The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online Page B

turned out. As a man who commanded his own intelligence unit hidden within the folds of the United Nations’ baroque superstructure, who could act with relative freedom because so few knew his office even existed, Yevgeny Primakov only needed to make two calls.
    They decided to put the plan into effect that afternoon.
    Milo filled his coffee-bitter stomach with garlic chicken from a Chinese diner, then picked up a ten-year-old BMW 3 Series with enough trunk space from outside a drab office block in Berlin-Mitte. It took about forty seconds for the Company-issue remote on his key ring to find the right combination; the car bleeped and unlocked. He slipped inside, pulling the door shut, and forced open the panels around the ignition tumbler with a screwdriver he’d lifted from Lukas Steiner’s apartment, connected the cables, then used the screwdriver to turn the ignition. He pulled out into the Berlin traffic. Hopefully the job would be done before anyone noticed the car was missing.
    He was in Kreuzberg by four, parked inside the courtyard on Gneisenaustrasse. The apartments that looked down on his BMW were full of young professionals, most of whom would be at work. For fifteen minutes, he sat behind the wheel, waiting. When a retiree wandered in to use the trash bins, he lay down as if searching for something that had dropped under the passenger seat.
    By the time the students were released from their imprisonment at four thirty, he had used a T-shirt to wipe down the seats, steering wheel, gearshift, and handles and then taken his position by the courtyard entrance. The broad street, cut down the middle by a median of leafless trees, was packed with shops, and nearby he noted a small Sri Lankan and Indian restaurant, the Chandra Kumari, its strong scent filling the street. Then, farther down and across the street, he spotted a navy blue Opel sedan with Berlin plates and two Germans inside, looking intensely bored.
    It was that, the look of boredom, so intense that it could only be fake, that caught his eye. Then the familiarity. It took about a minute to figure it out: Earlier in the week, while surveying the Imperial Tobacco factory where Rada Stanescu worked, he’d seen that same car. The same two men who, from their dress, hair, and glasses,looked German. One young—late twenties—the other somewhere past fifty. The same men. The same boredom.
    He fought the impulse to jump back into the safety of the courtyard. Instead, he glanced at his watch and thought it through. Only two people knew where he was—Yevgeny and his new master, Alan Drummond. Of them, only Drummond had known where he was earlier in the week.
    Alan Drummond still didn’t trust him, and so, rather than assign another Tourist or depopulate a curious embassy, he had asked the Germans to run a casual surveillance.
No, not a terrorist, just a potential problem. All we need is a report on his movements
.
    This, of course, was another level of the vetting. If the Germans saw him molesting a schoolgirl—or worse, killing her—they wouldn’t sit idly by as the crime was committed. Drummond, like any manipulator, was raising the stakes of his final exam. Whether or not Milo had the stomach for the job was one thing; Drummond also wanted to know that he had the chops for it.
    Despite a fresh wave of anxiety that tickled the Chinese food in his guts, this changed nothing. If the plan went properly, his minders wouldn’t prove more than a distraction, Alan Drummond be damned.
    Adriana Stanescu, it turned out, was not a stupid girl. Despite being ashamed of her parents’ professions, she knew, as most children do, which of her parents’ commands made sense. Not speaking to strangers, for instance—Adriana had been taught that one. When Milo said, “Entschuldigung,”
Excuse me
, she only hesitated in midstep, then continued. He tried again. “Adriana. Your father, Andrei, told me to pick you up. He’s stuck over in Charlottenburg.”
    When the girl