Twelve Days

11 SIX DAYS…

Nine a.m. in Volgograd meant 1 a.m. on the East Coast. Just as Wells greeted Salome, Vinny Duto arrived to meet his own femme fatale. Donna Green. Duto would have preferred POTUS, but the big man wasn’t interested. Duto couldn’t even blame his staff for the failure to set the meeting. He had tried to arrange it himself the morning after he returned from Tel Aviv, calling Len Gilman, the President’s scheduler. Duto knew he was risking embarrassment. In Washington, as Hollywood, making your own calls screamed of desperation.

Gilman wasted no time shooting him down.

“The President doesn’t see senators one-on-one,” he said. “Simple fairness. He takes a meeting with you, the other ninety-nine will demand the same treatment. He just doesn’t have time for that.”

“I’m sure the President can handle the slings and arrows of my fellow senators.”

“Of course he can, Vinny. My job is making sure he doesn’t have to. Can’t you give me any idea what this is about?”

“I already told you. Iran.”

“But beyond that. Whatever you tell me will remain in the strictest confidence.”

“If I wanted you to know, I would have told you already.”

“Then we seem to have reached an impasse. If something changes, I’ll call you. This is your personal line, yes?”

Twisting the knife. Duto knew the President didn’t like him. He had only run for Senate when he’d realized the White House was preparing to force him out as DCI. Still, he wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve this meat-locker treatment. He’d never feuded openly with the President, never embarrassed the White House.

For the first time in his life, he understood the impulse to leak. He’d always hated leakers. Don’t like it? Then quit. But you signed an oath of secrecy and you’d best keep it. Now he saw the other side of the equation. You won’t listen, boss? Maybe the world will.

The next night, his phone lit up. A blocked number.

“Vinny?”

Duto knew that flat female voice. “Donna.”

He didn’t like Green any better than Gilman. She had spent her whole life inside the Beltway, second-guessing the guys in the field. Duto knew that guys like Wells leveled the same charge against him. They forgot he had been one of them back in the day. He’d given blood for the job, and not metaphorically.

“Len says you have something to tell us. I’m listening.”

Either Green or the President himself had decided Duto was too important to be ignored entirely.

“No phones for this.”

Green sighed, an I’m-too-busy-for-this-nonsense sound. Duto was glad they weren’t face-to-face. Whatever his sins, he’d never hit a woman. He wanted to go to the grave that way. “Next you’re going to tell me this has to be today?”

“If possible.”

“Can you come over?”

“It’s in your interest not to have it logged.” The Secret Service recorded all visitors to the White House for both security and historical purposes. The logs were sacrosanct. Any effort to remove an entry would only call attention to it.

“I’ll call you later, location, time.”

“Great.” Duto tried to hang up, but Green beat him to it.

Now his two-car detail turned into a Home Depot parking lot just off the Little River Turnpike. Acres of empty blacktop at this hour. Convenient for a meet, if not exactly sexy.

“She’s not here,” his chief bodyguard said.

“Any other blinding glimpses of the obvious?” Duto knew his reputation. Short-tempered, verging on nasty. He didn’t mind. Better feared than loved. He rode in an armored Tahoe, with two guards up front. Two others in the chase car, a Crown Vic. Most senators didn’t rate that much protection, but Duto’s years as DCI had put him high on al-Qaeda’s wish list.

They parked in the center of the lot, which was surprisingly clean. No stray carts or trash. The beige husk of the store filled the west end of the lot. Duto reached for his phone, a reflex. Waiting meant downtime. He hated downtime. Much as he had disliked running for senator, putting his fate in the hands of millions of people who had no idea how Washington actually worked, he enjoyed the fact that the campaign never ended. His staff could always schedule another rally, radio interview, debate prep session, briefing book. By the end he had memorized the minutiae of the federal budget, the projects it funded in Pennsylvania, the most important issues in every town with more than five thousand people. He’d turned his opponent into a likable simpleton.

But at this hour Duto had no one to call. Wells was in Volgograd, no doubt arm-wrestling a bear for his life. Shafer was asleep. In the morning, Shafer would fly to Utah to convince Wells’s son Evan not to ditch his FBI minders. The kid was an ungrateful brat. Duto had pulled big favors to get him in that safe house. If Evan was too dumb to realize he needed the protection, so be it. Like his father, he was too bullheaded to take good advice.

The difference was that Wells knew how to survive.

It was morning in Jerusalem. Duto was tempted to call Rudi. Four days since their meeting, and the Israeli hadn’t called. Maybe he had decided that he could serve his country best by keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he was too sick to help. Maybe he had asked and found nothing. Whatever the answer, Duto had made his best case back at Ben Gurion Airport. Pushing would be counterproductive. Duto shoved his phone away and waited.

Downtime.

Green’s motorcade showed up fifteen minutes later. Duto was surprised to see it was only three SUVs — two black Suburbans, one blue Jeep Grand Cherokee with the distinctive long antenna of a coms vehicle. The detail parked nose-to-tail about twenty feet from his Tahoe. Two men stepped out of each Suburban, surveyed the empty asphalt, fanned out toward the corners of the lot, muttering to each other on their shoulder-mounted TAC radios.

Only then did the real convoy arrive. Two more Suburbans, two Explorers, and another Cherokee for coms. Eight trucks in all, at least twenty guards. Like Green was going to Baghdad, not suburban Virginia. Though Duto could hardly complain. He had traveled in similar style as DCI.

The wind came straight from the Appalachians, chilling Duto through his overcoat. Green was dressed for the weather, in wool-lined boots and a green down jacket that plumped around her like she’d shoplifted it from a Salvation Army. Whatever the President saw in her, it wasn’t her fashion sense.

Duto extended a hand. “Donna.”

“Vinny. I’d say it’s good to see you, but that would be a lie. And I’m planning to keep the lies to a minimum tonight.”

“The pleasure’s mine, then. Mind if we walk?”

“I’d prefer if you stayed close,” the guard nearest Green said.

“I think we’ll be okay,” Duto said.

“I’d prefer if you stayed close.” Like Duto hadn’t spoken at all.

“I trust you to protect us from fifty feet, Kyle,” Green said.

The guard nodded. His master’s voice. They strolled side by side toward the Home Depot.

“I’m here, Senator. So talk.” She spoke straight ahead, not looking at him.

“Whatever you have planned for Iran, it needs to wait.”

“Because?”

“The HEU wasn’t Iranian. Someone’s setting you up.”

“That possibility has been considered and rejected.”

“You saw what you wanted to see.”

She stopped. Looked at him. “Okay, Vinny. Say it’s not Iranian. Whose, then?”

“I don’t know who enriched it. But I can tell you a private team working for Aaron Duberman put it there.”

Every time Duto made the accusation, it sounded crazier. He knew he was right, yet he felt like a nutty conspiracy theorist. Green seemed to sense his embarrassment. She looked at him, let him see her smirking.

“So I’m clear. We’re talking about the guy who spent two hundred million dollars to elect my boss.”

Duto nodded.

“Are you saying that we’re conspiring with him to produce false evidence to invade Iran? Because that sounds like treason. And I’ll need to double-check the Constitution I keep in my office, but I do believe treason is punishable by death.”

“I’m not saying you knew.”

“What exactly are you saying, then?”

“This is the best false-flag op I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, false flag. So we didn’t know. I’m so relieved.” Every word more sarcastic than the last. “Is this where you hand me a thumb drive that proves we have aliens at Roswell?”

Her disregard finally got to him. He grabbed her arm. Unfortunately, or maybe not, the down kept him from getting a grip. Kyle ran at them, his feet pounding the asphalt. He hadn’t drawn his pistol, but his hand was inside his jacket.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine.” Duto dropped her arm.

Green let the question hang for a couple long seconds before she finally nodded.

“You sure, Ms. Green?”

“Your boss and I are having a full and frank exchange of views. Run along, now.”

“I wasn’t asking you, Senator.”

Green nodded again, and they watched Kyle retreat.

“It’ll take more than that. I hope you’re properly humiliated,” Green said under her breath.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Vinny. You probably wonder why POTUS wanted you gone so bad. It was me. I remember Fred Whitby.”

The chill in Duto’s bones didn’t come from the wind. Whitby had been Director of National Intelligence when Duto was DCI. They’d fought to control the agency and the entire intel community. Duto won. Through Wells and Shafer, he used Whitby’s involvement in the death of a detainee at a secret prison to force Whitby to resign. Wells quit the agency in protest when he realized what Duto had done. At the time, Duto hardly cared. Losing Wells was a small price to pay to control all of American intelligence.

“They called it ‘The Midnight House,’ right? Neatest knifing I ever saw. Your boys got rid of him, it didn’t even touch you.”

Duto didn’t bother to ask how she knew the details. She knew because knowing was her job. At least now he saw why everyone called her the smartest person in the White House.

“You’re missing the point of that story.”

“Enlighten me.”

“I was right. He was dirty.”

“You were, too. Up to your neck in rendition. But he went down.”

“And Duberman’s dirty, too. If you could stop trying to destroy me for a minute, you’d see I’m helping you.”

“The President’s biggest donor is behind all this?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m guessing it’s because he hates Iran, thinks it’s a threat to Israel, doesn’t trust the deal we made.”

“I haven’t asked him, Donna, but yes. I’m sure he’s said as much to you.”

“Not since this started, though. Man hasn’t called me once.”

“Because you’re doing exactly what he wants.”

“So it doesn’t matter what Duberman does or doesn’t do at this point. He calls, he doesn’t call, it’s all evidence.”

“Ask yourself why I would tell you this if it isn’t true. Or at least if I didn’t believe it.”

“Because you hate the Senate already. Think you’re too good for it. But you know there’s no way you’re ever going to be more than the junior senator from Pennsylvania unless lightning strikes. And this feels like lightning. Your friends inside Langley, and you still have a few, have told you the evidence isn’t as airtight as we’d like. You know we still can’t find the colonel who tipped us.”

News to Duto, valuable news, not that he was about to tell Green the mistake she’d made in revealing it. “All true.”

“Now you’re making the same mistake as Tehran. Underestimating POTUS, thinking that he doesn’t have the stones to attack. You know if I listen to you and we back down, we’ll owe you the kind of favor that will give you a whole new career. State. Defense. Whatever.”

“And John Wells is helping me with this?”

“Probably he doesn’t have the full picture. Just like you did with Whitby.”

“It’s a good theory, Donna.” Duto raised his right hand. “Only problem is it’s wrong. I’ll swear on whatever you like. I’ll swear on Home Depot.”

She shook her head. “I want evidence. Any at all.”

Duto realized he’d misplayed his hand terribly. He’d figured his time as DCI would count for something. And it had. The opposite of the way he’d hoped. He should have held off on calling the White House until he had something tangible.

Donna Green was even more cynical than he was. An impossible feat.

“I don’t have anything concrete to show you.”

“That’s no, then.”

Duto hadn’t planned to go into details, but he felt the need to explain. “A former case officer named Mason was running the op, but if you ask Hebley about him, he’ll say the guy died four years ago in Thailand.”

“But this Mason is actually alive.”

“No. He’s dead.” Duto remembered now why he hadn’t planned to go into details. “Last week. Wells killed him.”

“Where’s the body?”

Duto opened his mouth, but no words came out. Alarm flashed in Green’s eyes. Like she couldn’t decide if he was playing her or simply losing his mind.

“Gone. I know it sounds far-fetched. But it’s not like you have a ton of evidence tying the uranium to Iran either.”

“If it’s not Iranian, where’d Duberman get it?”

“We’re looking.”

“You must at least have a working theory.”

“We have several.”

Duto realized that as DCI, he would have fired any deputy who made a presentation this bad.

Green turned back to the convoy, giving him no choice but to follow. A signal that the conversation was over. “Vinny. Let me tell you something you won’t want to hear. If you don’t mind.” Her tone had a new breeziness that didn’t comfort Duto. She sounded like a cop trying to talk down a jumper. “The Indians found the guys who shot down United 49. We took ’em six hours ago. Predawn in Mumbai. A Delta team.”

“Delhi signed off on the Deltas?”

“We didn’t give them a choice. POTUS wanted to be sure we brought them in alive. And the Indians are embarrassed. We warned them about Chhatrapati. Years ago.”

“I know.” Duto had been DCI at the time. The Federal Aviation Administration had even considered banning American carriers from flying to Mumbai. But the Indian government protested and promised to improve security, and the FAA backed down. “So who has the shooters now?”

“They’re in the bath.” Meaning the Navy was holding them offshore. “They’re Lebanese. And we’re a hundred percent sure they’re Hezbollah.”

“They’re talking?”

“They’re bragging.”

For the first time, Duto wondered if he and Wells and Shafer had made a mistake. Maybe they couldn’t connect Mason to Duberman because the connection didn’t exist. But no. The thread they’d followed was real.

“If Tehran thinks we’re going to invade on false evidence, they’d have every reason to shoot down our planes. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that they haven’t even hinted at making a deal since we hit them? That they went straight to the wall?”

“Interesting theory, Senator.” The chill was back in her voice. As much as saying: I tried to make you see reason. And I failed. We’re done. “Two choices here. I go back to POTUS, tell him you’ve accused his largest campaign donor of treason without evidence. Get it in the record. When we hit Iran, find all that HEU you say doesn’t exist, that file magically finds air.”

“WikiLeaks?”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I just love the idea of it on the front page of the Times. Terrible way for a distinguished public servant like you to end his career. Second choice, we pretend this was a bad orange-flavored dream.”

The threat snapped Duto’s shoulders back, puffed his chest. Fight or flight. The amazing part was that for once his conscience was clear. He’d told the truth. He’d tried to warn her.

