The Nearest Exit - Couverture rigide

Steinhauer, Olen

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0312622872 ISBN 13 : 9780312622879

Editeur : Minotaur Books, 2010

Synopsis

Milo Weaver has nowhere to turn but back to the CIA in Olen Steinhauer’s brilliant follow-up to the New York Times bestselling espionage novel The Tourist

The Tourist, Steinhauer’s first contemporary novel after his awardwinning historical series, was a runaway hit, spending three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and garnering rave reviews from critics.

Now faced with the end of his quiet, settled life, reluctant spy Milo Weaver has no choice but to turn back to his old job as a “tourist.” Before he can get back to the CIA’s dirty work, he has to prove his loyalty to his new bosses, who know little of Milo’s background and less about who is really pulling the strings in the government above the Department of Tourism—or in the outside world, which is beginning to believe the legend of its existence. Milo is suddenly in a dangerous position, between right and wrong, between powerful self-interested men, between patriots and traitors—especially as a man who has nothing left to lose.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Olen Steinhauer is the author of the bestselling Milo Weaver series, including The Tourist, and a series of widely acclaimed Eastern European crime novels, which include The Bridge of Sighs, The Confession, 36 Yalta Boulevard, Liberation Movements, and Victory Square. He is a two-time Edgar Award finalist and has been shortlisted for the Anthony, the Macavity, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and the Barry awards. Raised in Virginia, Steinhauer lives with his family in Budapest, Hungary.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

THE NEAREST EXIT (CHAPTER 1)

He felt that if he could put a name to it, he could control it. Transgressive association? That had the right sound, but it was too clinical to give him a handle on it. Perhaps the medical label didn't matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was the effect it had on him, and on his job.

The simplest things could trigger it--a bar of music, a face, some small Swiss dog crapping on the sidewalk, or the smell of automobile exhaust. Never children, though, which was strange even to him. Only the indirect fragments of his earlier life gave him that punch in the gut, and when he found himself in a freezing Zürich phone booth calling Brooklyn, he wasn't even sure what had triggered it. All he knew was that he had lucked out: No one answered. An early breakfast somewhere, perhaps. Then the machine picked up. Their two voices: a minor cacophony of female tones, laughing, asking him to please leave a message.

He hung up.

No matter the name, it was a dangerous impulse. On its own, it was nothing. An impulsive--maybe compulsive--call to a home that's no longer home, on a gray Sunday afternoon, is fine. When he peered through the booth's scratched glass at the idling white van on Bellerivestrasse, however, the danger became apparent. Three men waited inside that van, wondering why he'd asked them to stop here, when they were on their way to rob an art museum.

Some might not even think to ask the question, because when life moves so quickly looking back turns into a baffling roll call of moral decisions. Other answers, and you'd be somewhere else. In Brooklyn, perhaps, dealing with Sunday papers and advertising supplements, distractedly listening to your wife's summary of the arts pages and your daughter's critique of the morning's television programming. Yet the question returned as it had so many other times over the last three months: How did I end up here?

The first rule of Tourism is to not let it ruin you, because it can. Easily. The rootless existence, keeping simultaneous jobs straight in your head, showing no empathy when the job requires none, and especially that unstoppable forward movement.

Yet that bastard quality of Tourism, the movement, is also a virtue. It leaves no time for questions that do not directly relate to your survival. This moment was no exception. So he pushed his way out, jogged through the stinging cold, and climbed into the passenger seat. Giuseppe, the pimply, skinny Italian behind the wheel, was chewing a piece of Orbit, freshening the air they all breathed, while Radovan and Stefan, both big men, squatted in the empty rear on a makeshift wooden bench, staring at him.

With these men, the lingua franca was German, so he said, "Gehen."

Giuseppe drove on.

Each Tourist develops his own personal techniques to keep from drowning--verse recitation, breathing exercises, self-injury, mathematical problems, music. This Tourist had once carried an iPod religiously, but he'd given it to his wife as a reconciliation gift, and now he was left with only his musical memories. As they rolled past the bare, craggy winter trees and homes of Seefeld, the southern neighborhood stretching alongside Lake Zürich, he hummed a half-forgotten tune from his eighties childhood, wondering how other Tourists dealt with the anxiety of separation from their families. A stupid thought; he was the only Tourist with a family. Then they turned the next corner, and Radovan interrupted his anxiety with a single statement. "My mother has cancer."

