drummond’s face. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. “It’s not going to work.”

“What?”

“This. You’re still after him, aren’t you? Listen-you think that if you ruin Irwin it’s going to make your marriage any better? I’ve got news for you-”

“No, Alan. You listen. And think. What’s the one result of Xin Zhu’s operation? What’s the one lasting change?”

“It’s made me into a permanent joke,” Drummond said, then shook his head. “Okay, what’s the one lasting change?”

“Irwin in control of the department.”

Drummond shook his head. “But he’s not. Not really. By Friday he and his staff are out of there.”

“Which is long enough to get access to all the department’s files.”

That seemed to make Drummond uncomfortable. “Go on.”

“From the beginning, the only operation we were sure Zhu knew about was the Sudanese operation. Right? He knew it inside and out.”

“We’ve been through this-he knew it all from a letter that Thomas Grainger wrote.”

Milo set aside his glass. “A beautiful coincidence. It’s the one operation that Irwin’s people were already familiar with, because Irwin himself ran it. Irwin told me that he knew next to nothing about what the department did before he took over. He stayed far away in order to protect himself. With one notable exception. The Sudan. His inner staff had to know about it.”

“Okay,” said Drummond, allowing him this one fact, “but by Friday he’s out of the department. That’s a lot of work for such a limited period of access.”

“You’re forgetting the other result of the entire game.”

“What’s that?”

“Myrrh. You recalled everyone-at Irwin’s insistence-and he and his staff were around to oversee the redeployment. He knows the names and go-codes of every Tourist you have. If I’m right, so does Xin Zhu.”

Drummond stared into his drink and thought through the implications.

“It does make sense, Alan. You just have to look at it. The timing. The details. I keep going over it, and I can’t find anything to kill the theory.”

Drummond finished his Scotch, refilled it, then opened a humidor full of cigars but didn’t take any out. He shut it, then opened it again, a nervous gesture. “Let me get this straight. First you tell me, yes, we have one. Then we don’t. Now, you’re telling me we do?”

“Not we, Alan. Not you.”

“Irwin. Right.”

Milo waited.

Finally, Drummond looked at his hands. “Okay. I’m willing to treat it as a serious possibility. The question is, what do we do about it?”