Three months were like forever. That was a thought that came to him when he saw Tina’s bright eyes appear in Erika Schwartz’s doorway. As they embraced, Milo flashed on that moment in 2001, in Venice, when he’d first stumbled across this beautiful, pregnant woman on the damp cobblestones, seizing up as labor pains shot through her.
Now, eighteen years later, these two strangers—the woman and the baby inside her—had become such a part of him that without them he was no longer fully himself. During those months apart he’d felt as if parts of him, some internal organs, were missing. He could function, but something somewhere deep in him had stopped working. It was why he’d started smoking again, and within that first half hour of their reunion Tina sniffed and called him on it. But now that he was with them, the urge for nicotine faded. He was whole again, and the infant born on that day in Venice was a grown woman with tears in her eyes, and into her ear he whispered, “It’s almost over, Little Miss.”
It was a gift, these two days in Schramberg. He was like a sponge, demanding stories from them, particularly Stephanie.
“I’ve been learning about nature,” she told him. “A month ago I went into the forest and lived for three days without any tools.”
“What? But it was freezing!”
She shrugged. “I had a coat. I ate rabbit and ferret.”
It had taken weeks for Tina to be talked into allowing this wilderness survival weekend, and even though one of Erika’s guards had been assigned to keep track of Stephanie from a distance it had terrified her. “But she’s different now,” Tina confided in him. “In a good way, I think.”
Their shopping trips, sometimes to Schramberg, more often to far-flung towns to avoid notice, began in early December when Tina told Erika that if she didn’t allow a change of scenery she would face an insurrection. Unlike Milo, who had arrived skinny and sunburned, his wife and daughter looked healthy and strong, and for that he was thankful to Erika Schwartz.
Two days were enough, just barely, to repair him. He shaved and cleaned himself and ate and spent every moment with them. And when the stories ran out he just watched them—“kind of like a creep,” Stephanie noted. Then it was Tuesday morning and time to go. He kissed them, then walked with hobbling Erika Schwartz out to another smuggler’s car, an Audi.
“You know where you are going?” she asked.
“The Arkaden.”
“The Russians don’t matter as much as the Americans,” she said. “You cannot expect Germany to attack one of its largest financial institutions if America protects two of its largest companies.”
Milo opened the car door. “They need time to absorb it. I’m going to call them tomorrow night.”
“You are pushing it.”
“If I call now, the answer will be no.”
Erika looked at him a long time, and he had the sense that her face was a mask covering an Escher maze of conflicting considerations that he would never entirely understand. This old woman was probably the most complicated and inscrutable intelligence officer he’d ever had to face, and in the past he’d paid dearly for underestimating her. Then she nodded abruptly. “Go,” she said.
During his long drive, he thought about how his life had changed. He could no longer fly to New York and sit in a conference room to calmly talk people into his way of thinking. Instead, he had to skulk from one meeting place to the other, crossing borders undercover and stopping in roadside stores to pick up amateur tools of the trade, as he did at the last gas station in Germany, where he bought four burner phones from four different manufacturers.
Nearer to Davos, he found a radio station relaying live coverage of the Forum. Prince William was talking with David Attenborough about climate change. “We are now so numerous,” Attenborough said with his familiar intonation, “so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms that we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it.”
He’d been unable to make Alan’s funeral in Boston, and when he called Penelope after the ceremony she’d finally broken, shouting down the international line that Milo was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. He’d had to absorb that blow, because what choice did he have? Maybe she was right. Alan, Kristin, Noah, Leonberger, Griffon. Heeler, probably.
The Attenborough session ended with applause, and after some brief commentary, as he was rolling through the outskirts of Davos, seeing soldiers in the distance, Brazil’s newly inaugurated populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, came on the radio. Milo turned it off.
He parked in the basement lot of the Rätia shopping center at the southern end of Davos, not far from the train station. He pulled on the hood of his coat and used sunglasses, knowing there were cameras he couldn’t spot as he made his way up the Promenade to the Arkaden cinema, where he bought a single ticket. The audience was thin, most people in the center or up front, so Milo took a seat along the back wall and settled in. The lights went down, and a series of advertisements for upcoming films scrolled, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was watching the aisles on either side, waiting.
When they finally arrived, the film had started. In it, one young asshole, on what looked like a New York street, videotaped another young asshole punching and knocking out a Chinese man. For YouTube likes, apparently. Back at their house, though, they were paid back by an unseen person, violently, and that was when Milo noticed a sliver of light to his right as the theater door opened and closed. Two men entered at the same time as, on his left, a third man entered. They let the doors shut behind them. Milo was surprised that Maxim Vetrov had brought the same two thugs he’d had with him in Algiers. Maybe they’d lobbied for the job, a respite from the relentless North African sun.
