The Tourist. Olen Steinhauer

Чтение книги онлайн.

       2

      She was a careful driver these days, which he supposed was an inevitable result of her two Austrian years. Had she been stationed in Italy, or even here in Slovenia, she would’ve ignored her turn signals and those pesky speed limit notices.

      To ease the tension, he brought up old London friends from when they both worked out of that embassy as vaguely titled “attachés.” He’d left in a hurry, and all Angela knew was that his new job, with some undisclosed Company department, required a steady change of names, and that he once again worked under their old boss, Tom Grainger. The rest of London station believed what they’d been told—that he had been fired. She said, “I fly up for parties now and then. They always invite me. But they’re sad, you know? All diplomatic people. There’s something intensely pitiful about them.”

      “Really?” he said, though he knew what she meant.

      “Like they’re living in their own little compound, surrounded by barbed wire. They pretend they’re keeping everyone out, when in fact they’re locked in.”

      It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom Grainger’s delusions of empire—Roman outposts in hostile lands.

      Once they hit the A1 heading southwest, Angela got back to business. “Tom fill you in on everything?”

      “Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?”

      “Not in the car.”

      “Oh.”

      “Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”

      Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his brief conversation with Grainger. “He says your Frank Dawdle was sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn’t say how much.”

      “Three million.”

      “Dollars?”

      She nodded at the road.

      Charles continued: “He was last seen at the Hotel Metropol in Portorož by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.” He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. “Want to tell me more? Like, who the money was for?”

      Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she’d found during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.

      “And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts from the SOVA, and not from our own people.”

      As if he’d said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.

      “I’m not sure who the orders started with, but they reached us through New York. Tom’s office. He chose Frank for obvious reasons. Old-timer with a spotless record. No signs of ambition. No drinking problems, nothing to be compromised. He was someone they could trust with three million. More importantly, he’s familiar here. If the Slovenes saw him floating around the resort, there’d be no suspicions. He vacations in Portorož every summer, speaks fluent Slovene.” She grunted a half-laugh. “He even stopped to chat with them. Did Tom tell you that? The day he arrived, he saw a SOVA agent in a gift shop and bought him a little toy sailboat. Frank’s like that.”

      “I like his style.”

      Angela’s look suggested he was being inappropriately ironic. “It was supposed to be simple as pie. Frank takes the money down to the harbor on Saturday—two days ago—and does a straight phrase-code pass-off. Just hands over the briefcase. In return, he gets an address. He goes to a pay phone, calls me in Vienna, and reads off the address. Then he drives back home.”

      The song ended, and a young DJ shouted in Slovenian about the hot-hot-hot band he’d just played as he mixed in the СКАЧАТЬ