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Olen Steinhauer

Book - 2010

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Subjects
Published
New York : Minotaur Books 2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Olen Steinhauer (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
404 p. ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780312622879
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

OLEN STEINHAUER'S 2009 thriller, "The Tourist," introduced a tantalizing new word to the lexicon of espionage fiction. Steinhauer's "Tourists" are members of a tiny fraternity of C.I.A. operatives who move ceaselessly around the world, cultivating informers, ferreting out double agents and assassinating America's enemies. Like black-ops versions of Ryan Bingham, the corporate hit man played by George Clooney in "Up in the Air," these covert agents exist unencumbered by relationships or a home. The novel's main character, Milo Weaver, is a secret operative with multiple identities who has grown sick of the rootlessness, duplicity and amorality of Tourism. One of the few members of the group who are also family men, Weaver longs to settle down in Brooklyn with his librarian wife and 6-year-old stepdaughter, but he's drawn back repeatedly into a life of murder and deceit. "The Nearest Exit," Steinhauer's follow-up novel, reprises the themes of "The Tourist," with even more success. As the story begins, Weaver's latest stab at domesticity is cut short when he's dispatched on a mission designed to test his loyalty to the organization. His orders come in "a white spongy envelope" that he opens in a seedy hotel in a bohemian neighborhood of Berlin: "Two photographs, from different angles, of a pretty olive-skinned girl, blonde from a bottle. Girl: 15 years old. Adriana Stanescu, only child of Andrei and Rada Stanescu, Moldovan immigrants. . . . Kill the child, and make the body disappear. He had until the end of the week." Unable to summon the resolve to complete the operation, Weaver arranges a complicated deception. When Adriana is found dead anyway, her body dumped in a forest, Weaver is quickly identified, captured and brutally interrogated by German intelligence agents. Although he manages to exonerate himself, this encounter leads him into the sordid world of human trafficking, a blackmail plot involving German intelligence officials and the search for a mole within the Tourism department. Like John le Carré, with whom he is often compared, Steinhauer skillfully renders the game of espionage in the post-cold-war, post-9/11 era. "The other side was multifaceted," Steinhauer wrote in "The Tourist." "Russian mafias, Chinese industrialization, loose nukes and even the vocal Muslims camped in Afghanistan who were trying to pry Washington's fingers off the oil-soaked Middle East. . . Anyone who could not be embraced or absorbed by the empire was anathema and had to be dealt with, like barbarians at the gates." But the rules of spycraft remain essentially unchanged: almost nothing is what it seems, enemies often masquerade as friends, and those closest to the action are often farthest from the truth. In "The Nearest Exit," Weaver roams Europe trying to unravel half a dozen interlocking conspiracies, wrestling with ambiguities at every turn. Are the "shadows" following him agents of German intelligence? Have they been sent by the Chinese? Or is a devious United States senator keeping tabs on him? Does the mole exist? Or is the entire operation an ingenious illusion meant to sow confusion and fear among the Tourists and their deskbound analyst colleagues called Travel Agents? Weaver learns that even his own identity has been stolen to serve the organization's sinister ends: a fellow Tourist, a cold-blooded assassin who derives "real pleasure in planning a murder," has employed it to eliminate a nosy reporter in Budapest. Weaver traces this strand of the plot to a Hungarian strip club, where he "watched the endless parade of flesh and, though he would soon leave it, hated everything to do with his lousy business." Like le Carré's George Smiley, Weaver is a richly imagined creation with a scarred psyche and a complex back story that elevates him above the status of run-of-the-mill world-weary spook. The son of a former K.G.B. agent and an American member of a Baader-Meinhof-type gang who hanged herself in a Munich prison, Weaver was raised by adoptive parents and recruited by the C.I.A. just after he graduated from college. His father, Yevgeny Primakov, now a United Nations intelligence operative, turns up periodically as a savior, a potential liability - and a reminder that Weaver can't escape his past. Weaver is at once a loving father and a coolly efficient killer. At one moment he's reading his stepdaughter a bedtime story, at another breaking the leg of a pursuer with a lead pipe and forcing the man's boss to listen via cellphone to his victim's screams. The tension between those parallel lives begins to overwhelm him. "In the end Milo Weaver wasn't outside the moral universe, no matter how well the Company had trained him," Steinhauer observes. "He couldn't escape the continual reminders that his universe had become imbued with morality - bathing his infant daughter's fat, squirming body, later