“The Tiger?” Milo asked, feigning ignorance.
“Come on! You know, that famous assassin. The one who killed the French foreign minister a while back. He was hired by the CIA.” Dzubenko shook his head. “Now, Zhu started with this, which made me doubt him right away, but then he slowly told me the whole story.”
“Which is what you’ll do for me right now.”
For the next hour, Dzubenko told it as he remembered it. He told it the way one tells a story he’s had to repeat often in recent days, playing with red herrings and side characters, knowing that the essential focus will not be lost. He began with the assassin, Benjamin Harris, otherwise known as the Tiger, and his surrender to a man from the department named Milo Weaver, with a message: Someone has killed me with the HIV virus, and I want you to find him. “But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? Not for any Company agent, least of all someone from this fucking-secret department.” Dzubenko was right about that; it hadn’t been enough to get Milo moving. It had taken more. It took the untimely death of an old friend, Angela Yates, and its connection to the Tiger, to make him act. Dzubenko took a drag off his Marlboro. “People are all the same. We need a personal reason to get our asses off the couch.”
He told how an agent in the Department of Homeland Security decided Milo was responsible for Angela’s death, and he had to go on the run. “From Disney World-can you believe it? He was there with his old lady and his kid. Tina, that’s the wife’s name. The daughter was called Stephanie. He had to leave them behind and go black.”
Dzubenko knew about the other players: the Tourist James Einner, the Russian businessman Roman Ugrimov, Diane Morel from French intelligence, and the Tourist Milo had killed, Kevin Tripplehorn, aka, many other names. He knew that it all connected to an attempt to destabilize the Sudanese government by blaming the murder of a radical cleric on the Chinese, who had significant oil interests in that country. Zhu told Dzubenko that the murder itself was one thing-the mullah had been a pain for everyone-but the riots that followed were the real crime. Eighty-six is the official number, Zhu told him, but more died. Innocents. Even a few of our own people, working in the oil fields. There was no need for that.
Zhu knew, further, that the plot had been instigated by Thomas Grainger, then head of Tourism, now deceased, as well as Terence Fitzhugh, also deceased. Both of whom had been directed by a certain senator, Nathan Irwin of Minnesota.
“That was a fuck of a messy month. Don’t get me wrong-we have plenty of messy months ourselves, but we expect a little less bloodletting from the CIA. I mean, you guys have a real budget. It should lead to less corpses, no?”
“It should,” Milo said, all the feeling drained from his limbs. This man knew everything.
“But there was one thing 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. You know what I told him?”
“I don’t,” said Milo, “but I’d like to know.”
“I told him this Weaver character was obviously working with the bad guys himself. Because the bad guys are the only ones who ever survive. Zhu thought that was pretty funny.”
The truth was that Yevgeny Primakov had helped him stay alive, and it struck him that the question of whether his father was a good guy or a bad guy was just a matter of perspective.
He’d had enough. It wasn’t just that the Chinese knew ninety percent of what had happened last year; it was simply hearing it again, described so vividly, and the way Dzubenko’s words brought back all those mixed feelings of confusion and anger and despair. He stood and offered a hand. “Thanks, Marko. You’ve been a big help.”
“So now will you move me to Wisconsin?”
“Wisconsin?”
“I have a cousin who lived there for two years. The most beautiful place on earth. The best women, too.”
“I didn’t realize,” said Milo. “We’ll see what we can do. You need anything else?”
Dzubenko looked at the full ashtray and the vodka bottle. “Another carton. Maybe some tonic water for mixing-my stomach’s starting to hurt.”
“Maybe you need some food instead.”
“Tonic’s fine.” He picked up the television remote. “It’s good, you know.”
“What?”
“Your Russian. Not that teach-yourself-Russian bullshit most of you Company guys use.”
“Thanks.”
Dzubenko turned on the television and added, “Poka,” an informal good-bye.
“Poka, Marko,” Milo said, and as he closed the door behind himself, he heard a German talk show hostess ask, with utter earnestness, You mean that, after all the things he did, you slept with him again? The studio audience let its contempt show with a synchronized Boo.
9
Drummond was coming down the stairs. “So?”
“It all fits.”
They stepped onto the dark porch, and cold, erratic gusts hit them. In the distance, against the glow of headlights on the highway, the silhouette of a guard stood smoking a cigarette. In the foreground, the Lincoln started up, but Drummond didn’t bother stepping down to the grass. He didn’t say a thing, so Milo said, “He tells me we have sixty-three Tourists in all. Is that about right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I used to know how many we had in Europe, but that was my focus. Grainger never shared the big number.”
“It’s the number we’re supposed to have, yes.” He coughed into his hand. “This is some serious bad news, but I want to vet him more before freezing things.”
“Freeze?”
“I don’t want the Chinese picking off our Tourists for sport. If we do have a mole, then I’m using the Myrrh code.”
Myrrh was the universal recall, the order of last resort. “Shouldn’t you wait for a second source?”
“Dzubenko is the second source.”
“What?”
Drummond chewed on something, perhaps the inside of his mouth. “As soon as I got his story, I started asking around. Any Chinese intel on double agents. There were a few leads, but these kinds of rumors are a dime a dozen. They always sound convincing until you ask for compromised material, then they dry up. But a friend over in Asia-Pacific told me about someone they’ve got in the Guoanbu. A woman. She’d been in the Third Bureau, which deals with Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, for a couple years. Nice, solid source for low-level intel. Then, in late December, there was a personnel shuffle, and she ended up in the Sixth Bureau, counterintelligence, and a small office on the outskirts of Beijing, run by one Xin Zhu.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Drummond shook his head. “Don’t get too excited. Zhu runs his department like al Qaeda runs its operations-in cells. Each individual works on a fragment, completely insulated from the person working at the next desk. This discipline is kept in check by the knowledge-or rumor, it doesn’t matter-that a percentage of them are only there to spy on the others for the boss. Sounds like a dreadful place to work.”
Milo didn’t bother saying that it sounded familiar. “She does have some access, though, right? We could backtrack the intel that crosses her desk.”
Again, he shook his head. “Nothing she’s worked on has dealt with any Western sources. Zhu kept her with her specialty, and the best she gets is occasional dirt on Macau and Taiwanese politicians. Only once did she come across what you and I are interested in. Once. And that was just blind luck, and lust. A couple weeks after she started working there, Zhu’s own secretary, An-ling Shen, began showing interest in her. She let him take her out one night. He’s an insignificant man physically-portly, nearsighted-and knows there’s only one way to woo an attractive younger woman into bed. With secrets. So he told her that his boss, Xin Zhu, had an important source within the CIA.”