An American Spy, page 15
“Maybe, but that doesn’t make much sense. Anyone searching his place would run across it as easily as I did.”
“He should’ve used a nanny-cam. They put them in clocks now, so babysitters have no idea.”
“Do they?”
“How can you not know about these things?” she asked.
“What about Penelope?”
Tina came out to the living room; he followed. “She’s messed up. The last time they talked, she was kicking him out of the house. She needs to know what’s going on.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to London?”
“I don’t need to. Yevgeny will be in town on Monday, and he’s bringing information.”
“Little Miss will be happy. She likes him. I do, too.”
“Don’t bring all this up to him. I’ll take care of it.”
“Why can’t I ask him?”
“Because he’s not supposed to know what he knows, and you’ll put him in a position of having to lie to you. There’s no reason for that.”
“I bet I could get him to talk.”
“I bet you could, too, but don’t.”
They both looked up as Stephanie walked in, her face red and wet from washing, but the black coins of her eyelids hadn’t lightened at all. “Sarah lied to me,” she told them. “This isn’t water based at all!”
It was over pizza at La Bruschetta that Milo noticed Chaudhury on the opposite side of Seventh Avenue, under the awning for Rite Aid, staring through the window at him.
“Sorry, ladies,” Milo said, patting his lips with a napkin. “There’s someone I need to talk to. Be right back.”
As he rose, Stephanie craned her neck to peer out the window. “The dark guy?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s got eyes like mine.”
It was overcast but still warm out on the street when Milo waited for the traffic to ebb and jogged across to join Chaudhury, who first said, “You haven’t been beating up on that kid of yours, have you?”
“She said your eyes look like hers.”
“Maybe it’s because my dad did beat up on me.”
Milo stared at him, wondering if it was a joke. There was no way to tell. “You find anything on the drive?”
“I’m not here about that. I need you to give me that camera you took.”
“Is it yours?”
“Everything’s mine.” In answer to Milo’s look, he softened and said, “No, man. I just want our technicians to take a look at it. See if we can find out who was spying on your friend.”
“You want to tell me how you knew it was there?”
“No,” said Chaudhury. “How about two o’clock? Give you time to eat your pizza. I’ll drop by your place to pick it up.”
“You don’t come near my place,” said Milo. “We’ll meet here. And in the future, if you want me, call me. Don’t ever show up when I’m out with my family.”
Chaudhury opened his hands, patting the air. “Calm down, tiger.”
“Are you going to tell me about the drive?”
He rubbed the side of his nose—one of those awkward, obvious signals that amateurs think looks natural—and Milo noticed Chaudhury’s denim friend crossing the street to their side. “There’s nothing to tell. It was wiped clean. Zeroed out.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
Chaudhury shrugged. “I’ll see what my man in London can find.”
“You’re done with me?”
“Yeah, Milo. I’m done with you. But if you come across some hot tip, I’d appreciate hearing about it.”
“See you at two,” Milo said.
As he returned to his seat, he saw that Chaudhury and his friend had left, and that Stephanie was sucking through a straw, stealing his Coke. “Give that back, kid.”
Smiling, she puffed her cheeks and blew noisy bubbles into his glass.
“Ah, forget it,” he said.
“Was that the Homelander?” Tina asked.
“I’m not sure.”
She stared at him.
“Now he says he’s Company.”
She nodded at that but frowned. “So? Anything new?”
“About who?” asked Stephanie.
“Nothing,” Milo said to Tina. To Stephanie, he said, “Alan.”
“What about Alan?”
Tina gave him a look, and he realized that they hadn’t discussed what they were and were not going to tell her. Procrastination was evidently Tina’s only plan. That, or absolute secrecy. “The fact that someone keeps stealing his Coca-Cola,” he said. “It’s a big mystery. They’re going to have to bring in the army soon, shut down the city, and search each house until they find the person who did it.”
Wide-eyed, Stephanie blinked at him and, very seriously, said, “It wasn’t me.”
