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He’d been too young to understand, and too old to admit his ignorance. Her visits never lasted long enough for her to explain it well enough. He was always tired when she arrived in the middle of the night to rap on his window and carry him out to the nearby park.
“I am your mom, but you won’t call me mom. I won’t let you be oppressed, and I won’t let you oppress me with that word. You won’t even call me Ellen—that’s my slave name. My liberation name is Elsa. Can you say that?”
“Elsa.”
“Excellent.”
His early childhood was punctuated by these dreams—because that’s how they felt to him: dreams of a ghost-mother’s visitations with her brief lesson plans. In a year, she might come three or four times; when he was eight, she came nightly for an entire week and focused her lessons on his liberation. She explained that when he was a little older—twelve or thirteen—she would take him away with her, because by then he would be able to understand the doctrine of total war. Against whom? Against the little voices. Though he understood so little, he was excited by the thought of disappearing into the night with her. But he never did. After that intense week, the dreams never returned, and only much later would he learn that she’d died before she could bring him into the fold. In a German prison. By suicide.
Was that the Bigger Voice? The voice that spoke from the stone walls of Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison, convincing her to remove her prison pants, tie one leg to the bars on her door, the other to her neck, and then sit down with all the enthusiasm of a zealot?
He wondered if she could have done that had she kept her real name. Could she have done it if she had still called herself a mother? He wondered if he could have survived these last years, or chosen so casually to end his life, if he had kept hold of his own name.
There he was again, back to thoughts of suicide.
When the restaurant closed at ten, he again checked Ugrimov’s front door, then jogged westward, sometimes frustrated by dead ends, until he’d reached the waterside porticos of the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia. The third door, Grainger had said, so he counted to three, then, despite his stomach again acting up, lay flat on the cobblestones to reach over the edge of the walkway, down toward the rancid-smelling canal.
Unable to see, he had to do it by feel, touching stones until he felt the one that was different from the others. By now, these selected cubbyholes were over fifty years old, having been added to the architecture of postwar Europe by the members of the Pond, a CIA precursor. Remarkable foresight. Many had been discovered, while others had broken open on their own from poor workmanship, but occasionally the surviving ones proved invaluable. He closed his eyes to help his sense of touch. On the bottom edge of the stone was a latch; he pulled it, and the stone separated into his hand. He placed the lid beside himself and reached inside the exposed hole to find a weighty plastic-wrapped object, sealed airtight. He took it out, and in the moonlight ripped it open. Inside lay a Walther P99 with two clips of ammunition, all like new.
He replaced the stone’s cover, returned to Barba Fruttariol, and worked his way around the area, circling the palazzo as he wandered dark side streets, always returning at different angles to watch the front door or peer up to the lights along Roman Ugrimov’s terrace. Sometimes he spotted figures up there—Ugrimov, his guards, and a young girl with long, straight brown hair. The “niece.” But only the guards passed through the front door, returning with groceries, bottles of wine and liquor, and, once, a wooden humidor. After midnight he heard music wafting down—opera—and was surprised by the choice.
While the mewing cats ignored him, a total of three drunks tried to become his friend that night. Silence worked on all except the third, who put his arm around Charles’s shoulder and talked in four languages, trying to find the one that would make him answer. In a swift and unexpected surge of emotion, Charles thrust his elbow into the man’s ribs, cupped a hand over his mouth, and punched him twice, hard, on the back of his head. With the first hit, the man gurgled; with the second, he passed out. Charles held the limp man a few seconds, hating himself, then dragged him down the street, across an arched bridge spanning the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, and hid the drunk in an alley.
Balance—that word returned to him as he crossed the bridge again, trembling. Without balance, a life is no longer worth the effort.
He’d been doing his particular job for six—no, seven—years, floating unmoored from city to city, engaged by transatlantic phone calls from a man he hadn’t seen in two years. The phone itself was his master. Weeks sometimes passed without work, and in those periods he slept and drank heavily, but when he was on the job there was no way to stop the brutal forward movement. He had to suck down whatever stimulants would keep him in motion, because the job had never been about keeping Charles Alexander in good health. The job was only about the quiet, anonymous maintenance of the kindly named “sphere of influence,” Charles Alexander and others like him be damned.
