Twelve Days

1

The images were horrific. A man’s legs, brown skin sloughed off, exposing the yellow-red meat underneath. A layer of jet fuel burning on top of the ocean, charring a chunk of bone. Worst of all, bits of a stuffed toy, blood smearing its white fur.

The first reports of an explosion in Mumbai showed up on Twitter ninety seconds after the jet was hit. A half hour later, 12:30 a.m. in India, 2 p.m. in Washington, the Associated Press and Reuters confirmed a plane crash. The Indian navy had sent ships to search the waters west of the city, Reuters said. Two hours later, a bleary-eyed spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation identified the jet as a United Airlines flight bound for Newark. “The situation is difficult. At this point, we cannot expect survivors.”

Almost immediately, Reuters broke the news that the jet’s captain had reported missiles in the air seconds before the plane exploded. Then an Indian news agency reported that airport authorities had surveillance video that showed a missile striking the jet. By 8 p.m. Eastern, CNN and Fox and everyone else had the video. The anchors murmured somberly, Disturbing, we want to warn you so you can have your children leave the room…

The video was silent, not even a minute long. The camera was fixed and faced west from the airport’s control tower. It didn’t capture the actual launch. The missiles were already airborne when they entered the frame. From left to right, twin red streaks rose toward an invisible target. After five or six seconds, they faded, too far away for the camera to catch. But they hadn’t stopped their chase. The proof came with the explosion, a white flash tearing open the night, resolving into a mushroom cloud. The shock wave hit seconds later, rattling the camera as the cloud in the distance grew.

HORROR IN THE SKIES, the crawl under the video said, and this time CNN wasn’t exaggerating. India’s navy would call off its search by morning. No one could have survived.

The inevitable next act would be assigning blame.

The video ended. CNN cut to a serious-looking man in a gray suit with a white shirt. Fred Yount, Terrorism Analyst at RAND Institute—

John Wells flicked off the screen before he had to hear Yount. A man squeezed a trigger in the dark. A few seconds later, almost three hundred people were dead. Whatever Yount had to say wouldn’t change those bare facts.

Wells had quit the Central Intelligence Agency years before. But he’d never escaped the secret world. He knew now he never would. He felt like a swimmer fighting a whirlpool. He was strong enough to avoid being sucked down, but not to reach land. He could only tread water, knowing that one day his body would fail.

He was in his early forties, but his chin was still sturdy, his shoulders thick with muscle. Only the patches of gray hair at his temples and the permanent wariness in his brown eyes betrayed his age and his too-close acquaintance with the world’s sins.

Now he lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. He was in room 319 in the Courtyard by Marriott at the Washington Navy Yard, a hotel favored by randy congressmen for its nearness to their offices. More than anything, Wells wanted to close his eyes. Sleep. But he had a plane to catch in less than four hours. He had arrived in the United States only the night before. Now he was going back the way he’d come, over the Atlantic, bound for London and Zurich. To meet with a man who didn’t much want to see him. Then, maybe, to Mumbai.

Wells understood. He didn’t want to see himself either. Not at the moment. He was carrying himself around like a rain-soaked cardboard box about to burst. Too many miles. And too much death. Wells blamed himself for the downing of the jet. A few days before, he’d discovered the truth about a plot to maneuver the United States into war with Iran. He’d nearly found a way to stop it. But his enemies had outplayed him.

He’d failed.

Wells turned out the bedside light. He closed his eyes, and for sixty seconds thought of the jet’s passengers. Then he made himself forget them. Nothing else to do.

A light knock stirred him. The room door swung open. “Nice opsec.” Ellis Shafer’s gravelly, mumbly voice. The lights flicked on.

“If it came to that, I could kill you in my sleep, Ellis.”

“Hitting you hard?”

“I’m all right.” Wells pushed himself up.

“Of course you are.” Shafer sat on the bed next to Wells. “They probably didn’t even know what hit them. Except the captain. Obviously.”

“You should be a grief counselor.”

“Should I tell you they’re in heaven with seventy-two million virgins each?”

“Ellis—”

“Too soon?”

Wells had been raised Christian but converted to Islam more than a decade before, in the mountains of Pakistan. Shafer was a Jew who had declared his atheism at his bar mitzvah more than fifty years earlier. Unlike Wells, he still worked for the CIA. Barely. Until one of the new director’s new men got around to dropping off a letter of resignation for him.

Over the years, Wells and Shafer had worked together on a half-dozen operations.

But they had never faced a mission as tricky as this one.

A few weeks before, Iran had begun a secret campaign against the United States. Assassins working for the Quds Force, the foreign intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, killed a CIA station chief. Then the Guard smuggled radioactive material onto a Pakistani ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Fortunately, a rogue Guard colonel tipped the CIA to Iran’s efforts, enabling the Navy to intercept the ship in the Atlantic.

Then the colonel gave the agency an even more disturbing piece of intel. He said Iran had moved three pounds of weapons-grade uranium to Istanbul. The uranium was ultimately destined for the United States, according to the colonel, who called himself Reza.

Wells and Shafer knew that the truth was very different. Iran had nothing to do with the killing of the station chief, or the smuggling. Reza wasn’t a Revolutionary Guard colonel at all. He worked for a private group trying to trick the United States into attacking Iran. A billionaire casino mogul named Aaron Duberman had paid for the operation. Duberman hoped to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon that it might use against Israel. Iran regularly threatened to annihilate the Jewish state, and a nuclear weapon would make the threat real. Even if Iran never used the bomb, its mere existence would give the country new freedom to launch terrorist attacks against Israel.

Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, the United States had stood firmly with Israel against Iran. Now the relationship between Washington and Tehran was warming. The White House had recently agreed to loosen economic sanctions against Iran. In turn, Tehran promised to stop work on its nuclear weapons program. But those promises in no way satisfied Duberman and the mysterious woman who was his chief lieutenant. They had decided to force the United States to act by fooling the White House into believing that Iran was trying to smuggle the pieces of a nuclear weapon onto American soil.

Wells and Shafer had unraveled the scheme in the last couple of weeks, after Wells tracked down Glenn Mason, an ex — CIA case officer who had betrayed the agency to work for Duberman. Senior CIA officials refused to consider that Mason might be involved, for a reason that at first seemed airtight. Mason had been reported dead in Thailand four years before, and the death report appeared genuine. Mason hadn’t used his passport or bank accounts since. In reality, Wells discovered, Mason had undergone extensive plastic surgery, so he could travel without setting off facial-recognition software.

After chasing Mason across three continents, Wells finally found him in Istanbul. But Mason turned the tables, capturing Wells and imprisoning him in an abandoned factory. Wells spent a week in captivity before killing Mason and escaping. Wells assumed that the Turkish police would find Mason’s body at the factory, setting off an investigation that would unravel the plot.

Instead, Duberman’s mercenaries disposed of Mason’s body and cleaned up the factory, leaving police with nothing to find. Wells and Shafer had no other evidence to prove that Duberman was involved.

Meanwhile, the plot was close to success.

Tests conducted by the Department of Energy had shown that the weapons-grade uranium the CIA found in Istanbul didn’t come from any known stockpile. The DOE and CIA agreed that Iran was the only logical candidate to have produced it. Kilogram-size chunks of highly enriched uranium didn’t exist in private hands. And Iran had worked on nuclear weapons for decades, doing everything possible to hide its efforts from international inspectors. The United States and Israel had repeatedly unearthed hidden enrichment plants over the years. But Iran was twice as big as Texas. No one could say for sure that every plant had been found. In fact, Iranian exiles had told the CIA of rumors that the government had opened a new plant deep under central Tehran.

Despite his fears of starting another war in the Middle East, the President decided he had to accept the reality of the Iranian threat. In an Oval Office speech, he gave Iran two weeks to end its nuclear program or face an invasion. To support his threat, he ordered drones and stealth fighters to bomb Tehran’s airport. Congressional leaders in both parties backed the President. Ironically, the earlier deal with Iran increased his credibility. A man who wanted an excuse to invade Iran wouldn’t have spent years trying to end sanctions.

China and Russia protested the American attack on Tehran, but neither country offered any military aid to Iran. Afghanistan and Turkey, which had long-standing rivalries with Iran, agreed to allow the United States to use their territories as bases for American forces who might eventually invade. The rest of the world stayed on the sidelines. Most countries seemed to think the United States and Iran deserved each other. One was a fading empire that used its military too often, the other a dangerous theocracy that couldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Iran responded furiously to the American threat. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a two-hour speech accusing the United States of lying to justify an invasion: “Iran shall never open its legs to the filthy Zionist-controlled inspectors. Our people will gladly accept martyrdom. The Crusaders and the Jews will suffer the fury that they have unleashed…”

Now someone had shot down an American plane. Iran was the obvious suspect. And the Islamic Republic had a history of terrorism against the United States.

Shafer turned on the television. CNN was replaying the explosion yet again.

“Think it was Duberman?”

“A couple hundred civilians wouldn’t stop him, if he thought it would fuel the fire.”

“On the other hand…” Shafer didn’t have to finish the thought. The Iranian government might also have downed the jet. The fact that it was innocent of the nuclear plot made it more rather than less likely to lash out. From Iran’s point of view, the United States had created fake evidence as an excuse for an invasion. Iran was not likely to wait for American troops to cross its borders before it took revenge.

“We have any idea where Duberman is?” Wells said.

“Probably Hong Kong,” Shafer said. “When not starting a war, he’s got casinos to run. Those rich Chinese want to see the man who’s taking their money.”

Wells wondered if Duberman was cold-blooded enough to glad-hand wealthy gamblers while goading the United States into war. He’d never met the man. But the sheer boldness of Duberman’s scheme suggested that the answer was yes. And Duberman was not just an ordinary billionaire, if such a creature existed. He was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune of almost thirty billion dollars. He had mansions all over the world, a small fleet of private jets, his own island. He had spent $196 million on ads in the previous presidential election, making him the largest political donor ever. Some analysts believed that the President wouldn’t have won without his help.

“You talk to Evan and Heather?” Shafer said. Wells’s son and ex-wife.

“Yeah. They agreed to hang out a few more days. Though they aren’t happy about it.” “Hang out” translated into stay in FBI protective custody. Before Wells killed him, Mason had threatened Evan and Heather. Wells didn’t know if Mason had been serious, but he couldn’t take the risk.

“Where are they?”

“Provo. Heather told me the biggest risk was death by boredom. And Evan says I’m going to get him kicked off the team. He just cracked the rotation and now this.” Evan was a shooting guard on San Diego State’s nationally ranked basketball team.

“We all have problems. You mention you killed five guys three days ago?”

“We had a nice conversation about it.”

The room door banged open. Vinny Duto walked in. Strode in.

The former Director of Central Intelligence, Duto was now a Pennsylvania senator. He’d crash-landed in the Senate after the President pushed him out of the CIA. He was an old-school politician, unpolished and raw with power. No one would call him handsome. He had stubby fingers, a heavy Nixonian face. But his intensity had resonated with Pennsylvania’s flinty voters. He had dominated the debates.

As DCI, Duto had saved Wells’s life more than once. Now they were working together to stop Duberman. But Wells could barely stand Duto at the best of times. He saw Duto as the worst kind of Washington opportunist. And he knew that Duto pegged him as an adrenaline junkie who took unnecessary risks.

They were both right.

Duto offered Wells a thin-lipped smile. “Gentlemen. Hope I haven’t interrupted anything.” Duto liked to irritate Shafer by accusing him of having an old man’s crush on Wells.

Wells felt the itching in the tips of his fingers that meant he was ready to fight. Three hundred people dead and Duto was cracking jokes. Wells knew exactly what Duto thought of the downed plane. Not a tragedy. A moment. One that might help his career if he played it right.

“Imagine you lost a donor on that plane,” Wells said. “Then you could pretend to care.”

“Life lessons from you, Johnny? Definition of irony.”

“Boys. Already?” Shafer clapped his hands like a cheerleader trying to distract a drunken crowd from a blowout. “Same team here. Same team. We have bigger fish to fry, n’est-ce pas?”

Shafer’s horrendous French broke the spell. “Did you just say n’est-ce pas?” Duto said.

“He did,” Wells said.

“You two ready to be grown-ups?”

They both nodded.

“Then let’s move on. Please tell us you have something CNN doesn’t, Vinny.”

The new CIA director, Scott Hebley, had tried to freeze Duto out. But Duto still had sources in the National Clandestine Service, the former Directorate of Operations.

“Video analysis says the missiles traveled at least five kilometers from launch, maybe six. Based on distance and speed, the betting is they’re late-model Russian SAMs. Possibly SA-24s. Which only came into service in 2004. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much untraceable. The Russians have sold them all over, including Libya. After Qaddafi went down in 2010, we had a report that both Iran and Hezbollah agents got their hands on a bunch.”

“And could easily have moved them to India,” Shafer said.

“The White House will see it that way for sure. At this point, I don’t think we have any way to know whether this is Duberman pushing buttons or the Iranians firing across the bow.”

“Anything on the ground?”

“The Indian security services have responded with their usual efficiency,” Duto said.

Meaning none. In 2008, terrorists had attacked hotels, a synagogue, and the central train station in Mumbai. The police didn’t respond in force for hours, allowing ten attackers to kill 166 people and wound hundreds more. “Good news is that the Bureau”—the FBI—“has a five-man forensic team permanently in Delhi. They’ve flown in, along with some of our guys. Bad news is that there are a bunch of slums around the airport. Very dark at that hour, no security cameras. It’s just possible whoever did this was dumb enough to leave the firing tube on the ground. Otherwise.” Duto raised a mock missile to his shoulder. “Drive in, pow-pow, drive out.”

“Pow-pow,” Wells said.

Shafer grunted at him: You made your point, now lay off.

“White House planning anything?”

“If they are, they’re not telling me. But at the moment, I don’t think so. They suspect Iran, but they’ve got no evidence. I think for us the best bet is to stay away from Mumbai, stick with the original plan.”

That morning, before the attack, the men had met at Duto’s office in Philadelphia and agreed that finding the real source of the Istanbul uranium was their only chance to stop the plot. They were caught in the world’s worst game of chicken-and-egg. With the President already having launched a drone strike against Iran, the CIA wasn’t about to chase new theories. Especially one that accused the President’s largest campaign donor of treason.

Wells, Shafer, and Duto would have to find their own proof. But they were stuck on their own. They couldn’t have NSA crack open the servers at Duberman’s casino company. They couldn’t go to the CIA for surveillance or Special Operations Group help.

But if they could prove that someone other than Iran had supplied the uranium, then the President and CIA would at least have to consider their theory about Duberman. And no matter how careful Duberman and his operatives had been, the agency and NSA could unravel what he’d done if they focused on him.

Unfortunately, at the moment they had no idea who might have supplied the uranium. They faced the same blank wall that had led the agency to conclude that Iran had been the source. And they were short on time to find out. The President had given his speech, with its two-week deadline, almost three days earlier. They had less than twelve days left, if they were lucky.

Wells saw that Duto was right. Mumbai was a blind alley. Let the FBI and CIA work it. Their first plan was still their best option.

“Fine,” Wells said. “Zurich it is.” Zurich was home to Pierre Kowalski, an arms dealer, both friend and enemy to Wells over the years. Kowalski was dirty enough to know who might have been sitting on a stash of weapons-grade uranium. Wells could only hope he was clean enough to want to stop this war.

“You going tonight?”

“Through London.”

“He know you’re coming?”

“He knows.”

“He gonna help?”

“He said he’d see me. Not sure he knows anything.” Must we do this? Kowalski had asked when Wells called. To which Wells had said, Yeah. We must. And hung up before Kowalski could object.

“But he’ll see you? How sweet.”

Before Wells could swipe back, Shafer intervened. “You talk to Rudi, Vinny?” Ari Rudin, who had run the Mossad until two years before, when the Israeli Prime Minister forced him out.

“Yeah. He tried to tell me he was too sick to meet.”

“Sick?”

“He has lung cancer. Been keeping it quiet. Told him I’d come to Tel Aviv. I’m not expecting much. I fly out tonight. Twenty-two-hour round-trip for a ten-minute meeting.” Duberman’s wealth and his importance in Israel meant that the Mossad must have watched him over the years.

“Too bad you don’t have lung cancer, too,” Wells said. “You could make him meet you halfway.”

“What about you, Ellis?” Duto said. “You going to look for the leak?”

The final thread. Duberman’s team seemed to have a source inside Langley. Wells, Shafer, and Duto weren’t sure whether the leaker knew the truth about the plot or had simply been fooled into giving up bits of information that Duberman could use. In any case, they saw the leaker as an opportunity as well as a threat. He was another potential avenue to Duberman. But they risked alerting Duberman to what they knew if they went after him.

“At this point, no. Ice is too thin. I’m just going to go into my office, keep my head down for a couple days. May try to talk to Ian Duffy. Mason’s station chief in Hong Kong. He’s back in D.C. now. Lobbying. Maybe he knows something about how Mason connected with Duberman.”

The move was a long shot at best, but all they had right now were long shots.

“So we go our separate ways,” Duto said. “John, in terms of”—Duto made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger—“I know you’ve had difficulties getting hooked up.” Without access to a diplomatic pouch, Wells had trouble getting weapons across borders. “Some places, I still have friends. Russia, for example.”

Wells wasn’t entirely sure why Duto was working so hard. Getting involved with this mess carried serious risk. Duto wouldn’t bother unless he smelled a bigger payoff.

Then Wells realized. “You think this is your ticket, don’t you?”

Duto must have expected the Senate seat would be his last stop. He had won his race as a conservative Democrat, a breed that rarely survived presidential primaries. But now he had a chance at the biggest prize of all. If he could prove that the President’s largest donor was trying to lure the United States into war, he could demand whatever he wanted from the White House. A promotion to Secretary of State or Defense. Done. The President’s endorsement in the next election? Absolutely.

Duto had used Wells and Shafer before. But never for stakes this high. And Wells had never seen the con so early in the game.

“La, la, la,” Wells said. Arabic. No, no, no.

Duto nodded. “Nam.” Yes. “Unless you prefer the alternative.”

He tapped his wrist. “Come on, you can ride with me to Dulles.”

“I’ll get there myself.” Wells couldn’t bear sharing a car with this man.

“As you wish.” Duto walked out.

Wells and Shafer sat side by side on the edge of the bed.

“We can’t,” Wells said.

“Can’t what?”

“He’s not fit.” Wells wasn’t one hundred percent sure about much, but he was sure that Duto shouldn’t be President. Part of him wanted to flip on the television and watch ESPN for the next eleven days. Let Duto solve this, if he could.

“You want another war, John? Me neither. Take a minute so you don’t run into him in the elevator. Then go. You have a plane to catch.”

Wells had nothing left to say. He went.

2 ELEVEN DAYS…

The woman who called herself Salome had spent three hours running countersurveillance, MTR to taxi to Star Ferry and back to MTR, the Hong Kong subway. She reached the pickup spot, an alley behind a run-down Kowloon hotel, just as the gray Sprinter van arrived. She pulled open its cargo doors and stepped inside.

She was certain that she hadn’t been followed. Wells had no way of knowing where she was. But she was furious with herself for what had happened in Istanbul four days before. She couldn’t afford another mistake.

Now she squatted inside the van’s cargo compartment, holding a cheap white nylon bag. Gleaming white urinals and dull plastic pipe surrounded her. Anyone who happened to check the van’s license plate would find it was owned by HKMCA Plumbing PLC. The corporation was real enough, one of forty-five hundred subsidiaries of Duberman’s casino company. Thus the Sprinter had every reason to make its way through the tunnel that connected Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and fight through the island’s congested avenues until it reached the narrow roads that led up the side of Victoria Peak. Its destination was Duberman’s $200 million mansion. The house was one of just a handful of private homes on the upper slopes of the Peak, the eighteen-hundred-foot mountain that provided a lush green backdrop to Hong Kong’s skyscrapers.

After fifty minutes, the van stopped. Through the wire mesh that split the cargo compartment from the front seats, Salome heard the driver lower his window and mumble in Chinese. A buzzer sounded. The van turned, rolled forward, stopped again. “Here,” the driver said. Salome pushed aside a sink and hopped out the back.

She found herself in the center of a five-car garage, its concrete floor spotless. Around her: a yellow Lamborghini Aventador, a red Ferrari 288 GTO, a white Rolls-Royce Phantom, and an orange Porsche Carrera GT, a twin of the car that had killed the actor Paul Walker. All spit-shined each week so that they gleamed under the halogen lights that hung from the ceiling.

The cars were flawless, worth millions of dollars. They were protected by a fire-suppression system that could fill the garage with a nontoxic foam in twenty-five seconds. Yet as vehicles they were basically useless. Duberman drove them once a year at most. They didn’t even have gasoline in their tanks. Gas was flammable and corrosive, and its impurities might leach out and damage their fuel lines since they were run so infrequently. They might as well have been gold bricks with rubber tires.

Still, they served a purpose. Duberman brought in his biggest 88 Gamma bettors to see them, along with his other collections in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Lose $2 million, you can sit in them. $5 million, start their engines. $10 million, maybe I’ll let you drive one. The whales coveted these invitations, though Salome couldn’t imagine why. For the money they gambled away, they could have bought the cars themselves.

Duberman himself traveled in a four-ton gray Bentley sedan outfitted with armor plates and inch-thick windows that would stop anything up to a .50-caliber round. The security at his mansion was similarly over-the-top. The property was hidden from the street by a reinforced concrete wall ten feet high and three feet thick, built to survive a five-ton truck bomb. A mantrap ringed the inside of the wall. Five feet wide and fifteen deep, the trap was hidden under the narrow green lawn that Duberman’s engineers had carved out of the mountain.

Duberman’s security hadn’t always been so oppressive. He’d added a lot of it since his wedding two years before. Salome supposed the additional protection made sense. His wife, Orli, was a celebrity in her own right, a Victoria’s Secret supermodel. And they had two infant children, obvious kidnap targets. But Salome wondered sometimes if Duberman had added the extra security to make himself feel better about the risk he’d taken funding their operation. Though he surely knew that all the mantraps in the world wouldn’t stop a Delta team.

The van pulled out. Salome was briefly alone with the cars. Then the house door opened to reveal Gideon Etra, Duberman’s personal bodyguard.

“Salome.”

Etra knew her real name. But both he and Duberman usually used her cover name, which she had borrowed from a famous biblical vixen. According to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Salome danced before her stepfather Herod so seductively that he offered her whatever she wanted. She demanded the head of John the Baptist. Despite his misgivings, Herod gave it to her.

For a dance.

She had picked the name as her legend almost ironically. She was no one’s courtesan. She could have been pretty, but she didn’t want to be. She didn’t wear makeup and left her brown hair in a boring shoulder-length cut. Though she had an athlete’s body, trim and fit, she hid it behind neutral-colored suit sets. She wore a wedding ring, too, discreet white gold, though she had never married. The clothes and ring were the female version of camouflage, her way of making herself forgettable.

Nonetheless, she had grown to love her chosen name. Lately, as her plan moved ahead, she found herself wondering if it didn’t carry its own biblical magic. A foolish thought, but one she couldn’t shake.

“Gideon.” She reached for the Ferrari’s door. “Want to go for a ride?”

Etra blinked, then computed that she was joking and smiled. Humor wasn’t his strong suit. He was in his early fifties, with close-cropped gray hair, an old-school bodyguard. He could have passed for one of Duberman’s executives. He wore tailored gray suits and carried a Sig Sauer P238, an undercover officer’s weapon meant for close-range use, easily hidden but short on stopping power.

Nonetheless, underestimating Etra was a mistake. His nickname was Chai-Chai, though only Duberman used it. Etra had earned it as a sniper for the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. The name was more than slightly ironic. In Hebrew, chai had two meanings. Eighteen, and life. Etra had finished Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon with thirty-six confirmed kills, more than any other IDF soldier.

“Any problems?”

“The plumbing and I had a fine time.”

“That means no?”

“Not that I could see.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Phones. Burners. For your boss. And a picture. For you.”

She tossed him the bag. He unzipped it, pulled out a photo.

“Who’s this?”

“His name’s John Wells.” She had taken it in Istanbul. The only smart decision she’d made about Wells. “He’s not a friend.”

“Can I share this with my team? Or is it just for me?”

“They can see it, but don’t tell them who he is.”

He opened the house door, and she followed him inside.

The house had been cantilevered over the mountainside, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the city. This view always awed Salome. Enormous skyscrapers soared from Hong Kong Island and the mainland, looming over a forest of smaller towers. Hovercrafts, ferries, fishing boats, and even a few antique Chinese junks churned across the roiling gray waters of Victoria Harbor. Cars, trucks, and motorcycles fought for space on the causeways. When the sun set, the city’s neon would glow in the dark and the view would be even more spectacular.

“Boss’s running late. Be here in a few minutes,” Etra said.

“Few meaning five? Or an hour?”

Etra didn’t answer. He treated even basic questions about Duberman as state secrets.

“You’re so helpful, Gideon.”

“Thank you.”

She wasn’t sure if he knew she was mocking him. She nodded at the city below. “You know, this is what we’re trying to protect.”

Out of necessity, a dozen mid-level functionaries at 88 Gamma had helped support Salome’s operation. They were the lawyers who created shell companies that she used for safe houses and vehicles. The accountants who funneled money to the accounts that paid her mercenaries and hackers. Even the pilots who shuttled her from country to country.

But none had any idea what she was doing. She and Duberman had chosen employees whose evaluations showed that they followed orders unquestioningly. Inside 88 Gamma, Salome was known as an independent consultant who worked with the company on development projects in countries where it couldn’t advertise its presence.

But she and Etra could speak honestly. He had known what they were doing as soon as Duberman agreed to fund her plans. The men spent nearly every hour together. And Salome didn’t worry about Etra’s loyalty. A decade before, Duberman had spent two million dollars on an experimental leukemia treatment for Etra’s son Tal, a prototype gene therapy. The treatment, which no insurer would cover, saved the boy’s life.

“Hong Kong is what we’re trying to protect?” Etra parroted back to her. “Not too many Jews here.”

Salome wondered if she should explain. Of course, a city of eight million Chinese wouldn’t be at the top of the Iranian hit list. But like Tel Aviv and New York, Hong Kong stood as a monument to modern civilization. Iran’s mullahs pretended that they hated Israel and the United States. Salome knew better. They hated freedom in all its forms. Religious, economic, sexual. They hated women. They hated success. They couldn’t compete, so they threatened to lash out with the most destructive tools they could find. A few kilograms of dull yellow metal would tear a hole in this city, kill hundreds of thousands of people. Worst of all, the Iranians could never have invented a nuclear bomb on their own. But they had no shame about stealing the West’s discoveries and using them against their creators.

“It’s not just us. They hate all this.”

“I don’t care who else they hate. Or who else they love. They hate me, that’s enough for me.”

Etra’s phone buzzed with a text message.

“He says fifteen minutes.”

“But he’s here, right? In the house? You’re here, he’s here.”

“I guess.”