Last time he made that mistake.

“Do what you like, Donna. But I promise I’m gonna figure out where Duberman scored that uranium.” Duto raised his voice. “Then I’m going to call you and tell you. Just you and me, face-to-face. Then I’m gonna turn you around and bend you over so hard you won’t sit for a month. Like I did to Whitby.”

All the guards, hers and his, were listening openly, not even pretending they hadn’t heard. Kyle trotted toward them.

“Get that, buddy? Do I need to repeat it?”

“Enough, Senator.” Kyle inserted himself between Duto and Green, close enough for Duto to see what was left of the spinach Kyle had eaten for dinner. Duto hoped beyond hope that the guard would put a hand on him. He still worked the heavy bag four days a week.

Green guided Kyle aside. “No worries. We’re done here.”

Duto stepped back as Kyle hurried Green to her Tahoe. The rest of her guards followed. Doors slammed. Forty-five seconds later, the last of the SUVs crunched out of the parking lot and turned onto the turnpike, running lights flashing, no sirens.

Duto watched in silence, replaying snatches of the conversation, his adrenaline fading. Had he really threatened to quote-unquote bend over the National Security Advisor? In front of two dozen witnesses?

They better find that uranium.

12

The woman who called herself Salome wasn’t alone. A man stood beside the bed. His face was faintly asymmetrical, the left side wider than the right, like he’d had an accident that surgery hadn’t fully fixed. His right hand hovered over his hip. His eyes stuck to Wells’s hands.

A pro.

Wells stepped toward the bed.

“Close enough,” Salome said.

“All friends here.”

A smile spread from Salome’s lips up her cheeks to her eyes. North like a warm front. While it lasted, she was pretty. Alive. Then it was gone. She looked at him as coolly as a research scientist checking out a chimp. Don’t mind this old needle, Mr. Chips. Won’t hurt a bit…

In happier news, they’d left the window curtains open. So they didn’t plan to kill him. Not here, anyway. A tour bus idled in the parking lot below. As Wells watched, an old couple tottered toward it, hand in hand. He thought of Anne and all the lives he’d left behind.

“Mason told me you were trouble,” Salome said. Her English was measured, almost too perfect, a hint of eastern Mediterranean. She could have passed for first-generation American, the accent left over from her native-speaking parents. She wore only a wedding ring, no nail polish or makeup. All business.

Except the smile.

“You come see me in person, I guess I’m moving up the ladder.” Wells figured he’d take his best shot first. “You work for Aaron Duberman.”

She shook her head, not so much denying what he’d said as declaring it irrelevant.

“For money, or because you’re crazy?”

She muttered in Hebrew and a pistol appeared in the guard’s right hand. That fast. Too bad. At least now Wells knew what he was up against.

“Be more polite,” Salome said. “Who looks out for you? A broken-down CIA man and a senator no one trusts.”

“I’ll worry when I see you throw carrots on the carpet to distract me.”

Wells saw she didn’t get the reference. So she hadn’t been at Buvchenko’s.

“I didn’t think I’d have the pleasure of seeing you again,” Wells said. “Salome? That’s your name?” A biblical reference, but Wells couldn’t remember the details. “Your real name?”

“As real as any.”

Ask a stupid question… Still, Wells was content to joust for the moment.

“And you’re Israeli?”

“Why do you keep bothering me about this?”

“You’re asking why I’m trying to stop a war?”

“I don’t want war.” She winked.

Wells couldn’t read her at all. She was playing with him like a cat batting a mouse. “If you’re worried about bugs, I never got here last night.”

“I’m not worried. You know, my friend here thinks I shouldn’t talk to you at all. He wants to shoot you in the face and be done with it.”

“Lucky for me you’re in charge.”

“It seems so.”

They looked steadily at each other, the only sound the rumbling of the bus outside. Wells couldn’t deny the truth: He felt connected to this woman. They were both endless travelers, perpetual outsiders who had spent their lives in crummy hotel rooms, giving fake names to anyone who asked. They both knew how easy lying became after you’d done it too much, how boring the simplicity of truth became.

“You came all the way to Volgograd to tell me you weren’t going to shoot me in the face?”

“And see you for myself, the man who killed five of mine. But mainly I came to tell you it’s over.”

The fact that she felt the need to say so suggested otherwise. “Buvchenko told you I was here.”

“Of course.”

Had the Russian supplied the uranium, then? Wells thought not. Then he would be a prisoner at the mansion, or more likely another target on the firing range. No, Salome had asked Buvchenko to watch out for Wells, and if he appeared to find out what he knew. No matter which direction he went, she was a step ahead.

“Last night, after dinner, he called you, told you I was asking about you. You said, hold me overnight, you’d come to Russia.”

“I appreciate your”—she hesitated, trying to remember the word—“perseverance, yes? But understand, you only make trouble for yourself and your family.”

Family. The magic word. What she had come to say. Wells stepped toward her. The guard lifted his pistol.

“Listen,” she said. “You promise Buvchenko a million dollars? I pay ten. You don’t know anything. Not even my name. You think these men in Washington look after you, but if Mason hadn’t been a fool, you would be dead already.”

“Concrete shoes.”

“A joke to prove your bravery. What I tell you, bravery doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe I came here knowing you’d come for me. Maybe there’s a Delta squad one room over.”

She smiled, but this time her eyes stayed cold. “You’re not that clever. You run here and there, hoping for a clue. How does the song go? Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em—”

“If you’re so confident, why threaten my family?”

“Don’t you see they mean nothing to me?” Her voice was level, a teacher trying to stay patient with a not-very-bright student. “A whole country is in danger if Iran gets the bomb. I mention Evan and Heather only to remind you that you have something to risk, too. Because I know your life doesn’t matter to you. Only the mission.”

What she was really saying was that she felt the same. That they were the same. But they weren’t. She was a fanatic. She saw the world in abstraction. Us. Them. White. Black. Who would close her eyes to reality if it didn’t agree with her mind’s vision. Wells was the opposite. He lied to the world, yes, but alone he drank truth until it filled his belly and choked his throat.

“Everything I read says Iran doesn’t even want the bomb anymore,” Wells said. “They’re giving it up. All this for nothing.”

“If you believe that, I don’t know how you’ve survived so long.”

“If I could get to my gun, I’d show you.”

She laughed.

In the distance a siren whistled, ooh-ooh, ooh-OOH. Then another. Wells wanted to believe the sirens were a coincidence. He knew better.

No wonder she wasn’t in a hurry.

Salome murmured something to the bodyguard. He didn’t answer. She spoke again, a tone that brooked no argument, and this time he tucked his pistol away.

“You think the Iranians are nice people? You know they shot down that plane.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s true. You should help us, John. These men, they’re your enemy, too. Look how they made the United States bleed in Iraq. How they treat their own people.”

The sirens rang louder. Wells saw two police cars swinging into the parking lot. A black SUV followed. Now more sirens in the distance, a beat that needed remixing.

Salome pushed herself off the bed. Two quick steps to the window. She tipped her nose to the glass like a cat that had spotted a particularly tasty bird.

“Your welcoming party. A Muslim convert comes to Russia to meet an arms dealer? FSB will love that. So fortunate for the motherland that Buvchenko did his duty, told them you were here. Or maybe you tell them you’re American, ex-CIA? Even better. They’ll hold you a month, more, before all this gets sorted. So, good. You stay here, your son is safe.”

She had him. Running was impossible. He had nowhere to go. He would have to give himself up, talk the FSB into letting him call home. Duto still had Kremlin contacts. Once the Russians knew who he was, maybe they’d figure a one-way ticket to the border was the easiest way to deal with him.

Maybe.

The guard muttered.

“My friend asks you to step into the bathtub while we take our leave.”

Wells shook his head. The guard pointed the pistol at Wells’s feet.

“A Russian jail with a hole in your foot. No fun.”

Wells knew she was serious. He went to the tub, his muddy shoes staining the white plastic. At least she hadn’t made him turn on the water. This woman had outplayed him twice now.

“Good luck.” She smiled, the real smile, the one that warmed her face. She stepped into the bathroom, raised her right hand to his face, ran her fingers along his chin. Then touched her flat palm to his chest. The warmth of her skin stunned him. “Allah will protect you, I’m sure.”

The words lifted the spell. Wells didn’t like the glancing reference to his religion. Or the intimacy she’d presumed. He pulled her hand from his chest. “Touch my son, I’ll kill you.”

“Of course you will.”

Then she was gone.

The room door closed. Wells waited a few seconds before going to the window. The police didn’t seem to be in any rush. They stood in the parking lot, rubbing their hands against the cold. Wells counted nine in all, plus a German shepherd, sniffing the air as one of the uniformed officers stroked its head.

The shepherd bugged Wells. He wasn’t sure why, and then he was. The dog answered a question he hadn’t thought to ask. Salome knew how dangerous he was. She didn’t have to risk seeing him in this little room. She could have met him at Buvchenko’s mansion, where he could be controlled more easily. Why here?

Cops brought dogs to find explosives.

Or drugs.

Wells pulled open the drawers of the cheap wooden dresser. Empty, empty, empty. The nightstand, too. He flattened his cheek to the carpet, peered beneath the bed. There. A bundle the size of a brick, wedged against the bed’s center support. He snaked his arm under, tugged it out. It was brown, plastic-wrapped. Heroin. A kilo or more.

No wonder Salome hadn’t bothered to shoot him. Wells didn’t work for the agency. He couldn’t claim diplomatic immunity. He’d spend the rest of his life in a Russian prison. Another name for hell on earth.

Wells wished they’d left him something less dangerous. Like a grenade.

Outside, another SUV rolled up. Two plainclothes officers drifted toward the front entrance. Wells grabbed his backpack, checked the peephole to be sure that Salome wasn’t still in the hall, stepped out. The hotel was a simple rectangle with a single internal north — south hallway. The guest elevators occupied the north end, three doors from Wells’s room. Wells ran the other way, south.

The hallway ended at a gray-painted door with a push bar. A red sign warned “Emergency Exit! ALARM!” in Russian and English. Wells didn’t think so. The hotel wouldn’t want sirens screeching every time a guest took the fire stairs. Anyway, he had no choice. Just ditching the brick down a trash chute wouldn’t be good enough. The cops would scrub the hotel when they didn’t find the heroin in his room. He had to make it disappear permanently.

Wells pushed the bar. No alarm. He scrambled up the stairs two at a time, quads burning, heart pounding. Past the fifth floor, the sixth. To the fire door to the roof. Atop the stairs, he found a fire door wedged open with a VCR tape. Old-school.

Outside, a mess of crumpled cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles. Wells ran for the rusty metal flues that rose side by side from the center of the roof, pumping inky black smoke into the gray sky. The smokestacks extended about six feet off the roof and had old-style mushroom caps mounted loosely atop the flues to keep rain and snow from pouring inside.

Wells carried a butterfly knife in his backpack. As he reached the flues he pulled it out, flipped it open. He had never been quite so conscious of time passing, of the seconds escaping with every motion. How long before the cops downstairs moved? Two minutes? Three? How much time had he used already?

The smoke was greasy and lukewarm after its trip up the flue. Wells reached under the cap, sliced at the bag. A river of brown poison poured down the steel pipe into the furnace below. Where it belonged. When the bag was empty, Wells tossed it down the chute, dropped in the knife, too. He ran for the door, leapt down the stairs. His hands were black now, slick with oil sludge. He didn’t want to leave a trail. He balled them up, didn’t touch the railing. He took the stairs in twos and threes, half running, half falling.

At the third floor, he stopped. If the cops had already reached the hallway, he would have no choice but to go downstairs and surrender in the parking lot. But the corridor was quiet. He ran for his room. The electronic lock on its door beeped green. No doubt the cops had made the clerk downstairs disable it. They were on their way up. He’d beaten them by seconds.

In his bathroom, Wells washed his hands to clean off the grease and whatever heroin residue might be stuck on them. As he finished, he heard footsteps, Russian voices mumbling. The door creaked open. Something skittered across the carpet. Wells saw it in the bathroom doorway. A green sphere. A grenade, and then another.

Wells almost laughed. He’d asked for a grenade. The Russians had seen fit to give him two. He spun, went to his knees, clapped his hands over his ears, and squeezed his eyes closed. If the grenade was a standard frag, he was dead, but if it was a flash-bang, a concussion—

The explosion seemed to come from inside his head. He was nowhere, and then in the hills north of Missoula, caught in a massive thunderstorm. He ran for cover as the skies exploded again—

No. Not Montana. Russia. Wells opened his eyes, found himself back in a shadowy version of the bathroom. Spiderwebs shrouded his eyes. A whistling scream filled his ears. He reached for the toilet and hung his mouth open, trying to vomit, failing. Only a thin trickle of spittle hung from his mouth. He knew the police had to have followed the grenades into the room, but the idea of turning his head to see them was impossible. He stared at the stained white bowl until men pulled him up, jerked his arms behind his back, cuffed them tight.

They shoved him in the chair in the corner. With his hearing gone, he watched the search play out like a silent movie, a comedy starring one smart dog and a bunch of dumb cops. The shepherd walked through the room, didn’t alert. His handler took him out, brought him back in, tried again. When he still didn’t alert, the handler got into a heated argument with the guy who seemed to be in charge, a tall thin man who wore a suit and thick black plastic glasses that would have passed for hip in Brooklyn. Wells didn’t need to hear them to know what they were saying:

It’s here. Why can’t your idiot dog find it?

Because it’s not here!

It’s here.

They tried to talk to Wells, but he pointed at his ears and they seemed to believe him. They patted him down, like the dog wouldn’t have sniffed the stuff on him. Then they tore up the room. Pulled open the drawers, flipped over the bed, cut his bag open, and found his second passport. The discovery made them happy, but not for long.