Giuseppe continued driving in his safe way, and Stefan used a rag to wipe excess oil off of the Beretta he'd picked up in a Hamburg market last week. In the passenger seat, the man they knew as Mr. Winter--who toured under the name Sebastian Hall but was known to his distant family as Milo Weaver--glanced back at the broad Serb, whose thick, pale arms were crossed over his stomach, gloved fists kneading his ribs. "I'm sorry to hear that. We all are."

"I'm not trying to jinx anything," Radovan went on, his German muddied by a thick Belgrade accent. "I just had to say something before we did this. You know. In case I don't have a chance later."

"Sure. We get it."

Dutifully, Giuseppe and Stefan muttered their agreement.

"Is it treatable?" Milo Weaver asked.

Radovan looked confused, crammed in between Stefan and a pile of deflated burlap bags. "It's in the stomach. Spread too far. I'm going to have her checked out in Vienna, but the doctor seems to know what he's talking about."

"You never know," Giuseppe said as he turned onto another tree-lined street.

"Sure," Stefan agreed, then went back to his gun, lest he say something wrong.

"You're going to be with us on this?" Milo asked, because it was his responsibility to ask such things.

"Anger helps me focus."

Milo went through the details with them again. It was a simple enough plan, one that depended less on its mechanics than on the element of surprise. Each man knew his role, but Radovan--might he take out his personal troubles on some poor museum guard? He was, after all, the one with a gun. "Remember, there's no need for casualties."

They all knew this, if only because he had repeated it continually over the last week. It had quickly become a joke, that Mr. Winter was their Tante Winter, their old aunt keeping them out of trouble. The truth was that he had been through nearly three months of jobs they knew nothing about, none of which had claimed bystanders. He didn't want these recruits ruining his streak.

This was job number eight. It was still early enough in his return to Tourism that he could keep track, but late enough for him to wonder, and worry, about why all the jobs had been so damned easy.

Number four, December 2007. The whiny voice of Owen Mendel, acting director of Tourism, spoke through his Nokia: Please, go to Istanbul and withdraw fifteen thousand euros from the Interbank under the name Charles Little. You'll find the passport and account number at the hotel. Fly to London, and in the Chase Manhattan at 125 London Wall open an account with that money. Same name. Make sure customs doesn't find the cash. Think you can handle it?

You don't ask why because that's not a Tourist's prerogative. Simply believe that it's all for the best, that the whiny voice on the line is the Voice of God.

Job two, November 2007: There's a woman in Stockholm. Sigfreid Larsson. Two esses. She's at the Grand Hôtel on Blasieholmshammen. She's expecting you. Buy her and yourself a ticket to Moscow and make sure she gets to 12 Trubnaya ulica by the eighteenth. Got that?

Larsson, a sixty-year-old professor of international relations, was shocked but flattered by all the fuss made over her.

Jobs for children; jobs for third-rank embassy staff.

Number five, January 2008: Now this one is sensitive. Name's Lorenzo Peroni, high-scale arms dealer based in Rome. I'll text you the details. He's meeting with a South Korean buyer named Pak Jin Myung in Montenegro. I want you on top of him from when he leaves his apartment on the eighth until he returns on the fifteenth. No, don't worry about mikes, we've taken care of that. Just keep up the visual, hone your camera work.

As it turned out, Pak Jin Myung was no arms buyer but one of Peroni's many mistresses. The resulting photographs were more appropriate for English tabloids.

So it went. One more impotent surveillance in Vienna, the order to mail a sealed manila envelope from Berlin to a Theodor Wartmüller in Munich, a one-day Paris surveillance, and a single murder, at the beginning of the month. That order had been sent by text message:

L: George Whitehead. Consider dangerous. In Marseille for week starting Thurs.

George Whitehead, patriarch of a London crime family, looked about seventy, though he was in fact closer to eighty. No bullets were required, just a single push in the hotel steam room. His head cracked against the damp wall planks; the concussion knocked him out for life.

It hardly even felt like murder.

Others might have been pleased by the ease and inconsequence of these assignments. However, Milo Weaver--or Sebastian Hall or Mr. Winter--could not relax, because the ease and inconsequence meant only one thing: They were onto him. They knew, or they suspected, that his loyalties did not lie entirely with them.

Now this, another test. Get some money together. Ideally, twenty million, but if you can only get five or ten we'll understand.

Dollars?

Yes, dollars. You have a problem with that?

THE NEAREST EXIT. Copyright © 2010 by Third State, Inc.