Not exactly a definitive answer. “And what’s keeping him? Casino business?” Of course, Duberman wouldn’t poke his head out and tell her himself. Billionaires rarely explained. And never apologized.

A shrug.

“Gideon. You probably know him as well as anyone.”

“Maybe.”

“Ever met his friends?”

“Maybe.”

“I mean, his real friends. People he grew up with.”

Etra shook his head as if he couldn’t believe she’d had the audacity to ask the question. And walked out holding her bag of phones, leaving Salome to consider what she knew about her boss.

Duberman’s parents had arrived in the United States in 1946 and settled in Atlanta. After escaping the Holocaust, they dreamed no great American dreams. Or just one: to keep their heads down and survive. Nathan managed a rent-to-own store in Oak Knoll, a poor neighborhood southeast of downtown. Gisa taught kindergarten.

After five years, they had scrimped enough money for a down payment on a fourteen-hundred-square-foot house in the city’s Midtown District. They quickly had three sons. Aaron was the youngest and by far the most ambitious. He attended the University of Georgia on a wrestling scholarship, majored in business, moved to Las Vegas to work for Hilton.

I was tired of the South, he’d told Fortune for a cover profile a decade before. It had all this history that didn’t have anything to do with me. I liked Vegas from the minute I saw it. Empty space, blue sky. It seemed like anything was possible. He rose quickly at Hilton, but he didn’t stay. When you work for a company that has somebody else’s name on the door, you know there’s a limit to how high you can get. At the tender age of twenty-six, he and two other junior Hilton executives struck out, buying a scrubby hotel-casino in Reno called The Sizzling Saloon.

Duberman had never fully explained how he came up with the eight hundred thousand dollars for his one-third share, though he hinted at the answer in Fortune. I had friends. The kinds of friends that the Nevada Gaming Commission looked down on. But they were always decent to me. If I paid on time. Besides, what’s the casino business without a little gamble? So he began his march toward fortune.

He didn’t get far at first. The Sizzling Saloon’s blackjack tables were scorched with cigarette holes, its waitresses with stretch marks. After three years, his partners tired of the grind. They wanted to sell to the casino next door. Duberman refused. He bought them out instead.

Now I owned the place, but my friends owned me. Duberman had a streak of Donald Trump in him, a natural talent for self-promotion. He dropped Sizzling from the casino’s name, calling it simply The Saloon: Where the West Comes to Play. He promised to take any bet. He put up billboards around Reno showing himself wearing a ten-gallon hat and holding a revolver in each hand. Can You Out-Gun The Saloon-Keeper? Take Yer Best Shot!

The fact that the Saloon-Keeper was a Jew from Atlanta was part of the joke. And Reno laughed. Within three years, the casino was the city’s most profitable. Duberman branched out to Las Vegas, opening two more Saloons. They were miles from the Strip and catered to locals. They, too, were hits. He bought out his silent partners. Finally, I had the money to say good-bye to my old friends. Not cheap, but money well spent. He expanded to Iowa and Mississippi and took Saloon Gaming Inc. public. At thirty-seven, his fortune topped $100 million.

Then Saloon started to lose ground. Its casinos couldn’t compete with the eye-catching attractions that its bigger competitors offered. Its Western theme seemed dated and cheesy. Still, its customers were loyal. Duberman could have milked them for years. Instead, he changed Saloon’s name to 88 Gamma. He mortgaged his fortune to redesign his casinos with a sci-fi theme. He installed oxygen bars, shark tanks, brushed aluminum tables, huge flat-panel screens dangling above the casino floor. He wanted to attract young Asians, who were often heavy gamblers. He succeeded wildly. By 2001, he was a billionaire.

Then Duberman made his biggest bet yet, a $2 billion casino in Macao. The only other casino mogul to invest in Macao at the time was Sheldon Adelson, who like Duberman was an outsider in the gambling industry. MGM and other, more established companies avoided the territory. It had a reputation as a lawless place dominated by Chinese gangs called triads. But Adelson and Duberman saw opportunity. The big companies were afraid of the crime, the triads, the Chinese government, Duberman told Fortune. They were doing risk analysis, hiring consultants, blah blah blah. Me, I’m a simple guy. I didn’t get an MBA from Harvard. I had a simple theory. I said, wait a minute, you’re letting me build a casino across the border from a billion people who love gambling more than breathing? And who can’t do it legally anywhere else? Uhh, sounds okay to me.

It was. 88 Gamma Macao did not have an empty seat or slot machine for nine months after it opened. By then, Duberman had broken ground on an expansion that tripled its size. Two days before his fiftieth birthday, his fortune reached $10 billion, putting him in one of the world’s most elite clubs. It now topped almost $30 billion.

For a while, Duberman’s public profile grew with his fortune. He became the largest individual donor to Israel, a supporter of close ties between the United States and China. He gave cheeky interviews like the one with Fortune. But in the last couple of years, he had fallen almost silent, and cut back on his charitable spending.

Meanwhile, he had become the largest political donor in American history, putting up $196 million to help reelect the President. Investigative reporters had tried to tear down the veil of secrecy and expose why Duberman had spent so much. What Does Aaron Want? The most popular theory was that Duberman needed White House access to lobby for better relations between Washington and Beijing.

“He’s worried if we make China mad, they retaliate, close the border with Macao,” one analyst told The New Yorker. “His stock falls eighty percent overnight.” Salome had laughed out loud when she’d read the article. Them that know don’t tell, and them that tell don’t know…

She’d met Duberman while she was working for Daniel Raban. He was a right-wing member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, who had won a silver medal in the pole vault. The achievement made Raban an instant hero in a country short on successful Olympians. He was a perfect television politician, tall and handsome, with an adoring wife and three young sons. Off camera, reality was less appealing. Raban was infamous for sexually harassing his female staffers. Inevitably, Israeli political journalists called him the Pole.

He had hit on Salome more times than she could count, always unsuccessfully. She put up with his antics because he served on the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Every member of the committee could pick one aide to sit in on classified briefings from the Mossad and the IDF. Raban had chosen Salome, giving her access she would otherwise have needed decades to achieve.

Plus, though she disliked him personally, she agreed with his politics. He had won his Knesset seat with the slogan Peace Last! The Palestinians and the Arab states had to accept Israel’s right to exist before negotiations on a permanent peace deal could begin, he said. Give up trying to kill us, we’ll talk. Peace Last!

At the beginning of Raban’s second term in parliament, Duberman invited Raban to a private lunch at his villa in Jerusalem. The offer was not a surprise. Duberman visited Israel regularly and cultivated young right-wing politicians. Naturally, Salome came along. She served as Raban’s personal Wikipedia, memorizing the facts he couldn’t be bothered to learn.

Duberman recognized Raban as an empty suit by the time his waiters had cleared away their salads. He focused questions about Israeli’s strategy in the West Bank to Salome. He seemed genuinely interested in her answers. She liked him immediately. More than liked. He wore his brown hair slightly longer than was respectable for the chief executive of a major company. Though he was well past fifty, his eyes radiated enthusiasm and energy. His body was solid under his suit, his hands thick and powerful. Salome had never been attracted to older men, but she found it easy to imagine those hands around her. He was the most self-assured man she had ever met.

His mind was equally appealing. He understood a truth that many Israelis still disliked discussing aloud. In the last sixty years, the Jews had carved a modern state from the desert. Israel could boast a strong economy, with first-rate hospitals, universities, and highways. It had a powerful army, free elections and media. Meanwhile, its Arab neighbors plunged deeper into tyranny and filth every year. In Iraq, the Shia and Sunni blew each other up as fast as they could. In Egypt, the elite lived like pharaohs while tens of millions of their subjects barely survived. The Saudis married their cousins and stoned women to death for adultery. And in Gaza and Lebanon and Jordan, the Palestinians bred like rats in their pathetic refugee camps. Like if they made themselves miserable enough, Israel would have to accommodate them.

Anyone who looked at the situation rationally could reach only one conclusion. Israel couldn’t trust its Muslim neighbors. Not now, not ever. It would simply have to manage them, so that Jews could hold on to their birthright, the land they had settled three millennia before. The Bible was filled with myths. But the Zionist claim to Judea and Samaria was real. Jews had prayed on the Temple Mount a thousand years before Muhammad drew breath. When the Arabs drew maps that erased Israel, they weren’t just spitting at Jews today but at every Jew who had ever lived.

Salome didn’t say any of this at that first lunch. Neither did Duberman. He didn’t have to. She knew he understood. He discussed the Palestinians with a certain briskness, like a warden dealing with an unruly cell block. When they were finished, he took her hands and promised to call the next time he came through Jerusalem.

“Don’t know why you were trying so hard,” Raban said after they left. “He likes them way prettier than you.”

“You’re only jealous because he saw you for what you are. A baboon in a suit.”

“I should fire you.”

“Who would keep you from embarrassing yourself?” They’d had this conversation before.

Over the next couple years, Salome saw Duberman whenever he came to Israel. They had breakfast at his villa, or he picked her up on his hour-long drives between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. She wondered if they would become lovers. But when she suggested they meet for dinner instead of breakfast, he told her he was too busy. Even before he began dating Orli, Salome saw the truth of Raban’s barb. Duberman preferred his women as conventionally gorgeous as his cars. She wanted to think less of him for his shallow taste, but in reality his unreachability only made him more attractive.

To make sure she didn’t betray her feelings, she kept their meetings as academic as think-tank seminars. She briefed him on the secret operations and strategic analyses that the IDF and Mossad disclosed to Raban’s committee. The information was classified, of course, but Salome never worried about telling him. Duberman believed in Israel as much as any sabra.

On the surface, Israel’s position seemed stronger than ever. With jihadis focused on fighting the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel was enjoying a peaceful period. It had walled off its Palestinian enemies in Gaza and the West Bank. Its strike on a Syrian reactor in 2007 had left Bashar al-Assad with no hope of building a nuclear weapon.

Yet, quietly, it faced increasing danger from Iran. After the United States invaded Iraq, Iran’s leaders had made the bomb their top priority. The mullahs aren’t fools. They can read a map. Armies of American soldiers to the west and east. I think mainly they want nukes to keep the Americans out. But once they get them, who knows what they’ll do?

Salome worried that her focus on Iran might bore Duberman. She was wrong. Their moment of truth came over breakfast on a winter morning in Jerusalem, on the glassed-in patio of Duberman’s villa. A faint dusting of snowflakes coated the Old City, frosting on a golden cake. Snow here was rare but not unprecedented. Jerusalem’s hills rose a half mile above sea level, and winter winds from the north swept down cool air from the mountains around the Sea of Galilee.

In keeping with the weather, Duberman’s chef had prepared bowls of oatmeal heaped with brown sugar and raisins. “Don’t know where he found it,” Duberman said.

Salome fluffed the oatmeal with her spoon. “I’ve never had it before.”

“Never?”

“I’ve only been to the United States and Europe in the summer.”

“Mount Hermon, skiing?”

“Not for me.”

“I think you have to grow up with it.”

Salome tasted the oatmeal, put down her spoon.

“You don’t like it,” he said.

“It tastes like paste.” She had never much cared for polite fibs. “Anyway, I have a briefing in an hour. A new program they want to tell us about. Rumor is it’s good.”

“So why don’t you look happy?”

“They’re trying. But there are things they won’t do.”

“Such as.”

“Attacking those European parasites who sell the Iranians their equipment.”

Duberman’s steward appeared to refill their coffee. “Leave us, please.” The steward vanished. “Tell me.”

“We’ve traced several. A machine tool factory outside Hamburg, a software company in Singapore that specializes in modeling fluid dynamics—”

“Fluid dynamics.”

“To understand what’s happening inside the warhead as the chain reaction takes over—”

“Wait, please. Understand who you’re talking to. I run hotels. I don’t even know what it means to enrich uranium.”

So Salome explained. Uranium existed naturally in several different forms, called isotopes. When it came out of the earth, newly mined uranium ore consisted of 99.3 percent of the U-238 isotope, 0.7 percent U-235. U-235 could be used in a bomb. U-238 could not. The two kinds of uranium had to be separated. Nuclear scientists called the process enrichment.

“Like oil,” Duberman said. “You can’t run your car on crude oil, you have to refine it.”

“Kind of. Anyway, during World War II, the United States figured out how.” American scientists had come up with several ways to enrich uranium. One still in use today combined uranium with fluoride to make it a gas. Then the gas was injected into spinning tubes called centrifuges. The lighter molecules spun out against the centrifuge walls. The heavier molecules stuck to the center. Because U-235 was lighter than U-238, the gas against the wall held more U-235 than natural uranium did. The gas was vacuumed into another centrifuge, where the process was repeated. Slowly but surely, the amount of U-235 increased. Until, finally—

“You have enough of the good stuff. And boom.”

“There are other steps, too, but yes. But the centrifuges need special parts. High-strength steel. Perfectly round bearings because they spin so fast. The fluorine gas is corrosive. All this takes advanced equipment that the Iranians can’t make themselves. They have to buy it. Mainly from Europe.”

“If we stopped the suppliers, would we stop the program?”

“Not necessarily stop it. But slow it down, sure.”

“But isn’t it illegal, what the suppliers are doing? Violating sanctions?”

“Yes. We’ve told the Germans, the French. And so have the Americans. But what we know isn’t always the same as what we can prove. The Iranians are smart. They use front companies from China and Russia to buy the stuff. The Europeans say they can’t be responsible for what happens if they sell equipment to a legitimate buyer in China and then that company sends it to Singapore and then to Dubai and then Iran. And the Chinese won’t listen, they don’t care.”

“But these European companies know?”

“Oh yes. It’s a very specialized business.”

“The Mossad won’t stop them?”

“They’ve said no to attacking the suppliers directly. They’re worried what the Europeans will say. But they’re making a mistake. Someone needs to hit these people.”

“Someone.”

“It wouldn’t be that hard. They aren’t government officials. No bodyguards or police looking after them.”

Duberman pushed back from the table, scratching his chair against the tile floor. His villa sat atop one of Jerusalem’s highest hills, with a view over the gold-encrusted Dome of the Rock and the Mount of Olives. The snow had stopped. The winter air was crystalline, the city’s buildings etched against the gray sky. He stood, looked at the Old City, the narrow alleys where Jews and Muslims and Christians had fought and mingled for fifteen hundred years.

“Whatever I want, it’s mine. Too much money to spend in ten lifetimes. No wife, no family.” At this point, he hadn’t met Orli. “Even if I did. One percent of what I have would be enough for my children and their children and their children, too. What do I do with a fortune like this?” He turned to her. “What is it you’re saying? Clearly, now.”

Until this moment Salome hadn’t been sure herself. She’d been thinking out loud. Writing letters to the stars, as her high school boyfriend said. But the words came to her. She knew they were true. Her legs trembled under the table, but her voice was steady.

“For a few million dollars, we can do this.”

“Men from the Mossad? The IDF?”

“Too easy to trace. And I don’t think Tel Aviv”—where the Mossad was headquartered—“would approve.”

“Where, then?”

“Men who kill for money aren’t hard to find.”

“Do you have specifics? Of how this might be done?”

“I have ideas.”

“A budget? Employees?”

She saw he was putting the operation in the terms he understood best, a business plan.

She shook her head. The wrong answer.

“Then you’re wasting my time. If you truly believe you can do this, the next time we meet, you’ll have details. What it costs. How we do it without our friends in Tel Aviv catching on. I can move money wherever you need. Ten, twenty, even fifty million a year. But everything else, that’s up to you. The logistics. How big a team. How we find them. What we tell them.”

“I understand.”

“No. You don’t.” His voice a lash. He’d never spoken to her this way before. Like she was an employee who’d disappointed him. “There’s no timetable. You call me when you’re sure you can answer my questions, all my questions, and we’ll meet. When you’re ready. Not before.”

“All right.”

“Zev will see you out.” Nothing more. He walked off, leaving her to watch her oatmeal turn to concrete.

Like the CIA, the Mossad ran espionage operations all over the world. The Israeli Defense Forces had the simpler but equally crucial task of stopping suicide bombers before they reached Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Spy services made elaborate, months-long efforts to recruit agents. The IDF used a simpler strategy. Like a big-city police department, it paid for tips. The Palestinian security services viciously punished anyone they caught collaborating with Israel. Even so, with the average Palestinian making less than two thousand dollars a year, rewards of a few hundred dollars attracted plenty of informants.

Salome had seen the strategy succeed firsthand. Israel had a military draft. After basic training, she joined the IDF’s intelligence division. She learned surveillance and countersurveillance, how to find and recruit potential agents, interrogation techniques. Then she went to work as a junior intelligence officer, handling low-level Palestinian informants in the West Bank. She had come away after her two years of service feeling that for enough money, anyone could be bought.

Still, she had no illusions about her ability to handle an operation like the one she’d proposed to Duberman. She could hire the hackers and forgers she needed for communications and passports. Eastern Europe was full of those guys. Finding the trigger pullers would be much harder. She had told Duberman the truth. Plenty of men would kill for money. Unfortunately, they were mostly the wrong men: untrustworthy, uncontrollable, and potentially police informants. She couldn’t risk scraping together a new team for every job. No, she needed eight or ten men with clean passports who could travel all over Europe and Asia. Mercenaries and paramilitaries. She couldn’t find them herself, so she needed to find someone who could. He would make the hires and run the op on a day-to-day basis, serve as a screen between her and the team. Ideally, he would be American, ex-military or — CIA.

She knew there had to be CIA or Army officers who would bite on the deal she would offer. They were the men who’d come home from yearlong tours in Kabul to find that their wives had moved out. Who waited for noon so they could settle on the couch with a bottle of Smirnoff and a glass of ice. Who slept with their pistols under their pillows. Who would be desperate to try anything that might let them stop thinking about themselves.

Her man was one of those.

But how to find him? She couldn’t exactly put out an ad: Troubled former CIA officer needed to run assassination cell. Competitive salary, full benefits. Must be burned out, but not completely.

It wasn’t as if anyone kept a list of these men.

Then she realized she was wrong. Of course someone kept a list.

She told Raban he should investigate whether the Mossad was doing enough to manage its troubled case officers. At first, the idea bored him. Then she explained that the hearing wouldn’t have to be classified. The chance for television exposure warmed him up immediately. You think it’s important, that’s enough for me, sweetie.

She knew that the committee would never hold such a hearing. No matter. She had Raban make an official request. Then she asked a friend at the IDF to put her in contact with the CIA. Not the National Clandestine Service or even the Directorate for Analysis. The human resources department. She told the good folks in HR that she and her boss wanted to reform the way the Mossad dealt with difficult officers.

These people, they’ve served us. They deserve our help, we can’t just toss them aside like used tissues. I know some of them we can’t reach, but at least we have to try. She figured, correctly, that human resources managers didn’t get much respect from their frontline cousins and would appreciate being taken seriously.

I hate to bother you with this, but our people are stonewalling me. I ask them for numbers, they just say these problems are rare. I ask how rare, they say internal matter. I ask how they respond, they say internal matter. Internal matter this, internal matter that, I’m so sick of hearing those two words. I’m hoping I might run some questions by you. Pick your brain, isn’t that the English expression?

She had top-level Israeli security clearances. Anyway, she wasn’t asking for the details of ongoing operations, just how the agency handled burned-out case officers. Three weeks later, she found herself in a conference room at Langley. I’m interested in warning signs, how you intervened, when you realized cases might be hopeless. How much damage they did, how you contained it. I don’t mean in just the obvious ways, blown operations or agents. I’m talking about more subtle problems, hits to station morale, lost management time. The stuff the frontline guys pretend doesn’t matter, but in reality matters a lot. She watched that last line score. A half-dozen heads nodded. And the horror stories began.

Obviously, I wouldn’t want you to tell me names. But I would hope you would stick to the facts of their lives and careers. In other words, if someone was drummed out for being an alcoholic in Cairo, don’t make him a heroin addict in Tokyo. The more accurate the information you give me, the better sense I can make of it.

And the easier it will be for me to find the man I need.

They provided even more information than she’d hoped. Whatever else it might be, the CIA was a bureaucracy. Everybody had a file. After two days, Salome had learned about dozens of troubled officers. One in particular stood out. A man who served with distinction in Baghdad, then transferred to Hong Kong and flushed his career away. Who lost millions of dollars gambling. Who rejected the agency’s every effort to help and was ultimately forced out. Millions of dollars? Weren’t you concerned where the money was coming from? If he was selling secrets? Of course, the CIA managers said. But the money turned out to be his own, an inheritance. His parents had died in a car accident. He’d received a large settlement. After a review of his career, the agency determined that he was not a security risk despite the gambling losses. There was no evidence that he had tried to contact the FSB, the Chinese, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Nor had he tried to hide his problems. They had been obvious from the start of his Hong Kong posting. And even if he’d wanted to betray his own agents, he hadn’t had any to give up. In Hong Kong, he had hardly worked. In Baghdad, he had teamed with the military on operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq. But those missions had little ongoing intelligence value.

So the officer had been forced out, his security clearance pulled. He could never work for the agency again. But he hadn’t been prosecuted. The CIA had even let him keep his pension.

So Iraq made him break down? The stress? The managers confessed they couldn’t be sure. All along, the officer had refused to discuss his problems. And where is he now? Still in Hong Kong, they said. They had asked the station to monitor him. But its chief had insisted that anything other than an occasional look-in would be a waste of manpower. The consensus was that the officer would drink himself to death in a year. If he didn’t put a bullet in his head even sooner.

Sounds like a tragic case. Exactly the sort of situation I’m hoping to prevent.

She met Duberman four days later at his villa in Jerusalem. No oatmeal this time, and no patio. He sat at an ornate gilded desk that looked like it belonged in Versailles. Spread across it were pictures of sharks, ugly beasts with squared-off heads. He held one up.

“What do you think?”

“I think that’s why I never learned to surf.”

“My casino manager wants to put in a new tank in Macao, drop in a couple of those. I’m not sure looking at them would make you want to throw down a thousand dollars on red.” Duberman put down the photo. “So. You asked for the meeting, here I am.”

She told him what she’d done. Normally, he was difficult to read. Not now. He started grinning right away. Five minutes in, he interrupted.

“You conned the CIA into giving you a list of its worst burnouts.”

“You haven’t heard the best part.” She told him about the Hong Kong officer who had lost everything gambling in Macao. “I know there’s no guarantee he played at 88 Gamma—”

“You said he lost millions?”

“That’s what they told me.”

“And he’s American, not Chinese?”

“That was the impression they left. He had served in Baghdad.”

Duberman reached for his phone. “Start the timer on your phone. It’ll take me two minutes to get his name if he played with us. Five minutes if he did it somewhere else. Round-eye losers that size are rare.”

He was wrong, barely. Three minutes passed before he hung up. “Glenn Mason.”

“You sure?”

As an answer, he reached across the desk, put a finger to her lips. His touch was heavy, firm. A jolt of sexual energy coursed to her hips. She forced herself to lean back so that he was no longer touching her.

“Mason lost three million dollars with us. Blackjack. Two and a half million of his own, a half million on a chit. Far as we can tell, he never played anywhere else. Ironic. We cut him off a few months ago. We have his address, but we haven’t put any pressure on him because he’s broke. They’ll email me everything we have.”

“Great.” Her voice sounded breathy in her ears. She hoped he didn’t notice.

“So now?”

She cleared her throat. Time to stop acting like a teenage girl who’d just been touched for the first time. “Now I quit Raban’s office and start spending your money. A reliable source for passports. Anonymous email accounts. Phones. Pistols. Eastern European stuff. Won’t take long.”

“Why not talk to him first?”

“Because he’ll have questions. He’ll want proof that we’re serious, and the more I do the more details I can give him.”

“Will you tell him it’s about Iran?”

“Yes. He’ll figure that out anyway.”

“But nothing about where the money’s coming from.”

“Of course no.”

“If he says no?”

“We move on. I’ve got twenty possibilities. They won’t all be as easy to find as he is, but they’re all real.”

“So nothing subtle.”

“No. I’m just going to show up.” The IDF philosophy. No mincing around. Make a direct approach, get a yes or no. The first betrayal was the toughest. Later on, people found reasons to keep getting paid. “From what they said, they’re hardly even watching him. If he agrees, then everything else falls into place.”

“Make sure he’s not too broken.”

“He spent years in Iraq. He’s tougher than you think.”

The next day she told Raban she was quitting to become an independent consultant to companies interested in making Middle Eastern investments. She hinted that Duberman was a client, but told him she couldn’t be more specific because of a nondisclosure agreement. Raban said he understood.

After a couple weeks recruiting hackers in Eastern Europe, she flew to Hong Kong to recruit Mason. She knew he would agree as soon as he opened the door of his apartment and stared at her with his haggard, bloodshot eyes. As she’d predicted to Duberman, once she had Mason, everything else clicked. Within a few weeks, Mason traveled to Thailand to fake his own death. Then he had plastic surgery so he could travel without worrying about tripping facial-recognition software. As soon as he recovered from the operations, he began recruiting. Over time, Mason’s guys met her, but none learned her real name. And even Mason never figured out who was funding her.

While Mason recruited, Salome created the network of safe houses and vehicles and communications gear he needed. She became an expert at using anonymizing browser and email software, learned to judge a fake passport. The preparation was necessary. Still, she chafed at the wasted time. The Iranians were inching closer to a weapon. She knew because she still had access to the Mossad’s analyses, thanks to Raban.

Every couple of months, she had lunch with him. She peeled his hands off her legs while he updated her on the Mossad and the IDF. He still thought of her more or less as one of his staffers. Staying connected to Raban helped in another way, too, by giving her an excuse to talk every so often to right-wing groups in Washington that supported Israel. Through them she could get invitations to the circuit of cocktail parties and conferences where CIA analysts and Pentagon lifers mingled with defense contractors and Middle Eastern lobbyists. She moved carefully, of course. She knew that she would set off alarms if she seemed too pushy. She kept her job description vague, a common practice at these gatherings, where business cards often had titles like Principal or Managing Director/Services. As she’d hoped, she became a familiar face. Even in an age of drones and metadata, informal networks mattered. She traded tidbits about Israel’s fight against Hamas for tips about the European and Asian companies that were making hundreds of millions of dollars by helping Iran enrich uranium. Slowly, she built a hit list.

And a year after that snowy breakfast in Jerusalem, she gave Mason his first targets, two executives at a German metal company that was selling high-strength steel to Iran. Seventeen days later, he called her at her office in Zurich. The killings had gone off perfectly.

She had feared guilt might overtake her afterward. Instead, she felt the childish thrill of a bullied ten-year-old who had punched her tormentor and sent him gasping. You thought we couldn’t touch you, but you were wrong. Her lack of empathy surprised her. I suppose this is what it means to be evil, she thought, but the word had no sting. She’d chosen these men to die, and their deaths had come.

Over the next year, Mason and his team kept killing.

Yet the Iranian program steamed ahead. Then Raban told her that the Mossad had pilfered the most recent American National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The NIE reported that Iran remained determined to build a bomb and would complete one in two years, three at most.