Angela had said, “There is no other side anymore,” but there was. The other side was multifaceted: Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes, and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghani stan who were trying to pry Washington’s fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. As Grainger would put it, anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gates. That was when Charles Alexander’s phone would ring.
He wondered how many bodies padded the murky floor of these canals, and the thought of joining them was, if nothing else, a comfort. It is because of death that death means nothing; it’s because of death that life means nothing.
Finish the job, he thought. Don’t go out in failure. And then …
No more planes and border guards and customs people; no more lookingover your shoulder.
By five, it was decided. The prescient glow before dawn lit the sky, and he dry-swallowed two more Dexedrine. The jitters returned. He remembered his mother and her dreams of a utopia with only big voices. What would she think of him? He knew: She would want to beat him senseless. He’d spent his entire adult life working for the procurers and manufacturers of those insidious little voices.
When, at nine thirty, the George Michael fan unlocked the osteria again, Charles was surprised to find himself still breathing. He ordered two espressos and waited patiently by the window while the man cooked up a pancetta, egg, garlic, oil, and linguine mix for his dour, sickly customer. It was delicious, but halfway through his plate he stopped, peering out the window.
Three people were approaching the palazzo. The bodyguard he’d seen yesterday—Nikolai—and, close behind, a very pregnant woman with an older man. That older man was Frank Dawdle.
He dialed his cell phone.
“Yeah?” said Angela.
“He’s here.”
Charles pocketed the phone and laid down money. The bartender, serving an old couple, looked angry. “You don’t like the breakfast?”
“Leave it out,” Charles said. “I’ll finish it in a minute.”
By the time Angela arrived, her hair damp from an interrupted shower, the visitors had been inside the palazzo for twelve minutes. There were four tourists along the length of the street, and he hoped they would clear out soon. “You have a gun?” Charles asked as he took out his Walther.
Angela pulled back her jacket to show off a SIG Sauer in a shoulder holster.
“Keep it there. If someone has to get shot, I better do it. I can disappear; you can’t.”
“So you’re watching out for me.”
“Yeah, Angela. I am watching out for you.”
She pursed her lips. “You’re also afraid I won’t be able to shoot him.” Her gaze dropped to his trembling gun hand. “But I’m not sure you’ll even be able to shoot straight.”
He squeezed the Walther until the shaking lessened. “I’ll do fine. You get over there,” he said, pointing at a doorway just beyond, and opposite, the palazzo’s entrance. “He’ll be boxed in. He comes out, we make the arrest. Simple.”
“Simple,” she replied curtly, then walked to her assigned doorway as the tourists, thankfully, left the street.
Once she was out of sight, he reexamined his hand. She was right, of course. Angela Yates usually was. He couldn’t go on like this, and he wouldn’t. It was a miserable job; it was a miserable life.
The palazzo’s front door opened.
Bald Nikolai opened it, but remained inside, his tailored jacket arm holding the bloated wooden door so that the pregnant woman— who Charles could now see was very beautiful, her bright green eyes flashing across the square—could step over the threshold and onto the cobbles. Then came Dawdle, touching her elbow. He looked every one of his sixty-two years, and more.
The bodyguard closed the door behind them, and the woman turned to say something to Dawdle, but Dawdle didn’t answer. He was looking at Angela, who had emerged from her doorway and was running in his direction. “Frank!” she shouted.
Charles had missed his cue. He began running, too, the Walther in his hand.
A man’s voice shouted from the sky in easy English: “And her Ilove, you bastard!” Then a rising wail, like a steam-engine whistle, filled the air.
Unlike the other three people in the street, Charles didn’t look up. Distractions, he knew, are usually just that. He hurtled forward. The pregnant woman, eyes aloft, screamed and stepped back. Frank Dawdle was stuck to the ground. Angela’s flared jacket dropped as she halted and opened her mouth, but made no sound. Beside the pregnant woman, something pink hit the earth. It was 10:27 A.M.
He stumbled to a stop. Perhaps it was a bomb. But bombs weren’t pink, and they didn’t hit like that. They exploded or crashed into the ground with hard noises. This pink thing hit with a soft, wretched thump. That’s when he knew it was a body. On one side, spread among the splash of blood on the cobblestones, he saw a scatter of long hair—it was the pretty girl he’d spotted on the terrace last night.
He looked up, but the terrace was again empty. The pregnant woman screamed, tripped, and fell backward.
