The Tourist
Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as ‘first class – the kind of thing John le Carre might have written’In the global age of the CIA, wherever there's trouble, there's a Tourist: the men and women who do the dirty work. They're the Company's best agents – and Milo Weaver was the best of them all.Following a near-lethal encounter with foreign hitman the 'Tiger', a burnt-out Milo decides to continue his work from behind a desk. Four years later, he's no closer to finding the Tiger than he was before. When the elusive assassin unexpectedly gives himself up to Milo, it's because he wants something in return: revenge.Once a Tourist, always a Tourist – soon Milo is back in the field, tracking down the Tiger's handler in a world of betrayal, skewed politics and extreme violence. It's a world he knows well but he's about to learn the toughest lesson of all: trust no one.
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The TOURIST
OLEN STEINHAUER
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Olen Steinhauer 2007
Olen Steinhauer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007296774
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007310111 Version: 2017-10-18
Contents
Part One: Problems Of The International Tourist Trade
Part Two: Tourism Is Storytelling
About the Author
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—all it 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; youknow what to do. Open the window and tryto 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 sixty-year-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.
