The Counterfeit Agent

12

This time Duto’s guard waved Shafer through, no ID check. Inside, Duto had dropped his great man posturing. He sat at his kitchen table, bathrobe loose on his shoulders over a thready V-neck T-shirt. Instead of whiskey, he sipped milk from a half-gallon jug. Shafer wondered if Duto had an ulcer. For the first time, he seemed old to Shafer. Shafer hated thinking of him that way. Duto was younger than he was. If Duto was old, what was Shafer?

He was pleased to see Duto put down the milk, sit up straight, slip on his commander’s mask. “Where’s your buddy?” On cue, the front door creaked open. Twelve quiet seconds later, Wells joined them. His hands were loose at his sides and he looked curiously around Duto’s kitchen like he’d never seen appliances before. Tactical readiness. Or maybe just looking for a glass. He opened a cupboard, found one, swiped for the jug.

“Careful,” Shafer said. “Vinny drinks straight from it.”

“Whatever he has, I’m sure we’ve already caught.” Wells poured himself a glass. “What happened?”

“All I know, the alert came through about fifteen minutes after I got off the phone with him.” Shafer looked at Duto. “Attack in Manila. Worldwide lockdown.”

“I called the station. Veder’s office. Nobody answered.”

“I think it was already done. The alert said forty minutes prior. Bomb in his SUV.”

“Guards, too?”

“Dead at the scene. I checked at the TOC”—the Tactical Operations Center—“before I left. No new cables, but local TV in Manila had live feeds. The SUV was shredded. Witnesses saying two motorcycles, each with a rider and passenger. Whole show over in less than thirty seconds. Somebody had a cell-phone video, but all it showed was a motorcycle cutting through stopped cars. Back of a rider in a leather jacket. They’ll get other video, but I don’t think it’ll show much. A pro job.”

“By definition, anybody who kills a station chief and two bodyguards is a professional,” Wells said.

“Nobody’s taken responsibility yet.”

“What are we doing?” Duto said.

“FBI is waking a forensic team up. They’ll be in the air before dawn. And we’ve moving a SOG team from Mindanao to Manila.” SOG stood for Special Operations Group, the CIA’s paramilitary arm, mostly ex — Special Forces soldiers.

“There’s going to be Olympian-quality ass-covering on this one. Why didn’t we take the warning more seriously, et cetera. Tricky part is, what does Hebley tell the FBI?”

“Maybe he keeps it inside the tent, claims that disclosing it would jeopardize an ongoing op,” Shafer said.

Duto shook his head at the suggestion. “Too many people know already. They can’t make it disappear. So they admit it, but they emphasize it was vague, unspecific, untraceable.”

“That’s what you would do.”

“Yes.”

“Love that three of our guys aren’t even cold and you’re more worried about where the blame is going than finding out who killed them.”

“I am telling you that Hebley will smell the reputational risk and act accordingly. You can choose to pretend otherwise and blunder into some avoidable political trap. Like you’ve done your whole career. Only now you don’t have me to bail you out, Ellis.”

Shafer couldn’t believe that a couple minutes before he’d felt sympathy for Duto. “James Veder would still be alive if you’d pushed your guys harder yesterday. If you’d gotten us a name.”

Duto shrugged: I tried.

“This make sense to either of you?” Wells said. “If the Iranians are really so close to a bomb, why poke us now? Why not keep their heads down until it’s done?”

“They don’t know they have a leak,” Duto said. “They don’t know we know they’re behind this—”

“If they’re behind this—” Shafer said.

“And maybe they’re done already. Maybe they’ve got a nuke on a shelf in a cave somewhere.”

Shafer wanted to believe Duto was wrong. CIA, DIA, MI6, the counterproliferation guys at the International Atomic Energy Agency, everybody said the Iranians were years from a bomb. But the estimates could be wrong both ways. The agency might have been so worried about giving Iran’s scientists too much credit that it hadn’t given them enough.

“And this is their coming-out party?” Wells said. “Prod us, dare us to respond?”

“Not like they’re going to take out an ad on Jazeera.”

“A giant mushroom cloud,” Shafer said. “We’re in the club. But they haven’t run a test.” Meaning an underground nuclear test. The United States had installed sensors in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iraq to detect the shock waves an explosion would produce.

“Can they be confused with earthquakes?” Wells said.

“I don’t think so. It’s a very distinct signature. I’ll check in the morning.”

“Maybe they’re so confident—” Duto said.

“I don’t care how confident they are. They need to be sure, and that means a test.”

“What are the other options? False flag is the most obvious.” Meaning that another intelligence service had both invented the Revolutionary Guard double agent and carried out Veder’s assassination, with the aim of making the United States blame Iran.

“From who? Who gains if we attack Iran?” The crucial question. But none of the answers made sense.

“The Israelis,” Duto said. “And they love motorcycle bombs.”

“Can’t see them bombing two of their own embassies to build this guy’s legend.”

“They didn’t exactly level them.”

“And kill a station chief. We’ve had their back for fifty years. They wouldn’t risk that. Especially since they know they might convince us to attack Iran anyway.”

“Who, then?”

“The Russians or the Chinese might kill a station chief if they thought they could get away with it—”

“That’s a stretch—”

“I know it’s a stretch, Vinny. But, again, why? Moscow, Beijing, they don’t mind an Iranian nuke. They can manage Iran easier than we can. At least they think so.”

“Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe they’ve decided they can’t trust Iran.”

“Then why not just come on board with sanctions, help us put pressure on Tehran?”

“So as not to piss the Iranians off,” Duto said. “Look publicly like they’ve abandoned their ally.”

“They could whisper to the White House, Go ahead, do what you have to do, we won’t stop you — in fact, we’ll help you target. Much easier than taking the risk of killing one of our station chiefs. No.”

“No,” Duto said. “I don’t suppose we think MI6 or any of the Europeans are possibles.”

“What about the Saudis,” Wells said. “They’d love to see us hit Iran, and I can’t see them shedding too many tears over one station chief.”

“But they’re like Israel. They wouldn’t risk the blowback if we found out.”

“We keep tripping over the same rock,” Shafer said. “Allies don’t kill allies. Let’s go the other way. From the bottom. Glenn Mason.”

“Somebody — the Iranians, for the sake of argument — hires him,” Wells said. “He puts together a team. Attacks two Israeli embassies. Then settles his score with Veder. On the Rev Guard dime. And Iranians didn’t mind?”

“Maybe it was part of the deal. They wanted to kill a station chief, he wouldn’t work for them unless they let him pick the target.”

“Okay, but what’s he been doing the last three years?” Wells said. “The Iranians were so sure they’d have a bomb by now that they decided to hire Mason back then?”

In the dining room, Duto’s grandfather clock chimed three times, sweet and sober.

“We can’t solve this in your kitchen,” Shafer said. “Too many moving parts. The seventh floor needs to know this is more than chasing down some Iranian cell. They need Mason’s name so they can focus on him. Where he’s been. Where he’s getting his money.”

“And if you’re telling them that—” Duto said.

“We tell them how we got onto this. You, your buddy Juan Pablo Montoya.”

“Enjoying this, Ellis? You wonder why people don’t like you—”

“I know why people don’t like me. I just don’t care. I don’t draw my entire identity from a crowd of ass-kissers.”

“Do what you have to do.” Duto smiled. “You may not get the reaction you expect.” He turned to Wells. “What about you? You going in, too? They’ll love to see you.”

“If we can find her name, I’m going to look for the woman.”

“What woman?” Duto and Shafer said simultaneously.

“The one who caused the trouble between Mason and Veder.”

At home, Shafer found his wife asleep, snoring lightly, a new habit. She used old-style face cream, the gloppy white stuff, masking her cheeks. Not that she needed it, as far as Shafer was concerned. The mirror gave him no relief. But when he looked at her, he saw her true youth smiling under her skin. He kissed her ear and she sighed in her sleep. He lay on the covers beside her and waited for the morning.

He arrived at Langley at seven a.m. The bad news had spread overnight. Three dead, no suspects, the threat still out there. In the elevators, men and women nodded grimly at one another, no easy greetings today.

Shafer’s phone rang as he reached his desk. Lucy Joyner. “What did you get me into?”

“We almost saved him. Truth.”

“I’m making those files go away. And your note.”

“Before you do, one more favor.”

“Ellis—”

“It’ll only take a second. Please.”

She didn’t answer.

“I need the SUFC reports for Glenn Mason from ’98 through 2001.” Case officers had to report what the agency inelegantly called serious unauthorized foreign contacts, a term that essentially translated into relationships with foreign nationals. Mason had almost certainly filed an SUFC on the Peruvian woman he’d dated.

“They weren’t digitized in his personnel file?”

“Didn’t see them.”

“I’ll take a look.”

“You’re the best.” Shafer hung up before she could change her mind. He tried not to notice the tremble in his fingers as he punched in his next call.

“General Hebley’s office.” A woman’s voice, calm, efficient, slightly cold. A nurse who specialized in blood draws.

“It’s Ellis Shafer. I need to talk to the director. It’s urgent. About today’s attack.”

“Ellis who?”

“Special Assistant Deputy Director Ellis Shafer.” Duto had given him the title just before he left. Shafer had figured out the acronym, decided to let Duto have his little joke. He wished he hadn’t.

“Spell your last name?”

“S-H-A-F-E-R.” He resisted the urge to throw in a T after the F. In the background, he heard a man say, “Kyra!”

“I’ll get him the message.”

“Thanks—”

She was gone. Shafer waited an hour before calling again.

This time she was curt. “I have passed along the message—”

“Please tell him it’s time-sensitive—”

“Yes, Mr. Shafer.”

Shafer knew he couldn’t call again. While he waited, he read up on the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian nuclear program. The idea that the Guard would have used Glenn Mason was not as odd as it first seemed. The Guard’s Quds Force, which handled foreign espionage and operations, had a history of using non-Iranians for politically sensitive jobs. As far back as 1984, Iran had used the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah to bomb the American embassy in Beirut. If Mason had somehow come to the Guard’s attention, its commanders might have seen him as a perfect way to attack the agency. We’ll use this traitor, show you that you’re rotten from the inside out.

Shafer’s phone rang, a blocked inside number. He grabbed for it.

“General—”

“This is Jess Bunshaft. I understand you have some information for us.”

Bunshaft was one of Hebley’s mid-level assistants.

“I can come up—”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll be in your office in five minutes.”

Click. The seventh floor was making a habit of hanging up on him.

Five minutes became forty-five by the time Bunshaft showed. He was a small man with a big gym-grown neck, a receding hairline, and a neatly groomed goatee. He was half Shafer’s age. Or less. Like most of the world. He reached out a stubby-fingered hand.

“Jess Bunshaft. Sorry I’m late. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Bunshaft showed Shafer a mouthful of perfect white Chiclets. Everyone under forty seemed to have teeth meant for high-definition television. “You’re a living legend.”

“Which translates as won’t retire though I desperately should.”

Bunshaft made a sound that could have been a laugh. He sat on the edge of Shafer’s couch and reached into his jacket for a reporter’s notebook and pen. He broadcast eagerness, but not to hear what Shafer had to say. To be done with this chore, so he could get back to more productive tasks.

“Ever heard of Glenn Mason?”

Bunshaft shook his head.

“He was a case officer for more than a decade. Lima, Baghdad, Hong Kong. Resigned a few years back.”

“Got it, got it, Lima, Baghdad—” Bunshaft scribbled in his notebook, the kind of active listening that wasn’t listening at all but a parody.

“Put the notebook down for a second and pay attention.” Shafer hated sounding like a cranky old man, but he had to get through.

Bunshaft smiled. “Sure.” He placed the notebook and pen on the couch, patting them carefully, Like you asked, Gramps.

“Glenn Mason ran the cell that killed Veder.”

“Our source says—”

“I know what the intel says about Iran. I don’t know whether the Rev Guard brought Mason in to do the job or whether this is some false flag meant to get us at Iran’s throat, but Mason’s the guy. Mason has a personal beef with Veder that goes back to Lima. In 2001, Veder stole his girlfriend there.”

Bunshaft stopped pretending to listen, started listening for real. “You think this is about a woman? In 2001?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

Shafer explained. Duto, Wells, Montoya, Nuñez, Ramos. The whole story, aside from yesterday’s research in Joyner’s office. Bunshaft took careful notes.

After twenty minutes, Shafer wound up. “That’s it. I thought you’d want to know.” Despite everything, he vaguely hoped that Bunshaft would extend a hand, invite him up to seven. Great work. Now I see why Duto kept you around.

“You didn’t think you should tell us about this earlier?” Bunshaft said.

“I called the seventh floor as soon as I got in—”

“Yesterday, I mean. Last week. When it could have done some good.”

Now Shafer understood the note-taking. Bunshaft had wanted to be sure of every detail so he could use them all for the prosecution, like a detective listening to a husband offering a half-assed alibi for the night his wife was killed.

Duto had warned him, but he’d refused to listen. Now Shafer was a convenient scapegoat if the congressional investigators came calling. We could have stopped the attack if these guys had told us instead of freelancing.

“This has all come together in the last three, four days. Duto only called me and Wells last week. We had to have the name. Imagine I’d come to you with a story about a disgruntled case officer whose name we didn’t even know.”

“Do you know when the Colombian—”

“Montoya—”

“When Montoya initially called the senator?”

Shafer shook his head.

“So, just so I have this timeline right, John Wells informed you on Monday about the possibility there might be a personal motive for an attack on a station chief—”

“Right, Monday. I told Duto. He said he’d call some of the guys he’d worked with. Came back to me with a name last night.”

“What time?”

“Right around midnight. I think he was maybe ten minutes too late.”

“If you’re playing some other angle on this, tell me now.”

“My angle is to get you to find Glenn Mason.”

“And the senator and Mr. Wells will confirm what you’ve told me.”

“Of course.”

Bunshaft stood. At the door, he stopped. “Stick around this afternoon, okay? Carcetti may want to talk to you.” Max Carcetti was Hebley’s chief of staff and enforcer. Hearing his name didn’t inspire confidence.

“I’ll be here.”

He called Wells and Duto, told them to expect questions from Bunshaft. Then Joyner called. “What you want is a paper file, hasn’t been scanned.”

“I thought everything from the late nineties was scanned—”

“Not everything, not for officers who have departed the agency. Those are in the files downstairs. You want it, go get it yourself. I’d do it sooner rather than later because suddenly the PTB”—a Joyner expression, powers that be—“seem interested in your man.”

“Will the records guys let me in?”

“I’ll tell them. This is the last favor, Ellis. I mean it.”

The personnel records unit was on the second floor of the Old Headquarters Building, shrinking steadily as files were digitized and archived to cold storage in the West Virginia mountains. In twenty-five minutes, Shafer had the forms. In 1999 and 2000, Glenn Mason reported a relationship with Julia Espada, a reporter and translator for the Associated Press in Lima. His report for 2001 didn’t mention her. The name was common, but Shafer figured tracking down an AP reporter, or ex — AP reporter, should be easy enough.

Back in his office, he turned up Espada after ninety minutes of searching, mostly on public databases. She was an American citizen now, lived in Houston. He called Wells to pass along her name and address.

“I’ll go to Houston tonight.”

“Try not to scare her.”

Wells hung up.

Shafer spent the rest of the day talking to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, confirming that Iran could not have conducted an underground test without being caught. He knew he could have answered the question in a few minutes on Wikipedia, but he preferred to distract himself from the seventh floor’s silence.

The sun had set and he was reading the latest updates from Manila when his phone rang. Bunshaft. Shafer snatched the phone.

“Mind coming upstairs?”

It wasn’t a question.

“Of course.”

“I’ll meet you at the elevator.”

And there Bunshaft was, waiting for him like an old friend, leading him past the guard station that protected the suite where the director and his deputies worked. Bunshaft made a right, then a left. Suddenly Shafer knew where they were heading, a windowless conference room sometimes called SIS Jail, because it could be locked from outside. He’d seen it with Wells, years before. It wasn’t exactly Guantánamo. It had phones, a couch, a private bathroom. Mainly it was used to intimidate officers suspected of mid-level misbehavior like expense account fraud or leaking to the press.

So he was in worse trouble than he expected. He stopped. Bunshaft waved him on like they were headed for Hebley’s suite.

“Don’t bullshit me. I know this floor better than you.”

Bunshaft’s fake smile disappeared, then came back stronger. “Come on, Ellis. It’s just for a couple hours. Didn’t want you to get bored and go home.”

