Milo Weaver rode the Narita Airport escalator up from arrivals to where the enormous departures board floated above travelers’ heads, displaying seemingly random cities, first in Japanese, then English, and back again. His personal phone was pressed against his ear, and he said, “It’s a different world now.”
He was replying to his wife, Tina, who was lamenting their daughter’s recent dramas in high school, where she had been targeted by a girl whose family had recently arrived in Zürich from Lebanon. “She shouldn’t have to deal with bullies,” Tina had said. “I never had to.”
Which was when Milo reminded her that this world was different than theirs had been.
He might have gone further, telling her that his own schizophrenic high school experience had been riddled with bullies, the kind who would make today’s bullies look like mice, and it had taught him the value of confrontation, but he didn’t want to dig a hole for himself when he was going to have to hang up any second. He hadn’t seen his family in a week, leaving the day after Stephanie’s seventeenth birthday party, and once he was done with Tokyo he would be able to once again settle into the comforting obligations of domesticity.
“What does the teacher say?” he asked.
“They don’t believe in obstructing the natural developmental curve.”
“What?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re the one who wanted a progressive school.”
“You sound like your sister. Progressive isn’t synonymous with mean.”
Milo searched the faces in the crowd as he made his way to the exit. “Why don’t we talk to the kid’s parents? Even if I’m delayed I’ll be back by the end of the week, so let’s set up something for Friday.”
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
There was silence on the line as he exited to the curb, rolling his carry-on, and the noise of arriving taxis swelled around him. Across the busy access road, he found the face he’d been looking for: a man in his early forties, Kaito Fukaya, whose work name was Poitevin. Poitevin noticed him as well, then turned to look in the other direction, to where a Boeing Dreamliner rose whining into the sky.
“Okay,” Tina said as he crossed the road. “We’ll talk to them. You better be back by then.”
“I promise.”
By the time he hung up he was close enough to Poitevin to reach out and touch his shoulder but didn’t. Instead, as they both walked the long arc that connected the three terminals of Narita International, he let Poitevin remain a step or two ahead of him, and as they conversed they never looked at each other. To an outside observer, they were strangers heading in the same direction.
“Your plane was late,” Poitevin said in his heavy accent.
“We had to refuel in Mozambique,” Milo answered, which was just the passphrase. In reality, he’d flown direct from Manila, where he’d gone to confer with the UNESCO field office about an arrest warrant hard-line president Rodrigo Duterte had issued for Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, a prominent critic. It had led to a standoff, with Trillanes holing himself up in the Senate building, the one place in the country he was immune from arrest. The newspapers were going crazy, and the UNESCO officers, who thought of Milo as some vanilla representative of the central office in Paris, told him they feared unrest and a crackdown by Duterte. Milo should have been in and out in a day, but the airport closed as category 5 typhoon Mangkhut made landfall, and he camped out with a UN lifer at his apartment in the upscale Pasay district, drinking imported whisky and listening to his host’s complaints about a country he loved turning sour. More interesting was the man’s girlfriend, a corporate lawyer negotiating the sale of Asia-Wide, a local shipping company that had recently filed for bankruptcy.
“The pirates did it,” she’d told Milo. “Last month was the third attack. A dozen sailors and fifty million worth of cargo sunk to the bottom of the Pacific, between here and Guam.” That had been the final nail in the coffin of what had been one of the largest shippers in the Philippine Sea. Given the dangers, only one brave company had stepped forward: Salid Logistics, a conglomerate out of Oman. With a resigned shrug, she’d summed it up in a single word, “Globalism,” and reached for her glass.
By the time Milo was able to fly out, fifty-four Filipinos had been confirmed killed by mudslides, another forty-nine missing. Then he’d gotten Poitevin’s flash alert, forcing him to change flights and come to Japan.
“She’s in Tokyo?” Milo asked him.
Poitevin shook his head. “Not anymore. Yesterday she flew up to Hokkaido. Staying in Wakkanai.”
This was a surprise. Why had the woman he was looking for moved to the northernmost tip of Japan, twenty miles off the coast of the Russian island of Sakhalin? “What’s she doing there?”
“I think she’s hiding.”
“From whom?”
A shrug. “You’ll have to ask her. I put her address on the server.”
