With only a handful of “tourists”—-CIA-trained assassins—-left, Milo Weaver would like to move on and use this as an opportunity to regain a normal life, a life focused on his family. His former boss in the CIA, Alan Drummond, can’t let it go. When Alan uses one of Milo’s compromised aliases to travel to London and then disappears, calling all kinds of attention to his actions, Milo can’t help but go in search of him.
Worse still, it’s beginning to look as if Tourism’s enemies are gearing up for a final, fatal blow.
ORDER OF THING
Tuesday, April 22 to Thursday, April 24, 2008
There had been signs, and it was more a measure of luck than intelligence savvy that Erika Schwartz was able to put them together in time. For instance, the military counterintelligence office, MAD, could easily have left her off the distribution list for their April 17 report on EU-related anomalies—a list they only added her to because they were preparing to ask for the use of an Iranian source in return. When the report came, it would have been easy to miss number 53, an item from Budapest. In fact, she did miss number 53, and her assistant, Oskar Leintz, had to draw her attention to it. He came into her new, large-windowed office on the second floor of the Pullach headquarters of the BND, the German Republic’s foreign intelligence agency, slapping the report against his palm. “You saw the bit from Budapest?”
She’d been sitting, uncharacteristically, with a salad on her desk, staring out the window where, just over the trees, she could see distant storm clouds. Since her promotion two weeks earlier, she still hadn’t gotten used to having a view; her previous office had been on the ground floor. She hadn’t gotten used to having resources, nor to the look on people’s faces when they walked into her office and shuddered, having forgotten that this obese, ill-humored woman now sat at Teddy Wartmüller’s desk. As for poor Teddy, he was in prison. “Of course I saw the bit from Budapest,” she said. “Which bit?”
“You haven’t touched that salad.”
“Which bit from Budapest, Oskar?”
“Henry Gray.”
Of course, she’d seen number 53, but she hadn’t connected the name because she’d only seen it once before, months ago, on another report from the same source, a journalist named Johann Thüringer. Now, with Oskar’s prodding, it returned to her. She opened her copy of the MAD report.
53. JT in Budapest: On the night of 15 April, Henry Gray (American journalist—see ZNBw reports 8/2007 & 12/2007) disappeared. His romantic partner, Zsuzsa Papp (Hungarian), insists he was kidnapped. Her suspicion: either the USA or China. When pressed, though, she refuses to go into details.
“Gray is connected to Milo Weaver,” Oskar helpfully reminded her, now stroking his thin mustache.
“Tangentially,” she said, then noticed that she’d gotten some Caesar dressing on the report. She remembered Thüringer’s observations from 8/2007 and 12/2007. In August, he reported that Mr. Gray had been thrown off the terrace of his Budapest apartment and was in a coma. The December report noted that Gray had woken in the hospital and eventually disappeared on his own. Soon afterward, an AP stringer named Milo Weaver had arrived asking questions about him. Gray had so far eluded the man . . . until now, at least.
[Read—and listen to—the complete excerpt of chapters 1-3 of An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer]
I’m always on the lookout for something fresh and interesting in the world of TV spies, and given the plethora of new shows that are cycled out on a regular basis—and the ease with which I get suckered into cloak-and-dagger narratives—you’d think I would have a long list of favorite spy shows at my fingertips. I don’t.
