Five days later, Alan stared out the window of the Acela Express, watching the landscape of New York turn into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland until it reached DC, flipping idly through a discarded Washington Post. It was the third time he’d taken this route in the past two weeks. First time, he’d gone to meet Helen, his CIA contact, to find out who in the US government had sent Interpol the Red Notice request for Joseph Keller; once she’d agreed to that, he slipped in the more dangerous question about the Department of Tourism. She’d pouted at him as they walked together through Dumbarton Oaks park, not far from her Georgetown apartment, and told him that he’d be better off not dredging up ghosts. “I’m asking if it really is a ghost, Helen.”
“What would make you ask that?”
“Things that are hard to explain. Bumps in the night.”
“You’ve been listening to ghost stories.”
He didn’t deny it, just said, “Can you check on it?”
His second visit had been with Penelope, when she’d insisted on going to the Museum of African American History and Culture because she’d heard there would be an exhibit on James Baldwin. When they arrived, though, it turned out that it wasn’t an exhibit but a discussion of Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, with a panel including the actor LeVar Burton. As Penelope sat listening, Alan had wandered through the museum, eyeing artifacts of slavery and oppression, feeling the echo of all that horror in the news he’d been reading lately: black people killed by police, black neighborhoods losing access to the voting booth, white supremacists crawling out of the woodwork and staging torchlight parades. His mood darkened.
Bad days in America and, always, the cloud that hung over all human endeavor: climate change. As world temperatures crept steadily upward, people remained resolutely distracted by the crimes humans committed against one another. Everyone was dancing to the wrong tune, and dancing toward a cliff.
And now he was back on the Acela, alone this time, sipping an antioxidant smoothie he’d picked up at the Penn Station Jamba Juice. Helen had given him no preview of what she would say, only a note in the drafts folder of their shared Hotmail account: Monday 1345 Lincoln.
Yes, even this—even the possibility of a resurrected Department of Tourism—was nothing in the face of global disaster. But it was the only thing that, for now, he could have an effect on.
As the train was nearing the station, he looked down at the Post in his hands to see a headline on the fifth page: PORTUGAL ARRESTS SUSPECTED RUSSIAN SPY. He began to read, then cursed silently to himself. Against their instructions, the Portuguese had picked up Diogo Moreira. Fucking Beatriz Almeida. Milo, hiding out in Milan, was going to blow his top.
It was a little after one when he tossed his empty cup and hustled out of Union Station for the twenty-five-minute walk down chilly Massachusetts Avenue to Lincoln Park. There had been a time when he would have balked at the idea of going by foot, but he’d been younger and stupider back then; self-destructive, too. A heart attack turned that around, as did Penelope, who cut through his self-pity with a line in the sand: Cut it out, or I’m gone.
He waited by the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune handing a copy of her educational legacy to two children. Farther down the park, Abraham Lincoln stood holding the Emancipation Proclamation, as if with a simple piece of paper America could be cured.
“Good, you’re early,” he heard, and turned to find Helen smiling at him, her blond hair curved around her face and flowing into the raised collar of her black trench coat.
“You are, too.”
“How’s Pen?”
“Saving immigrants. It keeps her busy.”
“Good for her,” Helen said, and he joined her slow walk toward the sixteenth president. “The request for the Red Notice,” she told him, “started at Justice. You’ve heard of Gilbert Powell, I believe?”
“Founder-of-Nexus Gilbert Powell? What does he have to do with it?”
“Well, Powell plays his senator like a fiddle. My source says after a boozy lunch with Powell, the senior congressman from Kentucky came out all cylinders firing, demanding a talk with Justice.”
“What was his reasoning?”
“National security.”
“So the request was pushed through by Gilbert Powell.”
“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t make sense to me, either.” She opened her hands. “But that’s all I got.”
Alan wasn’t sure what to make of this revelation, so he just said, “Weird,” and, “The other thing?”
“The ghost?”
“Yeah.”
Helen rocked her head. “That took longer than expected.”
“But you found it?”
“Indeed I did.”
“So it does still exist?”
“It does not.”
He was taken aback by her unequivocal reply. “What did you find?”
“A story,” she said. “Remember 2008?”
Alan did. Alan would never forget 2008. “It was the end of Tourism.”
“It was also an election year,” she reminded him. “Did you vote?”
He hadn’t—he’d been too far gone for that—but said, “Of course.”
“A lot of people did, and a young politician with a weird name won. Democrats got control of both houses. There was a lot of talk during the campaign of the crimes of the previous administration. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. State-sponsored torture. Outing CIA officer Valerie Plame. The Democratic base wanted Republicans behind bars. This ring a bell?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, imagine the feeling in the White House in the weeks before inauguration. They didn’t know what the new administration would do. So they started cleaning house. They sent people into all the departments to find dirty secrets and either shred or move them, so the Dems couldn’t bring them to a grand jury.”
“And among those dirty secrets…”
“Tourism. Exactly. It had been around for decades, but all the administration worried about was what it had done during their eight years. As you know, not all of it was pretty. And the way it ended—that’s a story no one wanted out. So it was decided to erase Tourism from the archives.”
“Erase erase?”
“Erase from the server. Hard copies put into cold storage, off-site.”
“Where off-site?”
“There’s probably no more than five who know where. I’m not one of them.”
“Do you know who those five people are?”
“I’m not even one of the people who can find that out.”
Alan understood. “When were the records erased?”
“Sometime in December 2008. But the point is that there’s no way in hell anyone has revamped the department. Not without the records. Without them—without the blueprint for putting it together—you can’t create the department. You can create something, but that would just be a shadow of Tourism, which had been honed over half a century to perfection.”
Not perfect enough, Alan thought as they reached Abraham Lincoln.
“You going to tell me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Those things that are hard to explain—do they really look like Tourism?”
He almost told her that, yes, they did look like Tourism, and, further, it called itself Tourism and even used the go-codes of the original Tourists—Leticia had verified that. He almost told her all of this but stopped himself. “It’s doubtful,” he said. “Just wanted to be sure.”
Helen looked like she didn’t believe him. “It’s a good thing,” she said with a shrug.
“What?”
“Imagine what the current administration would do if they had those files.”
“Or if those files ended up in Moscow,” he said.
She let out a short, sharp ha!, then winked at him. “Take care of yourself, Alan.”