Arguing would be pointless. Shafer followed Bunshaft into the conference room, which was as studiously neutral as he remembered. He settled himself on the couch, pretending not to hear the click of the lock as Bunshaft left. A laptop and phone on the table, twin honeypots. Shafer wished he could warn Wells and Duto. But every call and every keystroke from these rooms was monitored in real time. He dialed his wife instead.

“Ellis.”

“Hi, babe.” In almost forty years of marriage, he had never called her that. He knew she’d understand.

“How was your day?” She coughed, trying to force the word out. “Babe.”

“Not bad. I’m stuck in a meeting. John might come by looking for me. If he does, just tell him you don’t know when I’ll be back.” The listeners could guess what he was doing, but he’d gotten the message out with enough deniability not to worsen his position, whatever his position was.

“Will do. Love you, Ellis. Hope you get home soon.”

“Me, too. I love you, babe.”

“Don’t push it.”

He watched the seconds slip into minutes and then hours. He closed his eyes, tried to meditate. But he’d never been much for meditation. He kept trying to calculate how many hours he had left. Life expectancy for a man his age couldn’t be more than twenty years. Twenty years, seventy-three hundred days, one hundred seventy-five thousand hours. Give or take. Sounded like a lot, but Shafer knew better. Like sands through the hourglass, et cetera, et cetera. Cheery thoughts. Maybe he ought to concentrate on the practical. He wondered if they’d keep him overnight. He’d sleep on the floor. His back couldn’t tolerate the couch.

Around eleven, the lock clicked open and Bunshaft walked into the room, followed by a tall man with a high-and-tight haircut, broad shoulders, and a perfectly round paunch. Like he’d swallowed a bowling ball. This was Max Carcetti, Hebley’s chief of staff. Hebley had been Carcetti’s patron in the Marines. They’d risen together until Hebley had four stars on his collar and Carcetti three of his own. Now Carcetti was the aide Hebley trusted most, the one who made problems disappear. Almost everyone at the top had someone like Carcetti. Except for guys like Duto, who preferred to play the role themselves.

Shafer stood. “General.”

Carcetti crossed the room in two big steps, put out a hand, crushed his bones in a Marine grip. “Ellis Shafer. Myth and legend. Sorry to meet you under these circumstances.”

If Carcetti was being polite, Shafer was in even more trouble than he thought. Carcetti and Bunshaft sat side by side across the table from Shafer. “Tell me what you told him,” Carcetti said. “Not the highlights. The whole thing.”

Shafer repeated the story that had led him and Wells to Glenn Mason.

“Ever met Mason?” Carcetti said when Shafer was done.

“No.”

“What about Veder?”

Shafer tried to remember. “Not that I recall.”

“Because, I have to say, the story is compelling. There’s only one problem.”

“Sir?” Shafer wasn’t in the habit of calling anyone sir, but the expression on Carcetti’s face suggested he ought to make the effort.

“Glenn Mason is dead. He’s been dead more than three years.”

13

Salome sat in the back of a Nissan sedan, reading the email on a two-year-old Dell laptop. She’d written it the afternoon before, when Duke called to confirm that the job was done. His men had stowed their motorcycles in an old cargo van, ditched the van in a long-term lot near the international airport in Manila. They would leave the Philippines one by one, by sea and air, for Hong Kong and Bangkok and Dubai. As always, time and planning were the best defense against surveillance. CIA, NSA, and the Philippine National Police would watch the airport and the international ferries. But hundreds of thousands of men entered and left the Philippines each week. Without a tip, the pool of possible suspects was too large to track.

A day had passed since the attack. It was nearly noon in Manila, morning in Istanbul, the sun still hidden behind the city’s eastern hills. Salome was about to send her email to reporters around the world. She would cc a copy to Veder’s CIA account, too, to be sure that the agency saw it immediately. She had intentionally written the email to appear over-the-top. Its real audience was the CIA, not the media. And the CIA already knew that the claim of responsibility was fake, that the Army of Mecca and Medina didn’t exist. After all, Reza had told Brian Taylor that Iran planned to invent a Sunni terrorist group to take credit for the assassination.

The Nissan stopped at a light on Tarlabası, a wide, grimy avenue that traced a scar through central Istanbul. Salome handed the Dell across the backseat to Vassily, a twenty-two-year-old Bulgarian who was her best hacker. Vassily had a rash of pimples on his chin and the pale doughy skin of a man who spent his life in basement rooms lit only by computer screens. He could easily be a virgin. He was at least half in love with Salome. She wondered if she should sleep with him, guarantee his loyalty forever. But the experience would be too much for him. He’d wind up obsessed. Anyway, he was already loyal. Let him enjoy his suffering. In her experience, Eastern European men were either sadists or masochists, and Vassily was no sadist.

“Send it.”

Vassily clicked open a map studded with green and yellow icons. “There’s an unlocked Wi-Fi three hundred meters down.”

The Nissan’s driver raised his eyes to her to show her he’d heard. He was a tall, slim man in his late thirties. He almost always wore a suit and almost never spoke. He was a former soldier who had nearly died in a motorcycle crash a decade before. The accident tore most of the skin from his legs, crushed his nose and chin. Then he had fallen into the trembling hands of an alcoholic surgeon whose repair efforts nearly killed him. Ultimately, another set of doctors repaired much of the damage, though up close the soldier’s cheeks and nose glowed with an unnatural shine.

He and Salome had lived two houses apart growing up. He was two years older than she, and they’d had their share of teenage fumblings. Nothing serious, but enough to give them reason to keep in touch, see each other on those rare occasions when both were home. In another life, she might have married him. After his accident, she visited him in the hospital a dozen times. She asked him once how he’d managed the pain. His eyes went flat. Every day I prayed for the world to end, he said. Not just to die, for the whole world to end.

I understand, she said. And she did. As a child, a teenager, she’d thought of herself as happy. But at twenty-two, she’d plunged into a depression so black that she couldn’t leave her room, couldn’t eat. Couldn’t even sleep. She lay on her floor, eyes open, waiting to die, hoping to die, knowing she wouldn’t. Worst of all, she had no idea what had triggered her pain. She’d was getting ready for her first year of law school. She had plenty of friends. No one in her family had died. She just… disappeared.

After nearly a month, her roommate insisted on taking her to a local infirmary. She was so terrified of being locked up that somehow she faked her way through a ten-minute interview with the doctor on duty. She walked out with an appointment with a psychiatrist and a prescription for Prozac. This may take a few weeks to work, he said.

But he was wrong. She could have been an advertisement for Eli Lilly. After a week, the clouds over the world had turned from black to gray. She could pretend to be human again. After a second week, she wasn’t pretending. Yet the experience profoundly unsettled her. She had lost her balance so easily, fallen so far so fast, that she could no longer trust herself, much less the rest of the world.

She couldn’t directly connect that episode to the choices she’d made in the years that followed, much less to the mission she’d chosen for herself. Yet she knew the link was real.

She wasn’t sure how much her driver knew about that lost month. He’d been serving at the time, and a few months later he’d crashed his bike. By the time the reconstructions were done, so was his military career. He disappeared to Africa, worked as a soldier of fortune and bodyguard. When she decided to devote her existence to this mission, she knew she would need one person she could trust absolutely. The list was short. He was at the top.

He agreed without hesitation. He had served as her driver and bodyguard ever since. He kept an eye on Vassily and the other bright boys when she couldn’t. But he wasn’t exactly her lieutenant. He’d never volunteered an opinion on what they were doing, whether it was moral, whether it even made sense. And she’d never asked.

Vassily ran a finger across the Dell’s battered black case, as close as he came to a sensual gesture. “After we send the email, you destroy this. Safest way, use it once and never again. Throw it in the Bosphorus, set it on fire, I don’t care. I have a hundred more.”

“I’m aware. You buy them with my money.”

Vassily picked up used laptops at flea markets in Belgrade and Sofia, wiped their hard drives, installed Linux or pirated copies of Windows as operating systems. Intel, AMD, and the other chip makers all embedded unique serial numbers in each processor they created, the computer equivalent of a vehicle identification number. But buying used laptops for cash broke the chain of custody and stopped everyone, including the NSA, from linking the chip serial numbers to the new owner.

Along with new operating systems, Vassily installed special antisurveillance software to block bugs, location finders, or keystroke capture programs. His programs were far more aggressive than the commercial antispyware that companies like Norton sold. They would wipe the entire hard drive if they discovered any suspicious program.

Salome’s email would be double-bagged, in hacker jargon, routed through an anonymizing server in Denmark, then a second in Iceland. Vassily had assured Salome that the NSA would need weeks to trace it to Istanbul, much less this wireless connection, which was an unlocked router that couldn’t be connected to them anyway. Even so, he had insisted that they use the laptop only once. For a message this important, it’s the only safe way. They track everything on the Internet. And it’s like a thread — once they start to pull it, no one can stop them. They make connections between an email you sent today, a phone call you made two years ago, a text message I sent from another phone that wasn’t even to you. You know the difference between God and the NSA?

The NSA doesn’t wish it was God.

“The router. Pull over.” The Nissan stopped. “No surveillance, clear signal. At your word.”

“Send it.”

Vassily typed, lifted his hands from the keyboard with a flourish. “All systems go, as the Americans say.” In the rearview mirror, the driver caught Salome’s eye: Must he prattle so?

The sedan rolled on. Salome stowed the laptop on the floor, rested a hand on Vassily’s arm. He sighed like a dog whose master had just scratched his belly. “You’ve done well. We’ll drop you at the Galata.” The sigh turned to a grunt, but he didn’t argue.

Ten minutes later, the Nissan pulled over. “Remember what I said about this.” He tapped the laptop. His hand was the color of an egg-white omelet and not much firmer.

“Go,” Salome said.

The Galata Bridge was a wide, low span that crossed the eastern edge of the Golden Horn, a narrow channel that stretched west off the Bosphorus. To the north, a hilly neighborhood called Karaköy offered some of Istanbul’s best views. The plaza at the bridge’s southern end functioned as Istanbul’s Times Square, a transportation hub for locals and tourists alike. The bridge itself provided a close-up look at the never-ending parade of freighters, ferries, yachts, and cruise ships that made the Bosphorus one of the world’s most vital waterways.

On this morning, commuter traffic choked the Galata, though the sun had just appeared over the mosques and apartments on the eastern side of the Bosphorus. Winter clouds reflected the city’s lights onto the strait’s black waves, creasing it with streaks of orange and yellow. Finally, the Nissan crawled off the southern end of the bridge. It turned left onto a wide boulevard that circled the edge of the Eminönü peninsula, the end of Europe. The high walls of the Topkapi Palace loomed atop the hill above this road. For centuries, the Topkapi had been home to the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Now it was a museum for tourists.

Salome looked at the high brick walls of the palace. She saw Langley, and Fort Meade, and all the other high-security campuses that had sprouted in the forests around Washington. The Ottoman sultans had openly disdained their subjects. The DCI and the rest of America’s modern princes claimed to serve the people outside their walls. Maybe they even believed their speeches. But they had more in common with the Ottomans than they knew. Walls offered security, but at a price. They blinded those inside to the world around them. Salome was rescuing the princes from their insularity, forcing them to recognize a threat they should have already seen. For this heroism they would call her a traitor, if she was fool enough to let them discover her.

The Nissan pulled over. Salome handed her driver the laptop. He would make sure it was clean of fingerprints and leave it in an alley to be scavenged and resold. Salome preferred anonymous disposal to destruction. In the unlikely event that the Americans could track it based on a single email, they would be chasing a false trail.

“One hour.”

“One hour.”

She walked to the terminals that served the Bosphorus commuter ferries. Every hour, dozens of ships docked around the bridge. Thousands of men and women were now hurrying through the plaza on their way to work. A brisk ten-minute walk brought her west of the bridge, to the terminal for the busiest ferry of all, a short route that ran almost straight across the Bosphorus. The man who called himself Reza waited near a ticket booth. He smoked a cigarette and wore a shapeless windbreaker with a nylon hood that shadowed his head. A baseball cap and heavy plastic glasses further hid his face.

As Salome approached, he took a final drag on his cigarette and tossed it to his left. Left signaled that he had not been followed and could call Brian Taylor. Salome gave no sign that she’d noticed him. She kept walking. She was looking for surveillance overt or covert, Turkish police or plainclothes officers, anything out of the ordinary in the morning scrum. She didn’t expect anything. In the aftermath of Veder’s killing, the CIA would be desperate to talk to Reza, but it had no way of finding him. Still, she’d decided to check the plaza herself. She had to meet Reza after the call anyway.

She took one more look. The plaza was the usual perfect mess of confusion, nothing more or less. She joined the crowd heading south, her wordless symbol that she agreed he was clean. The moment was his.

Reza smoked one more cigarette. Then he pulled out a new, unused mobile phone that he’d bought for cash near the Grand Bazaar a couple weeks earlier. Nothing in the world was untraceable anymore, but Salome and Reza and Duke were trying. They knew NSA and CIA would try to pinpoint a call to Taylor’s phone even before Taylor picked up. The Turks might even be helping, though the CIA wouldn’t ask for local aid on a job this sensitive unless it saw no alternative.

Even NSA’s newest software couldn’t find a call from a prepaid handset instantaneously. In middle- and high-income countries, big telcos tolerated prepaids as a way to reach poorer customers. But they designed call-routing software to prioritize monthly subscribers. They were also very concerned with making sure that hackers didn’t find ways to beat their tolling systems and get free airtime. What all this interference meant in practice was that the NSA needed at least ninety seconds to lock down new prepaid phones.

Reza hoped to finish his call by then. But even if he went long, NSA would have no way to pick him out from every other commuter holding a phone. Surveillance cameras had become all but inescapable in major cities. The key to beating them was not hiding from them but confounding them with crowds.

Reza murmured in Farsi, amping himself up, getting into character. You warned this CIA officer. Told him an attack was coming. He didn’t listen. The blood of these men in Manila, it’s on his hands. Not yours. He looked around for his Revolutionary Guard minders, the men who would torture him and his family in Tehran if they knew he was making this call. Did they exist? Of course they existed. If they didn’t exist, he couldn’t betray them. Were they in this plaza even now, watching him?

No. He was clear.

Taylor answered on two rings. “Yes?” In Farsi. “Reza? Is that you?”

“I warned you. And now it’s happened.”

“We didn’t have enough specifics—”

“You blame me for this?”

“That’s not what I meant—” Taylor sounded panicked. Reza wondered how many people were listening from the American side. Ten? Twenty? Whispering in Taylor’s ear, Don’t lose him—

“Help us. Help us catch them.”

“I don’t even know why they chose Manila.”

“Come in for a debrief, Reza. We can talk somewhere safe.”

“How many times must I tell you? I am not your agent.”

“I don’t even know your real name, that’s the problem—”

“Not a problem. My protection, my only protection.”

Reza checked his watch. Sixty seconds already. He turned east, surfing along the commuters pushing south. Not too fast. He wanted the whole call to route through a single tower, give the Americans as few clues as possible.

“At least help me understand what happened. We don’t get this.”

“I don’t, either.” Reza couldn’t hide his frustration. He was a proud Rev Guard officer. Admitting ignorance to an American embarrassed him. “What’s happening in Tehran, who’s making these choices, I don’t know. I’m not at that level. They give me orders, I follow. Ask your other sources.” Like you have any.

“We’re trying. What about tactically, are you planning more attacks?”

“I haven’t been told.”

“I know you don’t care about money—”

“If you know I don’t care about money, why do you insult me by talking about it?”

Silence.

“Can we meet face-to-face—”

“Again?”

“Not a debrief. Just you and me.”

“Lie.”

“No. Your terms, you set the time and place. You’re doing this for all the right reasons, Reza”—the words too obvious, his wheedling tone pathetic—“but it’ll be helpful for us both.”

“I’ll consider it. I have something to tell you anyway.”

Reza hung up, looked at his watch. One hundred fifty-six seconds. Too long. The phone buzzed in his hand. Taylor, calling back like a woman. He powered down the phone, joined the commuters headed up into Sultanahmet.

The street was just wide enough for a line of parked cars and a single traffic lane. On both sides were tiny stores stuffed with sewing machines and bolts of cloth. Twenty years of growth had given Istanbul massive suburban-style malls on its edges and ultra-luxury stores in the ritzy neighborhoods northeast of Karaköy. But in the Middle East tradition, the city still had clusters of tiny specialty shops that all seemed to offer identical products at identical prices. A woman peered in the window of a store that hadn’t yet opened for the day. Salome. She turned and followed as he walked past. This street had no cameras. They’d checked. He extracted the SIM card from his phone, crushed it in the gutter. The phone itself was useless now, and untraceable. He’d wipe it down and dump it in a trash can.

“So?”

Reza told her.

“Did he believe you?”