Their work had failed. Tehran was too determined. Only obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities could stop its program.

In her twenties, Salome had fallen into a depression so deep that it seemed as if every cell in her mind was misfiring at once. Merely breathing became unbearably painful. The word depression didn’t begin to describe how she felt. She had slid to the bottom of a crevasse five hundred meters deep, the kind that swallowed climbers on Everest. Not only could she not see the sun, she couldn’t even be sure it existed.

She was at her lowest for only a few weeks, but the experience stamped her, changed her deep in her bones. To this day, she wasn’t sure what had brought her down. The experience forced her to face her own mind’s fragility. Yet, paradoxically, it had given her a sense of invulnerability. She no longer feared the world. It couldn’t hurt her as much as she could hurt herself.

Hearing about the NIE didn’t instantly send her back down the hole. But it did make her remember what those days had been like, and to realize she was at risk. If this project failed, she’d lose everything. The Iranians would have the bomb, and she would know she had missed her chance to stop them.

She forced herself to retreat. To think. She still had Mason and his team. She needed a new way to use them. She drove east and south from Jerusalem into the desert, to the Dead Sea. The lowest point on earth, hundreds of feet below sea level. A depression, yes. Mountains on either side flanked the grandly named sea, in reality nothing more than a narrow salt-filled lake. Third-rate hotels clustered in a resort community midway down its shore, offering Dead Sea mudbaths and all-you-can-eat buffets, salmonella included. They catered to Russian immigrants and pensioners who didn’t have the money to go anywhere else. Yet Salome felt strangely rejuvenated when she came to this ugly place. Maybe because of the sulfurous warmth. The fear that threatened her was cold.

On her third day, she watched Russian television, the foreign minister complaining about the White House. “The Americans think they can do whatever they like,” he said. “They invade this country and that country. They pay no attention to national sovereignty. One day they will see the rest of the world does not jump to their drum.”

They invade this country and that country…

Only the American military was powerful enough to destroy Iran’s weapons program. But the White House didn’t see the danger Iran posed. Or it feared another war in the Middle East too much to respond. Salome needed to force the United States to see the risk of allowing Iran to build a bomb. If the Iranians weren’t yet ready to threaten America, she would threaten it for them. She would foretell the future, in order to prevent it.

She spent the next day figuring out realistic ways she might bait the United States. Then she flew halfway around the world to meet Mason in Indonesia. He told her she was insane.

Then he told her what she needed to do to succeed.

She knew she’d have to tell Duberman face-to-face what she wanted. They rarely saw each other. The rest of his inner circle would notice if they spent too much time together. Anyway, he was married now. She had seen his wife Orli in magazines. She was Israeli, the daughter of Russian emigrants. In the photos, she was absurdly gorgeous, with long blond hair and hazel eyes. Salome hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Hah.

Salome came to Duberman’s mansion in Tel Aviv, catching a glimpse of Orli on her way to do whatever supermodels did in the morning. Pilates? A Botox refresher? Orli wore a long black T-shirt and yoga pants. She was as beautiful as her photos. Two men in suits waited at the front door, one large and one small. Her bodyguards. The muscle and the shooter. Salome felt the need to say something as she walked by.

“I work for your husband.”

“Don’t we all.” Orli gave Salome the brilliant white smile that had sold a million Kias. Salome found herself unexpectedly charmed.

Duberman waited for her in his office. No hammerhead shark this time, no small talk. The international version of CNN played on a television behind her. He muted it but left it on. Letting her know that her visit was an interruption.

“We have a problem.” She told him about the National Intelligence Estimate. He listened with hands folded, eyes hooded. As if she were a casino manager explaining a $20 million loss.

“I’d say that’s more than a problem,” he said. “I’d say we’re done.”

“This makes it even more critical we don’t give up.”

“Then I hope you have a better idea.”

“I do.”

He reached for the remote control, turned the television off.

“The spies call this a false flag.” She explained her plan, that they needed to make America attack Iran.

“Impossible,” he said when she was finished. “Even if you could pull it off, which you can’t — you know what she tells me, the last few times we talked?”

“She?”

Duberman looked vaguely irritated that Salome couldn’t read his mind. “Donna.” Meaning Donna Green, the National Security Advisor, as close to the President as anyone. “I’ve pushed her. I mean, carefully, I don’t want to make her mad. But she knows where I stand, and she knows I’m connected over here, so she half expects it. I say, Donna, you can’t trust them, no matter how many cups of coffee you drink with them in Vienna. Even if they sign an agreement, it doesn’t matter. She tells me, we don’t want Iran to get a bomb either. And I say, tell me that they’re not getting close. She says, maybe. I say, I know that means they are getting close. I say, the Israelis want you to get out your pen, draw some red lines. She says, it’s great to hear from you. Next time you’re in Washington, come by, let’s meet in person. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he repeated the question. “Do you understand? They are not going to war with Iran.”

“Unless we make them.”

He laughed. A dry, asthmatic sound, the sound of someone trying to reason with a crazy person. “Make the United States go to war?”

“The uranium. If we can get that.” What Mason had told her in Jakarta. Get the HEU, they’ll have to listen.

“You have a source?”

“Not yet, but I will.” Though Mason had also said that finding weapons-grade uranium would be impossible. Nothing on earth was guarded more closely.

“And our current guys, none would wonder about this change in strategy?”

“These men, you give them a mission, that’s what they do. Long as they get paid. So—”

He reached into the desk, came out with a battered deck of cards. He shuffled them expertly, a perfect riff. Another new trick. Their backs were powder blue, with Hs in white.

“These are almost forty years old, these cards. Hilton made new managers work the floor. To learn the business up close. There were no mechanical shufflers back then. So I learned.” He flipped through the cards. “My boss back then, he liked to say, ‘Your first loss is your best loss.’ You understand? If it’s not working, walk away.”

“That’s how you see this? A deal gone bad? A game? I guess I underestimated you.”

She pushed her chair back and stood. She was conscious of the theatricality of the gesture, conscious, too, that her anger was real. The man across the desk from her had put up the cash, but she had done everything else.

“Sit down.”

She didn’t.

“Understand what you’re proposing here. I’m an American citizen. This is treason. Punishable by death. And I’m not in the same place I was when we started.”

Yeah, you married the best Barbie money could buy. I married Glenn Mason. Salome didn’t say a word.

“Orli’s pregnant.”

Her stomach twisted. More proof that the life she’d imagined with Duberman had never existed anywhere but her mind. Strange to know his greatest secret and so little else about him.

“Congratulations.” She choked out the word.

“Thank you. I’m trying not to think about the fact that I’ll be in my seventies when they’re teenagers. So this thing you’re proposing—”

“It’s a long shot. And if we get caught, yes. I understand. There’s only one reason to do it, Aaron.” She rarely permitted herself to use his name. “If we don’t, Iran’s going to get the bomb. And not just one. Sooner or later, they’ll turn that city behind you into a pile of smoke. Maybe your kids will be there when it happens. You don’t care about that, then there’s nothing else I can say.”

He shuffled once more and then shoved the cards away.

“You know how leverage works, right?”

“No more business jargon. Please.”

“Put up a dollar of your own, borrow nine, now you have ten dollars. Then you do something with it. Buy a stock, whatever. If what you buy goes up ten percent, to eleven dollars, you pay back the bank the nine dollars, keep two dollars. That’s leverage. The investment only went up ten percent, but you doubled your money. But if what you buy goes down ten percent, you’re wiped out. You multiply your gains and your losses. You get it?”

“You’re saying this is leverage. The bank being the U.S. military.” She wasn’t sure, but she thought he was convincing himself, the way he had years before, putting the scheme in business terms, his native language.

He grinned. An odd expression. His face wasn’t built for big smiles. “But that’s it. The Pentagon isn’t a bank. If they catch us, they won’t sue us. They’ll string us up.”

She didn’t know where he was going. Silence seemed to be her best choice.

“Do you believe?”

“Excuse me?”

He pointed at the ceiling in all apparent sincerity. “In God.”

In truth, she didn’t. Her depression had wiped out any belief she had in a universal power, much less an afterlife. Any God who allowed the mind to inflict such pain on itself was either nonexistent or impossibly cruel. She preferred the former. But she didn’t think that answer would satisfy Duberman. “God? I guess so. I mean, maybe.”

“That’s no. If you have to think about it, it’s no.”

“No—”

“You don’t have to spare my feelings. Me, I believe. Everything I’ve been given, how could I not? Funny, isn’t it, we’ve never really talked religion before.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”

“I guess.” He turned away from her, to the window. “Out there, Tel Aviv, the gays, fine. They haven’t been to temple in their whole lives. Then in Bnei Brak, these ultra-Orthodox with ten children, spending their day mumbling over the Torah.” Duberman folded his hands together, rocked back and forth in his chair, imitating a Hasidic man praying. “Can’t stand each other. Can’t even talk to each other. But they’re all Jews. The Nazis, they were right about that. We’re a race. Not a religion. Not a culture. A race. Brothers in blood.”

Salome thought of Orli, her long blond hair. Of Ethiopians and Chinese converts. But now was not the moment to argue.

“Germans, Iranians, Russians, two thousand years ago Romans, Egyptians then and now — all of them, they all want to stamp us out. Crush us. Nothing else in common, but they all hate Jews. The pogroms and the camps and the wars. All the way back to the Babylonians. We’ve always survived.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure this is the only way? Treason.”

“I don’t know any other.”

“Then all right. If you can find that highly enriched uranium, we’ll do it.”

She felt as though she were watching them both from fifty thousand feet up. All of Tel Aviv below her, the sea to the west, the skyscrapers along the beach, and she and Duberman floating above, protecting them all without their knowing.

“What are you thinking?”

“That I wish we had a film crew here. Or at least a hidden camera. This moment ought to be recorded for posterity.”

“Not sure that would be a great idea.” He looked down at his desk in a way that let her know they were done, she was dismissed. Amazing that he could make a decision so momentous and then push her aside.

“You have an incredible ability to compartmentalize.”

His nostrils flared in a silent laugh. “You want to stay for lunch, talk about your feelings? Go find the stuff.”

She turned, walked to the door. She knew she shouldn’t say anything to jeopardize her triumph, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Whatever happened to, your first loss is your best loss?”

“Corporate crap. Never believed it. If I had, I would have walked away from The Sizzling Saloon. Don’t you know anything about me? I like to gamble.”

In the next months, she put the pieces together. She found an Iranian exile who could pass as a Revolutionary Guard colonel. And the only man in the world who had a private stash of weapons-grade uranium. She met Duberman in Hong Kong to tell him, get his final go-ahead. She saw that he was thrilled, and half terrified, too. She understood.

Her luck, or Duberman’s God, or both, were on their side. Their new plan worked. Reza played his part as colonel perfectly. They gave the CIA enough evidence to make his story plausible. Only a few months after agreeing to discuss the end of sanctions, the United States and Iran were at the brink of war.

There was only one problem.

John Wells.

Wells tracked Mason to Istanbul. Mason and Salome played back, caught him there. Then Salome messed up. She let Mason convince her to hold Wells prisoner instead of killing him. Wells escaped, killed Mason and four of his men along the way. Salome had barely contained the aftermath. She knew Wells would keep coming. But did he know who she was? That Duberman was behind her?

She’d spoken to Duberman a few days before, to let him know that they had captured Wells and cleared the way for their final move — leading the CIA to the highly enriched uranium. She didn’t want to discuss the new situation over the phone or email, even in code, even through anonymizing software. She flew to Hong Kong for a face-to-face chat.

Now, at last, she heard his confident steps coming toward the living room. Then the man himself. He wore a black turtleneck, dark gray pants, sleek black shoes. He looked like a cool college professor, one who was a little too old but could still fill an auditorium. In fact, the clothes were hand-tailored and cost as much as a car. He looked as he had when they’d met almost a decade ago. She figured he had a high-end anti-aging regimen going, testosterone and human growth hormone and whatever other potions doctors used to stop time. But even guessing at his tricks, knowing his vanity, she felt herself loosen in the usual places. He might be married to another woman, but he would never lose his hold on her.

The realization annoyed her.

“Aaron. Nice of you to make it.”

“Congratulations.” He came to her, wrapped his arms around her, and squeezed. He had never hugged her before. He smelled faintly of an aftershave almost medicinal in its harshness, simple and expensive. She wanted to cradle her head against his shoulder. Instead, she detached herself, stepped back.

“See if you still want to hug me after I give you the news.”

“Soon enough. Meantime. Notice anything different?”

Now she did. On her last visit, the room’s couches had been white leather over steel frames, a vaguely Nordic look. The frames were the same, but the leather was now red. The change had probably cost fifty thousand dollars.

“You redecorated.”

“Tinker Bell.” Duberman’s impolite name for his five-hundred-dollar-an-hour decorator. Every so often he said something like that, reminding her he was from a different generation. “He didn’t ask. I should have fired him, but I feel a certain loyalty since he set me up with Orli.”

Salome refrained from pointing out that putting a billionaire with a supermodel didn’t exactly qualify as groundbreaking in the matchmaking department. For whatever reason, Duberman felt talkative today, not ready for business.

“You have to live it to understand, being this rich makes you the center of your own little solar system. Somebody buys my furniture, somebody drives. It’s not just that somebody else gardens. Somebody else hires the gardeners. All I do is breathe and write checks. Though somebody else signs them, mostly.”

“I’m having a hard time sympathizing.”

“I feel sometimes like I’m not living my own life. This thing we’ve done, it’s the only thing in the world that’s really mine.”

“And your kids.”

“They’re Orli’s, really. They love me, but if I vanished tomorrow she’d have a thousand men at her door. She’d pick a good one and it’d be like I was never there.” Duberman looked vaguely embarrassed, as though he’d said more than he meant. She had never seen that expression on him before, and she didn’t like it. Embarrassment didn’t suit him.

“So you’re telling me you decided to start a war because firing your decorator would have been too difficult.”

“Exactly.” He grinned. “Anyway. You didn’t come halfway around the world because you have good news.”

His library was a square room with books on every side, an old-school gentlemen’s club. He flipped a light switch to expose a keypad. He tapped in a code. A section of books on the back wall slid into the floor, revealing a safe room.

“Does it connect to the Bat Cave, too?”

He led her in, closed the door. The room was a cube, ten feet on each side. Two narrow twin beds were pushed against the walls and a three-foot-high gray safe occupied the center. The place looked like an unfinished art installation, a parody of itself: The Safe Room, a/k/a The Billionaire’s Mind.

She patted the safe. “Let me guess. Five hundred thousand euros and a pistol.”

“Why don’t you tell me the problem.” A statement, not a question. Now he was the one who was annoyed. So she explained how Wells had escaped, killed Mason and the others, fled Turkey.

“Now? Where is he?”

“Back in the U.S. I had a lawyer hire detectives to watch for him at airports all across the East Coast. Didn’t say who he was, just that we were looking for him. One picked him up coming through Boston.”

“So we have eyes on him?”

“No. Too dangerous. I let him go. I’d rather have guys on Ellis Shafer. That’s his main contact inside the agency. Even so, it’s tricky. These private detectives, the good ones won’t touch anything that crosses wires with the CIA. It’s one thing to look for a guy at an airport, but once they know Shafer works for the agency, only the low-rent ones will go near it.”

“So Wells is loose.”

A few minutes ago she’d thought they were friends. Now his voice was quiet. Icy. She wished he would shout at her. Anything but this. She waited.

“We’re close on this,” he said finally. “Especially after what those animals did in Mumbai—”

His words brought Salome back to the reports from India. She had focused so closely on Wells that she hadn’t thought much about the downing of the jet. But Duberman was right. The war drums were beating.

“They must want a war,” Duberman said.

“Want it or think it’s inevitable.” Most Iranian Muslims were part of the Shia branch of Islam. And the drive to martyrdom had been part of Shia culture from the very founding of the sect. The first Shia had believed Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, was his true heir. Other Muslims, calling themselves Sunnis, opposed Ali. At a battle near the Iraqi city of Karbala, the Sunnis killed Ali and slaughtered his men. They had dominated Islam ever since. Today, ninety percent of Muslims were Sunni.

But the Shia remained faithful to Ali. In fact, the name Shia meant “followers of Ali.” Each year, hundreds of thousands of Shia made pilgrimages to Karbala to commemorate that first battle. Recently, Sunni terrorists had made a habit of attacking the pilgrims. No matter. They kept coming.

When Salome heard analysts say that Iran would never use a nuclear weapon against Tel Aviv because it knew that the Israelis would respond with a hundred bombs of their own, she thought of those pilgrims shuffling along, unarmed, unprotected, awaiting their fates.

She pushed the pilgrims out of her mind. “So have you talked to Donna?” The National Security Advisor.

“Not since the uranium turned up. It’s better if I don’t get involved right now. They know I want them to attack. I can’t seem like I’m celebrating. At this point, if I do call, it’ll be directly to POTUS. And it’ll be one time only. Best to keep that card tucked away in case of emergency. The question is, does your friend Wells know enough to make a case? And will anyone listen?”

“He and Shafer weren’t getting anywhere with the agency. That’s why Wells came to Istanbul by himself. Everything he did, he did on his own. As far as the CIA is concerned, Glenn Mason’s been dead for years.”

“You think Wells knows about me?”

Salome hesitated.

“Tell me the truth.”

“I’m trying to think it through, Aaron. He found Mason, so he and Shafer must know about the money Mason lost in Macao. Whether they jumped to you, I don’t know.”

“Let’s assume they have. What about anything Wells might have seen in Istanbul. License plates? IDs? The factory?”

“We’re safe on the factory. Paid for from an account that doesn’t come anywhere near us. Wells did steal a laptop when he broke out, but all our computers have software on them that erases the hard drive if the wrong password is used or someone tries to copy it. Wipes it clean.”

“You’re confident in that.”

“I’ve seen it happen.”

“So what do you think we should do? About Wells.”

The ultimate question. The reason she had flown more than ten thousand kilometers to see Duberman.

“I think he’s too much of a risk. We have to neutralize him.”

“You mean kill him.”

“We already took him captive, and that blew up.”

“He have a family?”

“A son and an ex-wife. But they’re gone. Probably Wells has the FBI looking after them. Anyway, going after families usually causes more problems than it solves. The same with Duto and Shafer. A senator, a CIA officer, they’re untouchable. But Wells, he takes chances. He’ll come at us. We catch him—”

“Last time you caught him, he killed five of your guys. What makes you think you’ll have better luck this time?”

“We’ll be ready.” She knew the answer sounded lame.

“As far as you know, Wells doesn’t have anything more than he did last week.”

“Unless he’s put you and Mason together.”

“So what, some dead CIA officer lost money at my casino. Millions of people do that every year. I never met the guy.”

“But—”

He raised a hand to silence her. “As a rule, I don’t like waiting. I want the other side reacting to me. But right now this war has its own momentum. We keep our heads down a few more days, the United States will attack. After that, John Wells can say whatever he wants.”

“If you’d seen what he did in Istanbul.”

“Then you should have killed him when you had the chance.” He’d made up his mind, she saw. “Assuming you find him again, you watch him. You think he’s getting close, we’ll talk. Those phones you gave me are clean?”

She nodded. He opened the door and let them out of the ridiculous little panic room. Salome had a sudden premonition that she’d never see him again. She wanted to kiss him on the lips. Just once.

“Don’t,” Duberman said.

“What?”

“Don’t go after him, Salome. I can see it in your eyes, that’s what you’re thinking.”

In the living room he hugged her again, lightly this time, for show. Then he walked off to the family quarters of the house. Where he lived. Without a thought of her. She was alone, looking out over Hong Kong.

Why did she let him tell her what to do? She’d devoted her life to this project. Every hour, every day, for years. He hadn’t done anything except reach into his bank accounts and give her orders. Yet somehow, he was the boss. She couldn’t disobey him.

She would do what he said. She would watch Ellis Shafer. She would find John Wells and watch him. She wouldn’t touch them, either of them.

Not yet.

3

The boxy Mercedes Geländewagen waited outside Zurich Airport’s Terminal B, a police placard attached to its front windshield so it didn’t have to circle like everyone else in the world. As Wells emerged from the terminal, an awesomely ugly man slid out of the SUV’s back seat. Blond hair sprouted in random patches from his skull. His eyes were so small they didn’t even qualify as beady. He wore a baggy nylon sweat suit that Wells knew concealed a snub-nosed pistol.

Wells had met him once before. He was a Serb who went by the nickname Dragon. A bodyguard for Kowalski. Wells remembered him as skinnier, more feral, and even uglier. The years living in Zurich had softened him. Though Wells guessed that he still knew how to squeeze a trigger.

“Dragon.”

The man smiled in surprise, touched a finger to his chest. “Goran now.”

“You’ll always be Dragon to me.”

“You have weapon?”

Wells shook his head. “More’s the pity.”

Dragon pulled open the SUV’s front passenger door, waved him in. The windows were cracked, but the Mercedes stank of stale Eastern European tobacco.

“Uncle Pierre know you smoke in here?” Wells said. No answer. “Bad for the leather.”

The driver turned up the radio. Lousy German pop. Not that there was any other kind.

Wells closed his eyes and tried to rest. It was midafternoon in Switzerland, the winter sun disappearing behind the jagged snowcapped mountains west of the airport. Wells had slept a few hours over the Atlantic on the first leg of the trip, his overnight flight to London. Not nearly enough to make up for the sleep he’d lost in the last two weeks. Especially the nights he’d spent chained to a wall in Istanbul. Many Special Forces operatives used amphetamines to keep themselves awake during long missions. Wells had never tried speed, but the idea seemed especially tempting today. He felt dull and slow, gray around the edges.

Zurich was a city of bankers. Yet the global financial crisis hadn’t touched its wealth. Audis, BMWs, and Mercedeses filled the highway from the airport to the center of town. Farther east, in the wealthy neighborhood along the Zürichsee where Kowalski lived, the mansions gleamed, their walls not so much painted as polished.

Wells hadn’t been to Zurich in years, yet he remembered the tiniest details of the place. The city had imprinted itself on him then because his emotions had been so high. On that trip he’d come intending to kill Kowalski. The arms dealer had tried to assassinate Wells, but his shooters had botched the job. Instead, they’d wounded Wells’s fiancée, Jennifer Exley, a CIA officer. Exley, who was pregnant, had lost the baby. From her hospital bed, she begged Wells to stay with her, not seek revenge. Wells went to Zurich instead.

Ultimately, Kowalski bought back his life by giving up information that helped Wells stop a terrorist attack. They would never be friends, but they weren’t exactly enemies. But Exley had never forgiven Wells for leaving her. She’d quit him and the agency both.

In the years since, Wells had met Anne, a New Hampshire cop. Now Anne had left him, too, rejecting his marriage proposal. The two women were very different. Exley was a brilliant blue-eyed pixie who judged herself more harshly than the world ever would. She had worked herself to the brink of exhaustion after 9-11 to punish herself for failing to foresee the attacks, even though no one else had either. Anne was tall, brown-eyed, athletic and strong, practical and cynical. Wells wasn’t sure the two women would have liked each other. Yet they’d both reached the same conclusion about him. That he cared for his missions more than either of them. That he would rather die than leave the field.

He’d been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

And now Wells found himself aching for Exley as the big Mercedes rolled through Zurich’s silent streets. Her absence centered on his shoulders, his upper back, where she had wrapped herself around him on their motorcycle rides. The fact that Kowalski was still in his life while Exley was gone seemed a cosmic joke.

Or maybe not. When she’d needed him most, he had left her. Not exactly proof they were soul mates. Maybe he had preserved his memories of Exley in amber, romanticized a love that would inevitably have faded. Even a child wouldn’t have guaranteed anything. Wells had walked away from a child and a wife once already.

He put aside these unpleasant speculations as the Mercedes pulled up outside Kowalski’s red-brick mansion. He reached for his door, found it locked. Behind him, Dragon slid out, opened it from the outside.

“Step out, turn around, hands on the roof.”

Wells did as he was told. Dragon frisked him thoroughly, an unapologetic and professional job. When he was done, he yelled something over his shoulder and the front door swung open. Pierre Kowalski. He’d gained weight since Wells last saw him. He had a ruddy complexion, two ample chins. He wore a blue polo shirt and folded his thick arms across his chest. His bulk came across as aristocratic. A European trick, one that fat Americans could rarely pull off.

Wells reminded himself to be friendly as he walked up the slate front steps. He needed a favor, and he was short on leverage and time.

“John Wells.”

“Pierre.” Wells extended a hand.

Kowalski took it in both of his. “You must be in trouble if you’re being polite to me.”

The mansion looked as Wells remembered, its walls covered with nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. “You still have that thing in the other room?”

“Romulus and Remus? The AK and the RPG?”

“That’s the one.” The piece consisted of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an assault rifle preserved for eternity inside a clear plastic box, buffed in a way that made their murderous details hyperreal and beautiful.

“A few weeks ago, a Qatari tried to buy it from me. Seven million dollars. I said no. Probably my favorite piece. I’m surprised you remembered.”

“It stuck with me. And the art history lesson.”

“Oh yes. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The tiger shark in the box.”

“You told me it was at the Metropolitan Museum. I tried to see it once when I was in New York, but I couldn’t find it.”

“The man who owned it took it back. Never trust a hedge fund manager.” Kowalski was as smooth as Wells remembered. His practiced finesse no doubt played well with the dictators who bought his weapons. He led Wells into the kitchen, more suitable for a restaurant, twin six-burner stoves and Sub-Zero refrigerators, along with a fleet of copper pans hanging from the ceiling.

Kowalski nodded at the granite-topped island in the center of the room. “Sit, please. Would you like a drink? Something to eat?”

“Nein.”

But Kowalski pulled two Heinekens from the nearest Sub-Zero. “If you change your mind.” He popped them open and they sat catercorner on the island. Dragon lurked at the edge of the room.

“You look healthy, John.”

The phony gentility suddenly irked Wells. Kowalski paid for this mansion and its art by selling weapons to third-world countries. At best, he encouraged poor governments to spend money they couldn’t afford on helicopters and personnel carriers they didn’t need. At worst, he spread untold misery in shabby little wars that rated five minutes a year on CNN.

“We’re such good buddies, how come Dragon had to feel me up before I could see you?”

“Goran. He’s respectable now.” Kowalski sipped his beer. “You came all this way to reminisce. Or no?”

Wells had told him only that they needed to meet as soon as possible.

“It’s about Iran.”

“No surprise.”

“You want the long version or the short?”

“I think the short might be safer. For both of us.”

“Know anyone who might have been sitting on a hunk of HEU?”

“You think Iran is getting it from an outside source?” Kowalski shook his head. “No, not that. You think someone fooled the CIA. The Iranians are telling the truth, the HEU isn’t theirs. Someone wants America to invade Iran. Mossad?”

“I thought you didn’t want the whole story.”

“It’s impossible, John. Even the Mossad couldn’t do it.”

“My question is, if I came to you, said, Pierre, I need weapons-grade uranium, cost doesn’t matter, but it’s got to be enough to make someone sit up and notice, where would you send me?”

