MI6 didn’t have the manpower to keep an eye on each foreign diplomat in the country, even ones as important as the one in this photo—Colonel Yi Lien—but he didn’t interrupt.
“The trip wasn’t strange. The colonel took the ferry over to France every weekend.”
“No Chunnel?”
“Fear of closed spaces—that’s in his file. So he does the ferry, then drives on to a little cottage he’s got in the Brittany countryside.”
“Bought under his name?”
Grainger reached for his computer’s mouse, but he was sitting too far back and had to drop his foot in order to reach it. “Of course not. Under a …” He clicked twice and squinted at the screen. “Yes. Renée Bernier. Twenty-six, from Paris.”
“Mistress.”
“Budding novelist, it says here.” Another click. “She uses the place to write, I suppose.”
“And meet with the colonel.”
“Everybody’s got to pay rent.”
“Walk me through this,” said Milo. “Colonel Yi Lien takes the ferry over to his French chalet. Spends the weekend with his girl. Then he boards the ferry. And drops dead?”
“Not dead. Heart attack.”
“And MI6 is there to resuscitate him.”
“Of course.”
“And they go through his bag.”
“What’s with the attitude, Milo?”
“Sorry, Tom. Go on.”
“Well, the colonel’s a paranoid sort. Doesn’t trust anyone in his own embassy, and for good reason. He’s sixty-four, unmarried, with a declining career. He knows that pretty soon someone’s going to suggest it’s time to pack up for Beijing, and he doesn’t want that. He likes London. He likes France.”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Right. But since he trusts no one, he keeps his laptop with him at all times. Big security risk. So our friends in MI6 took the opportunity, on the ferry, to copy his hard drive.”
“Very resourceful.”
“Aren’t they?” Grainger clicked his mouse again, and his printer, buried in the bookshelf alongside a row of untouched antiquarian books, hummed as it spat out a page.
“And Colonel Lien? What happened to him?”
“Irony of ironies. He was recalled to Beijing not long after the heart attack.”
Since Grainger wasn’t going anywhere, Milo retrieved the printout.
It was an interoffice memo from the U.S. embassy in Paris, top secret. A relay from the ambassador to Frank Barnes, the head of the Diplomatic Security Service in France, concerning new guidelines in dealing with the Chinese ambassador to France, who would temporarily be monitored by a three-man team.
“And Six just shared this with us for free?”
“They’re our special friends,” he said, smiling. “Actually, one of my personal special friends passed this on to me.”
“Does your special friend think Angela passed this on to Lien? Is that what Six thinks?”
“Calm down, Milo. All they did was pass on the memo. The rest, we figured out on our own.”
Like Tina, Milo still couldn’t believe that Angela Yates, “poster girl for Us-Against-Them,” would give away state secrets. “Has this been verified? The ferry; the heart attack?”
“Like I told you yesterday,” Grainger said with theatrical patience, “Yi Lien’s coronary made the British papers. It’s public record.”
Milo dropped the memo on Grainger’s desk. “So what’s the evidence?”
“That paper went through three sets of hands. The ambassador and Frank Barnes, of course. And the embassy’s chief of security. That would be Angela Yates. We’ve cleared Barnes, and I hope you won’t demand an exegesis of the ambassador.”
He’d already listened to this overview yesterday in Grainger’s car. But now, the physical reality of the memo was making him queasy.
“When was the last time you saw Yates?”
“About a year. But we’ve kept in touch.”
“So you’re still on good terms?”
Milo shrugged, then nodded.
“Good.” Grainger looked at his mouse—it was a bulbous thing with a blue-lit scroll wheel. “Did you and she ever …?”
“No.”
“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