Frank Dawdle produced a pistol and shot wildly three times, the sound echoing off the stones, then turned and ran. Angela bolted after him, shouting, “Stop! Frank!”
Charles Alexander was trained to follow through with actions even when faced with the unpredictable, but what he saw—the falling girl, the shots, the fleeing man—each thing seemed only to confuse him more.
How did the pregnant woman fit into this?
His breathing was suddenly difficult, but he reached her. She kept screaming. Red face, eyes rolling. Her words were a garbled mess.
His chest really did feel strange, so he sat heavily on the ground beside her. That’s when he noticed all the blood. Not the girl’s—she was on the other side of the hysterical woman—but his own. He could see that now. It pumped a red blossom into his shirt.
How about that? He was exhausted. Red rivulets filled the spaces between the cobblestones. I’m dead. Off to the left, Angela ran after the dwindling form of Frank Dawdle.
Amid the indecipherable noises coming from the pregnant woman, he heard one clear phrase: “I’m in labor!”
He blinked at her, wanting to say, But I’m dying, I can’t help you. Then he read the desperation in her sweaty face. She really did want to stay alive. Why?
“I need a doctor!” the woman shouted.
“I—” he began, and looked around. Angela and Dawdle had disappeared; they were just distant footfalls around a far corner.
“Get a fucking doctor!” the woman screamed, close to his ear. From around that far corner he heard the three short cracks of Angela’s SIG Sauer.
He took out his telephone. The woman was terrified, so he whispered, “It’ll be all right,” and dialed 118, the Italian medical emergency number. In stilted, too-quiet Italian from just one painful lung, he explained that a woman on the Rio Terrá Barba Fruttariol was having a baby. Help was promised. He hung up. His blood was no longer a network of rivulets on the ground; it formed an elongated pool.
The woman was calmer now, but she still gasped for breath. She looked desperate. When he gripped her hand, she squeezed back with unexpected strength. Over her heaving belly, he looked at the dead girl in pink. In the distance, Angela reappeared as a small form, hunched, walking like a drunk.
“Who the hell are you?” the pregnant woman finally managed.
“What?”
She took a moment to regulate her breaths, gritted her teeth. “You’ve got a gun.”
The Walther was still in his other hand. He released it; it clattered to the ground as a red haze filled his vision.
“What,” she said, then exhaled through pursed lips, blowing three times. “What the hell are you?”
He choked on his words, so he paused and squeezed her hand tighter. He tried again. “I’m a Tourist,” he said, though as he blacked out on the cobblestones he knew that he no longer was.
(#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Part One (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
Problems of the INTERNATIONAL TOURIST TRADE (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4 TO
THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2007
1 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)
The Tiger. It was the kind of moniker that worked well in Southeast Asia, or India, which was why the Company long assumed the assassin was Asian. Only after 2003, when those few photos trickled in and were verified, did everyone realize he was of European descent. Which raised the question: Why “the Tiger”?
Company psychologists, unsurprisingly, disagreed. The one remaining Freudian claimed there was a sexual dysfunction the assassin was trying to hide. Another felt it referenced the Chinese “tiger boys” myth, concerning boys who morphed into tigers when they entered the forest. A New Mexico analyst put forth her own theory that it came from the Native American tiger-symbol, meaning “confidence, spontaneity, and strength.” To which the Freudian asked in a terse memo, “When did the tiger become indigenous to North America?”
Milo Weaver didn’t care. The Tiger, who was now traveling under the name Samuel Roth (Israeli passport #6173882, b. 6/19/66), had arrived in the United States from Mexico City, landing in Dallas, and Milo had spent the last three nights on his trail, camped in a rental Chevy picked up from Dallas International. Little clues, mere nuances, had kept him moving eastward and south to the fringes of battered New Orleans, then winding north through Mississippi until late last night, near Fayette, when Tom Grainger called from New York. “Just came over the wire, buddy. They’ve got a Samuel Roth in Blackdale, Tennessee—domestic abuse arrest.”
“Domestic abuse? Can’t be him.”
“Description fits.”
“Okay.” Milo searched the cola-stained map flopping in the warm evening wind. He found Blackdale, a tiny speck. “Let them know I’m coming. Tell them to put him in solitary. If they’ve got solitary.”