walking her to school and listening to her rambling stories, making curry for his wife, vacuuming on the weekends." Steinhauer's tale has its weaknesses. His cardboard villains, including the conspiratorial senator and a Chinese spymaster who may be running the mole, will make readers long for an opponent like Smiley's Karla. Steinhauer also has a tendency to delineate his characters with a few trademark idiosyncrasies, then repeat them over and over, to annoying effect. The unhappy German spymaster Erika Schwartz ("a big woman since the 70s, an obese one since the fall of the Wall") snacks incessantly on Snickers bars and washes them down with bottles of cheap riesling. Weaver's own eccentricities - he pops Dexedrine like Pez, struggles with an addiction to Davidoff cigarettes and carries an iPod loaded with the music of Serge Gainsbourg and David Bowie - sometimes feel more like tacked-on accessories than genuine outgrowths of his personality. Yet these minor drawbacks are far outweighed by Steinhauer's brisk pacing, sharp dialogue and convincing evocation of a paranoid subculture. In a terrifying conclusion, he brings together the myriad aspects of his plot and catches many of his characters - the father of the murdered Moldovan schoolgirl; the man who killed her; the German intelligence officer who hatched the plot; and Milo Weaver himself - in a spasm of violence that passes for a kind of moral reckoning. "We are taught, and we learn through experience, that everything and everyone is a potential hazard," Tourists are told in the handbook of their profession. It's a destiny that Weaver is desperate to escape, but that may well consume him. In the world of Olen Steinhauer's Tourists, those closest to the action are often farthest from the truth. Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 23, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Since the events of The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver has served time in prison, worked in administration, and tried to reconnect with his wife and daughter. But talk therapy is hard when you're trained to keep secrets. When asked to return to the field, he agrees, although, because of his disgust with the Department of Tourism (a black-ops branch of the CIA), he plans to feed information to his father, Yevgeny Primakov, the secret ear of the UN. But his handlers don't trust him, either, giving him a series of vetting assignments that culminates in an impossible loyalty test: the abduction and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Ironically, Weaver is then tasked with finding a security breach that threatens the very existence of Tourism and the lives of the Tourists. Seeing his own brutal compatriots as humans, he does his best to save the thing he despises, a conundrum that pretty much sums up the shades of gray that paint this modern-day espionage masterpiece. The Tourist was impressive, proving that Steinhauer had the ability to leap from the historical setting of his excellent Eastern European quintet to a vividly imagined contemporary landscape. But this is even better, a dazzling, dizzyingly complex world of clandestine warfare that is complicated further by the affairs of the heart. Steinhauer never forgets the human lives at stake, and that, perhaps, is the now-older Weaver's flaw: he is too human, too attached, to be the perfect spy. His failure to save the girl he was told to kill threads the whole book like barbed wire.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Milo Weaver, a former field agent with the CIA's clandestine Department of Tourism, returns to action after a stint in prison for alleged financial fraud in this intense sequel to The Tourist. His handlers want Weaver to pursue a mole rumored to have infiltrated the CIA's black-ops department, but with his loyalty in question, he must first undergo some test missions, one of which is to kill the 15-year-old daughter of Moldovan immigrants now living in Berlin. Such a horrific assignment further weakens Weaver's already wavering enthusiasm for his secret life, and he becomes increasingly preoccupied with reconnecting with his estranged wife and child. When bombshell revelations rock Weaver's world, he vows to somehow put international intelligence work behind him. Can he do so without jeopardizing his and his family's safety? Steinhauer's adept characterization of a morally conflicted spy makes this an emotionally powerful read. Author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This sequel to Steinhauer's memorable The Tourist presents an espionage tale as puzzling as any a spy fiction might require. An abundance of characters peppers emotionally troubled ex-superspy Milo Weaver's return to the field to perform a horrifying job he does not want to do for people he distrusts. The reader is suspended over a chasm of ambiguity as to who in which agency has been assigned by whom to do what to whom. As with all excellent spy stories, this one reveals betrayal by professional liars at every level. Tourists, hypersecret operatives of the CIA, appear to be the target of a mole, or perhaps there is no mole, only a loose lip somewhere high among American politicos. Working in Europe and the United States, anguished Milo unravels a skein of knotted plots, amoral officials, and subplots disguising an ingenious, unexpected, and terrible revenge. Verdict While not quite as focused as The Tourist-at times too many important characters and multiple plots threaten to overwhelm the reader-this is still an extraordinarily complex and compelling thriller. [Library marketing.]