The Tourist. Olen Steinhauer

       10

      Milo had always felt comfortable in large airports. It wasn’t that he loved to fly—that, particularly after the Towers, had become an increasingly unbearable experience with its various secure levels of undress. The only things he enjoyed forty thousand feet above sea level were the cleverly packaged airline meals and the day’s music choices on his iPod.

      Once he was on the ground again, though, in a properly designed airport, he always felt that he was wandering through a tiny city. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, was properly designed. Its striking sixties architecture—what designers in the sixties imagined a beautiful future would look like—made for a strangely nostalgic utopia of crowd control architecture and consumer pleasures, reinforced by the soft ding over loudspeakers followed by a lovely female voice listing the cities of the world.

      Nostalgia was a good word for it, a false nostalgia for a time he was too young to know. It was why he loved Eurovision winners from 1965, the unreal Technicolor of those midcareer Bing Crosby films, and (despite his promises to the contrary) the perfect pair of a Davidoff cigarette and a bracing vodka, served at an airport bar.

      He hadn’t wandered Charles de Gaulle in years, and he soon realized things had changed. He passed a McDonald’s and some bakeries, settling on the vaguely precious La Terrasse de Paris. There was no bar, instead a cafeteria-style area where he searched in vain for vodka. The only things available were small wines—red and white. Frustrated, he settled on four deciliters of some chilled mass-market Cabernet that cost nine euros. His plastic cup, the cashier told him, was complimentary.

      Milo found an empty table by the rear wall, bumping into backs and luggage on the way, and settled down. Six in the morning, and the place was packed. His cell phone sang its irritating song, and it took him a moment to find the thing in his inner pocket. PRIVATE NUMBER. “Yeah?”

      “Milo Weaver?” said a thin, wiry voice.

      “Uh huh.”

      “Einner. You landed all right?”

      “Well, yes, I—”

      “New York tells me you’ve got the package. Do you?”

      “I hope so.”

      “Answer yes or no, please.”

      “Sure.”

      “The subject takes lunch every day at twelve thirty precisely. I suggest you wait for her outside her place of work.”

      Feeling more desperate for his nostalgic interlude, Milo looked for an ashtray; there was none. He tapped out a Tennessee-bought Davidoff, deciding to ash into the cup and drink the wine from the bottle. “That’ll give me time to nap. It was a long flight.”

      “Oh, right,” said Einner. “I forgot how old you are.”

      Milo was too stunned to say what his mind muttered: I’m only thirty-seven.

      “Don’t worry, Weaver. We’ll have you out of here in time for your vacation. I don’t even know why they bothered flying you in.”

      “We done?”

      “I understand the subject is an old friend of yours.”

      “Yes.” Milo took a drag, losing his grip on his sense of humor, while someone nearby coughed loudly.

      “Don’t let that get in the way.”

      Milo suppressed the urge to shout a reply. Instead, he hung up as, a few seats away, a young man started a coughing fit into his hand, glaring at him.

      Milo suddenly realized why. Round eyes watched him tap ash into his plastic cup, and he waited for the hammer to fall. It was swift—the cashier, having noticed the crime in action, called over a stock boy who had been crouched by the canned coffee mixtures, and he followed her pointed finger to Milo’s corner. The boy, eighteen or so, wiped his hands on his orange apron as he weaved expertly between tables toward him. “Monsieur, ici vous ne pouvez pas fumer.”

      Milo considered standing his ground, then noticed the big sign with the symbol for no smoking on the wall, a few feet from him. He raised his hands, smiling, took one last drag, and dropped the cigarette into the plastic cup. He poured in some of the wretched wine to extinguish it. The stock boy, behind a bashful grin, was relieved not to have to throw this man out.

      Grainger had booked him into the Hotel Bradford Elysées, one of those classical, overpriced monstrosities along the Rue Saint-Philippe du Roule that, were anyone to ever audit the books of the Department of Tourism, would be the first thing to go. He asked the front desk for a wake-up call at eleven thirty—about four hours from then—and picked up a Herald Tribune. In the ornate Bradford Elysées elevator, he read headlines. They weren’t pretty.

      More car bombs in Iraq, killing eight U.S. and Canadian soldiers, and more riots in Khartoum, Sudan: a photo of a full square of angry men—thousands—waving placard photographs of the dead Mullah Salih Ahmad, a white-bearded holy man with a white taqiyah covering his bald scalp. Other signs in Arabic, the caption told him, called for the head of President Omar al-Bashir. On page eight, he found a single-paragraph story saying that Homeland Security had apprehended a suspected political assassin, whom they refused to name.

      Yet the most important news was unwritten: Milo Weaver had arrived in Paris to set up one of his oldest friends.

      Mawkishly, he remembered when both of them were young field agents in London. Lots of codes and clandestine meetings in out-of-the-way pubs and arguments with British intelligence about the mess their countries were just starting to make of the postcommunist world. Angela was smart and stable—a near-contradiction in their business—and she had a sense of humor. In intelligence, those three things together are so rare that when you find them, you don’t let go. Given the amount of time they spent together, everyone assumed they were a couple. This served them both. It kept her homosexuality out of conversations, and saved Milo from diplomats’ wives setting him up with their nieces.

      For two months after the Venice fiasco, Angela couldn’t speak to him—that’s how much killing her boss, Frank Dawdle, had disturbed her. But the next year, when Milo became simultaneously a husband and a dad to a baby girl, Angela came to the wedding in Texas and showered happy praise on Tina. They had remained in touch, and when Angela came to town Tina always insisted they take her out to dinner.

      He lay on the hotel bed without undressing and considered calling Tom. What to say? He’d already argued Angela’s innocence. Should he report that James Einner was a dunce, unequipped to handle the operation? Tom didn’t care what Milo thought of Einner.

      The truth—and for a moment it disturbed him—was that, six years ago, as a Tourist, he never would have questioned any of this. The job would have been simple and clean. But he wasn’t a Tourist anymore, and for that he had no regrets.