Read Online The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer - Free Book Online

hair was long enough to be pulled back behind his ears—far from his time in the marines. He had reading glasses in his shirt pocket and a broad, all-American chin.
    “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Milo said, watching the lights of Zürich pass by. “You in town just to see me?”
    “You’d like to think that,” said Drummond, still smiling. “No—Kosovo’s proclaiming its independence soon. I’m in for a little discussion with some representatives.”
    “Should be heated.”
    “You think so?”
    “Depends on our policy. Serbia won’t take it sitting down. At least Kosovo waited until the Serb elections were finished. If they’d done it beforehand, the nationalists would have swept the vote.”
    The smile vanished. “I wasn’t too sure about you, Hall. I got some wind about you causing major havoc last year. Enough that I wouldn’t have brought you back. You’re too . . .” He snapped his fingers, but the word wouldn’t be summoned. “Your Tourism career ended seven years ago with—the reports tell me—a breakdown. Then you moved into administration and—I’m just being honest here, you understand—and your record in the Avenue of the Americas was not particularly stellar. As for the way it ended . . .” He shook his head. “Well, you were accused of killing Tom Grainger, my predecessor.” He squeezed his lips together and cleared his throat. “Anything to say about all this?”
    Milo didn’t have much to say, because, looking into Drummond’s smug face, he lost all desire to impress the man. He tried anyway. “I was cleared of those charges.”
    “Well, I
know
that. They do let me see files now and then. It was another Tourist who killed Grainger.”
    “Yes.”
    “Now, that Tourist—him, you killed.”
    “You seem very well informed, sir.”
    “I’ve got facts, Sebastian. Plenty of them. It’s the messiness that troubles me. A Tourism director dead. A Tourist. Not to mention Terence Fitzhugh, the Senate liaison . . .
suicide
, if you trust the files.”
    “Angela Yates,” said Milo.
    “Right. An embassy staffer. She was the first to go, wasn’t she?”
    Milo nodded.
    “All this messiness. All this blood. With you at the center of it.”
    Milo wondered if he’d really been summoned to Zürich to be accused of murder again. So he waited. Drummond didn’t bother speaking. Milo finally said, “I guess you’ll have to ask Mendel why he brought me back.”
    “He didn’t tell you?”
    “Something about budgets.”
    Drummond stared at him, thinking this over. “Messy or not, you’re enough of a pro to be let in on a few things. Last year’s budget problems have intensified, and Grainger turning up dead did nothing for us in Washington. It seemed to echo all our enemies’ arguments. That we’re irresponsible and expensive, financially and in terms of human lives.”
    “Sounds about right, sir.”
    “Sense of humor. I like that. The point is that by now when we lose a Tourist we don’t have the resources to replace him. In Mendel’s estimation, you had at least been trained before, and all it would take was a relatively cheap catch-up course.”
    “I was cut-rate.”
    Drummond grinned.
    “How many have we lost?”
    “Tourists? Enough. Luck isn’t always on our side.”
    That struck Milo as an entirely banal way to explain away the deaths of human beings, but he set aside his annoyance and turned to the window as they merged onto a highway, heading out of town.
    “Last year,” Drummond said, “when things went sour for you, was there anyone outside the department who knew the details of what happened?”
    “Janet Simmons, a Homelander—she learned a lot. I don’t thinkshe got the whole story, but she’s smart enough to put some things together.”
    “We’ve vetted her,” Drummond said. “Is that all?”
    Yevgeny Primakov knew everything, but that was a treason he didn’t feel up to admitting. “She’s the only living person. She and Senator Nathan