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” North Korea. “If you were crazy enough to go. But they would take your money and put a bullet in you.”

“Plus they can’t enrich to ninety-four percent.”

“That’s right.”

“Where else?”

“Nowhere. Nowhere else.”

Footsteps. Wells turned to see a tall blonde, high cheekbones and full lips. “Nadia,” he said. Kowalski’s girlfriend. She was a Ukrainian model, the most beautiful woman Wells had ever seen. He had met her on his previous trip. She’d kissed his cheek as he left, gently. Even in his rage over Exley, he had felt the pull of her beauty.

Now she looked at him blankly. Wells saw she didn’t remember him. And something else, too. Her arms and legs were as slim as ever, but her belly swelled under a loose T-shirt. She was pregnant. “Congratulations.”

She laid a hand on her stomach. “Thank you.”

“Nadia, do you remember John Wells? You met years ago.”

She looked at him, and he saw the realization in her face. “Yes. Of course.” She smiled, but warily. Wells realized that he reminded her of a time when life hadn’t been quite so certain.

“Nadia and I are married now,” Kowalski said.

“Congratulations again.” Married. And pregnant. Even the arms dealer and the model had moved on with their lives while Wells wasn’t looking. “You’re a lucky lady.”

“I think so, yes.” She came to Kowalski, rubbed his cheek. “Just remember we have the banquet tonight. No snacks.”

She floated off, beautiful as ever. Wells watched Kowalski watching her go.

“I love her,” Kowalski said.

“You want me to applaud for your good taste?”

“You think she’s easy to love because she’s beautiful?”

An odd tack from Kowalski, considering he was the one who’d chosen her. Wells wasn’t in the mood to pursue the argument. “North Korea aside, you have no idea where I might pick up a kilo of HEU?”

“I do not.”

“You want me out of your happy home, give me something, Pierre. You can’t find it for me, send me to someone who might. The dirtiest guy you know.”

“When you say it like that, it’s easy. Mikhail Buvchenko. Russian.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“Spetsnaz, until he figured out he could make a lot more money in my business. He’s in his mid-thirties, connections all up and down the Red Army.”

“You’ve dealt with him.”

“We’ve bumped into each other a few times. He’ll sell to anyone. Assad, Burma, Congo. Places where the Kremlin has an interest but doesn’t want to do business directly. You want chemical weapons, he can help. Even has a little private army.”

“Army?”

“That’s too strong. A battalion, say. Several hundred men. They were the first ones on the ground in Ukraine, a way for Putin to make a low-risk move, see how Europe and the U.S. would react.”

“Or not react.”

“Exactly.”

“But if he’s so connected to the Kremlin, would he deal HEU without their say-so?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think his agreement with them is that he answers when they call. In return, they don’t interfere with his other arrangements, as long as he doesn’t do anything directly opposed to Russian interests.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

“Mistake. He’s not so nice. And he won’t come west. You’ll have to go to Russia.”

“Set it up, Pierre.”

Kowalski drummed his fingers nervously against the granite countertop.

“Even if I vouch for you, I can’t promise he won’t kill you.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you cared, Pierre.” Wells found himself smiling. “You’re afraid if you vouch for me and I kill him, his mercenaries will be here five minutes later. Blowback.”

“Maybe I care a little, too.”

“Maybe you don’t.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“I promise you, I’m not interested in him. Compared to what’s at stake, he’s nobody.”

“I wouldn’t try that argument with him.”

“Fair enough.”

“I do this, we’re even, John?”

“Sure.” Until the next time I need you.

“It may take a couple days.”

“Sooner is better.” Though Wells didn’t mind getting at least one decent night’s sleep. But he couldn’t wait here. And then, suddenly, he knew his next stop. A city that aside from its wealth was as unlike Zurich as anywhere he could imagine.

4 TEN DAYS…

Room 219, Hart Senate Office Building.

Unlike the White House Situation Room or the Pentagon’s Tactical Operations Center, 219 didn’t show up often in movies. But everyone at the CIA knew its importance. The “room” was actually a suite of offices that housed the staff and hearing rooms of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Unmarked frosted-glass doors hid 219’s real front entrance, which was permanently guarded by Capitol police officers who shooed away tourists and other uninvited guests. Behind the second door, a corridor turned sharply right, a way to keep anyone in the foyer from glimpsing the offices inside, or the staffers who worked in them. At the end of the hall, a biometric lock secured access to the conference room where senators received briefings from the DCI and top intelligence officials. The hearings took place within a huge elevated vault, a larger version of the secure rooms that the CIA operated inside American embassies. The room was mounted on pillars so that technicians could easily sweep its steel walls for bugs. The steel itself blocked noise and electromagnetic signals from escaping. No one had ever managed to spy on the hearings. Information regularly leaked nonetheless, in the simplest possible way — from the committee’s senators to reporters.

After all the security, the vault’s interior usually disappointed visitors. It had the same furniture as any congressional hearing room, with wooden conference tables that looked decent from a distance, cheap up close. But the room had played host to plenty of fireworks over the years. During the 1980s, when some senators called for the CIA to be abolished over the Iran-Contra scandal, case officers called 219 as the Lion’s Den. Since 9-11, the acrimony had faded for a while. Aside from libertarians like Rand Paul and liberals like Ron Wyden, Congress generally supported the War on Terror. But the recent revelation that the agency had spied on committee staff members as they prepared a report about CIA interrogation programs had again poisoned relations. And today, Brian Taylor feared the room might live up to its old nickname.

Taylor was deputy chief of base for Istanbul. (Technically, the CIA’s station in Turkey was located in Ankara. By long-standing tradition, the CIA could have only one “station” in every country, so it referred to its office in Istanbul as a “base.”) He had found the weapons-grade uranium that the United States accused Iran of producing. He was the only agency officer ever to meet Reza, the Revolutionary Guard colonel who had tipped the CIA to Iran’s plans. Now Reza was in the wind, and the United States and Iran were close to war. And after initially rushing to support the President, members of Congress were expressing concerns about a military confrontation.

“This isn’t Iraq. We know the uranium is real,” an anonymous senator had told The Washington Post that morning. “But we need to know why the White House is so sure it’s from Iran. Just like we need to know who blew up that jet. The hearings today and tomorrow will be critical.”

A laundry list of top officials would testify at the hearing, including the DCI, Scott Hebley. But Taylor knew he would be the star witness. Without him, none of this would have happened.

The agency understood the importance of his testimony. It had flown him and his boss, Martha Hunt, to Virginia three days before. Since then, Hebley’s aides had rehearsed with him nonstop. Max Carcetti, Hebley’s top lieutenant, played the committee’s head, an Illinois senator named Laura Frommer. Carcetti cut Taylor off, jumped on inconsistencies in his answers. You just told us that Colonel Reza claimed Iran had produced enough uranium for several nuclear weapons. Earlier you said ten. Which is it, Mr. Taylor?

Hunt, the Istanbul chief of base, would attend the hearing but wasn’t scheduled to testify. Part of Taylor wished she’d stayed in Turkey. She was slim and beautiful, her delicate blue eyes hiding her intelligence and toughness. For as long as they’d worked together, Taylor had had a hopeless crush on her.

But he and Hunt had worked side by side to find the uranium. Suddenly, his crush didn’t feel so hopeless. On the charter home, they hadn’t done anything as obvious as hold hands. But Hunt had slept beside him on the otherwise empty jet. Close enough for him to smell her perfume, something light and floral and faintly sweet. She’d settled in, with her head almost on his shoulder. Almost.

Still, Taylor knew that if he blew his testimony, she’d never forgive him. The night before the hearing, after a dinner of mushroom pizza at their Reston safe house, she walked Taylor through his testimony yet again. “Stick to the facts. They ask why you think Iran would do this now, that’s above your pay grade. They ask about alternatives to an invasion—”

“That’s above my pay grade.”

After an hour, Taylor rebelled.

“Martha. Stop treating me like your idiot little brother.”

“I am limiting your downside.”

“And yours.”

She stood, put her fingers to her lips, blew him a kiss. “See you in the morning.”

“You have nightmares, you know where to find me.”

“Night, Brian.”

Taylor hardly slept that night. At 5 a.m., he gave up trying. He showered, shaved, dressed. He spent two hours trying not to drink too much coffee while he read over his reports and checked his email. They didn’t have full access to Langley’s classified feeds here, but they could port in through a virtual private network.

Not much had happened overnight. Reza was still missing, still hadn’t touched the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the CIA had put in a Swiss account for him. No surprise there. Taylor didn’t expect him to turn up. In India, the leads in Mumbai pointed to Hezbollah. But despite a lot of door-kicking, the Indian police had no suspects. Meanwhile, Israel reported that Iran had mobilized its “Widows Brigade,” seven hundred female suicide bombers who would attack American soldiers if they crossed the border.

More proof that an invasion of Iran would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look easy. Iran was larger, its army better trained. Most important, its people were far more unified than Afghanis or Iraqis. In those countries, the United States had fought factions. In Iran it would be at war with a nation.

Hunt emerged from her room at 7:30, showered and scrubbed. “You sleep?”

“I look that bad?”

“I’ll put some foundation on you. Hide the circles—” She swept her hands under her eyes.

“Martha, I am not wearing makeup.”

“It’ll be subtle.”

Much as he wanted to feel her fingertips on his skin, he had to draw this line. “No one’s expecting me to be minty fresh.”

“Minty fresh? I don’t suppose you want to go over your talking points one last time.”

“If you weren’t my boss, I’d tell you what I really want.”

Three hours later, Taylor sat in the secure room at the heart of 219 as Senator Frommer and the rest of the select committee took their places on the dais before him. Frommer had asked for Taylor’s testimony first, in place of the DCI, a not-so-subtle shot at the agency. This hearing runs on our schedule, not yours. She was in her early sixties, with a helmet of dyed black hair and a face whose wrinkles had been Botoxed into submission.

She’s smart, Carcetti had told him. And she trusts her instincts. She can afford to. She’s in a safe seat and she’s got no plans to run for President. They listen to her on that committee. Both parties. They like her. Keep her on your side, you’ll sail through. He didn’t have to say what would happen if Taylor couldn’t keep Frommer on his side.

Hunt sat beside Taylor at the witness table. Carcetti had wanted a lawyer, too. But Taylor insisted a lawyer would only make him nervous, and Carcetti finally agreed.

She’s not much for ceremony, Madame Frommer, Carcetti had said. At ten-thirty sharp, she’ll hit that gavel to get started and get to the point. That’s one reason they like her.

Sure enough, as senators were still settling themselves, Frommer tapped the gavel. “We will begin this hearing of the Select Committtee. I am not sure I’ve ever been involved with a more important session. A few days ago, the President of the United States presented the American public with shocking news about Iran’s nuclear intentions. The United States believed that Iran could be a partner for peace. But if the White House is correct, the Islamic Republic has secretly been preparing for war all along. Under such circumstances, I think we agree that the President has the right to defend our interests and keep Americans safe.

“Unfortunately, recent history compels us to treat presidential pronouncements about weapons of mass destruction with skepticism. Over the next two days, we will hear testimony from the DCI and other members of the intelligence community. But I want to begin by hearing from the CIA officer who found the uranium. We are in closed session. I am going to use your real name, sir, Brian Taylor. And your real title, deputy chief of base for Istanbul. Mr. Taylor, please stand and raise your right hand, so I may administer the oath.”

Taylor stood, raised his hand. “I, Brian Taylor, do solemnly swear—”

For the next forty-four minutes, Taylor explained everything that had happened in Istanbul since the day when the first letter from Reza arrived on his desk. “Thank you for allowing me to testify,” he said when he was done. “It’s an honor. I’m happy to answer any questions.”

He spoke mostly from memory, referring to his notes as little as possible. Try not to read the whole time, Carcetti had said. Head up, so you can look the committee members in the eye. They like that. Taylor wasn’t so sure. He’d expected his statement would sway the senators, break the tension in the room. It seemed to have the opposite effect. He felt like a kid who had broken a window and been called into the principal’s office. Only the faint hum of filtered air pumping through the vault’s narrow vents broke the silence.

Frommer cleared her throat. “Mr. Taylor. We appreciate your coming before us. You do understand, the story you’re telling is unusual.” She drew out the last word. “Would you agree?”

Defer when you can, Carcetti had said. She’s the boss. Don’t fight her. When in doubt, stretch out the at bat, get more information. And never cut her off. Never never. Senators don’t like that.

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean.”

“I mean the way you handled Reza’s recruitment and handling. The fact that he came to you. That you never learned his real name or position within the Quds Force. Have you ever had another agent like that?”

“No, ma’am — chairwoman.”

“Senator, please. And the fact that the agency cannot find Reza despite a quote-unquote intense effort, that’s also unusual.”

“Yes.”

“What do you make of these oddities, Mr. Taylor? I remind you that you are under oath.”

If Frommer meant to intimidate him by mentioning that he was under oath, she succeeded. Taylor heard his pulse thumping in his skull, the blood surging through. The funny part was that he had told the truth. He believed in Reza. Even so, he felt like a kid caught in a riptide pulling him out to sea. If he kept calm, didn’t fight the current, he’d be fine. But it was hard to keep calm with the water lunging into his nose. The next few minutes would be crucial. If he failed, the President might face a revolt on Capitol Hill.

“Mr. Taylor? Still with us?”

Taylor didn’t know how long he’d been silent. Too long. Hunt leaned over, murmured in his ear, her breath warm against his skin, her perfume filling his nose. “You all right?”

Her words broke the spell. Or maybe her perfume. That fast, Taylor knew what to say. “Chairwoman Frommer. I’m sorry. I wanted to answer you as precisely as possible. You are correct that walk-ins are unusual. Most of the time, the agency makes the initial approach. That’s the classic method. In our training at the Farm, we spend a lot of time practicing recruitments. And it’s true that walk-ins can be double agents dangled by foreign services. I assume that’s your paramount concern, that Reza is working for a foreign agency trying to fool us into attacking Iran.”

“Yes.”

“But walk-ins have been among the best assets in the CIA’s history. They have unique advantages. They are often spies themselves, so they understand tradecraft and don’t need hand-holding. They give up vital information quickly, because it is the very importance of the information that has caused them to approach us. Put another way, they’re motivated. We don’t have to play games with them. I hope that makes sense.”

When you’re answering, don’t go on and on, Carcetti said. Pause halfway through. Get them to buy in.

“I suppose.”

“I believe the man who called himself Reza was one of these ultra-high-value walk-ins. Do I wish I knew his name? Yes. That we had him under our protection, in a safe house somewhere? Yes. Would I prefer someone else had seen him? Of course. At least then I wouldn’t be the only one in front of the firing squad.”

Taylor thought he was close to breaking through. But Frommer merely shook her head.

“Mr. Taylor. If a firing squad is required, you won’t be its only target. We’re going to hear much more testimony today. And, of course, we will discuss next steps.”

“That’s above my pay grade.”

Even as the words left his mouth Taylor knew he’d made a mistake. Frommer was in no mood for canned lines.

“You are correct. Far above. Let’s focus on the question that you are here to answer. Is the man who calls himself Reza who he claims to be? Is he real?”

Taylor’s life had shrunk to the microphone in front of him. He reached for it, cupped it toward him. His hands weren’t shaking. A small victory.

“Believe me, I understand what that question means for our country, Chairwoman. I’ve spent more hours than I can count thinking it through. And my answer is yes.”

“Why?”

Because no one could be that good an actor. But Taylor knew Frommer didn’t want pronouncements. She wanted specifics.

“Because the truth is that no one betrays his country without good reason. I saw Reza’s motivations up close and they were real, believable, and specific. I’ve outlined them today and I discussed them in detail in my reports, which I know the agency has made available to you. Nor do I fault Reza for his desire to keep his real name secret. He mentioned Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning when I promised to protect him and his identity. I can’t disagree with his assessment of our security flaws.”

“Is that all?”

“It is not, ma’am. I believe a foreign agency would have presented someone whose cover story didn’t raise as many questions as Reza’s. I repeatedly demanded more information from him. A would-be double agent would have answered at least some questions. Tried to ease my suspicions. His superiors would have insisted. Reza refused. He never gave me the impression that he was under anyone’s control.”

“So the holes in his story actually make him more plausible?”

“I know that’s counterintuitive, but yes. He told me repeatedly that the intelligence he provided would speak for itself. And that has proven to be correct.”

“Mr. Taylor, the agency sometimes uses the term source capture, does it not?”

Taylor hadn’t heard anyone at the CIA utter those words since his training at Camp Peary. But this was not the moment to argue. “Yes, Madam Chairwoman.”

“Can you define those words for me?”

“Source capture occurs when a CIA officer becomes so overly protective of an agent that he can no longer determine the agent’s value or reliability. It isn’t the same as being doubled, where the officer winds up becoming an active spy for the other side. It’s more subtle and insidious. It happens for any number of reasons. Sexual attraction, or even friendship over a long period. Usually, the officer doesn’t even recognize what’s happening. Ultimately, instead of running the source, he winds up quote-unquote captured by him.”

“Did Reza capture you, Mr. Taylor?”

Not even Carcetti had asked the question so bluntly. “I assure you, Senator, that Reza and I were in no way friends. I always felt uncomfortable at our meetings, to be honest.”

“But there’s an even simpler form of source capture, yes?”

Stretch the at bat… “I’m not trying to be difficult, Senator, but I don’t understand the question.”

“Then I’ll explain.” Frommer didn’t smile. “If an asset is providing uniquely valuable information, he will have a uniquely valuable effect on the career of the officer who’s handling him, yes?”

“Possibly.”

“You, for example. I’m sure you recognized Reza’s importance to your career.”

Taylor’s cheeks reddened like Frommer had slapped him. She’s the boss, Carcetti had said. Don’t fight her. But Taylor couldn’t help himself. He had joined the agency after 9-11, for the right reasons, to defend his country—

“Question my judgment, Senator, I can live with that. But don’t question my integrity. Don’t call me a careerist. Believe it or not, I know my place. I’m a small cog in a very big machine. I don’t have any plans to be DCI. Or even a station chief. I’ve never told anyone this before, but I figured on retiring after this posting. If I’ve been fooled, if I’m wrong, I expect to be disciplined. Or terminated. This isn’t about me—”

“Mr. Taylor—”

Never cut her off. Taylor raised a hand. “With respect, you brought this up. I’d like the opportunity to finish—”

“Mr. Taylor—”

“This isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for the country. Making sure that a nuclear weapon never explodes on American soil. I can only tell you what I saw. And I saw a man who repeatedly gave us accurate and actionable intelligence. A man who led us to 1.3 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium. As I’m sure you know, that ingot is by far the biggest piece of nuclear material that anyone has ever found. If we prove it didn’t come from Iran, so be it. If the Iranians let us talk to their scientists, inspect their plants so we can be sure they aren’t enriching in secret, great. But until then, my money’s on Reza.”

Taylor folded his hands on the table, waited for Frommer to rip him a new one. Instead, a smile creased her filler-plumped lips. He’d turned her around. Not just her. Senators from both parties were nodding and smiling. Each of the fifteen faces above him looked down with new respect.

He’d won.

“Mr. Taylor. I am surprised. It’s rare to have a CIA officer speak so bluntly to us. I appreciate your candor.”

“Thank you, Senator.”

“I know my fellow senators have questions. As is customary, members will speak in order of seniority. I remind you, you have six minutes each. Not that any of you would ever go over.” Faint laughter. “The floor is yours, Mr. Vice Chairman.”

A cakewalk followed. Three senators urged Taylor to reconsider his plans to retire. He was done and dismissed within an hour. Hebley and Carcetti, who had watched from the row behind him, met him and Hunt in an empty conference room down the hall.

“Had me worried,” Hebley said. “But that was a complete one-eighty.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They shook his hand and then they were gone.

But the real verdict came from Hunt, as they settled into the black car that would take them to Langley for a full debrief. For the second time that day, she brought her lips to his right ear. “Well done, Brian. Play your cards right, you might get laid tonight.”

His response was immediate. And would have been embarrassing if anyone besides Hunt had been there to see it.

“Hey ho,” she said, looking at his crotch.

“Ho hey.” Taylor had never felt better, not even on the day he’d found the uranium itself. He had not just survived the Lion’s Den. He had made the lions eat out of his hand. Now he was due for his reward.

If only he hadn’t been so very, very wrong.

5

No one had ever accused Vinny Duto of being a patient man.

Today he had no choice. For his flight to Israel, he had borrowed a jet from his friends at Boeing, who were still good for a favor or two. Nonetheless, he brought along a pair of bug zappers to make sure that the conversation he was going to have couldn’t be recorded. He trusted the guys who’d lent him the plane. But not that much.

The jet itself was nothing fancy, just an old 757 that would need to refuel in Rome on its way to Tel Aviv. Duto didn’t plan to touch Israeli soil, though. He would have a drink with Rudi in the cabin while his pilots stretched their legs, or whatever it was pilots did after a five-thousand-mile flight, and then go home. He wanted no Israeli immigration records of this trip.

But when they landed at Fiumicino, a message from Rudi waited on his Samsung. Not tonight. Chemo wiped me out. Duto cursed to himself. He was not a sentimental man, and he didn’t fear death. It came for everyone, and it would come for him, too. Meantime, he had choices to make, chits to cash, problems to solve. A preoccupation with mortality was an indulgence, a weakness.

Still. Lung cancer. He called Jerusalem.

“Vinny.” A whisper.

“I hoped I’d get to see you tonight.”

“My doctors have other ideas.”

“I have a present for you.” Duto nudged the box with his toe. A radio-controlled Hummer, almost two feet long, one-twelfth scale. RC cars were Rudi’s only known indulgence.

“Unless it’s a new lung, you can keep it.”

“Better than a new lung.”

A faint sound that Duto recognized as a laugh.

“What if I come to you tonight? In Jerusalem?” Though he hated to leave a trail.

“Vinny.”

“Tomorrow?”

Another laugh. “I hope I live long enough to watch it happen to you, Vinny.”

“Rudi.”

“It’s good. Everybody else treats me like I’m dying. You’re the same prick as ever. You landed already at Ben Gurion?”

“Rome.”

“All right, stay there tonight. I feel better in the morning, I’ll call you.”

“Thank you—”

Rudi hung up.

Duto splurged, booked himself a room at the Artemide. He hadn’t been to Rome in thirty years. By the time he checked in, the sun had set, but he had time at least to take a cab to St. Peter’s, see the great dome, cross his chest and pretend to pray. Instead, he made the mistake of logging in to his email.

He spent the next six hours taking advantage of the time difference to keep his D.C. staffers busy. So be it. The Vatican wasn’t going anywhere. And when he woke in the morning, he found a text from Rudi. BG 4 p.m. So he’d lose two full days to this chase. He hoped the conversation would go well, though he had reason to believe it wouldn’t.

The man at the base of the 757’s stairway looked only vaguely like the Mossad chief whom Duto remembered. He was a crumpled copy fished out of the trash. The old Rudi was lean and strong, with the ropy muscles of middle age and a shock of dark curly hair. The new Rudi was bald, even his eyebrows gone. His neck and shoulders had sunk into themselves, like a careless surgeon had taken them out and lost a bone or two before putting them back.

Duto started down the stairs. Rudi shook his head and dragged himself up, step by step. He reached the top step breathless, as if he’d just crested Everest. Duto wrapped him up, dragged him inside, where he flopped into a cracked leather recliner that had probably seemed luxurious in 1987.

“Don’t die, Rudi. Trouble if you die.” Duto poured him a glass of water and tried not to stare as five long minutes passed. Finally, Rudi sighed and put down the glass. He looked around the cabin, his eyes settling on the jammers, each the size of a deck of cards, with a single green light blinking steadily on top.

“I’m not sure I’m comforted by the fact you think we need those.”

“With your accent, nobody could understand you anyway,” Duto said.

“You don’t like my English, learn Hebrew.” Rudi coughed lightly into his hand. “This an agency ride?”

“Boeing. Tell me I’m seeing the chemo and not the cancer, Rudi.”

“It’s good I look like this. Means they’re still trying to beat the thing. That’s what I tell Esther.” His wife. “I’m not sure she believes it.”

“Do you?”

Rudi tapped his chest, like he was carrying a baby inside and not a tumor. “You want to hear all about it? My sad story?”

Duto found himself shaking his head.

“I didn’t think so. So your turn to talk. And it better be worth my time, Vinny. My very limited time.”

Duto explained the last month, how he’d gotten a tip that led Wells to Glenn Mason, how Wells tracked Mason to Turkey and killed him. How Duto and Shafer and Wells were convinced that the uranium in Istanbul hadn’t come from Iran.

“You think some other service is setting Iran up?” Rudi said. His brow lifted as he tried to raise his nonexistent eyebrows. “Us? You think we did this?”

“I wanted to ask.” Even though I already know you didn’t. Unless Aaron Duberman works for the Mossad, and that’s a conspiracy too far.

“No.”

“You’ve been out of the loop—”

“Even if I were dead, I’d hear. And we’d never do it, if you caught the Mossad tricking you this way it would destroy the U.S. — Israel relationship forever. Come on, Vinny. You didn’t fly all this way for that.”

“I didn’t.”

“What, then? You think the FSB, Putin making a mess? Too risky.”

“Agree.”

“Then what?”

“What if it’s not another country? What if it’s a private group?”

“I’m supposed to be the one who’s sick. Maybe you have a brain tumor, Vinny. It’s impossible.”

“How well do you know Aaron Duberman?”

Rudi leaned back in his seat. “Christ,” he muttered.

Duto explained that Mason had lost millions of dollars at Duberman’s 88 Gamma casino in Macao before quitting the CIA and disappearing. That a Pakistani ship captain connected to the smuggling had also lost tens of thousands of dollars at Duberman’s casinos. That Duberman had never explained the rationale for his massive donations to the President.

Rudi stared him down. Duto knew the look well: You expect me to believe this nonsense? “It’s thin, I know. But it fits.”

“You haven’t gone to anyone with this.”

“Not yet.”

“Because you know how crazy it sounds.”

“It’s the only explanation for Mason. Remember a few weeks ago, I asked you about those assassinations in Europe, the bankers and the others helping Iran?”

“You think it was the same group.”

“Duberman’s first try at stopping the program. When he saw it wasn’t working, he decided on something more radical.”

“All right. Say it’s true.” Though Rudi didn’t sound convinced. “You don’t think we asked Duberman for this?”

Duto lifted his hands. “Of course not. But he’s important over here, newspapers, political donations, you must have a file on him.”

“We started paying attention to him about ten years ago, he spent $135 million on Radio Zeta, that’s a national channel here, lot of influence. We’re going to look at someone like that. Then he donated $180 million to the Holocaust Museum for what they’re calling the Memory Project, you know about that?”

Duto shook his head.