“I think so.” He tapped the pockets of his windbreaker until he found his cigarettes. He held the pack to her. Pro forma. He’d never seen her smoke. But today she took one. She must be pleased. He lit hers, then his.

“Good. Now we make him suffer,” she said. She dragged deep, blew a perfect smoke ring into the gray morning air. She wasn’t short on tricks. They both watched in silence until it dissolved away. “We make him wait.”

14

Mason’s dead?” Shafer didn’t have to pretend to be shocked. He wanted to argue. But he knew whatever he said would only make him a bigger fool when Carcetti explained how he knew Glenn Mason had departed the planet.

“When this guy told me your theory, I was dubious.” Carcetti chuffed Bunshaft on the arm like a coach sending in a plucky benchwarmer at the end of a blowout. “By dubious, I mean I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. But Jess here, you had him convinced. Ellis Shafer says this, Ellis Shafer says that, Ellis Shafer says his ass smells like roses, why don’t I lean over, take a whiff. I told him, check Mason’s records. Figured it was the quickest way to get him out of my office. You get a look at those bank records, Ellis?”

Shafer shook his head.

“Allow me to inform you, then. Mason hasn’t touched his pension for almost four years. Thing’s building up in an HSBC account at the rate of eight hundred forty American dollars every two weeks. Okay, fine, I know what Ellis Shafer will say if I tell him that, he’ll say that’s just what Mason would do if he’s gone undercover to work for the Revolutionary Guard. Of course, dumb Marine like me, I would think that if Mason was working against the United States, he’d be sure to draw that money down so it wouldn’t be obvious, in case anyone ever went looking for him. But fine, I’m trying to think like Ellis Shafer would—”

Each time, Shayy-fur, Carcetti drawing out Shafer’s name, ridiculing it. Mockery was among the oldest interrogation tricks around, and the most effective.

“So I tell Jess, check Glenn’s passport, and wouldn’t you know, that hasn’t been used in close to four years, not since he entered Bangkok on a tourist visa. Not a peep. And so I myself call our COS in Bangkok this afternoon. He’s none too happy to hear from me, what with the time difference, but he picks up like a good soldier. I ask him if come the morning he won’t try to help us find Mr. Mason. Turns out he doesn’t have to. Because before he does, he checks the embassy’s records for reports of Americans who have died in Thailand in the last five years. In those files is the sad tale of an American citizen named Glenn Mason, who drowned in a boat accident off the coast of Phuket. Three weeks after his arrival in Thailand. Mr. Mason was unmarried and without siblings or parent — in fact, without anyone who merited notification. So he was cremated and presumably turned into landfill, or whatever the Thais do with the ashes of Americans that no one wants—”

Shafer had to say something, if only to stop the flood from Carcetti. “When the report came in, nobody at the embassy realized that he was a former case officer?”

“Why would they, Ellis?” This question delivered reasonably enough. Shafer had no answer. American men died regularly in Thailand. Of alcohol poisoning, heroin overdoses, and, yes, drownings. Mason’s name wouldn’t have stood out to the overworked State Department officer who happened to see it.

“So he drowned. And I think to myself, what might Ellis Shafer say to this sad story? He might argue that Mr. Mason had gone to Thailand to assume a new identity for his work as a double agent for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Never mind the incredible implausibility that Iran would recruit him in the first place. Or that he would agree to such recruitment. This afternoon, yours truly asked NSA for a priority search, has anyone whose photo matches Mr. Mason traveled under any name with any nation’s passport in the last four years? Would you like to guess what the search found, Ellis?”

“You’re grinning like a monkey that hijacked a Chiquita truck, so I’m going to say nothing.”

“Correct. By the way, NSA checked to see if his email accounts had been active since the accident, cell phone, et cetera. Nothing.”

Carcetti spread his arms, turned up his hands like a scale. “The evidence Glenn Mason is dead.” He lowered his right hand to just above the table. “The evidence he’s alive at all, much less running a worldwide plot on behalf of Quds Force or anyone else in the Rev Guard.” He lifted his left hand over his head. “Since even you would have to agree he couldn’t do that without leaving some electronic trace.”

Earlier in his career, Shafer would have argued. Age had not exactly brought him wisdom, but it had slowed him down. On the one hand, he could take his spanking like a good boy and move on. On the other, having his objections noted for the record might help him later. He decided on the second course. Carefully. Carcetti looked to be about a half inch from sending him home for an internal review that would last long enough to tip Shafer into retirement.

“Jess, did you call anybody who worked with Mason to find out for yourself if he’d fought with James Veder over a woman in Lima? Did you talk to Wells?”

“I—”

“He didn’t have to do any of that,” Carcetti said. “Unless Glenn Mason can kill from the afterlife.”

“Do you think I came up with Mason on my own? Or was I duped? Me, Duto, and Wells, why would we stick ourselves in this briar patch?”

“If I had to guess, I’d guess that you are desperately trying to prove yourself relevant. So you took a half-assed theory and ran with it.”

“Anyone from the embassy see Glenn Mason’s body before it was cremated?”

“Why would they?”

“And the station hasn’t gotten the original police report yet.”

“So the Thai police are in on the conspiracy, too?”

Faking a death for an offshore accident wouldn’t require anything like a conspiracy. Rent a small boat, fail to return it, let it be found empty a day or two later. Arranging for a body would be the only tricky part, the only part that might require the cooperation of a helpful police officer. Or maybe not. Neither salt water nor the creatures of the sea were kind to human flesh. After a few days in the ocean, corpses were indistinguishable.

But Carcetti had made up his mind. He’d made up his mind even before he told Bunshaft to check the records. He or his bosses had decided that Glenn Mason could not be working for Iran, that the idea was idiotic. His certainty told Shafer something else — that the seventh floor had locked on to the theory that Iran was responsible for Veder’s killing. Believing Mason might be involved was easier if there was a possibility that someone other than the Revolutionary Guard had hired him.

“You aren’t interested in talking to John. Vinny. Even Montoya.”

“I am interested in making this whole sorry episode disappear so we can figure out who shot Veder and what to do about it.”

Shafer decided to make one last play. He knew he’d fail, but maybe he could provoke Carcetti into telling him more about the Rev Guard tipster.

“Our source for these plots.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen some cables—”

“We’re going to want to tighten that list.” Carcetti wasn’t smiling.

“My understanding, this is humint, one source, same guy who gave us the Israeli embassy bombings a few months ago. And my understanding, he’s new. Very new.”

Carcetti looked at his watch. “Much as I love chatting with you, Ellis, I have to be up in five hours. The director doesn’t like it if I’m late for our morning run. So, the point, please—”

“Guy comes out of nowhere. Suddenly he’s giving us grade-A intel on the Guard. Better than we’ve ever had. How much do we know about him? Do we even know his real name?”

Carcetti didn’t answer, and Shafer knew he’d scored.

“We know everything he’s told us has checked out.”

“Doesn’t that seem awfully convenient?”

“I’m just a big dumb Marine, Ellis. But I have a different word for that kind of intel. I call it actionable. I call it a godsend.”

“What if he’s fake?”

“You think you’re the first person with that theory? What’s the logic, that the Iranians are intentionally tipping their own attacks? That some other service is running a false flag, killed Veder and bombed those embassies to get us to attack Iran? All right, fine. Tell me who. Make it convincing, I’ll drive you to Hebley’s house myself.”

For the first time since Bunshaft had brought him to this room, Shafer felt something like hope. Carcetti meant to be sarcastic, but his words betrayed a faint uncertainty. He might listen to an alternate theory. Too bad Shafer didn’t have one. “If I can prove that Mason is still alive—”

“No one up here is interested in letting you freelance. We can’t control your buddy John, but you still work for us.”

A nicely tricky formulation. Shafer wondered if Carcetti was subtler than he looked. Maybe he was inviting Shafer and Wells to keep investigating, just in case. Or maybe he was sure Shafer and Wells were wrong but didn’t mind watching them put their necks in the guillotine. Either way, he’d offered Shafer the tiniest of openings.

Carcetti pushed back from the table. “Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Know if I ever bring you up here again, your resignation letter will be waiting.”

“Great to meet you too, General.”

15

Julia Espada lived in a one-story ranch east of downtown Houston’s skyscrapers, an iffy neighborhood. A battered swing set occupied most of her narrow front yard, under a big porch light for security.

Avis had stuck Wells with a neon green Jeep Patriot, gaudy and underpowered. The worst possible car for a spy, or anyone else. He eased it into her driveway behind a decade-old Explorer. Inside the house, a dog yammered. A big dog. Wells wondered if he should wait for morning. She hadn’t answered his calls. She was divorced, looking after two kids. She might not take kindly to an intrusion at this hour. But Shafer was in a mess at Langley, and the time they had wasted over the weekend had probably gotten James Veder killed. Wells stepped out of his car. “Hello!”

A lamp clicked in the living room. Wells saw a Rottweiler standing on a couch, scraping at the window. A Lab would have been too easy.

The door opened a notch. “What do you want?” Shouting over Rottie the Rott. Not exactly How are you this evening? but better than Get off my property or I have a gun.

“My name’s John. Here about Glenn Mason.”

To his surprise, she didn’t say Glenn who? or stall for time. She said something in Spanish to the dog. He whimpered and sat. The door opened. “Come.”

Inside, Wells found sagging furniture and a thready blue rug with a pattern too faded to make out. He perched awkwardly on a recliner as she sat on a couch. The dog circled the coffee table, allowing Wells to see that he was unneutered. Very unneutered. Finally, he took his place at Julia’s feet. He looked up balefully at Wells, awaiting orders.

“This is Pedro.”

“Bet he makes the other dogs in the neighborhood jealous.”

She laughed like a mountain stream high with snowmelt. Her hands were thick and tired and her hair was short, more gray than black. But when she laughed, Wells could imagine men fighting over her. “You came all the way from Langley to see me in the middle of the night.”

“I tried to call.”

“Lots of break-ins in this neighborhood. You’re lucky my children are with their father this week or I might have let Frank take a closer look at you.”

The Rottweiler wagged his stumpy tail in a way that managed to menace. “I don’t exactly work for Langley.” Wells explained who he was, what he wanted.

“You can’t make me talk, then.”

“Older I get, the more I realize I can’t make anyone do anything.”

“You only help people do what they wanted to already.”

“That’s me. Next best thing to a shrink. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

She leaned back, settled herself against the couch. Like he really was a psychiatrist and she had a dream to tell. Wells had caught a break, a witness who wanted to talk.

“I could tell you all about myself, how I don’t work for the AP anymore, I was laid off two years ago, now I translate for legal aid groups, public defenders. But you’re not here for that.”

She pointed to a framed photo: her, two kids, and a middle-aged white man with the start of a potbelly. “My ex. I met him in Lima. He was a project manager for Habitat for Humanity down there. Good man. Boring. I’ll let you in on a secret, Mr. I Don’t Exactly Work for Langley. I married him for the permiso de residencia, the green card. Don’t tell INS.” Her voice had an easy Spanish lilt. She turned out the lamp, left the room in what passed for dark in central Houston.

Wells went with the vibe, closed his eyes. “Did he know?”

“A very good question. Either way, he deserved better. But I wanted the card, and I wanted boring after James and Glenn. Such strange men. Especially Glenn. Sometimes when we were home, hours went by without him speaking. Latin men, they talk like women, more. I liked the silence.”

“Until it got strange.”

“Yes. And he made me, frightened isn’t the word, but he was dark. The stray dogs in Lima live in the hills, come down to scavenge after dark. One night we were on the highway and one came across, a big one with a limp. It turned, looked right at us. Glenn didn’t slow down until I screamed. He pretended he hadn’t seen, but I knew he had. He wanted to hit it. Feel the bones crack against the bumper. That was the beginning of the end for us, I think.” She went silent. Wells waited. “Maybe I’m making him sound worse than he was. He loved me, I think, as much as he could. He wanted to marry me. I didn’t know how to break it off—”

“Did you know he worked for the agency?”

“Of course I knew. By the third time you go to the embassy, it’s obvious who is and who isn’t. He didn’t really hide it. Most of them don’t.”

“That didn’t bother you? Peru, the late nineties—”

“I didn’t love Shining Path, either. So, no, that didn’t bother me. But when the end came, I should have known better, told him it’s over. And I probably would have, but James got there first, and he was a—”

She sighed, a lover’s light sigh.

“Must have been good, you remember him that way after all these years.”

“I know it’s foolish, but yes. He had the confidence. And with reason. Cojones like Pedro.” She laughed. “All the tricks, too. I can’t explain, when I met him I couldn’t stand him, I knew what he was, Mr. James Veder, CIA from Colombia, a real dirty war going on up there. But he had something.”

“Charisma.”

“I knew I was going to be his conquest of the month, I didn’t care.”

“Until Glenn walked in on you.”

The light snapped on. Wells opened his eyes to see her sitting up. Relaxed no more.

“Why do you come here if you know the whole story?”

“I don’t.”

“James came to see me at Glenn’s. The first time for us there. Glenn was supposed to be away overnight. Something happened, he flew back. Me and James, we didn’t even have time to cover ourselves when he walked in—”

“That bad.”

“He threatened to kill us. Of course I wanted to live, but part of me understood. How he must have felt. But he didn’t do anything. The next day was September eleventh, and that made it worse. I knew I’d never talk to him again, we would be stuck in — you know, like a fly in the yellow stone—”

“Amber.”

“Sí. Set in amber.”

“And did you? Speak to him?”

“Never. Neither him nor James. James went back to Colombia in October. I don’t know when Glenn left, but a while later someone told me he was gone. I wish I could have said good-bye.”

“You never spoke to Mason again.” Wells couldn’t hide his disappointment. She’d been their best chance.

“Yes and no.” She paused. “This might sound odd. About three months ago, someone called me, here. Maybe eight-thirty in the morning, the bus just come for my kids. I hear breathing, music in the background. No words. I say Hola. Who’s there? No answer. I hang up. No caller ID, it was the landline, so I star-sixty-nine it, but it’s a weird number. Okay, no problem. A minute later, it rings again. This time the music is louder. That song by Phil Collins, the one from Miami Vice—”

“‘In the Air Tonight’?”

“Sí.”

“Glenn loved the show. The song also. The DVD for it just came out back when I knew him and he was so excited. He had someone buy it, send it to him.”

Growing up in western Montana, four hundred miles from the nearest major city, Wells hadn’t paid much attention to pop culture. And the culture itself was different then. Less enveloping, less self-aware. People could watch television shows without having a position on them, reading plot summaries of every episode. Still, Miami Vice was burned into his memory. Every teenage boy in America wanted to be Don Johnson or Philip Michael Thomas back in 1984. They were that cool. Mason must have felt the same.

Hard to believe Crockett and Tubbs would be old enough to collect Social Security now.

“So when you heard the song—”

“I wanted to hang up, but I didn’t. I must have been figuring it out; after a few seconds something clicked in my mind. I knew. Not just the song, but the way he was so silent, that was just like him. I said, Glenn, is that you? I’m sorry we never talked. I should have called you. He didn’t say anything, but that made me even more sure, because anybody else would have hung up, I mean, I wasn’t shouting or anything, if this was a, a broma—”

“A prank—”

“Yes, a prank, then I wasn’t doing what he wanted. I said, I’m glad to talk about it if you want. He hung up. I don’t know what he wanted me to say, but he never called back.”

“Three months ago, this was.”

“About then. I don’t have the exact date.”

“Did you write down the number you star-sixty-nined?” Another blast from the past.

“I did, but I don’t know where I put it. I must have lost it. But it started with a one and then six-six. I remember I Googled it. The country code for Thailand. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe.” Not even twenty-four hours had passed since Duto and Shafer fingered Mason. Wells knew the outlines of Mason’s career but not the details. Shafer might have found more since Wells had left for Houston, but Shafer wasn’t answering his phone. And his wife had left a five-word message on Wells’s voice mail: Ellis is in trouble upstairs.

“You never talked to Veder again, either.”

“No. He was embarrassed. He liked the game, but he didn’t want to get caught. I think he regretted going after another officer’s girlfriend. Is he in Thailand?”

“He was chief of station in the Philippines until about twenty-four hours ago. Someone blew up his car. Killed him, two guards.”

Her mouth opened in a silent O. She walked out of the room. Pedro followed her to the doorway and blocked it, daring Wells to follow. Wells didn’t move, and after five minutes Julia came back.

“You think Glenn did this.”

“What do you think? It was a long time ago, what happened. A long time for a grudge.”

She twisted her hands.

“I can imagine it. Even the way he made love.”

