The Tourist. Olen Steinhauer

       2

      The sheriff had moved three drunks and two spousal abusers to the group cell, leaving Samuel Roth alone in a small cinder-block room with a steel door and no window. Milo peered through the door’s barred hatch. A fluorescent tube burned from the ceiling, illuminating the thin cot and aluminum toilet.

      To call his search for the Tiger obsessive would have been, according to Grainger, an understatement. In 2001, soon after he’d recovered from his bullet wounds in Vienna and retired from Tourism, Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghani stan, he would spend his time on terrorism’s more surgical arms. Terrorist acts, by definition, were blunt and messy. But when someone like bin Laden or al-Zarqawi needed a specific person taken out, he, like the rest of the world, went to the professionals. In the assassination business, there were few better than the Tiger.

      So over the last six years, from his twenty-second-floor cubicle in the Company office on the Avenue of the Americas, he’d tracked this one man through the cities of the world, but never close enough for an arrest.

      Now, here he was, the man from that embarrassingly meager file Milo knew so well, sitting comfortably on a cot, his back to the wall and his orange-clad legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Samuel Roth, or Hamad al-Abari, or Fabio Lanzetti—or five other names they knew of. The assassin didn’t check to see who was peering in at him; he left his arms knotted over his chest as Milo entered.

      “Samuel,” Milo said as a deputy locked the door behind him. He didn’t approach, just waited for the man to look at him.

      Even in this light, with its harsh shadows and the way it yellowed his skin, Roth’s face recalled the three other photographs back at the office. One from Abu Dhabi, as al-Abari, his features half obscured by a white turban. A second from Milan, as Lanzetti, at a café along the Corso Sempione, talking with a red-bearded man they’d never been able to identify. The third was CCTV footage from outside a mosque in Frankfurt, where he’d planted a bomb under a black Mercedes-Benz. Each remembered image matched these heavy brows and gaunt cheeks, the pitch eyes and high, narrow forehead. Sometimes a mustache or beard hid aspects of the face, but now his only mask was a three-day beard that grew to the top of his cheekbones. His skin was splotchy in this light, peeling from an old sunburn.

      Milo remained beside the door. “Samuel Roth—that’s the name we’ll use for now. It’s easy to pronounce.”

      Roth only blinked in reply.

      “You know why I’m here. It has nothing to do with your problems with women. I want to know why you’re in the United States.”

      “Кaк вac зoвут, мудаки?” said Roth.

      Milo grimaced. He was going to have to go through the motions. At least a change of language would hide their talk from these Tennessee boys. In Russian, he answered, “I’m Milo Weaver, of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

      Samuel Roth looked as if that were the funniest name he had ever heard.

      “What?”

      “Sorry,” Roth said in fluent English. He raised a hand. “Even after all this, I still didn’t expect it to work.” He had the flat, irregular accent of someone who’d absorbed too many.

      “What didn’t you expect to work?”

      “I’m lucky I even remember you. I forget a lot of things these days.”

      “If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll hurt you. I am authorized.”

      The prisoner’s eyes widened; they were bloodshot and tired.

      “There’s only one reason you’d risk entering the country. Who are you supposed to kill?”

      Roth chewed the inside of his cheek, then spoke in a laconic tone: “Maybe you, Company man.”

      “We were tracking you since Barcelona—you know that? To Mexico, then Dallas, and that rented car to New Orleans where you picked up your girlfriend. Maybe you just wanted to know if she survived Katrina. You switched to your Italian passport—Fabio Lanzetti—before switching back in Mississippi. Changing names is a nice trick, but it’s not foolproof.”

      Roth cocked his head. “You’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

      “Would I?”

      Samuel Roth wiped his dry lips with his fingers, stifling a cough. When he spoke, he sounded congested. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Milo Weaver—a.k.a. many other names. Alexander.” He pointed at Milo. “That’s the name I know best. Charles Alexander.”

      “No idea what you’re talking about,” Milo said as nonchalantly as he could manage.

      “You’ve got a long history,” Roth continued. “An interesting one. You were a Tourist.”

      A shrug. “Everyone likes a vacation.”

      “Remember 2001? Before those Muslims ruined business. Amsterdam. Back then, I only worried about people like you, people who work for governments, ruining my business. These days …” He shook his head.

      Milo remembered 2001 better than most years. “I’ve never been to Amsterdam,” he lied.

      “You’re curious, Milo Weaver. I’ve seen files on lots of people, but you … there’s no center to your history.”

      “Center?” Milo moved two steps closer, an arm’s length from the prisoner.

      Roth’s lids drooped over his bloodshot eyes. “There’s no motivation connecting the events of your past.”

      “Sure there is. Fast cars and girls. Isn’t that your motivation?”

      Samuel Roth seemed to like that. He wiped his mouth again to cover a large grin; above his sunburned cheeks his eyes looked very wet, sick. “Well, you’re certainly not motivated by your own well-being, or else you’d be somewhere else. Moscow, perhaps, where they take care of their agents. At least, where agents know how to take care of themselves.”

      “Is that what you are? Russian?”

      Roth ignored that. “Maybe you just want to be on the winning side. Some people, they like to bend with history. But history’s tricky. Today’s monolith is tomorrow’s pile of rocks. No.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. I think you’re loyal to your family now. That would make sense. Your wife and daughter. Tina and … Stephanie, is it?”

      Involuntarily, Milo shot out a hand and gripped Roth’s shirt at the buttons, lifting him from the cot. This close, he could see that his dry, peeling face was riddled with pink sores. This was not sunburn. With his other hand, he squeezed Roth’s jaw to hold his face still. There was rot in the man’s breath. “No