“They’re keeping it quiet. A lot of people have tried to lock down the survivors, get them on video before they die, and they’ve been successful. This is coming at it from the other end—”

“The Nazis? Why would they—”

“It’s not about putting anyone in jail. They’re old, too. Find the ones who want to relieve their consciences. See if they have any physical evidence they want to share. It’s controversial, because some people think it equates us and them, why should we need them to prove what we already know? And because we’re paying them—”

“Paying?”

“Not interviews. Papers and pictures. Anyway, Duberman is funding it. Seven, eight years ago, he made the donation. Not a pledge, either. He promised on a Sunday, the money came by Wednesday. So the Prime Minister started to see him. Maybe twice a year. Two or three times, I sat in also. And I can tell you, yes, back then he was very worried about Iran. We told him the truth, we’re doing what we can, but war is unrealistic, they have fifteen times as many people as we do, all we can do is push the levers we have.”

“He ever hint he might do anything himself?”

Rudi considered. “No. Though in the last meeting, he said something I thought was strange, he asked me directly if I had the resources I needed. The PM didn’t like that. He said, Aaron, we’re a grown-up country, we have our own military, we set our own budgets for our foreign policy. Duberman knew he’d gone too far. He apologized.”

“That was the last time you saw him?”

“Maybe we shook hands at a cocktail party. But the last time we ever talked seriously, yes. After that, I asked our analysts for a full report on him. They ultimately concluded he was honest in his support. He has homes here, and he dated Israelis even before he married Orli. Not one of these American Jews who constantly meddles but has never been here.”

“Which gives him even more incentive.”

“It’s an interesting theory. But you know what happens if you go to the President or your new DCI with this. And no evidence.” Rudi shook his head. “If we had strong leads that the uranium wasn’t from Iran, I would know.”

“I’d settle for a weak lead.”

“I’ll ask. But everyone knows I’m sick. They’ll wonder why.”

“Whatever you get, I’ll be grateful.” Now they had come to the question Duto didn’t want to ask. “We have one more lead. Mason’s boss was a woman.”

“That leaves half the planet.”

“This operation was put together right and tight. Somebody found Mason. Not Duberman. He wouldn’t have known where to look or how to make the approach. He had to have a cutout. This woman. She would be a professional, or at least a semipro.”

“Just say it. You think she’s Mossad. An Israeli. A Jew.”

“Do you think Aaron Duberman would have used someone who wasn’t Jewish as a cutout?”

“A billionaire Jew pushing the United States into war. With the help of a mysterious Jewess.” Rudi chomped down hard on the last word. “This is Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff, Vinny. Tell me again how Israel benefits if it goes public.”

What Duto had feared he’d say. “You want us to invade Iran, Rudi?”

“If that’s the alternative to this, maybe.”

“You have to get in front of it. It’s gonna come out, Rudi. You help, I’ll make sure you get credit.”

“Here I thought you came all this way to ask me for a favor. Turns out you were looking out for me. Vinny Duto, King of the Jews.”

Before Duto could answer, Rudi’s eyes opened wide. He raised a hand to his mouth and began to cough, racking heaves that shook his body. Like if he coughed hard enough he would spit out the tumor. Duto rose from his chair, but Rudi shook his head, no no no. Duto ran into the bathroom for paper towels. By the time he came back, a film of bright red blood covered Rudi’s palm. He lifted it to Duto almost triumphantly.

“In case you were wondering whether I was faking.” Rudi mopped his hand. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I have to think about this, my friend.” Weariness had replaced the anger in his voice. “I’m not sure I’ll have anything even if I do decide to help.” He pushed himself up, his arms shaking. Duto rose, too, but Rudi flapped a hand at him. “No.”

“Let me, please—” Duto reached for him. Rudi grabbed his right index finger and twisted it back, the last trick of the weak against the strong.

“I’m serious. I’ll show myself out.”

6 NINE DAYS…

The first king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz, had procreated with a stallion’s vigor. His progeny continued the tradition. Sixty years after Abdul-Aziz’s death, more than a thousand men and women could claim him as a grandfather.

But General Nawwaf bin Salman was more important than most. The eldest son of the Defense Minister, he commanded the Saudi missile arsenal, more than a thousand Chinese-made Dongfengs that could reach any target in Iran or Israel. And as part of his job, Nawwaf ran the Saudi nuclear program.

Though program was not quite the right word. The Saudis had given billions of dollars to Pakistan to help that country build a nuclear arsenal. In return, Pakistan’s generals had promised that if Iran built a nuke, they would hand over a half-dozen bombs. The result would be the Persian Gulf version of mutually assured destruction, two sworn enemies with the power to obliterate each other’s capital. Both Pakistan and the Kingdom denied the deal. We have enough trouble with the North-West Frontier, Pakistan’s Defense Minister told the Secretary of State. You think we want to take a chance on the Arabs, too? We give the Saudis a bomb and it winds up in Washington, we know you blame us.

Maybe. In June 2008, American satellites had spotted a massive construction project at a military base near the village of al-Watah, one hundred seventy miles west of Riyadh, the center of the Arabian desert. In summer, the area was one of the most unpleasant places on earth. Temperatures topped one hundred thirty degrees. Even Bedouins stayed away. Yet the Saudis had evidently decided the project couldn’t wait. Construction moved fast. After a few weeks, the satellites picked up the outlines of missile launchpads and fortified bunkers.

The Saudis already operated two other missile bases, but al-Watah attracted the attention of the CIA’s Near East analysts. Its bunkers were set fifteen meters deep into the desert’s stony soil. Their concrete walls were six meters thick. Putting so much effort into a storage site for conventional warheads made no sense, especially given the base’s inhospitable location.

The agency and the White House watched the site with alarm, waiting for the armored convoys and helicopter flights that would signal that Pakistan had made good on its promise. But they never came. In fact, after rushing to build al-Watah, the Saudis never used the base. Only seventy men lived in its garrison, guarding the perimeter and opening and closing the empty bunkers twice a day. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that the base was a bluff of sorts. The Kingdom wanted to show the world that its military could handle nuclear weapons without actually committing to them.

Wells understood the reluctance. Nukes would be the ripest of targets for al-Qaeda’s jihadis. Plus the Saudis preferred to outsource their national defense to the United States. For seventy years, the Kingdom had depended on the American military to protect it, most notably when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. The biggest Saudi oil fields were a short tank ride from the Kuwaiti border. Even so, the Kingdom’s primary contribution to the conflict had been teaming up with Kuwait to cut a $36 billion check to cover the majority of the cost of the war. Like the United States Army was nothing more than a for-hire force.

But Wells planned to let that bit of history be. He hadn’t come to the Kingdom to discuss Saudi-American codependency or ask for a guided tour of al-Watah. Instead, he hoped that General Nawwaf might lead him to the source of the highly enriched uranium. Given the Saudi interest in nuclear weapons, someone sitting on a private stockpile of HEU might have approached the Kingdom as a potential buyer before turning to Duberman.

The trip was a long shot. But Wells’s only alternative was to sit in Zurich while he waited for Kowalski to set up a meeting with Mikhail Buvchenko. Instead, as soon as Kowalski’s driver dropped him at the Zurich airport, Wells called a Riyadh number whose true owner was known to only eight people. It rang the personal mobile phone of His Majesty Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Prime Minister and King of Saudi Arabia.

Years before, Abdullah had asked Wells to find a Saudi terrorist cell. The King feared he could not trust his own security forces because other members of the royal family supported the jihadis. After the mission, Abdullah promised Wells the Kingdom’s lifelong support. Wells had already called in the chit twice. He didn’t like asking again, but under the circumstances the chance seemed worth taking.

“As-salaam aleikum.” Abdullah answered this phone himself. As far as Wells could tell, he enjoyed having the chance to be a normal human being in this tiny way. He had a throaty smoker’s baritone, a Saudi Jack Nicholson. The vigor in his voice hid the fact that the King, born in 1924, had entered his tenth decade.

“Aleikum salaam, Your Majesty.”

A pause. Despite his age, Abdullah’s mind and memory were intact. Wells imagined him looking at the phone, sorting through possibilities.

“John Wells?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry to bother you—”

“No matter.”

Not quite the same as no bother. “With your permission, I wish to come to Riyadh. To put a question to one of your nephews. A general.” Wells spoke formally now, conscious of just how rough his Arabic sounded.

“I have more than one nephew who’s a general.”

“Nawwaf bin Salman, sir.”

Abdullah didn’t speak. Wells wondered if he’d overreached somehow.

“Where are you now?” the King finally said.

From Zurich, Wells flew to Rome, where he caught an overnight Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Riyadh. Saudia — as the airline was known — had the quirks of the country it served. It was at once deeply religious and highly status-conscious. The 777 jet included two prayer rooms, one at the front of the plane for first-class passengers, one at the rear for everyone else.

The pilots were Saudi, but the flight attendants were Filipino women. Male Saudis considered working as cabin crew beneath their dignity, and no Saudi woman would ever be allowed a job where she could mix so closely with men. No alcohol was available, and every flight began with a prayer in Arabic: Bismi-Allah wa al-Hamduli-Allah… In the name of Allah, Praise be to Allah, Glory to Him who made this transport for us, as we could never have created it.

The words both comforted and disconcerted Wells. Arabic was the language of his time undercover in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For better or worse, those years had hardened him into the man he was now. He had fought alongside jihadis who hated the United States. Though he never accepted their beliefs, he admired their endurance and fearlessness. They weren’t fools, most of them. They fought knowing that they could never overcome the United States. They would have been wiser to focus their energy on the corrupt regimes closer to home. Yet their choice had a certain peculiar logic: America was the devil, and fighting the devil was the highest calling, even if only Allah could overcome him.

So the jihadis were brave and tough. Callous and cruel, too. They cared little for the lives of the civilians around them, less for any enemy unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Facing a foe with overwhelming advantages, they used deceit as a tactic. They fought without uniforms or front lines, picking off one or two soldiers at a time, then disappearing. But was Wells any different? He had lived with these men for years, pretended to be one of them. All along he’d hoped to destroy them, and he’d killed more than one in cold blood. He had come back from those mountains almost a decade before. Yet he still couldn’t talk about what had happened there. Not with Shafer, not with Anne, not even with Exley. He couldn’t find the words, in any language. He circled that time in his mind like a plane trying to land in heavy fog. A psychiatrist would probably say he had post-traumatic stress disorder, but Wells didn’t plan to ask.

In the cabin around him, heavy-legged men in white robes and leather sandals settled back in their seats. Wells wondered what these Saudis would make of him, an American who had taken their religion as his own. In theory, Islam was the most equal of faiths. Becoming Muslim didn’t require approval from a priest or rabbi. Anyone who read the Quran with honest effort could join the umma, the worldwide community of believers.

Yet the Saudis had a way of making other Muslims feel like outsiders. Blood, language, and land joined the Gulf Arabs to Islam. They could trace their lineage to the original tribesmen who had supported Muhammad. The Quran was written in their native tongue. Their country included Islam’s holiest sites. Their very flag included the Shahada, the Islamic creed: There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.

No, Wells knew how they’d see him: misguided at best, a faker at worst.

He closed his eyes as the jet leveled off and found himself dreaming of the Kaaba, the forty-three-foot-high cube at the heart of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, tall black granite walls set on a marble base. The Kaaba protected al-Hajar al-Aswad, the Black Stone, a smooth piece of obsidian that was sometimes thought to have come from a meteorite. The people of Mecca had believed in the stone’s mystical powers even before Muhammad brought Islam to them. Now it marked the spiritual center of the religion. Muslims faced the Kaaba when they knelt to pray.

Wells had been to Mecca, yet he hadn’t seen the Grand Mosque. The failure seemed to summarize the contradictions of his life.

In his dream, he finally arrived at the Kaaba. But he’d made a mistake. Pilgrims were supposed to circle the cube counterclockwise. He was walking the wrong way, squeezing through the crowd. He tried to turn but found he could only march forward. Bodies pinballed off his, bouncing him side to side. At first the other pilgrims didn’t notice. Then one yelled: Imposter! The cries spread: American! Apostate! Men linked their arms to form an unbreakable wedge. They jammed Wells backward. He knew that if he stumbled the crowd would swallow him whole. Then a final jolt threw him on his back and the men around him roared—

“Sir? Sir?” The words in English, not Arabic.

Wells opened his eyes. A flight attendant leaned over him, her hand poised above his shoulder, close enough for Wells to pick up the scent of her too-sweet perfume.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’ve run into turbulence.” Indeed, the cabin rattled as the plane passed through dirty air. “You’ll need to buckle your belt.”

Wells latched his belt and closed his eyes. He hoped the Kaaba would return, that he could win some spiritual succor in his dreams at least. But it was gone. He spent the rest of the flight listening to the snores of the men around him.

His only consolation came from the back of the cabin, where two women whispered intimately in Arabic. Wells couldn’t hear their words, only the low lovely trill of their voices through the stale pressurized air. He wondered if they were sisters, wives to the same man, or both. He wished he could ask, but the question would have been beyond impolite.

Two men in the black uniforms worn by Abdullah’s elite guardsmen waited as Wells stepped off the Jetway at King Khalid Airport in Riyadh. Wordlessly, they led him to the front of a long immigration control line. A nervous customs officer hardly looked up before stamping his passport.

Outside the terminal, a cool, blustery wind rustled the date palms. Even Riyadh had winter. The men led Wells to a sleek black Mercedes limousine, where another uniformed officer waited. He ushered Wells into the limo as the two escorts stepped into a chase car, a black BMW sedan parked nose-to-tail with the Merc.

“As-salaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam.”

“I’m Colonel Fahd Ghaith. Deputy Commander, First Special Division of the National Guard.” The Mercedes rolled off. Its windows were thick and bullet-resistant, and Wells guessed it had an inch or so of steel armor in its doors, too.

“None of this was necessary.”

“The King has asked me to ensure your trip is pleasant.”

“I appreciate that.” Though Wells feared the star treatment would only bring unwanted attention to his arrival. He watched through the back window as a third car pulled away from the terminal, a four-door white Nissan with a tinted windshield and a nick on the driver’s door. The windshield and the distance hid the faces of the driver and passenger.

“That one yours, too?”

Ghaith followed Wells’s gaze. “No. Are you concerned about it?”

“Should I be?”

“You’re His Majesty’s guest, Mr. Wells.”

Not exactly an answer, as they both knew. Terrorists had attacked the royal family before. They would be glad for a chance at Wells. The Mercedes and BMW followed the signs for the airport exit, the Nissan a few cars back. Lack of sleep and that dream about the Grand Mosque were probably making Wells twitchy.

Probably.

“General Nawwaf will see you this evening. Eight-thirty. His office is in the Ministry of Defense at the Riyadh Air Base. In the meantime—”

The Mercedes sped through a police checkpoint and accelerated onto Route 535, a crowded highway that ran southwest from the airport to the center of Riyadh. The chase car remained a few lengths behind, the Nissan still coming.

“A hotel?”

“His Majesty’s guests don’t stay in hotels. A small residence south of downtown.”

“Small residence?”

“Very modest. You’re still looking at that car?”

“He’s still there.”

“This is the main road from the airport. As you can see from the traffic. Nonetheless. I’d rather not have you worrying.” Ghaith turned to the front seat. “At the house in twenty minutes, Khalid. Let’s have your siren.”

A moment later, the limousine’s siren sang its high Oo-oo, Oo-oo. The traffic ahead cleared, and the Mercedes surged to fill the empty pavement.

Two minutes later, the limousine turned from 535 to Route 65, the main highway through central Riyadh. The Nissan had vanished. Wells relaxed as best he could, took in the city around him. Riyadh was flat, unapologetically ugly, and in the middle of a Shanghai-size construction boom. With oil at one hundred dollars a barrel, Abdullah was expanding universities and hospitals and building a skyscraper complex for banks and a stock exchange. Inevitably, the new development was called the King Abdullah Financial District. Abdullah was a more democratic monarch than his predecessors, but his modesty had limits. He shared the Saud family fetish for spreading his name far and wide.

After carving through the downtown traffic, the Mercedes turned west onto an eight-lane highway that Saudis called the Mecca Road. The city’s sprawl seemed endless, an infinite loop of concrete towers, asphalt roads, and dirt lots. Beige and black and brown blurred together, as if Riyadh’s builders wanted the city to reflect the monochrome desert that surrounded it.

The limousine left the highway and turned south down Prince Turki Road, a six-lane boulevard. An oversize complex of buildings loomed to the left, with signs announcing “King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre” in English and Arabic.

“Best hospital in Saudi Arabia. World-class.” Ghaith spoke the last two words in English, with relish. “We’re almost there.”

The Mercedes turned right, into a crowded residential neighborhood, a mix of blocky apartment buildings and new houses. Then left, right, and left again, before squealing through an open gate watched by two guards. It stopped outside a three-story mansion.

“Twenty minutes exactly. Well done, Khalid.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“This is the small residence?” Wells said.

“Only one thousand square meters.” Ten thousand square feet. Ghaith stepped out, and Wells followed him into a foyer that had more marble than most churches. A gold-leaf chandelier hung overhead. The Saudis didn’t consider subtlety a virtue.

Ghaith pointed down a corridor. “Kitchen’s that way. There’s a chef if you’re hungry. Halal only, I’m afraid. Though I do believe there’s a liquor cabinet in the closet of the master bathroom.”

“I won’t ask how you know.”

“Also an indoor pool at the back of the house, an exercise room.”

“Who stays here, Colonel?”

“Mostly Western doctors working at the hospital.”

“Of course.” Abdullah would hardly mind spending a few million dollars on mansions to entice the best specialists to come to Riyadh to treat him and his family.

“I’ll be back at eight to pick you up, but my men will wait in front. If I can be of service, please call. Is there anything else you need, Mr. Wells?”

Wells thought of the mysterious Nissan. “Wouldn’t mind a pistol. If you have one to spare.”

“I assure you you’re safe here. These are some of the King’s best men.”

“No doubt. But I prefer to look after myself.”

“Al-Hamdu lillah.” Praise be to God. “I’ll see you this evening, Mr. Wells.”

Wells forced himself onto a treadmill for an hour, flipping on CNN International to see what he’d missed on the flight from Rome. Laura Frommer, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had announced her support for the President. The CIA offered a convincing case at our hearings, Frommer said at a press conference. And the Iranians can defuse this crisis very simply. Open your nuclear facilities, let us speak to your scientists. You say you aren’t trying to build a bomb, but this uranium ingot tells a different story.

The American government had found its line: If war comes, it’s Iran’s fault, for refusing to open up. The argument had traction. Polls showed that sixty-three percent of Americans favored military action, up eleven percent since the missile attack that downed United 49. If Duberman was behind the missile, it had worked even better than he expected. Wells briefly wondered if he should have gone to Mumbai instead of coming here. But he had no leads in India. And he and Shafer and Duto were far better off staying off the agency’s radar. That would be impossible in Mumbai.

Exhaustion overcame Wells as he stepped off the treadmill. He found his way to the master bedroom, set his phone for 7 p.m., pulled the shades. And slept.

He woke not to the beeping of his alarm but amplified Arabic voices in the distance. He didn’t have the usual traveler’s dislocation when his eyes snapped open. He knew exactly what he was hearing. The Maghrib, the sunset call to prayer, the fourth of the day. Wells felt an oddly urgent need to pray outside, launch his devotions into the setting sun, nothing but desert between him and Mecca.

He found a prayer rug in the bedroom’s cavernous closet, made his way to the mansion’s flat roof. The wind yanked the sleep from him and he prayed vigorously, purposefully. By the time he finished, the sun had nearly disappeared. He felt calmer and stronger than he had in weeks.

He stood, turned to go inside—

And saw the white Nissan from the airport rolling past the mansion’s back gate. The scratch in the driver’s door left no doubt.

Wells didn’t panic. Whoever was inside wouldn’t try to storm the mansion. Far easier to attack as the Mercedes left the grounds, a natural choke point, or on the road to the Ministry of Defense.

He would shower, get ready for his meeting. When Ghaith returned, they’d talk.

As he was showering, his phone buzzed. He stepped out unwillingly, grabbed for it. Kowalski. “I don’t know if this qualifies as good news or bad, but the Russian says he’ll meet you. No surprise, you come to him. Fly into Volgograd.”

“It’s not back to Stalingrad?”

“Nor Putingrad. Yet.”

“When?”

“He can do it as soon as tomorrow. If I were you, I’d get there before he changes his mind.”

“What about the visa?”

“Get to any Russian embassy or consulate, he’ll arrange it.”

Buvchenko proving the power of his connections. Wells wondered if he could leave Riyadh tonight after his meeting with Nawwaf. A direct flight to Russia would be impossible, but Saudia or Turkish Airlines surely had overnight service to Istanbul. From there he could get the visa, be in Volgograd by the next night. He wished he could ask the Saudis for a private jet, but had pushed Abdullah’s generosity too far already.

“What did you tell him?”

“That you had a question for him, one you had to ask in person.”

“That’s all?”

“And that you would pay a lot of money for the right answer. He likes money. As do we all.”

“Thank you, Pierre.”

“Don’t thank me until you get out.”

Ghaith arrived as Wells was raiding the refrigerator, which was disappointingly empty.

“No chef?”

“Didn’t want to bother him. I saw the Nissan again, Colonel. From the airport.”

“You’re sure?” His tone surprised Wells. More annoyed than nervous.

“I was on the roof. For the Maghrib.”

“It’s ours.”

Wells’s turn to be surprised. “You said—”

“I lied. I didn’t want to worry you. I didn’t think you’d make it. There’s one other undercover car, too.”

Wells crossed the kitchen in two big strides, put himself face-to-face with Ghaith, close enough to smell the sugary coffee on the colonel’s breath. He had six inches and fifty pounds on the Saudi.

“You didn’t want to worry me?”

“An error. I apologize.” Ghaith pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’m married to one of His Majesty’s grandnieces. Check for yourself. If you’re concerned whether you can trust me.”

“If Abdullah sent you for me, then I trust you. I don’t doubt your loyalty, Colonel—”

“Thank you.”

“It’s your judgment I’m not sure about. You have anything else to tell me, now’s the time. A specific threat, whatever.”

Ghaith shook his head. “Nothing like that.”

“Then why all this? Four cars. How many men?”

“Eight. Plus the guards at the house.”

“Eight agents. For what?”

“Word about your arrival has spread.”

“In one day? Did someone email the whole country? John Wells is in town. Huntin’ season.”

“I told no one. Several of His Majesty’s secretaries know. His brother. General Nawwaf, too.”

“Nawwaf must be reliable or he wouldn’t be running your missiles.”

“He’s reliable. But I don’t know everyone on his staff. The wrong person hears. A ten-second call to AQAP.” Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“And you were planning to tell me when? When you dropped me back at the airport?”

“I am sorry.” Ghaith’s embarrassment seemed genuine.

“I’d like that pistol now. Don’t tell me you don’t have a spare somewhere in that Mercedes.”

Ghaith pushed past Wells, out of the kitchen.

He came back a minute later with a big black pistol. A Glock 22. Forty-caliber.

“You didn’t have anything bigger? Like a cannon?”

“It’s too big for you?”

Point, Saudi Arabia.

“As long as it’s loaded.” Wells popped out the magazine, found it full. Fifteen fat copper-jacketed rounds.

“You understand you can’t bring it inside the ministry offices.”

“If I need it in the Ministry of Defense, we’re really in trouble.” Wells snapped the magazine back into the pistol. It would kick harder than the 9-millimeters he preferred. Still, he was glad to have it.

He stuffed it into his jacket pocket, the butt poking out. Not ideal, but better than shoving it into the back of his jeans like a wannabe gangster. “Can we go now?”

At first glance, the security around Riyadh Air Base seemed more appropriate for an installation like Kandahar or Bagram, an American airfield in hostile territory. A high concrete wall stretched around the perimeter. Cameras were everywhere. Signs warned in Arabic and English: “Danger: Armed Guards — Do Not Approach Without Authorization!”

At first Wells didn’t understand why the Saudi military had chosen to present such a hostile face to its capital city. Then he saw that hostility was precisely the point. The Sauds wanted their people to remember that they were ruled, that the concept of consent of the governed went only so far in Riyadh.

The base’s walls extended for what seemed like miles. Finally, the Mercedes reached its main entrance, marked by a tall and strangely elegant arch of tan-colored concrete. Four soldiers in a fortified machine-gun nest targeted them with a spotlight as the limousine stopped at the outer gate guardhouse. Khalid lowered his window to hand over his identity card. After a brief conversation, he looked over his shoulder at Ghaith.

“Colonel. They say we aren’t authorized.”

Wells liked this day less and less. He rested his fingers on the butt of the Glock. But pulling it would only make the guards more nervous. Through the glare of the spotlight, he saw their chase car five meters behind. Both too close and too far to do any good. They would make a fat target for a suicide bomber.

Two guards stepped out of the gatehouse and motioned for the Mercedes to turn around. Ghaith pushed open his door. The guards lowered their rifles, but the weapons seemed only to make him angrier. “We’ll sort this out in one minute, no more. Or by next week you simpletons will be in the Empty Quarter chasing scorpions.” Ghaith meant it, Wells saw. Nobody pulled rank quite like the Saudis.

The guards looked at each other, then waved him into the guardhouse.

Three minutes passed before Ghaith stepped out of the guardhouse, back into the Mercedes. He slammed the door. Whatever he’d said seemed to have carried the day. The gate slid open. “Go, Khalid.” The Mercedes eased inside.

“They still had us coming this morning. Oafs.”

Another easy explanation. Or maybe someone wanted to be sure that their arrival would attract notice instead of being quiet.

Finally, Wells walked into Nawwaf’s office, a square room that overlooked the airfield’s main north — south runway. Models of American, Russian, and Chinese missiles filled a glass cabinet by the door.

As was customary in Saudi offices, photos of Abdullah and Salman hung prominently. Wells expected to see personal photos of Nawwaf with Salman, a way for the general to remind visitors of his place in the hierarchy. There were none. The omission mildly impressed Wells. Nawwaf was confident enough in his own authority not to rely on his father.

Nawwaf was tall and thin, with a crisp uniform and a neatly trimmed beard that framed his narrow lips. He stood from behind his mahogany desk and saluted Wells, more than a hint of irony in the gesture. “Mr. Wells. Hello.”

“Salaam aleikum, General.”

“I’d prefer we stick to English, Mr. Wells. I studied physics at Oxford. I expect my English is adequate for your needs.”

“Nam.” Yes.

Nawwaf didn’t smile. Wells decided to take a friendlier tack, get the general talking generally about the Iranian program before moving on to the questions he’d come to ask.

“I appreciate your taking the time to see me. Do you know why I’m here?”

“I was told only that it was not related to our base at Watah.” Making sure Wells knew that the topic was off-limits.

“I have questions about the enrichment process. I’ve heard you’re an expert.”

“I doubt I can tell you anything your own scientists haven’t.”

“Humor me.”

“As you wish.”

“I’ll start with the obvious. Could Iran have enriched uranium to weapons-grade? Even though we and the IAEA watch their stockpiles.” The International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The Iranians acknowledge they’ve enriched several thousand kilos to twenty percent enrichment. If they hid a fraction of that, they could easily take the final step, from twenty percent to weapons-grade.”

