When they arrived at the safe house in the predawn hour, and a dour old Milanese man opened the door for them, Leticia felt a grudging respect for Milo’s organization. Not the details necessarily—as far as she could tell, their security wasn’t much at all—but the unity. Where Tourism, and the life that she’d followed afterward, had been about solitude, the Library felt, even during her short exposure to it, like a team effort. Each person had taken a role without really having to ask Milo what to do, and their roles felt instantly complementary.
Still, though, she searched the apartment and then checked the surrounding streets as Tina helped Milo up the narrow stairs and to bed. The girl, Stephanie, was a surprise. She’d seen kids whose lives had been turned upside down, and more often than not they broke quickly. Mute shock, and then a meltdown. But Stephanie wasn’t in shock. Surprise, yes, but fascinated surprise. When Leticia returned from scouting the neighborhood, the girl asked her if she’d ever killed anyone.
“Yes,” Leticia told her.
“Many?”
“What’s many?”
Stephanie’s wry smile told her all she needed to know about this girl—she was going places.
While the Weavers took the two bedrooms, Leticia lay down in the living room and set the alarm on her phone so she could take twenty-minute power naps. After the second one, which was interrupted by a call from Alexandra back in Zürich, she decided to stay up. With late-morning light streaming in through the lace curtains, she brewed coffee and looked through the meager bookshelves, finding a copy of Dante’s Inferno.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Poor Dante went astray of the straight road. Hadn’t they all?
She heard someone moving in the back of the apartment and stiffened, but when the bathroom door opened and closed, followed by the sound of a man peeing, she relaxed again and waited until Milo stumbled out and headed to the coffee machine. He saw her and smiled.
“How’s the head?” she asked.
“Better,” he said as he poured himself a cup. She waited for him to add some milk, then work his way over to one of the chairs in the living room. He settled in and took his first sip.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he answered.
“Your sister called.”
“Anything?”
“Everyone’s safe. Your … reference librarians?”
“That’s right.”
“Joseph Keller, too.” In answer to his look of concern, she added, “Alexandra filled me in before we left Zürich.”
He looked surprised. “On everything?”
“I think so. Keller is a refugee from MirGaz with a list of international payoffs.”
Milo nodded, apparently accepting his sister’s breach of security.
“She says there’s no sign of anything at your apartment. No one skulking around.”
“There wouldn’t be,” he said. “If they saw Tina packing, they know we’re gone.”
“Alexandra’s wondering if all this is overkill.”
“What do you think?”
“Compared to how we were, back in the day? This is not overkill.”
He nodded, agreeing, then stretched his legs out and yawned. She knew what he would say next, but she would make him ask the question. When he did, though, she didn’t like the way he formulated it: “A week ago you were in Wakkanai, waiting for me,” he said. “Then you’re in Zürich. Are you stalking me?”
“You really think the world revolves around you, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I wasn’t in Wakkanai waiting for a job offer, that’s for damned sure. I was there because I’d gotten a lead from a contact in Tokyo.”
“The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were there to sell them information.”
“It was a trade. My information for theirs.”
“What kind of information?”
She looked at her hands, which still held the Inferno. She tossed it on the coffee table. “Chibok, remember? It bothered me. All those girls, just gone. Forced to convert to Islam, forced to marry militants, forced into slavery. Even after the negotiations and the escapes, there are still more than a hundred unaccounted for. And I’m not just talking about these girls, understand. In 2014 alone Boko Haram kidnapped about two thousand people.”
Milo nodded. Of course he knew this; the UN had stacks of reports on it.
“I wanted to do something,” she said.
“In Japan?”
“I couldn’t walk into the Sambisa Forest, where they had dragged those girls, and singlehandedly rescue each one of them. Now, could I?”
Milo shrugged.
“But others could do it,” she said. “The UK, for example, tracked the Chibok girls soon after the kidnapping and offered to go in and rescue them. Nigeria said no—it was an internal matter. They were afraid, I suppose, of looking weak beside their old colonial masters. As long as the government thought that way, nothing was going to happen. So I saw a possible solution: Convince the government to accept foreign help.”
