The Wolves Page 14

  Of course, Wells had carried out other missions since Times Square. But they’d all been classified, and his role in them had never leaked. The public had moved on. Almost no one outside the agency remembered him now. Wells knew the CIA had its own reasons for erasing him. By keeping his profile low, the agency could give friendlier operatives credit for his work. Still, Wells never questioned the trade-off. He much preferred to operate in secret.

  Until now. He wished he could show Roberts some of what he’d done. “It’s ludicrous.”

  “Then tell me why does he hate you so much?”

  “I stopped him from starting a war.”

  Roberts lifted the pistol.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Why you smiling, then?”

  ’Cause the truth is going to sound a lot crazier than the lie they’re peddling.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You get five minutes.”

  Wells offered the summary. Duberman had tried to fake the United States into attacking Iran. Wells, Duto, and Shafer stopped him. Roberts never lowered his pistol.

  “After all that, why did he come here? Why not stay in Tel Aviv? He’s Jewish, they’ll look after him, yeah?” Roberts said when Wells was done.

  “I asked the President to make the Israelis kick him out.”

  Roberts feathered his lips: Pfft. “The President. Of the United States. Of America. Dropped in on him, did you? Have a cuppa. I wish Aaron told me you were bonkers besides being a stalker—”

  Wells felt his temper rise. “I told him that if he didn’t get Duberman out of Israel, Shafer and I would go public. I thought coming after him here would be easier than in Tel Aviv. So far, I’ve been wrong—”

  “You can’t think I’m enough of a knocker to believe that—”

  “Look at the evidence. A week after the President calls off the invasion, Duberman moves here.”

  “That’s not evidence, guv’nor. Not even a coincidence. That’s like, a plane lands in New York, and a week later my wife gets pregnant. And a month after that, a dog barks.”

  “You don’t believe me, let’s call the chief of station here.”

  “Some random voice on the other end of the line. Buddy of yours who’s equally crackers. I think not. You know Aaron’s promised me a million quid if I bring you in. Time to make that call—”

  With his left hand, Roberts fished a phone from his pocket. He kept the pistol steady on Wells. Wells wondered if he could reach Roberts before he got off a shot—

  “Don’t make me shoot you out here. Messy for everyone.”

  “Forget the COS. How about Vinny Duto?” Having to ask Duto for help again chapped Wells, but he had no choice. If Roberts delivered him to Duberman, he was dead.

  “The senator.” Roberts looked at Wells with half-closed eyes, like he couldn’t decide whether Wells was running a game or just nuts. “Why stop there? Let’s call the President.”

  “It’s noon in D.C. You want Duto or not?”

  “Sure. Call him. Have him call me back from an official Senate number. Which I will check. Even then I won’t believe you, but it’s a start.”

  “Give me your number, I’ll tell him.”

  Wells called Duto’s BlackBerry. No answer. He called the emergency private number, the one Duto claimed he’d pick up anytime, anywhere. I’m meeting the President in the Oval Office, I’ll answer. So don’t use it unless you have to.

  No answer. Roberts lifted his pistol. “Enough.”

  “One more time.”

  “All right, one more time, then we give up calling your boss and I call mine.”

  Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring—

  “Hello?” Duto was breathing hard.

  “I interrupt you with your secretary?”

  “This best be good, John.”

  “Only if you care about me getting shot.” Wells explained what he needed.

  “Tell him to give me five minutes to get to a landline.”

  “Fast finish, huh?”

  “Keep talking, maybe I don’t get there at all.” Duto hung up.

  “He says five minutes,” Wells said to Roberts.

  “Fine with me. Time for trivia.”

  Wells didn’t ask what he meant.

  Roberts’s phone buzzed six minutes later. Roberts held it up: 202-456-1414, the main Congressional number. “Hello? Yes. Right here. Telling tales out of school. Taking your name in vain.” A pause. “So it’s true? Tell me one thing, then. Let’s say a second that you’re not pulling my leg. Why haven’t your people taken care of my boss already?”

