Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

His secretary, a heavyset brunette with a telescopic eye for detail, brought a stack of mail and a coffee to his large oak desk. He thanked her and opened his laptop, starting up a program called Tracker, which was exactly what the name suggested. It tracked the cell phones and shoulder chips of all his Tourists on a world map, giving him a God’s-eye view of the breadth of his influence. Red spots peppered the planet, most remaining still while others, on planes or high-speed trains, moved incrementally. When he dragged his cursor over a dot, a simple heads-up display gave him the work name and any recent notes attached to it. A counter along the bottom gave him the total number: thirty-seven.

He’d finished going through his mail and fielding fresh intelligence reports and delivering orders when Irwin breezed into his office. He’d been doing this more often recently, walking through the door without knocking, even when Drummond was on the telephone. The senator approached the windows overlooking Manhattan. To the city, he said, “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what, Nathan?”

“This. Working a mile up above the city. A bubble.” He stepped back and frowned at Drummond. “It’s not healthy. If you’re not mixing with the rabble, then how can you even protect the rabble’s interests? You can say a lot of bad things about politicians, but we never forget who we’re representing. They have our e-mail addresses, know our names and faces, know where we live. Everything-well, most of the things we do are there for public display. Step out of line, and someone’s standing nearby with a sledgehammer.”

Drummond pushed back from his desk and examined the senator. Despite the premature whitening of his hair, the man was full of the kind of nervous energy Drummond had seen a lot of in the military. He had youth in his mannerisms, perhaps a result of mixing with the rabble. “You might be right,” Drummond admitted. “Instead, we mix with people like you, and trust that you’re reporting back on what the rabble really want.”

“Not just what they want. What they need.”

“Of course. You here about Hang Seng?”

“Later,” Irwin said, waving that away. “You seen Milo Weaver recently?”

The question was ill placed because Irwin wanted to see its effect. Drummond understood this. He’d been expecting the question, though, and it proved that Weaver had at least been right about Irwin’s goons following him. “As a matter of fact, he came by last night. Looking for a job.”

“He wants back in?”

“Not in a million years. Wanted advice on where to look. I’m sending a recommendation over to Cy Gallagher over at Global Security. You know him?”

“Think we’ve crossed paths before.”

“Well, it’s just a recommendation. I have no idea what he’s looking for these days.”

“I’m sure that even Cy could find a use for Weaver’s skill set,” Irwin said, then gave him a nod of greeting and wandered out again.

Later, walking to the lunch he’d promised Stuart Fossum, he used his personal phone to call two Tourists. Practicing bad security, he’d scribbled their six-digit go-codes on scrap paper before leaving the office, and read them off. One Tourist he recalled from Bolivia, the other from Mauritania.

He paid for the lunch-Fossum’s insistence on seared Kobe beef with a truffled herb salad made the expensive meal ludicrous-with his own credit card. His guest handed over the folder of seven files without a word, then launched into an extended harangue about the CIA. Drummond played along with it, but cut the meal short when his phone rang and he was called back to the office. In fact, it was Milo who called. Sticking to their prearranged signal, Milo said, “Did you talk to your friend Gallagher yet?”

“Not yet. Later in the afternoon.”

“Look, I put together a CV last night that I think you should show him. Little more fleshed out. Can I bring it by now?”

“I’m not in the office.”

“Can we meet at the Staples in Herald Square? I’m heading there to do up a copy. Then I’m off to Jersey.”

“Not staying at home anymore?”

“Just meet me, will you?”

He hopped a bus to Thirty-fourth, three blocks north of the office, and found Weaver in the hectic, crowded store, sitting on a bench with an open knapsack full of stapled sheets. Drummond settled beside him, his open briefcase between them, and started leafing through one of the copies. He was almost surprised to receive an actual CV for Milo Weaver, with dates and fake CIA departments listed, charting a fictional but appropriately slow career advancement. While he read through it, unfolding pages in an elaborate and noisy game of distraction, Weaver removed the seven FBI files from his briefcase and slipped them into his knapsack.

As they went about their ruse, Drummond tried to get a sense of who among the crowd were Weaver’s shadows. The blond girl with the pigtails and the backpack? The biker with the handlebar mustache? The effeminate male duo holding posters for a rave? He had no idea.

Weaver was already getting up, telling him he didn’t need advice on the CV. He just needed a job. “You get that to Gallagher and let me do the rest, okay?”

“Sure, Milo. I’ll do just that.”

When he returned to the office, he gave Saeed Atassi the go-ahead to leak his Tour Guide, then went to Harry Lynch’s cubicle. The nervous Travel Agent looked terrified by the personal visit. Drummond squatted beside him. “Harry, I hear you’re a whiz with the machines.”

“I’m all right, sir.”

“Well, I need a little wizardry. Soon you’re going to see Tourists Klein and Jones start to move. They’re coming here. Is there a way you can arrange it so that no one else knows?”

A smile appeared on Harry Lynch’s face.

In alphabetical order, they were:

Derek Abbott (Legislative Assistant)

Jane Chan (Scheduler)

Maximilian Grzybowski (Chief of Staff)

William Howington (Legislative Assistant)

Susan Jackson (Press Secretary)

David Pearson (Legislative Director)

Raymond Salamon (Legislative Assistant)

It was a small staff by congressional standards, most of the legwork accomplished by a disproportionately large army of interns. What that meant, Milo realized, was that each staff member had a larger share of the federal administrative and clerical employee allowance-and a senator that paid better than others knew he was buying loyalty.

Each of the seven was represented by a manila folder he laid out on the card table in the dusty safe house on Grand Concourse, across from Franz Sigel Park. It was nearly five, and he’d spent the hours after his meeting with Drummond on four different forms of transport, leading his shadows over into New Jersey and then evading them by bus, boat, taxi, and back alleys before doubling back by bus via the George Washington Bridge and heading up to the Bronx. With the evening came a chilly breeze that leaked in through the fire-escape window he’d broken in order to get inside, then covered with cardboard from a still-full crate of toilet paper. Only now could he begin to go through the files.

Each contained biographical information. The one whose name he had obviously zeroed in on, Jane Chan, did still have family in the old country, but in Hong Kong, not the mainland. Still, since China’s takeover in 1997, it wasn’t inconceivable the Guoanbu had made her family’s continued safety contingent on its American relative’s cooperation.

Of the rest, Chinese connections were either unknown or, in three cases, tangential. Derek Abbott had previously worked for Representative Lester Wharton of Illinois, until Wharton was arrested for receiving gifts from the Chinese honorary consul in Chicago, in exchange for trade legislation.