“He was angry—”

“Not angry. I don’t think you can understand unless you’re a woman, but sometimes I felt he wasn’t touching me at all. That I wasn’t a person, just a hole he was trying to rip wider. I mean, every man has some of that in him, but he had a lot.”

Wells tried not to wonder what his exes would say about him. He scribbled his number and email on a paper from the reporter’s notebook he carried.

“You think of anything else, he calls you—”

She nodded.

“Anytime.”

“Be careful, Mr. Wells. I think he called because he wanted me to know that whatever was in him back then has come out.”

Wells headed north on 45. He wanted to be on the first plane to Los Angeles in the morning. Then Bangkok. He wasn’t sure how he would narrow down his search once he arrived in Thailand, but maybe Shafer would have ideas.

As much as he hated the Jeep, driving in Texas was a joy. Average left-lane speed was low eighties, and the cops just watched. The more gasoline burned, the better. Wells watched enviously as a bright yellow motorcycle blew by like the Patriot wasn’t even moving. After a couple minutes, his backup burner phone buzzed. Only Shafer had the number. “Ellis.”

“You found her?”

“She said he called three months ago. From Bangkok. Where I’m going.”

Wells was modestly surprised that the answer elicited a stream of low-grade profanity. “What’s wrong with Bangkok?”

“These pricks up here, they think he’s dead.”

A long honk alerted Wells to the fact that he was drifting between lanes. The Patriot definitely did not drive itself. “Hold on. One minute.” He found an exit, pulled into an off-brand gas station with big signs demanding “Pay INSIDE Only: Cash AND Credit.” Despite its arc lamps and surveillance cams, the place looked as though it got robbed at least once a month.

“Tell me.”

Shafer explained what Carcetti had told him.

“He’s stayed off the grid for four years?” After what Julia had told him, Wells had no doubt Mason was alive. Beating the NSA that long was impressive. Maybe he was running the operation through a courier, bin Laden — style. But Wells thought Mason would have wanted to get his revenge against Veder firsthand.

“Not just off the grid. They ran a face-recog search and it came up blank. So he hasn’t traveled, either, unless he’s so connected that someone’s getting him around passport control.”

“No.” Sovereign countries watched their borders. The President didn’t need a passport. Everybody else followed the rules. Diplomats and celebrities might be taken through secret lines so no one bothered them at Heathrow or JFK, but they still got stamped and photographed.

“I don’t get it, either, but they’re convinced back here. They don’t want to hear about Mason at all. Plus the momentum to blame Iran is building. It might not matter, but will this woman testify that she talked to him?”

“She didn’t exactly talk to him,” Wells explained.

“She knew it was him because she heard the Miami Vice theme song?”

Wells riffed off the drum solo that was the song’s signature.

“No you don’t fool me, the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows—”

“None other. I can actually see them flashing across Biscayne Bay in a speedboat. Pastel jackets. Three-day beards.”

“Tell me you’re joking, John.”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m going to keep this little tidbit to myself, so the new director doesn’t laugh me all the way into retirement. But at least it fits with what Carcetti told me about the drowning. For whatever reason, Mason based himself in Thailand. Find a bar in Phuket with a Miami Vice fetish.”

“Can you check her phone records? NSA’s got to have that call somewhere. At least the metadata.” Meaning the incoming number, if not the call itself.

“May take a couple days. If I haven’t made it clear already, the ice up here is about a half-inch thick. Ever think you’d miss Vinny, John?”

Wells hung up.

Insult to injury, the hotels near the airport were sold out. Wells backtracked halfway to downtown before he found an empty room. Flight schedules showed the shortest route to Phuket was almost thirty hours. If the hunch was wrong, he’d lose another thirty getting back.

But Phuket was their only lead. So Wells booked the ticket: Korean Air, Houston-L.A.-Seoul. Then a small break, straight to Phuket without a stop in Bangkok. It was three a.m. when he closed his eyes, a wake-up call not even four hours away.

He thought of Anne. At this point, he wasn’t sure how many days were left in her countdown. Twenty-four? Whatever the answer, his uncertainty was not promising. Was she sleeping now in their bed, Tonka beside her, the two of them snoring? Anne didn’t believe him when he told her she snored. But she did, especially after a long day at work. Or maybe she was awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering what Wells would do.

No. He’d vote for sleep. She had written him off already. She’d given him the thirty days to come to terms with the truth. But he wasn’t ready for the truth yet. Maybe he’d walk away. Maybe this would be his last ride before he sailed off with Crockett and Tubbs into the sunset… His consciousness was dissolving sweet as sugar in water… an ageless retirement…

Ageless?

Wells sat up. Reached for his phone. Changed his mind, decided to let Shafer sleep. Then changed it again. Shafer had woken him enough times. He was almost disappointed when Shafer picked up on the second ring.

“Better be important.”

“I wake you?”

“Dummy. My wife.”

“Sorry. I know why the NSA recognition software can’t find him. And why he went to Thailand.”

“Do tell.”

“Plastic surgery.”

Facial-recognition software didn’t exactly look at faces, as a person would. It compared the dimensions of various facial features that conventional disguise could not change. Those included the eye sockets, the jawline, the distance between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip. At any time, NSA looked for a few hundred people around the world, and pulled down tens of billions of digital images each day. Not just from obvious places like cameras on federal buildings and airport immigration control. From pictures uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and other photo-sharing sites. Feeds from satellites and drones.

The matching required massive processing power. The images came in every conceivable size, shape, and resolution. Some included a single face, others had dozens or hundreds. Some shots were head-on, others angled. As a first step, the agency’s software digitally rewrote them to approximate a standard passport photo, the base-case image. The process was known as rendering, but many photos couldn’t be rendered. Their resolution was too poor, or they didn’t contain anything that the software recognized as a face. Those were thrown into the digital equivalent of cold storage, though no photo was discarded for at least six months.

After the rendering process was complete, another software algorithm examined the images to determine the dimensions of the “unique signifiers”—the facial features that determined identity. It matched those against the targets in its database. Billions of images, dozens of parameters, and hundreds of targets translated into trillions of comparisons a day. Adding to the complexity of the problem, the matching software needed to account for the errors that rendering inevitably introduced. Comparing two original passport photos was easy enough. Those were taken in standard sizes everywhere in the world, precisely to make identifications easy. Matching a man wearing a hat in a crowd in Times Square to a cell-phone shot taken covertly at a madrassa was far harder. But the software got more sophisticated every year.

If enough variables matched, the software alerted a human analyst. It sent him the surveillance images, the original image or images of the suspect, and the rendered standardized versions. The analyst looked over the photos himself to decide if the software had found a true match. Most of the time, it hadn’t. And because the software compared so many images, NSA had to calibrate the parameters for a match carefully. Allowing too wide a margin of error would waste analysts’ time. Setting it too tight might miss a match.

After a back-and-forth that reached the agency’s highest levels, NSA kept the criteria strict. The agency considered the possibility that a high-level terrorist might have plastic surgery to remake his face but dismissed it as impractical. An operation would require tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of recovery time. In the four-thousand-mile hot belt that stretched from Algeria to Pakistan, only a handful of hospitals and surgeons had the skills to handle such a makeover, mainly in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. The mukhabarat in those countries had already told those doctors that if anyone… problematic… appeared at their clinics they should inform the authorities. Otherwise they would risk being considered supporters of terrorism, with tragic consequences. The warnings seemed to settle the issue.

No one had considered that a terrorist might have surgery before he was a target, to give himself a new identity in this age of surveillance.

“Plastic surgery,” Shafer said now. “Like that movie with Travolta and Nicolas Cage.”

“If he had his cheeks and eyes and nose and chin done—”

“It would hurt. Cutting open his cheekbones and all the rest. And he’d look weird. Like one of those actresses who seems younger at fifty than thirty.”

“But it would work.”

“I’ll talk to people who know how the algorithms work. But I suppose.”

“For the right price, he could find a clinic that would do anything he wanted—”

“I get it.”

“Being a jerk because you’re sorry you didn’t think of it.” Wells hung up. He tried to sleep but couldn’t. Instead, he spent the hours until morning trawling the Internet for Thai plastic-surgery clinics. He had close to a hundred names by the time he was finished, and no idea how he would convince their doctors to talk. Still, at least he had a theory now, a lead to chase. He was smiling as he boarded his flight to Los Angeles.

16

The first cable reporting the attack arrived at 8:34 a.m. local time, as Brian Taylor sat down at his desk with his morning coffee. Within an hour, the calls from Langley started. Taylor spent the next twenty-one hours sitting beside Martha Hunt in the station’s coms room, answering questions about Reza from the many desks that could stake a claim to handling the Iranian.

Near East had geographical standing, along with a list of twenty-two questions for Taylor to run by Reza about the structure of the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force. Counterterror had a say because of the Hezbollah connection, and fourteen questions of its own. Counterintelligence insisted that Taylor at least get his real name, those last six words spoken in incredulity. Like Taylor hadn’t realized the man’s identity might matter. Special Operations Group made a pitch to snatch Reza. Guy popped up months ago. Time to resolve the uncertainty, debrief him whether he likes it or not. Taylor and Hunt pointed out that kidnapping an agent wouldn’t do much to help his loyalty, and for now that plan was off the table. I’ll talk to him, Taylor said.

Too bad he couldn’t. Not unless Reza called. Standard rules of tradecraft simply did not apply in this case. Reza was the worst agent Taylor had ever run, and the best. He wondered if Reza might be a Revolutionary Guard plant. After all, Reza had given up just enough details about the attack on Veder to prove his bona fides, but not enough to stop it. But why would Iran risk the anger of the United States by killing a station chief and then leaking its responsibility? An Iranian exile group was another possibility, but Taylor didn’t believe any of them had the skill for an operation this large and complex.

So when the section chiefs asked Taylor what he thought, he told them the truth. He believed in Reza. Even the holes in his story could be viewed as proof of his authenticity. If the Revolutionary Guard were dangling Reza as a provocation, he would have handled himself more slickly, given Taylor enough details for the agency to confirm his identity. On the other hand, if Reza had chosen to betray a brutal regime… and was paranoid by nature and training… and was operating alone… he might well choose to keep his identity secret even from his case officer. For a while, anyway.

At 5:30 a.m. the morning after the attack, Hunt told the masters at Langley that she and Taylor needed to sleep. We still have questions, one of the suits said. Hunt nodded, turned off the screen.

“Let’s go home.”

“You’re tops. I think I’m in love.”

Hunt opened the soundproof steel door that separated the coms room from the rest of the station. “Take a nap, a shower. I’ll see you at nine.” Taylor staggered up, trailed after her.

In the hallway outside, she turned. “Do you believe in him, or have you just argued yourself into it?”

His head felt like it weighed five hundred pounds. “He’s told us about two different attacks.”

“You’ve met him once.”

She was right. He didn’t have enough evidence to judge Reza either way.

“You need to see him again.”

“Think I don’t know that?”

Two hours later, Reza called.

Over the next two days, Taylor reviewed surveillance footage from the dozens of cameras around the Galata Bridge plaza. But the cams had poor resolution in the weak morning light. Taylor spotted a man who might have been Reza, but the Iranian’s disguise of hood, cap, and glasses was surprisingly effective. The photos were of little use.

Reza’s parting words to Taylor, the promise of more information, sent the agency into a fever. SOG moved a six-man team from Warsaw to Istanbul, with orders to stay as long as necessary to get photos of Reza — though history suggested he might not pop up for months. The team was very experienced, all ex — Special Forces, two Deltas and four Rangers. Unfortunately, their experience had come in Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recently Yemen. None spoke Turkish. In fact, only one had ever visited Istanbul. Taylor feared that they wanted an excuse to snatch Reza, though SOG had promised that they were tasked with surveillance only.

To balance out the paramilitaries, Near East desk moved two case officers from Langley. They spoke Turkish and had worked Istanbul before. With the entire Istanbul station, plus the two backups, plus the SOG team ready to scramble, Taylor figured they would get at least a clear photo of him next time he made contact.

He was wrong.

The call came on his landline around two a.m. on a Monday morning, eleven days after the hit on Veder. Taylor was stretched on his couch. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, wondered who at Langley had a question that couldn’t wait.

“Good evening.” In Farsi.

“Reza?”

“I’m outside.”

They hadn’t figured Reza would call on Veder’s Turkish landline. It was taped but not monitored in real time like the mobile. No doubt NSA would fix that oversight tomorrow. Meantime, Reza had again outsmarted Taylor and everyone else. Or else someone inside was helping him. Taylor knew he was getting paranoid, but the guy never made a mistake. Nobody was that lucky.

“How did you get my number?” Stalling. Taylor’s phone sat on the kitchen counter. He needed to grab it, text his backup.

“Be downstairs in two minutes. No surveillance. Leave your phone. If you try to have me followed—”

“You’ll disappear and I’ll never see you again.” When Langley reviewed the call, his petulance wouldn’t earn high marks, but getting outplayed over and over was grating.

“Walk south on Türkgücü. And wear heavy shoes.”

“How will I—”

“It’ll be obvious. Ninety seconds left.” Click.

Heavy shoes? Taylor shrugged on a jeans and a sweatshirt. He couldn’t find boots, pulled on a pair of loafers instead. He reached for his phone and then gave up. The SOG guys were at a hotel north of Taksim. Close but not close enough. No way could they scramble in time. And they couldn’t trace him anyway. He couldn’t risk carrying his phone. It was big enough to be obvious even in a routine pat-down. He would be meeting Reza naked. Again.

He was on the street in just over two minutes. He jogged south. The night was cold and slick. He skidded on a patch of wet sidewalk, windmilled his arms, barely staying upright. He wished he’d taken a few extra seconds to find the boots. Would Reza have ditched him?

Maybe.

Two blocks south he saw the motorcycle, a sleek black Suzuki. The rider wore a helmet with a mirrored faceplate. Taylor was sure it was Reza. He ought to have been nervous, considering that motorcyclists had killed Veder. Instead he felt the same stupid excitement he’d had when he saw Daniel Craig at a restaurant in New York.

Reza flipped up his face shield. “You bring your phone, anything that can track us?”

“No.”

“All right. I will trust you.”

Words that made Taylor wish he’d texted his backups, brought the phone. “Of course.”

A helmet lay under elastic netting on the seat behind Reza. He offered it to Taylor. “You know how?”

Taylor hadn’t ridden a motorcycle since senior year at UMass, when a friend insisted on taking out his old Honda Nighthawk 750, skidded off a curve on Route 22, and cut himself in half on a speed limit sign. He searched for an objection that wouldn’t sound too lame.

“My shoes.”

That wasn’t it. Soon as the words left his mouth, Taylor wanted to smack himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand Three Stooges—style. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. When he wrote up this meeting for Langley, he wouldn’t be mentioning footwear of any kind.

Five minutes later, they were on the O-2 expressway, which functioned as the city’s ring road. Reza rode expertly, ignoring the rain-slick pavement, cutting through the light late-night traffic like a garrote wire. Taylor wondered if they were headed for the Sultan Mehmet Bridge and the Asian side of the Bosphorus. But Reza turned off well before. He piloted the bike northwest, into the heavily wooded hills that began almost at the outer edge of the expressway. The forest preserves stretched to the Black Sea, an abrupt and surprising contrast to the city’s concrete.

A few minutes later, Reza turned in to an unpaved parking area whose sign warned in Turkish and English: “No Overnight Parking.” At the edge of the forest, he cut the engine. Taylor pulled off his helmet, stood beside the bike. The night was silent aside from the spatter of rain on the motorcycle’s gas tank and a distant rush of expressway traffic. Taylor was suddenly very aware that he hadn’t brought his Sig. Reza could have planned an ambush with his Rev Guard comrades. They’d shoot him, drag him into the trees. His body might not be found for weeks.

Yet he didn’t feel frightened. He didn’t completely trust Reza, but he didn’t see the Iranian as violent. Sly, maddening, not a killer.

Reza nestled his helmet against his lap.

“Where’d you learn to ride like that?”

“I know Allah will protect me.”

The answer surprised Taylor. They’d never talked about religion, but he had assumed Reza wasn’t observant.

After a beat, Reza laughed.

“You should see your face. You think I believe that nonsense? Like some taxi driver with a sticker on his bumper? I have as much use for Allah as He has for me.”

“You enjoy making a fool of me.” Taylor needed to put himself in charge, but he had no idea how.

“You don’t like me, Mr. Brian.”

“I like you fine.”

“Maybe you want to hit me.”

“I need your name. You have no idea of the pressure I’m under, Reza.” No. Spies begged case officers, not the other way around.

“This way is safer for both of us.”

Taylor tried another tack. “Did you check your bank account?”

“I tell you this isn’t about money for me.”

“We can’t trust you if you don’t agree to a real debrief.”