After a half hour, two cops pulled Wells up, hustled him into the empty room across the hall, threw him on the bed. They were big men, with pale skin and dull blue eyes. They looked at him like they were waiting for an order to work him over. Wells took limited comfort in the fact that it hadn’t come. The police weren’t one hundred percent sure about him.

The man with the glasses walked in. Up close his suit was cheap and his shoes scuffed. He looked like a Depression-era traveling salesman. No way was he FSB. Wells’s fears had been right. Salome and Buvchenko must have used a local trafficker to tip the police—American drug trafficker in 306, bring a dog, all the proof you need is in his room. They found the perfect way to put Wells in a hole without having to call in chits in Moscow.

He tapped his ear. “You can hear now.”

“Yes.” Barely. Static still filled Wells’s ears. The cop sounded like an FM station disappearing behind a hill.

“Which one?” The Russian held up his passports.

Wells pointed at the one with his real name.

“John Wells. You smuggle drugs?”

“I don’t know who told you that, but he’s wrong.”

“You smuggle drugs.” Not a question this time. “Heroin.”

“No.”

“You know the penalty we have in Russia for drug smuggling?”

“I came here to meet Mikhail Buvchenko. You know who I mean?”

“Of course I know him. He lives in the country. Nothing to do with this.”

“I went to his mansion last night to talk to him. Not about drugs. I said something he didn’t like. I guess today he got mad, called you.”

“He didn’t call me.” The guy flipped through Wells’s second passport, the one in the name of Roger Bishop. “This is yours also.”

“Yes.”

Wells wondered if the cop would ask why he had two passports, but he was stuck on the drug angle. “Last month you go to Guatemala. Panama. Thailand. Turkey.”

“Looking for someone.”

“For cocaine. Heroin. Now you come here, spread your poison.”

“Sir. May I ask you your name?”

The man pulled his wallet, flipped it open to show his police identification. “Boris Nemkov.”

Despite the hole he was in, Wells couldn’t help but remember a line from the second season of The Wire: Why always Boris?

“You’re a detective.”

“I am head of narcotics police for Volgograd oblast.”

A drug cop. An honest one, too, if Wells could trust the cheap suit.

“Don’t you think it’s odd I have two working U.S. passports?”

“Plenty of smugglers have extra passports.”

“The dog in my room, it found nothing.”

“So far.”

“There’s nothing to find.”

“Maybe you see us coming, you hide it. In the cart of the maids. The trash. I promise, we find it. Then—” Nemkov sliced his hand across his neck and walked out of the room.

Five minutes later, he was back. Scowling. “The longer it takes, the madder I become.”

“I swear on my son’s life. No drugs.”

“All this tells me is that your son means nothing to you.”

Wells felt his temper rise. “I landed in Volgograd yesterday, I came to this hotel, Buvchenko’s men picked me up. I stayed overnight, they dropped me back here. Then you came. Where would I have found these drugs?”

“Don’t talk to me about Buvchenko.” Boris went to the door. He pulled it open, stopped, looked at Wells. “The next time I come back, I have it. Then we take you in. But first I give my men ten minutes alone with you, punishment for wasting my time.” Boris murmured in Russian. The cops laughed. “Tell me now.”

“Nothing to tell.”

Boris shook his head with what seemed to be genuine disappointment and walked out.

Wells thought of Salome, how very wrong he had been about her. Had he tried to convince himself she saw him as anything but an obstacle to her plans? Was he so lonely? So desperate for connection? Maybe she respected him vaguely for his courage, the way the Germans and Russians who had once fought here had respected each other. But even so, they had killed each other without pity or remorse.

An hour passed. Another lost hour, another hour closer to war.

Finally, the door swung open. Nemkov stalked in, tugged a cheap wheeled suitcase, hard-sided gray plastic. Wells stared at it, wondering if it was filled with heroin. He didn’t know if Nemkov was crazy enough to plant evidence on an American he’d never met. Maybe. Any Russian policeman who didn’t take bribes had to be crazy.

“That’s not mine.”

“It is.”

Wells shook his head. Nemkov dropped the suitcase at Wells’s feet. He stood over Wells, tugged at Wells’s left ear like an angry nineteenth-century schoolmaster.

“We found it.”

Wells tried to shake his head, but Nemkov held him fast. Wells couldn’t help feeling the ear-tugging was childish for both sides. Like the detective had decided he was unworthy of a proper beating.

Nemkov said something in Russian. One of the cops went to his knees. Snapped open the clasps and opened the suitcase.

Revealing an empty compartment. Wells looked down at the molded plastic, wondering what he could be missing.

“Where is it?”

It’s nowhere and everywhere. It went to the dick. H. E. Roin, born Helmand Province, Afghanistan, died Volgograd, Russia. Poppies to ashes and dust to dust. Wells’s concussion talking. “Where is what?”

Nemkov pulled harder, twisting Wells sideways. Wells feared the detective might take his ear off. “This whole hotel. My men, they want me to make the evidence. You understand what I mean?”

“Plant it.”

“Prison for you forever. But I don’t do that.”

Nemkov stepped away from Wells, reached behind his back, for a 9-millimeter. First Buvchenko, then Salome’s guard, now this cop. For the third time in eighteen hours, Wells stared at a pistol’s unblinking eye. Maybe it’s time to think about your life choices, son. But Nemkov had to be bluffing. A man who wouldn’t plant evidence wouldn’t shoot a handcuffed prisoner.

Unless his fury ran away with him.

Nemkov stepped around the bed, knelt behind Wells. Wells felt the pistol kiss his neck, the tip of the barrel oddly warm.

“Last time. Where is it?”

This interrogation had gone as far it could. Nemkov would pull the trigger. Or he wouldn’t. For the first time in all his years, Wells understood the words death wish. He was well and truly tired of being so close, of feeling the Reaper creep past, smirking and winking at him. Tired, too, of all the killing he’d done over the years to survive. Do it, then. Let me rest.

But as quickly as the words came to him, he pushed them away, forced the shameful weakness from his mind. And of course Nemkov didn’t kill him. He grabbed Wells’s cuffed arms and pulled him off the bed.

“This suitcase, it’s yours. I give it to you to replace the bag they cut. You see it’s empty, no trick. I give you back your money.” Nemkov held up the passports. “Even these.”

“Thank you.”

“Now it’s time for you to go. In one hour, there’s a plane to Domodedovo.” The largest of the three airports that served Moscow. “What you do after that is up to you, but I advise you, leave Russia as soon as possible.”

An excellent idea.

Nemkov drove Wells to the airport himself, in silence. As they stopped at the terminal, Wells tried to open his door, found it locked. Nemkov reached over, squeezed his wrist.

“Tell me the truth, why you were here?”

“I swear it wasn’t drugs.”

“But the truth.” Nemkov shook his head.

Somewhere in his concussion-scrambled mind, Wells wondered if Nemkov wanted to help. And why not ask? “Detective—”

“Colonel.”

“Colonel. I’m sorry. The hotel has surveillance cameras, yes?”

“Of course.”

“If your men can find a shot of a man and a woman leaving together a few minutes before you arrived—”

“A few?”

“Five or less. Send me that picture, I promise I’ll tell you the whole story when it’s over. Whatever happens.”

“You promise?”

“And what I did with the drugs they tried to plant on me. You know, the ones you and your dog and the whole 23rd Precinct couldn’t find.” The concussion talking for sure. For a moment, Wells feared he had said too much, that Nemkov would drive him back to the hotel and start the beating anew. Nemkov seemed to be trying to decide, too. But finally he nodded.

“And if I find them, what? You want me to arrest them? Use the police for your work?”

“They’re probably already gone from Russia. I just want you to email me the picture.” Wells gave one of his new email addresses. Having an image of her to show other people might make the trip worthwhile.

“If I decide to help you, it’s not for pay, you understand. It’s for—” Nemkov opened his door and spat onto the pavement.

As soon as the cop had pulled away, Wells emptied his new suitcase and ran his hands over the plastic, feeling for compartments where Nemkov might have hidden drugs or weapons. But he didn’t expect to find anything, and he didn’t. The suitcase was what it seemed, a cheap Samsonite knockoff, its walls too thin for any secret panels.

After security, he found an Internet kiosk, booked himself a business-class seat on a 5:40 p.m. Lufthansa flight, Domodedovo to Frankfurt. Then he emailed Shafer and Duto: B no help. LH 1447. Talk from Germany. He needed Shafer to know where to look for him in case he vanished again. Salome would hear soon enough that Wells had beaten her trap. When she did, she would have Buvchenko call his friends at the FSB. How fast the FSB sounded an alarm for Wells would depend on the story Buvchenko told. But Wells would be at risk until the moment that Lufthansa plane left Russian airspace.

The Transaero flight to Moscow was mostly empty. He settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, imagined how he would relax when this mission was done. Hiking the Grand Canyon. Buying a big new motorcycle and ramrodding it across the Montana plains at a buck-ten. Seeing Evan suit up for the Aztecs, a pleasure he’d never had.

Daydreaming had its dangers. In Afghanistan, Wells had seen that men who relied too much on fantasy for comfort rarely lasted long. But after the madness of the last day, he needed a few minutes of relief. Better yet, a good night’s sleep. When he landed in Frankfurt, he would take a cab to the most efficient, boring hotel in the city. He would pull the shades and close his eyes. And he would wake ready for war.

As the Transaero 737 touched down on the Domodedovo tarmac, a concussive fog crept back into his brain. Wells blamed the change in air pressure. Black spots flitted across his eyes as he trudged through the massive steel-and-glass terminal that connected Domodedovo’s domestic and international wings. A suicide bomber in the international arrivals hall had killed thirty-four people here in 2011. Now explosives-sniffing dogs and teams of commandos in spiffy blue-and-black camouflage paced the check-in counters.

At this hour, the airport was heavy on business travelers, well-dressed Europeans who looked relieved to be leaving. A high school ski team waited to check in for an Alitalia flight to Milan, the children of Moscow’s elite, girls wearing diamond bracelets flirting with boys in Prada jackets. Wells watched the world through Saran wrap. His muzzy head accounted for only part of the disconnect. He couldn’t help remembering the way Salome had touched him. Then walked away to leave him to his fate. He didn’t know what she’d been trying to tell him, or why that moment seemed so much more real than this one.

He forced himself to move, find the Lufthansa counters. No surprise, they were quieter and more organized than the rest of the terminal. He printed out his boarding pass and joined the line for border control. Fifteen minutes later, an unsmiling woman waved him forward to her kiosk, where she took his passport with the practiced boredom displayed by immigration agents everywhere.

She flipped through it. “Mr. Wells.”

“That’s me.” He’d had to use his real passport for this trip, since Buvchenko arranged the visa.

“This is not a conversation, yes? If I have a question, I ask.” Stupid Americans always think they need to talk.

“Right. I mean, was that a question? Did I need to answer?” Wells laying it on too thick now. She put a finger to her lips, ran the passport through her scanner.

The moment of truth. If Buvchenko had reached the FSB, she’d ask him to wait a moment, then pull him out of line. A few questions in our office, nothing to worry about—

“You’ve traveled a lot lately, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am. Work.”

“And for this trip you stayed in Russia only two days. Why?”

“I met a business associate in Volgograd. The meeting’s done—”

“Fine. I see.” She typed away on her keyboard. “There’s a problem.”

Here it comes.

“A business associate, you said?”

“Yes.”

“But you came on a tourist visa.”

Wells didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d liked business associate, thought it sounded slick. Professional. “I’m sorry about that. My associate arranged the visa. Short notice.”

She pecked away on her computer. “I’m noting this in our files. Do you plan to come back to Russia?”

“Of course, yes—”

“Then make sure you have the proper visa. Next time the penalty is serious.” She shoved his passport back to him.

“I’m so sorry—”

She waved him on. “Next.”

He had half an hour before the flight boarded. He sucked down four Tylenols, a Coke, a liter of water, trying to ratchet his brain back into gear. As the minutes ticked down, he sat two gates from his own and watched for any sign that the FSB was looking for him, uniformed or plainclothes police, hushed conversations between the Lufthansa agents.

Part of him wished he’d made a trickier move, checked in and then left the airport. He could have caught a cab to downtown Moscow, found a train or a bus heading west to Poland. But that would have taken yet another day, time he didn’t have. Unless he found a smuggler to lead him over the border, he would still have to clear an immigration post that would be on the same computer network as the one he’d just passed. By tomorrow the FSB would surely have sounded the alarm.

When the flight opened, he was the first to board. He settled himself in seat 2C, watched placidly as the plane filled around him. A pretty thirtyish woman with bobbed blond hair took the seat beside him, looked him over, buried her face in a German gossip magazine. Fine by Wells. With any luck, he’d be asleep by the time this plane left the runway.

The last passenger boarded. The purser made the usual preflight announcements in German, Russian, and English. And then finally closed the cabin door. Wells had never been so happy to hear the solid thunk of metal fitting metal, the low hum of air seeping from the vents over his seat. The flight attendants took their seats and the Airbus 319 rolled back from the Jetway. Diana Ross sang to Wells: Set me free, why don’t you, baby,/Get out my life, why don’t you—

The plane slowed.

Stopped.

The intercom alert chimed. The purser grabbed a headset. Listened. Made a short announcement in German that sent a brief hum through the passengers around him.

“What’s he saying?” Wells said to his seatmate. Though he already knew. The knot in his stomach was all the translation he needed.

“He says we need to return to the gate for a moment. A sick passenger.”

I’d much rather be treated in Frankfurt, thank you very much.

