Read The Nearest Exit for Free Online

yes, of course, and after some refresher course you’ll be vetted by the jobs you do. A few weeks. We’ll make no contact during the probationary period.”
    A “few weeks” had grown into three months. Even the great Yevgeny Primakov, secret ear of the United Nations, hadn’t figured on that. Nor had he figured on the kind of job that Alan Drummond, Mendel’s successor, would assign him in Berlin: a final, impossible vetting.
    It was five days after the Zürich job, a little before nine on Friday morning, and he stood on the cold, gusty grounds in front of the Berlin Cathedral. He was caught in the funk of a muddy post-drunk anticipation, trying hard not to look like a vagrant, but it was difficult. All night he’d sought solace in a vodka-based honey liqueur called Bärenfang, but it had only added to his sickness. The rumble of rush-hour traffic rolled toward him; a tour bus with Augsburg plates swerved onto Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and gasped to a stop not far away.
    A white spongy envelope had awaited him, and once he’d gotten it from the Hansablick clerk in exchange for a tip, he’d taken it with him on a long walk, a subway ride, and another walk to a dusty, nondescript pension in Friedrichshain, a bohemian district of what used to be called East Berlin.
    Two photographs, from different angles, of a pretty olive-skinned girl, blond from a bottle. Girl: fifteen years old. Adriana Stanescu, only child of Andrei and Rada Stanescu, Moldovan immigrants. On the reverse of one photo:
    L0 2/15

    Kill the child, and make the body disappear. He had until the end of the week.
    He’d burned the instructions Monday, and since then shadowed the Stanescus, examining the details of their lives. Rada Stanescu worked at the Imperial Tobacco factory, while her husband, Andrei, drove under the banner of Alligator Taxi GmbH most evenings. They lived in Kreuzberg among Turkish families and gentrifying Germans, not far south of Milo’s pension.
    What of the girl, Adriana, who’d been scheduled to die? He’d followed her to the Lina-Morgenstern High School, where her friends were a mix of German and Turkish students. He’d found nothing out of the ordinary.
    Don’t ask
—another Tourism rule. If a girl is to be killed, then she is to be killed. Action is its own reason.
    He began walking to the cathedral’s ticket office, where the Bavarians from the bus were beating their hands, sending up clouds of breath, waiting for the window to open.
    Each morning, Andrei Stanescu dropped off his daughter one block from her school. Why one block? Because (and he read this from her expressions, from the shame in her father’s face) Adriana was embarrassed that her father was a taxi driver. Between the drop-off point and school, along Gneisenaustrasse, were six apartment-building entrances and the always-open car-sized entrance to a courtyard. In the afternoon, she returned to him along that same route, always alone. The courtyard, then, was where it would have to happen. If it happened at all.
    Every Tourist has a past, and Alan Drummond knew all about those two things that, had the budgets been more favorable, would have barred Milo from Tourism: his wife and daughter. Drummond knew that this seemingly simple task would be more difficult for him than storming the Iranian embassy in Moscow.
    Clearly, his suspicions had been right—the department still didn’t trust him, and all the jobs that had come before were mere preparation, a three-month incubation before his rebirth into Tourism. An extended test, really, culminating in job nine: an envelope, gray Berlin skies, and the desire to snuff himself rather than see this little job through.
    If he’d had no daughter, would it have been easier? He made a conscious decision to not dwell on that, but his brain ignored him. He wondered, foolishly, how many evil acts it takes to make a person evil. Six? Eighteen? Just one? How many had he committed?
    What does the Bigger Voice