When he met Chaudhury on the sidewalk at two, there was no sign of his denim-clad friend. Milo handed over the camera in a paper bag. Chaudhury seemed to want to talk, but Milo didn’t. “Take this,” Chaudhury said, reaching into a back pocket. He produced a blank, white business card with a D.C. 202 phone number and the name “Director Stephen Rollins” handwritten on it. “It’s the office number. I strongly suggest that you leave it alone, but if you find you can’t put down your paranoia and you absolutely must verify that I work for who I say I work for, call that number.”
“Who’s Director Rollins?”
“My Lord and Master.” Chaudhury grinned. “Though I prefer to call him by his proper name. God.”
“Will you get in trouble if I call?”
“Me? I’m a survivor, Milo, I’ve no worries. I just think you’d probably like to stay off my boss’s radar,” he said, then raised a hand in farewell.
At home, Milo found Tina cleaning up the living room. “Looks like we’re getting a permanent guest,” she said.
“What?”
“Penelope. Someone ripped up her apartment.”
“I put everything back,” he said quickly.
“The bedroom?”
“What?”
“Did you slice open her mattress and tear out the springs?”
“Oh.”
“I told her to pack a bag and come back.”
Penelope arrived two hours later, and Milo carried her large, heavy suitcase up their narrow stairs. She seemed more put out than scared, and while Milo grilled chicken breast for a Caesar salad, the two women drank wine in the kitchen doorway and berated the Central Intelligence Agency. “It was them, wasn’t it?” she asked Milo.
“I think so.”
“They could have just asked me. Knock on the door, say, Mrs. Drummond, may we please look around? I would’ve said yes.”
“They don’t always think so directly.”
“What does that mean?” Tina asked.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he had meant. Then he knew. He turned to face them. “The Company spends as much time anticipating disaster as it does collecting intelligence. If someone says, Let’s go ask Mrs. Drummond if we can look around, someone else at the table certainly says, She’s upset. What if she says no? Then they all have a think—okay, if she won’t let us in, what happens next? Because operational planning is about staying five steps ahead. If you aren’t, then things go wrong. If Mrs. Drummond is upset, and says no, maybe she’ll be sure not to leave the apartment so that no one can come in to look around. Or maybe she’ll hire someone to keep the place secure.”
“But I wouldn’t do that. Christ, Alan worked for the Company. He loved the bastards.”
“You would do that if you had something to hide. You would do that if you thought Alan had something he was hiding from them. That’s what they’re thinking. So, logically, the only thing they can do is break in when you’re not there, then get out as fast as they can. Which means leaving a mess.”
There was no point telling either of them that a man named Dennis Chaudhury had worked all night ripping the place apart. She knew what she needed to know—that the Company had done this, and that she should not pretend to herself that the Company was her friend.
“I should write a letter,” she said finally.
“By all means,” he said, turning back to the hissing chicken. “Just don’t expect an elegant apology. Not on paper, at least.”
7
Some families thrive by being open to the world, absorbing visitors into their daily routines, while others hold themselves always at a distance, in voluntary exile, as if bringing in some third party might blemish their particular joy. The Weavers were part of this latter group. When friends and family visited, they used their too-small apartment as an excuse and put them up at the nearby Park Slope Inn—it kept the intrusions within a predictable, manageable bracket of time.
Penelope, though, crashed like a boulder in the middle of their living room, taking their couch for her bed. It was awkward for everyone except Stephanie, who seemed energized by the disruption. On Friday, Tina went to work, leaving Milo and Stephanie to deal with their guest. Penelope, perhaps to get out of their hair, left at noon for “errands” and didn’t come back until after five, carrying a large bag full of metal containers of steaming Thai food from a restaurant called Sea. By then, Milo and Stephanie had spent a couple of hours browsing at BookCourt, shopped for groceries, and bought tickets for Sunday’s international puppet festival at the Yeshiva University Museum. Penelope held the bags aloft and said, “No more of Daddy’s unsalted food!” Stephanie cheered.
