the beginning of the interview, I attacked him.”
“Why?”
“I told you before—he brought up Tina and Stef.”
“You lost your cool.”
“I was short on sleep.”
“Okay.” Grainger reached out to tap the oak desktop, referring Milo to an unmarked gray file in the center. “Here’s the Angela thing. Go ahead.”
Milo had to get out of his chair to retrieve the dull-looking folder that showed off the newest Company security technique: Top secret files were now left unmarked, to better avoid attracting interest. He left it closed in his lap. “What about the Swiss clinic?”
Grainger pursed his wide lips. “As he said. Registered under Hamad al-Abari.”
“So you’ll put Tripplehorn on it?”
“We’ve only got eleven Tourists in Europe right now. Elliot died last week near Bern. The rest, including Tripplehorn, are all occupied.”
“Elliot? How?”
“Accident on the Autobahn. He’d been off the grid a week before we finally matched him up with the body.”
Because of security, Milo didn’t know any of the Tourists’ real names, their ages, or even what they looked like—only Grainger and a few others, including Fitzhugh, had that level of clearance. The news of Elliot’s death still bothered him. He scratched his ear, wondering about the man he only knew through a code name. How old was he? Did he have children? “You’re sure it was accidental?”
“Even if I wasn’t, I doubt we’d get the money for a proper investigation. That’s the level of purgatory we’ve entered.” When he saw the doubt in Milo’s face, his tone softened. “No, Milo. It was an accident. Head-on, and the other driver was killed, too.”
Milo finally opened the file. A couple of sheets of printed facts and a photograph—a mug shot of a fat Chinese man in a People’s Liberation Army colonel’s uniform.
“The Brits discovered it,” Grainger said. “Well, ‘discover’ is a strong word. They were lucky bastards. All routine, apparently. Six was keeping an eye on the opposition.”
In Milo’s experience, MI6 didn’t have the manpower to keep an eye on each foreign diplomat in the country, even ones as important as the one in this photo—Colonel Yi Lien—but he didn’t interrupt.
“The trip wasn’t strange. The colonel took the ferry over to France every weekend.”
“No Chunnel?”
“Fear of closed spaces—that’s in his file. So he does the ferry, then drives on to a little cottage he’s got in the Brittany countryside.”
“Bought under his name?”
Grainger reached for his computer’s mouse, but he was sitting too far back and had to drop his foot in order to reach it. “Of course not. Under a …” He clicked twice and squinted at the screen. “Yes. Renée Bernier. Twenty-six, from Paris.”
“Mistress.”
“Budding novelist, it says here.” Another click. “She uses the place to write, I suppose.”
“And meet with the colonel.”
“Everybody’s got to pay rent.”
“Walk me through this,” said Milo. “Colonel Yi Lien takes the ferry over to his French chalet. Spends the weekend with his girl. Then he boards the ferry. And drops dead?”
“Not dead. Heart attack.”
“And MI6 is there to resuscitate him.”
“Of course.”
“And they go through his bag.”
“What’s with the attitude, Milo?”
“Sorry, Tom. Go on.”
“Well, the colonel’s a paranoid sort. Doesn’t trust anyone in his own embassy, and for good reason. He’s sixty-four, unmarried, with a declining career. He knows that pretty soon someone’s going to suggest it’s time to pack up for Beijing, and he doesn’t want that. He likes London. He likes France.”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Right. But since he trusts no one, he keeps his laptop with him at all times. Big security risk. So our friends in MI6 took the opportunity, on the ferry, to copy his hard drive.”
“Very resourceful.”
“Aren’t they?” Grainger clicked his mouse again, and his printer, buried in the bookshelf alongside a row of untouched antiquarian books, hummed as it spat out a page.
“And Colonel Lien? What happened to him?”
“Irony of ironies. He was recalled to Beijing not long after the heart attack.”
Since Grainger wasn’t going anywhere, Milo retrieved the printout.
It was an interoffice memo from the U.S. embassy in Paris, top secret. A relay from the ambassador to Frank Barnes, the head of the Diplomatic Security Service in France, concerning new guidelines in dealing with the Chinese ambassador to France, who would temporarily be monitored by a three-man team.
“And Six just shared this with us for free?”
“They’re our special friends,” he said, smiling. “Actually, one of my personal special friends passed this on to me.”
“Does your special friend think Angela passed this on to Lien? Is that what Six thinks?”
“Calm down, Milo. All they did was pass on the memo. The rest, we figured out on our own.”
Like Tina, Milo still couldn’t believe that Angela Yates, “poster girl for Us-Against-Them,” would give away state secrets. “Has this been verified? The ferry; the heart attack?”
“Like I told you yesterday,” Grainger said with theatrical patience, “Yi Lien’s coronary made the British papers. It’s public record.”
Milo dropped the memo on Grainger’s desk. “So what’s the evidence?”
“That paper went through three sets of hands. The ambassador and Frank Barnes, of course. And the embassy’s chief of security. That would be Angela Yates. We’ve cleared Barnes, and I hope you won’t demand an exegesis of the ambassador.”
He’d already listened to this overview yesterday in Grainger’s car. But now, the physical reality of the memo was making him queasy.
“When was the last time you saw Yates?”
“About a year. But we’ve kept in touch.”
“So you’re still on good terms?”