She gave Wells the thinnest of smiles, and he knew she knew. He wondered if he should ask her to call Shafer when they landed. But the story was too tricky to explain in the few seconds he had, and she didn’t seem the type to do favors for strangers.

The plane inched forward. Stopped. 2C was near enough to the cabin door for Wells to hear the electric motors inching the Jetway forward. The death rattle of his bid for freedom.

The Jetway skimmed into place.

The purser stood, kept his eyes on Wells as he raised the big handle and pushed open the door. Wells found himself unbuckling his belt. No need to be difficult. And where could he go, anyway?

“Viel glück,” the woman murmured. Maybe Wells had misjudged her. Too late now.

A man in a suit stepped inside, two cops in tow.

These are not the droids you’re looking for.

“You are Mr. Wells?”

Wells nodded. The man flicked two fingers. Up. Up. The simple perfect command of a police officer in a police state, a man who knew his orders would be followed without question, much less argument.

“Come with me. Please.”

13

Mormons creeped Shafer out.

A ridiculous prejudice. Yet he couldn’t shake it. The long underwear. The polygamy. The promise that believers might receive their own planets after death. Most of all, the unfailing perky friendliness. He didn’t trust anyone who smiled so easily.

But here he was in Provo, the spiritual heart of Mormonism. He’d flown to Denver on United in the morning, supposedly heading for San Diego. At Denver International, he’d shucked his connecting flight, bought a fresh ticket on Southwest to Oakland via Salt Lake. Simple countersurveillance. He’d walked the United flight three times, scanning faces. He didn’t see any of them on the Southwest flight.

In Salt Lake, he rented a car, drove to the wide boulevards south of downtown, found a long-term lot. He locked his phones in the glove compartment, taking only a burner he’d never used. He walked east and south until he found Great Deals Used Cars on State. He carried eight thousand dollars in cash, crisp hundred-dollar bills he’d pulled from his basement safe the night before.

The showroom was nicer than he’d hoped. A salesman in jeans and cowboy boots beelined for him. “Afternoon. I’m Rick. What can I do you for today?”

“Put the preposition in the right place.”

Rick’s smile faded, then came back stronger. “Sir?”

“Your cheapest car.”

“We can do that. Naturally.” Rick laid a friendly hand on Shafer’s shoulder. “But maybe I can show you something nicer first, credit problems are no problem at Great Deals—”

Shafer was in no mood for cute. He twitched his shoulder like he was having a seizure until Rick pulled his hand away. “Cash. You want the quickest sale of your life, or not?”

Rick cleared his throat. “In that case. I think you’re looking at a 2000 Regal. A Buick.” Rick nodded over his shoulder at a fenced-in corner filled with junkers. “Hundred sixty thousand miles. Sticker’s nineteen hundred, totally fair, but maybe I can knock fifty bucks off for a cash sale—”

“It’ll get me to Provo?”

“Heck, it’ll get you all the way to New York City”—those last three words spoken as if New York were Mars—“if that’s where you want to go. All our cars go through a ninety-point checklist, we call ’em Great Deals certified—”

“Done.” Shafer pulled out his wallet. “If you can get me out the door in ten minutes.”

“No problem, sir, no problem at all—”

“And shut up while you’re doing it.”

Nine minutes later, Shafer had himself a new used car, legally registered and insured. The Regal was the saddest vehicle he’d ever driven. Someone had sprayed its pleather seats with mint air freshener in a futile effort to hide the smell of ten thousand cigarettes. Its steering wheel clicked ominously when Shafer switched lanes. Its brakes worked like a radio call-in show, with a seven-second delay.

No matter. Shafer had made himself as untraceable as any American could. Even if Salome’s crew tracked the credit card he’d used for the rental, the trail would dead-end in Salt Lake. The Regal was too old and cheap to have a GPS. He’d ditched his phones. He could head to the safe house, where Evan and Heather were hiding, with a clear conscience.

This visit counted as a rear-guard action at best. Not that Wells and Duto were making much progress. Shafer had stopped at Duto’s house predawn, on his way to Dulles. Duto stood in the doorway in black silk pajamas, reading glasses dangling from a lanyard. He didn’t invite Shafer in.

“Told her I was gonna rape her,” he said before Shafer could ask about Donna Green.

Shafer thought he’d misheard. “You threatened to tape her?”

“Rape. R-A-P-E. Rape.” Emphatically. Like he was trying to win a prison spelling bee.

“The National Security Advisor? Of the United States? Of America? All these years learning to hide what a psychopath you are, you choose this moment to blow it?”

“She said I was making a play. I told her I’d be back with the truth, and when I was done with her she wouldn’t sit down for a month.”

“More like buggery, then.”

Duto folded his arms over his chest and smirked. He reminded Shafer of an old-school Hollywood mogul, the kind who made every starlet spend time on his couch. “That better or worse? I’m telling you, there was no convincing her. She knows about the Midnight House, how I got to Whitby.”

Now Shafer understood. Green had waved the red flag, told Duto that she’d taken the agency from him. And Duto had charged, just as she’d expected.

“Nothing’s changed,” Duto said.

“Sounds like a productive meeting.”

“More than you think. Donna told me we got the guys who took out the jet. Delta grabbed ’em in Mumbai last night. They’re Hezbollah.”

“So we’re going to come back at them?”

“Yes. She wouldn’t say how.”

Another step toward war.

“And Wells busted out, too.” The text had come in a few minutes before, Wells reporting that Volgograd was headed for Moscow and then Frankfurt. “I think he’s in rough shape.”

“He’s a big boy.” Duto’s standard answer when Shafer worried about Wells. Like Wells was a horse who could be worked forever without consequence. “Call him when you work it out with Evan. That’ll cheer him up.” Duto edged the front door toward Shafer’s foot. “Anything else? I gotta take a piss.”

“Me, John, you against the world, you still need me to know you’re in charge.”

As an answer, Duto shut the door.

Now Shafer parked the Regal outside a gray two-story house in the snow-dusted foothills on Provo’s east side. A wooden stockade fence hid the building’s first floor. The blinds were pulled tight on the second. A bubble camera watched the locked front gate. Shafer buzzed.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

“Heather? It’s Ellis.”

“I need to see your identification, sir.”

Not Heather. An FBI agent. Shafer held his license to the camera. A fresh westerly wind blew from the desert, dragging lacy clouds across the blue Utah sky. Shafer listened to the weekday sounds floating up from the streets below, school buses idling, kids yelling. Footsteps crossed the yard, and the gate opened to reveal an olive-skinned woman, late twenties.

“I’m Special Agent Rosatto. Hands against the fence.” She frisked him thoroughly. “Come with me.”

In the living room, Evan and Heather, Wells’s ex-wife, played Scrabble on a beige couch. They grunted insincere greetings. They’d wanted Wells.

Heather was in her early forties now, still pretty, but with the hollowed-out face of a compulsive exerciser. Shafer had met her long before, when Evan was a toddler and Wells was on his way to Afghanistan to infiltrate al-Qaeda. She and Wells had fallen in love in high school, married young, had a baby. Then she’d left. Like Exley. And now Anne. They’d all seen that the field was Wells’s true mistress.

As for Evan, Shafer didn’t need a DNA test to know that he was John’s son. He was tall and rangy like his father, the same strong nose and thick brown hair. But his cheeks were unlined, his eyes soft. I used to care… but I take a pill for that now, his T-shirt explained. Shafer didn’t know if Evan was weaker than John or just younger. Not even nineteen. Not one but two generations behind Shafer. Shafer knew he’d been that young once. He had pictures to prove it. But his memories of those years were lighter than dreams.

“We need a few minutes outside,” he said to Rosatto.

“If she’s okay with it.”

Heather nodded.

“Just please stay in the yard.”

So they stood around an empty sandbox, Heather and Evan on one side, Shafer on the other. Heather took a half step back, letting her son do the speaking.

“I saw you on TV a couple weeks ago, Evan,” Shafer said. “At Fresno State. That one-three must have been thirty feet out.” He’d checked YouTube highlights the night before.

Evan looked at Shafer the same way Shafer had looked at Rick the used-car salesman. “Where is he?”

“Flying from Russia to Germany, or he may already have landed.”

“What’s he doing?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Then he should tell us himself.”

Evan’s voice was cool. Composed. Maybe he was more like John than he seemed, snarky T-shirt and all.

“He can’t call. He’d have to come here, and he can’t spare the time.”

“Because of the NSA?”

“Among other things.”

“That woman in there, she’s FBI, yes? And you’re CIA.”

“Yes.”

“So why are we worrying about the NSA?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Enough of that.”

“I wish it weren’t.”

“Ellis. I haven’t forgotten what John did in Kenya. But this, we’ve been here a week. You know she won’t let us leave the house? Haven’t even been outside until now.”

“A few more days.”

“Give us something, Ellis.”

Shafer had known they would reach this point sooner or later. Now he realized he wanted to tell them. Everything. He shouldn’t, but he did. If only to unburden himself.

“You want to know?”

“Yes,” Evan said.

“No,” Heather said.

“Go inside, Mom.”

“Don’t do this. It’s not fair.” She looked at Shafer with wide pleading eyes. He understood. She had lost Wells to this shadow war. She feared Evan would be next.

“Fair’s got nothing to do with it,” Evan said.

The kid was eighteen. Old enough to enlist, if he wanted. He had the right to know.

Heather turned away, walked into the house. So Shafer told Evan the story. It took an hour. He didn’t mention Duberman by name, but he gave up everything else. Evan looked at him in disbelief when he finished.

“This mysterious billionaire might kill us to get at John?”

“Your father’s lots of things. Not crazy. Neither am I. It’s all true. And we would both feel better if you stayed here until we figure out where the uranium came from.”

“Or we, the country, I mean, invade Iran,” Evan said. “This guy won’t care after that, right?”

“Probably not.”

“So John’s running to every country that ever had this stuff, and they’re all blowing him off. And in another week, we’ll attack and it’ll be moot.”

Something about what Evan had said bugged Shafer. And it wasn’t the dig, either.

“Say that again.”

“I said, John’ll be in Libya, chasing some guy who worked at some reactor in 1983”—as if the year was the dawn of recorded history—“and meanwhile the President will come on television to tell us all about Operation Irani Freedom or whatever. And Richie Rich will buy himself a new spaceship because he’s so excited his plot worked.”

Some reactor in 1983. That fast, Shafer saw what he’d missed. He was a fool. It had taken an eighteen-year-old kid to spot the hole.

A country running an active nuclear weapons project would track its HEU to the milligram. It wouldn’t sell the stuff at any price. But what about a country that had stockpiled a chunk of weapons-grade uranium and then ended its program? The material instantly would be a liability. It would be locked in a vault and after a few years forgotten. Waiting for someone — for Salome — to find it and pry it out for the right price.

A long shot, sure. But no longer than the possibilities that had taken Wells to Russia and Duto to Israel. Plus Shafer had an edge. Of all the countries that had walked away from enrichment programs over the years, South Africa had gotten the furthest. It was the natural place to start. Shafer’s first agency posting had been in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire — the country now known as Congo. This was the late seventies. Kinshasa was rife with officers for the South African Bureau of State Security — infamously known as B.O.S.S. All over Africa, the CIA worked hand-in-glove, white-hand-in-white-glove, with South Africa. It saw the white-run government in Pretoria as a buffer against the Communist-supported African National Congress.

In Kinshasa, Shafer had worked with a dozen South African intelligence officers. They were for the most part unapologetically racist, especially after a few drinks. The blacks can’t be trusted to manage their own affairs, one told Shafer. You don’t let the animals run the zoo. Yet when they weren’t talking politics, they were pleasant enough. And Shafer, cynical to his core, nonetheless believed that some forms of government were worse than others. Communism would make Africa even poorer and more miserable. Eventually, sooner than they expected, white South Africans would have no choice but to give the vote to the black majority. Meantime, he would work with them when the need arose.

So Shafer told himself. Though he wondered if he was just making excuses.

The white regime took longer to fall than he expected. But it did. And in the mid-nineties a couple of the guys he’d known in Congo emigrated to the United States. Shafer couldn’t remember where they’d wound up, but he could find out easily enough. Lucky for him, they all had these weird Afrikaner names. He wouldn’t need fancy databases to track them. He was guessing the United States had only one Joost Claassen.

A poke in the ribs from Evan brought him back to Provo.

“I gotta go. Promise you’ll stay.” If Evan sat tight, so would Heather. “Even if you think it’s BS.”

“For that story, I’ll give you a week. On two conditions. One for you, one for my dad. First. Whatever happens, promise when it’s over you’ll give me the after-action report.” The kid raised his eyebrows, at once acknowledging and mocking the lingo.

“Done. What’s the other?”

“You tell John, I want him to come out here, come skiing with me. If I’m stuck in Utah, I might as well get to Alta. Pow-pow.”

“What about basketball?”

“I’m already out of the rotation.”

“All right, I’ll tell him. Though I bet he hasn’t skied in at least twenty years.”

Evan grinned, and Shafer saw he’d chosen the sport for exactly that reason. An easy way to show his superiority over the old man. Shafer turned for the gate. “Tell your mother I had to run.”

“I’d like to see that,” Evan said.

Shafer found a copy shop that had workstations with Internet access. In forty-six seconds, he found Joost and Linda Claassen, in Henderson, Nevada. He bought himself a phone card, hoping Joost hadn’t moved. Or gone unlisted. Or died.

“Hallo?” The voice was thirty-five years rougher than Shafer remembered, but the accent was unmistakable.

“Joost.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Ellis Shafer. We knew each other back in Kinshasa.”

“I never lived in Kinshasa.”