Saturday began with a surprise, for Milo had forgotten his own thirty-eighth birthday. He woke to Tina and Stephanie piling on top of him with kisses and happy wishes. Everyone ate chocolate cake for breakfast, even Penelope, though she criticized the quality of the chocolate the baker had used. Stephanie gave him an aluminum box for pens that she had painted with unintentionally abstract dragons, while Tina gave him a set of Waterman pens. Tina had apparently told Penelope about his birthday, for she, too, handed over a heavy wrapped present, which turned out to be both volumes of Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. “Salt, you’ll find, is a very common ingredient.”
They all seemed to enjoy most of Saturday, going out for a movie Stephanie chose, Kung Fu Panda—the title seemed to say it all. By Sunday morning, though, Penelope’s mood had taken a nosedive, and when Stephanie got out of bed at nine to sit in her pajamas and watch cartoons, Penelope pulled a pillow over her head and groaned. Over breakfast, she told them, “Alan and I always agreed that not having children was a lifestyle choice—we simply wanted to keep some style in our life.”
Tina, who depended on her Sunday morning quiet time with the arts pages, grew noticeably irritated when Penelope kept interrupting her to bring up Alan’s virtues and flaws. When Penelope was washing up, Tina said, “Christ, she does test one’s nerves, doesn’t she?”
They all piled into the subway to reach the Yeshiva University Museum on West Sixteenth for the Jewish, Greek, Czech, and Chinese puppet festival. It was something Tina had read about the previous weekend, and Milo was excited to show Stephanie something that wasn’t transmitted through a television screen. Watching her laconic reactions to the puppets on the lit stages, though, he worried that she’d been warped too much already. Despite the historical curiosities of Mitzvah Mouse, the herky-jerky illuminations of the Greek shadow puppets, and the strangely lifelike Czech marionettes, Stephanie remained entirely unmoved—until the Chinese hand puppets.
Though the first show, concerning a married couple arguing over how best to cook an eel, did little to raise her interest, when during the second show Wu Song came on wearing his red kimono against the black velvet background, tinny music rising behind him, she settled down and focused. Then came the tiger, an elaborate, large-headed monster with wide, flat teeth, twisting with anger and hunger. Milo didn’t know the story, but it seemed pretty basic—Wu Song, while passing the Jingyang Ridge, kills a tiger with his bare hands, an act that makes him famous. Still, it was a masterly show, a dance between Wu Song’s martial arts and the man-eating tiger’s artful lunges, and by the time the tiger had been dispatched, Stephanie was leaning forward, pinching at the fabric of her jeans. Penelope, beside Tina, muttered, “So that’s what they do.”
Only later, at a coffee shop on Union Square, did she elaborate over a dish of vanilla ice cream. “They didn’t tell the rest of his story, which doesn’t surprise me. Old Wu Song was a real killing machine. He later avenged his brother’s death by poison by decapitating his brother’s wife and killing her lover.”
“Really?” asked Stephanie.
“It’s one of those lovely stories about loose women sliding easily into murder, then getting what they deserve.” She winked at Stephanie. “Let that be a lesson to you.”
On their way back to Brooklyn, Milo’s phone chirp-chirped, and he found an invitation from his father—Byblos Restaurant, 11:00—and texted back Yes.
“Who was that?” Tina asked over the rumble of the subway car.
“Yevgeny. We’re lunching tomorrow.”
“Grandpa?” asked Stephanie, brightening.
“First me, then you two can have him for dinner,” said Milo. “Tomorrow or Tuesday.”
“Well, I’ll be off your couch by tomorrow,” said Penelope. “The new bed’s being delivered, as well as some new furniture.”
“You can stay,” Tina said, a little too quickly. “If you want. I mean, if you’re not comfortable there.”
“Thanks,” Penelope said, seeming to believe her, though the truth was that both Tina and Milo couldn’t wait for her to be out of their home.