“But could they have hidden it?”

“Certainly. They had years when no one was watching on-site. The inspectors checked afterwards, but it’s a matter of altering output tables, hiding the efficiency of the process.”

“That simple.”

“Did you know, Mr. Wells, that the United States has lost hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium over the last fifty years?”

Wells shook his head in genuine surprise.

“No one really thinks it’s missing. Otherwise, Washington and London would be ghost towns. Probably it never existed at all. Uranium enrichment is an industrial process, and like all industrial processes it has a margin for error. Especially if you want it to.”

“So they hide this uranium. Then? They build another plant without anyone noticing?”

“Possibly.”

“Wouldn’t it be huge?”

Nawwaf shook his head. “Once you reach twenty percent, you need only a hundred or so centrifuges running for a few weeks to reach the weapons-grade level. A small factory or warehouse could hide those.”

“If they used an aboveground site, wouldn’t there be emissions?”

“Only for a couple of hundred meters. You couldn’t find it with a brute search. You’d need to narrow the target area first.”

“So you think the Istanbul uranium came from Iran?”

“I didn’t say that, Mr. Wells. You asked me if the Iranians could have enriched uranium to weapons-grade. The answer is yes. Whether they have actually done so is another matter. That comes down to what you Americans found in Istanbul. What you claim to have found, I should say.”

“You think we planted it?”

“Maybe you wanted an excuse to attack Tehran. On the other hand, if the Iranians did produce it, we have a problem. I’m not sure which is worse.”

Wells saw his opening.

“What if I told you I agreed with you?”

“That the United States has planted the uranium?”

“Not the United States. Someone trying to get America to attack Iran.”

Wells watched as Nawwaf reacted to the theory the same way everyone did: Impossible.

But what if it’s not?

“Who? The Israelis would be the obvious choice.”

“Suppose it’s a private group?”

Nawwaf shook his head. “No private group could manage it.”

“Unless they didn’t enrich it themselves.”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“Has anyone ever tried to sell the Kingdom highly enriched uranium?”

Nawwaf laughed, an unexpected sound.

“At least now I understand why you’re here.”

The general busied himself in his desk, came up with a gold cigarette case and lighter. “Do you smoke?”

Wells shook his head.

“You Americans all expect to live forever.”

“At this point, I’d settle for next week.”

Nawwaf lit up with a practiced hand, dragged deep. “I smoke less than I used to, and I enjoy it more. Now. You were asking if I might know the real source of that ingot?”

For a moment, Wells let himself believe the general might have the answer. “That’s right.”

“I confess I find your theory interesting. But I can’t help. I was approached once the way you suggest. Before you grow too excited, it was by a North Korean. This was a conference five or six years ago. He claimed he had a working bomb. I went as far as asking the price. Five billion dollars. Two up front, three when they delivered.”

North Korea again. Wells wondered whether Duberman could possibly have been desperate enough to deal with the psychopaths in Pyongyang.

“Cheaper than the Pakistanis.”

“Funnily enough, he said the same, too. But I couldn’t take him seriously. I had no way of knowing if they could even build a competent bomb. Their tests were just past fizzle, the low single-kiloton range. No, we would have to buy at least two to have one to test, and if it failed we would hardly be in position to demand a refund.”

“You think he was serious?”

“I think he thought he was. I didn’t bother to tell anyone here. I would have been a laughingstock. And he wasn’t offering raw HEU, you should understand. Not what your people found in Istanbul. Only a finished bomb. I don’t think he’s the one you want.”

“And that was the only time?”

Nawwaf took another drag on the cigarette. If he wasn’t actually searching his memory, he was a fine actor. “Yes, truly. I don’t love your country, Mr. Wells. But my father and the King have told me to speak honestly, and I wouldn’t dishonor them by lying to you.”

“Then I thank you for your time.”

“Good luck with your search.”

“By the way, General, do you have any idea why we were stopped at the gate? We were told that the time for this meeting hadn’t been updated.”

“My assistants handle that. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Not at all.” Wells extended his hand and they shook over the general’s giant desk.

“I’ll try to find the Korean’s name, for what it’s worth. And if I think of anything else, I’ll call you.”

Wells saluted. “Ma’a as-salaama.” Good-bye.

“Ma’a as-salaama.”

“He was helpful?” Ghaith asked, as they walked side by side through the ministry’s empty corridors.

“Maybe.” Wells would talk to Duto and Shafer about North Korea, though the possibility was far-fetched at best. “So we can be at the airport?” He’d booked himself on a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul that left just before midnight.

“I should tell you. While you were speaking to Nawwaf, the King’s office sent word. His Majesty wishes to see you tomorrow.”

Wells wondered why. Maybe Abdullah wanted him to relay a message to the White House, though Wells wasn’t sure why the King would bother with an intermediary. He could call the President directly.

Whatever the King’s reasons, staying overnight in Riyadh meant Wells would have to postpone his trip to Russia for at least another day. Buvchenko might call off their meeting. But Wells could hardly say no. He didn’t need to be an expert on royal etiquette to know that Abdullah had given him an order dressed as an invitation.

“Of course.”

The Mercedes waited outside the ministry’s front doors, its engine running. The wind was up, the night almost cold. Wells looked up, expecting a galaxy of stars. But light pollution from the base and the city blocked all but the brightest.

Riyadh was far from a late-night town. Most Saudi families ate dinner inside their high-walled compounds. The city had no bars or clubs, not even any movie theaters.

So aside from the trucks cutting through Riyadh on their late-night runs across the desert, the Makkah Road was nearly empty as the Mercedes sped home. The BMW followed fifty meters behind. The Nissan was ahead, with the final escort, a Toyota Land Cruiser, farther back. A stretched-out convoy, blazing down the left lane, passing the eighteen-wheelers in the right two lanes like they weren’t moving at all.

From somewhere behind them came the whine of a motorcycle engine cranking at high revs, closing fast. Through the back window, Wells saw the bike accelerating past the Land Cruiser, closing on the BMW. It was a big black sportbike, 1,100 ccs or more. It had to be doing at least one hundred thirty miles an hour. The driver wore a black helmet with a striking gold face shield.

As it closed, Wells pulled his pistol. Not that the weapon would do him much good. The Mercedes didn’t have firing ports, and the bullet-resistant windows worked both ways. Trying to fire through them from inside would send bullet fragments ricocheting around the passenger compartment.

The motorcycle pulled up beside them. It slowed beside the right rear door, next to Wells. Barely three feet of pavement separated them. The rider turned toward Wells, the body of the limousine reflected and distorted in his face shield. Wells lifted his pistol. The rider would have to respect the threat unless he knew about the bullet-resistant windows.

Maybe he did. He pulled his gloved hand from the left handlebar, cocked his thumb to make a finger pistol. He extended his arm close to the glass and pretended to shoot, raising and lowering his index finger, pow pow pow. Wells imagined the rider, eighteen, nineteen, twenty at most, the years when death wasn’t even a whisper. No doubt he was grinning like a fool under his face shield. He returned his hand to the bars and raised himself off the seat and pulled backward, lifting the nose of the bike. Back and back until the motorcycle rose at forty-five degrees from the pavement, a highway wheelie—

After a few seconds he lowered the nose, settled himself behind the fairing, took off down the empty highway. The bike pulled away like Secretariat in the Belmont homestretch. No license plate, at least not one that Wells could read. In fifteen seconds, it disappeared into the dark, its red taillight dimming, engine fading. Wells had spent plenty of time on motorcycles. He was comfortable with three-digit speeds. But he couldn’t remember ever pushing that hard.

Ghaith leaned forward to Khalid. “How fast?”

“Two-fifty, two-sixty kph.” One hundred and sixty miles an hour, give or take. Suicide speed.

Wells checked the back window but saw only their chase cars. He tucked the pistol away.

Ghaith’s phone buzzed. He reached for it, listened briefly. “No. A ghost. Keep on exactly as you are. Text when you reach Turki Road.”

He hung up, turned to Wells. “I didn’t think you were the nervous type.”

“You’re telling me that was a coincidence.”

“We call them ghosts. You know how many times every year the ambulances clean up the accidents? Our sons, they have too much hormones, no women, nothing to do. They want to find out how fast they can go on these big empty highways. Know the police can’t catch them. He’s on his way into the desert. He sees the limousine, he stops. Sees who’s inside. You think a jihadi acts like that?” Ghaith mimicked the rider’s finger pistol.

“Or else he’s tracking us, checking out the setup, the chase cars.”

“Even if he is what you fear, he can’t touch us in here. These windows stop an AK.”

“VBIED.” The letters, all too familiar to American soldiers, stood for vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.

“At one hundred fifty kilometers an hour?” Ghaith yawned.

“What time did you get up this morning, Colonel?”

“Five a.m.”

“I’ll bet you get up at five every morning.”

“Yes. Why?”

Ghaith understood the danger, or he wouldn’t be running an eight-man protective team. But fatigue was giving him tunnel vision. He wanted to explain away these obvious danger signs, because responding to them required energy he didn’t have. He wanted to stick to his original plan—get Wells home as quickly as possible, the most direct route—instead of recalibrating.

Natural mistakes. Wells had made them himself. Which didn’t make them any less dangerous.

“We should tighten up. Pointless to have four vehicles that can’t cover each other.”

“You want us to slow down?”

“I want time to react.”

“You’ll be at the house in three, four minutes. Tomorrow morning I promise you a ten-car police escort. A tank if you like. A helicopter.”

Wells ignored the sarcasm, checked the door next to him. Its knob was low, locked. Wells tugged on it, couldn’t raise it.

“Unlock the doors, Khalid.”

Khalid stole a glance at Ghaith.

“What is this?” the colonel said.

“Just tell him.”

“As long as you don’t jump out at one hundred fifty kph. His Majesty will be very angry if anything happens to you.”

“I won’t.”

Ghaith muttered the order. Khalid popped the back locks.

They passed the King Faisal Hospital apartment buildings. Khalid pulled off the highway as he had that morning. Wells had a sense of déjà vu that could have come straight from The Matrix. He’d been in Afghanistan when the movie came out, but he caught up years later. He didn’t watch many movies, but he had to admit he’d enjoyed that one. The super-slo-mo bullets. Keanu Reeves with his sleepy surfer’s twang. All the techno mumbo jumbo. Déjà vu is a glitch in the Matrix… It happens when they change something.

Then the whole world exploding.

Ahead, the white Nissan ran a blinking yellow traffic signal, turned left onto Prince Turki Road. Hardly a second passed before Ghaith’s phone buzzed with a text. He read it, leaned toward Khalid. “Go.”

Khalid turned south on Turki Road, passing over the highway. Ahead, the big apartment buildings of the medical center were mostly dark. The chase cars followed. South of the overpass the boulevard turned oddly claustrophobic. The perimeter wall of the hospital complex hemmed the road to the east. To the right, apartment buildings and a block-long mosque loomed several stories high and extended nearly to the edge of the road, blocking any view of the intersecting streets. An attack could come from almost any direction, including overhead. Yet Ghaith seemed unconcerned. “Two more minutes,” he said. And then Wells heard a pair of motorcycle engines screaming. To the north, behind them. Through the back window, he saw the headlights closing. The Toyota tried to block them, but it had no chance. They swerved around it as easily as a running back cutting past a fat defensive lineman.

The lead bike tucked itself off the back bumper of the BMW, which was about sixty meters behind the limousine. The rider extended his arm. This time the pistol in his hand was real. Three quick pops echoed through the night. The BMW slowed, swerved right, trying to force the rider off the road—

As the trailing bike cut left, closing on the limo—

The Mercedes roared ahead and swerved right, toward the curb. Khalid was trying to keep the motorcycle where he could see it, stop it from sneaking up on the passenger side.

And Wells saw the trap. The assassins knew the limo was armored. They couldn’t hope to shoot out its windows. But they could flush it into a suicide attack, into a car pulling out from one of the side streets. By cutting to the curb, Khalid had given himself even less time to react—

“No—” But even as he spoke, Wells realized he couldn’t possibly explain in time. He had only one move. He grabbed the door handle, swung open the door—

He braced himself, threw his body out of the car, angling backward onto the pavement, throwing his hands over his head so that his shoulders and back and arms would take the worst of the contact. He rolled left over right, bounced over the curb, scraped along the narrow strip of concrete and rocks that separated the roadbed from the four-story apartment building that fronted it. His left hand caught on the edge of a concrete slab. He heard a bone snap and his left pinky caught fire, the pain radiating up his arm. Hold tight, hold tight…

A moment later, he thumped against the side of the building. He blinked, but regained his bearings quickly enough to see a white minivan pull out from a cross street barely twenty feet in front of the Mercedes.

The motorcycle that had been tailing the limo suddenly cut hard left—

Much too late, the limo’s brakes screeched—

Wells squeezed his eyes tight, but even from half a football field away the heat of the explosion singed him and its blast wave pummeled his face with gravel and dust, a devil’s wind. He wiped his face clean as best he could and opened his eyes. An orange-yellow fireball rose as high as the tops of the apartment buildings. The minivan was obliterated, its frame twisted and shattered. The motorcycle was gone, too. Wells guessed that it had outrun the explosion and survived. The Mercedes was nothing more than a burning box. Its armored frame had hung together, but Ghaith and Khalid couldn’t have survived. The buildings nearest the explosion had partially collapsed.

The BMW chase car was now past Wells. It had stopped short of the explosion. It was basically intact, but its windshield had been blown out. The motorcycle that had tailed it—

Sat stopped about fifty feet past Wells. The rider figured out what had happened at the same time as Wells did. He turned and looked at Wells with his gold faceplate. Wells reached for his pistol. It was gone. It had fallen from his pocket when he’d jumped from the limo. It was lying to his left. He dove for it as the rider reached across his body and fired three times, the first round close enough for Wells to hear it ding off the concrete.

Wells swept the Glock up with his busted left hand. He ignored the pain in his pinky and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t have much chance at shooting the guy under these circumstances, but he didn’t much care. As long as he could get the guy back on his bike and away. The rider fired twice more—

And then headlights lit up the bike and Wells heard a car roaring toward them. The rider dropped the pistol in frustration and turned back to his bike as the Toyota, the final car in the convoy, gave chase.

Close.

Wells breathed in deep, filled his lungs with foul gasoline-soaked air, pushed himself to his feet. Already the fireball had faded, and the motorcycle engine, too. Instead, screaming filled the night. Help, a woman sobbed from the corner, her voice somehow clear through the crackling of the fire. Allah, please help! All this carnage and chaos and suffering for him, because of him.

But he was still here.

Skill, and luck, too, though Wells wasn’t feeling very lucky at the moment, feeling instead like a kind of perverse Pan, a small-g god who was a bringer of chaos instead of pleasure wherever he went. He longed to curse but instead he tucked the Glock into his jacket pocket and ran for the woman yelling under the rubble, her voice already losing strength, dulling and fading like a bad phone call. He doglegged around the wreckage of the Mercedes, the steel beams of its frame warped from the inferno, until he reached the wrecked concrete.

At his feet he found a strip of plain white plastic in the road, a piece of a shopping bag. Perfect. He bound his left pinky tight to his ring finger, pulling until the pain dried his mouth. The break was bad, just short of a compound fracture, but Wells didn’t care. Even if the agony in his hand magnified until he screamed with each piece of concrete he pulled, he needed to make himself useful as best he could. He needed to dig.

7

When the President ordered that first drone strike on Iran, he’d felt a certain grim excitement.

But since the attack on United 49, the excitement had worn off, leaving only the grimness. This morning he’d woken at 3 a.m. with a sour stomach. He’d fought the urge to call the Secret Service and demand a low-profile ride through D.C. Not to go anywhere in particular, just to remind himself that the world outside his bulletproof windows existed. That drunks still stumbled home after the bars closed.

He hadn’t understood the price he would pay for choosing this path. Nothing in the world — not the exhaustion of the primaries, not the tension of Election Day, not the elation of the Inaugural — compared to these last days for pure suffocating power. Only his predecessors in this office could truly understand. He wanted to call them, ask them how they’d borne it. But he felt somehow he’d be cheating, burdening them with a weight that wasn’t theirs. This confrontation belonged to him, no one else.

The paradox was that the pressure made him more certain of the decisions he’d made. He knew how carefully he’d considered every alternative. He’d hoped that his surprise first strike would wake the Iranian government to the risks of its overreach. In daylight, American drones and stealth fighters had smashed Iran’s air-defense system and flown straight through Tehran to target the military airport at its heart. He couldn’t have sent a clearer message. We don’t want to attack you, but if we do, you can’t possibly defend yourselves.

He had three aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. He had Marine regiments on the way to western Afghanistan and the 82nd Airborne headed for southeastern Turkey. He had said explicitly that he had no interest in regime change, that he merely wanted the Iranians to drop their nuclear program.

He hadn’t expected that Iran would give way immediately. But he had figured it would try to deter an invasion by promising to negotiate over opening its weapons plants. That move would have made sense as a way to buy time. Instead, Iran’s leaders had taken the opposite course. They’d accused him of lying and making up evidence. They had promised they would die before agreeing to a deal.

Then they had shot down a civilian jet.

Who were these people? How could he make them see?

At least he had Donna. Donna Green, his National Security Advisor, a skinny angular woman smarter than everyone else in the White House. Including him. They didn’t always agree, but he trusted her completely. They were set to meet at 4 p.m., less than two hours from now. He’d insisted on forty-five minutes alone with her before the Secretary of Defense and the general who ran Central Command updated him on war plans.

In theory, Green was coming early to brief him on the investigation into United 49. In reality, he wanted the conversation with her that he couldn’t have with anyone else outside his family, the one where he dropped the I-am-President mask enough to vent some of the pressure he felt.

First he had to endure the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. He had tried to escape, telling his chief of staff, an old-school Boston Brahman who bore the unfortunate name of Harrison Hamilton, to reschedule. They make me feel like an old lady with too many cats. Every time I focus on one, the other three start pissing on the floor. And I see in their beady little eyes that they’re hoping I’ll die so they can gnaw on my fingertips. Besides, I met them last week.

But Hamilton had flat-out said no. Sorry, Chief. Can’t help you with this one. Half an hour will buy you goodwill you might need. If it makes you feel any better, they won’t argue. They read the polls like everyone else. Closer, in fact. They just want to be able to tell the world they heard you make the case firsthand. In the Oval Office. Pretend they’re potential donors, okay? Very attractive, very rich donors.

So he spent precisely thirty-seven minutes with his four congressional house cats, and then at 2:45 p.m. went upstairs to his bedroom to read. He’d asked his staff for the best histories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, hoping for clues. But the only conclusion he reached was that Jack Kennedy had been crazy enough to walk to the edge of nuclear war and lucky enough that the Soviets backed down. If Kennedy’s experience was any guide, the President would have to push hard before the Iranians folded.

More sleepless nights.

After an hour, he set aside the book and snuck a cigarette. Normally, his wife gave him grief for smoking in their private quarters instead of the specially ventilated corridor where he usually indulged. But she wasn’t arguing this week.

He swigged a mouthful of Scope to clear the ashy taste from his mouth, fixed his tie, walked downstairs, settled himself behind his desk. At exactly 4 p.m., a steward opened the door to the Oval Office and Green walked in. She held a red-bordered file, rarely a good sign.

“Mr. President.”

She settled herself in the simple wooden chair to the right of his desk. “Before I bring you up to speed on Mumbai, you should know that CIA is reporting a terrorist attack in Riyadh. A car bomb. The attack occurred two and a half hours ago, roughly 2230 local.”

“Related to Iran?”

“Unclear. As you know, AQ has a robust presence in the Kingdom. The attack was on the southwest edge of the city. Several dead and injured, but no one in the royal family. We should know more after the sun comes up over there.”

“Unless it’s related to Iran or otherwise significant, I don’t care. I don’t need to hear about random terrorist attacks right now.”

“Yes, sir.” The rebuke didn’t seem to ruffle Green. “Now. As to Mumbai. I have potentially good news. India’s Minister of the Interior has told the FBI that his investigators have an informant who reports the men who fired the missiles are in hiding in a slum there. The police don’t have the location locked down yet, but they believe they will within the next twenty-four hours.”

“Any nationality on the perps?”

“The report is Middle Eastern.”

“And they haven’t gone home? Why?”

“Speculation is that the ship that was supposed to pick them up didn’t show. Maybe because half the Indian navy was in the bay searching for pieces of the plane. But that’s a guess. The Indians are keeping this guy to themselves. The minister has refused our requests to talk to him.”

The President’s left ear suddenly itched terribly. The ear canal. He had a powerful urge to dig a pinky inside. A Q-Tip. He wasn’t prone to tics or itching, and he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him why he had suddenly developed one. Back in the day, Jack Kennedy had gotten by with muscle relaxants.

“Is this the usual sovereignty nonsense? We are a great nation, not just cricket and lamb vindaloo.” The last sentence in a mock Indian accent that wouldn’t have won him any friends on the subcontinent.

“Yes, the usual sovereignty nonsense. We will push. I think they’ll drop the pose soon enough.”

“It’s morning there, yes?”

“A little before three a.m. in Mumbai.”

“I want us in there before noon their time. If I have to call Gupta directly to tell him, let me know.” Anil Gupta, the Indian Prime Minister. “And I want Rooney in here to tell me exactly what they have and how we’re going to make sure the Indians don’t blow it.” Tim Rooney, the FBI director. “I want these men taken alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

The itch migrated from the President’s ear to his throat. At least that problem was fixable. He tapped a button discreetly attached to the underside of his desk. Almost before he lifted his finger, a steward opened the door to the hallway that connected the Oval Office with his private kitchen.

“Mr. President?”

“Club soda with lemon, please. Donna?”

“Sounds good,” Green said.

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, Mr. President.”

Sixty-four seconds later, the sodas arrived on a sterling silver tray.

The President raised his glass. “Salud.”

“Salud.”

“Let’s assume the Indians are right. We get these guys, they turn out to be Iranian. Like I told you earlier. I want your best guess, why provoke us this way? Attack a civilian jet when we were so careful to stick to legitimate military targets?”

“I think it’s dangerous to guess at motivation, sir. Especially when we have such poor intel into the Iranian government.”

“Your objection is noted. For the record. Now, guess.”

“A couple possibilities come to mind. Here’s one you won’t like. We’re wrong. The Iranians aren’t responsible for the HEU. They’ve decided that since we’re attacking them on false pretenses, they might as well hurt us.”

“Before I ordered the drones in, everyone agreed the evidence pointed to Iran. Everyone. DCI, DNI, our nuke experts. You, too.”

“It did. It does. But it’s still circumstantial. Even now, we don’t have confirmation from communications intercepts or human sources.”

“Then why don’t they just let us in?”

“Would we let them in if the situation were reversed?”

The President suddenly found himself very tired.

“What about aliens?”

“Sir?”

“Maybe it’s not Iran. Maybe a UFO dropped that uranium in Istanbul.”

“You asked me to speculate, sir.”

“I asked you to speculate. Not give me a stroke. I went on television and told the world that Iran was responsible. Are you seriously telling me that’s open to question?”

Before the President took office, he’d vowed not to make the mistake of putting himself in a bubble, surrounded by staff too frightened to challenge him. But this situation was exceptional. The die was cast. He had made his choice. He could tolerate a lot of uncertainty. But not the possibility that he had just attacked another nation under false pretenses.

She cocked her head, looked at him, seemed to recognize how he felt. “No, sir. It’s very unlikely.”

“Then let’s move on.”

“Yes, sir. If the Iranians are committed to protecting their program at all costs, the jet could be a warning shot. Their way of telling us that if we invade them, we can expect terrorist attacks all over the world.”

“That’ll backfire in the worst way. People will want me to bomb Tehran into ash.”

“In the short run. Imagine if it stretches for months. Not just planes. Attacks on military bases, police stations. Shootings in malls. Movie theaters. Almost a low-grade military campaign. The Iranians make sure we know that the attacks will continue as long as we have soldiers on their soil.”

“They couldn’t possibly pull that off.”

“But if they could. We’re not used to being attacked. September 11 aside, we haven’t had major civilian casualties since the Civil War. Maybe a pacifist groundswell starts? Why are we bothering about this bomb? Why are we interfering anyway?”

The President shook his head. “I can’t believe they’d have the guts to try that.”

“If more planes go down—”

“I’ll reconsider. Next guess.”

“This is the simplest. They’re convinced we’re going to attack and they can’t do anything about it, so they’re taking their pound of flesh in advance. It’s not a strategy as much as a lashing-out.”

“Don’t you always say, never assume the enemy is irrational?”

“People get locked in and panic.”

The President wondered whether that sentence held a second message for him.

“Anything else?”

Green nodded.

“One more, the most likely. Plenty of different factions inside Tehran. Plenty of folks over there were never on board with the program. They may not even have known about it. Now that we’ve busted it open, they feel like fools.”

“They want to close it down.”

“Plus they see a chance to break the conservatives for good. But the mullahs and generals who approved it know that if they walk away, they’ll lose the government. Wind up dangling by their necks from cranes.” The preferred form of execution in Iran.

“So they’re doubling down.”

“Correct. They don’t care if we find out they shot down the plane. In fact, they’d rather we did. The worse it gets, the more control they have.”

“Until the Airborne and the Marines level them.”

“They may figure they can survive a limited invasion. Or that once they beat the liberals, they can walk back from the brink, open up the program at the eleventh hour long enough to stop us from coming over the border. They’re dealing with the immediate problem and hoping the future will take care of itself.”

“So do you have anything that’s not speculation?”

“With any luck, the guys who shot the missiles can give us some answers. Especially if they’re Hezbollah.” The Lebanese Shiite militia group that Iran funded. “The hardliners are the ones with the lines into Lebanon. They’d rather use Hezbollah than their own security services and risk having the liberals find out.”

“Okay. Say that last theory is right. The jet got taken down because of an internal Iranian power struggle. How do we hit back without helping the hardliners? Assuming a public attack would play into their hands.”

“Agree. Better to come back with something quiet and with teeth.”

“I’m sure SOCOM has options,” the President said. Special Operations Command.

“No doubt. Meantime, this is more out there — but you might think about dangling a carrot as well, sir. Give Rouhani and the good guys something. So that the Iranians can’t just say you want to give our program up and get nothing back.”

“Hit ’em in secret, offer a way out in public.”

Green nodded. The President’s phone buzzed.

“Secretary Belk and General Warner have arrived, sir.” Roger Belk, the Secretary of Defense, and Tom Warner, the four-star who ran Central Command.

“Thank you.” He hung up. “I overreacted before, Donna. I know the sacrifices you make for this place. The hours you work.”

Green clasped her hands. She seemed to be deciding if he was offering her another chance to talk over the first possibility she’d raised, that Iran wasn’t involved with the uranium. He hoped she realized he wasn’t.

“Sir. I can’t even imagine the pressure you’re under.”

“I’m so glad to have you on my team.”

“Yes, sir.”

