It was after one when Alan let him out in front of the slab of the United Nations Headquarters, which many of its employees called Turtle Bay after the neighborhood. Milo only made it a few steps before he heard Alan shouting at him. He turned to see his deputy holding out the plastic cup of green liquefied health. “You forgot the smoothie!” he shouted.
“Keep it,” Milo called, then hurried across UN Plaza and up the stairs to the entrance. Security took a moment to examine his scuffed, laminated ID before waving him on. In the elevator, he got a few looks from the other employees rising with him, and that was when he realized he should have changed, because the dust of Algiers was still all over him. Again, he wasn’t the man he used to be.
He got out on a high floor and wandered down the narrow corridor until he’d reached a door with a plaque: DEPUTY AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS, ALGERIA, SAID BENSOUSSAN. He knocked once, waited, then knocked again. Finally a slim secretary with hair up in a bun opened the door. A flash of familiarity, but only slight, for he rarely visited the patrons’ offices. He put on a smile. “Milo Weaver. I’d like to speak with the deputy ambassador, please.”
She stepped back and gestured to the chairs across from her desk. “I will see if Mr. Bensoussan is available.” She disappeared behind another door, gave him a moment to collect himself, then stepped out again and opened her hand for Milo to enter.
Said Bensoussan was just shy of forty, as slim as his secretary, and more stylish than his job required. Immaculate suits, a perfectly coiffed goatee, and manicured nails gave him a fussy look that always impressed Milo, for whom vanity felt like one thing too many to keep track of. Bensoussan was also much smarter than the ambassador he served.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said, rising to shake Milo’s hand. Once his secretary had closed the door, Bensoussan went through the pleasantries. “When did you get in? Have you rested? What can I get you?”
“Listen,” Milo said, “I wanted to thank you. I’m told you made a call on my behalf.”
“My pleasure. However, no one I talked to admitted knowing anything about you. I’m not sure I was any help.”
“For the effort, then.”
Bensoussan opened his hands and settled back behind his desk. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me about it.”
Milo told the Egorov story just as it had happened, fighting his natural instinct to hide details from a patron. He knew that Bensoussan in particular was adept at catching loose details and holding on to them, patiently waiting for other puzzle pieces to fit, until he could eventually create entire pictures of things you never wanted to share. But in this case, Milo hoped that openness would encourage Bensoussan to react in kind.
By the time he finished, Bensoussan had taken a cigar from a box and begun rolling it in his fingers, a cue that he was deep in thought. “You don’t believe the official story? Heart attack?”
“Do you?”
Bensoussan shrugged. “Whether or not Egorov was murdered, it doesn’t answer the question of who he wanted to hand over to you. You said he had changed his movements?”
“Last month, after a trip to Paris.”
“And the DSS found nothing at the café. Did they speak to his mistress?”
“I don’t know. Can you ask?”
“Who questioned you?”
“His name’s Mustafa Rahmani.”
Said nodded severely. “I’ll let you know whatever he decides to tell me.”
“Are you worried they won’t tell you?”
“These days, one never knows,” he said, opening his hands. “I haven’t seen my president for months. In this world, everything is a question mark.”
“Wasn’t it always?”
Said smiled and rocked his head. “We’ll see you in a few hours, correct?”
“Both me and Alan.”
“Good.”
“What’s it about?”
A smile twisted the corner of his lips but didn’t spread any farther. “A month ago you sent in the preliminary fiscal year 2019 budget.”
“Ah,” Milo said, instantly annoyed.
Bensoussan picked up on this. “We pay a lot of money for the Library’s services, Milo. You have to expect your customers to ask for improvements now and then.”
“What kind of improvements?”
Bensoussan blinked at him, then shook his head. “Nothing too egregious, I’m sure. We’ll talk this evening.”
After the Algiers safe house, the Hilton room that had been reserved for him to freshen up in felt like decadence. He took a long shower, pulled on a thick robe, and drank coffee while looking out at the UN building from his thirty-ninth-floor window. Beyond lay the East River and Long Island. It was a clear day, the sun sinking behind his building, and as he stared he listened to American news playing on television.
