“Okay. But you’re back by Saturday. We will fly to Disney World without you. Isn’t that right, Little Miss?”
“For sure,” Stephanie said to the television.
Milo held up his hands. “Promise.”
Tina rubbed his knee, and he pulled her close, smelling her freshly washed hair as he gazed at the television. That’s when he realized he’d been wrong: Wile E. Coyote wasn’t subject to the same laws of physics as the rest of us. Against all odds, he always survived.
Tina sniffed, then pushed him away. “Jesus, Milo. You stink.”
To visit the tower at the intersection of West Thirty-first and the Avenue of the Americas, you first had to know that you were being tracked by cameras that covered every inch of sidewalk and road around the building. So by the time you entered, you were expected, and Gloria Martinez, the dour forty-year-old Company desk clerk, was ready with your ID. Milo made a sport of flirting with Gloria, and she in turn made a sport of rebuffing him. She knew his wife was, as she put it, half-Latina, and because of this she occasionally thought it important to remind him, “Watch out, and keep sharp things away from your bed.”
Milo accepted this wisdom along with the breast-pocket ID, smiled for the camera attached to her terminal, and promised her, for the third time, “a secret vacation in Palm Springs.” In reply, she drew a cutting finger across her neck.
At the next stage of entry, by the six-pack of elevators, stood three enormous football players they called doormen. These men held the keys that allowed access to the four secret floors, stretching from nineteen to twenty-two, that constituted Tom Grainger’s domain. On this day, Lawrence, a tall, hairless black man, took him up. Even after five years of the same daily grind, Lawrence still waved a metal detector over Milo’s body in the elevator. It bleeped around his hip, and, like every day, Milo pulled out his keys, phone, and loose change for examination.
They passed the nineteenth floor, that eerily sterile interview level of narrow corridors and numbered doors where, when necessary, the Geneva Convention became a joke. The twentieth was empty, set aside for future expansion, and twenty-one contained the extensive library of printed Tourism files, a backup of the computer originals. The doors finally opened on the twenty-second floor.
Were a visitor to accidentally reach the Department of Tourism, he would find nothing out of the ordinary. It was an enormous open-plan office, stuffed with low-walled cubicles where pale Travel Agents hunched over computers, digging through mountains of information in order to write up their biweekly reports—or, in the vernacular, Tour Guides—for Tom Grainger. It had the feel, Milo always thought, of a Dickensian accounting office.
Before 9/11 and the collapse of the previous office at 7 World Trade Center, the Department of Tourism had been divided along geographic lines. Six sections devoted to six continents. Afterward, as this new office was put together and all the intelligence agencies were being scrutinized, Tourism rearranged itself along thematic lines. At present, there were seven sections. Milo’s section focused on terrorism and organized crime, and the many points at which they intersected.
Each section employed nine Travel Agents and one supervisor, giving the Avenue of the Americas (not counting an undisclosed number of Tourists spread around the globe) a staff of seventy-one, including its director, Tom Grainger.
One-quarter, Grainger had said. One-quarter of these people would have to go.
The old man was in a meeting with Terence Fitzhugh, Langley’s assistant director of clandestine operations, who sometimes arrived unexpectedly to address aspects of Grainger’s incompetence. While Milo waited outside the office, Harry Lynch, a twenty-something Travel Agent from Milo’s section, frog-marched a bundle of laser-printed sheets down the hall, stopping when he noticed Milo. “How’d it go?”
Milo blinked at him. “How’d what go?”
“Tennessee. I caught the radio traffic late Tuesday, and I knew—I knew—that this was our guy. It took a while to verify, but I had a feeling in my spine.”
Lynch felt a lot of things in his spine, a gift Milo was suspicious of. “Your backbone was right, Harry. Great job.”
Lynch glowed with pleasure and ran back to his cubicle.
Grainger’s door opened, and Fitzhugh stepped out. He towered over Grainger as he pointed at Milo with a manila envelope. “Weaver, right?” Milo admitted this was fact, and complimented his long memory—they hadn’t spoken in half a year, and then only briefly. In a show of comradely affection, Fitzhugh slapped Milo’s shoulder. “Too bad about the Tiger, but you just can’t predict these things, can you?”
Grainger, behind him, was noticeably silent.
“But we’re rid of one more terrorist,” Fitzhugh continued, stroking the thick silver hair above his ear. “That scores one for the good guys.”
Dutifully, Milo agreed with the sporting metaphor.
“So, what’s on your plate now?”
“Just Paris.”
“Paris?” Fitzhugh echoed, and Milo noticed a flicker of apprehension in his features. He turned to Grainger. “You got the budget to send this guy to Paris, Tom?”
“It’s Yates,” Grainger informed him.
“Yates?” Fitzhugh repeated again; perhaps he was hard of hearing.
“She’s one of his oldest friends. It’s the only sure way of pulling this off.”
“Gotcha,” Fitzhugh said, then patted Milo’s arm and walked away, singing, “Oo-la-la!”
“Get in here,” said Grainger.
The old man returned to his Aeron, settling against the bright backdrop of Manhattan, and placed an ankle on the corner of his broad desk. He did that a lot, as if to remind visitors whose office this really was.
“What did he want?” Milo asked as he took a seat.
“Like I told you, they’re reaming me over the budget, and then you go and mention Paris.”
“Sorry.”
Grainger waved the problem away. “One thing before we get into this. Your new friend, Simmons, has apparently done a rush-job autopsy on the Tiger. She wants to prove you killed him. You didn’t give her any reason to think that, did you?”
“I thought I was very cooperative. How did you hear about the autopsy?”
“Sal. Our friend at Homeland.”
Grainger wasn’t the only one with a friend in Homeland Security. Milo remembered the hubbub over the president’s announcement, nine days after the Towers, that he was establishing a new intelligence agency. The Company, the Feds, and the NSA lined up to squeeze in as many of their own employees as possible. “Sal” was Tourism’s plant, and periodically Grainger talked with him through an anonymous e-mail service called Nexcel. Milo had used it a few times himself.