“It’s your choice, whether you trust me. I don’t trust you. Every time I look around, you have another leak. Manning, Snowden.”

“That was the Army, NSA—”

“You think your place doesn’t?”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Reza?”

“What I say is, tell everyone I will not come in, I will not tell you my name. The end. Twice now I have given you enough to leave me hanging from a rope. That’s enough.”

“Maybe you still work for the Guard, Reza. Maybe they tell you what to say.”

“Insult me this way.” Reza started the Suzuki’s engine, rolled off.

Taylor ran after him, yelling Stop, stop, like a lovesick teenager who’d just been dumped. Reza turned onto the road, still helmetless. Taylor couldn’t do anything except watch him go. He didn’t even have a phone. His feet were raw in his loafers.

A few seconds later, the motorcycle turned around, puttered back into the lot. The most humiliating moment of Taylor’s career. Turned out this wouldn’t be the meeting where he established the proper officer-agent relationship.

Reza cut the engine. “I should have left, but I must tell you two things.”

“I’m listening.” Taylor said the words with all the dignity he could muster. Which wasn’t much.

“We’ve put a package on a ship to the United States.”

“A bomb?”

“Not bomb. Radioactive material. It’s a practice.”

“A test run.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“Three weeks ago, I went over the mountains, back to Tehran. A friend of mine, good friend, engineer in the program, he says we’ve made enough uranium for ten bombs, and more every day.”

If what Reza said was true, he had just delivered a world-changing piece of intelligence. Iran planned to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States.

“When you say ‘uranium’—”

“I mean what the scientists call H-E-U.” Reza sounded out each letter. “My friend told me that this has happened in only the last few months, they worked out some technical problem I couldn’t understand, now they make two, three kilos of it every day. He said they have so much that they don’t even keep it in the gas form anymore, they turn it into the metal. I don’t know what that means.”

“I don’t, either.” But Counterproliferation would. “So they’ve built a bomb.”

“Not yet. It’s a matter of the engineering, making the pieces fit. He thinks that’s still two or three months away, but he isn’t sure. That happens somewhere else.”

“Can we talk to him?”

“Not unless you get someone into Tehran, maybe not even then. They hardly let the scientists off the bases anymore. Never out of the country. Both so they don’t defect and the Israelis don’t kill them. Plus he has his own special problems with them.”

Then Taylor understood. Reza’s hatred of the regime. His obsession with secrecy. Even what he’d said a few minutes before, I have as much use for Allah as He has for me. “This friend of yours, this good friend—”

“What about him?”

Taylor knew that if he was wrong, or if Reza’s pride and whatever was left of his Muslim identity wouldn’t allow him to admit his sexuality, taking this route would infuriate him. In an ordinary recruitment, Taylor would work up to this moment over years. But he didn’t have months, much less years.

He decided to make the play. Obliquely.

“Is he married, this man? Does he have a family?”

“Why does that matter?”

“You tell me, Reza.”

“You’re a fool.” Reza couldn’t meet Taylor’s eyes.

“If his heart is in the West, if he’d like to leave the regime behind, come to a place where he can live more freely, even get married, maybe we can get him out.”

“It’s impossible.” Reza’s voice was low and angry, the sound of a man who hated himself for his own hope.

“Nothing’s impossible. Of course, for that we’d need his real name. And yours.”

“I will ask. Now leave it alone, Mr. Case Officer.” He thumbed the starter. The Suzuki came to life.

Taylor knew he’d pushed Reza to the limit. “Wait.”

“What now?”

“In all this you haven’t given me the details on the ship. Do you have a name?”

“No. I know it left Dubai seven or eight days ago.”

“What flag?”

“Pakistan. It started in Karachi. Bound for the East Coast. I don’t know where exactly. Not New York. The security there is stricter.”

“Who knows about the package?”

“Probably only the captain, but I don’t think he knows what it is. They bribed him. Probably he thinks it’s drugs.”

“Is this like the size of a container? A trunk?”

“Smaller. A small suitcase, a backpack. Lightly radioactive, maybe shielded.”

“If it’s out of Dubai, not your operation, how do you know any of this?”

“We had two choices, Dubai or Istanbul. They decided to use Dubai the first time. I don’t know why, but they said they will come back to Istanbul soon. It’s a test run, like I told you.”

“Just so there’s no mistake. You’re telling me that Iran plans to bring highly enriched uranium into the United States?”

“There’s no mistake.” Now that the conversation had moved off his personal life, Reza had his sneer back. “Smuggle the components one by one, build the bombs in America.”

“Bombs.”

“Did you think we needed ten bombs for Tel Aviv?”

They stood side by side. An oddly powerful desire to kiss Reza swept Taylor. He had never wanted to lock lips with another man before, so he could only assume that he was grateful to the Iranian for revealing that the United States faced nuclear blackmail, or worse. Fortunately, the feeling passed quickly.

“These bombs. Does Iran plan to use them?”

“I don’t think so. My guess, we see them as a way to make sure you never invade. Put a few in different cities, tell your President. You attack us, we attack you.”

“Don’t they understand we’ll see it as war?”

“Look at it as they do. You invade Iraq. Hang Saddam. Bomb people everywhere with drones. The mullahs expect you’ll kill them, too, if you can. This way, they have an answer.”

“We’ll find those bombs and then we’ll destroy the people who put them there. Not regime change. Regime erase.” Taylor knew he sounded like a parody. He was trying to reassure himself.

“The bombs, imagine, they hide them in those lockers you have all over—”

“Self-storage.”

“Yes. They don’t even have to have anyone watching them, they can have remote triggers, mobile phones. Say you find three, or four. Can you know you’ve found them all?”

The nightmare scenario.

“Reza, you have to come in.”

“Find the boat.”

“We’ll get your friend for you. Whatever it takes.”

Reza grabbed Taylor’s motorcycle helmet, stuffed it between his legs. “I told you not to say anything more about that.” Before Taylor could protest, he rolled off.

Taylor could only watch as the motorcycle swung onto the road, disappeared into the night.

Best agent ever. And worst.

17

The voice in Wells’s ear was manicured as a polo lawn. Thank you for calling the Aesthetic Beauty Centre. To proceed in English, press one. Arabic, press two. Chinese—

Wells pressed one.

You have reached the Aesthetic Beauty Centre, located near Bangkok, Thailand. Our surgeons and staff are renowned for discretion, skill, and service. As a reminder, all new clients must have referrals from existing customers. Please leave your name and telephone number and someone will call you back. You may also email us at concierge@abcbeautiful.com—

Wells clicked off, called back, pressed two when the language options came up. The message was the same in Arabic. “Asalaam aleikum. My name is Jalal. I am calling for Dr. Rajiv Singh about a possible surgery for my daughter. The matter is urgent. Please call me on my mobile.” All this in Arabic. Wells left a number with a Saudi prefix, 966, and hung up.

Finding Aesthetic Beauty had taken Wells ten days. Halfway through his flight to Seoul, he realized his plan to try to find Mason through plastic surgeons was worse than a long shot. No doctor would tell a random stranger about his patients. Wells was left with his original idea, casing bars and nightclubs in Phuket, looking for a bouncer or bar girl who knew Mason.

But Phuket took longer to search than he’d expected. The island had six hundred thousand residents scattered across dozens of villages and towns. Its tourist offerings ranged from high-end gated resorts for wealthy families to the infamous Patong Beach. Patong’s sex trade wasn’t confined to a few alleys. Its red-light district stretched along a four-lane road for what felt like miles. Every night, the sun dipped into the sea. Neon signs for Singha and Heineken flickered on. Cover bands struck their first chords. And swarms of sunburned farangs poured from hostels and hotels, ready to feed.

During the day, the bars were empty, leaving Wells no choice but to join the herd. He handed out photocopied pictures of Mason to hundreds of bartenders, bouncers, madams, and prostitutes. He expected sharp questions—Why are you looking for this man? Instead, the Thais he asked seemed to see the search as a joke. They gave him answers straight from The Hangover Part II. The movie was hugely popular in Thailand. Check the elevator! Come back with Alan, I tell you! Where you monkey? When Wells pressed on: He steal your money? Screw wife?

The whores ignored his questions entirely: Phuket no place for trouble. Worry tomorrow, come with me tonight. From one bar girl whose head barely reached Wells’s chest: Big handsome, I give half-price, then we do twice!

By the end of his second night, Wells realized he should just call himself a private investigator. Insurance companies and divorce lawyers regularly sent detectives to Phuket after disability claimants and badly behaved husbands. The locals were happy to cooperate, for the right price. Wells made more photocopies, this time with “REWARD: $2,500” above Mason’s forehead. He would have made the figure higher, but he didn’t want the search to stand out to the police officers who sometimes appeared at the bars.

After an exhausting week, Wells had visited every club and disco on Phuket. He heard “In the Air Tonight” at least twice a night — not surprising, given the demographics of the men around him. Phuket had lost its status as a destination for hip young backpackers decades before. The bars were filled with guys in their thirties and forties, many past fifty. They were mostly European and Russian, not American, but it seemed Miami Vice had been a global phenomenon after all.

Wells found the bars grim and unsexy, even when the girls were beautiful. Especially when they were beautiful. Farangs in Thailand offered a long list of self-serving excuses for what they were doing. Among the most popular were that Thai men also frequented prostitutes and that Buddhism didn’t frown on prostitution. The arguments weren’t entirely wrong. Compared to the hard-edged desperation of red-light districts in European cities like Amsterdam, the sex trade in Phuket wasn’t hopeless. Its ubiquity lessened its stigma. Prostitutes here didn’t view themselves as fallen women, and they were much less likely to be abused or murdered than American streetwalkers. They earned decent livings, and they did sometimes escape the bars entirely by marrying their clients. But the farangs ignored the incredible imbalance in wealth that drove the trade. No Thai teenager dreamed of moving to Phuket to sell herself to men two or three times her age. The women came from poor villages in northern Thailand, hoping to make enough money to support their families. They had only a few years to do so before younger girls replaced them. And though they were encouraged to use condoms and regularly tested for HIV, about one in fifty still became infected. Many more wound up with other sexually transmitted diseases. Once they aged out of the bars, they had little chance for marriage or legitimate jobs.

Wells returned to his hotel each night exhausted and depressed. No matter what time he got home, he set his alarm to wake him for the fajr, the first of the day’s five Muslim prayers. He turned west toward Mecca, closed his eyes, murmured the Arabic phrases that had comforted him since those first days in Afghanistan when he’d learned about Islam. When he was done with his own devotions, he prayed for the whores, that Allah grant them the most important of all His gifts, the ability to endure.

As for the men, Wells tried to ignore them. He wanted to feel sorry for them, especially the ones who believed they could buy something more than sex, who had flown halfway around the world chasing a cheap replica of love. But even the least of them were predators. On his fifth night, at one of Patong’s sleaziest bars, Wells saw two forty-something men standing at a cocktail table with a Thai girl who was seventeen at most. One of the guys was skinny, with greasy skin and a slicked-back widow’s peak. His buddy was stout, a rugby player gone to seed. The girl wore a neon-green dress. When she stepped away to get them fresh beers, Wells saw her clubfoot limp.

Wells had finished handing out photocopies and turned to leave when the music cut out and he overheard the fat one say, Every hole and back again, Spence. One last night ’fore we go home to those frigid bitches.

The big guy raised a hand and the two men fist-pumped over the table. Wells knew that changing their minds would be a long shot at best. Still he bought three shots of vodka, settled himself between them. “Gentlemen. How are you this fine night?”

The greaser’s eyes were loose, floating on a sea of alcohol. The fat one had the satisfied dull face of a Soviet commissar presiding at a mock trial. Even before they replied, Wells realized he had no chance. However long they’d been here, they’d seen and done too much. Ping-pong shows. Flaming banana shows. Live couple shows. One girl, two girls, three girls. Maybe even a boy or two. A lifetime of depravity in a few days. They’d drained the sensation from every act. Except pain.

“Not bad,” the big one said. “Not at all.” His accent was English.

He grinned. His teeth belonged on a more handsome face. Cosmetic dentistry had arrived in the United Kingdom. Better late than never.

“Couldn’t help hearing your plans for this young lady.”

“When we’ve done with her, she won’t limp no more.”

The words tore Wells. He knew he should walk away. He knew he wouldn’t.

“Humanitarians.” He slid each man a shot glass. “I like that.”

“Looking to watch, then?” The chubby one leaned toward his friend. “What do you think?”

“Wants to pay for it, why not, then—”

The music came up. They leaned in close to hear each other. Perfect.

“Drink to it.” The fat one reached for a shot.

“Hold off. Those are for the headache.” Wells put his arms around the men’s shoulders.

“No touching, aye—”

“What headache?”

Wells snaked his hands into their hair and crushed their foreheads together like a cymbalist trying to impress the hottest cheerleader in school. Strength declined more slowly than reflex speed. Even now, Wells benched three hundred pounds, curled seventy-five. He had the advantage of surprise. They had the disadvantage of alcohol. They hardly flinched as their skulls crunched, the sound dull and dangerous as brick hitting pavement. The skinny one buckled to the floor, no muscle tone. The rugby player was tougher. His eyes rolled half into his head as he slumped onto the table.

“That headache.”

The guy tried to stand. Failed. He swiped at the table, toppled down. The girl stared at Wells, lips parted. He pressed baht notes into her hand. She reached for him, but he shook his head, walked into the humid night.

By his ninth night in Phuket, Wells decided he was wasting time. The search was breathtakingly inefficient. He needed more clues, or FBI task-force-sized help, or both. He’d called Shafer twice for advice, ways to narrow the search. But Shafer had nothing to offer. When Wells asked how the investigation in Manila was going, Shafer answered. They’ve got me so deep in the meat locker I think I’ve frozen solid. He sounded terrible, like a losing coach just waiting for the season to end.

Wells decided to give himself one more night and then try something new. Maybe Hong Kong, chase what had happened to Mason on that last tour. But a little after midnight, at a narrow bar in an alley off Patpong, his persistence paid off. A bartender looked over the sheet, touched a finger to Mason’s photocopied face. “I know.”

“He’s here?”

The bartender shook his head. “Other side of bay. Has house.” He was twenty-five or so, with full hips and wide lips that gave him an oddly froglike look.

“You’re sure?”

“I from there.”

“Tell me how to find it, the reward’s yours.”

“Too busy now. Come back tomorrow. Noon.” Before Wells could argue, the man turned away to pour shots for five ghost-pale Russians.

Wells worried the bartender wouldn’t show. But when Wells arrived a half hour before noon, he was waiting. He led Wells past lumps of vomit congealing in the sun to an Internet café.

“I’m John.”

“Prateep. You American.”

“Yes. New Hampshire.” The words made Wells think of Anne. He’d missed her the last few days, wondered what she would make of this awful scene.

“Like Phuket?”

“It’s all right.

“Other islands better. Phuket good for money, no more.”

The world’s epitaph. Wells slid pictures of Mason across the table. Prateep held them close, like he was failing an eye exam. “Last night look more like him.”

Wells understood. In the bar’s low light, Prateep had focused on the contours of Mason’s face. Now the details confused him. “That’s an old picture. He had surgery for his eyes, nose. Everything.”

Prateep stacked the photos on the tabletop, pushed them to Wells. “What his name?”

“His real name is Glenn Mason. I think he has a new name now.”

“Call himself Duke.”

“Duck?”

“D-U-K-E. Rent house on my island. Quiet. No trouble.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Six months, maybe. How you know him?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“This man, he never let anyone take his picture. Don’t bother anyone. Quiet. Why you want him?”

“Just to talk.”

Prateep leaned back, receded into himself as big men sometimes did. Wells didn’t press.

“Ten thousand, I tell you how to find him.”

“Too much.”

Prateep’s face hardened. Ten thousand dollars was cheap if the guy really knew where Mason lived. “Twenty-five hundred now, rest after I get back.”

“All now.”

“How about I show you the cash, prove I have it? You come to the island, show me where he lives, you can have it all at once.”

Four hours later, an open-canopied speedboat stopped beside a crude wooden dock that extended off a narrow white beach.

“Koh Pu,” the pilot said.

He wore a floppy hat and the biggest sunglasses Wells had ever seen, almost goggles. They didn’t affect his navigational skills. He had steered them expertly from the port town of Krabi, ten miles north.

Wells handed him one hundred dollars. “Until five-thirty.” Two hours.

“You not here then, I come back tomorrow. Too much coral here. Dangerous in the dark.”

