“Still, there are easier ways. Cheaper ways.”
“Money doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Roth said patiently. “Besides, it was fun. I had to give one last chase. Not so difficult a chase that you’d lose me, but not so easy that the FBI or Homeland Security would stumble across me when I arrived in Dallas. No, I had to set up a trail outside the country that you—because you’ve been responsible for my case these last years—would be watching. Then I had to lead you around this enormous country. I’d hoped to make it all the way to Washington, or even to your home in Brooklyn, but it wasn’t to be. A lot of things weren’t to be. I wanted to go further. I wanted to really make you work.”
“Why?”
“If I had the time,” Roth explained, “I’d be elusive with you, because it’s a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he’s told. Each agent needs to beat it out of his subject, or, better yet, discover it on his own, without the subject ever realizing he’s slipped up. But, sadly, there’s no time. It has to be little Blackdale, and it has to be direct, because I won’t be around by tomorrow.”
“Going somewhere?”
Again, that smile.
Milo wasn’t ready to believe this. It was pride, of course, balking against the idea that someone had for the last three days been leading him by the nose. “And Kathy Hendrickson?”
“She only knows that I paid her well for her performance. Yes—and for her bruises. She doesn’t know why. Really, she knows nothing,” he said, then gasped his way into a retching cough. Once it passed, he looked at his hand. “Oh.” He showed his blood-speckled palm to Milo. “Faster than I’d hoped.”
“What is?”
“My death.”
Milo stared at the Tiger’s face, at what he’d wanted to believe were the symptoms of a difficult run through the southern states. Bloodshot eyes, fatigue, and the skin itself. That yellow pallor wasn’t from the fluorescents. “Diagnosis?”
“AIDS.”
“I see.”
The lack of sympathy didn’t faze Roth. “I talked to some doctors in Switzerland—the Hirslanden Clinic, Zürich. You can check on that if you like. Look up Hamad al-Abari. Those mountain Germans are smart. Some new procedure they’ve got to examine the rate of growth through the T-cell count—something like that. They can figure out when the HIV virus got in me. Five months ago, it turns out. February. That places me in Milan.”
“What were you doing in Milan?”
“I met my contact. The intermediary I mentioned before. He goes by the name Jan Klausner, but he can’t speak decent German or Czech. From his accent, he might be Dutch. Midforties. His red beard is the only real thing about him.”
Milo remembered that file photo of Fabio Lanzetti—Milan, the Corso Sempione, with a bearded man. “We’ve got a picture of you two together.”
“Good start.”
“He gave you a job?”
“He’s been feeding me jobs for years. Actually, the first one came six years ago, not long after Amsterdam. A surprise. I worried my failure there had made the rounds, that work would dry up. But then Jan showed up. The work was irregular—one or two a year—but it paid well. His last order was for January. A job in Khartoum. Mullah Salih Ahmad.”
Milo thought back. The Sudan. January.
In January, a popular radical cleric known for inflammatory pro-al-Qaeda speeches, Mullah Salih Ahmad, had disappeared. Two days later, his garroted corpse was found in his own backyard. It had been international news for about five minutes, quickly overcome by the continuing civil war in the western Darfur region, but in the Sudan it stayed brutally current, and the blame was placed on the president, Omar al-Bashir, who seldom let critics remain in the limelight, or out of jail. Demonstrations followed, met by battle-gear police with guns. In the last month, more than forty had been killed in riots.
“Who hired you?”
The energy seemed to go out of Roth, and he stared, unfocused, past his interrogator. Milo didn’t bother breaking the trance, though he imagined SUVs full of Homeland Security barreling down the dusty Tennessee roads toward them.
Finally, Roth shook his head. “Sorry. The doctors call it AIDS dementia. I lose track of stuff, forget things. Can hardly walk.” With effort, he swallowed. “Where were we?”
“Mullah Salih Ahmad. Who hired you to kill him?”
“Ah, yes!” Through a twitch of pain, Roth seemed pleased that he could still find that memory. “Well, I didn’t know, did I? I have this contact, Jan Klausner, maybe Dutch, a red beard,” he said, unaware of his repetition. “He tells me nothing about who’s hiring him. He just pays the money, and that’s all right by me. But then there was the Ahmad job, and Jan’s master cheated me on the money. Only paid two-thirds. Klausner says it’s because I didn’t follow the instructions, which were to brand the body with some Chinese pictograms.”
“Chinese?” Milo cut in. “Why Chinese?”
“Good question, but no one tells me anything. Klausner just asks why I didn’t do this. After all, I did have a metalworker make the brands. Sadly, though, the Sudan is not overflowing with expert machinists, and what I got turned out to be made of aluminum. Can you imagine? When I heated them up, the pictograms just melted.” He coughed again, as if his body weren’t built for so many words at a time. “No Chinese—that was Klausner’s excuse for his master coming up short.” Another cough.
Milo reached into his jacket and took out a small flask. “Vodka.”
“Thanks.” The assassin took a long swig, which only made him cough more blood across his prison oranges, but he didn’t let go of the flask. He raised a finger until the coughs had trickled away, then said, “I better get it out quick, no?”
“What did the pictograms say?”
“Something like: As promised, the end. Weird, huh?”
Milo nodded.
“I could have let it go, and I considered that. But that’s bad business. If people find out I let one customer cheat me, then …” He wiped his bloodstained lips. “You understand.”
“Of course.”
Roth coughed again, less wretched this time. “Anyway, I thought for obvious reasons that it was the Chinese. They’ve invested billions into that country for oil; they supply the government with guns. They’d want to protect their investment. But then … yes. I saw the newspapers. Everyone believed the president had it done. He’d been harassing Ahmad for years. So I had it, right? There was Jan Klausner’s master, at least for this job.” He blinked a few times, and Milo feared he’d drift off again, but then he was back. “I’m an impulsive worker. In other men that spells defeat, but somewhere along the way I made it work for me. Half-second decisions are part of the job, don’t you think?”
Milo didn’t dispute the point.
“President al-Bashir, it turned out, was on a diplomatic trip to Cairo. So, impulsively, I flew there. Fancy villa, all the security out. But I’m the Tiger, right? I figure a way in. All the way in. I find him in his bedroom—alone, luckily. And I put the question to him: Omar, why are you stiffing me? But listen to me, Milo Weaver. After we’ve gone through about twenty minutes’ rigmarole, I realize he doesn’t know anything about this. Did he want Ahmad dead? Sure. The man was a pain in his ass. But did he actually order the killing?” Roth shook