  A longer pause. “All right. I see. By the way, three questions, Senator. Quick like a bunny, so I know you’re not Googling. Where were you born? What’s your middle name? Your birthday?”

  Roberts waited.

  “Good. Good. Good. And a bonus. Your ex-wife’s name, please?”

  Trivia.

  “All right. You’ve given me a bit to think about. If I call you back in an hour through the switchboard, they’ll put me through?” One more pause. “I’ll do that.” Roberts hung up, turned to Wells. “Whoever that was told me to tell you that you need to start standing on your own two feet. Also that it wasn’t his secretary when you called. It was his secretary’s wife.”

  Duto. All class. “I’m just glad he remembered his ex’s name.”

  “Linda.” Roberts tucked away the pistol. “For now, let’s say that I’m not calling Aaron. Let’s say that was Vinny Duto, and he was telling the truth. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I’m hoping for your help.”

  “To kill him?”

  “No—”

  “But yes. You won’t ask me to pull the trigger, you’ll call it information about his routine, his guards, what all. But either way, you want help to find a way in for a clean kill. And Orli, she on the menu now, too?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why of course, John? She must be at least partway in it, if she’s lying about you.”

  “You have my word. Call it chivalry.”

  Though chivalry hadn’t stopped him from shooting Salome in South Africa.

  “Tell me something else. Why do I care?”

  “Why do you care? He tried to start a war—”

  “Didn’t ask me to fight it. Man pays me well, treats me decent, maybe he’s got some upstairs, downstairs in him, but if I had thirty billion dollars in the bank I’d have an ego, too. I’ve got three kids and a wife who doesn’t work. So unless you’re willing to write me checks for six thousand pounds a week—”

  The answer Wells feared. “I hope you’re banking most of it, because it’s ending soon. Even if it’s not me, someone’s going to make him pay.”

  “Who? So he didn’t want Iran to get the bomb. He’s not exactly alone. Sounds to me like this is a matter for your President. He doesn’t want to touch it, maybe you shouldn’t, either.”

  “You were in the SAS, right?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “What if the UK had gotten behind that invasion? Could have been your buddies over there, getting killed for a lie.”

  A soldier’s sad tight smile crossed Roberts’s face: What else is new? He turned away from Wells, toward the stairs that led down to Tanner Road. Wells felt the Dewar’s curdling in his stomach. He’d worked up the courage to ask out his high school crush, and she’d turned him down. Worst of all, he couldn’t even blame her.

  “Do me a favor,” Roberts said over his shoulder. “When you come calling, keep me out of the crossfire.”

  “Don’t forget. He lied to you, too.”

  “About what?”

  “About me.”

  Wells saw he’d scored at least a minor point. “Give me your number.”

  Wells did. “Will you tell him you saw me?�
��

  “Probably not. He’d want to know why I didn’t call him right away, and I’m not sure I have the right answer. But I can promise you, he knows you’re here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They have the HKIA immigration lists.”

  Of course. “So they knew I was coming? They were waiting for me at the airport?”

  Roberts shook his head. “Not exactly. They don’t get real-time manifests. There’s a delay.”

  “Because I was followed as soon as I landed.”

  “Wasn’t us. I can tell you that.”

  So the airport chase remained a puzzle. Wells didn’t like unanswered questions. They had a way of boomeranging.

  “Anyway, I’ve got your number, you’ve got mine. I’m going to bed. Give me five minutes and then you can pick up those fancy shoes in the lobby. Next time, call before you come over. Better still, don’t come at all.”

  Roberts disappeared. Wells followed five minutes later. His sneakers and the Dewar’s waited on the doorman’s desk.

  Wells took the shoes, left the bottle. “Want it? I’m just going to throw it away.”

  The doorman shook his head. The perfect ending to a perfect night.

  10

  The midnight-blue BMW 550i sped up the side of the Peak, wipers fighting the tropical downpour to a draw, tires squealing on the wet pavement. The sedan fishtailed through a hairpin curve and closed on a Hyundai van until it was a hand’s width from the van’s back bumper.

  “Trying to get inside his tailpipe,” Mikhail Buvchenko said from the front passenger seat. Given the weather, Buvchenko preferred more brake, less gas. But complaining would have looked weak. He settled for a joke.

  Buvchenko’s driver, an FSB captain named Nikolai Vulov, answered by inching even closer to the Hyundai. Nikolai’s driving style was perfectly Russian, mixing fatalism, impatience, hypermasculinity, and overconfidence. We’re all going to die, anyway. Now out of my way before I run you off the road! Vodka often played a role, too, though not today. All three men in the BMW were stone sober.

  Two minutes later, they reached a traffic light at a ridge a hundred meters below the top of the Peak. Here, the road from the harbor intersected Lugard Road, a narrow lane that encircled the summit. Duberman’s mansion lay three hundred meters west, barely visible through the clouds. Nikolai turned toward it.

  “Easy here,” Buvchenko said. “Let’s have a good look.”

  Normally, Lugard Road offered a billion-dollar view of the city and Victoria Harbor. Today, the rainclouds curtained the skyscrapers, and a high concrete wall along the road hid most of Duberman’s property. Nikolai slowed to ten kilometers an hour. Through the narrow gap in the mansion’s front gate, Buvchenko glimpsed a guard. He wore a baseball hat and poncho to shield himself from the rain and cradled a carbine, an American M4. Beside him, a second man sat on a motorcycle.

  “I’ve seen prisons with less security,” Nikolai said.

  “He’s worth more than all the prisoners in Siberia put together.”

  “Thieving Jew.”

  “Always stealing, those Jews,” said Sergei, Nikolai’s deputy, from the back seat. Sergei had sausage fingers and a bull’s neck and the amazingly annoying habit of parroting Nikolai almost word for word. Nikolai and Sergei had picked Buvchenko up when he arrived in Hong Kong three days before. They’d driven him directly to the Russian consulate and locked him in a cell masquerading as a guest room. Finally, this afternoon, they’d come for him, told him they were taking him to Duberman. Buvchenko didn’t mind Nikolai, but he was already sick of Sergei, a man who could make an expensive suit look cheap. Buvchenko had been the same way a decade before, before he learned to smooth his edges.

  “Funny, I didn’t know Duberman made anyone go to his casinos.” Even as he said the words, Buvchenko wished he hadn’t. He would win no arguments with these two.

  “A Jew-lover. I wouldn’t have guessed,” Sergei said.

  “Jew, gypsy, whatever, as long as he does what we want.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Nikolai said. “I’ll loop around and then we’ll say hello.”

  “No doubt he’ll be thrilled to see us.”

  “For your sake, I hope he is.”

  “Right,” Sergei said. “For your sake.”

  The road swung around the back of the Peak. The south side of the island was exposed to the South China Sea, and the weather was notably worse. The wind whipped streaks of water sideways against the BMW’s windshield, a giant open-air car wash. Nikolai pointed into the mist. “No skyscrapers down there. You’d hardly believe it’s the same island.”

  “If you say so.” Buvchenko was no expert on Hong Kong. He’d visited the city only once, a decade ago, before the American warrant for him and the Interpol Red Notice. But he’d had no problems on this trip. He’d flown Aeroflot nonstop from Moscow, under a Russian diplomatic passport in the name of Ivan Khorosho. Ivan was the Russian version of John and khorosho translated as “well.”

  A joke from his FSB masters. At least this one was painless. Unlike the whipping that Nemtsov had given him. A thin layer of skin and scar tissue now covered the wounds. Buvchenko changed his gauze dressing and dabbed on fresh antibiotic salve every other day. Still, the cuts stung like a thousand needles. Worse, at night they itched. Buvchenko needed all his willpower not to tear up the fresh skin. He could tolerate the pain as long as he was free of Lubyanka. Now he had to convince Duberman to take the FSB’s offer. No easy task, but if he failed, the stripes on his back would be only the beginning of his torture.

  —

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, the BMW rolled up to Duberman’s mansion for the second time.

  “Drive past the gate before you stop, so they know you don’t plan to ram it,” Buvchenko said. He opened his door as the BMW stopped. Sergei began to follow.

  “Stay in the car,” Buvchenko hissed. “You’ll only mess this up.”

  “You’re the boss.” Sergei didn’t hide the mockery in his voice. These two, and probably every FSB officer in Hong Kong, knew that Buvchenko had not come to them by choice. They’d seen his back. Nemtsov’s cruelties were no secret.

  Consider our station in Hong Kong your backup, Nemtsov had said in Lubyanka, after explaining his plan to Buvchenko. They’ll do what you tell them. He hadn’t spoken the next sentence, but Buvchenko heard it nonetheless: As long as you do what I tell you.

  Buvchenko still wasn’t sure why Nemtsov was using him to approach Duberman. Nemtsov claimed Duberman would pay special attention to Buvchenko because Buvchenko had met Wells. He can’t argue when you tell him that we know what he did to the Americans.

  Buvchenko suspected the real reason was that Nemtsov wanted to keep the FSB at a cousin’s remove from the operation. If it went bad, Nemtsov would have Buvchenko killed without fear of political blowback. No one inside Lubyanka would stand up for Buvchenko. For all the bribes he’d paid over the years, he was an outsider, and the FSB saw outsiders as disposable.

  Buvchenko put aside these curdled thoughts as he walked to the gate. Duberman had no way of knowing the truth. He would assume that Buvchenko had the FSB’s full support.

  A metal door beside the gate slid sideways as he approached, revealing the guard in the baseball cap. Up close, Buvchenko saw that the bulk of a Kevlar armor-plated vest stretched the guard’s poncho. He trained his M4 on Buvchenko. “Hands high!” Like his weapon and his vest, his accent was American.

  Buvchenko put his hands just above his shoulders, palms cupped in, the version of hands up that was almost satirical.

  “On your knees.”

  Buvchenko wasn’t kneeling for this man. He shook his head.

  “I’ll count three—”

  “Shoot me, you’ll regret it.” Buvchenko would choose this American and his M4 over Nemtsov’s whip for a thousand years.

  “On
e—two—”

  “Don’t be stupid. I can help Mr. Duberman with his biggest problem.”

  “What’s that again?”

  “John Wells.”

  The guard cocked his head. “Your name?”

  “Mikhail Buvchenko.”

  “Russian?”

  “Very good. With the FSB. Heard of it? Now tell your boss before I get wetter.”

  —

  A HALF HOUR LATER, Buvchenko stood in a garage filled with the most expensive cars he’d ever seen, including a black Bugatti Veyron. The Veyron had twelve hundred horsepower and could reach four hundred kilometers an hour, but it was so hard to handle that even professional racers had trouble with it. Bugatti had built fewer than five hundred. This one didn’t look like anyone had ever sat inside it, much less driven it. Still, Buvchenko couldn’t help but admire it for its raw power.

  Putin had three, or so the rumors went.

  Buvchenko was alone, Nikolai and Sergei waiting outside. As he preferred. Just inside the gate, the guard had patted Buvchenko down and wanded him with a metal detector and took his wallet, phone, even his belt. When he reached the garage, two more guards patted him down and wanded him again. Before leaving, they’d given him only one instruction: Don’t touch the cars.

  As he imagined for the hundredth time how he’d make his case, two men stepped through the door that connected the garage and the house. Buvchenko had seen photos of both, though he’d never met either. First came Duberman’s chief bodyguard, Gideon Etra, a former Israeli soldier. Gideon was lean and hollow-eyed and seemed to favor his left leg. Buvchenko could have torn him apart in hand-to-hand combat. But the way that Gideon hung his fingers over the pistol on his hip suggested he wouldn’t give Buvchenko the chance.

  Behind Gideon was Aaron Duberman. A handsome man with an easy smile. The dossier that Nemtsov had given Buvchenko said that Duberman was in his sixties, but he looked a decade younger. “You’re Mikhail Buvchenko?”

  “I am.”

  Gideon stopped five meters from Buvchenko, the Bugatti between them. He said something under his breath to Duberman. Hebrew, so Buvchenko couldn’t understand it. He imagined it was a warning. Duberman kept walking.