The President reached for his phone. “Send them in.”

For twenty minutes, Belk and Warner walked the President through what both men insisted on calling the “positioning of assets.” Pentagon-speak for moving the soldiers and Marines who might be fighting and dying at his command.

Within a week, all three of the 82nd Airborne’s brigade combat teams, with about six thousand soldiers each, would be encamped in Turkey. At the same time, four Marine regiments, totaling more than ten thousand Marines, would reach their forward operating bases in southwestern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the 75th Ranger Regiment was en route to Kurdish-controlled territory in northeastern Iraq. Finally, the Saudis were allowing Delta, SEAL, and Marine Special Operations units to operate out of their giant air base in Khobar, on the condition that the United States never admit their presence.

“Basically, sir, the positioning is on schedule,” Belk said. “Not entirely surprising, considering these are mostly elite units and don’t have a huge amount of armor, which is what really screws up the logistics.”

“So we’ll have forces to the east, north, and south by the time my deadline hits?” the President said.

“Correct, sir,” Warner said. Four-star generals fell into two categories, the President had discovered. The bantamweights compensated for their lack of size with doctorates in operations research and an incredible devotion to fitness. The heavyweights were solid and strong, with chests full of medals and decorations. At six feet and two hundred pounds, Warner belonged in the second camp. He had gray Prussian eyes and a private’s quarter-inch haircut. “The three carriers will also be in place, so we’ll have the ability to fly hundreds of sorties a day. And six guided-missile destroyers. That’s the good news.”

“And what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news, sir, is that our options will still be somewhat limited. We’ll have roughly thirty thousand soldiers and Marines around Iran at your deadline. Now, those are elite units with a high tip-to-tail ratio. But you may recall that we invaded Iraq with a force closer to one hundred fifty thousand. And we judge Iran’s forces to be more capable than Saddam Hussein’s and more likely to fight for the regime.”

“So a sustained ground invasion is unrealistic. Much less an occupation.”

“Correct, Mr. President. For that, we’d need heavy armor. Three divisions at least. 1st Cav, 1st Armored, 1st Infantry. Even then we’d be stretched. Our planners would be more comfortable with four or even five.”

“And the Iranians are aware of this?”

“They can do the math as well as we can. The only possible way we could win a ground war with a force this size would be if the Iranians were foolish enough to mass their units near the border. Then we could decimate them with airpower. But none of our planners think they would make that mistake.”

“So their strategy would be to let us advance?”

“Most likely. Fall back, engage us with irregular forces, attack our supply lines as they get stretched. Force us to thin our air cover over larger and larger territory. Hit back hard as we approach Tehran, and the heavy civilian presence limits the advantages of our airpower. That’s what I’d do, sir.”

“So what options do I have on deadline day?”

“That depends how much risk you’d like to take,” Belk said. “The most realistic options are limited strikes, discreet locations.”

“You know what I want. The nuclear sites.”

Warner lifted his meaty right hand. “If I may, sir.”

“Please.”

“We won’t have the advantage of surprise, and Natanz and Fordow are large and well-defended installations. We would start with missile and bomb strikes to soften the targets, degrade defenses. I believe the 82nd and the Marines are capable of taking those two sites even in the face of sustained Iranian opposition, especially if they have help from the Special Forces.

“But understand, the longer they stay, the greater the risk. We estimate the Iranian army and Revolutionary Guard have sixty thousand men within one hundred kilometers of both those installations. That is a serious edge in manpower, and they have substantial air-defense capabilities, too, that will blunt our edge there. We’ll be facing an army, not an insurgency, with artillery and tanks and helicopters.”

The President stared into his glass of club soda as if it held the answer.

“You’re starting to make me nervous, General.”

“I don’t mean to say we’ll be overrun. The casualties will be significant. And once we’re done, we have to get them out.”

“I can see where this is going. It’s always the same. You always want more. You never want to go in without the entire army.”

“I’m sorry if that’s how this is coming across, sir.”

“Right now I am not even going to consider a full-scale invasion. But if I did, how long would it take to deploy the divisions you say we need?”

“Ten to twelve weeks, depending on how much the host countries will help. That’s the absolute best case without any language or scenario training.”

The President turned away from the men on the couch, looked out through his bulletproof, bombproof windows. He wanted to feel both angrier and calmer. He was the most powerful man in the world and yet now he feared he couldn’t control the avalanche he’d started. The only way out is through. He couldn’t back down. Not now.

“That’s unfortunate. Since the deadline I set is not even nine days away. I want to see both of you back in this office exactly twenty-four hours from now. I want you to look like you haven’t slept. I want a viable plan to hit those nuclear facilities. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Belk and Warner said simultaneously. The men stood to leave.

Green cleared her throat. “Sir. Shall I stay?”

He shook his head. She followed them out. And then he was alone in the Oval Office.

8 EIGHT DAYS…

Two platoons of National Guardsmen watched Wells overnight. In the morning, a dozen armored Humvees convoyed him to Abdullah’s palace on highways that police had closed to all other traffic. Barn door closed with the horse long gone.

The King’s palace was in northern Riyadh, close to the airport, convenient for meetings with visiting dignitaries. Wells couldn’t begin to guess at its size. He’d seen smaller malls. Two attendants led Wells through the formal stateroom where the King usually met Western visitors, into a private sitting room decorated in a tropical theme. Brightly colored couches overlooked a glassed-in interior courtyard where parrots and macaws flitted among hanging vines that seemed to have been imported straight from the Amazon.

“Coffee? Tea?”

Wells shook his head.

“His Majesty will be along shortly. Please make yourself comfortable.” The door locked with a faintly audible click as they left.

So Wells watched the parrots twitter. At this moment, hundreds of workers were cleaning up the carnage from last night, filling the eight-foot-deep crater in Prince Turki Road, shoring the damaged buildings. In a few hours they would hang heavy plastic drapes to hide the broken apartment façades. The intersection would look like just another construction site in a city full of them, a view as false as this tropical tableau. The Saud family preferred to pretend that terrorism didn’t exist inside the Kingdom’s borders.

A half hour passed before Abdullah entered, helped by a fifty-something man who could have been a younger clone. The King’s hair was as black as ever. His eyes were still clear under his glasses. But three years had passed since Wells had first met him. And three years meant a lot to a man born in 1924. Abdullah’s hands shook, and the folds of his robe couldn’t hide the weight he’d lost. He wheezed gently as he walked. The King had genetics and the best doctors money could buy, but time always won.

“Your Majesty. As-salaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam. Come, please, Mr. Wells.”

Wells did. To his surprise, the King reached out, hugged him.

“You were injured.”

The night before, a National Guard medic had strapped bandages on his cheeks and chin to cover the cuts from the blast wave and put a proper splint on his broken pinky. Wells had turned down the medic’s offers of painkillers. The decision seemed like the right way to honor Ghaith. But as a result, Wells hardly slept. “It was nothing.”

“My men failed you.”

“No one could have stopped what happened.” A lie, as Abdullah probably knew. “Your men gave everything. I’m the one who’s alive.”

“Inshallah.”

“Inshallah.”

The King lumbered to an armchair and sat.

“Sit, please.” The King indicated the couch nearest his chair. “These men, they call themselves believers, soldiers, an army of Islam. Soldiers? They kill innocent Muslims—” Abdullah stopped himself, shook his head. “You know all this.”

Wells nodded.

“Allah sends them all to hell, this I’m sure.”

“Nam.” The men who’d blown that bomb had their own theological explanations for what they’d done, but Abdullah was in no mood for debate. Besides, he was right. The killers belonged in hell.

Abdullah nodded at the fiftyish man who’d come in with him. “This is my nephew, Fahd bin Salman, commander of the National Guard. He has a few questions for you and then he’ll tell you what his men have found so far. After that, you and I will talk.”

Fahd extended a hand. “I’m sorry to meet you under such unpleasant circumstances, Mr. Wells.” His resemblance to Abdullah ended when he opened his mouth. His voice was soft, vaguely fussy. Even at ninety, the King was more powerful.

“As am I.” Wells felt the need for a certain formality around these men.

“May I ask what you saw last night?”

Wells explained everything, including the delay at the air base gate, the motorcycle on the Mecca Road, and the attack.

“Do you have any idea why Ghaith didn’t respond more forcefully?” Fahd said when he finished.

“I think he felt we were adequately defended. With the armored limousine and the convoy.” Too many 5 a.m. wake-up calls left him punchy didn’t strike Wells as the right answer, even if it was true.

“But you disagreed.”

“I guessed.”

“You were right. Did you see the license numbers of the motorcycles? Or their makes?”

“I’m almost sure they didn’t have plates. They were big, a thousand ccs or more. Black. Sportbike fairings. I think they were identical, both the same model. Beyond that, I can’t say. I’m sorry.”

“What about the bomb vehicle?”

“White, a minivan.”

“And you didn’t see the driver.”

“No. I can’t identify the men on the bikes either. They wore helmets with mirrored face shields. One dropped a pistol at the scene. I’m sure you’ve recovered that.”

“A Makarov, yes. We’re trying to trace it, but as you know they’re very common. I wish I could tell you we had good leads, but we don’t. We recovered the vehicle number of the van earlier today from a piece of the frame that survived. It was reported stolen about two months ago from a parking lot in Jeddah. There were no cameras in the lot there and the police have no leads. Most likely, whoever stole it just drove it to Riyadh and parked it in a garage somewhere, waiting for this sort of chance. The driver, we haven’t even found fragments. I think we’ll be lucky even to recover enough for a DNA sample.”

“How big was the bomb?”

“Based on the size of the crater and the damage to the buildings, we’re estimating five hundred kilos of high explosive.”

More than a thousand pounds. A huge bomb. They were lucky it hadn’t done even more damage. “You have a list of guys who can put together a bomb that size?”

“We try to track them. But every month, more come home from Iraq and Syria.”

Depressing. And true. “What about the bikes?”

“They reached the southern ring road, turned west. After that, we believe they went into the desert. We’re looking, but I fear they were garaged before sunrise. Before the attack, they passed several intersections where we have cameras, so we’re analyzing those. But we don’t have plates, and as you said, the riders hid their faces.”

“Professional job.”

“Very much. Mr. Wells, do you think this attack could in any way be related to the mission that brought you to the Kingdom?”

Wells had given that question plenty of thought during his sleepless night. “I doubt it. I’d be shocked if the people I’m going after have resources like that in Riyadh. I think someone heard I was here and decided to take a shot at me.”

“I agree.”

“So have you asked the FBI for forensic help?” Over the years, the Bureau had quietly worked with the Saudis to investigate terror attacks.

Fahd looked at Abdullah. “For now, no. We believe we have the situation in hand.”

So the King didn’t want the United States looking over his shoulder on this investigation. Wells knew why. “How about investigating from the other end?”

“The other end?”

“Who told the jihadis that I was in Riyadh?”

Fahd hesitated.

“I think before we can answer that question we’ll need to find out who carried out the attack.”

“Of course. I understand.”

Wells did, too. The King was angry about the attack. But he knew that the tipster was probably inside his family. One of his nephews. He might even have a good idea which one. He didn’t intend to disturb the fragile peace within the House of Saud by finding out if his hunch was right. He certainly didn’t want the FBI poking around. Wells was his friend, and Ghaith his grandnephew by marriage, sure. But neither man was blood.

“You can only do so much. I appreciate the briefing.”

“Go,” Abdullah said.

Fahd hurried off.

Then Wells and the King were alone.

“I’m glad you see our position.” Abdullah spoke without irony or apology. A statement of fact, honest and cold as a North Atlantic wave. We’re both grown-ups, and you know the reality I face. The reason he was King.

“As long as you don’t mind leaving me unfinished business.” They may be your family, but if they’re foolish enough to leave these borders, if they give me the chance, in Europe, Dubai, wherever, I’ll kill them. The reason Wells was Wells.

Abdullah merely nodded. Wells was reminded of a phrase attributed to Earl Long, the three-time governor of Louisiana, Huey’s less famous, more corrupt younger brother:

Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk. Don’t talk anything you can whisper. Don’t whisper anything you can smile. Don’t smile anything you can nod. Don’t nod anything you can wink.

Long hadn’t been around for the Internet, but Wells could guess what he would have made of email.

“So. Nawwaf briefed me this morning on your theory. I must tell you I don’t think it’s correct.”

“You think that the uranium is Iran’s?” Wells found himself genuinely surprised.

“Persians are Persians.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know what the Shah had in common with the religious ones who took over in 1979? They all see everything within two thousand kilometers as theirs. West to Mecca, east to Baluchistan, north over the Caucasus.”

“They must know the Muslim world would never accept Shia control of the Kaaba.”

“They know nothing of the sort. In fact, the opposite. They see it as their divine right. And the ones who aren’t religious, for them we’re just a bunch of uncultured Bedouin riding camels through the desert. As far as they’re concerned, Iran is the only real nation in the region, the only one with any history. To them the bomb is a triumph. Not just military, but technical, scientific. It makes them a modern nation.”

“Modern as North Korea.”

Abdullah ignored the objection. “Also, the bomb makes us squirm and protects them from you. And the Jews, too.”

“Until Pakistan gives you a bomb of your own.”

“Maybe they’re not so sure the Pakistanis will give us a bomb,” Abdullah said.

“What about you, Your Majesty? Are you sure?”

“It doesn’t matter, because we haven’t made the request.”

“I see all the reasons they might want a bomb. It doesn’t mean they’ve achieved one.”

“If they have, they need to be stopped. And if they haven’t, maybe they need to be stopped from trying.”

“You want the United States to invade Iran on rigged evidence, Your Majesty.”

“What is rigged? What does it mean?”

“People on the left and the right in America, they already don’t believe what the government says. After what happened in Iraq, this would be a catastrophe. Maybe even cause a constitutional crisis.”

“I don’t believe it. Because you’re an absolute monarch. You buy off anyone who criticizes you, and destroy the ones who won’t stay bought. Your biggest threats come from your nephews, not your citizens. You can’t imagine millions of people filling the streets to challenge you.

But Wells said only, “Believe me, Your Majesty. It’s possible.”

“There are still eight days left. Maybe Iran will see the light and you won’t have to invade.”

“So you won’t help?”

Abdullah leaned forward, staring at Wells like a pitcher who needed just one more batter for his no-hitter. He might not have too many fastballs left, but Wells was about to see one.

“I won’t help? Have I not helped already? I let you come here, speak to Nawwaf as you wished. Last month in Bangkok you asked for aid and we granted it immediately. And I promise that no one will tell the FBI and CIA that you were the actual target of this bombing. Unless you would rather that your name be part of our reports.”

“No.” Wells didn’t know what the agency would do if it heard about his freelancing, but the response certainly wouldn’t be you go girl!

“Those courtesies will continue. I gave you my word and it holds. Even though I fear what you find may not help my country. Do you understand me, Mr. Wells?”

“Thank you.”

“Then what more would you like?”

“That you might speak to the President.”

“What shall I say?” Abdullah smiled gently, as much as telling Wells that he was making a fool of himself.

“That he should wait. That there’s too much we don’t know.”

“So you want me to pass along a theory I don’t believe, act against my country’s interests.”

“A war on false pretenses.”

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” The shriek came from behind the glass, astonishingly loud. Wells spun in surprise — and found himself staring at a huge blue parrot. “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” God is great.

“Glad you think so,” Wells said.

“Allahu akbar?” A questioning tone this time, and then the parrot flew off.

“You know, this is my favorite room in the whole palace. These birds.”

“I thought you were more of a falconer, Your Majesty.”

“In my old age, these amuse me. They remind me of my aides, the foolish ones who repeat whatever I say. I bring them here sometimes, but they never see the joke.”

“That why I’m here?”

“You and I, we can speak honestly. So I tell you now. Even if I spoke to the President as you asked, it would make no difference. Do you know why?”

Wells shook his head.

“Because he listens to three or four people about this now. His NSA, maybe the Secretary of Defense, maybe the Vice President and chief of staff, if he trusts them. And even them, he hardly hears. In his mind, he’s reached the point where it’s his decision and his alone. This is what it means to command an army.”

“And you think he’s made his decision?”

“You’ll need strong evidence to change his mind. Very strong.”

Abdullah pushed himself up. “Will you stay for lunch with me?”

Wells looked at his watch. Almost noon. “I can’t.” He decided against asking Abdullah for a private jet to Russia. The King would have agreed, but Wells didn’t know what Buvchenko would make of his arriving that way.

“All right, then.” Abdullah took Wells’s hands in his own. The king’s hands were worn with age, dry and creased. “Barak’allah fik.” May God bless you.

His tone was final, the meaning clear enough. Good-bye, not just now but forever.

9 SEVEN DAYS…

Gentlemen?” the waiter at the Hyatt Regency said.

“Coffee, scrambled eggs, rye toast, hash browns. And a side of bacon.” Shafer felt like a bad Jew when he ordered bacon. A bad Jew who was going to die of a heart attack. But the guy at the next table had a plateful, and it smelled delicious.

“Egg-white omelet with asparagus, and please ask the kitchen to cook it dry,” Ian Duffy said.

“Yes, sir.”

Bad enough that Duffy’s gray suit had a rubbed metallic sheen that screamed Armani. Real men don’t eat egg whites. Shafer wanted to despise the guy. But he couldn’t.

Duffy had been chief of station in Hong Kong during Glenn Mason’s tour there. Duffy had quit the agency two years before and come back to the United States. Now he consulted for multinational companies with investments in China. His company was called Global Asian Partners, or Asian Global Partners, or I Partner Asia Globally, or some such. Shafer had done his best to forget.

The clandestine side wasn’t that big. Shafer must have met Duffy at least a couple times over the years. But when he looked Duffy up on LinkedIn, he had no recollection of the man. On-screen, Duffy wore a getting-it-done smile. His profile openly mentioned the CIA. He didn’t specifically say he’d been Hong Kong station chief, but he came close: 200X–201X: Senior Management, Overseas Post, East Asia. Shafer was astonished at first, then less so. Of course Duffy’s prospective clients would want to know what he’d been doing all those years after the University of Michigan. The CIA was a lot more impressive than the State Department.

For a couple of days after Wells flew to Switzerland and Duto to Tel Aviv, Shafer didn’t try to contact Duffy. Shafer justified his hesitation by telling himself that the CIA was waiting for him to make a mistake. Like the White House, the agency had gone all in on the theory that Iran was the source of the Istanbul uranium. The DCI’s chief of staff and axman, Max Carcetti, had warned Shafer against trying to prove otherwise. Shafer would embarrass himself and the agency at a crucial moment, Carcetti said. And Carcetti had leverage, in the form of tapes of Shafer passing classified information to Wells and Duto — who no longer had CIA clearances.

The tapes gave Carcetti and Scott Hebley, the DCI, all the evidence they needed to fire Shafer. If they wanted to play hardball, they could even ask the Department of Justice to prosecute Shafer as a leaker. Shafer probably wouldn’t go to prison. Duto was a senator and the former DCI, and Wells had worked for the agency for more than a decade. Even so, fighting a federal indictment would take years and cost Shafer his life savings. Shafer figured the only reason Hebley and Carcetti hadn’t gotten rid of him already was that they wanted him in the office, where they could watch him easily. Best to tread lightly, especially since Duffy probably didn’t have anything useful anyway.

But the morning before, not long after the agency received reports of a terrorist attack in Riyadh, Shafer saw a message in his in-box from 2belizeprincess45@gmail.com. The body text was a cut-and-paste for counterfeit Viagra. The point of the message was contained in the sender’s address: Wells wanted Shafer to call him on his second burner phone in forty-five minutes.

For a moment, Shafer found himself oddly sympathetic to the jihadis he’d spent fifteen years chasing. Did he and Wells think they would beat the all-seeing NSA with these simple tricks? Inshallah, my man. Forty-three minutes later, he stood outside his car in the parking lot of the Tysons Corner Galleria as Wells recounted his conversation with General Nawwaf.

North Korea?

I don’t believe it either, Wells said. But since it’s all I got, I figured I’d mention it. Anyone you can ask?

I’ll think about it.

What about this bombing? We just got the reports. Were you—

I don’t want to talk about it. If I thought it was relevant, I would have mentioned it.

I’m sorry, John.

The show never ends. And I’m starting to think I know all the lyrics by heart.

Get some sleep. If you can.

Keep an eye on Evan and Heather, okay?

Of course. You’ll feel better in the morning.

Shafer wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince Wells, or himself. Either way, he was talking to dead air. Wells was gone. And Shafer was furious with himself for his cowardice. Wells risked his life in the field every day, and Shafer was sitting on his hands because he was afraid to irritate the seventh floor? He left the burner in his glove compartment, found a cab to take him to the Clarendon Metro, the orange line. He didn’t think Carcetti and Hebley would bother with a live tail. But they might have stuck a GPS tracker on his car.

From Clarendon he headed east to Rosslyn. South to Crystal City on the blue line. Northeast to L’Enfant Plaza on the yellow. To the street, a brisk walk from the entrance at 9th and D to the one at 7th and Maryland, then back underground. Again the blue line. The run took nearly an hour and was probably unnecessary, a blur of silver trains puffing in and out under waffle-shaped concrete ceilings. But Shafer wanted to work his countersurveillance muscles. Feel like a real case officer again. He got off at Benning Road. The massive growth in the government and the lobbyists who sucked its teats had made Washington wealthier than it had ever been. Neighborhoods around Capitol Hill and all over Northwest had been prettied past recognition. But the gentrification boom hadn’t touched the low-slung housing projects that speckled the hills east of the Anacostia River. Here, crack vials still littered the sidewalks, and convenience-store clerks cowered behind bulletproof glass.

Shafer trudged along East Capitol until he saw the neon lights of a check-cashing outlet glowing in the dusk. In a world of cheap prepaid mobile handsets, check cashers were among the last places that could be counted on for old-fashioned pay phones. Of the four phones outside Ready-Chek! — Go, one had no handset. Another had inexplicably been mummified with electrical tape. Burns and scratches that couldn’t even be called graffiti covered the last two. As Shafer tried to pick the one less likely to give him hepatitis, two women in miniskirts sidled toward him. They were either prostitutes or doing their best to freeze to death. He expected an approach, but apparently he was too old for them to bother. The one on the left said something under her breath to the other, and they both giggled and kept walking. An entirely inappropriate flush of self-pity seized him. When even the whores ignore you, you might as well be dead.

He shoved quarters into the phone and dialed. “Global Pan-Asia Partners,” a woman said, her voice crackling through the broken plastic.

“Ian Duffy, please.” Shafer was shouting, trying to keep the mouthpiece away from his lips.

“Who may I say is calling?”

“Ellis Shafer.”

“And will he know what this is in reference to, Mr. Shafer?”

“Tell him it’s Farm business.”

Three full minutes passed. Shafer started to lose feeling in his fingers. He was nearly ready to hang up.

“This is an unexpected pleasure. The famous Ellis Shafer. How may I help you?”

Shafer didn’t know why Duffy was so chummy. Maybe they had met after all. “I’d love to tell you over a drink tonight,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.

“Tonight’s no good. Breakfast? Tomorrow?” Duffy’s voice combined his Michigan childhood and the decades he’d spent in former British colonies. The flat nasal tones of the Midwest and the elongated consonants of Hyde Park. He sounded like an aristocrat with a cold.

“Tomorrow would be great.”

“Eight a.m.? The Hyatt in Bethesda?”

“Looking forward to it.” Though Shafer wasn’t. He’d have to set his alarm at 5:30 for another Metro run.

“See you then.”

The sky was dark when he left his house the next morning. But not so dark that he didn’t notice the unmarked white van that picked him up when he turned onto Washington Boulevard. Then again, he would have had to be blind to miss it. It was a dented Ford Econoline with tinted windows and no commercial insignia, which only heightened its obviousness. Shafer looked for a front license plate to memorize, but the van didn’t have one. The omission wasn’t necessarily illegal. Several nearby states, including North Carolina and West Virginia, didn’t require front plates.

The van seemed to Shafer less a tail than a signal. We’re watching. We know where you live. The agency had already sent that message loud and clear. Which left Duberman.

He called home. “Sweetie. Can you do me a favor and look outside?”

She walked to the window. They’d been together forty years. Shafer believed he’d know his wife by her footsteps alone.

“I’m looking.”

“See anything out of place? Unmarked vans, anything like that?”

“Everything looks okay. What’s going on, Ellis?” He’d learned in Africa a generation ago that she didn’t scare easy. She didn’t sound scared now. Not for herself, anyway.

“I’ll tell you when I get home. As much as I can.”

As a rule, she didn’t ask him about work, but in this case she deserved to know.

“If I see anything, I’ll call you.”

“And the police. And the neighbors.” Shafer thought of the pistol he kept in the basement, but the suggestion would only make her laugh.

“That bad?”

“Better safe than sorry. Love you.”

“Likely story.”

He drove on, eyeing the van in his mirror, trying to push down his fury, keep his mind clear. They wanted to come at him, fine. But not his wife. Real spy agencies didn’t play these games. They were too easy, and too easy to escalate. Shafer decided to let them tail him for now. He’d find out at the Metro station if they were serious about following him.

The East Falls Church lot was already almost half full when he arrived. D.C.’s rush hour started early. Shafer drove slowly through the lot, waiting for the van to follow. But it stopped outside the entrance, as if the men inside weren’t sure what to do. After a few seconds, it rumbled off. Shafer suspected its disappearance meant that the driver didn’t want him to see its rear license plate and run a trace. More proof they were private investigators. FBI or CIA operatives wouldn’t have cared. Shafer wondered if he ought to follow them, but they had a decent lead and he wasn’t in the mood for a high-speed chase through suburban Virginia. Anyway, they’d be back.

The morning’s countersurveillance run on the Metro gave Shafer plenty of time to consider why Duberman and the woman who worked for him had sent the van. The move seemed unnecessarily provocative. They knew the agency and White House had bought their scheme. But for whatever reason, they still felt the need to pressure Shafer. Maybe he and Wells were closer than they imagined.

Shafer walked out of the red line Bethesda Metro stop at 7:45. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed. It was always possible that the agency or the FBI was running a twenty-agent team on him, but those were basically impossible to spot, and Shafer didn’t know why they would bother.

Duffy arrived at eight, exactly on time. Shafer didn’t recognize him, didn’t think they had ever spoken, but Duffy was as cordial as he’d been the day before. Duffy was a common agency type, tall and lanky, with blue eyes that seemed friendly at first and then less so. The CIA contained a surprising number of Midwesterners and Mormons. Shafer didn’t know why. Maybe they saw espionage as a way to channel their murderous ids into the noble task of protecting the homeland. They unsettled Shafer. He knew he was being unfair, but he had no trouble imagining them setting railroad schedules for trains to Auschwitz in 1944.

“You live close by?” Shafer said, as the waiter walked away.

“Chevy Chase. We were lucky enough to buy a house twenty years ago and sublet it all these years I was in Asia.”

“And business is good?”

“Fantastic.”

