Milo hadn’t set foot in the United States for nearly six months, and while he and his family had once lived not so far from JFK Airport, over in Park Slope, when he stepped outside to join the busy taxi queue, he didn’t have the feeling of returning home. There was something off in the cacophonous hustle that typified New York City, the feel of a threat hanging in the air.
He supposed it was a hangover from Algiers, because, even trading calls with Alexandra from Atatürk Airport, they hadn’t gotten any closer to discovering why Kirill Egorov had been killed by his colleagues—because by now Milo was running with the most straightforward explanation. Nor was there any way to figure out who Egorov had wanted him to protect. Did Paris have anything to do with it? Alex promised to check. But that was a long shot, and now, with Egorov dead, it was beginning to look like he would never learn who the old man had been hiding.
Or maybe the feeling that had overcome him had nothing to do with Egorov and was instead deeper, born of the creeping worry he’d been carrying for months. That the world was leaning at too dangerous an angle, and that if they didn’t watch out it would topple.
No. He knew what it was: Leticia had been approached to join a resurrected Department of Tourism, and he had just landed in the city where its headquarters had once been. And he knew, because he was no longer the man he used to be, that if they wanted to, any Tourist could walk right up to him and end his life before he even knew they were there. Everything, now that he’d landed in America, was a potential threat.
Alan Drummond, whose cheeks were starting to bloom with late-life rosacea, was in a perfectly silent Tesla sedan idling at the curb. Milo threw his bag in the backseat, and as soon as he got into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut, Alan pressed the accelerator and they were off, the Tesla’s big navigation screen charting the gridlock traffic in their immediate future.
Other than the red face, Alan looked undeniably fit. After a mild heart attack eight years ago, he’d become a fitness nut, and now haunted Tribeca gyms and blended esoteric smoothies in his kitchen—and the results were startling. His cheekbones stood out, his skull was clearly defined, and his pink skin glowed with health. As he drove, eyes on the road, Alan tapped a clear plastic cup that sat in the cup holder, full of green liquid. “Made that for you.”
Milo eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“Almond milk, protein powder, lecithin—”
“Lecithin?”
“For the brain.”
“Why’s it green?”
“Spirulina,” Alan said. “Algae. Crazy healthy.”
Milo had no intention of drinking the mixture, so he changed the subject. “You heard about Algiers?”
“Alex told me. She even called Said Bensoussan for help.”
Milo nodded; Alexandra had told him this back in Atatürk. “I want to drop in on him before the meeting.”
Once, their roles had been reversed; Milo had worked for him rather than the other way around. Alan Drummond had been the Department of Tourism’s final director, his short tenure ending abruptly with the end of the department itself, a disaster that had arguably shaped them both.
As Milo recounted his Algerian adventures, Alan absorbed it all without comment until the very end, when he said, “We can put someone on it, but it doesn’t sound like a front-burner worry. Not with the patrons grumbling.”
“You know what the meeting’s about?”
He shook his head. “But I’ve got suspicions. You didn’t give them that Jordanian intel. You passed it to Israel instead.”
“They needed it first.”
“Israel isn’t paying our bills. And our patrons don’t want to learn things from the papers. Particularly when those things are happening in their own country.”
Milo looked out the window at the traffic and the ugly expanse leading from the airport to the city. These decisions—choosing which country got what information, and when—were as close to manipulation as the Library ever got. The Lebanese intelligence, dealing with the movement of certain known terrorists through Beirut, had been entirely time dependent, and if he’d given it to Lebanon first the Israelis would have lost their chance to catch the person in question. “The Lebanese didn’t want him in their territory anyway.”
“Of course they didn’t. And of course they were secretly happy the Israelis took care of it for them. But it serves them better not to admit that.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Milo said, and stretched himself out in the seat.
“I saw a preview of the IPCC report.”
