Excerpt of The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, TO
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
1
Four hours after his failed suicide attempt, he descended toward
Aerodrom Ljubljana. A tone sounded, and above his head the seat
belt sign glowed. Beside him, a Swiss businesswoman buckled her
belt and gazed out the window at the clear Slovenian sky—allit
had taken was one initial rebuff to convince her that the twitching
American she’d been seated next to had no interest in conversation.
The American closed his eyes, thinking about the morning’s
failure in Amsterdam—gunfire, shattering glass and splintered wood,
sirens.
If suicide is sin, he thought, then what is it to someone who
doesn’t believe in sin? What is it then? An abomination of nature?
Probably, because the one immutable law of nature is to continue
existing. Witness: weeds, cockroaches, ants, and pigeons. All of nature’s
creatures work to a single, unified purpose: to stay alive. It’s
the one indisputable theory of everything.
He’d dwelled on suicide so much over the last months, had examined
the act from so many angles, that it had lost its punch. The
infinitive clause “to commit suicide” was no more tragic than “to eat
breakfast” or “to sit,” and the desire to snuff himself was often as
strong as his desire “to sleep.”
Sometimes it was a passive urge — drive recklessly without a seat
belt; walk blindly into a busy street — though more frequently these
days he was urged to take responsibility for his own death. “The
Bigger Voice,” his mother would have called it: There’s the knife; you
know what to do. Open the window and try to fly. At four thirty that
morning, while he lay on top of a woman in Amsterdam, pressing
her to the floor as her bedroom window exploded from automatic
gunfire, the urge had suggested he stand straight and proud and face
the hail of bullets like a man.
He’d spent the whole week in Holland, watching over a sixtyyear-
old U.S.- supported politician whose comments on immigration
had put a contract on her head. The hired assassin, a killer who
in certain circles was known only as “the Tiger,” had that morning
made a third attempt on her life. Had he succeeded, he would have
derailed that day’s Dutch House of Representatives vote on her conservative
immigration bill.
How the continued existence of one politician—in this case, a
woman who had made a career of catering to the whims of frightened
farmers and bitter racists—played into the hands of his own
country was unknown to him. “Keeping an empire,” Grainger liked
to tell him, “is ten times more difficult than gaining one.”
Rationales, in his trade, didn’t matter. Action was its own reason.
But, covered in glass shards, the woman under him screaming
over the crackling sound, like a deep fryer, of the window frame
splintering, he’d thought, What am I doing here? He even placed a
hand flat on the wood- chip- covered carpet and began to push himself
up again, to face this assassin head- on. Then, in the midst of all
that noise, he heard the happy music of his cell phone. He removed
his hand from the floor, saw that it was Grainger calling, and shouted
into it, “What?”
“Riverrun, past Eve,” Tom Grainger said.
“And Adam’s.”
Learned Grainger had created go-codes out of the first lines of
novels. His own Joycean code told him he was needed someplace
new. But nothing was new anymore. The unrelenting roll call of cities
and hotel rooms and suspicious faces that had constituted his life
for too many years was stupefying in its tedium. Would it never
stop?
So he hung up on his boss, told the screaming woman to stay
where she was, and climbed to his feet . . . but didn’t die. The bullets
had ceased, replaced by the whining sirens of Amsterdam’s finest.
“Slovenia,” Grainger told him later, as he drove the politician
safely to the Tweede Kamer. “Portorož, on the coast. We’ve got a
vanished suitcase of taxpayer money and a missing station chief.
Frank Dawdle.”
Excerpted from The Tourist
by Olen Steinhauer. Copyright © 2009 by Olen Steinhauer. Excerpted by
permission of St. Martin's Minotaur, a division of Macmillan, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