Anthony Halliwell, head of Northwell International, was in Congress defending against news reports of the massacre of Afghan citizens by his private soldiers. This was what Rahmani had been talking about: America farming out the defense of its empire to contractors who lacked discipline. Stories like the Northwell massacre were the bread and butter of North African politics, used as a cudgel during campaign speeches to the wound-up masses.
There was a lot of talk about Donald Trump, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the upcoming midterm elections. Trump was on-screen, shouting about a caravan of Central Americans marching north in order to justify his promised border wall. His words sounded familiar, the same sort of rhetoric he’d heard in Hungary, Poland, France, and Britain about Syrian refugees escaping war. And if Alan’s scientists were right—and after three years of research by hundreds of scientists checking one another’s work, he didn’t doubt they were—then refugees would be the new reality, fleeing natural disasters, wars over water rights, disease, and starvation.
Just thinking about it gave him a headache.
A well-known, mustached commentator named Sam Schumer came on the screen to discuss the Massive Brigade’s three-month burst of violence earlier in the year, the explosions in shopping malls, a kidnapped CEO, the brief hacking of the DC electrical grid, and the numerous bank robberies. Then President Trump was there again, in the Rose Garden, declaring that the Massive Brigade, like ISIS, had been defeated. “I don’t think any previous administration could have taken care of it so quickly,” he said.
There followed a blurry photo of a middle-aged woman with dark hair, a baby in her arms, sitting in a dilapidated living room with young people who all looked to her with something approaching adoration. It was an odd photo, with the feel of a Virgin Mary re-creation.
Schumer said, “Their new leader, Ingrid Parker, seen here living underground with her Massive Brigade comrades, is still on the loose. The silence these last months is not defeat. We know this—even the president knows this. It’s only the calm before the storm. Stay vigilant.”
He met Alan at Sakagura, a moody Japanese restaurant hidden beneath an office building on East Forty-Third. Around them, in other dim booths, customers talked animatedly but quietly, as if the very design of the place had lowered their volume. Architecture as mood control. He and Alan followed suit, talking quietly about regular business and making plans to distribute recent intelligence that had come in from Brazil concerning the popular right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. After Milo talked him through the report he’d sent in on the Philippines, Alan started complaining about DC. “It’s a cesspool of Chinese, Saudi, and Russian spies.”
“More than usual?”
“Absolutely. Everybody knows the Oval Office is full of venal, easily manipulated peacocks running the country like their own piggy bank. So the charm offensive arrives with suitcases full of money. This country’s going to spend the next twenty years unraveling all the intelligence lost and compromised these four years.”
“It’s sad,” Milo said.
“If only there were an organization that could do something about it,” Alan mused theatrically.
“Don’t start,” said Milo.
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not what we do.”
“But if we did we would do it best,” Alan said, smiling. His phone bleeped a Nexus message from his wife. “Pen wants to know if we can take you out for drinks.”
Milo shook his head. “My flight’s at eight-thirty.”
Alan nexted back a negative and said, “It’s all right; she’s just being polite.”
“You mean she doesn’t like me?”
“I guess you’ll have to have a drink with her to find out.”
Milo smiled, then thought a moment. “What do we know about Egorov besides the obvious?”
“I checked his file. Nothing really out of the ordinary. For a few years he was close to Putin, but four or five years ago he started pulling away. Which, I suppose, explains being posted to Algeria.”
“He was in Berlin before?”
“Sounds like a demotion to me,” Alan said.
The mystery of Egorov hung on Milo’s shoulders, but he knew from experience that he probably wouldn’t find an answer. And if he did, it would come years later, when an unrelated situation revealed the truth. Which was why the reference librarians and their enormous, deeply encrypted database were the backbone of the Library. They kept track of everything, cross-referencing and finding connections that Milo was just too human to be able to make.
“Do me a favor,” Milo said. “Get word to Berlin that I’d like to have a talk. I’ll have Kristin reroute my flight.”
“Because Egorov was stationed there?”
“And because he was friends with my father. So was Erika Schwartz. They were all the same generation.”
“And Erika’s been out of the picture three years.”
“Oskar Leintz isn’t.”
“Really?” Alan shook his head. “You hate that guy.”
“I work with you, don’t I?”