Milo woke late, the suddenly bright Wakkanai light cutting into his cursed hangover, and when he looked out his window and squinted he finally saw it in the distance: the Russian island of Sakhalin. Two islands … no, just one, but he was seeing double. He’d drunk with Leticia until three, at which point she had suggested that if he stayed any longer they were going to have to have sex, so he staggered to the door and accepted the kiss she planted on his lips, as well as the advice she left him with as her large, beautiful eyes peered deep into him: “You have to make a choice, Milo. Either you’re on this earth to do good, or you’re wasting space.”
He nearly missed his flight back to Haneda Airport, and once he reached it he planted himself behind a counter and ate fried crustaceans until his nerves settled down. For the rest of the six-hour layover, he alternated between reading field reports forwarded to him by the reference librarians, and thinking about his failed recruitment of Leticia Jones. It was a blow, though not entirely unexpected, for she had always followed her own path. And now she’d discovered a conscience. A need to do rather than just witness. Were a few hundred kidnapped girls what it took to soften one of the hardest hearts he’d ever known? Perhaps. Or maybe she was playing a game of her own with him, which he wouldn’t understand until weeks or months had passed. That, too, was possible.
Long game or not, her questions still weighed on him. Was he merely an observer? Of course he was, because that’s the business he was in. No one faulted journalists for remaining separate from their subjects’ lives, and in fact when they did become involved it meant they had broken one of journalism’s ethical tenets. This dispassionate approach to the Library’s intelligence work had always been attractive, because even when the world was falling apart he could remain at arm’s length, describing it for his patrons. The world was never his responsibility, nor his fault.
Certainly there had been times—in Germany, in China—when he’d tossed out that ethical rule book, when his sense of right and wrong had gotten the better of him. But could he really say the world was a better place because of his escapades? How had saving Martin Bishop gone?
He didn’t have to look far to find a world in disarray, slouching toward oblivion. Two hundred seventy-six, then a hundred and twenty, girls in Nigeria. Millions of refugees streaming out of Syria. Venezuela ripping itself apart. Pirates on the high seas. Typhoons burying Filipinos in mud, hurricanes and heat waves and melting poles. Electorates in Russia, Poland, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, and the UK voting for their own dark futures—not to mention the political turmoil in America.
He couldn’t save them all, but could he save some?
What if? What if he did choose to do more than just report on travesties to the Library’s more upstanding patrons? To step into the currents of history and redirect a few streams?
He knew what would follow: The nations that funded the Library would react immediately, rightly fearing that one day Milo would come knocking on their own doors. No one wants to pay for a policeman they can’t control. The cash would dry up, and the sixty-eight librarians spread across the globe, both full- and part-time, would be unemployed. Or worse.
He upgraded to a particularly pleasant business class for the Emirates flight that took nearly eleven hours to reach Dubai, and on the plane he wrote two reports on the concerns he’d listened to in Manila. After he landed he sent one report to Paris for UNESCO to keep in its files, and the second, more detailed one went to Zürich, where the reference librarians could add it to their enormous database that, stuffed with fifteen years of secret knowledge, was probably the Library’s greatest asset. He made a few calls before boarding the next flight to Algiers, and once on the ground at Houari Boumediene, he asked Zürich to tell Kirill Egorov that he would be at the Library’s local safe house until early evening, when he would have to fly on to New York to find out what the patrons wanted from him.
The half-hour taxi ride took him along the Bay of Algiers, where the blinding afternoon sunlight bleached shipping freighters and fishing boats. To the north, Palma and Ibiza were so close and yet a world away from North Africa. Eventually his taxi turned inland to reach the Hotel La Famille in Bab El Oued. Milo paid the driver and took his bag inside, standing in the cool lobby until the taxi had left again. He smiled at the proprietor, an old man with a large set of keys hanging from his belt, then walked out of the hotel without saying a word.
It didn’t take long, walking west along Avenue Colonel Lofti, to find Rue Rosseti, where he knocked on the inconspicuous door. The old, round woman who answered wore a black jilbab, only her face and hands visible. “Où sont les autres dilettantes?” she asked, almost spitting the nonsense passphrase.
“Ils sont derrière la grange,” he told her, and as she took a step backward into the gloom she grunted in irritation.
She led him up the dark stairwell to the second floor and worked at a heavy door with bars over the window until it popped open to reveal a small, humid studio apartment, blinds down, a table with a couple of wooden chairs, and a sad-looking sofa against a water-stained wall. From the looks of the place, this janitor wasn’t earning her stipend. There was mold along one edge of the carpet and ancient cracks in the walls that made him worry the building’s foundation might be damaged. The counters in the kitchenette were filthy.
After the French passphrase, she didn’t say another word to him, communicating with her hands and eyes. It was possible that she didn’t know any French beyond the code. She showed him that the refrigerator, which was dead, contained six large bottles of water. She demonstrated how the door would lock on its own when he left, then made a big deal about pocketing the keys so he knew he wouldn’t be trusted with them.
Then she was gone, and Milo went to turn on the overhead light, but the switch did nothing. He tried the kitchen, and then the floor lamp by the sofa. She hadn’t even paid the electric bill. He sighed and went to peek out the blinds down to Rue Rosseti, and saw their useless janitor hurrying down the street and back to her life.