“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Doesn’t matter. I want you to give her this.” He opened a drawer and took out a black, thumb-sized flash drive, five hundred megabytes. It clattered on Milo’s side of the desk.
“What’s on it?”
“A mock-up report on Chinese oil concerns in Kazakhstan. The kind of thing they’ll want to see.”
“I don’t know, Tom. You may have cleared Barnes, but you still haven’t convinced me Angela’s to blame.”
“It’s not your job to be convinced,” Grainger told him. “You’ll find out more from your contact. Trust me, there is evidence.”
“But if Yi Lien’s gone, then …”
“Networks always survive recalls, Milo. You know that. What we don’t know is who’s at the top of the food chain now.”
Milo looked at Grainger’s hairless scalp, thinking this over. It was a simple enough matter, and he was glad to be brought in; he could at least make sure they dealt fairly with Angela. But the Company didn’t work like that—it didn’t buy international air tickets because it felt like being fair. He was being brought in because Angela trusted him. “How long will it take?”
“Oh, not long,” Grainger said, pleased the subject had changed. “You fly there, meet her, and hand over the drive. The story is that she’ll hold it for a contact named Jim Harrington who’ll arrive in Paris on Monday to pick it up. That’ll give her”—he raised his hands— “if, of course, it is her—only two days to copy it.”
“Is Harrington real?”
“He’s flying to Paris from Beirut. He knows what to do, but he doesn’t know why.”
“I see.”
“You’ll get it done in no time. Hop an evening flight and be back home by Saturday morning.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
Milo knew why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he’d missed his coffee that morning, nor that he was feeling an acute desire for a cigarette. It wasn’t even the miserable fact that he was preparing to set up a friend for treason—that only made him sick. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Tiger?”
Grainger, looking very innocent, said, “What about him?”
“That he was one of ours. That he was a Tourist.”
The old man’s expression lost its innocence. “You believe that?”
“I’ve spent the last six years tracking him. Don’t you think this piece of information might have helped?”
Grainger stared at him for about ten seconds, then rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Let’s talk when you get back. Okay? We don’t have time for it now.”
“The story’s really that long?”
“It is. Your plane leaves at five, and you need to type up some explanation of the Blackdale fiasco that doesn’t make us look like complete idiots. Also, put in all your receipts—I’m not paying for undocumented expenses anymore.”
Milo grunted an affirmative.
“I’ll tell James Einner to expect you. He’s your liaison in Paris.”
“Einner?” said Milo, suddenly awake. “You really think we need a Tourist for this?”
“Overkill never killed anyone,” Grainger said. “Now go. Everything’s been forwarded to your terminal.”
“And the Tiger?”
“As I said. When you get back.”
Milo had always felt comfortable in large airports. It wasn’t that he loved to fly—that, particularly after the Towers, had become an increasingly unbearable experience with its various secure levels of undress. The only things he enjoyed forty thousand feet above sea level were the cleverly packaged airline meals and the day’s music choices on his iPod.
Once he was on the ground again, though, in a properly designed airport, he always felt that he was wandering through a tiny city. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, was properly designed. Its striking sixties architecture—what designers in the sixties imagined a beautiful future would look like—made for a strangely nostalgic utopia of crowd control architecture and consumer pleasures, reinforced by the soft ding over loudspeakers followed by a lovely female voice listing the cities of the world.
Nostalgia was a good word for it, a false nostalgia for a time he was too young to know. It was why he loved Eurovision winners from 1965, the unreal Technicolor of those midcareer Bing Crosby films, and (despite his promises to the contrary) the perfect pair of a Davidoff cigarette and a bracing vodka, served at an airport bar.
He hadn’t wandered Charles de Gaulle in years, and he soon realized things had changed. He passed a McDonald’s and some bakeries, settling on the vaguely precious La Terrasse de Paris. There was no bar, instead a cafeteria-style area where he searched in vain for vodka. The only things available were small wines—red and white. Frustrated, he settled on four deciliters of some chilled mass-market Cabernet that cost nine euros. His plastic cup, the cashier told him, was complimentary.
Milo found an empty table by the rear wall, bumping into backs and luggage on the way, and settled down. Six in the morning, and the place was packed. His cell phone sang its irritating song, and it took him a moment to find the thing in his inner pocket. PRIVATE NUMBER. “Yeah?”
“Milo Weaver?” said a thin, wiry voice.
“Uh huh.”
“Einner. You landed all right?”
“Well, yes, I—”
“New York tells me you’ve got the package. Do you?”
“I hope so.”
“Answer yes or no, please.”
“Sure.”
“The subject takes lunch every day at twelve thirty precisely. I suggest you wait for her outside her place of work.”
Feeling more desperate for his nostalgic interlude, Milo looked for an ashtray; there was none. He tapped out a Tennessee-bought Davidoff, deciding to ash into the cup and drink the wine from the bottle. “That’ll give me time to nap. It was a long flight.”
“Oh, right,” said Einner. “I forgot how old you are.”
Milo was too stunned to say what his mind muttered: I’m only thirty-seven.
“Don’t worry, Weaver. We’ll have you out of here in time for your vacation.