The Nearest Exit

By Olen Steinhauer

Minotaur Books

Copyright © 2010 Third State, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-62287-9

Chapter One

When DJ Jazzy-G hit the intro to "Just like Heaven," that Cure anthem of his youth, Henry Gray achieved a moment of complete expat euphoria. Was this his first? He'd felt shades of it other times during his decade in Hungary, but only at that moment-a little after two in the morning, dancing at the ChaChaCha's outdoor club on Margit Island, feeling Zsuzsa's lips stroke his sweat-damp earlobe ... only then did he feel the full brunt and stupid luck of his beautiful life overseas.

Eighties night at the ChaChaCha. Jazzy-G was reading his mind. Zsuzsa was consuming his tongue.

Despite the frustrations and disappointments of life in this capital of Central Europe, in Zsuzsanna Papp's arms he felt a momentary love for the city, and the kerts-the beer gardens that Hungarians opened up once they'd survived their long, dark winters. Here, they shed their clothes and drank and danced and worked through the stages of foreplay, and made even an outsider like Henry feel as if he could belong.

Still, not even all this sensual good fortune was enough to bestow upon Henry Gray such intense joy. It was the story, the one he'd received via the unpredictable Hungarian postal ser vice twelve hours before. The biggest story of his young professional life.

His career as a journalist thus far had rested on the story of the Taszr Air Base, where the U.S. Army secretly trained the Free Iraqi Forces in the Hungarian countryside as that unending war was just beginning. That had been four years ago, and in the meantime Henry Gray's career had floundered. He'd missed the boat on the CIA's secret interrogation centers in Romania and Slovakia. He'd wasted six months on the ethnic unrest along the Serbian-Hungarian border, which he couldn't give away to U.S. papers. Then last year, when the Washington Post was exposing the CIA's use of Taliban prisoners to harvest Afghan opium that it sold to Europe-during that time, Henry Gray had been mired in another of his black periods, where he'd wake up stinking of vodka and Unicum, with a week missing from his memory.

Now, though, the Hungarian post had brought him salvation, something that no newspaper could ignore. Sent by a Manhattan law firm with the unlikely name of Berg & DeBurgh, it had been written by one of its clients, Thomas L. Grainger, former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. The letter was a new beginning for Henry Gray.

As if to prove this, Zsuzsa, who had been standoffish for so long, had finally caved to his affections after he read out the letter and described what it meant for his career. She-a journalist herself-had promised her help, and between kisses said they'd be like Woodward and Bernstein, and he had said of course they would. Had greed finally bent her will? In this moment, the one that would last a few more hours at least, it really didn't matter.

"Do you love me?" she whispered.

He took her warm face in his hands. "What do you think?" She laughed. "I think you do love me."

"And you?"

"I've always liked you, Henry. I might even love you someday." At first, Henry hadn't recalled the name Thomas Grainger, but on his second read it had dawned on him-they had met once before, four years ago when Gray was following leads on the Taszr story. A car had pulled up beside him on Andrssy utca, the rear window sliding down, and an old man asked to speak to him. Over coffee, Thomas Grainger used a mixture of patriotism and bald threats to get Gray to wait another week before filing the story. Gray refused, then returned home to a demolished apartment.

July 11, 2007

Mr. Gray,

You're probably surprised to receive a letter from someone who, in the past, has butted heads with you concerning your journalistic work. Rest assured that I'm not writing to apologize for my behavior-I still feel your articles on Taszr were supremely irresponsible and could have harmed the war effort, such as it is. That they didn't harm it is a testament to either my ability to slow their publication or the inconsequence of your newspaper; you can be the judge.

Despite this, your tenacity is something I've admired. You pushed forward when other journalists might have folded, which makes you the kind of man I'd like to speak to now. The kind of journalist I need.

That you have this letter in your hands is evidence of one crucial fact: I am now dead. I'm writing this letter in order that my death-which I suspect will have been at the hand of my own employer-might not go unnoticed.

Vanity? Yes. But if you live to reach my age, maybe you'll be able to look upon it more kindly. Maybe you'll be able to see it for the idealistic impulse I believe it is.

According to public records, Grainger had run a CIA financial oversight office in New York before his fatal heart attack in July. Then again, public records are public for a reason-they put forth what the government wants the public to believe.

Around three, they fought their way off the dance floor, collected their things-the seven-page letter was still in his shoulder bag-and crossed the Margit Bridge back to Pest. They caught a taxi to Zsuzsa's small Eighth District apartment, and within an hour he felt that, were his life to end in the morning, he could go with no regrets.

"Do you like that?" Zsuzsa asked in the heavy darkness that smelled of her Vogue cigarettes.

He caught his breath but couldn't speak. She was doing something with her hand, somewhere between his thighs.

"It's tantra."