She knew what this sounded like to someone like Milo: a shockingly naïve proposition. His expression didn’t make her think she was wrong. “How would you do that?”
“Did you know that during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration twenty billion dollars of government money went missing?”
“That’s a lot.”
“For you and me, yes. But for an economy like Nigeria’s? It’s ridiculous. So I began with the cabinet and worked my way down. Gathered evidence. I charted where their money came from, which accounts it was laundered through, and whose pockets it went into. And that’s when I stumbled across it.”
Leticia got up, walked to the kitchenette, took a bottle of water from a cabinet, and returned, cracking the top open. Milo watched her the whole distance, and when she returned to her chair she said, “This world we live in—we put border checks everywhere for people, but money? Money is the freest thing that exists. It can vanish and reappear anywhere on the planet like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And in the space of forty-eight hours one cabinet member’s account rose to a million dollars and then fell to twenty dollars.”
“Cashed out?”
“Yeah. Three days before the Chibok attack.”
Milo’s face twisted; he was clearly confused. “Wait—are you saying…?”
She held up a finger. “I didn’t know, did I? So I followed the money in reverse. It had been laundered through a Senegalese shipping company, a Malaysian textile firm, and a Chinese economic development company.”
“How did you track all these accounts?”
“Friends. I have friends.”
“But this,” Milo said, sounding pained. “Look, the Library’s good, but even with all our resources it takes months for us to track these sorts of things, and we’re not always successful. But you have a few friends who can pull this off?”
“The difference,” she told him, “is that my friends, even the ones working for Maastricht, aren’t worried about a little breaking and entering.” She winked and gave him a smile to make him feel better. “But this did take years, Milo. I started looking in 2014, after the Chibok girls were taken. Didn’t put it together until last year. In July 2017, I was working on the other side of the world when my friends told me that over a two-day period, that same bank account had been filled again and emptied.”
“And you thought…”
“I didn’t know. But if it was true…?” She shook her head. “I dropped everything and went. But I was too late.” She hesitated, then went silent, remembering landing at Murtala Muhammed International and finding the news already full of another Boko Haram attack. A hundred and twenty girls, gone. She felt the emotion building in her, just as it had then, and cleared her throat.
“So you knew,” Milo said, sinking deeper into his chair, his expression bleak. Maybe he wasn’t a bad egg after all.
“I spoke with the local cops,” she went on. “I even went out into the bush for a week, talking to villagers who were too afraid to answer my questions. Then I came back to town and ran into a guy, Karim Saleem. Moroccan, or so he said. Accent? British, and not just from school. I’d seen him three years earlier, in Chibok. Worked for some NGO—Literacy Across the World. LAW. Focus on education in the third world. Over drinks he told me he’d been studying the effect of unrest on education trends, which was adorable, but utter bullshit. I didn’t believe anything he told me—it sounded scripted. So I lifted his wallet and found three names on three different credit cards. I had Maastricht run the names. There was nothing on the name he used with me, but another one—Walid Turay—came up in a police report from Thailand. He’d been arrested as the fence for an armed robbery of—get this—land title deeds from a distant relative of the king.”
“Strange.”
“Stranger still, his outbound flight from Nigeria had been paid for by a company called Tóuzī.”
“What’s Tóuzī?”
“The Chinese developer that laundered the Boko Haram money. I also had the name of the person who authorized that million-dollar transfer—a man named Liu Wei.”
“Are you honestly telling me some Chinese company was paying Boko Haram to kidnap these kids?”
She opened her hands. “I didn’t know. That’s why I was in Wakkanai—to find out. Tóuzī’s headquartered in Shanghai, but Liu Wei was working on a big project on Sakhalin Island. He has Japanese family in Wakkanai that he visits once a month. I didn’t want to deal with Russian security in Sakhalin, not alone, so I was going to wait in Japan and hold him down and ask him some questions.”
“Did he show up?”
