He tried to change the subject: "How's Stef? What does she know?"

"She thinks you're on a job of some sort. A long-term job.”

“And?"

"And, what? You want me to say she misses her daddy? Yes, she does. But you know what? Her real father, Pat, has risen to the challenge. He picks her up from the sitter's, and he even cooks. He's turned out to be a pretty good guy."

"I'm glad," Milo said, though he wasn't. If Patrick made Stephanie happy, then that was fine, but he didn't trust that Patrick would remain around long enough. He was not a constant kind of person. Despite himself, he asked the worst imaginable question: "Are you and he…?"

"If we were, it wouldn't be your business anymore. Would it?"

That was really all he could take. He started to stand, but the knife wound in his chest barked back. Tina noticed the pain in his face. "Hey. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said, hung up the phone, and called for a guard to help roll him back to the infirmary.

On September 10, a Monday, he got his final visit from Special Agent Janet Simmons. She told him that, finally, the evidence had been pieced together. She wouldn't say why it had taken so long. The blood in Grainger's house had matched the corpse found in the hills. She'd pulled in some favors with the French and gotten a DNA match connecting the corpse to the bottle of sleeping pills in Angela Yates's Paris apartment.

"I don't understand, Milo. You were innocent. You didn't kill

Grainger or Angela. As for the Tiger, I still don't know what to think."

Helpfully, Milo said, "I didn't kill him either."

"So, okay. You killed no one. And one thing I know for sure is that you never made a deal with Fitzhugh to protect your family- that was just window dressing."

Milo didn't answer.

She leaned closer to the window. "The question follows: Why couldn't you be up-front with me? Why the parade of misinformation? Why did your father have to manipulate me? It's fucking humiliating. I'm a reasonable person. I would've listened."

Milo thought about that. During those hours on the nineteenth floor, he'd wanted to do just that. But, again, he remembered why. "You wouldn't have believed me."

"I might have. Even if I didn't, I would have checked on your story."

"And found no evidence," he said, then remembered what the Tiger had told him two months and a lifetime ago. "I had to be elusive, because no decent intelligence agent believes anything she's told. The only way I could make you believe it was if you discovered it on your own, while thinking that I never meant to lead you to the truth."

She stared at him, perhaps feeling manipulated, perhaps feeling stupid, he didn't know. These days, he knew so little. Finally, she said, "Okay. Then what about this senator? Your father sent a couple guys posing as aides to a senator, Nathan Irwin, who were then posing as Company men. Why lead me to a senator?"

"You'll have to ask him that."

"You don't know?"

Milo shook his head. "I suppose the senator's connected to everything, but my father never told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to trust him."

She nodded slowly, as if trust were a difficult concept to swallow. "Well, I guess it worked, eventually. And tomorrow, once the paperwork's finished, you'll be free."

"Free?"

"You've been cleared, haven't you?" She leaned back in her chair, the phone pressed to her ear. "I'm giving the warden an envelope with some money. Not a lot, just enough for a bus ticket to wherever you're going. Do you need a place to stay?"

"I've got a little place in Jersey."

"Oh, right. The Dolan apartment." She looked at the frame of the separation window. "I haven't talked to Tina in a while. Are you going to see her?"

"She needs more time."

"You're probably right." She paused. "You think it was worth it?”

“What?"

"All the secrecy about your parents. It's put a halt to your career, and Tina is… well, you might have ruined your marriage."

Milo didn't hesitate in his answer, because he'd thought of little else in that prison. "No, Janet. It wasn't worth it at all."

They separated with polite words, and Milo went back to his cell to pack his few belongings. Toothbrush, a couple of novels, and his notebook. It was a small bound pad in which he'd begun to turn myth into reality. On the inside cover he'd scribbled the black book.

Had they bothered to examine it, the guards would've been baffled by the five-digit numbers that filled it-they referenced pages, lines, and word counts from the prison library's edition of a Lonely Planet travel guide. The jaunty tone of the decoded version would have surprised anyone who knew Milo Weaver:

What is Tourism? We know the pitch- Langley will tell you that Tourism is the backbone of their readiness paradigm, the immediate response pyramid, or whatever they've rebranded it this year. That you, as a Tourist, are the pinnacle of contemporary autonomous intelligence work. You're a diamond. Really.

All that may be true-we Tourists are never able to float so high above the chaos to find the order in it. We try, and that's part of our function, but each fragment of order we find is connected to the other fragments in a meta-order that is controlled by a meta-meta-order. And so on. That's the realm of policymakers and academics. Leave it to them. Remember: Your primary function as a Tourist is to stay alive.

Among the possessions returned to him upon his release was his iPod. One of the guards had used it occasionally during the past two months, so it was fully charged. On the bus, Milo tried with no success to rouse himself with his French mix. He went through a few seconds each of all those pretty girls who made the sixties look like they might have been fun, ending with "Poupee de cire, poupee de son." He couldn't even manage to listen to all of that one. He didn't cry-that was past now-but these optimistic melodies had no bearing on his life, such as it was, anymore. He scrolled through the artist list and tried something he hadn't listened to in a long time: the Velvet Underground.

That, then, seemed to reflect his world.

He didn't go to the Dolan apartment yet. Instead, he got out at Port Authority and took the subway up to Columbus Circle. He picked up some Davidoffs and wandered directionless through Central Park. He found a bench among other benches and families and children, tourists scattered among them, and smoked. He checked his watch, judging the time, and made sure to put the cigarette butt in a trashcan. Paranoia, perhaps, but he didn't want to be picked up for littering.

He'd noticed his shadow on the bus. A young man, twenties, with a mustache, a thin neck, and a phone from which he sent a number of text messages. He'd followed Milo off the bus and down into the subway, at some point chatting on his phone to give an update to his masters. He didn't recognize the man, but he supposed that in the last month the Department of Tourism would have been gutted and restocked with plenty of fresh faces. The existence of his shadow didn't really bother him, because the Company just wanted to make sure he was put to bed. They wanted no more trouble from Milo Weaver.

In his head, Lou Reed sang about shiny boots of leather.

Now, as he walked east along the southern edge of the park, the shadow was a half block behind him. A good agent, he thought. Don't crowd your subject. Milo left the park and, after two blocks, descended into the Fifty-seventh Street station, where he took the F train downtown.

He had time, so he didn't mind that the F was local the whole way, stopping continually on its way to Brooklyn. People wandered on and off, though his shadow, perched by the rear of his car, stayed where he was. The only movement he made was to take a newly freed seat, though he made sure to sit in it when Milo wasn't looking.