By the time he rolled into Blackdale that Independence Day morning, his travel companions were three days’ worth of crumpled McDonald’s cups and bags, highway toll receipts, candy wrappers, and two empty Smirnoff bottles—but no cigarette butts; he’d at least kept that promise to his wife. In his overstuffed wallet he’d collected more receipts that charted his path: dinner at a Dallas-area Fuddruckers, Louisiana barbecue, motels in Sulphur, LA, and Brookhaven, MS, and a stack of gas station receipts charged to his Company card.
Milo shouldn’t have liked Blackdale. It was outside his comfortable beat of early twenty-first-century metropolises. Lost in the flag-draped kudzu wasteland of Hardeman County, between the Elvisology of Memphis and the Tennessee River’s tri-border intersection with Mississippi and Alabama, Blackdale didn’t look promising. Worse, it was as he drove into town that he realized there was no way he could make his daughter’s July Fourth talent show that afternoon back in Brooklyn.
Yet he did like Blackdale and its sheriff, Manny Wilcox. The sweating, overweight officer of the law showed surprising hospitality to someone from the most-despised profession, and didn’t ask a thing about jurisdiction or whose business their prisoner really was. That helped Milo’s mood. The too-sweet lemonade brought in by a mustached deputy named Leslie also helped. The station had a huge supply on tap in orange ten-gallon coolers, prepared by Wilcox’s wife, Eileen. It was just what Milo’s hangover had been pleading for.
Manny Wilcox wiped perspiration off his temple. “I will have to get your signature, understand.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” Milo said. “Maybe you can tell me how you caught him.”
Wilcox lifted his glass to stare at the condensation, then sniffed. Milo hadn’t showered in two days; the proof was all over the sheriff’s face. “Wasn’t us. His girl—Kathy Hendrickson. A N’Orleans working girl. Apparently she didn’t like his kind of lovemaking. Called 911. Said the man was a killer. Was beating on her.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Picked him up late last night. I guess that’s how you guys got it, from the 911 dispatch. The hooker had a few bruises, a bloody lip. They were fresh. Verified his name with the passport. Israeli. Then we found another passport in his car. Eye-talian.”
“Fabio Lanzetti,” said Milo.
Wilcox opened his calloused hands. “There you go. We’d just squeezed him into the cell when your people called us.”
It was about two inches beyond belief. Six years ago, unbalanced and living under a different name, Milo had first run into the Tiger in Amsterdam. Over the ensuing six years, the man had been spotted and lost in Italy, Germany, the Arab Emirates, Afghani stan, and Israel. Now, he’d been trapped in a last-chance motel near the Mississippi border, turned in by a Louisiana prostitute.
“Nothing more?” he asked the sheriff. “No one else tipped you off? Just the woman?”
The flesh under Wilcox’s chin vibrated. “That’s it. But this guy, Sam Roth … is that even his real name?”
Milo decided that the sheriff deserved something for his hospitality. “Manny, we’re not sure what his name is. Each time he pops up on our radar, it’s different. But his girlfriend might know something. Where’s she now?”
The sheriff toyed with his damp glass, embarrassed. “Back at the motel. Had no cause to keep hold of her.”
“I’ll want her, too.”
“Leslie can pick her up,” Wilcox assured him. “But tell me—your chief said something about this—is that boy really called the Tiger?” “If it’s who we think it is, yes. That’s what he’s called.”
Wilcox grunted his amusement. “Not much of a tiger now. Pussycat, more like. He walks funny, too, kind of weak.”
Milo finished his lemonade, and Wilcox offered more. He could see how the police got hooked on Mrs. Wilcox’s homebrew. “Don’t be fooled, Sheriff. Remember last year, in France?”
“Their president?”
“Foreign minister. And in Germany there was the head of an Islamist group.”
“A terrorist?”
“Religious leader. His car exploded with him in it. And in London that businessman—”
“The one who bought the airline!” Wilcox shouted, happy to know at least this one. “Don’t tell me this joker killed him, too. Three people?”
“Those are the three from last year we can definitely pin on him. He’s been in business at least a decade.” When the sheriff’s brows rose, Milo knew he’d shared enough. No need to terrify the man. “But like I said, Sheriff, I need to talk to him to be sure.”
Wilcox rapped his knuckles on his desk, hard enough to shake the computer monitor. “Well, then. Let’s get you talking.”