-Jonathan Pearce, California State Univ.-Stanislaus, Stockton, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Proving there's still juice in the le Carr formula, still another spy comes in from the cold.There's a sort of Tourist who, when he or she visits a church or museum, wants to blow it up. In the clandestine community, Touristsnote the capitalizationare spoken of with the reverence reserved for the best and brightestand the most lethal. The Department of Tourism, established by the CIA, is so hush-hush that within the Company itself there are those who doubt its existence. Who can blame them? Who ever sees a Tourist? In the entire world, there are only 63 of this special breed, who murder in the service of their government. Essentially decent, though deeply committed, Milo Weaver was one of them. Was, then wasn't, and then suddenly, inexplicably, he's back. So there's Milo, a Milo now with wife and daughter, presumably again ready to kill on command. Soon enough, he discovers that disconcerting changes have taken place: That old gang of his is no longer at command center. But blow away a 15-year-old girl? How does one go about preparing for an assignment that far beyond the pale? Long ago, Milo trained himself to accept on faith that certain acts of wickedness were in fact patriotic acts when ordered by people who loved their country as wholeheartedly as he did. Now, however, a new pragmatism may be undermining the Tourist trade. And maybe murder will turn out to be just murder.Excessively complicated, but it's a Steinhauer (The Tourist, 2009, etc.), which means it's good all the same.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

THE NEAREST EXIT (CHAPTER 1) He felt that if he could put a name to it, he could control it. Transgressive association? That had the right sound, but it was too clinical to give him a handle on it. Perhaps the medical label didn't matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was the effect it had on him, and on his job. The simplest things could trigger it--a bar of music, a face, some small Swiss dog crapping on the sidewalk, or the smell of automobile exhaust. Never children, though, which was strange even to him. Only the indirect fragments of his earlier life gave him that punch in the gut, and when he found himself in a freezing Zürich phone booth calling Brooklyn, he wasn't even sure what had triggered it. All he knew was that he had lucked out: No one answered. An early breakfast somewhere, perhaps. Then the machine picked up. Their two voices: a minor cacophony of female tones, laughing, asking him to please leave a message. He hung up. No matter the name, it was a dangerous impulse. On its own, it was nothing. An impulsive--maybe compulsive--call to a home that's no longer home, on a gray Sunday afternoon, is fine. When he peered through the booth's scratched glass at the idling white van on Bellerivestrasse, however, the danger became apparent. Three men waited inside that van, wondering why he'd asked them to stop here, when they were on their way to rob an art museum. Some might not even think to ask the question, because when life moves so quickly looking back turns into a baffling roll call of moral decisions. Other answers, and you'd be somewhere else. In Brooklyn, perhaps, dealing with Sunday papers and advertising supplements, distractedly listening to your wife's summary of the arts pages and your daughter's critique of the morning's television programming. Yet the question returned as it had so many other times over the last three months: How did I end up here? The first rule of Tourism is to not let it ruin you, because it can. Easily. The rootless existence, keeping simultaneous jobs straight in your head, showing no empathy when the job requires none, and especially that unstoppable forward movement. Yet that bastard quality of Tourism, the movement, is also a virtue. It leaves no time for questions that do not directly relate to your survival. This moment was no exception. So he pushed his way out, jogged through the stinging cold, and climbed into the passenger seat. Giuseppe, the pimply, skinny Italian behind the wheel, was chewing a piece of Orbit, freshening the air they all breathed, while Radovan and Stefan, both big men, squatted in the empty rear on a makeshift wooden bench, staring at him. With these men, the lingua franca was German, so he said, "Gehen." Giuseppe drove on. Each Tourist develops his own personal techniques to keep from drowning--verse recitation, breathing exercises, self-injury, mathematical problems, music. This Tourist had once carried an iPod religiously, but he'd given it to his wife as a reconciliation gift, and now he was left with only his musical memories. As they rolled past the bare, craggy winter trees and homes of Seefeld, the southern neighborhood stretching alongside Lake Zürich, he hummed a half-forgotten tune from his eighties childhood, wondering how other Tourists dealt with the