The Spanish doctors had assured Leticia that there was no infection, and while warning her that Dalmatian shouldn’t move too much, they had given her the green light to transport him by car. That worked out well until they crossed into France in their rental and his wound started to bleed again. Dalmatian fought with her, insisting he could make it the whole way, but he was being a fool, and as they passed the snowcapped peak of Le Peuil she spotted him gritting his teeth and clutching wet red hands to his wound. So she’d sped to the next town, Vif, just south of Grenoble, and taken him to the emergency entrance of the Alpes Isère Hospital Center. A befuddled French doctor found the broken stitches and bandaged him up, and when Leticia explained that he’d been impaled on a broken railing in Barcelona the doctor sighed and contemptuously said, “Spain.”
Dalmatian was forbidden from traveling for at least forty-eight hours, and the doctor would only discharge him after Leticia made a reservation at an isolated lodge at the edge of the Parc Naturel Régional du Vercors. In the morning, she stepped outside to survey the grounds of what turned out to be a ranch stocked with horses, mules, rabbits, guinea pigs, goats, ducks, and other farmyard animals. She went for a short ride, taking a beautiful stallion named Deck of Cards up to the edge of town to look out for shadows that never appeared. A little before one, the call came, and she gave Milo an update on Dalmatian. He listened soberly, then told her that the meeting the Germans had set up in Davos was not with Xin Zhu’s people, but with the Second Bureau.
“Shit.”
“Don’t go,” Milo said.
“Maybe they want a new deal,” she said, thinking aloud.
“Or maybe they want to kill us, one at a time.”
Anything, she reflected, was possible. “Either way, I’ve got to get to Davos.”
“Be careful.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said.
When she came back to the room, she brought Dalmatian food from the kitchen, and he ate ravenously, which was a good sign.
“I gotta go,” she told him.
“Let’s go, then,” he said through a full mouth.
“It’s a six-hour drive,” she told him. “Follow me tomorrow, when you’re ready.”
“And let you have all the glory? Here. Help me up.”
They were in the car within the hour, following signs to Geneva, where they skirted around the edge of the enormous lake and ascended into the mountains. For a long time they were silent—neither was much of a talker—until Dalmatian said, “So what do you think? We making it out of this?”
“Well, I am,” she said.
He grinned at that, then: “There are a lot of moving parts. One or two things go wrong, and this boat sinks fast.”
She looked into the rearview at a BMW that had been around for a couple of miles. “If we see the boat leaking, we know what to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Abandon ship.”
He frowned at her, then peered out at the mountain peaks disappearing into the night. Finally, he shook his head. “Someone has to plug the holes.”
“Look, you’re a librarian,” she said. “You’ve been one a long time. I’m not part of any club—I learned my lesson long ago. I don’t let other people’s mistakes take me out.”
Dalmatian grunted, then turned away and said nothing more.
It had been dark for three hours when they finally reached the Hotel Terminus in Küblis, just north of Davos, and settled into a room with two beds and bare-wood walls. Dalmatian was holding together well, but sitting up for so long had exhausted him. He stretched out on his bed, and Leticia bundled up, went outside, and drove south. It took forty minutes driving through sporadic traffic and two very long, beautifully maintained tunnels to reach the parking lot on the outskirts, beside Lake Davos. In the strobe of passing headlights, she walked along the road and caught a bus down to snow-covered Dorfseeli Park, across from another parking lot with a huge tent where journalists registered their credentials for the Forum. She joined the crowds walking down the Promenade, Davos’s shopping street, past yellow and brown apartment buildings and their brightly lit ground floor shops.
She had no real plan other than to take it all in, to get the scent of a place she’d never visited before. A sleepy town that, for one week a year, became the epicenter of the world’s wealth, all under the theory that the collision of ideas and money could make the world a better place. Which was, she knew, a bit of a joke, even to the attendees who paid, at a minimum, $75,000 for an invitation. Many paid it not because they thought they could build a future utopia—few even attended the endless forums where earnest humanitarians prescribed solutions to the world’s ills—but because in the space of a few days they could meet more powerful people than they could in a year of flights in their private jets. And here they were, all around her, shoulder to shoulder.
Or, no. Not really here—for up ahead, in front of the Congress Hotel, which was part of the Congress Center where the Forum took place, was a line of black-clad Swiss soldiers toting submachine guns. There, behind that line, was where the world’s most powerful had wrapped up the Forum’s first day and were sipping short drinks and glad-handing one another and discussing the maximization of profit. Among them, but kept at a distance, were invited guests like the environmentalists—sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg and ninety-two-year-old David Attenborough. What did these idealists do among the financial elite? They guilted and cajoled, and the businesspeople smiled and told them what great work they were doing, then passed them off to others so they could get back to the real work of the Forum: mergers and acquisitions.
Or was she being too cynical? Probably. But a lifetime of ups and downs had taught Leticia Jones that cynicism was the only way to see the world for what it was. As an added benefit, cynicism left little room for disappointment, and quite often you could even be pleasantly surprised.