Shafer wondered if he had the wrong man. But no. Old spy habits died hard. “Come on, Joost. Remember that party you threw, Christmas, you brought in the witch to cast spells on us? Betty Nye, she hid in the closet. Orson had to drag her out.” Orson Nye had been Shafer’s first chief of station.

Joost laughed. “Okay, then. I remember. Where is Orson these days?”

“Nursing home in Virginia. Alzheimer’s.”

“That is unfortunate.”

Shafer had forgotten how Afrikaners talked, these oddly flat statements. “Sure is. I need to see you, Joost.”

“Where are you?”

“I can be in Henderson tonight.”

“Ellis—”

“It’s not about back then, Joost. I’m hoping you can help me find something.”

Joost went silent. Shafer had only pay-phone static for company. He wondered if he’d pushed too hard, lost the old man.

“I’ve left all that behind.”

“I swear. Nothing to be worried about.”

“Then I look forward to seeing you tonight.”

Henderson was on the outskirts of Vegas, four hundred miles down I-15 from Provo. Shafer decided to stick to the Regal instead of flying out of Salt Lake, a way to avoid using credit cards and the TSA.

Still, as the mile markers rolled by and the Buick’s gauges rose toward red, Shafer wished he’d splurged for the second-cheapest car on the lot. The ninety-point checklist at Great Deals Used Cars didn’t seem to include the engine. Shafer turned the Regal’s heat to high to relieve the radiator and kept the speedometer steady at fifty-three. Anything beat blowing the engine in the Utah desert.

The six-hour trip took eight hours. But finally Shafer knocked on the door of Joost’s house in Henderson. A tidy ranch in a tidy subdivision, as far from the chaos of Kinshasa as Shafer could imagine. The Regal had cooled after sunset. Shafer believed it might even survive the return trip north.

The door swung wide open. Joost looked surprisingly like the man Shafer had known a generation before. Gray hair and age spots notwithstanding, he held himself ramrod-straight, ready to head upriver into the heart of darkness.

“Joost. You look good.”

“So do you.” To Shafer’s surprise, Joost opened his arms and wrapped him up. “Come, come.”

Joost’s living room was covered with pictures of Joost and a stout Hispanic woman maybe twenty years younger. She definitely hadn’t been his wife in Kinshasa. Shafer vaguely remembered that woman as tall and blond. “Is that—”

“Janneke died in 2005. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Linda was her nurse. She thinks I was a mining engineer over there.”

Now Shafer understood why Joost had been wary of his call. “She’s out tonight?”

“She plays poker with the tourists once a week. You’d be surprised how much she wins. Sit, please. If you’d like a drink—” On the coffee table Joost had set out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a bowl of ice. “I don’t drink much these days, but I thought tonight. Just a taste.”

“Please.”

Joost poured them two shallow drinks. “Cheers.”

“It’s good to see you, Joost.”

And it was. Not because Joost had been a good intelligence officer, or even a good man. He’d had a long-running affair with a secretary at the Dutch embassy, if Shafer remembered right. But Joost had kept his promises, a rare trait in their business. In any case, seeing him offered a more intimate version of a college reunion, a reminder that everyone was headed the same way.

“You’re still working, Ellis?”

“For now.”

“Can you believe Zaire is even worse now than it was back then?”

“We didn’t exactly leave them a winning hand.”

“Always this excuse. They’ve been independent fifty years now. Time to take responsibility for themselves. I remember you saying something like that to one of the big men. You were never afraid to say what you thought. Though you must have known after a few months that you were wasting your breath.”

Story of my life.

“Worst that could happen, they send me back to Langley, I stop getting malaria.”

“You remember the time when Mobutu’s secretary called you in, that crazy one who drove the pink Rolls-Royce—”

For an hour, they talked about nothing but the past.

“So,” Shafer said finally. “There was something I wanted to ask you about.”

Joost tapped his wrist. “Now we come to the point.”

“We can talk all night.”

“Please, Ellis. You didn’t come all this way to reminisce about Mobutu.”

Shafer poured them both fresh splashes of whiskey.

“Were you ever involved with the nuclear stuff?”

“Our program? So, so, so.” All one word: sososo. “No.”

“Joost, I promise, I’m not here officially. I’m not fishing to get you in trouble.”

“You see the life I live, Ellis. I don’t want reporters at the door.”

Shafer waited.

Joost sipped his drink and seemed to decide he had to give Shafer something. “Look, South Africa isn’t like the States. Inside the apparatus, we all knew each other.”

“After ’77, it wasn’t any great secret,” Shafer said, hoping to encourage him.

In 1977, South Africa had been close to conducting an underground nuclear test when the United States discovered its preparations.

“One of the scientists, a little man named Alfred, he’s dead now, we grew up together in the Transvaal. When I came back from Zaire, he told me bits and pieces.”

“You were working with Israel.”

“Yes. The Jews didn’t care about the sanctions. People hated them even more than us. We had money and uranium ore. They had the scientists. We traded.”

“And the enrichment project succeeded.”

“These stories you see now that we had six nuclear weapons, that’s an exaggeration. Cubs trying to be lions, we say. But we did make enough for one.”

“This was in the eighties.”

“Yes. I can’t remember exactly which year.”

“And what happened to it? That highly enriched uranium.”

Joost poured himself another whiskey, a big one this time, and offered the bottle to Shafer, who covered his glass.

“I don’t suppose all these questions have anything to do with what you found in Istanbul.”

“You know I can’t answer that.” Shafer already regretted telling the story to Evan.

“For what it’s worth, the stuff we produced was very pure. Just like the uranium you found over there.”

“You’re sure.”

“It was a point of pride.”

“So the stuff is still in a vault in Pretoria?” Shafer couldn’t believe finding it would be this easy. Wells and Duto had gone all over the world, and Shafer was about to get the answer.

“Of course not. We wouldn’t have left it for the ANC. It’s not even in Africa anymore.”

Shafer’s elation vanished. “So where?”

“Where do you think? We sent it to the Jews as a present. Why not? At least they’d helped us.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

Another brick wall. If the South Africans had given up the uranium twenty years before, the Israelis had no doubt long since blended it into a nuclear warhead now pointing at Iran.

Still, he’d come too far not to finish his questions.

“How much HEU was it, anyway?”

“A bit more than fifteen kilos.”

Shafer hadn’t expected such a precise answer. “That’s oddly specific.”

“Because fifteen was always the amount we needed to reach for a bomb. The scientists celebrated for a week when they reached it, my friend told me. But then the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry had a big fight and de Klerk halted the program.”

“Because you knew what was coming.”

“What could we do with it? Blow up Soweto?” The giant slum southwest of Johannesburg. “The joke was that it would look better after.”

“So the program stopped at fifteen kilos. One bomb.”

“Fifteen-point-three sticks with me, for some reason. But it’s all gone now. Ask your friends in Tel Aviv.”

“Did Israel pay for it? How did you arrange the transfer?”

Joost splashed more Johnnie Walker into his glass. He seemed to have forgotten his promise of “just a taste.” “Now you’ve dug too deep for me. You need someone closer to the program. But none of them came to the States.”

“The planes go both ways. If I wanted to chase this, who would I ask?”

“A lot of the scientists, they’re gone now. But the bugger who ran the program at the end is still around. Real jackal, that one.”

Joost drained the last of his whiskey. It seemed to hit him all at once. He closed his eyes, flicked his tongue across his lips. “Were we ever friends, Ellis?”

Shafer flashed back to a long night at the British embassy, Joost drunkenly wrapping an arm around the ambassador’s wife, whispering in her ear until Janneke peeled him away.

All these years later, he was still a sloppy drunk.

“Sure we were.” The truth could wait. Forever.

“How come you never looked me up until now?”

“I wanted to leave you in peace. But this is too important. So? This jackal who ran the program?”

“What about him?”

“His name, Joost. What’s his name?”

14 FIVE DAYS…

All anyone needed to know about the new Russia was that Lubyanka was still open.

Sure, the Soviet Union had crumbled a generation before, and Russia was now theoretically a democracy. Sure, the very name Lubyanka sent a shiver through Russians of a certain age. The building was synonymous with the bad old days, secret trials and one-way trips to Siberia. No one knew how many prisoners had been tortured to death in its basement cells. For generations, it had served as the headquarters of the Committee on State Security, the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti.

The KGB.

The KGB had vanished with the USSR, replaced by the more polite-sounding Federal Security Service, known in English as the FSB. Yet the FSB was in no hurry to leave Lubyanka. Moving was such a headache. Lubyanka was a beautiful building, conveniently located just a few blocks from the Kremlin.

Besides, many senior FSB officers had a more positive perspective on the KGB than the average Russian. After all, they were KGB veterans themselves. As was Vladimir Putin. He wasn’t about to punish his old buddies. Putin and his oligarchs had more to lose from a revolution than Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet apparatchiks ever had.

So, by any name, the secret police stayed in business. And inside Lubyanka’s walls, the cruelties continued.

The FSB held Wells at Domodedovo through the evening. The airport cell was big enough for a dozen men, but besides Wells, its only occupant was a baby-faced Southeast Asian. Wells tried English and Arabic on the guy, but he only shook his head and pointed to his belly. Wells guessed he was a drug mule. His skin was waxy and soft, like he was melting from the inside out.

Wells had endured more unpleasant cells. This one was warm, quiet, and windowless, a tonic for his concussion. The fog in his mind lifted and the black spots in his vision disappeared. He was left to consider the wreckage of this mission. Had Custer felt this way when he rode over the hill at Little Bighorn? Wells had traveled all over the world and earned only a broken finger and a shaken brain for his troubles.

He hadn’t always won before, but he had never felt so outclassed.

He tried to tilt his anger to Salome and Duberman. But after a few minutes, the revenge fantasy lost its appeal. He changed his tack, closed his eyes, found his favorite Quranic verses. He didn’t believe for a minute that Muhammad had received messages straight from Allah. Yet he sometimes sensed divine inspiration in the text. Not just in the obvious places, the rhythms and melodies of famous Surahs like The Overturning, with its bizarrely poetic promise of the apocalypse:

But contradictions and digressions filled the Quran’s lesser chapters, verses that sounded sweet in Arabic but could barely be translated into any other language. Only a truly confident God would allow such malarkey in His revealed word. I command you to believe no matter what I say…

Wells slept. He must have, for the jangle of metal against metal stirred him. He opened his eyes to see a man in a windbreaker at the bars. Behind him, a digital clock read 00:23. He waved Wells over, cuffed his hands behind his back through the bars, slid the cell door open.

“Bye,” the Asian kid said.

“Good luck.” Though Wells wasn’t even sure what luck would mean for the guy. He might be better off having the package break inside him, a brief euphoria before he tumbled into the void.

“Bye-bye-bye.” Like a toddler who knew only one word.

Wells’s captor tugged his shoulder. Wells looked at him. “You’re FSB, yes?”

“Da.”

“How ’bout you tell me what’s going on?”

“Lubyanka.”

The word even sounded cold. For a moment, Wells considered trying to make a break. But the idea was beyond foolish. He didn’t speak Russian, didn’t have money or a car waiting. He wouldn’t clear the airport before they shot him down. He would get out of this mess with his wits, or not at all. And Duto and Shafer think I’m just the muscle.

They brought him to the center of the city in style, a big Mercedes. The ride took twenty minutes, the Merc’s blue light clearing a path better than any siren. Even as Wells was still getting his bearings, they reached a plaza dominated by a single massive building on its northeastern side.

“Lubyanka,” the FSB agent said again.

“I get the tour? Excellent. Didn’t think that was part of the package.”

The guy patted Wells’s cheek, the touch more menacing than any punch.

The Mercedes stopped at a manned gate on the building’s north side, away from the square. As they waited for the guard to examine the driver’s identification, Wells found himself wanting to be inside. He was tired of the uncertainty of this twilight struggle. If they planned to torture him because they believed he was a spy, or a troublemaker, or just because they could, so be it. Give him a battle to fight.

His wish came true. The gate came up. The Merc rolled down a long curved ramp and stopped before a steel door where two men waited, pale guys with meaty hands and crumpled noses. A heavyweight welcoming committee. They yanked Wells out, shoved him inside, down a long staircase that ended in a narrow corridor lit with dim red bulbs, like a predigital photo lab. Wells figured he had to be fifty feet below street level. With no natural light or sound to anchor him, he would quickly lose any sense of time. They could destroy his sleep cycle in a day or two just by playing with the lights.

A woman stood at the end of the corridor. For a moment, Wells thought he was looking at Salome. But when the guards brought him closer, he realized his mistake. This woman had the same narrow hips, the same confident stance. But she was older, with a pinched nose, a wattled neck. She pulled open the door behind her.

“Ready for a shower?” she said in English.

The guards dragged him through the doorway into a white-tiled room about fifteen feet square, lit with standard white bulbs. A dozen showerheads were mounted from the ceiling. A camera and speaker hung in each corner.

The lead guard turned, gave him a right-left-right combination to the stomach. Wells doubled over, stared at the narrow tiles at his feet. He caught his breath, tried to straighten. But the second guard grabbed his cuffed hands, pulled them up and back, driving Wells’s head down toward the floor. Over the years, his shoulders had been dislocated more times than he could remember. They loosened in their sockets. The pain arced like a firework about to burst. But just before they popped out, the cuffs came off. His hands were free. Wells needed a moment to realize that the guard had unlocked him.

Wells didn’t question why. Instinct took over. He straightened up, trying to spin around, get in a quick right hook. Before he even got his arm all the way up, the first guard kicked out his legs, sending him sprawling. The fall didn’t hurt much, but it was humiliating. As he pushed himself up to go after them, they walked out of the room, locked the door. Perfect choreography. Wells wondered how many times they had pulled this routine.