Vetrov removed his wide-brimmed hat and edged his thick body slowly along Milo’s row to reach him. The other two worked their way to the center of the next row up. Settling into the seat beside Milo, Vetrov smelled of cigarettes. “Hello, Mr. Weaver,” he said in his halting English.
“Thank you for coming,” Milo said, but in fluent Russian, which earned raised eyebrows from Vetrov.
“Russian?” he asked.
“Half,” Milo said, then smiled at the two thugs, whom he suspected would soon have a crick in their necks from turning to stare so ominously at him.
“I have to admit, I am surprised,” Vetrov said. “In Algiers, you did not seem very happy to meet us. And now that we have a warrant out for your arrest, you invite me to Switzerland.”
“In Algiers, I didn’t understand. Neither did you.” When Vetrov frowned, Milo said, “You thought I was working with Egorov against you. And I thought you were working with my enemies. In fact, both of us wanted the same thing, and Egorov made sure neither of us knew it.”
“He was very clever,” Vetrov said. “Clever old man.”
“By then Joseph Keller was long dead. He’d been killed in Paris. And Egorov had destroyed Keller’s list. But he pretended otherwise because he wanted to destroy me.”
This seemed to disturb Vetrov, and he sighed, glancing up at the movie, then back to Milo. He said, “When Kirill came back to Algiers, he was supposed to bring Joseph Keller with him. But he didn’t. He claimed that Keller had been killed by accident. But then he began to change everything. His daily movements, his meetings with his mistress. He began sending encrypted cables to Moscow—but not secretly, mind. He made a show of it. Very strange.”
“He needed to create the illusion he was protecting Keller.”
“Maybe,” Vetrov said with a shrug. “So we monitored his phone. He called one Milo Weaver, of UNESCO, and told him that there was someone for him to protect.” He raised a short finger. “Evidence! Clearly he did have Keller. Now, then, was the time to confront him.”
“And kill him,” Milo said.
Vetrov shook his head vigorously. “No, no. Talk. A slap and tickle, yes, but talking, mostly. Unfortunately, his heart was not up to a simple interrogation.”
“So Egorov really did die of a heart attack?”
“I am afraid, yes.”
“Another question,” Milo said. “When he picked up Joseph Keller in Paris, whose orders was he following?”
Frowning again, Vetrov shook his head. “The Kremlin’s, of course. And we wanted him alive. We wanted information on Sergei Stepanov’s operations.”
“But the Kremlin did kill Anna Usurov.”
Vetrov held up his hands, as if defending himself. “Usurov—yes, maybe they did that. She was in Moscow, attacking Putin. She had to expect it.”
“What about Boris Nikolaev?” Milo asked, using Leonberger’s real name.
“Who?”
“He worked for us in Moscow. He was looking into Usurov’s death.”
Vetrov’s expression darkened. “Nikolaev was yours?” He shook his head. “The man killed himself—our people only wanted to speak to him. He put two militiamen in the hospital.”
This was what Milo had assumed after reading the police reports, but it helped to have it verified.
Vetrov shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. “So are you going to tell me? I hope I didn’t fly to Switzerland just to make friends with you.”
Milo told him, but slowly so that it wouldn’t sound too unhinged, about Egorov’s friends, the international corporations, and their weapon of choice: specialized Northwell agents working to advance their interests by whatever means necessary.
Vetrov’s frown had deepened so much that he worried the man’s face would collapse on itself. “A private army,” he finally said.
“Not just any private army. This one is global, and it’s expanding. They have no problem working against Russian, Chinese, European, or American interests. They’re not interested in long-term stability. They’re motivated entirely by short-term gain. But this,” he said, tapping the arm of his chair, “is where they meet every year. To establish yearly goals, settle financing, and bring in new clients. This is the only chance we have to get them all in one place. But I can’t do it myself. I need help.”
“You need the GRU.”
“I need the GRU,” Milo agreed.
“You ask for a lot, Mr. Weaver.”
“I have no choice. They’re trying to kill me.”
Vetrov stroked his mustache. “I will have to discuss with Moscow.”
“Of course.”
Vetrov’s eyes turned to the screen, where a man with wild hair sat in a wheelchair, staring back at the audience. “Samuel L. Jackson,” he said, smiling. “What an actor. You like him?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and slowly standing. “Not everybody. There never has been and never will be anyone in the world who everyone likes.”
He nodded to his thugs, who also got up, and all three of them headed to the exit. Milo waited until they were gone, then took out his burner phone and sent a message to Alexandra: Done.