She was turning to leave when she noticed a face among the crowd, off to the left. Chinese woman. Xin Zhu’s agent, who had saved her in Shanghai. A little shorter than she remembered, but just as stern faced. Standing under the flags of the Migros supermarket, hands deep in her pockets, watching. Leticia approached slowly, the way you approach a potentially feral dog, and looked out for her inevitable colleagues. She only spotted one, a man with a phone to his ear eyeing them from across the street.
“I had no expectation of ever seeing you again,” Xin Zhu’s agent said.
Leticia stuck out a hand. “You never told me your name.”
Without hesitation, the woman took it with a firm grip. “Li Fan.”
“How did you find me?”
“We knew you would come here,” Li Fan said, her voice as sharp as it had been in Shanghai. “You and Milo Weaver and Alexandra Primakov. And whoever else is still alive. So we joined Vice President Wang Qishan’s entourage and sent everyone out to wait. You were not hiding, were you?”
Leticia shook her head and began to walk back toward Dorfseeli Park; Li Fan joined her. “You know I’m supposed to meet with your people tomorrow, right?”
“Second Bureau,” she said. “Not my people.”
“Should I be worried about it?”
“You should always be worried,” she said, and that was when Leticia decided she liked this woman. “We in the Sixth Bureau have to be careful. Why? Because of Milo Weaver’s stupidity.”
That surprised Leticia. Had Xin Zhu actually told his underling that Northwell held evidence that, if decrypted, would get him killed? “I hear Xin Zhu has disappeared,” Leticia said diplomatically.
Li Fan shook her head. “He has stepped back, yes, but he is still very much involved.”
It was a kind of answer, so Leticia focused on the matter at hand. “You told me before that Northwell’s friends in the Central Committee hold a lot of influence over the Second Bureau.”
“That is correct.”
“Does that mean I’ll be killed tomorrow?”
Li Fan shook her head. “You are not important; Milo Weaver is not important. His files are important.”
“Northwell has his files. So, I expect, does the Second Bureau.”
“They are unable to read them.”
Ah, there it was—the answer to the most urgent question. And it was the first piece of good luck she’d heard in a very long time. “Are you telling me that after three months they still haven’t decrypted them?”
“That is what we understand,” Li Fan said, almost gliding by her side, her head tilted up to look at Leticia, small eyes very still. “Milo Weaver has very good hackers.”
“Do you know the deal Milo’s offering?”
“The files for help taking down Northwell.” She frowned. “All of the files?”
“All but a very few exceptions,” Leticia said.
“What kind of exceptions?”
“The kind Xin Zhu would appreciate.”
Li Fan did nothing to suggest she understood what Leticia was getting at, but her sudden lack of curiosity seemed to speak volumes. She said, “You do not have to talk us into it. Did you look at the map as I asked?”
“I did,” Leticia said. “They’re trying to disrupt the Niger Chad pipeline before it’s even built.”
“We cannot let that stand.”
“Then I shouldn’t bother meeting with the Second Bureau at all.”
Li Fan shook her head. “If you don’t go, they will warn Northwell. Northwell will take precautions. And you will lose your chance.”
Leticia nodded, appreciating her point, then told her where they would assemble everyone, and when.
“Who else is joining this?” Li Fan asked.
“We’ll find out when we all meet.”
“CIA?”
Leticia gave her a lopsided grin. “We’ll know when we know.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just don’t be stupid this time. I cannot save you here.”
“I’m betting on the crowds to protect me.”
“I do not gamble,” Li Fan said, nodding, then turned and headed back into town, her colleague across the street abruptly turning around to follow. Leticia continued to Dorfseeli Park, and after the bus ride back to Lake Davos drove back to Küblis. In one of the long tunnels, where the lights flashed by in an endless sequence and she felt as if the world outside this futuristic tube had vanished, she called Milo. He agreed with Li Fan’s assessment that there was nothing to do but to go through with tomorrow’s meeting, but Leticia didn’t like it. She’d risked her neck quite enough for the Library; she’d suffered months of grueling solitude with Milo in Laayoune, preparing for this day. And at the last minute she’d been thrown a curveball.
The tunnel ended, and she was back in the world again, and it was unfortunately the same as it had been before.
What to do? Stick to the plan as Milo wanted? Because no matter how it looked to others, she was certainly not a librarian, and she would make her own decisions, particularly when those decisions could decide how long she remained alive.
Back at the Terminus, Dalmatian was poring over maps of Davos, and when she told him what had happened he sighed heavily and said, “Well, we should have expected this.”
Once again, she wondered why she didn’t just abandon ship. It was a rule she’d maintained her whole life, to always know where the exit was. Without that option, she couldn’t function. The same was true now. In her pocket were car keys; in the lot there was a car. She knew how to get her hands on money. Leaving was always an option.