Alexandra was talking, but he was having trouble listening. He kept turning to the screen of his laptop, where Grace Foster stood outside Sardi’s, smiling, with Gilbert Powell. But he couldn’t focus on that either, for he was worried about Leticia. Finally, he walked over to the kitchen, the phone pressed hard to his ear, and started a pot of coffee. “Sorry, Alex. Say it again.”
“Okay,” she said, then took an audible breath. “Oliver Booth campaigned for Brexit, knowing what it would do to his company, and when Brexit passed he convinced his big accounts, MirGaz and Northwell and Nexus, to move to IfW. Got that?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, once the bank was in trouble, he brought in IfW’s offer to acquire TransBank. He painted the board into a corner and gave them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Now Oliver Booth is running TransBank from his IfW office in Berlin.”
Milo was back now. “That’s what happened with Asia-Wide and Salid Logistics.”
“Exactly what happened. But instead of Brexit, it was piracy.”
“Pirates who never took anything.”
“Sure,” Alexandra said. “And guess where Salid Logistics banks.”
“IfW.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Milo said, then sighed.
“What?”
“There’s something else.”
He told her about Grace Foster meeting with two of their patrons, along with Gilbert Powell. Foster, once of the CIA, who had tried to kill him on a plane flight to Berlin and tried to recruit Leticia to join this new outfit called Tourism.
She exhaled loudly. “Alan said the Agency hadn’t started up Tourism again.”
“Maybe he was wrong,” Milo said. “Catch a morning flight to Zürich, and I’ll pick you up.”
“I’ll just fly to Milan.”
“No,” he said. “We don’t need to draw attention to this city.”
“Oh,” she said, a note in her voice as she got it. “Say hi to the girls for me.”
She had him. The path to Zürich would take him past Locarno, close enough to Tina and Stephanie to make a visit obligatory. He would leave soon and spend the night.
As he was looking for milk for his coffee, Noah came in and placed a sheet of paper on the counter. On it was a page from The Punch, a Nigerian daily newspaper, from August 2017.
NEW RUSSIAN FACTORY PROMISES JOBS was the headline, and below it was a photo of the Nigerian interior minister shaking hands with a man in his forties identified as Yuri Kozlov, regional manager of MirGaz.
“That’s the land purchase?” Milo asked. “The twenty-two acres?”
“Forget about the land,” Noah said, and pointed to the Russians and Nigerians crowded in the background of the photo-op. He touched his finger to an old man, sad looking, a big gray face he’d only met once but could still identify immediately.
“That’s Kirill Egorov,” Milo said.
“Gold star.”
They moved to the kitchen table and sank down. “Part of his official duties?”
Noah shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe he was ordered to head south to assist the deal. Happens all the time. Or maybe Egorov was connected to MirGaz in a way we don’t yet understand.”
Milo sighed heavily. Why couldn’t anything just be simple? He took the information to Keller’s room and found the accountant sitting at the desk with a book, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “It takes me away from here,” Keller said. “Makes all this seem small.”
Keller knew nothing about Egorov and MirGaz and Nigeria, and his ignorance no longer frustrated Milo—he’d made peace with the man’s uselessness. “I’m going to leave in a while. I’ll be back in the morning. Want me to pick up anything?”
“Decent coffee,” Keller said.
Milo grinned. “Thank you, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For not going really crazy. I know captivity is hard. But we’re close to figuring things out.”
Keller shrugged. “Are you really close?”
“I think so.”
He closed his book on the bedside table. “Did you want me to look at Anna Usurov’s information? Maybe I’ll see something.”
“Sure,” Milo said. “That might be helpful.”
As he left Keller’s room, Kristin waved him over to her computer. She’d done a background check on Grace Foster and laid it all out on a spreadsheet. Born 1974, raised in Minnesota, Vassar College, Harvard Law, divorced, no children, a stint in a Boston firm before a post-9/11 move to Langley for eight years until returning to the private sphere in 2009.
“What am I focusing on?” he asked, feeling as if the fatigue of so many hours looking at words had made him stupid.
“Ex-husband,” said Kristin.
His gaze returned to the marital data and stopped. Married for six years to Anthony Halliwell. Halliwell, founder of Northwell International.
“Jesus.”
Noah looked up from his computer and asked something that, in that moment, felt like a non sequitur: “What did Foster do in the CIA?”
Milo’s eye moved to the relevant paragraph. “OIG.”
“Office of the Inspector General,” Noah said. “They would have been responsible for getting rid of the Tourism records.”
“Oh,” said Kristin.
For a moment, no one said a thing; then Milo looked at Kristin’s screen, searching for something. He said, “Alan told us the files were cleared out in December 2008. Foster resigned the next month.”
“Wait,” Kristin said, holding up a hand. “Are you suggesting she took the Tourism files and…”
“… and gave them to her ex-husband,” Noah said. “To Northwell.”
Milo covered his face in his hands, the world suddenly shifting beneath his feet. Was it really that simple? That clear? The only way to know was to say it aloud and see if Noah and Kristin could poke a hole in it. “This was never about one country reviving Tourism,” Milo said slowly. “Northwell is Tourism. It’s a private enterprise.”
“An international enterprise,” said Noah.
Milo felt like he needed to sit, to let the idea sweep over him, but he feared that if he sat down he would never get up. Northwell as the new Tourism. And MirGaz? “MirGaz is its client.”
“Its patron,” said Kristin. “So is Salid Logistics.”
“And Nexus?” Milo asked.
Kristin nodded.
“And its banker,” Noah said, “is Oliver Booth at IfW.”
Kristin was pacing, tapping a ballpoint pen against her chin. She said, “If you were running a private army of Tourists, what would you fear most?”
“The same thing we fear,” said Milo. “Exposure.”
“But the risk to them isn’t as great as it seems,” Noah cut in. “CIA pays attention to anything that threatens US security. The GRU does the same for Russia. MI6, MSS—all the same. Their operations are spread so thinly across the globe that any single intelligence agency isn’t going to put together the big picture.”
“Exactly,” said Kristin, excited now. “That’s exactly it.”
Both men looked at her.
“National agencies aren’t a threat,” she said. “But if Northwell was aware of the Library—an organization that looks at the world holistically—then we would be perceived as its biggest threat.”
“You gave the patrons Keller’s names,” Noah said to Milo. “One of them—maybe more than one—passed this on to Northwell. Northwell realized you had Keller, which is why Foster tried to kill you.”
“I think we know which patron,” Kristin said.
Milo exhaled. “Beatriz Almeida.”
It was a lot to take in, and Milo had trouble sorting through the ramifications of it all. He would have to leave it to his two geniuses to distill it all into a report for little minds like his own. He gulped down half of his coffee. He was trembling, but not from caffeine.
“One more thing,” Kristin said as he gathered his keys. “Outside the US, Nexus is the most popular messaging app in the world. They advertise absolute anonymity. But what if they put in a back door? What if these new Tourists have access to the largest tracking system in human history?”
“Then we’re fucked,” said Noah, and Milo couldn’t find a reason to disagree.