Koh Pu was only thirty miles east of Phuket across the waters of Phang Nga Bay. But reaching it required a hundred-mile drive around the bay followed by a boat ride. After spending days on planes to get to Phuket, most Western tourists had no appetite for more travel. As a result, Koh Pu had no condo complexes or concrete-walled fortresses, and certainly no neon-signed brothels. Lushly forested hills rose into a perfect blue sky. A warm breeze ran off the bay’s emerald waters. For the first time since landing in Thailand, Wells could imagine why backpackers a generation ago had seen these beaches as heaven on earth. Call someplace paradise, kiss it good-bye… At this moment, a developer was no doubt considering how many hotels he could build here, how much a hydrofoil from Phuket would cost.

Prateep stepped onto the sand. “Beautiful, yes?”

On the trip from Phuket, Prateep had explained that Koh Pu had two small resorts with barely a dozen beds each, along with a handful of villas owned by wealthy Thais from Bangkok and several hundred permanent residents. The island’s isolation was curse as well as blessing. During the rainy season, few tourists came. Residents survived through fishing and rubber farming. Prateep’s family owned the island’s only bar outside the resorts. Prateep had worked there before plunging into Phuket’s lucrative muck.

Fifty meters up, they reached the island’s main road, a single lane of packed dirt. Prateep turned north.

They walked past tin-roofed houses with goat pens and fenced vegetable gardens. After a few hundred meters, Prateep turned east onto a narrow side road that rose up a steep hill. His feet sank into the loose red dirt. With each step he puffed heavily, a truck in low gear. The breeze turned, coming from the north, bringing with it a low sweet scent of a flower Wells didn’t recognize. They passed two tin-roofed homes on garage-sized plots cut from the forest.

After a couple hundred meters they crested the hill. The road swung hard right, south. Past a thatch of trees, it dead-ended at a plot with a view of the bay and a low cement-and-glass box that looked like it had been airlifted from the Hollywood hills. Without ever having met Mason, Wells could imagine him here. The house was beautiful and strange. Its front side was a wall of glass, split by widely spaced support pillars. Thick black curtains hid the inside. It appeared to have been empty for some time. Cobwebs hung from the roof pillars. Still, someone was keeping an eye on the place, or at least weeding the gravel path that led around the front right corner to a brushed steel door.

“Know who takes care of it? When they come?” Though Wells figured the odds were against anyone paying a visit.

Prateep shook his head. “Bring money to bar.”

“Take it now.” Wells fished a stack of hundred-dollar bills from his pack. “Thank you.”

Prateep reached for the money. His eyes were flat as stones, his big lips pressed together. Wells knew the look. He’d seen it from more people in more countries than he could remember. You thought you could buy me. And you were right.

Prateep’s steps faded, leaving only the mad songs of birds hidden in the undergrowth. Wells walked slowly around the house. It was a single story, fifty feet long, thirty-five wide. Only the front wall was glass. The others were concrete. Up close they were cracked and stained. No surprise. Thai rainy seasons wouldn’t be kind to this design. And the concrete was probably less than skyscraper-quality. Just getting the sand and cement here must have taken half the men on the island.

Koh Pu had nothing resembling a police department, so Wells didn’t expect an alarm. He didn’t find one. Nor cameras. Nor trip wires. Mason must have decided that his face-altering surgery and faked death were protection enough.

Wells finished his loop and reached for his electronic pick. The house seemed to exhale when he opened the front door, as if no one had entered for months. He walked into a long living room with a wide-planked blond-wood floor that continued the California theme. He half expected a longboard hanging from the ceiling.

Despite the big west-facing windows, the curtains kept the room black. When Wells closed the door he’d be in darkness. He flicked the light switch beside the door, but nothing happened. Prateep had said the island had a central power grid. Either this house had been disconnected or its lights were burned out. Wells wanted to pull the curtains, but he couldn’t risk announcing his presence if someone came up. He pulled the headlamp from his backpack. It looked silly, but it kept his hands free. He strapped it around his head, clicked it on.

The headlamp threw out a narrow cone of light, a horror-movie view. With the door shut, the house smelled heavy. Like the concrete had not completely dried from the rainy season. Wells scanned the room left to right — and saw, almost too late, a spider the size of a child’s fist scuttling at him. He stomped it. The creature exploded with the wet gasp of an egg breaking. Wells was glad he’d chosen thick-soled boots despite the heat. Beneath his jeans, he’d hidden a knife.

He turned his attention to the floor. Was the spider Mason’s version of a security system? Doubtful. More likely a local stopping by for a visit. Wells needed more light. He reached for the door — and heard a motorbike rumbling up the track toward the house. He waited for the bike to stop at one of the huts. It didn’t.

Maybe Prateep had planned to set Wells up all along. More likely, the bartender bumped into the house’s caretaker on the road and slyly suggested a visit. Thanks for paying me early, dummy. Or maybe the visit was just bad luck. Either way, Wells didn’t think the good folk of Koh Pu would appreciate a farang breaking and entering. He would face an uncomfortable night or two in whatever closet passed for the island’s jail. Worse, the caretaker no doubt had orders to call Mason if he caught anyone at the house.

The motorbike topped the hill. Wells stepped deeper inside. Most likely the guy would just peek inside the front door. Wells would stow himself in a closet, hope the spiders weren’t biting. The spider. If the caretaker saw it, he would surely wonder who had stomped it. Wells peeled the corpse off the floor, tossed it in a corner. Then wished he hadn’t. Spider bits were everywhere. A massacre.

The engine grew louder as Wells hustled across the living room, pretending not to notice a second spider scuttling by, this one bigger than the first. He opened the bedroom door, stepped inside, saw a third spider against the closet wall to his right, much larger than the first two. It was black, furry, with an oversized sac at one end. Not a spider. A tarantula.

Thailand had tarantulas?

For the second straight mission, Wells found himself in an episode of Man vs. Wild. He’d much rather be looking at a guy with a knife. The tarantula provoked a sickly adrenaline rush rather than the calm of combat. Okay. He’d be honest. It creeped him out.

He pulled his knife as it scuttled toward a crack in the closet door, like it was deciding what to wear for the evening. You’ll need four pairs of shoes, buddy. Must be expensive. Hardee-har-har. It disappeared into the crack. Then it reemerged, came at him, moving quicker than he expected. It escaped the cone of his headlamp. He ducked his head to follow it. Three feet away, two—

He raised his right foot to stomp it. But the closer it came, the faster it moved. It cut to his left as smoothly as an eight-legged running back and crawled onto his left boot. His jeans were loose around the leather uppers of the boots. Wells looked down as the tarantula scuttled around the back of his boot, like it was searching for a way in. Was the warmth of his skin drawing it? He cursed in the dark as it crawled up the boot. With the knife in his right hand, he couldn’t get a clean swipe. He switched the blade to his left, jabbed downward at his calf with five inches of double-edged serrated steel. He aimed high, above the top of his boots. He was willing to cut his leg in order to get the thing off him. He wasn’t sure if its venom could kill him, but he knew he didn’t want to find out.

But he felt the blade slice through his jeans as the tarantula’s front legs touched his skin. He drove the blade down into something soft. The tarantula hissed as it slid off his boot and landed on the floor with a wet plop. Now that he’d sliced it open, it seemed pathetically small. White fluid oozed from its belly as it writhed and tried to stand. It looked up at him and feebly waved its forelegs, its hiss fading. Wells crushed it under his boot.

The engine outside cut out. Wells heard a man walking around the front of the house. He would be stuck inside until the caretaker left. He closed the bedroom door, pressed himself against the wall. Above his breathing, he heard what sounded like another tarantula in the closet. Maybe the caretaker doubled as an exterminator.

He looked around the room, which took up most of the north wall of the house. A king-sized platform bed lay beside Wells, no sheets or pillows, merely a bare mattress. A dresser rested against the wall opposite the bed. In keeping with the house’s modernist theme, all the furniture was steel-cladded, vaguely aeronautical.

To his left was the windowed west wall. To his right, the tarantula closet and an open doorway. Through it, Wells glimpsed a bathroom mirror and sink. Based on its location, this bedroom was the master. The guest bedroom would be behind the bathroom, with no view.

Wells had hoped for a laptop, piles of credit card statements, maybe even a photo of Mason postsurgery. But Mason had been careful, even here. Nothing was out. If he had any personal stuff, he’d hidden it. Wells reached for the dresser. The top drawer held an astounding collection of sex toys. The middle was filled with T-shirts and underwear. And the bottom contained shorts and sweatshirts. Wells started to close it — then stopped. Under the sweatshirts lay a manila envelope thick with paper. A single word was printed neatly on it: Records. Wells tucked it in his backpack. He shut the drawer, waited in silence as the caretaker puttered around outside. He didn’t care about the spiders anymore. He would hide in this room as long as necessary, until the caretaker left and Wells could make a clean exit. This envelope would lead him to Mason.

Then he heard the click of the front door swinging open. Seconds later, light streamed under the crack of the bedroom door. Wells had forgotten that the guy didn’t need electricity to come inside. He just had to open the curtains.

Now Wells was trapped. Then he realized: the bathroom might offer a way out. He edged the door open, looked inside. As he’d hoped, the bathroom was what real estate agents called a Jack-and-Jill, two entrances. A door on the north wall led to the guest bedroom.

Wells stepped through the bedroom, into the second bedroom. Mason had used the space as an office. A desk nestled in the corner. Wells prowled through its drawers, saw a tiny flash drive. It was loose, didn’t look like it had been deliberately hidden. Probably it was blank and Mason had left it accidentally. Even so, Wells scooped it into his pocket.

He heard the man in the living room humming to himself, apparently unaware that Wells was in the house. Wells moved to the office door in two careful steps. He waited as the man stepped into the master bedroom. Wells pulled open the office door and stepped down the hallway that connected the guest bedroom with the living room. As he did, he heard the caretaker walk into the bathroom. As Wells had hoped, the caretaker was following his loop. Wells strode across the living room — and heard yelling in Thai behind him.

Wells ran for the motorcycle. It was a tiny Honda dirt bike with a 150cc engine, barely big enough to hold him. The caretaker had left the key in the ignition. Why not, up here? Wells didn’t pause to consider his good fortune, but slid onto the bike. He pressed the starter and the engine came alive. The house’s door swung open, revealing a bantam of a man in mud-splattered jeans. Wells swung the bike around on the gravel path, easing back the throttle. These little engines could be fussy, and he couldn’t risk a stall.

The man yelled in Thai and pitched his arm forward like he was trying to lasso Wells with an invisible rope. Wells straightened out, gave the bike gas. He kicked up gravel as he gained speed. The man ran for the front of the house, trying to angle him off. But Wells beat him to the corner. He reached the dirt path that led to the main road and bounced down it, resisting the urge to gun the engine. The bike was skidding and yawing too much already, dragging on its shocks under his weight. Anyway, thirty miles an hour, even twenty, should be fine. He had less than a mile to ride.

Two and a half minutes later, he bounced up to the beach. The speedboat was still waiting. Wells dropped the bike’s kickstand, turned off the engine. No thank-you note. He’d have to be impolite. With the engine silent, he heard shouting up the road. He strode down the dock, swung himself onto the speedboat.

The pilot spun in his chair, grinned under his ridiculous sunglasses at Wells. “Why so much a hurry?”

The shouts grew more distinct. Wells could guess what they were saying. “Two hundred dollars, you go right now.”

“Five.”

Wells nodded.

“Grab anchor.”

Wells pulled the anchor, stowed it behind the seats. The pilot turned in his chair, started the engine. Then glanced back at Wells. “They telling me to keep you, you a thief.”

“I haven’t taken anything from them, I promise.” An answer that was technically accurate. Wells had stolen only from Mason.

The pilot shoved the throttle forward. The boat skipped ahead fifty yards. Then the pilot eased off and they drifted. “One thousand dollars.”

If not for the coral, Wells might have tossed the pilot overboard and taken the helm himself. The caretaker ran onto the beach, shouting. All he needed was a pitchfork and a flaming torch. Wells half wished he’d knocked the guy out, tied him up.

“One thousand. But no more.”

The pilot pushed the throttle and away they went. Wells would never have imagined he’d be so happy to leave paradise behind.

Four hours later, he sat on a lumpy twin bed in a Bangkok hotel that wouldn’t be in any guidebooks this year or next. The place was on the edge of the city’s red-light district, even bigger and nastier than Patong Beach. Through his dime-thin window, he heard the noises people made when they were trying to prove they were having a good time. Men shouting. Women squealing. Wells had chosen this place not for its creature comforts but because it took cash and wasn’t concerned with his name.

The more he saw of Mason, the more dangerous the man seemed. He was covering his tracks with the care of a man who had no agency to protect him. Yet he spent money like he had a government-sized bank account. And he’d been working on this operation since the day he left the agency, if not before. Wells didn’t know if Mason had access to NSA’s databases. But he had decided to err on the side of caution and avoid leaving his own trail wherever he could.

The Records envelope and flash drive lay next to his laptop on the bed. He tried the drive first. His laptop reported it empty. He’d send it to Shafer, in the hope that the geeks at Langley could find something. Assuming they still answered Shafer’s requests.

Inside the envelope, a sheaf of records from the Aesthetic Beauty Centre for Abraham Duke. The file began with a two-page letter from Dr. Rajiv Singh, director of the center, thanking Mason/Duke for his initial visit and putting the cost of his operations at $93,500. Plus an additional $24,300 for a thirty-day stay in a recovery suite. All payments up-front, cash or wire transfer only, cash preferred. Duke wanted a rhinoplasty, cheek augmentation, hair transplantation, and three other procedures whose names Wells didn’t recognize. By the time we have finished, your face will appear distinctly different, as discussed, the letter explained. Renderings attached — see your new look! But Mason had destroyed the renderings, or hidden them somewhere else. They were gone.

The next letter thanked Duke for his payment and reminded him that the center offered three follow-up visits over the next eighteen months at no charge. The plastic surgery equivalent of free oil changes with a new car. Two dozen pages of medical records followed. Wells couldn’t be sure, but the operations seemed to have gone smoothly. Finally, the packet included two pages of postoperative instructions and reports on follow-up visits. The last visit had come two years earlier. Duke reported no problems, and Singh pronounced him fully healed.

The records wouldn’t convince the CIA to take another look at Mason, especially since his name was nowhere in them. Wells needed before-and-after photos. Maybe Mason had burned them. More likely he’d locked them away in his house and Wells had missed them. Koh Pu was now off-limits. Wells thought his best chance would be with the surgery center. But he needed a good reason to visit. He had checked online, found the place had a one-page website. The kind that was intentionally exclusive. We don’t need to look for business on the Internet. Saying he was CIA or FBI chasing a terrorist wouldn’t work. Singh would call the American embassy in Bangkok to check his bona fides.

Wells was exhausted. He tucked away the records, lay down, closed his eyes. The shouting outside melted into a prayer call in his mind and Wells knew what to do. He fell asleep anesthesia-quick and woke to a heavy knock.

“Yes?”

“Checkout eleven o’clock!” It was 11:05, according to the clock beside the bed. Service with a smile. Wells passed another day’s rent through the door, took a lukewarm shower, and got to work.

Years before, Wells had worked for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to chase down a terrorist cell backed by other Saudi royals. Wells had killed the terrorists, but the mission remained unfinished in his mind. The princes who had financed the cell remained inside the Kingdom, where Wells couldn’t touch them. He hoped that one day he’d have his chance.

Meantime, in the wake of the mission, Abdullah had promised Wells that if he needed the Kingdom’s help, he need only ask. Wells had drawn from that favor bank once already. He was wary of relying too heavily on it. In this case, though, what he needed was simple: a phone, a passport, and someone to answer a call at the Saudi embassy in Bangkok.

The king’s word was still good. By late afternoon, the embassy had arranged what he needed. Wells moved from his hotel to the other end of the luxury spectrum, the Four Seasons downtown. A thousand baht didn’t even cover valet parking there. On the other hand, the Four Seasons garage was cleaner than his old room.

A Saudi-registered mobile phone waited in an envelope at the front desk, with the promise of a passport in the morning. On such short notice, it wouldn’t be live, but Wells didn’t need it to travel. He would use it only as proof of a fake identity.

From his room, he called the Aesthetic Beauty Centre and left his message as Jalal. He expected he’d have to wait until morning for a call, but his phone rang back within the hour.

“Asalaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam.” A woman’s voice.

“Is this Dr. Singh?” Wells said in Arabic. A Saudi would know his accent was wrong, but this woman’s accent was even rougher than his.

“I’m Aisha. Dr. Singh doesn’t speak Arabic. And you are Jalal?”

“Yes. Jalal bin Fahd.” Wells was implicitly claiming to be a member of the royal family by naming his father so prominently.