She shook her head. “I’ll lay odds he’s back in Shanghai by now.”
Milo frowned at her. “So what happened?”
She looked squarely at Milo, licked her teeth behind her lips, and told him the rest of the story. Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young. Fleeing to Hong Kong. Fighting back. To remove any doubt, she unbuttoned her shirt and slipped it off her left shoulder to show him the bandage on her arm. “I got nicked.” Then she described fleeing to Amsterdam, and that call with Joan—or, to Milo, Jane.
Milo looked stunned. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, finally asking, “So you came to us for help?”
This was getting tiring. “Really, Milo. You’ve got to do something about your ego. I came to Zürich looking for the bitch. She told me she was flying into Zürich from the States, and we made a date. I had no intention of meeting on her terms, so I tracked all the flights coming into Zürich from the US and stood around waiting. I saw you first, watched you stumble around, buy a bottle of water, and pass out. Honestly? Seeing you pissed me off—I was there to deal with Joan, but there you were, dropping like a drunken fly. To help you, I was going to have to break cover. And then … well, you know the story. There she was, crouching over you, something in her hand. A needle, maybe? I don’t know. But I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I launched. She ran off. I bolted when I saw the cops coming. Afterward, I saw her in the parking lot. She’d been picked up by a white van. It was two car-lengths away, in the other lane, and she rolled down her window and pointed at me like this.” Leticia made a finger-pistol and pointed it at Milo.
He looked like he had finally woken up. She hoped he appreciated what she’d done by changing her plans, and what kind of a mess she was in now.
He said, “This woman—Joan, or Jane—she’s after both of us.”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t attacked until I took Joseph Keller into safekeeping and shared names from his list with our patrons. To protect, one assumes, MirGaz.”
That sounded right to her, so she gave him the solution: “Give him up.”
Anger flashed through Milo’s face. “What?”
“Alexandra says his list isn’t helping anyone, and the guy doesn’t know enough to be of any use. Give him to the Swiss; let him be their problem. Won’t help me, but it might get them off your back.”
He shook his head. “He’ll be dead inside of a week.”
“It’s not your problem. Your problem is keeping your people alive, not him.”
“Enough, Leticia.”
She shrugged, leaned back, and crossed her legs. “You know what we need? Some of those Chinese guns.”
He frowned, still looking a little pissed. “What?”
“Those plastic guns you told me about. Something untraceable. Something to bring through security. I’m sick of leaving my hardware behind.”
“I don’t—” he began, then paused, seeming confused. “I told you about those?”
“The one-shot wonders from Beijing? Sure.”
He rubbed his forehead, and it gave her a measure of satisfaction to hear him say, “You really must have gotten me drunk.”
“Hell yeah I did.”
After a moment, he nodded and leaned back, accepting his incompetence. “So. We know why they’re after me. But what about you?”
Leticia rubbed her lip, letting the air go out of the room. “I didn’t know before, but I do now.”
“How?”
“At the airport. The man at the wheel of Joan’s van was Karim Saleem, or Walid Turay. They’ve been on me since Nigeria.”
Milo rubbed his hands through his graying hair, as if something terrible had occurred to him. “No,” he said.
“What, no?”
“Boko Haram in Nigeria, Tóuzī in China, MirGaz—they all connect to a single CIA department. How?”
“Elephant,” Leticia said.
He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.
“We’re each looking at parts of the same elephant.”
“But what is the elephant?”
Leticia didn’t have an answer, and neither did he. Then Milo’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. He answered it with a “Weaver,” then listened for a full minute. His shoulders sank, and he closed his eyes. “Jesus.” Whatever he had heard was seriously bad news. He pinched the bridge of his nose and finally said, “Thanks. Let me know how it goes.”
When he hung up, he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What is it?” she asked.
“Leonberger, one of our librarians, is dead.”
“What is with these names?”
He ignored her. “But he did his job. He sent us a flash drive. They’re decrypting it now.”
“What flash drive?”
“Anna Usurov’s.”
Leticia got up to pour herself another coffee—she was going to need it.