The Nearest Exit

“When was the last time you did blow?”

Milo’s memory seemed to be both slow and quick. “Christ, six years ago? No, seven.”

“Aha! Back when you were the great Charles Alexander.”

They’d had this talk before. Milo said, “He was never as good as people would have you think. It’s a myth, just like the Black Book. It keeps Tourists on their toes.”

They did two more lines. Milo mixed more drinks. As he came out of the bathroom, his phone vibrated for his attention. It was a message from the analysts:

Package picked up. Pavlo Romanenko, third secretary political section, Ukrainian embassy, London.

“My lead checked out.”

“Two for two,” Ei

“I should take a break.”

“What you should do is quit wiping your nose.”

He hadn’t realized he was doing it. They both laughed; then Ei

“With a mole?” Milo frowned at his glass. “Maybe. It’s looking like it.”

Silence followed. Ei

“How’d you answer that?” Milo asked, curious despite himself.

“How do you think? I killed him.” Ei

Milo left to refill their drinks in the bathroom, wondering about the point of that story. When he returned, Ei

“So why’d you come back?” Ei

“Maybe I wanted a last fling with adventure. Some fun.”

That provoked a shake of the head. “No, man. You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.”

“Maybe I realized I’m no good at anything else.”

Ei

“To be honest, I don’t know. It was probably a mistake. You heard Drummond. I don’t care what reasons he comes up with, I’ll never regret not killing that girl.”

“She’s dead anyway.”

“Not by my hand.”

Ei

Milo felt anxiety slipping through his buzz. “Maybe. But any department that orders a hit like that doesn’t deserve to stay around.”

“You just wander into the spy business yesterday?”

“Come on, James. Even you’ve got limits, right? If you’d been given that assignment-don’t tell me you’d actually do it.”

Ei

“Figure what out?”

“Last we talked, I was stewing in my own shit, and you were off to figure out who was assassinating Sudanese mullahs.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“It really was Grainger?”

Milo nodded. “But the orders came from Senator Nathan Irwin. He’s the one who ordered Angela killed, then Grainger, once he’d become a liability.”

“Fucking senators,” Ei

There was no need to answer that.

Ei

They took turns, then wiped the remnants onto their gums. Milo refilled their drinks, but when he came out again there were eight more white lines on the table. Ei

“It’s Sebastian. And I don’t believe you.”

“Why not? You found a copy of it. In Spain, you said.”

“I was lying, James. There’s no such thing as the Black Book of Tourism.”

Ei

“What clues?”

“You think I’d tell you? An unbeliever?”

According to the legend that all Tourists learned at one point or another, twenty-one copies of the Black Book of Tourism had been hidden by a retired Tourist in secret spots throughout the world. The myth of Tourism’s Bible fed into each Tourist’s desire for a single guide to show him the path to survival and sanity and perhaps even morality in a profession that encouraged none of these things. Until last August, it had only been a myth.

Milo, driven by some undeniable desire while in prison, had sat down and written it himself. Not long-maybe thirty pages-but it summed up what he thought such a book should say. He’d later copied it out by hand into twenty-one children’s schoolbooks and, over the first month of his return to Tourism, spread them throughout Europe and Russia. Then, over time, he’d slowly left clues to their whereabouts.

So when Ei

Ei

“Get that, will you?” Ei

Through the peephole, Milo saw a wide-angled view of two women with faux-fur coats, short skirts, and tiny purses. They not only dressed the same but looked the same, and when he opened the door he realized they were twins.

With a rough working-class accent, one said, “James ’ere?”

“Be right out!” he called over the flushing toilet. “Make them some drinks, Sebastian!”

Milo invited them in and scooped up his phone. They peered around the room as if they’d never been in a hotel before, which he seriously doubted. One alighted on the lines of cocaine. “My kinda party, i

“I’ll be back with the ice,” Milo said. They were already sitting down at the table, tightening the ten-pound note, when he closed the door behind himself. On his way down the corridor to the stairwell he heard Ei

Milo kept on until he had reached the hotel bar. He was suddenly ill, and for some inexplicable reason kept imagining James Ei