“How may the Aesthetic Beauty Centre help you, sir?” Wells heard her try to smooth her accent at his hint of al-Saud blood.

“My daughter will be married in five weeks.”

“Congratulations.”

“There is a difficulty. I don’t like to speak of it over the phone.”

She coughed. “A riding accident?”

“Very much so.” Meaning: Her hymen is broken. She needs it in one piece if she doesn’t want the groom to beat her senseless, or worse, on their wedding night. “I know there isn’t much time. She told me only last week.”

“We’ve dealt with this before.”

“Thanks be to Allah. I’d like to come in, discuss it further with Dr. Singh tomorrow.”

“I must ask, sir. Do you have an existing customer as a reference?”

So the security precautions were real.

“I do, but I promised I wouldn’t use her name.” Wells could have mentioned Duke, but he wanted to surprise Singh with the name face-to-face.

“A moment, sir.” Wells heard a whispered conversation. “If you fax us the identity page from your passport, we’ll schedule a consultation. Is your daughter here?”

“I wanted to know you could help before I brought her.”

“That’s fine. She’ll need time to heal, but a day or two shouldn’t matter.”

“Thank you, Aisha.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll text you our fax number. Dr. Singh looks forward to seeing you.”

She hung up. Wells wished he had the passport already, but he supposed he could hold them off until morning by saying he’d made a mistake with the fax number. Saudi princes were not known for attention to detail.

The Aesthetic Beauty Centre rose out of farmland seventy miles west of Bangkok, halfway to the Burmese border. The complex consisted of a two-story office building and two small outbuildings, all clad in expensive-looking coppery glass. A low fence surrounded the grounds, with a guardhouse at the front gate. A small helicopter sat beside the main building, presumably for repeat clients. Wells rated only a chauffeured BMW.

The gate swung open as the sedan approached. A tall Indian woman waited for Wells. “Asalaam aleikum. I’m Aisha.”

“Aleikum salaam.”

The building gleamed inside as well as out. Surgical suites occupied the right side, administration offices the left. An Indian man wearing a white doctor’s jacket waited in a conference room.

“You speak English, doctor?” Wells expected he’d have an easier time if he and Singh were alone.

“Of course.”

“So do I. I’d rather—” Wells nodded to Aisha.

“I assure you, you may trust Aisha.”

Wells shook his head.

“Aisha—”

She left. Singh snapped open a calfskin briefcase, pulled out a legal pad and pen.

“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. bin Fahd.”

“I’d like to hear more about the center.”

“Of course. I trained at Harvard, medical school and residency. After graduating, I worked in Los Angeles. I then returned to my homeland for eight years to practice in Delhi. I can tell you that I was considered perhaps the top plastic surgeon in India. I had achieved everything I hoped.” Singh spoke with complete confidence. Wells guessed he’d delivered this pitch hundreds of times.

“But you left.”

“Six years ago, I decided that the world’s elite deserved cosmetic and reconstructive surgery at the highest level. With absolute privacy. No center like that existed. So I built it. I am one of three full-time physicians here, along with another surgeon and an anesthesiologist. We’re all U.S.-trained. We perform most surgeries ourselves, with arrangements to bring in specialists when necessary. We have eight nurses and a nutritionist. We never have more than five patients on-site, and they don’t see one another unless they specifically request otherwise. We are expensive, but you — or your daughter, in this case — get what you pay for. Our clients are billionaires, politicians, celebrities. From all over. India, of course, but also China, Russia, the Arab world, and our reputation is spreading into Europe. The United States has been harder to crack, but it will come.”

“Impressive.”

“Thank you. Now, may we discuss your daughter?”

Singh radiated self-assurance. The only way to crack him wasn’t to try to trick him but to come straight at him, all at once.

“My daughter doesn’t exist. And my name’s not Jalal bin Fahd.”

“Is this a joke?” Singh swept up his briefcase, stood, headed toward the door.

“Sit down.”

Singh looked at Wells and sat.

“I work for the Saudi government. Chasing a man you operated on about four years ago. He went by the name Abraham Duke. His real name is Glenn Mason. Do you know who I mean?”

Singh shook his head.

“You’re lying. He had several surgeries. He paid you more than one hundred thousand dollars. You changed the look of his face. His case would have been memorable.”

“I never discuss my patients.”

“I have his records, Dr. Singh. And I can tell you that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia believes that Mr. Mason was involved in a plot against His Majesty. You cannot imagine how seriously the Kingdom takes that threat.”

“This is silly. An effort to intimidate me into talking about a person who may or may not have been a patient. Whatever you’re doing, it’s time for you to leave, Mr. bin Fahd. Or whoever you really are.”

Wells reached into his pocket, slid a folded piece of paper across the table to Singh. The doctor unfolded it hesitantly. “What is this?”

“The number for the Saudi embassy in Bangkok. Call them, ask for the diplomatic secretary. He’ll confirm what I’ve said, who I am.”

“You expect me to believe this is the real number?” But Singh didn’t throw the number away.

“I expect you to check it and find out it is. I’ll wait.”

Fifteen minutes later, Singh returned.

“What do you want from me?”

“Very little. Then I’ll leave and you can get back to putting new faces on drug lords.” Wells handed over one of Mason’s preoperative photos. “Remember him now?”

“I told you, I can’t talk about my patients.”

“If you think making an enemy of the Kingdom is bad, wait until the Interior Ministry tells the CIA that you refused to help capture a terrorist. Who happens to be an ex — CIA case officer.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” For the first time, Singh’s voice wavered. “We never ask our clients why they’re here.”

“That’s fine. All I need is postop photos.”

Singh laughed. “Look around, sir.” Contempt replaced the doubt in his voice. “Do you imagine the patients who come here want us to keep before-and-after snaps? For our website, perhaps?”

“What about renderings? Your letter to him mentions renderings.”

“We delete those at the final postop visit, assuming the healing has gone normally.” Singh pressed his advantage. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. Now, if you don’t mind—”

“What if the healing doesn’t go normally?”

“You say you’ve seen Mr. Duke’s records—”

“But if there’s a product recall, an emergency, even years later. You must be able to reach your patients. A phone number, an email.”

Singh shook his head.

“Choice A: Give me those, I’m gone. Never bother you again. And he’ll never know how I got them. Choice B: You get put on a whole bunch of lists you don’t want to be on.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong—”

“Even so. You think business will improve if The New York Times writes an article about a secret plastic surgery center in Thailand. That the kind of publicity your clients want?”

Singh picked up his briefcase, stalked out of the room. Wells wasn’t sure who he would see next. The center’s guards? The Thai police? Five minutes later, Aisha walked in.

“Dr. Singh said you’d asked for this.”

She gave Wells an envelope. Inside, a single piece of paper with a Thai phone number and an email address.

“Sorry we couldn’t help you today. Your car is waiting.”

Wells made the call as soon as they cleared the front gate. Two a.m. in Virginia, but no matter.

“John?” He didn’t even sound groggy.

“I have something for you.”

“Pictures.”

“No. The guy’s a ghost.”

“Shame to spend all that money on surgery and none of your friends can see it.”

“Isn’t it? But I have an email and phone. Not sure when he’s used them, but they should be live. Are you still in purgatory or can you get them run?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Wells read them off.

“I’ll see if I can’t get it in before the morning rush.” Meaning sneak the request through now, when a tired sys admin might not question it, or Shafer.

Back to Bangkok. Shafer didn’t get back to him that night. Or the next morning. Even at NSA, where some of Shafer’s best friends had worked, his juice seemed to be drying up. Wells wondered if he should go to Duto for help. Finally, just before midnight, thirty hours — plus after he’d passed Shafer the number, his phone buzzed.

“More to come,” Shafer said. “But it’s not too early to book your next flight.”

“Where?”

“You have to ask?”

“Istanbul?”

“Where else?”

18

The United States spent sixty billion dollars a year to spy on friends and enemies, tap phones, intercept emails, peek through windows. It spent six hundred billion more to maintain an arsenal that ranged from insect-sized drones to aircraft carriers. The system had deep flaws. It was secretive, duplicative, inefficient. Yet its sheer size and power guaranteed its effectiveness. No country with a choice would go to war with the United States.

That was the theory, anyway.

For years, the intelligence community had promised the President that Iran’s nuclear program represented only a minor threat to the American homeland. CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the best independent think tanks all reached the same conclusion. Tehran wanted nuclear weapons for three reasons. First, to deter an American invasion. Second, to cement Iran’s position as the strongest power in the Gulf, dominating Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Third, to menace Israel. Being able to threaten the Jewish state with extinction would make Iran’s leaders more popular with their own citizens and their Sunni neighbors.

But the analysts put the odds that Iran would use a bomb against Israel as very low, and against the United States as vanishingly small. Israel had more than a hundred nuclear warheads of its own and wouldn’t hesitate to annihilate Iran in a counterattack. History offered some reassurance. Despite Iran’s bluster, its army had never joined any of the Arab wars against Israel.

Iran had even less appetite for war with the Great Satan. Tehran had used the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force to bleed the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But since the eighties, Iran had refrained from attacking American civilians directly or even through Hezbollah. The mullahs knew that the United States was too powerful to fight. A nuclear weapon, even a dozen weapons, would not change their calculus.

The consensus was not universal. Hawks in Congress argued that the United States simply could not trust Iran with a bomb. Even if it didn’t attack America directly, it might use the weapon against Israel and suck the United States into a regional nuclear war. But the United States had just escaped Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the most frustrating conflicts in its history. The President had no appetite for another.

But at breakfast this morning, he had gotten a call from his National Security Advisor, Donna Green, that made him wonder whether the Chicken Littles were right after all.

He was digging into his scrambled eggs when his steward appeared with his encrypted iPhone. One of the peculiarities of being President was that he never carried anything. Not even a phone. The Secret Service offered a half-dozen reasons for the policy. He knew the truth. They were afraid of the security risk if he lost it. Not to mention the worldwide embarrassment.

“Mr. President. Ms. Green asks if you have a moment.”

Green knew his schedule, and she was too smart to bother him without good reason. He reached for the phone. “Donna.”

“Sorry to interrupt you, sir. Scott Hebley just called. He’s asking for a Four-H today.”

The term had nothing to do with state fairs or prize watermelons. It translated to an Oval Office meeting with the DCI, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“He explain why?” No mobile phone was as secure as the hardline network that connected the White House with Langley, the Pentagon, and Fort Meade. Still, they could speak relatively freely. A 4096-bit encryption key protected this conversation. At current processor speeds, a hundred supercomputers would need a hundred years to crack the call.

“Iran. Beyond that, he said he’d rather discuss it with everyone in person, sir.”

“Bit dramatic.”

From anyone else, the President would have demanded a pre-meeting report. But he trusted Hebley, who had wound down the war in Afghanistan with a minimum of fuss. The President would never believe he fully controlled Langley, but at least he could count on Hebley to follow orders. Unlike the previous director. Vinny Duto had been a creature of the National Clandestine Service from the top of his lying head to the tips of his lying toes. The President had looked forward to the day when his spokesman would thank Duto for his service and announce his resignation as DCI. But Duto had seen the end coming, beaten him to the door. He was the Senate’s problem now.

“Call Cindy. She should be able to open up a block around noon.” Cynthia Stone was the President’s chief scheduler, a hugely important position, given the value of his time.

“And the Veep?”

“We’ll hook him in after.” The Vice President liked the sound of his own voice too much for the President’s taste. When he and the President were alone, he kept himself in check, but in bigger groups he couldn’t help himself.

Stone moved one meeting, lopped fifteen minutes off another, and at 12:03 p.m., Green led the Four Horsemen into the Oval Office. They arranged themselves on the pale yellow couches that faced each other in the center of the room, perpendicular to the President’s desk. The President himself remained seated. These military men had been trained to respect authority, and he liked to remind them of his status as Commander-in-Chief.

“General Hebley. You asked for this meeting. The floor is yours.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. A little less than twenty-four hours ago, a case officer in Istanbul was contacted by a source we call Mathers. Mathers is our Revolutionary Guard walk-in, the same man who correctly informed us that Iran was targeting a station chief. Mathers now reports that Iran is trying to smuggle radiological material into the United States.”

Hebley paused. The President nodded: Go on.

“Mathers reports that the material is aboard a ship that sailed from Dubai more than a week ago. He didn’t know its name, but he did provide a few details about its destination and registry. We’ve focused on several possible candidates, all of which are in the Atlantic Ocean and outside American waters. We have not yet interdicted any of the ships, and, of course, that’s one reason I’m here today.”

“Do we know the type of material, or what our friends plan to do with it?”

“The type of material is a mystery, sir. As to what they intend, Mathers referred to this as a practice run.”

“For—”

“Mathers reports the Iranian stockpile of highly enriched uranium is significantly larger than our previous estimates. He claims that the Iranian government has solved certain unspecified production problems and has now enriched enough material for ten bombs. Depending on the size of the weapons, that would represent one hundred fifty to three hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Further, Mathers claims that the Iranian government intends to transfer HEU to American soil with the aim of building nuclear weapons in the United States.”

Not much could shock the people in this room into silence. That last sentence did.

“For an attack?” the President finally said.

“Mathers isn’t sure of the intent. But he says his best guess is that Iran wants the weapons here as a deterrent. Without intercontinental ballistic missiles, this would be a low-tech form of mutually assured destruction.”

“Blackmail,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said.

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Green said.

Tell me this is a practical joke, the President thought. To get me to pay more attention to foreign policy. But he had learned that even these men, powerful as they were, looked to him for leadership. Leaders didn’t waste time trying to wish away problems.

“Can we trust this source, General?”

“That’s the crucial question, Mr. President. The case officer handling him is fairly experienced, speaks good Farsi, has dealt with Iranians for several years. I’ve spoken to him myself, as have other senior members of my staff. He believes Mathers, and he makes a credible case.”

“Do we have any confirmation from anywhere else?”

Hebley cleared his throat. “At the moment, we have no independent confirmation.”

“Not one secondary source inside Iran we can ask?”

“Our intel into the Guard is limited, sir. And we have even less visibility into the Quds Force, which is the Guard unit that handles these operations. Not even the Israelis have ever cracked Quds. And their communications infrastructure—”

“Stop telling me what you don’t know, General. Tell me what you do know.”

“What we know, sir, is that this man claims to be a Rev Guard colonel and has given us limited warnings about two terrorist attacks. It may be that this is what the agency calls a false flag operation, that Mathers is working for another intelligence service that wants to provoke us into attacking Iran. But the countries which would benefit the most from a war are our allies. Our analysts don’t believe that they would risk angering us this way. An internal power struggle within Tehran could also be driving this. Anti-American elements inside the Iranian government could be trying to hoax us into an attack to bolster their position. Finally, it’s possible that our source is real. At the moment, we judge that most likely, though by no means a certainty.”

“How likely? Ninety percent?”

“Maybe fifty-one percent at this point, with everything else adding up to forty-nine.”

Green caught the President’s eye.

“Go ahead, Donna.”

“What about a third party? Al-Qaeda, say. If they could find an Iranian to help them, wouldn’t they love to trick us into this? Get the Crusaders attacking the Shia. Two truck bombs and a hit on a station chief, that seems within their capabilities.”

“We’ve considered nonstate actors such as AQ. We judge the possibility as unlikely. We have excellent intel on AQ and its offshoots and have seen no evidence of their involvement.”

“Another terrorist group? One we haven’t heard of yet?”

“That’s just it. The attacks themselves, I agree, the sophistication was limited. But two weeks have passed since James Veder was killed and we still have no leads. That makes us think we’re looking at a national intelligence service, one using high-level encryption to defeat our communications intercepts.”

“So we bring this source in, talk to him?” the President said.

“He’s absolutely refused to come in for a debrief. We’ve considered forcing him, snatching him, but we think we’d lose him as an asset. He’s provided information only on his own terms.”

The President suddenly heard what Hebley wasn’t saying. “But at least we know who he is? We’ve checked him out.”

Hebley looked at the door, like he was hoping for a knock to rescue him. It didn’t come. “Sir, at the moment we don’t even have a photograph of him. He’s a very difficult source.”

“One reason I like you, General, is you aren’t afraid to tell it like it is.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“That said, you and your entire agency should be embarrassed.”

The President generally considered foul language beneath this office, even if some of his predecessors were famous for profanity. Now, however, he decided an F-bomb was warranted.

“It’s fucking ridiculous. He’s a ‘difficult source.’” The President put air quotes around the phrase. “You sound like a kindergarten teacher. ‘Little Johnny is so difficult I can’t get him to take a nap.’Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job. You don’t want to snatch him, you think he’s more useful to you out there, fine. But get his picture, identify him. You know what? I guess I am telling you how to do your job. Find out if he could access this information. Along the way, maybe you could figure out who killed your station chief. I need more than this if we’re going to start scrambling jets. Way more. Fifty-one percent odds, that’s worse than nothing.”