“Remove your clothes,” a man said, a voice so empty it might have been computer-generated.

“I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“Five seconds.”

“Let me call my embassy. Please. Spasibo.” The pose of confused tourist was a weak play, but he didn’t see other options.

The room went dark. And then water drummed his head, soaked his clothes. It was frigid at first. Wells moved to a corner, but the room had been designed so that the showerheads covered it. The water warmed to lukewarm. Then comfortable. Wells didn’t need an engineering degree to figure that in a couple of minutes it would be scalding.

He pulled off his shirt, stepped out of his jeans. A psychological ploy to make him follow their orders without violence, show him that they were in complete control. And a good one. He doubted they would boil him to death in here if he refused to comply. But he couldn’t take the chance.

As he finished undressing, the water again went frigid. He closed his eyes, saw Afghanistan. For months on end he had bathed only in the bone-chilling streams that flowed down the sides of the Kush. The memory relaxed him, and maybe his captors saw that the cold wasn’t bothering him, because the water stopped quickly and the lights came up.

Wells forced himself to remember that the FSB had no reason to keep him for long. Moscow was two hours ahead of Frankfurt, eight ahead of the East Coast. At this moment, Duto and Shafer thought they were doing Wells a favor by letting him get a good night’s sleep in Germany. But when they realized he hadn’t reached Frankfurt, they would call Moscow. Duto still had FSB connections. Wells would spend no more than a day here. Two at most.

He hoped.

The two big guys stepped into the shower. With his hands free, Wells considered taking a pop. But clothes — and shoes — offered a huge advantage in close quarters combat. A boot strike would break his unprotected feet. Other body parts were even more vulnerable.

He let them cuff him.

They led him to an unmarked room at the other end of the hall. The woman waited inside, sitting behind a big and heavily scarred oak desk that looked strangely out of place in here. A relic dating back to the KGB, maybe even the Cheka. There were no other chairs. Wells had no choice but to stand naked in front of her. Water puddled at his feet. Goose pimples covered his arms and legs. He forced himself to stand straight, make no effort to hide himself. Let her look. Her smirk widened. She barked a command and the guards turned him around as slowly as a pig on a spit.

“Let me go,” Wells said.

“Shut up.” Her English was perfect, her tone as dismissive as a Valley Girl’s. He wondered if she’d spent time in California. “You must know we have a hundred ways to hurt you in this place, no marks. You leave, complain, no one cares. A crazy American telling lies about Russia. What do you think we were doing when we had you at the airport? We checked with Moscow station, they say you’re not one of them. Not listed. Not NOC.”

The letters stood for non-official cover. Most CIA case officers operated under diplomatic cover. They worked out of embassies and had immunity from arrest and prosecution. Only a few worked without that protection. Even they usually could count on their stations for help when they got in serious trouble. The FSB had its own operatives under non-official cover in the United States, so both sides tried to keep from playing too rough.

“NOC?” Wells said. “What’s that?”

She barked in Russian, and the guard to Wells’s right rabbit-punched him in the kidney. The pain spread up, slow-cooking his viscera and ribs. Wells forced himself to stay steady.

“Next time, I tell him to kick you in those big balls of yours.”

Wells nodded. He wasn’t sure he could speak. These guys did maximum damage with minimum effort.

“You play games with me, this takes until morning. I don’t want that. I want to get home, turn on the television, go to sleep. And you, I see even from the way you took that last punch, you’re a professional. Please, treat me with respect.”

She stared at him with her lumpy black eyes, almost daring him to argue. But she’d made her point. His best bet was to answer her questions as honestly as possible.

“Da.”

“Good.” She fetched the suitcase that Boris had given him from under her desk, pulled his passports. “Which is real?”

“Both real, both USG issued.”

“Is either your real name?”

“Wells.”

She flipped through it. “John Wells. Where were you born?”

“What it says. Hamilton, Montana.”

“But you use the other also. In the name Roger Bishop.”

“Yes.”

“Are these your only passports?”

“The only ones I’ve used recently.”

“Good.”

Wells didn’t know if she was complimenting him for his honesty or herself for having found such a valuable prisoner. She reached into the desk for a pen and a tiny notebook, scratched out a note. “You come to Russia when?”

“Two days ago.”

“Where did you arrive?”

“Here. On my way to Volgograd.”

“Why?”

“To meet Mikhail Buvchenko.”

Another quick note.

“From where?”

“Saudi Arabia via Istanbul.” No reason to lie. She wouldn’t even need to check flight manifests. The passport stamps told the tale.

“Saudi Arabia. You are Muslim?”

“I am.”

“This is very unusual. A white American becomes Muslim.”

He didn’t answer. She made another note. Wells wondered if she’d press him, but instead she said only, “Fine. Volgograd. You met Buvchenko?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Overnight. His men brought me directly from my hotel. We had dinner, and then he asked me to stay at his house.” Wells left out the tale of Peter the horse. “He didn’t give me much choice, so I stayed. Then, yesterday morning, he brought me back to Volgograd.”

“Where the police come to your room.” Showing him she knew everything that had happened, he shouldn’t bother to lie.

“They said I was carrying drugs.”

“Were you?”

“No. I don’t know why they had that idea. They searched the hotel and didn’t find any.”

He wondered if she’d ask about Salome, but she didn’t.

“Then they put you on a plane to Moscow.”

“The lead detective, Boris, he told me I needed to leave Russia. I didn’t argue.”

“You have much misfortune on this trip. People accusing you of drugs for no reason. The FSB comes for you.”

“I’ve had better weeks.”

She stood up, leaned across the desk, eyed him tip to toe. Wells couldn’t help thinking of the witch in the gingerbread house. Good enough to eat, my dearies. “So why all this travel? You are businessman? You do oil?”

“We both know I don’t do oil.” Wells shivered. His adrenaline was wearing off. His feet felt numb, like he was turning to a statue from the ground up. He couldn’t remember where he’d read that legend. Another fairy tale? A Greek myth? Tolkien?

A snap of her fingers brought him back to the room.

“You are tired? You need my men to wake you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then answer my question. So much travel? Such nasty places. CIA says you don’t work for them? Maybe you are bounty hunter? Like the American one? Dog the Bounty Hunter?” She said something to the guards, and they laughed.

She wasn’t a great interrogator, Wells decided. Too eager to impress with her knowledge of American culture. The realization strengthened him. He could beat her. He twitched his legs, jogged his feet against the floor. Probably he looked like he was having a seizure, but he needed to keep active, not give in to this slow hypothermia clouding his mind. Get out of here without mentioning Duberman’s name. He couldn’t risk that. He couldn’t be sure how it would play.

“Not a bounty hunter. I was CIA, yes. I quit.”

“You admit this?”

“It’s not illegal.”

“Did you ever travel to Russia before?”

“No.” A lie, a dangerous one. Wells had no choice. Years before, he’d come to Moscow chasing a Russian hit squad. He’d killed a carful of men, while the one he wanted escaped. But he didn’t think the FSB could connect him to the case. He’d used a different fake passport, and back then the Russians hadn’t gone for retinal scans or fingerprints.

“Never?”

“Never. I don’t speak Russian.”

“Where were you posted?”

“Mostly Afghanistan and Pakistan. But I tell you, I quit years ago.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Sometimes people ask me to do things.”

She waited.

“In this case, Senator Duto. From Pennsylvania. The former DCI, as I’m sure you know.”

“He sent you to Buvchenko.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The question. The FSB obviously wasn’t sure who he was, or what to do with him. They didn’t have any reason to provoke another diplomatic incident over a guy who had agency connections and might have a legitimate reason to be here. At the same time, Buvchenko had told them enough to get Wells brought to Lubyanka. This interview was a test. They hadn’t drugged him, or beaten him badly enough to do permanent damage. They didn’t have a team interrogating him. They were giving themselves the option to let him walk. If Wells could give this woman the right answer, the words she wanted to hear, she might. And as he tried to figure out what those words might be, he had one edge.

Salome had played their meeting in Volgograd brilliantly. But she’d made one mistake, telling Wells the story she and Buvchenko planned to peddle to the FSB. Of course, she’d done so to distract him from the fact that she didn’t expect to involve the secret police at all. She’d planned to seal his fate with a block of heroin. But Wells had beaten that trap. And thanks to Salome, he knew exactly why the FSB had brought him here. Buvchenko had told them he had come to Russia to buy weapons for the Syrian jihadis. This interrogator had signaled as much by making Wells admit he was Muslim.

All at once Wells saw the play. Lean in.

“I told Buvchenko I was looking for guns. For Syria.”

“You confess this?”

“I’m telling you that’s what I told him. But really it was a sting. Someone in Washington, I don’t know who, tipped Duto about rumors that Buvchenko was shipping weapons to the jihadis. So Duto asked me to get involved. I’m a Muslim, I have credibility, I could go to Saudi Arabia first and tell Buvchenko I raised money from the sheiks there.”

“I don’t believe you. Duto would just have told the CIA.”

“No, he’s angry because they dumped him. Wants to embarrass them. He thought if he could get the truth about Buvchenko, he could use it against them.”

She nodded, and Wells knew the story rang true to her. Why not? The Russians specialized in this kind of palace intrigue.

“Use it how?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me that.”

“He sends you to Russia to stand in a cell with your khuy shriveled up and doesn’t even tell you his plans, and you say yes.”

“When I get home, I’ll ask for a raise.”

“This was a stupid game. Very stupid.”

“I had an arms dealer who knows Buvchenko set up the meeting. I thought I was safe. I didn’t know Buvchenko would go running to the FSB. Bad for business.”

“He’s loyal to his country. Russia doesn’t help these terrorists.”

No, Russia helped Bashar al-Assad, who killed kids with nerve gas. But they could have that talk another time.

“It was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“Duto should have asked us himself.”

“I guess so.”

She made more notes. “If this story is a lie—”

“Call Duto. Tell him you have me. He’ll confirm it.”

Assuming he figures out what I said while he’s talking to you. If not, Wells and his shriveled khuy would be staying in these cells. He wondered if Buvchenko could play back. But the man couldn’t change his accusation at this point, and he might not want to press his FSB masters any harder. Salome was just one client, and no matter how much money she could offer Buvchenko, he’d lose it all and more if he angered Moscow.

As for Salome, she’d no doubt already left Russia. Whatever other contacts she and Duberman had here, she couldn’t risk involving them. Like Wells, she couldn’t be sure how the Kremlin would react if it discovered what Duberman had done. It might see the chance to tell the White House, put the President hugely in its debt. Plus she had no need to take risks. She won by running out the clock.

And the clock was still running.

“Don’t look so sad, Mr. Wells,” the woman said. “I think I believe you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Poor baby.” She said something in Russian, and the guards laughed. Wells didn’t mind. The less of a threat he presented, the more likely she would be to let him go. “If I unlock you, you’ll be a good boy?”

“You unlock me, I’ll do whatever you want.”

Five minutes later, Wells found himself in a cell all his own. Aside from the fact that it was underground and thus windowless, it wouldn’t have been out of place in a maximum-security American prison. It had a cot with an inch-thick mattress, a pillow that smelled like a locker room, and a plastic gallon jug half filled with water that Wells hoped wouldn’t make him sick. His clothes were too wet to wear, but the guards had fetched him underwear, a T-shirt, and sweatpants, all in the same shade of gray.

The day had gone worse than a country song. Wells wouldn’t know until the morning at least if the interrogator had bought his story. Still, he counted his blessings. If he hadn’t found that brick of heroin in his hotel room, he’d still be in Volgograd, in a cell far less inviting than this one.

Sometimes the only sane move was to lie down and sleep.

So he did.

15

Hussein Ayoub considered himself lucky.

More than lucky. Blessed.

Ayoub commanded the soldiers and militia who fought for Hezbollah, the Shia political party that dominated Lebanon. His army totaled more than ten thousand fighters, three thousand full-time and the rest irregulars. Despite its small size, it was highly capable. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, his people fought the IDF nearly to a draw.

Ayoub was forty-one, and tall. He wore his thick black hair swept up and back, in what was almost a pompadour. A handsome man. He had made his reputation in the ’06 invasion. Wearing a stolen Israeli uniform, he had walked up to four IDF soldiers at an outpost near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre and killed them at point-blank range.

Ayoub had commanded Hezbollah’s army for a year. Twice already he should have been killed. Once in Syria, fifteen kilometers south of Damascus. Rebels strafed his convoy with rockets, blowing up the cars behind and in front of his. Six of his guards died. The second time in Beirut, just a month before. A van loaded with artillery shells leveled an office building. Ayoub was supposed to be inside, but he was running late.

Inshallah. Truly. He had stopped fearing his own death after that morning outside Tyre. Dawn, the best hour for a surprise attack. The night watchers were worn out. Everyone else was still half asleep. He came in from the east, knowing the sun would be behind him, in their eyes. Still. They should have cut him down before he got close. His Hebrew was good, not great. The uniform was good, but his shoes were wrong. But back then the Jews were used to fighting kids in Gaza who threw rocks and Molotovs. They didn’t know what real war looked like.

Worse, for them, they didn’t know they didn’t know. Ayoub would never forget the way they’d yelled in surprise when he raised his rifle.

So he lived. But his life belonged only to Allah, and one day Allah would call for him. Until then he would fight for his people. At this moment, with the Israelis keeping to their side of the border, the fight was mainly in Syria. Years before, Hezbollah had joined the Syrian civil war, siding with Bashar al-Assad against the rebels who wanted to demolish his regime.

Ayoub disliked Assad. He and his friends drank, gambled, used drugs. Charity was one of the five pillars of Islam, but Assad lived in a palace while his countrymen starved. As the war ground on, Assad’s crimes multiplied.

