Wakkanai Airport was a small affair after Haneda, but it was efficiently laid out, and soon he was taking a taxi past a big open field into town. He didn’t know what to make of Egorov’s call, and he regretted how quickly he’d promised to go to Algiers. The week was becoming packed, particularly with the patrons demanding a New York meeting. Ever since taking over the Library he’d found himself making concessions—not just to the patrons, who had worked from that first day to siphon his power, but to his father’s old friends. Yevgeny Primakov had been profusely social, getting what he needed by way of charm and cleverness. He’d been the kind of man who changed the flavor of a room just by entering it, and as it turned out such traits were not hereditary.
Poitevin’s address led him to the Wakkanai Sun Hotel, a few blocks from Soya Bay. The hotel was wildly misnamed, at least on this cold afternoon with its slate-gray sky and ominous black clouds pushing in from the east.
Whether or not he found her, he needed a place to sleep before boarding his next flight. There had been a time, long ago, when constant movement had been his friend—but he’d been a different person then, a Tourist, popping amphetamines before skulking down alleys, living on the periphery of real human existence. Anything had been possible before life finally came knocking. Age had undermined him. Parenthood, too.
Through the windows of his fifth-floor room, he tried and failed to find Sakhalin Island through the gloom, then shut his blinds and thought back to his reason for being here: He had come to make the offer of a job.
The last he’d heard was that she was making her way consulting for Amsterdam-based Maastricht Securities, but then a year ago, after a stint in Nigeria, she had abruptly quit. He’d had a conversation with her chief in their office on the banks of the Maas River, a pale thirtysomething with too-efficient manners who considered her departure a stroke of good fortune. “We are here,” he told Milo, “for the good of our clients. This is a dispassionate business—it has to be.”
“You’re saying she was emotionally involved?”
“I’m saying she was all emotion.”
The description had troubled him, because even though he hadn’t seen her for ten years his memories were of a fiercely committed professional who, despite a flair for the dramatic, was never undermined by undue emotion. But looking at her old chief, who patted his mustache dry after each sip of Aquaviva, he suddenly trusted his own memories a little more.
It had taken a while to track her down. There had been a security detail for visiting businessmen in Malaysia, an unexplained appearance in Cape Town, and then, two days ago, word from Poitevin that she’d been sighted in a Tokyo nightclub with two members of Naikaku Jōhō Chōsashitsu, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, Japan’s largely disrespected foreign intelligence agency. Poitevin, who had his own contacts in Cabinet Intelligence, learned only that she had come to sell some information and move on.
But she hadn’t moved on. Instead, she’d flown to the northernmost point in Japan and checked into the Wakkanai Sun Hotel, where from the windows, on clear days, you could see Russia.
Milo showered and changed into some crumpled clothes, then went downstairs. The restaurant was mostly empty, the only other diners elderly Japanese who were too polite to stare at the Westerner struggling to debone his grilled rockfish.
Noah had looked into the hotel’s computer system and come up with two rooms attached to Western names and passports. In 215, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young, British, and in 306 Ms. Deborah Steele, American. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which she was, but he didn’t want to rush it. If he trusted his memories, then he knew that a forward attack wasn’t going to end well for him. Ideally, he would make himself known by doing this—sitting in the open clumsily eating fish—and she would come to him.
So he read brochures in the lobby and took a walk down to the bleak-looking harbor and peered at a large yacht with Chinese markings as the sun fell, then returned to the hotel. On the way, he noted a yellow M3 spray-painted on a wall, and wondered how the Massive Brigade was inspiring Japan’s youth.
Back in his room, he sat on the bed and checked messages, sent requests and, remembering Egorov, searched for the website that, until her reported suicide last month—by placing her head in her gas oven and asphyxiating herself—had been maintained by investigative journalist Anna Usurov. Russian journalists died faster than coal miners, and younger: Usurov had only been twenty-eight. Her blog, RESIST, was no longer up, and a government notice informed him that his IP address had now been logged.
He called home at eleven-thirty. Stephanie had just returned from school, where there had been another run-in with her bully, Halifa Abi, which had resulted in a trip to the director’s office for them both. Halifa had loudly critiqued her singing ability after the audition for a school show, and when Stephanie tried to ignore her, the girl called her a cunt. In reply, Stephanie had called her an anti-Semite.
“What?”
“But she is.”
“She might be, Little Miss,” he told her, “but it’s a rough thing to call someone.”
“And cunt isn’t?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” he muttered, wishing for the old days when her school fights were simple bursts of jealousy that could be unraveled with an evening chat and a glass of warm milk.
Tina came on and told him that she had confirmed a Friday meeting at four thirty with Halifa’s parents, and that he’d better make it. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.
After he hung up, he thought about his daughter’s troubles and wondered how, exactly, the fight had gone down. Was it possible that this Lebanese immigrant was so bold as to attack Stephanie outright, unprovoked? After all, Halifa was a newcomer to the school, and it seemed unlikely that she’d go out of her way to make enemies so quickly. Had Stephanie said something, even something innocent, that hadn’t made the story’s final cut?
But this was his problem, wasn’t it? After so long, living in a world where the obvious story was seldom the truth, he couldn’t help but question his daughter’s version of events. What he knew was that, come Friday, he could let none of his doubt show. Loyalty would have to come before objectivity.
And, he thought as he got up and put on his shoes again, he couldn’t sit around waiting for people to come to him. At this rate, he would never make it home. So he trotted down to the third floor and approached 306. Knocked and waited. Nothing. He knocked again and said, “Leticia, it’s Milo. Let’s have a conversation, shall we?”
When she opened the door, she was wearing a plush red robe that he didn’t remember seeing in his own closet, which meant that she’d taken the effort to bring her own. Which was very Leticia Jones. But even though she looked as if she’d settled in for the night, she’d recently reapplied her blood-red lipstick, and now she smiled at him. “Milo, did you really think I’d come to you? Please.”