Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

All the lights in the apartment came on. It took Jackson eleven minutes to dress in sweats and climb into a waiting taxi. Klein followed most of the way, until it let her off on the sidewalk outside the hotel. Milo was already waiting for her, talking with Klein on the phone. “Go join Jones. Once you’re in place we’ll finish this up.”

Jackson, too, doubted Milo was who he said he was, so rather than manhandle her he waited for her to call Irwin. On their way inside, she said, “What do you think I did?”

His phone was ringing. It was Jones. “Pearson is leaving. He looks nervous.”

“Panicked?”

“No, just nervous. He’s checking his watch.”

“The woman’s still in there?”

“Yes. But Klein won’t be here for another five or ten minutes.”

“Stay with her,” Milo ordered. If they called Pearson while he was out, the legislative director would likely still call Chan, if only to explain why he wasn’t returning-they were lovers, after all. “We’ll call Chan next.”

He hung up, and as they waited for the elevator, Jackson said, “Jane Chan?”

He looked at her.

“You’re going to call Jane Chan next? What kind of game is this?”

They boarded the elevator. Milo said, “It’s not a game.”

“It certainly isn’t. If you think Jane’s some kind of criminal, or terrorist, then you’re completely insane.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Jackson was angry now. “You wake people up in the middle of the night to interrogate them? That’s Gestapo tactics. And the CIA doesn’t even have the authority to screw around with people inside the country. What the hell is going on?”

He wasn’t sure why-perhaps because he’d suspected her so strongly, or because she had a history of clashing with the Chinese authorities-but he answered her. “We’re looking for a Chinese mole. It’s one of Irwin’s seven aides, which is why we called you.”

She blinked as the doors opened on the sixth floor. “Jane?”

“She and Pearson are our final suspects.”

“Oh.”

She said that with a strange, unexpected despair. “What?”

“I called her.”

“Chan?”

She nodded. Milo grabbed her elbow and pulled her out of the elevator. “When?”

“Just before I left. I told her-”

“What did you tell her?”

“Just that the CIA was accusing me of something, and I had to go defend myself. I told her-well, it just made sense-I gave her the heads-up. If you were looking into me, then you might start asking her questions.”

“Why?”

“Haven’t you ever had a friend?”

Milo opened the door to the room, and all eyes turned to Jackson, who was still stunned. Milo was already on the phone to Jones. “She knows. Go in now.”

Drummond, in the corner, looked as if the pistol had become too heavy for him. “What?”

Milo looked around the room. “Everyone, you’re free to go. Irwin, you come with me and Alan.”

“Well, isn’t this fucking anticlimactic,” said Max Grzybowski.

It was twelve fifteen when the three men reached Irwin’s long black Chrysler parked around the corner on M Street. Drummond got behind the wheel; Irwin took the backseat, Milo the passenger seat. As they left Thomas Circle, Milo’s phone rang. Again, it was Jones. “I’ve got some bad news for you, Milo.”

“Go ahead.”

“The woman, Chan? She’s sitting on the sofa with two bullets in her chest. Stone cold.”

It took nearly twenty minutes to cross the Potomac, head down the Jefferson Davis Highway, and exit into the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria. They found Leticia Jones in Pearson’s apartment, standing over Chan’s body, shaking her head. Chan was small, eyes closed on her wide face. Her skin was brutally white, the blood having drained out of two small holes in her chest; one of the bullets had struck high and punctured her aorta. The floor around the sofa was black and sticky.

“It’s no good,” said Jones.

Milo stood beside her. “What’s that?”

Leticia Jones didn’t feel up to explaining herself. She pointed at the window to the building’s courtyard. “That was already open, and here,” she said, crouching on the rug, “are the shells.” She pointed a long, red fingernail at a 9 mm casing moored in the blood, then another. “Super-close range.”

“When did Pearson leave?”

“Got to be forty minutes by now. I guess he wasn’t just picking up milk.”

Drummond approached them from behind. “If I found this on my couch, I wouldn’t be back yet either.”

Whether or not she was the mole, Milo hated to find her dead. He tried to work through how this had happened, avoiding the obvious answer: It had happened because Milo had decided to put his plan into action. Aloud, he said, “Jackson calls Chan to tell her about us. Chan panics and calls Zhu, or whoever her contact is. Zhu sends someone to get rid of her. All in-what? A half hour from Jackson’s call to when Pearson left?”

No one answered at first. Irwin was standing in a far corner of the apartment, a handkerchief to his mouth, eyes red. Drummond coughed, then said, “They knew you were sniffing around, Milo. You made sure of that. Zhu kept someone on hand in case there needed to be some killing. I would.”

Drummond’s phone rang, and he stepped away to answer it. Milo looked at Jones. “Clean, isn’t it?”

“Sort of.”

“The shooter got all the way from that window to here and put two bullets in her chest-and she didn’t even try to get up? She may have been asleep when he came in, but when she was shot she was sitting up.”

“Like I said,” Jones reminded him, “it’s no good.”

Klein wandered in from the kitchen, a pint of Häagen-Dazs in his large palm, eating. They both looked at him. “What?” he said.

Drummond came back holding his phone aloft. “It’s Reagan National. They’ve got Pearson.”

He had been picked up in Terminal B with a ticket for the six fifty-five Air Canada flight to Montreal. Klein drove alone; Milo joined Jones in her car; Drummond drove Irwin, who by now was showing real signs of shock. The ride with Leticia Jones was silent most of the way, until Milo said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. No one should be dead.”

Jones didn’t bother answering that.

Reagan National Airport, like JFK, had its own series of back corridors that led to interrogation rooms. The one in which they’d placed Pearson had a table and chairs and a window reinforced with wire mesh. Before going in, they peered at him through the window. The man that Milo remembered from Drummond’s office, talking into his cell phone with the easy confidence of young power, was now a mess. Hair awry, clothes disheveled, and a blank, wet stare.

“Who’s going to start?” asked Drummond.

Before anyone could argue, Milo stepped inside the room. David Pearson hardly gave him a look as he walked to the table and sat down opposite. “Talk, Dave.”

Pearson stared at his hands, which were flat on the table. “I don’t know who he was. But she did. She told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That they would get her. She knew.”

“Who’s they?”

“Her masters in Beijing.”

“I don’t follow.”

He kept his gaze fixed solidly on his chewed nails and shook his head. “She called. Susan. She told Jane that the CIA was bringing her in for some questions, and Jane-I didn’t understand it at first-she panicked. She told me she had to go. She had to leave. I asked why. She wasn’t making any sense. Then she told me. She said she was working for the other side. For… it really sounds ludicrous. For the Chinese. She said she’s been working for them for years.”