Yet Ayoub never questioned Hezbollah’s choice. The rebels on the other side raged against Shia like Ayoub. No matter that Shia and Sunni were all Muslims, that they all believed that Allah was the only God, and Muhammad his messenger. The Sunnis ruled the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia. There were five Sunni for every Shia. But that dominance wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to eliminate the Shia entirely.

Ayoub had seen the torture videos. Mostly they came from Iraq. Men begging for mercy as their eyes were gouged out, their faces sliced apart. Men led stumbling through the empty desert on the Iraq — Syria border. Held down. Chains strapped to their arms and legs. Each chain locked to a car. Each car driven a different way. He’d made himself stop watching them. He’d tried to forget.

But one he couldn’t. It was the simplest of all. No sound, a fixed camera focused on a plain wooden table. On it, a ten-liter bucket of water beside a cardboard box filled with puppies. Ayoub didn’t know the breed. In truth, he didn’t like dogs. But these creatures were impossible to hate. They curled over one another, full of life. They couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Eight in all.

A pair of gloved hands picked them up one by one, held them underwater as they squirmed and tried to breathe, their desperation obvious even without sound. Until their wriggling stopped. Then the hands threw the sodden corpses back in the box. They twisted over each other like broken vines. The hands pointed, proudly: See what I’ve done?

The screen went black. A single Arabic line splayed across it: The Shia are worse than dogs.

If the video had ended there, it would have been one more piece of Sunni propaganda. Not the stuff of nightmares. But it went on. The table reappeared. The bucket of water sat alone now. Until the gloved hands reached out, set a baby boy beside it. An infant, black-haired, black-eyed, naked, newly circumcised, his skin light Persian brown. He wriggled. He opened his mouth, screamed soundlessly at the camera. The gloved hands picked him up, carried him toward the bucket—

And the video ended.

What had happened to that boy? Ayoub wanted to believe that whoever had made the video had put him down after the camera was off. Maybe he was a prop, not Shia at all. But Ayoub knew these Sunnis. They had turned from Allah. Hezbollah could be cruel, but never without reason. Never with the joy the desert Arabs took in the suffering they inflicted.

They weren’t beasts. They were something worse, men with the souls of beasts.

And one had held that boy under the water until he drowned. In a basement somewhere in Syria or Iraq, a laptop held the truth. On nights when the wind stirred the dust in the Bekaa and kept him from sleeping, Ayoub promised himself that one day he’d find that computer and the man who owned it.

So, yes, Hezbollah had sent men to fight with Assad. As had Iran. The Iranians were Shia, too, the most powerful Shia nation by far. Naturally, Iran worked with Hezbollah. It gave the group seventy million dollars a year, trained Ayoub’s soldiers at bases outside Tehran, snuck freighters loaded with weapons through the Suez Canal and past the Israeli coast to Beirut.

And eight days before, when an Iranian friend of Ayoub’s sent a courier to tell him they needed to meet in Beirut, now, that very hour, Ayoub didn’t hesitate. He canceled his meetings, locked his phones in his desk, grabbed an old Honda motorcycle for the ride over the Dahr al Baydar pass into Beirut. He would make this trip with no guards. He preferred two wheels when he traveled alone.

The Iranian was a senior officer in the Quds Force, the foreign intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard. A very senior officer. He reported directly to Qassem Suleimani, who ran Quds. He called himself Ali, though Ayoub couldn’t be sure that was his name. They had met twice before. Both times Ali asked for help in Syria. Both times Ayoub agreed, sending more than a thousand paramilitaries. Ali didn’t explicitly promise what Hezbollah would receive in return. But weeks later, Hezbollah’s charities took in millions of dollars from Iranian expatriates in Europe.

On this third trip, Ayoub parked his motorcycle outside an apartment building in Haret Hreik, a crowded suburb south of downtown Beirut. Ayoub had never seen the building before. Each meeting with Ali happened at a different safe house. Not that Hezbollah would be foolish enough to try to monitor Ali’s comings and goings. And not that any other faction in Lebanon had any idea who he was. Ayoub knew how dearly Ali prized his anonymity. The Jews or the Americans would pay dearly for him if they stumbled across him.

Ali was small, hollow-cheeked, in his fifties. He had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a neat beard. He dressed modestly, Western-style, button-down shirts and sneakers. He hadn’t wasted time with small talk in their earlier meetings, and he didn’t today. No offers of tea or platters of hummus and big green olives.

“I need your help. Hezbollah’s help.”

“Of course.”

“This is about the Americans. As you can imagine. You saw the President’s speech?”

Twenty-four hours before, the United States had brazenly attacked the airport at the center of Tehran. Then the President gave Iran two weeks to open its borders or face invasion.

“Of course.”

“What he says, it’s a lie. He stares at the camera, lies to the whole world. I swear to you.”

“They lie always.”

In fact, Ayoub wasn’t sure the President had lied. Iran kept its nuclear strategy secret even from Hezbollah. Only a few people in Tehran knew the truth. Maybe the Iranians were trying to smuggle a bomb into America. So be it. Some part of Ayoub hoped that the President was telling the truth. Let the people in Washington or New York fear an Iranian bomb. The Americans were no friends of Hezbollah. They called Ayoub and his men terrorists. Never mind that Hezbollah ran medical clinics and handed out food all over Lebanon.

Worse, the United States sent billions of dollars to Israel every year, money the Jews used to buy jets and tanks to invade Lebanon. Worst of all, the United States fed the carnage in Syria.

“Why do you think the Americans have done this?” Ayoub said.

“Isn’t it obvious? They want an excuse to attack us. We have too much power for them. They’re angry about Iraq, how we outsmarted them. They fight a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, replace him with their friends. Instead, the Shia take over.” Meaning one who did what Iran wanted. “They see now in Syria their choices are Assad or the Islamic State, and they hate that they must work with us to help Assad. So they make this up.”

“To go to so much trouble—”

“They know their people are tired of war. They need a reason to send their soldiers against us.”

The explanation made sense to Ayoub. Which didn’t mean it was true.

“And you can’t open your doors, prove to the world it’s a lie.”

“Ayoub, if the Jews said that Hezbollah was making bombs to blow up the Qubbat al-Sakhrah”—the Dome of the Rock, the holy shrine that sat atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—

“I understand.”

“That they would blow up your camps unless you let them in—”

“We would never agree.”

“Just so. We’ll fill the streets with martyrs before we do what they ask.” Ali leaned close enough for Ayoub to smell the mint tea on his breath.

“What, then?”

“They must know the price they’ll pay if they keep on this path.”

Now they reached the heart of the matter. Ali explained what he wanted, and where. He would provide the surface-to-air missiles in Mumbai, Ayoub the men. Hezbollah had no shortage of soldiers trained to use SAMs. Missiles were its best defense against the Israeli air force.

The mission disturbed Ayoub, though not for the obvious reason. He didn’t question the morality of blowing up this plane. A couple hundred innocents would die. So be it. The Syrian war killed more civilians than that every week. No, Ayoub’s concern was tactical. He didn’t see why Ali didn’t just use his own men. But he couldn’t ask directly. Ali was polite enough to phrase his orders as requests, but he was the master in this room. Hezbollah depended on Iranian support to survive.

Instead of asking Ali directly, Ayoub tried a different tack. “You’re sure my men can do this? Without advance training.”

“Did you have training when you walked up to those Jews in Tyre?”

“I knew their post. I’d watched them all night. These men, they’ve never been to India, much less Mumbai. The airport must have security.”

“The airport, yes. But the slums are around it, and police there, they’re too lazy to go inside. Not even for bribes. Trust me. I’ve been there. Your men come tonight. My officer meets them. Walks them through the slum, shows them where to set up. No missiles. Tomorrow afternoon, they come back in daylight to see for themselves. Then, tomorrow night, they bring the missiles, they aim—” Ali raised his hands, hoisting an imaginary surface-to-air missile launcher. He cocked his head to look through the sight, squeezed the trigger. “Just like you and those Jews, Ayoub. Only a bigger explosion at the end.”

Ali sounded almost wistful.

“And your man can’t do it?”

“Better if he’s not there.”

So he wouldn’t be caught when the Americans went crazy afterward. “And my men? Do you get them out after? Or is that up to me?”

“Neither.”

Ayoub needed a few seconds to realize what Ali meant.

“You want them caught? But when the Americans see they’re Lebanese—” Then Ayoub understood the game. Ali was playing both sides. He wanted the United States to know that Iran had ordered the shooting. But he didn’t want to give it proof. He, or his boss Suleimani, wanted the flexibility to deny Iran’s involvement. The Iranians used proxies whenever they could. Though puppets might be a better word.

Ayoub remembered a saying of his father’s: When a mouse mocks a cat, you can be sure there’s a hole nearby. For this mission the Iranians had chosen Hezbollah as the hole. But Ayoub wouldn’t waste his breath protesting. “My friend, if this is what you want, my men will be proud to help.”

“You have someone in mind.”

“Yes.” Two cousins who ran a truck-repair shop in Baalbek. Jafar and Haider. Late twenties and fearless. Ayoub wondered what to tell them. Only bare outlines, and nothing about Ali, of course. They were smart enough to figure out for themselves that Iran was behind the mission.

But he would have to make sure they knew they wouldn’t be coming home.

“I think through Dubai is the shortest route,” Ali said. “MEA”—Middle East Airlines, the national Lebanese carrier—“has a flight at two p.m. Then Emirates to Mumbai.”

Telling, not asking.

“Done. Once they land in Mumbai, they’re yours.”

“And clean phones, of course.”

“I’ll get your courier the numbers. Anything more, my brother?”

“Later this week. Five more teams.”

Five more pairs of soldiers? Five more planes? Ayoub’s mask of civility must have dropped for half a second. Ali grabbed Ayoub’s wrist. “All right?”

“Of course. Will these be”—Ayoub hesitated—“active missions?”

“Not yet.”

Ninety minutes later, at a supermarket two kilometers from Hariri International Airport, Ayoub met Jafar and Haider. As he’d expected, they came without question when he called. And they didn’t flinch when he described the mission.

“An American jet,” Jafar, the older cousin, said. His meaning was clear enough. The Americans have this coming.

Ayoub didn’t expect the cousins to escape capture for long, but he gave them six thousand dollars and told them to hide, come back to the Bekaa Valley once the pressure lifted. They laughed.

“When they find us, do we tell them that this was a Hezbollah action?” Jafar asked.

“Yes.” The Americans would know the truth anyway.

“Good.”

The next night, the reports came in from India. They’d lit the sky with United 49.

Ayoub sent a third man to Mumbai, too, a truly clean operative who could travel on a Turkish passport. Not to help the other two, just to walk the streets and watch the local television channels so Ayoub might have a few minutes of advance word when they were caught. But the cousins managed better than he’d expected. A week passed with no word of their arrest. Ayoub wondered if the Americans had snatched them in secret.

He heard nothing from Ali, either. Probably the man wasn’t even in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, he had other concerns. That morning, the Syrian Minister of Defense had called to tell him that the Sunnis were preparing a major offensive. No surprise, they figured a potential war with the United States might distract Iran from helping the Syrian government. The minister asked Ayoub to send another two thousand men. Ayoub put him off, spent the day debating with his deputies what course to recommend to Sayyed Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s ultimate leader. If America invaded Iran, Hezbollah would be on its own. Maybe this wasn’t the moment to risk fighters he might need to defend Hezbollah’s own territory from the IDF.

The debate was exhausting. They all felt the pressure of war rising. Finally, after dinner, Ayoub sent his men home. The choice was ultimately Nasrallah’s anyway.

Ayoub arrived at 10 p.m. to a dark house, his wife Rima and their five children asleep. Rather than wake her, he pulled out the cot in his office. He could have slept on a stone pillow this night. He closed his eyes—

Bees surrounded him, buzzing wildly. He pulled himself from the dream, reached for his phone. His fourth phone, the least used and most important. Even Rima didn’t have the number. It was one of six that Hezbollah’s most senior commanders used to send one another coded text messages, a way to set meetings when they didn’t have time to rely on couriers.

Adhan Habibi, Nasrallah’s second deputy and his top military advisor, had sent the message. It consisted of the first five words of the fifth verse of the Quran’s first Surah: You alone do we worship… A few seconds later, another message popped up from the same phone: 10059.

The system was simple. The first message set the meeting’s location, in this case a disused warehouse fifteen kilometers west of Baalbek, near the town of Zahle. Habibi and Ayoub had met there once before. The commanders had five pre-agreed meeting sites, each signaled by a different Quranic verse. The second message set the time: one hour from now. One hour… fifty-nine minutes…

It was 1:45 a.m. Ayoub had no idea why Habibi would call a meeting so late, but when they created the system, they agreed never to question these summonses. They all knew that the more they used the phones, the more vulnerable they would be to American and Israeli spies. Ayoub would have to trust that Habibi had a good reason to ask for him.

Ayoub rubbed the sleep from his eyes, washed his hands and face. In his bedroom he pulled on a light jacket and the hundred-euro Adidas sneakers that were his only indulgence. He had fifty pairs, in every conceivable color.

His wife snored lightly, her arms cradled around their youngest daughter. He wished Rima wouldn’t keep the girl in their bed, but his wife didn’t care. I need something warm to hold when you’re not around. He kissed her cheek. She mumbled his name but didn’t wake.