“Anyone else watching her?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
The flight to Wakkanai left from Haneda Airport, so Milo had to take an hour-long taxi ride across the southeastern end of the city, skirting the edge of Tokyo Bay. He filled his time on the phone, talking to his reference librarians in Zürich. One of them, Noah, reported that Stabyhoun, a librarian in Greece, had uncovered Turkish agents giving financial support to antigovernment protesters. Milo, intrigued, suggested Stabyhoun follow up on his observations with a preliminary report they could share with the patrons.
Kristin, the other reference librarian, told him about a report from Whippet, in Paris, that the French had been monitoring Chinese efforts to mass-produce 3D-printed plastic pistols that could defeat detectors and cross borders. “How far along are they?” he asked.
“Same logjam as everyone else. They shoot one bullet beautifully, but the barrel explodes.”
“Not very useful.”
“Depends on how many bullets you need,” she said, then told him about a message that had come in: Kirill Egorov, the Russian consul in Algeria, wanted to speak with him.
“What’s it about?”
“He wouldn’t say. Just called the old central number and demanded the message get to you. I sent you his callback number.”
Though he knew of Egorov, and had even met him once, the old Russian’s connection to the Library was to its previous chief, Milo’s father. Once upon a time, Yevgeny Primakov and Kirill Egorov had been colleagues in Russian intelligence, and when Yevgeny took an abrupt turn and landed at the United Nations, most of his old friends had scorned him. Even Egorov had turned his back, but a few years later their paths had crossed over Iraq, and they began to talk again, trading secrets like baseball cards. But since Milo had taken over ten years ago, Egorov, then a consul to Germany, had gone quiet, and Milo had only kept track of his late career from a distance, a series of foreign postings in steadily less important lands, now Algeria.
“I’ll call him,” Milo told her. “How’s my sister doing?”
“Hold on,” Kristin said. “She needs to talk to you about something.”
Once he realized he’d be delayed returning home, he’d asked his sister, Alexandra, to watch over the Zürich office. Reluctantly she’d agreed, and when she came on the line he immediately said, “I’ll be back soon, Alex.”
“No you won’t,” she said gloomily.
“Why not?”
“The patrons are demanding a meeting at Turtle Bay. Soon as possible.”
“Shit,” Milo said, wondering if he’d been too optimistic promising to be home by Friday.
He waited until he was through security at Haneda before checking his messages, which required face recognition and two lengthy passwords to reach the server, which was encrypted to a degree that only the hackers in the Library’s employ knew how to describe. All this just to retrieve two small items: an address in Wakkanai, and a phone number with an Algerian country code. He called the number, and Kirill Egorov picked up on the second ring with a wary “Allô?”
“Privet,” Milo said, and continued in Russian, “I heard you were looking for me.”
“Thank Christ,” the old Russian said, sounding relieved. He didn’t say Milo’s name on what was presumably an open line. “I didn’t think the number would even be in service anymore.”
“It won’t be for much longer. What can I do for you?”
“I have someone who needs your protection.”
“We don’t protect people. That’s not what we do.”
“Tell me about Martin Bishop, then,” Egorov said, sounding smug.
Milo closed his eyes, irritated. “That was different.”
“It wasn’t. You helped an innocent whose life was in danger through no fault of his own. You made an effort to ensure that he would remain safe. This is precisely the same situation.”
Egorov had been his father’s friend, but Milo didn’t know what kind of man Egorov had become since then. How, for example, had he survived this last decade in Putin’s Russia? What compromises had he made? Men of his father’s generation had spent their entire lives compromising, and by a certain point it became second nature, so that eventually you lost track of whatever principles you once had. “Who,” Milo asked, “is this innocent?”
“Did you hear of Anna Urusov?”
“The dissident blogger in Moscow? She died last month.”
“It’s connected. This person is connected. He fled Moscow and landed in Germany. I found him in Paris.”
Milo sighed. “Are you the one protecting him now?”
“I have been, but I can’t anymore.”
“Where is he?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Then why don’t you get your people to protect him?”
Now Egorov sighed. “Your father never would have had to ask that question.”
It wasn’t the first time someone had thrown his esteemed father in his face, and it wouldn’t be the last. “And now he’s dead. If you want to talk in more detail, we can send someone to debrief—”
“No,” Egorov cut in. “I cannot trust this with anyone else. You’ll understand when we speak.”
Milo didn’t want to give in, but … “Look, I should be able to lay over in Algiers by Wednesday. We have a secure location there.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me—I don’t know if I can help.”
“But you will.” The old man was nothing if not persistent.
“I’ll tell the office to get in touch once we know my timing.”
“Thank you,” Egorov said again, and before Milo could temper his expectations the Russian hung up.