"Is it?" He gasped, clutching the sheets.

This really was the best of all possible worlds.

I will now tell you a story. It concerns the Sudan, the department of the CIA I preside over, and China. Unsurprisingly for someone like you, it also concerns oil, though perhaps not in the way you imagine.

Know too that the story I'm about to tell you is dangerous to know. My death is evidence of this. From this point on, consider yourself on your own. If this is too much to bear, then burn the letter now and forget it.

Afterward, when they were both exhausted and the street was silent, they stared at the ceiling. Zsuzsa smoked, the familiarity of her cigarettes mixing with the unfamiliarity of her sex, and said, "You will bring me along, right?"

All day, it hadn't occurred to her that the story had nothing to do with Hungary, and Hungary was the only country where her language skills were of any use. He would have to fly to New York, and she didn't even have a visa. "Of course," he lied, "but you remember the letter-it's dangerous."

He heard but didn't see her snort of laughter.

"What?"

"Terry is right. You are paranoid."

Gray propped himself on his elbow and gave her a long look.

Terry Parkhall was a hack who'd always had an eye for her. "Terry's an idiot. He lives in a dream world. You even suggest the CIA was in some way responsible for 9/11 and he hits the ceiling. In a world with Gitmo and torture centers and the CIA in the heroin business, how's that so unimaginable? The problem with Terry is that he forgets the basic truth of conspiracy."

Self-consciously, she rubbed at her grin. "What is the basic truth of conspiracy?"

"If it can be imagined, then someone's already tried it."

It was the wrong thing to say. He didn't know why, because she refused to explain, but a definite coldness fell between them, and it took a long time before he was able to fall asleep. It was a staccato sleep, broken up by flashes of Sudanese riots under a dusty sun, oil-streaked Chinese, and assassins from Grainger's secret office, the Department of Tourism. By eight he was awake again, rubbing his eyes in the poor light coming in from the street. Zsuzsa breathed heavily, undisturbed, and he blinked at the window. There was a pleasant ache in his groin. He began to have a change of heart.

While Zsuzsa couldn't be much use tracking down the evidence behind Grainger's story, he resolved all at once to make her his partner in it. Did tantra change his mind? Or some indefinable guilt over having said the wrong thing? Like her reasons for finally sleeping with him, it didn't matter.

What mattered was that there was a lot of work ahead; it was just beginning. He began to dress. Thomas Grainger himself had admitted that his story was shallow. "As yet I have no solid evidence for you, except my word. However, I'm hoping for material very soon from one of my subordinates." The letter ended with no word from his subordinate, though, just the reiteration of that one crucial fact, "I am now dead," and a few real names to begin tracking down evidence: Terence Fitzhugh, Diane Morel, Janet Simmons, Senator Nathan Irwin, Roman Ugrimov, Milo Weaver. That last one, Grainger claimed, was the only person he could trust to help him out. He should show the letter to Milo Weaver, and only Milo Weaver, and that would be his passage.

He kissed Zsuzsa, then snuck out to the yellow-lit Habsburg morning with his shoulder bag. He decided to walk home. It was a bright day, full of possibility, though around him the morose Hungarians heading to their mundane jobs hardly noticed.

His apartment was on Vadszutca, a narrow, sooty lane of crumbling, once beautiful buildings. Since the elevator was perpetually on the blink, he took the stairs slowly to his fifth-floor apartment, went inside, and typed the code into his burglar alarm.

He had used the money from the Taszr story to buy and remodel this apartment. The kitchen was stainless steel, the living room equipped with Wi-Fi and inlaid shelves, and he'd had the unstable terrace that overlooked Vadsz reinforced and cleaned up.

Unlike the homes of many of his makeshift friends, his actually reflected his idea of good living, rather than having to compromise with the regular Budapest conundrum: large apartments that had been chopped up during communist times, with awkward kitchens and bathrooms and long, purposeless hallways.

He flipped on the television, where a Hungarian pop band played on the local MTV, dropped his bag to the floor, and took a leak in the bathroom, wondering if he should begin work on the story alone or first seek out this Milo Weaver. Alone, he decided. Two reasons. One, he wanted to know as much as possible before sitting down to what ever lies Weaver would inevitably feed him. Two, he wanted the satisfaction of breaking the story himself, if possible.

He washed up and returned to the living room, then stopped.

On his BoConcept couch, which had cost him an arm and a leg, a blond man reclined, eyes fixed on a dancing, heavy-breasted woman on the screen. Henry's mouth worked the air, but he couldn't find any breath as the man turned casually to him and smiled, giving an upward nod, the way men do to one another.