Milo didn’t have to ask what the IPCC was—Alan kept constant track of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the IPCC’s report, which had been ordered in 2015, involved ninety-one authors from forty countries, many of whom Alan was by now on a first-name basis with. He’d sometimes show up at Milo’s home in Zürich after sitting with IPCC scientists at their headquarters in Geneva, just so he could vent his frustration at the world’s blindness to the encroaching disaster. When America had pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement a year ago, it took Alan three full hours of yelling to finally exhaust himself.
“Tell me,” Milo said.
“It’s not good. We’re looking at a one-point-five centigrade rise by 2030 at the current rate. At least one-point-five. And that’s the average—it’ll be two or three times higher in the Arctic.”
“Translate that for me.”
“Bad shit. Melting ice will raise the global sea level by half a meter. And it’ll keep rising, even if we keep it to one-and-a-half degrees—which doesn’t look fucking likely. Say good-bye to the Maldives and Solomon Islands. Say good-bye to New Orleans, Miami, and Atlantic City. Boston’s underwater. Bergen. Half of Baltimore.”
“I’m guessing the West Coast is not much better.”
“Not if you’re in Seattle, Madera, Silicon Valley, or the LA coast. No, you’re screwed. It’s not just people—you can forget about the coral reefs. Seventy to ninety percent of them are toast.”
Milo looked ahead at the gridlock leading into Manhattan. If ever there was an iconic image for human destruction of the planet, it was this—thousands of cars driving through packed, desolate-looking neighborhoods toward huge, energy-wasting skyscrapers. “Well,” he said, “I guess everyone moves inland. Problem solved.”
“You’re jerking my chain.”
“Just trying to be a problem solver.”
So Alan took a breath and gave him a dissertation on the ills that awaited middle America: extreme weather patterns, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and mudslides, and new diseases immune to antibiotics. Wildfires. “The melting ice caps lower the salinity in the oceans, which means the nutrients at the floor of the ocean can’t move to the surface and produce plankton algae, which fish live on. And so do we. Seventy percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen is produced by marine plants. We’re killing ourselves, and not enough people are panicking.”
Though Milo agreed with Alan’s assessment, he had listened to this, or permutations of it, plenty of times before. “Want to hear about Japan?”
Alan hummed an okay.
“She’s not signing up.”
“What a shame,” he said unconvincingly. Alan disapproved of recruiting Leticia. He, not without reason, considered her reckless, but unlike in the old days in the Department of Tourism, Milo’s decisions prevailed. “Were you not convincing enough?”
“She wants more.”
“Money?”
Milo shook his head. “Utility. She wants to change the world.”
“We talking about the same Leticia Jones?”
“She’s gone through an awakening,” Milo said as they slowed for traffic. “By the way, they’ve opened the department again.”
Alan eyeballed him as they came to a stop behind a large truck. “Wait, you don’t mean—”
“Tourism.”
Alan exhaled. “I’ll be damned.”
“We’ll all be damned.”
“But it’s not surprising. You’re not surprised, are you?”
“A little.”
As the traffic finally opened up, neither said a thing, the pile-on of memories burying their words. Eventually, Milo said, “Can you talk to your old contacts about it? We can’t afford not to know what they’re doing.”
“Sure. But maybe we’re too worried. The department lasted for decades. It did good work. And look around—you think Tourists wouldn’t be useful right now? Jesus, just think about what they could do in Ukraine or North Korea. Gather ten of them, and the Russians would never touch our elections again. They’re effective.”
It had always been the most persuasive argument for Tourism—its effectiveness when diplomacy was shot. But Milo knew too well the other side of the argument. “They’re too powerful to be a permanent fixture.”
Alan shrugged, then nodded ahead at an enormous billboard advertising a TV show—a spy drama set in Berlin, attractive actors in dark outfits, looking intently at the camera. Someone had used a ladder and red spray paint so that the image was covered in two enormous characters: M3.
“And are they too powerful?” Alan asked.