Hebley nodded.

“Are we clear? I want to hear you say we’re clear.”

“Yes, Mr. President. We’re clear.”

Jake Mangiola, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was an Air Force four-star, an old-school fighter jock. Now he gingerly came to Hebley’s rescue, one general helping another. “Mr. President, if I may.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think we all agree that considering offensive action against Iran would be premature. However, given the gravity of this information, it might be prudent for us to undertake a top-to-bottom review of our Iranian APs—”

“AP?”

“Action plan, sir—”

After years of briefings, the President still couldn’t get over the way four-stars talked. Like they were reading from invisible PowerPoint presentations, complete with acronyms.

“So you’ll have every option if the need arises. We can also move a second carrier group to the edge of the Gulf. We have the George Washington south of Sri Lanka now. It’ll take three, maybe four days to arrive. Call it an unscheduled training exercise.”

“Run your review, get the carrier in close.” He had to admit he felt a certain pleasure at snapping his fingers, moving a hundred-thousand-ton aircraft carrier like a kid playing Risk. But his elation passed quickly. The United States hadn’t faced a threat this serious since the end of the Cold War. At least.

He looked at Hebley. “Meanwhile, Scott, I assume you want a finding so you and your friends in the Navy can peek at those ships from Dubai. See if they’re carrying anything that glows in the dark.”

Hebley nodded, obviously glad to be on firmer ground. “We think we have a low-risk option.” He explained.

“Anybody object?” the President said when Hebley was finished. No one did. “Good. WHC will get you something this afternoon.” White House counsel.

“Yes, sir. We have several days before they’re in U.S. territorial waters, but we’d like to make the intercept sooner rather than later.”

“Let Donna know when you’re ready to move.” The President unsubtly glanced at his watch, signaling the meeting’s end. Hebley nearly levitated from the couch in his eagerness to leave. The others followed. “Donna, please stay.”

Green had worked briefly for the CIA before leaving to go to law school, where she’d met the President. After graduation she had spent a decade on the Hill working for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Profiles usually called her the most hawkish member of the President’s inner circle. It was more correct to say she was the champion cynic, believing the worst about every nation’s leaders — and usually its people, too. The President had learned not to doubt her judgments, however bitter they seemed. Vladimir Putin had turned Russia into a police state. The leaders of China had stolen billions of dollars for themselves. The Syrian resistance was a bloody jihadi mess.

“We really this clueless about Iran, Donna?”

“Sir, much as I hate to defend Langley, draw up a list of our strategic problems over the last decade, Iran barely makes the top ten. China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt — then Iran. Maybe ahead of Egypt, but you see the point.”

“But thousands of people in Tehran and the nuclear facilities must be able to confirm this. Scientists, military—”

“I doubt thousands. A few hundred. But most of them, remember, even the ones who aren’t religious, they want the bomb. National sovereignty, who are we to say Iran can’t have a few nukes when we have thousands. So let’s say ninety-five percent would never talk to us, no way, just on principle. The other five percent, maybe they’re on the fence, they’re scared of what the mullahs might do. Say a couple dozen people fall in that category. Mostly scientists. Literally working in caves. How are they going to reach us? Email nuke@cia.gov? They know if they’re caught, they’ll be tortured. Killed. Takes courage to make that choice.”

“Recklessness, even.”

“Yes. At the top, the mullahs have been in charge for thirty-five years. We don’t know much about what drives them, how many are genuinely religious, how many just want power. You can say that’s our own bad, that after all this time we should have a better picture, but cracking a closed society is tough. And the Guard are really good at what they do — they have to be or the Israelis would eat them for lunch.”

“What about the IAEA?” The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based group that tracked enrichment programs and reactors worldwide. “All those reports they put out, the monitors, could this really get by them?”

Green didn’t smile much, but she was smiling now. “Sir. The way IAEA works is that Iran does what it wants and then lies. I don’t mean fibs. I mean they build entire enrichment plants and don’t declare them. Then we or the Israelis catch them lying and tell IAEA. Then IAEA goes to Iran and says, We caught you, tsk-tsk, now let us verify the production of this plant. The Iranians negotiate for a while. Sometimes they let the inspectors in, and sometimes they don’t. Usually they cooperate just enough that we can’t say they completely stonewalled us. Even when they do let people in, they delay long enough to have plenty of time to destroy whatever evidence they don’t want us to find. I mean, this HEU could literally be coming out of a facility that we don’t know exists.”

She shook her head. “I know the obvious next question is, ‘Why even bother?’”

The President nodded.

“Because the games with IAEA slow them a little, give us a partial picture of what they’re doing, how successful they’ve been. Plus on some level it lets them know that we’re watching them. But it’s never stopped anyone who really wants a bomb from building one. Not India, not Pakistan, not North Korea.”

“So you’re saying, yes, we’re this clueless. That maybe they have ten bombs done and this guy we’re calling Mathers is the only one with the guts to tell us.”

“It’s possible, sir. I say that with fifty-one percent confidence.” Another smile, so the President would know she was joking. Green was a skinny woman, hipless, with short bobbed hair. She was married to a man who could have been her twin. Somehow they’d had one child, a son, though the President couldn’t imagine them in bed. He liked her complete sexlessness. He never worried why he wanted her around.

“What if we confront them, tell them what we know? Tell them their choices are the truth or war—”

“The one thing I am sure of, sir, is that that won’t work. They will deny. If they aren’t doing this and it’s a setup, of course they’ll deny. But even if they are, they’ll deny, because the mere fact that we’re asking will show them we’re not sure. We need evidence.”

“So let’s bring this guy in.”

“If we can. I was thinking about the material that’s on the ship. It depends what it is, though. Low-level material, that wouldn’t prove anything. But if it’s a chunk of bomb-grade uranium—”

“At least we’d know.”

“At least we’d know.” Green had been with him long enough to know when their meetings were over. “What can I do now, sir?”

“I want a list of people in the Iranian government who might be open to a back channel. Anybody halfway reasonable. Ambassadors, whoever.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Never a dull moment, Donna.”

“No, sir.” She stood, turned for the door.

“By the way, happy birthday.” She was fifty today. They both knew that whatever celebration she had planned would be postponed for the foreseeable future. He reached into his desk. “I picked this up special just for you. And by I, I mean the Secret Service.”

He pulled out a twin package of Hostess cupcakes and a candle. “Can you believe they almost discontinued these?”

She shook her head. “Thank you, sir.” Her voice caught.

“Should we light it now? Wish for no war?”

“I will if you will, sir.”

The cupcake was delicious.

19

Reza, Duke, and Salome sat in the kitchen of the safe house in Kadiköy, a quiet district on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Reza had just finished telling them about his meeting with Brian Taylor.

“Tell me you weren’t too queeny, Reza,” Salome said.

“Just queeny enough.”

Reza’s real name was Bijan Parande. He was the only child of an Iranian air force major who had stayed in Tehran after the Shah’s fall, betting that the new regime would need professional fighter pilots as much as the old. For a while, the major was right. But as Iran’s war against Saddam Hussein sputtered, the ayatollahs decided to purge their military of “counterrevolutionary infidels.” In March 1984, Major Parande sent his wife and eleven-year-old son to France. Three months later, the Revolutionary Guard arrested him on charges of treason. He was shot, his corpse dumped in an unmarked grave, his bank accounts seized.

Overnight Bijan and his mother, Afari, were reduced to ungenteel poverty in the northern suburbs of Paris. Afari became a housekeeper. Bijan had been spoiled in Tehran, but he accepted their new life with surprising speed. He had never much liked his father, who had torn out a chunk of his hair when he was seven. Bijan’s crime was trying on his mother’s shoes.

By twelve, Bijan knew that he preferred men to women. Open homosexuality was neither understood nor tolerated in the banlieue where he and his mother lived, so he kept his desires to himself. At seventeen, he fled for London. He wanted to learn English and had the vague idea of becoming an actor. He was almost absurdly handsome, tall and lean with flowing black hair, but his looks far outpaced his skills onstage. To survive, he worked as a busboy and waiter and lived in a cold-water apartment in east London. On his twentieth birthday, a Saudi princeling offered two thousand pounds for a night with him, and his life turned again.

Bijan spent the next fifteen years serving wealthy Arab men in London and Paris. He was expensive and discreet and picked up new clients through word of mouth. He spoke French, English, Farsi, and Arabic, and could easily pass as a business partner for his clients. Sometimes he even visited them on family vacations at their compounds in the south of France. Closeted Arab men took pleasure in such games.

At thirty-five, Bijan found business dwindling. His clients could have what they liked, and they liked young. He could have cut his rates, or accepted men in their seventies with hair growing from their ears. But he had been careful with his money, even bought a small apartment in Paris a few years before. He knew he’d survive, though he feared being bored.

He needn’t have worried.

The knock on his apartment door had come almost two years before, a breezy late-spring afternoon in Paris. Salome. She wouldn’t tell him her real name, who she was, or how she’d found him. But she knew everything about him, including what the mullahs had done to his father. He wondered if she worked for the DGSE, the French intelligence service. Though she didn’t seem French to him. Then again, the French wouldn’t consider him French, either, no matter that he’d lived in the country most of his life. When she outlined what she wanted, he agreed immediately.

Don’t say yes too soon, she warned. Think it over. The danger here, it’s real. And once you start…

But he didn’t need to think it over. He’d enjoyed his youth, but his youth was gone. His mother had died in 2009. Liver cancer. She’d never again seen Tehran. Bijan had no one else. Not a boyfriend, not even a dog. Now Salome wanted him to help make the ayatollahs pay for everything they’d done. “C’est bon,” he told her.

Bijan had never stopped speaking Farsi, mainly because his mother had never learned French. Still, his Farsi was rusty, his knowledge of Iranian culture even worse. A research trip to Tehran was obviously out. Instead, he moved to Sweden and took a studio apartment in Husby, a poor suburb near Stockholm where tens of thousands of Iranian immigrants lived. He kept to himself, spoke only Farsi. He watched Iranian television in local coffeehouses. He grew a scrubby beard, got a job as a dishwasher. He studiously avoided talking about politics. But after a few weeks, he noticed conversations dying as he walked into stores and restaurants. He’d been pegged as an Iranian spy, or at least a friend of the regime. When he told Salome, she laughed.

Next she sent him to Sofia. Bulgaria. There he shared a basement apartment with roaches and rats. He hadn’t been so uncomfortable since his first days in London. When he complained, Salome laughed. You spent too many nights pillow-biting in hotel suites. Got to toughen you up if you’re going to pass for Rev Guard, even a closeted one. Along the way, her bodyguard — the most terrifying man he’d ever met — taught him basic espionage and self-defense. How to recognize a tail and lose it. How to shoot. How to handle a knife. Even if you never use any of these tricks, you have to know them. Colonel Reza would.

Six months in Sofia roughened his skin, put bags under his eyes. We’re getting somewhere, Salome said. She moved him to Istanbul. There she gave him a tutorial on the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force and the first specifics about what she wanted him to do. He was surprised, taken aback. Why would a trained CIA officer accept intelligence from a man whose real name he didn’t even know? Why would the officer even respond to his initial effort to make contact? You’re going to tell him a very believable story. Still, you’re right, he won’t trust you at first, Salome said. Maybe ever. But we’re going to make what you tell him come true. And he’ll have to trust that.

Reza lived quietly in Istanbul through spring and most of summer. Then Salome told him the time for planning and training had ended. And he became Colonel Reza, an Iranian spy who was having second thoughts about his mission…

Now here he was. Twice he had promised Brian Taylor terror attacks. Twice they’d come. He had no idea how Salome and Duke had managed them. He had one job and one job only: to reel in Taylor, make him believe that Iran was about to send highly enriched uranium to the United States.

“Stroke of genius, the gay thing,” Duke said. “Taylor thinks he’s figured out what makes you tick. Why you’re taking this chance. He’ll feel like he has an edge. It’ll give him more confidence when he goes to his station chief, all the way up the chain.”

“Next time he sees me, he’s going to take my photo. Even if he has to tie me up himself to do it.”

“I promise the agency has snatch-and-grab teams in Istanbul right now,” Duke said. “They’ll be tailing Taylor, sleeping at his apartment. Langley will have live ears on every phone. They might even have the Turks helping. Only question is whether they’ll try to snatch you the next time you meet him. I think we have to assume yes.”

“Which is why you’re not going to meet him again,” Salome said.

Reza was disappointed. He liked playing with Taylor. Reza wondered, too, whether Salome planned to kill him when the job was done. She was a client, and his clients had a habit of discarding him after he’d satisfied their needs. He understood very well the risk he presented to her. He had thought of telling her that he’d left a letter with a friend that was to be opened only in the event of his death. But he had no friends he trusted well enough. Salome probably knew as much.

He supposed as a last resort he could leave the letter in his apartment. Then decided, what’s the use? If he died, the property manager would eventually unlock his door. Maybe the manager would find the letter, if Salome’s agents hadn’t already broken in and taken it. Maybe the manager would view it as something other than the mad ramblings of a dead man, bring it to the local police station. Even then, what would the gendarmes do? How would their investigation help him? He couldn’t beat these people who bombed embassies and killed CIA men. He would hope that Salome would trust in his discretion. Anyway, he would be satisfied whatever happened. The last two years had been the most interesting of his life. If he had to trade them for empty decades watching movies alone, so be it.

“So if I’m not to meet him, what happens next?”

“First we need to let them find the material.”

“On the ship?” Reza didn’t know why he was surprised. Of course Salome would make sure his third tip was as accurate as his first two. He saw where the game was leading, a stepped series of provocations, each more threatening to America than the previous. The sequence had to have one more. He couldn’t imagine what that would be. A threat to assassinate the President?

She put a hand on Reza’s arm. “Duke and I need to talk.” The words spoken in a way that made Reza wonder what Duke had done wrong. “I’ll call you. Until then, keep your routine.”

“Tell me what you know about Thailand,” she said to Duke as soon as Reza was gone.

“My caretaker called. Somebody broke into my house. A Westerner, probably American. I don’t know how he found me, but I think he took some papers. Surgery records.”

“Photos?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

She let that hang.

“I called Singh,” Duke said. “The doctor. He told me the guy approached them. At this point, he was trying to pass himself as Saudi. He had some kind of contact at the KSA embassy in Bangkok who vouched for him. Didn’t matter. Singh told him to get lost.”

“The same man? Went as American and then Saudi?”

Suddenly the pieces fit together. Duke knew who was chasing them. Not a happy thought. “This leak started with Eddie, right? Who knew Montoya. Who knows Vinny Duto from Colombia. Know who else knows Duto?” Duke paused. “John Wells.”

She didn’t look as surprised as he expected. He wondered again about her connections inside Langley. “Wells. The retired one who used to work with Duto?”

“He’s trouble, Salome. He’s kept his profile down since the thing in Times Square, but he won’t be scared of this. He likes it messy.”

“Duto can’t help him anymore.”

“Senators have a tiny bit of pull.”

“So could John Wells have found you through Aesthetic Beauty?”

“I told you, Singh said—”

“Of course Singh said that.”

Duke saw she was right. Singh couldn’t deny someone had come looking for Duke. The fact that Duke was calling him out of the blue proved Duke knew that much. But Singh would insist he hadn’t told Wells anything, even if he had.

“I didn’t use my real name, I paid cash, they don’t keep pictures.”

“You sure?”

“As sure as I can be without looking at their hard drives.”

“Do they have current contacts for you?”

“A mobile number and an email address.”

“The phone—”

“In my luggage at safe house three. I’ll destroy it.”

“Let’s assume Wells knows your real name, too. Maybe Eddie told Montoya, or maybe they figured it out for themselves.” Salome stared at him. Duke wondered if she knew the truth about his link to Veder, why he’d insisted on targeting the man. No matter. They couldn’t go back.

“Maybe he does.”

“Which means Shafer and Duto do, too. Maybe they’re already trying to convince the agency Glenn Mason is involved.” Saying it like there was no maybe at all.

“It doesn’t matter. Glenn Mason is dead. And I haven’t used that name in four years. Never.”

“A solid defense. As long as you stay dead.”

Not much he could say to that. He didn’t exactly trust her, but he knew he was in for the duration. Far too late for him to give himself up. He’d killed a station chief. He’d wind up with a needle in his arm.

“Let’s assume John Wells has tracked you to Istanbul. The famous John Wells.” Her voice was airy. Almost sarcastic. “What then. What shall we do with him?”