anxiety of separation from their families. A stupid thought; he was the only Tourist with a family. Then they turned the next corner, and Radovan interrupted his anxiety with a single statement. "My mother has cancer." Giuseppe continued driving in his safe way, and Stefan used a rag to wipe excess oil off of the Beretta he'd picked up in a Hamburg market last week. In the passenger seat, the man they knew as Mr. Winter--who toured under the name Sebastian Hall but was known to his distant family as Milo Weaver--glanced back at the broad Serb, whose thick, pale arms were crossed over his stomach, gloved fists kneading his ribs. "I'm sorry to hear that. We all are." "I'm not trying to jinx anything," Radovan went on, his German muddied by a thick Belgrade accent. "I just had to say something before we did this. You know. In case I don't have a chance later." "Sure. We get it." Dutifully, Giuseppe and Stefan muttered their agreement. "Is it treatable?" Milo Weaver asked. Radovan looked confused, crammed in between Stefan and a pile of deflated burlap bags. "It's in the stomach. Spread too far. I'm going to have her checked out in Vienna, but the doctor seems to know what he's talking about." "You never know," Giuseppe said as he turned onto another tree-lined street. "Sure," Stefan agreed, then went back to his gun, lest he say something wrong. "You're going to be with us on this?" Milo asked, because it was his responsibility to ask such things. "Anger helps me focus." Milo went through the details with them again. It was a simple enough plan, one that depended less on its mechanics than on the element of surprise. Each man knew his role, but Radovan--might he take out his personal troubles on some poor museum guard? He was, after all, the one with a gun. "Remember, there's no need for casualties." They all knew this, if only because he had repeated it continually over the last week. It had quickly become a joke, that Mr. Winter was their Tante Winter, their old aunt keeping them out of trouble. The truth was that he had been through nearly three months of jobs they knew nothing about, none of which had claimed bystanders. He didn't want these recruits ruining his streak. This was job number eight. It was still early enough in his return to Tourism that he could keep track, but late enough for him to wonder, and worry, about why all the jobs had been so damned easy. Number four, December 2007. The whiny voice of Owen Mendel, acting director of Tourism, spoke through his Nokia: Please, go to Istanbul and withdraw fifteen thousand euros from the Interbank under the name Charles Little. You'll find the passport and account number at the hotel. Fly to London, and in the Chase Manhattan at 125 London Wall open an account with that money. Same name. Make sure customs doesn't find the cash. Think you can handle it? You don't ask why because that's not a Tourist's prerogative. Simply believe that it's all for the best, that the whiny voice on the line is the Voice of God. Job two, November 2007: There's a woman in Stockholm. Sigfreid Larsson. Two esses. She's at the Grand Hôtel on Blasieholmshammen. She's expecting you. Buy her and yourself a ticket to Moscow and make sure she gets to 12 Trubnaya ulica by the eighteenth. Got that? Larsson, a sixty-year-old professor of international relations, was shocked but flattered by all the fuss made over her. Jobs for children; jobs for third-rank embassy staff. Number five, January 2008: Now this one is sensitive. Name's Lorenzo Peroni, high-scale arms dealer based in Rome. I'll text you the details. He's meeting with a South Korean buyer named Pak Jin Myung in Montenegro. I want you on top of him from when he leaves his apartment on the eighth until he returns on the fifteenth. No, don't worry about mikes, we've taken care of that. Just keep up the visual, hone your camera work . As it turned out, Pak Jin Myung was no arms buyer but one of Peroni's many mistresses. The resulting photographs were more appropriate for English tabloids. So it went. One more impotent surveillance in Vienna, the order to mail a sealed manila envelope from Berlin to a Theodor Wartmüller in Munich, a one-day Paris surveillance, and a single murder, at the beginning of the month. That order had been sent by text message: L: George Whitehead. Consider dangerous. In Marseille for week starting Thurs. George Whitehead, patriarch of a London crime family, looked about seventy, though he was in fact closer to eighty. No bullets were required, just a single push in the hotel steam room. His head cracked against the damp wall planks; the concussion knocked him out for life. It hardly even felt like murder. Others might have been pleased by the ease and inconsequence of these assignments. However, Milo Weaver--or Sebastian Hall or Mr. Winter--could not relax, because the ease and inconsequence meant only one thing: They were onto him. They knew, or they suspected, that his loyalties did not lie entirely with them. Now this, another test. Get some money together. Ideally, twenty million, but if you can only get five or ten we'll understand . Dollars? Yes, dollars. You have a problem with that? THE NEAREST EXIT. Copyright © 2010 by Third State, Inc. Excerpted from The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.