Shafer was sure Duffy would have given that answer even if he was on the verge of bankruptcy. “You don’t mind my asking, who do you work for?”

“Everyone from pharmaceutical companies trying to keep counterfeit Chinese drugs out of the supply chain to movie studios dealing with DVD knockoffs. Software, auto parts, it doesn’t matter, if the Chinese can copy it, they will. Hedge funds hire us to help with investments gone wrong. Ask us to figure out if hiring some minister’s son will cause more problems than it’s worth. Western companies are only just realizing now how complex doing business in China is. Only problem is that I wind up spending half my time on planes to Hong Kong.”

“And I guess they’re willing to pay.”

“I’m not afraid to tell you, Ellis. I charge a thousand-fifty an hour. And flying counts, too. Just to put me on a plane to HK costs twenty grand. But then, if you have seven hundred million dollars sunk into some truck plant there, twenty grand doesn’t sound so bad.”

Duffy didn’t bother to hide his pleasure. His cynicism was so deep that it had molted into something like optimism. Why shouldn’t I get rich? Everyone else is.

And he was right, more or less. Duffy had put in twenty-four years at the agency, retired at fifty-one. If he wanted to make a few bucks now, have all the egg-white omelets he can eat, Shafer understood.

Sometimes he wondered if he should have taken that path himself. Though it had never really been open to him. Years before, Duto had told Shafer that he was the ultimate agency loyalist, that as much as he claimed to stand apart, he couldn’t exist without the CIA. Shafer had wanted to disagree, but in his heart he knew that Duto spoke true. In his twisted way, Duto was a keen judge of character.

“How about you, Ellis? How are you?”

“Getting by. Day at a time.” Waiting for the blade to drop. “I have to ask, Ian. We ever work together?”

Duffy shook his head.

“Then why did you agree to meet me on such short notice?”

Duffy grinned. “I figured it’d be interesting, that’s all. And I thought maybe you wanted to come work for me. It’s not too late.”

“I don’t know anything about China.”

“You wouldn’t have to. The companies I work for do business all over.”

“Not why I called. Though I appreciate the thought.”

The waiter returned, bearing their breakfast, and they sat in silence until he left.

“You remember Glenn Mason?”

“Sure. Weirdest episode I had in all my years.”

“You know what happened to him?”

“After we got rid of him, you mean? He flaked. Disappeared.”

“You never heard that he drowned in Thailand?”

“When?” Duffy sounded genuinely surprised.

“A few months after you fired him. Rented a boat near Phuket and fell overboard.”

Duffy busied himself cutting a piece of omelet. “And it was never reported to us?”

“So it seems. Best I can tell, no one cared enough to bother. His parents were dead, he never married, no kids. And I’m guessing he didn’t have anyone in Hong Kong.”

“Not at the station, anyway. I’d like to tell you I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him, but I haven’t. Maybe once a year.”

“You don’t sound too cut-up.”

“I hardly knew him. He had a breakdown in Baghdad, and for some reason he decided he wanted Hong Kong, and personnel figured they owed him one. Which they did. But he was burned out even before he started. Didn’t come in half the time and was drunk when he did. He didn’t recruit a single agent.”

“You knew he lost all that money gambling.”

“Of course. He didn’t try to hide it. Part of me thought he was proud of it.”

“At that casino called 88 Gamma? Aaron Duberman’s place?”

“Yeah. Which, coincidentally enough, I started working for a couple months ago.”

Bile filled Shafer’s throat. Think. Was this Duffy’s wink-and-a-nod way of telling Shafer that he knew what Duberman had done? Doubtful. Shafer couldn’t imagine that Duffy would risk being charged with treason.

Much more likely that the woman running the plot for Duberman had hired Duffy and other ex — CIA officers as an early warning system. This way she would hear if Shafer or anyone else went fishing for information about 88 Gamma. And no one would wonder why a casino company was hiring guys like Duffy. Casinos were a rough business, lots of political interference and cash sloshing around.

“What do you do for them, if you don’t mind my asking?” Shafer had to tread lightly here. If he pushed too hard, Duffy would surely report this conversation back to 88 Gamma. This guy Ellis Shafer was asking about Aaron.

“They want to be sure they can collect on the credit they extend. Which, if someone is too connected in Beijing, gets tricky.”

“Makes sense.”

“So that’s it? You came here to tell me that Glenn Mason was dead?”

“Not really.” Shafer wondered if he could pull this pivot. Distract Duffy from his interest in Duberman, and at the same time find out if North Korea could possibly have supplied the Istanbul uranium. The odds were hugely against Pyongyang being involved, but the question was still worth asking.

Shafer slathered butter over his toast, took a bite, buying a few seconds, thinking through the story he was about to tell. “The reason I got onto Mason at all, I’ve been looking into the North Korean nuclear program. We got this weird report that an FBI agent who’d been stationed in Hong Kong defected to North Korea and he lives in Pyongyang now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither did I. The report came from a North Korean defector talking to the South Koreans. They sent it to the Bureau and they said it was ridiculous. Got filed under C for crazy. But like I said, I was looking at defectors’ reports about North Korea, and I realized that the guy might have said FBI when he meant CIA. So I looked for case officers from Hong Kong station who left in the last few years. That’s how I found Mason. Now I’m wondering if there’s any chance he might have faked his death and defected to North Korea.”

Shafer worried now that the story sounded a little too real, that Duffy might get interested enough to ask questions of his old friends back at Langley.

“So he fakes his death in Thailand and then goes to Pyongyang?” Duffy said.

“I know it seems like a long shot. The defector said this American was working with the North Koreans to look for buyers for nukes and raw uranium. That they’d tried to approach Saudi Arabia and gotten laughed off.”

Duffy shook his head emphatically. “Makes no sense. On either side. North Korea doesn’t have any nuclear weapons to spare, and if they were trying to sell them, why would they need some burned-out CIA op to help? And Mason, he struck me as desperate, not stupid. He would know that North Korea’s pure roach motel. He would last in Pyongyang until somebody high up got nervous. Then they’d shoot him. If he was lucky. More likely they’d find some even more unpleasant way to get rid of him. You heard about the air force general they fed to a bear?”

“Nice. So the North Koreans aren’t trying to sell their nukes?”

“That was really Seoul’s AOR.” Area of responsibility. “But I never heard anything serious.”

“Fair enough.”

“So. What are people saying inside? Are we really going to war with Iran over this?”

Shafer thought of the way Duberman had blocked them at every turn, even as the President’s deadline crept ever closer.

“It’s not looking good.”

10

The Yuzhniy Hotel was the best in Volgograd. The faintest praise imaginable. The restaurant beside its bland lobby doubled as a cabaret, complete with techno music, pulsing blue lights, and a smoke machine. Near the front, a single flabby stripper twisted halfheartedly around a pole. A late-afternoon special for bored businessmen.

At the counter, the receptionist made a copy of Wells’s passport, handed it back with a key.

“You are in room three-zero-six. We have free breakfast from six a.m. to nine.”

“In there?” Wells nodded at the restaurant, where the stripper was now jiggling on a low platform. “Sounds delicious.”

“Yes. If I can help you with anything, please tell me.” Her voice bordered on robotic. Wells sensed that if he presented himself at the desk again in five minutes, she would repeat herself word for word as if they’d never met. He was sorry for mocking her about the restaurant. Russian provinces weren’t the poorest places on earth, but they might have been the saddest.

He bypassed the hotel’s elevator to walk up the concrete staircase. Halfway between the first and second floors, he smelled cigarette smoke and stopped. Two male voices overhead, quiet, Russian. Wells was sure the men were here for him. He trudged up. He hoped they wouldn’t feel the need to work him over before taking him to see their boss. But then Russians liked a bit of drama, even when it didn’t serve their interests.

As their Ukrainian adventure proved. The protesters who’d started the trouble by begging Russia for help had obviously been agents provocateurs paid by the FSB. The entire episode was as badly acted as an elementary school play. Yet Vladimir Putin hadn’t let the West’s disdain stop them. And by the time he finished, he owned much of eastern Ukraine.

At the third-floor landing, Wells found two twenty-something men dressed in the mandatory uniform of Russian gangsters, black leather jackets and dark blue jeans. Though, weirdly, under their coats they wore thick white wool sweaters that could have come from L.L. Bean. Where the sweaters ended, ornate blue tattoos flared up their necks. Their faces were pouty, their fists meaty. The taller of the two wore an expensive version of brass knuckles, thick gold rings on nine fingers. Wells presumed he would have preferred ten, but he didn’t have the option. His left pinky was missing. Wells’s sudden appearance puzzled him for a moment. Then he dropped his cigarette and pulled his pistol, a snubnose, tiny in his hand. He didn’t look puzzled anymore. “You are Wells.”

“If you say so. You?”

“Why you take stairs?”

“Why not?”

Apparently, the right answer. The guy tucked away his pistol. “Hands—” He nodded toward the ceiling.

He stood back while his partner gave Wells an efficient frisk.

“You come with us.”

“Mind if I take a shower first?”

“You come with us.”

Volgograd was best known for being the place where Russia turned the tide of World War II. A five-month battle in late 1942 and early 1943 reduced the city, then known as Stalingrad, to rubble. In November, with the German Sixth Army near victory, more than a million Soviet soldiers counterattacked. Two months later, as the Soviets encircled the Germans, Hitler ordered his generals not to surrender or retreat. The Sixth Army would fight to the last man, he said. It very nearly did. By some estimates, the Battle of Stalingrad was the deadliest single engagement in the history of war. Nearly a million German soldiers died, along with hundreds of thousands of Russians. Germany alone lost nearly as many soldiers that winter as the United States had in all the wars it had ever fought — combined.

Stalin wasted no time rebuilding the city that bore his name. But after he died, Khrushchev renamed it Volgograd, part of the effort to end the cult of personality around Uncle Joe. By any name, the city remained a backwater. It subsisted on agriculture and heavy industry, with none of the glamour of St. Petersburg or the wealth of Moscow. The arms dealer Wells was about to meet might be the richest man in the entire province.

Outside the hotel, a BMW 7 Series waited. Wells’s escorts pushed him into the front passenger seat. They didn’t even bother to take his phone, more proof they didn’t think he represented much of a threat. Dusk was fading into night, and the Yuzhniy’s red neon sign glowed against the blue-black sky.

Volgograd’s streets were wide and quiet. The BMW quickly left the city behind and sped northwest along a provincial highway. Low apartment buildings and chunky concrete houses gave way to empty fields. Wells’s escorts seemed content to ride in silence, and he didn’t argue.

Then his burner buzzed. Shafer. They hadn’t talked in more than a day.

“Ellis.”

“Evan’s threatening to walk.”

Wells wasn’t entirely surprised. His son was headstrong and surely hated having FBI agents watching him. Especially since Wells hadn’t told him much about the threat.

“You told him to sit tight?”

“He said he has to hear it from you.”

“I’ll call him.”

“In person.”

“You told him that’s not possible?”

“Of course.”

“Make him stay, Ellis.”

“I can’t make him do anything. He’s a grown-up. It gets worse. Our friends are watching me. Our private friends, not the public ones, capisce?”

Meaning Duberman’s operatives, not the CIA.

“They come at you?”

“Not exactly. More like that they wanted me to know that they could find me. I don’t know if it means they think we’re close.”

“I’m on the way to see the Russian.” Wells kept his voice steady. “So you need to take care of this.”

“I’ll tell Evan you’ll call him as soon as you can.”

“And I will. But if there’s heavy hand-holding required, you need to make yourself useful. That means getting on a plane to see him, talk him down, you do it.”

“All right.”

“But make sure nobody’s watching. Let’s not give anyone a road map to that safe house by accident.”

“Save the tradecraft lessons, John.”

“I’ll let you know if my new friend tells me anything.”

“Don’t piss him off too much, okay? Files say he has a temper.”

“Got my knee pads right here, Ellis.” He hung up before Shafer could answer.

“Everything okay?” the driver said.

“Perfect.” Wells stared out as dusk fled and the road sank into black.

The BMW drove an hour before turning onto a dirt track. Stands of fir and pine dotted the hills around them. Wells sensed that when the sun rose the land would be pretty. After a few minutes, the sedan turned onto a paved driveway that ran between twin lanes of spruce trees. What looked like a model of the Arc de’Triomphe straddled the road ahead.

The BMW passed beneath the arch, crested a low rise. Buvchenko’s mansion lay in the dale below, tall and wide. Imposing. A Russian armored personnel carrier sat out front, its 100-millimeter main gun pointed at the road. The BMW drove past the mansion and finally parked beside a windowless concrete building. It was either a badly designed garage or a firing range. Wells figured on the latter.

Mikhail Buvchenko waited outside, a pistol strapped to each hip. He was a giant, well over six feet tall. He had hugely defined muscles that came from hours lifting weights every day, augmented with pharmaceutical help. He reminded Wells of a Slavic version of the movie star The Rock.

Despite the midwinter chill, Buvchenko wore only sweatpants and a black T-shirt that stretched tightly over his deltoids and biceps. His head was shaved and the skin of his face unnaturally smooth. His eyes flickered like he was watching a movie no one else could see. Wells detected a slight theatricality in the pose. Kowalski sold his clients Swiss urbanity to go with their AKs and rocket-propelled grenades. Buvchenko offered the opposite. I strong like bull. Buy my guns, you will be, too. Good for business, as long as he remembered he was only posing.

Buvchenko reached out, squeezed Wells’s hand, the grip just short of bone-crushing. “John Wells.”

“Mr. Buvchenko. Pleasure to meet you.”

Buvchenko smirked. We’ll see about that.

“You have your own range.”

“Ranges. Indoor and outdoor. Please, come with me.” He led Wells around the side of the building. “So Pierre Kowalski sent you to me. Very nice of him.” Buvchenko’s accent was almost absurdly thick. Verrri nus ahv heeem. Again, Wells sensed that the Russian was exaggerating for his own amusement.

“He’s a good guy, Pierre.”

“You weren’t always so friendly.” Telling Wells he knew their history.

“I’m more of a people person now.”

Behind the building’s back wall was the outdoor firing area, a concrete patio lined with sandbags and fronting an open field. An earthen berm a couple of hundred meters away marked the end of the range, which was lit by a bank of halogens.

Along the left and right edges of the field, signs marked the distance every ten meters. Wells didn’t get them. Then he saw the buckets of golf balls. Buvchenko had built himself a combined firing and golf range. Cute. A dozen men stood around, smirking and smoking.

The range had several firing positions, all empty besides one in the center, where a Russian 12.7-millimeter Kord heavy machine gun had been set up. The Kord was comparable to an American .50-caliber, a mean, lethal-looking weapon, belt-fed, with a long black barrel. Wells didn’t know why Buvchenko had brought him here. But the presence of the Kord and the audience suggested he wouldn’t like the answer.

“Ever fired a Kord, John?”

“Only an NSV.” An older version.

“The Kord is far superior. You’re about to have a treat.” Buvchenko whistled. A few seconds later, a horse trotted around the corner. The rider slowed him, walked him over to Buvchenko and Wells. A gelding, its eyes rheumy and its roan coat flecked with gray.

“As it happens, both the horse and the rider are named Peter.” Buvchenko tapped the horse on its flank. It took a half step back, tilted its head, regarded him warily. Buvchenko grunted a command in Russian, and Peter the rider led Peter the gelding over the sandbags. Wells saw now that a stake with a metal ring attached had been planted a hundred meters away, in line with the Kord’s firing position.

He and Buvchenko watched in silence as the two Peters reached the stake. The rider hopped off, loosely tied the horse to the ring. He scattered a half-dozen carrots on the ground, gave Buvchenko a lazy salute. Buvckheno yelled, “Go,” in English, and the rider walked off range. Wells expected the horse to be nervous, but the carrots had distracted it. It nosed at them, then picked one up and crunched away.

“There are two ways to do this,” Buvchenko said. “If you’re more interested in the Kord’s performance, you just open up on old Peter. On the other hand, if you feel like a challenge you can fire a couple in the air. I promise you he’ll take off. And that knot won’t hold him.”

“No.”

“Da.”

Wells shook his head.

“Mr. Wells, am I to understand that you’re too good to shoot a horse?” Buvchenko drew the pistol on his right hip, held it loose at his side. “He’s eighteen, you know, he’s had a long life. Now he’s just taking up space. A gelding. Can’t even breed.”

He stared at Wells like his eyes could bore through his skull. Wells stared right back.

“Put a bullet in his brain, it’s more humane than a slaughterhouse. Look at him, eating carrots. He won’t even know.”

“Those steroids, they turn your balls into jelly beans, don’t they, Mikhail? All the Viagra in the world and you can’t get it up.”

Buvchenko raised his pistol. “I count to ten. Then either the horse dies, or you do. One. Two—”

“Let me help. Ten.”

Buvchenko looked genuinely surprised.

“Wahid, ithnan, thalaatha, arba’a, hamsa, sitta, sab’a, thamania, tiss’a, ’ashra.” One to ten in Arabic. Wells raised his fingers as he counted, pronouncing as carefully as a kindergarten teacher.

Buvchenko stepped toward Wells, barked something in Russian. Then spat a gob at Wells’s feet. “I tell you, Idi na khuy. Means, go to the dick. Eff yourself.”

“See, we both learned something new today.”

“You aren’t going to shoot that horse.”

“You had any brains, you wouldn’t let me near that Kord.”

Buvchenko smirked. “It’s locked down.”

He turned toward the horse, raised the pistol over his head, fired twice. The horse whinnied wildly and reared in panic. It dragged the stake out of the ground and turned and galloped back toward them. Buvchenko raised both pistols and fired a half-dozen times, pumping his arms forward and back, a parody of an old-school gunslinger, used rounds littering the ground around him.

Flesh and bone exploded off the horse’s chest. It screamed, the only word for the sound, not a whinny but an oddly human cry of pain, and turned and galloped parallel to the firing line. Buvchenko kept shooting, and three geysers of blood erupted from the horse’s flank. It reared up. Then its back legs sagged and it fell forward, not all at once but slowly as its strength ebbed. Its scream became a low moan as it looked at the men on the firing line. Its tongue flopped out, and it slumped over, blood coursing over its belly and pooling on the frozen ground, wisps of steam rising from the black puddles.

“You showed him,” Wells said.

“To the dick with him. Like all of us,” Buvchenko said. He shouted in Russian, and one of his men walked onto the range and shot the horse in the head.

Buvchenko tucked away his pistols and clapped a massive hand on Wells’s shoulder. “He would have had a much easier time if you’d taken care of it.” And without waiting for an answer, “Come. Let’s have dinner.”

Dinner was traditional Russian, plates of blinis with sides of caviar and sour cream and smoked sturgeon. The boiled meat dumplings called pelmeni followed, with butter, horseradish, and vinegar. Then grilled salmon and shashlik, marinated lamb skewers. Buvchenko ate with relish and without irony and hardly spoke as the courses came and went. Wells pushed the horse out of his mind and forced himself to eat. The food was delicious and beautifully presented, served on robin’s-egg-blue china, with crystal glasses, sterling silver knives and forks, and a lace tablecloth. Buvchenko might be a gangster in every other way, but he ate like a nineteenth-century Russian noble.

A bottle of Stolichnaya vodka sat on ice in a silver champagne bowl at Buvchenko’s elbow. As the meal started, Buvchenko poured shots for them both, but he didn’t push when Wells declined. “More for me,” he said. Maybe he figured he had made his point on the firing range. My horse, my men, my mansion, my city, my country. Be glad I let you live.

After ninety high-calorie minutes, the waiters swept away the last of the dishes. Buvchenko burped mightily. “What do you think?”

Wells wasn’t surprised that the vodka had lessened rather than thickened his host’s accent. “Excellent.”

“My chef comes from the Four Seasons in St. Petersburg. Down here there isn’t much. Even the best whores wind up in Moscow. I wanted decent food, anyway.” Buvchenko poured two fresh shots, offered one to Wells. Wells shook his head.

“Pierre says you’re Muslim.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand this, but also I don’t care.” Buvchenko downed both glasses. A faint flush rose in his cheeks. Spit moistened his lips. He’d had at least a dozen shots over dinner. “So you came all this way to see me, you showed stupidity and courage both with the horse, we’ve eaten, you are a guest under my roof, you know who I am.”

“Yes.”

“You know my business. So I speak frankly to you. I supply weapons and soldiers. I don’t care who you are, what you want them for, that’s your business. If you can pay, I give them over. I have helicopters, BMPs, up to two thousand infantry, the planes to take them anywhere in Africa or Asia. Trained men who obey commands, don’t make a mess with civilians. Unless that’s what you want. Mines, SAMs, antitank. Jets and tanks are harder. I may be able to arrange those, but I can’t guarantee. My prices are high, but they’re fair. When Putin decided to go into Ukraine, I don’t mind telling you I supplied that first wave of men.”

“You’re good with Moscow.”

“If not, I would be in exile in London or in jail in Siberia. One doesn’t anger the tsar. And you? Who pays you?”

“Once, I worked for the agency. Now I freelance.” The answer was true as far as it went.

Buvchenko poured himself another shot. “Pierre didn’t tell me what you wanted. So, please, ask whatever questions you like. Be direct, I tell you, before I’m too drunk to answer.”

The offer seemed too good to be true, but Wells didn’t plan to argue.

“Suppose I wanted to buy plutonium or HEU.”

“A nuclear bomb.”

“Not a bomb’s worth. Just a kilogram or two.”

“And who do you represent? Who wants this?”

“Let’s say it doesn’t matter. But I have the money.”

“How much?”

“As much as I need.”

“I don’t understand. This is a real offer, or a test?”

“Real.”

“And you have the money, you say?”

“I can get it.”

Buvchenko shook his head. “Still, I don’t think it’s possible.”

“What about the depots in Chelyabinsk?” Where the Russians stored their nuclear weapons. A few years ago, a terrorist had stolen two weapons out of Chelyabinsk and barely missed blowing up Washington. The story remained a highly classified secret in both the United States and Russia; Wells knew only because he’d helped find the nukes.

“No. Security there is tight now. Even I don’t have those connections, and if anyone did, it would be me.”

“There’s nothing loose floating around? Someone must know. In Moscow, wherever. Even for a clue, I can pay.”

“I would gladly take your money if I had something to tell you. But why do you ask?”

Wells decided to give Buvchenko a two-sentence version of the story. “Someone’s trying to trick the United States into invading Iran. The HEU in Istanbul isn’t Iranian.”

“You mean the American president is lying?” Buvchenko wagged his finger. “Mr. Wells, I am ashamed you say such a thing as this.” His accent thickened. Meester Wheelles. A natural ham. He should have played dinner theater.

“Not lying. Fooled.”

“And now set this deadline for war. A red line like Syria, but this time I think he has no choice but to go forward.”

“Yes.”

“And who do you think has done this? Not the FSB.”

Wells hesitated. But maybe Duberman’s name would shake loose a connection in his host’s vodka-soaked mind. “An American billionaire named Aaron Duberman. He owns casinos.”

“Duberman?” Buvchenko rolled the name out: Dooobermannn. “A Jew, yes? And you say we Russians are anti-Semites.”

“I don’t care if he’s the Dalai Lama.”

“Yet you are Muslim. And here claiming this Jew tries to make the United States go to war.”

Wells shook his head. He was guilty of a thousand sins, but prejudice wasn’t one.

“All right, that is between you and your Allah. So what is your evidence for this?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Buvchenko leaned across the table to Wells. “Meaning you don’t have any?”

“Some.”

“But not enough.”

“Not yet.” Somehow the Russian, despite all the vodka, had turned the questions back on Wells. “What about North Korea?”

“I don’t think so. I won’t do business with them. They can’t be trusted.”

Quite a statement coming from a man who’d shot a horse for predinner entertainment. Once again Wells had traveled to another country, another continent, and found nothing but a brick wall. Worst of all, he was hardly even surprised. He was now expecting to fail. A terrible attitude in the middle of a mission.

At least tonight nobody had died in a car bomb.

“Excuse me a minute, Mr. Wells.” Buvchenko pushed himself up from the table, moving with the exaggerated care of a man who wanted to seem more sober than he was. “I must—” He was gone, leaving Wells to guess at what he had to do.

He returned a few minutes later, holding a bottle of Baltika, Russian beer. “Mr. Wells. I’m sorry to disappoint you after your long drive. I hope you’ll stay over tonight, catch up on your sleep. I’d be offended if you didn’t allow me to show you hospitality.”

“I appreciate the offer, but—”

“In fact, I insist.” Buvchenko’s smile left no doubt what he meant. Wells had no idea why the Russian wanted to keep him overnight. Buvchenko’s moods were impossible to read. But arguing would be pointless. Even if he could convince Buvchenko to let him out tonight, the Volgograd airport would be closed for the night by the time he got back to the city. Plus Wells wasn’t even sure where to go next. Buvchenko was his last real lead. All he’d miss was the free breakfast at the hotel, and he’d count himself lucky.

“I have your word I’ll leave in the morning?”

“Of course.”

“All right. As long as I don’t have to sleep with you.”

As an answer Buvchenko poured himself another shot.

Wells’s bedroom was vaguely anachronistic in the style of a Russian country manor, with oversize oak dressers and a heavy down comforter splayed across a narrow twin bed. Wells didn’t try to pray in this place, but instead kicked off his shoes and lay down. The windows had been left narrowly open, allowing the winter chill to sneak in, but the comforter warmed Wells instantly. He was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

A light knock on the door woke him.

“Mr. Wells. I am to take you back to Volgograd.” Eight a.m., according to the old-fashioned winding clock beside the bed. Wells couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night. Cold air and a warm blanket. Maybe the Russians had a few customs worth importing. Wells pushed himself up.

Buvchenko seemed gone, and Wells didn’t look too hard for him. Ninety minutes later, the BMW dropped him at the hotel. He nodded at the receptionist, walked up the empty stairs, along the third-floor corridor. 306.

He reached for his keycard. But the door was already open, propped with a pen.

He reached for the pistol he wasn’t carrying, cursed silently, pushed the door open.

“Come in.” A woman. He knew her voice but couldn’t place it.

Wells stepped inside, his shoulder against the door. 306 followed a setup familiar to anyone who’d ever stayed in a hotel. The front door opened into a short corridor that ran past the bathroom and into the main living space, which had a bed against one wall, a dresser and television on the other. Wells couldn’t pass the bathroom without exposing himself to anyone inside. On the other hand, if they’d wanted to shoot him, they wouldn’t have left the front door open.

“Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.” A faintly mocking tone, and then he knew. A dark street in a run-down slum in Istanbul. Headlights blinding him. This will sting.

She sat casually on the bed, legs crossed. Medium brown hair, brown eyes. A runner’s body, tight and athletic, underneath a dark blue suit-and-pants set and sneakers. No weapon that he could see. She could have passed for a lawyer on the way to work. Pretty enough.

“John.” She waved casually. “I’m Salome. We’ve met before, though you may not recognize me. I’m sorry to say you were in some distress at the time.” Her words ironic in their formality.

“No worries,” Wells said. “I remember.”