"Fine woman, huh?" American accent.

"Who ..." Henry couldn't finish the sentence.

Still smiling, the man turned to see him better. He was tall, wearing a business suit but no tie. "Mr. Gray?"

"How did you get in here?"

"Little of this, little of that." He patted the cushion beside him.

"Come on. Let's talk."

Henry didn't move. Either he wouldn't or couldn't-if you had asked him, he wouldn't have known which.

"Please," said the man.

"Who are you?"

"Oh, sorry." He got up. "James Einner." He stuck out a large hand as he approached. Involuntarily, Henry took it, and as he did so James Einner squeezed tight. His other hand swung around, stiff, and chopped at the side of Henry's neck. Pain spattered through Henry's head, blinding him and turning his stomach over; then a second blow turned out the light.

For a second James Einner held Henry, half elevated, swinging from that hand, then lowered it until the journalist crumpled onto the renovated hardwood floor.

Einner returned to the couch and went through Henry's shoulder bag. He found the letter, counted its pages, then took out Henry's Moleskine journal and pocketed it. He went through the apartment again-he had done this all evening but wanted a final look around to be sure-and took Gray's laptop and flash drives and all his burned CDs. He put everything into a cheap piece of luggage he'd picked up in Prague before boarding the train here, then set the bag beside the front door. All this took about seven minutes, while the television continued its parade of Hungarian pop.

He returned to the living room and opened the terrace doors. A warm breeze swept through the room. Einner leaned out, and a quick glance told him the street was full of parked cars but empty of pedestrians. Grunting, he lifted Henry Gray, holding him the way a husband carries his new wife over the threshold, and, without giving time for second thoughts or mistakes or for casual observers to gaze up the magnificent Habsburg facade, he tipped the limp body over the edge of the terrace. He heard the crunch and the two-tone wail of a car alarm as he walked through the living room to the kitchen, hung the bag over his shoulder, and quietly left the apartment.

Four months later, when the American showed up at Szent Jnos Krhz-the St. John Hospital-on the Buda side of the Danube, the English-speaking nurses gathered around him in the bleak fifties corridor and answered his questions haltingly. Zsuzsa Papp imagined that, to an outside observer, it would have looked as if a famous actor had arrived in the most unexpected place, for the nurses were all flirting with him. Two of them even touched his arm while laughing at his jokes. He was, they told Zsuzsa later, charming in the way that some superstar surgeons are, and even those few who didn't find him attractive felt compelled to answer his questions as precisely as possible.

They began by correcting him: No, Mr. Gray hadn't come to St. Jnos in August. In August he'd been taken to the Pterfy Sndor Krhz with six broken ribs, a punctured lung, a cracked femur, two broken arms, and a fractured skull. It was there, over in Pest, that he'd been pieced back together by an excellent surgeon ("trained in London," they assured him) but had not woken afterward. "The fracture," one explained, touching her skull. "Too much blood."

The blood had to drain away, and though the doctors held out little hope, they transferred Gray to St. Jnos in September to be observed and cared for. A small, wiry-haired nurse named Bori had been his primary caregiver, and Jana, her taller friend, interpreted everything she told the American. "We have-had-hope, you understand? The damage to the head is very bad, but his heart continue to beat and he can breathe on his own. So no problem with the small brain. But we wait to see when the blood will leave his head."

It took weeks. The blood did not completely drain away until October. During that time, his bills were paid by his parents, who came from America only once to visit but made regular bank transfers to the hospital. "They want to take him to America," Jana explained, "but we tell them it's impossible. Not with his condition."

"Of course," the American said.

Despite his condition stabilizing, the coma persisted. "These things, they are sometimes a mystery," another nurse explained, and the American gave a sad, understanding nod.

Then Bori blurted out something and raised her hands happily.

"And then he wakes up!" Jana translated.

"That was just a week ago?" the American said, smiling.

"December fifth, the day before Mikuls."

"Mikuls?"

"Saint Nicholas Day. When the children get boots full of candy from Nicholas."

"Fantastic."

They called his parents to deliver the good news, and once he was able to talk they asked if he wanted to call someone-perhaps the pretty Hungarian girl who'd come to visit once a week?

"His girlfriend?" the American asked.

"Zsuzsa Papp," said another nurse.

"I think Bori is jealous," said Jana. "She falls in the love with him."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Nearest Exitby Olen Steinhauer Copyright © 2010 by Third State, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Minotaur Books
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0312622872
• ISBN 13: 9780312622879
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 404
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible