The Wolves Read online

  Wells was to blame.

  Plus Duberman would never be safe while Wells was alive. Wells had killed a dozen of Duberman’s operatives. He was surely furious that Duberman had escaped what he would call justice. Duberman guessed the President had promised Wells he would act and asked Wells to stay away. But with each passing week, Wells would trust that promise less, move closer to coming after Duberman on his own.

  On a humid Wednesday, thunderclouds swirling over Hong Kong’s magnificent harbor, Duberman brought Gideon into his office. “How’s your ankle?”

  “Better every day.”

  “As long as you don’t tear it again.”

  “I didn’t tear it the first time.”

  The perfect segue.

  “I want to take care of him,” Duberman said.

  “Stir this up. Now? Whatever calculation the President’s making, if you kill Wells, the truce will be off. He’ll have to hit you back.”

  “What if Wells comes after me? Here, to Hong Kong, tries to attack me, kill me, in the house where I live with my family—”

  “Self-defense.”

  “Wells is a problem for him, too.” Him, in this case, meaning the President. “Maybe he thanks me for taking care of this.”

  Gideon sat on the couch across from Duberman’s desk, rubbed his wounded ankle. He was a trim man in his mid-fifties who still carried himself like the soldier he had once been. Not just a soldier, a sniper, with thirty-six confirmed kills during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His nickname was Chai-chai—chai being a Hebrew word that meant “life” and also “eighteen.” Duberman sometimes wondered what Gideon felt about all those kills. Were the details still sharp, or had time blurred the edges of his memories? Could you forget killing a man?

  “So, what, you invite Wells over?”

  “The expansion opens in two months.” Duberman was adding a hundred-and-ten-story tower to 88 Gamma Macao. Its two top levels, almost eighteen hundred feet above the South China Sea, would be open only to the highest rollers. The Sky Casino, atop the Sky Tower. The tables would take minimum bets of one hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars, the equivalent of $14,000 U.S. The world’s highest casino, 88 Gamma promised in press releases. For the world’s greatest gamblers. The Sky has no limits! “I’ll give interviews. Talk about how I’ll be there. How much I love living in Hong Kong, how I might spend the rest of my life here.”

  “You think he’ll be watching.”

  “He put a gun to my head and I laughed at him. He’s watching.”

  “He’ll figure a trap.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He can’t stop himself. It’ll make him crazy.”

  “That’s what you want? Maybe keep your head down, count your blessings.”

  The pushback surprised Duberman. He’d figured Gideon would want a chance for revenge. “I thought he cut your ankle, Chai. Not your balls.”

  Gideon cursed under his breath.

  “It’s like this. If I’m going to live, I want him dead. And if I’m going to die, I want him dead, too.”

  “So he comes. Then what? Not like we can ask the police for help.”

  “We put men down in the city, watch the main MTR stations. He can’t hide here.”

  “Seven million people in Hong Kong.”

  “How many look like him? The city’s too small and there aren’t enough ways up here. Sooner or later, we’ll see him. Then he’s ours.”

  2

  SAN DIEGO

  Evan Wells at the three-point line . . . jab-steps left at the basket . . . pulls back, elevates—

  John Wells put up his hands and lunged at his son. No chance. Evan twisted away, extended his arms, let go of the basketball at the apex of his jump, the rock spinning off his fingertips, textbook. Over the defender . . . He lifted his arms over his head and grinned. Bingo!

  Wells looked over his shoulder just as the ball split the net. Evan wasn’t just running Wells ragged, he was offering real-time commentary with every dribble. If he didn’t make the NBA, he had a future on ESPN.

  Wells leaned over, hands on hips, sucked the cool gym air into his burning lungs. Chasing Evan for forty-five minutes had exhausted him. Worse than two hours of weights. At least he knew his broken foot was healed.

  Evan collected the ball, flicked it smoothly between his legs. “Take a break, John?”

  “Don’t go easy on me.” Wells slapped for the ball, found only air. “Make me feel old.”

  “You are old. Starting to wonder how you make it out there.”

  Out there, I have a gun. Out there, there’s no court and no rules. Wells shuffled to the water fountain, drank deep. Like everything else in the gym, the fountain was brand-new, a tribute to San Diego State’s nationally ranked men’s basketball team, the Aztecs. Theoretically, the court was open to any student. But everyone knew the team had dibs.

  Evan played shooting guard for the Aztecs, though he wasn’t a starter. Of course, as he liked to tell Wells, his chances would have been better if Wells hadn’t made him disappear for a month during the season. The fact that Wells had been trying to save his son’s life cut no ice.

  Three more Aztecs stepped into the gym. All wore white T-shirts with SAN DIEGO BASKETBALL printed in block letters across their chests. Like the entire campus didn’t know who they were. College sports had changed since Wells played linebacker at Dartmouth. These kids were basically unpaid pros. They had strength coaches and hot tubs and massage therapists. They had nicknames on SportsCenter and fifty thousand followers on Twitter.

  Lamenting the good old days. Another sign of middle age. Still, Wells noticed a difference in his son. Evan had always been confident. Now he seemed almost arrogant. Adulation was a drug as dangerous as any other.

  “Two on two?” Evan yelled across the court. For him, the last forty-five minutes had been only a warm-up. To Wells, he muttered, “No problem, right, Pops?”

  Wells wanted to be upset his son was ditching him so blithely, but his legs told him he was lucky to avoid more punishment. “Call me tonight. We can grab dinner. If you want.”

  “It’s Friday.” Evan’s way of saying he would have other plans.

  —

  WELLS HAD BEEN in San Diego for a month, making up for lost time. Trying to, anyway. He and Evan’s mother, Heather, had divorced in the late nineties, when Evan was an infant. Back then Wells had just joined the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent much of the next decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an undercover operative infiltrating al-Qaeda. Along the way, he converted to Islam. Over the years, lots of people had asked him why. His answers never seemed to satisfy them. Wells supposed that even he couldn’t claim to understand his decision completely. He only knew that Islam’s tenets fit him better than Christianity’s, rested more easily on his head and in his heart.

  While Wells was undercover, Heather remarried and took Evan back to western Montana, where she and Wells had grown up. Even after Wells returned to the United States, Heather kept him from Evan. She said random visits from Wells would be hard on the boy. She never mentioned his conversion, though Wells thought it troubled her. She viewed it as an affectation, a cheap way for him to distance himself from the person he’d been. And from her.

  But Wells could hardly argue with Heather’s insistence on keeping him away, whatever her reasons. He officially quit the agency a few years after coming home, but he remained addicted to undercover work. He missed Evan’s adolescence as completely as he had the boy’s childhood. Another man raised his son.

  His failure to be part of Evan’s life gnawed, an ulcer that wouldn’t heal. When Evan turned eighteen, Wells told Heather that he planned to approach the boy directly, with or without her approval. Their first meeting was a disaster. Evan knew that Wells had worked for the CIA. He saw Wells less as a person than a walking symbol of Guantánamo Bay and all the other compromises and mi
stakes the United States had made during its war on terror. Wells left Montana thinking he would never see his son again.

  Then a kidnapping forced Evan to ask Wells for help, dangerous help, help that Wells had provided without complaint. Now they were more than strangers, less than father and son. Evan seemed happy enough to have Wells in San Diego. They met for breakfast every day, played basketball most afternoons. They even had dinner when Evan didn’t have a better offer. Evan introduced Wells to his friends as “my biological father.” When they were alone, he mostly called Wells John or Pops, the last word delivered with a soft irony that perfectly fit their relationship.

  Their physical resemblance helped. They were both tall, with brown hair, brown eyes, a hint of tan in their skin from Wells’s Lebanese grandmother. Wells had grown up on hunting and football. He was rawboned and muscled, bigger than his son. Evan was lean and slippery, with a basketball player’s glide. Even at his fastest, Wells couldn’t have matched Evan’s first step. Now, past forty, he had no chance. He chased his son around the court as hopelessly as a bull charging a matador. And loved every minute. Wells had told himself before this trip that he would be satisfied with whatever relationship Evan wanted.

  Evan even slipped sometimes and called him Dad.

  Still, Wells knew he hadn’t sorted out his life. A psychiatrist would surely ask him why he focused so hard on Evan, a relationship where he would always be a substitute, instead of working to understand why the women who loved him—first Heather, then Exley, now Anne—always left.

  The shrink would no doubt also tell him to accept that he would need to leave the field soon. His body didn’t forgive mistakes as it once had. Three months before, Wells had broken his foot jumping off a wall in South Africa. The injury had nearly gotten him killed. The psychiatrist would probably tell him to forget about Duberman, too. The billionaire was the President’s problem now.

  Why Wells didn’t talk to shrinks.

  —

  EVAN KNEW that Wells had ended Duberman’s plot to try to fake the United States into war. So far, he hadn’t asked for details. The story wasn’t exactly the elephant in the room, more like a shiny new Ferrari in the driveway, at once cool and absurdly showy. Aside from stopping a war, how you been, Pops?

  Wells wondered if Evan was also trying to figure out how he felt about the killing that was an inextricable part of Wells’s life. Over and over, Wells had broken the most basic law, the one that undergirded all the others. Thou shalt not kill. At that first meeting in Missoula, Evan had called Wells a psychopath. Now Evan was studying military history and strategy. Wells wondered if his son was considering following him into the Rangers and ultimately the agency.

  Wells knew the cost of the path he’d taken better than anyone. A wall, unseen and unbreakable, split him from the civilian world. He could pretend, but he would never belong. He wasn’t sure what he would say if Evan questioned him straight out for advice about joining. He found himself hoping Evan wouldn’t ask. What kind of father did that make him?

  The dream-blue California sky bubbled over Wells as he bicycled back to the apartment he’d rented a mile from campus. He’d imagined San Diego State as a playground by the ocean. In fact, the University of California–San Diego had the prime real estate. SDSU was ten miles inland, bordered by an interstate instead of the beach. Still, Wells found his apartment pleasant enough. It was a two-room white box in a complex with a pool, a gym, and even a tennis court.

  San Diego’s halcyon weather made doing nothing easy. Too easy. Downtown and the beaches were filled with guys who spent their days hanging out, though they were too old to be students and too young to be retired. They had streaked blond hair and sun-faded tattoos and girlfriends just out of high school. They lingered in packs in coffeehouses, talking about surfing in Hawaii and camping in Joshua Tree. They made Wells want to get a job, any job.

  Instead he hung out with Evan, waiting to stop waiting. The President had obviously decided that he wouldn’t go after Duberman unless he had a perfect shot at making the death look accidental. Duberman was too canny to give him that opportunity. Wells felt the pressure inside himself building, real as a blocked pipe.

  Even so, Wells couldn’t quite make himself move. He needed to be sure he was ready for another mission that would put blood on his hands. Going after Duberman was a choice, and Wells wanted the choice taken from him. He wanted a summons.

  —

  WELLS HAD COME to San Diego after two months of riding buses. The day after his meeting with the President, he had bought a backpack and an e-reader and his first Greyhound ticket. Washington to Atlanta. Atlanta to Jacksonville to New Orleans. New Orleans to Houston to Dallas to El Paso. El Paso for a while. He stayed in shape with pull-ups and push-ups and sit-ups. His foot healed and he sawed off the cast and started to run again, rebuilding his endurance mile by mile.

  He slept in motels with leaky showers and busted air conditioners and doors patched with plywood. He grew a beard. Days went by when he hardly spoke. He carried a phone, but only to call Evan. He spent his days tunneling into the Civil War a word at a time.

  El Paso to Albuquerque, Albuquerque to Denver, Denver to Salt Lake, Salt Lake to Phoenix. West and north and south, but mainly west. He disappeared into the American underbelly, bus stations and cracked concrete, diesel fumes and crumpled trash. The land outside his windows changed like a cheap green-screen backdrop, swamp to flatland to mountain. But the buses were always the same, rattling beasts with lumpy seats that made sleep difficult and dreams impossible. Their cabins stank of greasy fries and unwashed men. Not everyone on them was desperate. Wells sat beside college kids on road trips, soldiers visiting girlfriends, a librarian on her way to a romance writers’ conference in Phoenix. Some of the Greyhounds even came with Wi-Fi and reserved seats. Yet the desperation they carried was inescapable. They were public housing on four wheels. People with a choice didn’t ride them.