On Monday morning, otherwise known as Public Service Day, after Tina had left for work and he’d walked Stephanie to the Camp Friendship facility on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, Milo returned slowly home and dialed the Washington number Chaudhury had given him. Partly, he was preparing an answer to the question he knew his father would ask—How do you know who this Chaudhury character is?—but more, his curiosity was growing, and he wanted to find out who, exactly, was looking out for Alan these days. After three rings, a female voice said, “Director Rollins’s office.”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Rollins.”
“Your name?”
“Milo Weaver.”
“And this is concerning?”
“An employee of his.”
“Name?”
“Dennis Chaudhury. Want me to spell it?”
“No, thank you, sir.” She paused, perhaps typing it all out, and said, “Director Rollins is out of the office today. Can he reach you at this number?”
“Yes. You have it?”
“Yes, sir. Will eleven o’clock tomorrow morning be all right?”
“I think so,” he said, trying to sound friendly. “What’s the name of the director’s section?”
“You don’t know?”
He paused. “I’ve forgotten.”
“Well, Mr. Weaver, this section is like an expensive restaurant. If you have to ask . . .”
Running late, he met his father at Byblos, a crowded upscale Lebanese restaurant not far from the United Nations Headquarters. Yevgeny was already pushing hummus and pine nuts around a small oily plate with a piece of grilled pita bread, and Milo noticed him lick his fingers and wipe them on his pants as he rose to greet his son. It was an unlikely gesture from a man who had, for the decades Milo had known him, prided himself on his gentlemanly demeanor. Once he’d sat again, he brushed at his cheek as if swatting away a fly, a tic he’d been developing for years. The man was sixty-seven, and though he’d seen signs of his father’s gradual decline, this was the first time Milo had really seen the decades in him.
To move things along, Yevgeny had decided on entrées for them both—a spicy Kafta Koush Kash for Milo, and a fried fish entrée called a Sultan Ibrahim for himself—and once the waiter had left he offered the hummus dish to Milo. Milo declined, so Yevgeny scooped up more and took a bite, then, in Russian, spoke through a half-full mouth—another inconsistency. “I don’t think your friend is dead.”
“Neither do I,” said Milo. “The question is: Where is he?”
Yevgeny shrugged. “Who’s to say? A little before four in the morning, on Saturday the fourteenth, someone sabotaged the hotel’s security cameras. The staff got them working again after about fifteen minutes, then they went down again. There’s a half hour or so of dead time.”
“Anyone could have come in and taken him.”
“But no one took him.”
“What?”
Yevgeny smiled. “The city of London is as thick with cameras as that hotel.”
Milo rubbed the bridge of his nose—he’d forgotten that Yevgeny, or Yevgeny’s friends, would have access to the police cameras. “So he walked out on his own?”
“He left and took public transport to Hammersmith before getting to a street without cameras. From there, he vanished.”
It was something, and Milo felt the relief in his back, the sudden release of tension he hadn’t known he was holding on to.
Yevgeny swatted at his cheek. “Your friend, he’s a curious one.”
“I know.”
“Guess how he got to London.”
“Plane.”
“Five planes. New York to Seattle. Drove to Vancouver and then flew to Tokyo. From there, to Mumbai. Mumbai to Amman. Amman to London. Each plane, another name. His own only on the first flight to Seattle.”
Alan had circled the planet to reach London. “How long did this take?”
“Four days. In Mumbai and Amman, he left the airports briefly; in Tokyo, he stayed in the international terminal and waited for the next flight.”
“You got this from MI-5?”
“Some of it. They knew he flew in from Jordan; I filled in the rest.”
“What else do they know?”
“Arrived in London very late on Thursday the twelfth. Checked into the Rathbone and on Friday made a single call from his room, to a third-floor room registered to one Gephel Marpa. Want me to spell that?”
“Please.” Once he’d done so, Milo said, “Tibetan?”
“Very good. Long-standing member of Free Tibet. London resident, which means Mr. Marpa came to the hotel on purpose.”
