Free The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer Page B

melt. He lights up and we get talking. And the guy
is
funny, I have to admit. Even drunk—and the guy is really drunk. We talk about Kiev, and he tells me some of the places he likes. Not tourist shit—no. Some of the best clubs, the ones you have to look hard to find.”
    “He goes out dancing?” Milo asked doubtfully.
    “Ha!” Dzubenko spat, imagining that. “Please. He goes out looking for hot chicks, what else? We share war stories about girlfriends. Very funny, that guy. He convinces me to come back in, and I end up staying until after midnight. Fun time.”
    Milo stared at him, waiting, but Dzubenko didn’t seem to want to go on. “Well?”
    “I’m not saying another word until we get some vodka in here.”
    “Sure,” Milo said, then switched to English. “You hear that? Get us some vodka!”
    It took about two minutes. They heard trotting on the stairs, then the door opened just wide enough for Drummond to place a bottle of Finlandia and two shot glasses on the floor. The door shut. Milo poured shots and handed one over. “Budmo.”
    “Hey,” Dzubenko answered, then added in English, “Mud inside your eye.”
    They each put back two shots before Milo said, “Is this when it happened? You got the story at the embassy?”
    “Hell no! You think Xin Zhu’s a complete idiot? That was the next week. I get a call from him, and we head out to Tak-Tak, one of his favorite clubs. Usually, guys like him, they’ll end up at the Budapest Club, maybe Zair, but Tak-Tak? Shit,
I’d
never been there. But Zhu walked in like a king. They know him there. It’s the one place he can go where he’s the only slant-eye. We get a booth in the corner where we can watch the girls and talk in private. Then he starts drinking. I like to drink—don’t misunderstand me—but this Chinaman puts them away. Unbelievable. I guess because he’s so big he can take it.”
    “So he wasn’t drunk?”
    “Oh, he was drunk. Easily. He just didn’t pass out.”
    “Did you?”
    “For a few minutes, yeah.”
    “And he talked to you.”
    “Like we were brothers. Want to know what I think? I think the fat bastard is lonely. I mean, he can’t really trust anyone under him, and he’s afraid of those above him. So he works his intrigues all by himself.”
    “He told you this?”
    “I’m a good judge of character.”
    “But he told you about his intrigues.”
    “A little, yeah. But it wasn’t until the end of the night, when he was really wasted, that he told me this thing that’s got your friend excited. About the mole he’s been running in the fucking-secret American Department of Tourism.”
    “Tell me about that, please.”
    “Certainly,” Dzubenko said. He raised his shot glass, then drank. “When I told Zhu he was making this up to impress me—really, Department of
Tourism
? What kind of name is that?—he immediately broke it down. The administration of the Department of Tourism is organized into seven subject areas. One supervisor and nine Travel Agents for each section.” He grinned. “I stopped him there—
Travel agents?
I said. That’s when he told me they were kind of like analysts, collecting information from Tourism’s field agents, who are called Tourists. There are sixty-three of these guys, these Tourists, spread around the world.”
    Sixty-three—not even Milo knew that number. Drummond could verify it later.
    “He said that the Department of Tourism was the dirtiest part of America’s filthy intelligence machine.”
    “And he said he had a mole in this secret department?”
    Dzubenko nodded and held out his empty glass; Milo refilled it.
    “He offer any evidence of this?”
    “Well, I’ve got some experience in this sort of thing. Learning what’s true and what’s not.”
    “I imagine you do.”
    “Sure. I knew that with this fat fucker the best thing was to play on his vanity. I told him he was a liar. I told him no one would have a secret department with that kind of name, certainly