Milo was idling in front of a BMW dealership on the north end of Davos, at the intersection of four different roads. If they traced his location, he could quickly drive down endless side streets to avoid easy capture. One of the burners he’d picked up on the drive from Schramberg was pressed to his ear, and it rang four times before a woman answered with a hesitant “Hello.”
“This is Milo Weaver,” he said. “To whom am I speaking?”
A brief pause; then she said, “You can call me Sally.”
“Hello, Sally. Is Abdul with you?”
“Yes, he is.”
“And so you know everything now,” Milo said.
“Everything is a big word,” Sally told him, warming to the conversation. “What we know is what you wanted us to know. To claim we know everything would be silly. Why don’t we meet in person and discuss this more?”
Milo imagined taking a flight to Washington and heading to Langley and … “You’re already in Davos?”
“The Congress Hotel. If you like, we can come to—”
“May I speak to Abdul?”
Another brief pause, then: “Sure.” He heard the hiss of background noise. He’d been put on speaker.
“Abdul?”
Abdul’s tight voice said, “Hey, Milo.”
There was something wrong. “Did you explain it all?”
“Yes. They also have the recording.”
“And what do you think?”
There was silence for a moment, just the quiet hiss, and Milo imagined some sign language between Sally and Abdul and whoever else was in the room. “They’re weighing cost and benefit,” Abdul said.
“How are we doing?”
“Not well.”
A man’s voice said, “Come on, Abdul.”
“Maybe,” Sally said, “we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Maybe you should tell us what you have in mind.”
Milo hesitated, watching bundled couples pass along the sidewalk. Traffic chugged along, but no cops, and no one looked too hard at the car idling in front of the BMW dealership. “First,” he said, “I’d like to know how much you already knew. You sent Abdul to find me, when his brother was working for them. That wasn’t a coincidence. Therefore, you were either already investigating Northwell, or you were working with them.”
“Why would we work with Northwell?” Sally asked him. “They are anathema to American national security.”
“Because you thought you could control them.”
“No,” she said definitively. “In fact, we believed you were running all this. We believed Haroun Ghali was one of your librarians. We believed it was some unholy alliance between your organization and the Massive Brigade. The question we asked was: Why? Why would someone who was once a steadfast Agency officer take his skills to the dark side?”
“You should ask Grace Foster that question.”
“I’m sure we will.”
“Tell me this,” Milo said, eyeing an old woman with a shopping bag. “Has any of my story come up false?”
“Well, we haven’t had a lot of time to dig into it.”
“You’ve had long enough to catch any whoppers.”
“No,” she said. “No whoppers.”
“Tell him,” he heard—it was Abdul. “Just tell him, for Christ’s sake.”
The other man said, “Shut—” and the static disappeared; Sally had taken the phone off speaker.
“Are you going to tell me?” Milo asked. “Something about cost and benefit?”
He heard Sally give a little breathy laugh of impatience. “I think you understand, Milo.”
And then he did. It was what Erika had said—why should Germany bring down one of its major banks if the US wouldn’t go after two of its largest companies? “But unless you do something,” he said, “Nexus and Northwell will continue to undermine national security.”
“We’re just trying to understand before we commit ourselves.”
“You’re not going to help, are you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I can offer you fifteen years of intelligence files.”
“The Library’s?”
“Yes.”
He heard the sound of a body moving, fabric against fabric; then Sally said, “If we help, it won’t be for the Library’s files. It will be for better reasons.”
“Better?” he asked, surprised by how unenticing that amount of intelligence was to her. Was she really not interested? Or was there some way that not helping was more beneficial? Was she—
Oh, shit, he thought, then said those words aloud.
“Milo?”
He felt stupid. He felt like the innocent in this conversation, which was not how any spy ever wanted to feel. This was never going to work, he realized. “The only way you would turn me down is if you had a better source of intelligence that would be harmed by helping us.”
“Elucidate,” Sally said calmly.
“Something very good,” he said. “Like, twenty-four-hour surveillance of one-seventh of the world’s population.”
Sally didn’t say a thing.
“How long have you been in bed with Nexus? How long has their app been your eyes and ears?”
Her continued silence was a clear reply. The CIA had made a deal with Gilbert Powell, probably years ago. Of course they wouldn’t give that up. Not even to stop a rogue army of killers.
Milo hung up.
It had gone off the rails so quickly, and he remembered Leticia’s worries when she’d called earlier. She’d been right; this whole plan was held together with Elmer’s Glue and Band-Aids. He put the car in gear and drove out of town, and when he called Leticia she was in Küblis, night-jogging. “I still think it’s crazy,” he said. “But okay. Do it.”
“America not coming through?”
“No.”
She either sighed or gasped from the exertion. “All right, then.”
“Dalmatian up to it?”
“I hope so.”
“Be careful.”
“Always am,” she said.