  Even the librarian was newly divorced and nearly broke. She’d budgeted precisely two hundred and forty dollars for the three-day conference. Figured I could either drive and sleep in my car or ride this and have money for a motel, she said. She was in her late twenties, dark blond hair, with a round, pretty face and a soft, heavy body. She warmed up to Wells in a hurry. After an hour, she let her fingers graze his thigh. He made the mistake of asking what kind of romance she wrote. Hard-core stuff, she said. My ex wasn’t into that, but I am. What about you? She squeezed his leg, and Wells felt himself stir. He hadn’t been with a woman since his cruise with Anne, before he’d ever heard of Aaron Duberman. He’d forgotten how quickly and easily men and women could join when their bodies wanted to meet.

  Maybe they could do each other some good.

  But he didn’t want complications, even the uncomplicated kind. He picked up her hand, put it back in her lap. Probably more like your ex, he said. Too bad, she said. At the next rest stop, Wells walked the parking lot to stretch his legs. When he got back on, he found the librarian two rows up, next to a Marine. She winked, and he felt a ridiculous surge of jealousy that she’d be joining the twelve-foot-high club with someone else.

  —

  EVERY CITY HAD MOSQUES, usually near the bus stations. For a while, Wells prayed in them. But he felt unwelcome. He knew why. In spite of, or maybe because of, his flawless Arabic and his new beard, he looked too much like an FBI agent trying to pose as a Muslim. Eventually, he stopped going. He didn’t want trouble of any kind. He wanted to float as aimlessly as a branch on a river. But aimlessness didn’t come easy for him.

  He tried not to think about the meeting with the President, or to question whether he’d made the right choice. But he did. Every day. He tried not to think about the women who’d left him. But he did. Every day. He didn’t find peace. He didn’t find much of anything. Near the end, he stopped looking. He wasn’t sure if he was wasting his time. Maybe wasting time was the point.
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br />   Phoenix to Las Vegas to Reno to Seattle to San Francisco. In Vegas, Wells wandered the Strip, walked through Duberman’s palaces, ignoring the security guards, who found him wherever he went. He expected to hate the casinos, but he couldn’t. They seemed silly, a place for people who had too much time, too much money, too little imagination.

  He checked on Duberman every few days. About three weeks into his trip, he found a post on a fashion blog reporting that “Orli Akilov has made a splash in Hong Kong, where she and her mega-billionaire husband have moved for the spring—and maybe longer! ‘I think it’s important that our sons live all over,’ the Israeli beauty told reporters at a party sponsored by Cîroc vodka. ‘I want them to be world citizens.’”

  At least the President had made good on his promise to force Duberman from Israel. Wells awaited the news that Duberman had died in a plane crash or from a sudden bout of pneumonia. It didn’t come.

  Instead, Wells read that Vinny Duto had formed a presidential exploratory committee. Then the governor of California, a potential primary opponent for Duto, said he wouldn’t run. He didn’t explain. Maybe the President’s files had better dirt than he’d said.

  Wells wanted to vent his anger to Shafer. He called Evan instead. Finally made it to Cali. Mind if I come see you?

  Anytime, Pops.

  One final ride, San Francisco to San Diego. Five hundred miles and twelve hours for sixty-nine dollars. At a rest stop outside Los Angles, Wells shaved his beard. He knew his son would see it as a mountain-man pose. The Grizzly Adams hipster look is so 2015!

  Wells stepped out in San Diego with an aching back and something like nostalgia. He wouldn’t miss the buses. But he would miss their connection to a simpler era, when Americans could still disappear inside the country’s vastness. Before license-plate-scanning cameras and GPS trackers, biometric identification and metadata collection. When people still could hope to outrun their bad luck. Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong. The frontier had stayed open for a while after 1890. But it was closed now.