He walked through the lemon grove that separated his house from the outbuildings where his driver and personal guards lived. A cool wind rustled the empty branches, and a low ceiling of gray clouds obscured the stars. This night’s watchman was the weakest of Ayoub’s men, a dullard named Hamid. He sat on a folding chair, his eyes focused on what seemed to be an Arabic translation of a vampire novel. Not exactly full combat readiness. Ayoub crept close, tossed a pebble, hitting Hamid in the arm. He grabbed his rifle and jumped, the book sliding off his lap. Ayoub had never seen him move so fast.

“Halt!” His eyes opened wide as he looked at his commander. “Sir?”

“Vampires, Hamid?”

Hamid bowed his head, as if the paperback would become a Quran if he stared at it long enough.

“We’ll talk about that later. Wake the others. We have a meeting in Zahle.”

Baalbek was dark, its streets empty, its eighty thousand inhabitants tucked away until dawn. At the Hezbollah guard post that watched the intersection of the Beirut and Tripoli roads, Ayoub’s two-car convoy stopped only long enough to be waved through. Twenty minutes later, they reached the dirt lot behind the warehouse.

A lemon grove had once sat behind this building, but a mysterious blight had hit the trees years before. The farmer who owned the orchard had burned it to keep the sickness from spreading. Now charred stumps covered the fields, speckled with a few taller trunks that had survived the fire. Hamid wandered into the field, then pulled back, like a scared child.

“You want vampires, go that way.” Ayoub pointed east. Toward the Anti-Lebanon range, the low mountains that split the Bekaa from Syria and the brutal fighters of the Islamic State.

“Sir?”

“If you weren’t so useless, I’d send you there now.”

The inside of the warehouse still smelled faintly of lemons. Ayoub’s lantern revealed a space twenty meters by forty. Empty crates lined the walls, awaiting the day when the groves were replanted. Ayoub’s guards waited by the door. He’d waved them off when they tried to follow him inside. He needed a few minutes to himself. He’d beaten Habibi here. No surprise. Habibi lived in West Beirut, an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. After the 2006 invasion, Hezbollah had decided that not all of its leaders should live in the Bekaa Valley, its strongest territory but also the easiest to blockade.

Fifteen minutes passed before tires crunched on the gravel outside. At least four vehicles. Through the open warehouse door, Ayoub glimpsed their lights. Suddenly, he worried he’d made a mistake coming here. Maybe a Maronite hit squad had somehow cracked their code. Then he heard his men shouting greetings at Habibi’s guards.

He walked outside as Habibi’s men poured out. Habibi never traveled without at least a dozen guards. He was in the middle of the scrum, a heavy man with a beard too dark to be anything but dyed. He pushed his way through his guards, reached out for Ayoub.

“Hussein.”

“Habibi. Habibi!”

“Habibi,” Habibi said. A minor joke. Habibi translated into “friend.” “You drag me out of bed, over the pass in the middle of the night. This better be important.”

“I dragged you out? It’s the opposite, my friend.” He reached for his phone. “Look, look—”

But Habibi was already pulling out his own phone—

Both men realized at once.

“NSA.”

“NSA.”

Ayoub’s stomach lurched. He had misjudged his enemy, underestimated its cunning. He hadn’t known what he didn’t know. Just like those Israeli soldiers in Tyre. For a moment, he felt their anguish—

Habibi pushed him away, turned for his Toyota. “Go—”

Two miles overhead, two F-22A Raptor stealth fighters looped, hidden from the ground by the clouds and from Lebanon’s air-defense systems by their radar-defeating composite skins.

The Air Force had initially envisioned the Raptor as a pure air-combat fighter. But aerial dogfights were in short supply these days. The Raptor had a three-hundred-sixty-million-dollar price tag and not enough to do. So the Air Force had modified the jet’s missile bays to carry a pair of thousand-pound bombs. With stealth a priority for this operation, the Raptors were the natural choice.

The jets took off at 0130 from Incirlik, the giant NATO base in southeastern Turkey, on what was pegged as a routine night-training flight. They flew south over the Mediterranean until they were fifty kilometers northwest of Beirut, then east over the Mount Lebanon range, the mountains that separated the coast from the Bekaa Valley. After crossing the mountains, they made a ninety-degree right turn, south again.

The Raptor could reach nearly Mach 2 with its afterburners at full power, but these jets flew at four hundred knots. No need to speed. They had time, and if radar did scrape them they’d get less attention flying slowly.

But neither plane picked up a hint that it had been painted. No surprise. The Raptor’s twenty-year-old technology was no longer unbeatable. China and Russia had developed radar systems powerful enough to pick up its electronic traces. But the F-22A’s magic still worked in Lebanon.

At 0210, the jets reached the target — named Tango United, an unsubtle reference to the reason for the mission. They would have to stay in Lebanese airspace at least thirty minutes. But since Israel had the only jets within two hundred miles remotely capable of engaging an F-22A, having to stay on station a few extra minutes shouldn’t matter.

The Raptors weren’t the only planes the Air Force had sent to Lebanon. As Ayoub left his compound and headed for the warehouse, an Avenger drone followed. The Avenger was the newest drone in the American fleet, a major advance over the Predator and Reaper. Unlike its predecessors, the Avenger was powered with a jet engine. It could fly eighteen hundred miles at twice the speed of the propeller drones, without producing the distinctive mosquito-like buzz that jihadis all over the world now recognized — and ran from.

The Avenger didn’t carry bombs or missiles. But its payload was arguably even more lethal: the newest radar, cameras, and electronics intercept systems in the American arsenal. Now it was flying at four thousand feet, inside a thick cloud layer, so its optical cameras were no use. But it didn’t need them. Nestled in its wings were two infrared cameras sensitive enough to track the heat signature of a groundhog in a burrow, much less a man in a basement. In its tail was a radar system whose software could monitor two hundred different targets simultaneously.

But the Avenger’s most important tracking device was the three-foot dimpled sphere that hung below its composite belly. The ball was an electromagnetic sniffer as powerful as sixty-five cell phone towers. It could be used only when the Avenger was airborne. On the ground it emitted enough radiation to cause permanent damage. It was so precise that it could distinguish the signature of an iPhone from a Samsung Galaxy at a mile away. The Air Force techs who serviced the Avenger called it the Great Ball of Death.

Ayoub thought he’d taken adequate precautions. He thought he was safe.

He had all the protection of an ant under a magnifying glass.

The brave new world of drone warfare had pushed tricky technical issues on the Air Force. Foremost among them was the fact that drones were controlled through encrypted satellite links, while fighter pilots mostly radioed to local bases or E-3 Sentries that were effectively airborne command posts. Called AWACS — Airborne Warning and Control System — the E-3s were modified Boeing 707s instantly recognizable by the thirty-foot radar domes attached to their fuselages. The satellite and radio networks didn’t overlap. As the Air Force integrated drones into its fleet, the need for real-time links between drone controllers and fighter jocks became more obvious by the day. The service was now installing drone workstations in the cabins of five E-3 Sentries, a tricky and expensive proposition. The first retrofit had been finished only a few weeks before to a Sentry that was flying a slow loop one hundred kilometers off the coast of Beirut.

For the first time ever, a drone pilot was actually airborne.

The Avenger had arrived at Ayoub’s house a few minutes before the NSA spoofed the phones belonging to Ayoub and Habibi. The Hezbollah commanders had made one crucial mistake. They’d believed that they could risk leaving the phones on as long as they didn’t use them. They were wrong. Twelve months before, an analyst at Fort Meade had noticed an odd coincidence, a series of phones with sequential numbers that were rarely used but popped up only in houses and offices belonging to Hezbollah’s most senior leaders.

Ayoub and the other Hezbollah commanders used the phones to set up only a handful of meetings in the year that followed. But the connection was obvious once the NSA looked, the code even more so. The Quranic verses were not encrypted, merely correlated with meeting sites.

The broken coms system neatly solved the issue of how to kill Ayoub and Habibi without civilian casualties — a problem acute in the case of Habibi, who lived in a fifteen-story apartment building filled with families and who surrounded himself with women and children in his rare public appearances. As a bonus, the operation would grab the attention of Hezbollah and Quds Force in a way that a simpler bombing would not. At its best, the NSA’s technical wizardry came off as nearly God-like, and not every commander in Baalbek or Tehran contemplated his own mortality with as much detachment as Ayoub. This mission would send the message clearly: Worry less about Allah and more about America, habibis.

Meanwhile, if Ayoub and Habibi no longer used the phones or had switched to a more sophisticated code, they simply wouldn’t leave their houses. No harm.

But the messages did the trick. Eight minutes after Ayoub received his, the Avenger’s sensors spotted a man leaving his house. Seven minutes after that, it picked up two cars leaving the compound. The Avenger then took the only real chance of the operation, dropping below the cloud layer for eleven seconds, long enough to get its optics on the convoy. At Langley and the Pentagon, analysts agreed they were looking at Ayoub. A few seconds later, the Sentry’s coms officer radioed the Raptors.

“Tiger 1, Tiger 2, this is Sorcerer. We have confirmation on Alpha.” Ayoub. “Repeat, Alpha has left his nest.”

“Copy. ETA to our station?”

“Fifteen to eighteen minutes. Two vehicles. Small arms only, no SAMs.”

“Copy. Fifteen to eighteen. We are at eleven thousand, all quiet. Anything to the east?”

A few seconds of silence, then: “Nothing unusual.” The radar dome atop the E-3 could see all the way across Syria. If it wasn’t picking up Syrian jets, the Syrians didn’t have any jets in the air to pick up.

“Good to hear. Any word on Beta?” Habibi.

“Tiger 1, you read my mind. We have just received visual confirm that Beta has left his nest. Four vehicles, approximately fifteen men. ETA thirty-five minutes. Small arms only.” The report came not from the Avenger but from a CIA spotter in Beirut, the only American on the ground in the whole operation. Unlike Baalbek, Beirut was big and dense and easy for watchers.

“Copy. Beta arrival at zero-two-four-five local. Breaking off.”

“Roger that, Tiger 1.”

Then the pilots had nothing to do but wait. Tad Easterman, Tiger 1’s pilot, had eight years’ experience in the Raptor. As a technical challenge for him, this mission was right up there with a stadium overflight. In fact, stadium overflights were trickier. He was flying in circles waiting to drop satellite-guided bombs on a target that he would never see firsthand. Part of him wanted to break the cloud layer so that he’d at least have eyes on the men below. Instead, he focused on his displays and made himself stay as patient as a hunter in a blind.

Fifteen minutes later, right on schedule, Easterman picked up Ayoub’s convoy on his air-to-ground radar and infrared sensors. The F-22A’s downward-facing systems were less advanced than the Avenger’s, but the road was empty. Easterman had no problem spotting the two cars speeding east on the road that led past the warehouse. He watched as the vehicles parked behind the building and men stepped out.

“Sorcerer, Tiger 1 here. I have Alpha at the target. That your read?”

“Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees Alpha has reached your location.”

“Copy. We’ll stand by for Beta and your green. Breaking off.”

Nineteen minutes later, Easterman’s radar picked up four blips speeding toward the warehouse, this time coming from Beirut.

“Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. I have four more vehicles on Route Chicago—” The name the Air Force had assigned to the road that passed the warehouse.

“Roger that, Tiger 1. Avenger agrees. ETA is sixty seconds. Tiger 1 and Tiger 2, you are green as soon as Beta reaches Tango United.”

Back at Incirlik, the briefers had explained that Ayoub and Habibi would recognize what had happened within a few seconds after they met. Thus the Raptors needed to be ready to drop their bombs as soon as the second convoy reached the lot behind the warehouse.

“Copy. Tiger 2?”

“Copy.”

Easterman waited another fifteen seconds, then shoved the yoke forward, aiming to bring his Raptor down to five thousand feet in a decreasing-radius loop around the warehouse. The next few seconds were the only technically tricky part of the mission. He would be in a steep dive when he dropped the bombs in the Raptor’s bays, to minimize their forward momentum relative to the stationary target below.

The bombs could and would guide themselves after release. But unlike missiles, they didn’t have their own engines, so Easterman had a narrow window for the drop. For this mission, the bombs had been preprogrammed with the location of the warehouse. Unless he retargeted them, the software that controlled them wouldn’t let him release them without what Air Force engineers called a “true path” to the target, a route that didn’t violate the laws of physics. Easterman couldn’t do that math, but his on-board computers could. At the same time, the Raptor couldn’t be fully vertical at release, or else the bombs wouldn’t clear their bays. Ideally, he would have the Raptor in a fifty- to fifty-five-degree dive as he dropped the bombs.

Fortunately for Easterman, air-to-air combat required exactly these sorts of maneuvers, and the F-22A handled them as well as any jet that had ever been built. For the next few seconds, Easterman and the Raptor were in perfect harmony. The plane weighed twenty tons and had a forty-four-foot wingspan, yet it anticipated his moves as nimbly as his four-hundred-pound sportbike. Meanwhile, his ground-facing radar showed the convoy slowing, turning left around the warehouse. Another left and they were in the lot behind the building. Men poured out, glowing on his infrared monitor.

“Sorcerer, we are green. Target acquired. Engaging.”

The two Raptors carried four bombs, four thousand pounds of high explosive in all. The two convoys on the ground below totaled six vehicles, all standard civilian, no armor or blast-resistant windows. They were parked in a lot about one hundred twenty feet long and fifty wide. The laws of physics were brutal and simple. The Pentagon planners who simulated the attack reported odds of 99.2 percent that everyone in the target zone would die, whether they were on the ground or still inside a vehicle. As for the 0.8 percent, you don’t want to be that guy, the lead planner said. Unless you like skin grafts.

Easterman reached for a two-inch-high joystick on the console above his right knee, pushed it up and right like he was switching gears on a manual transmission. The heads-up display inside his helmet flashed yellow. The bomb was armed. Then green. The software agreed that the bomb could hit its preprogrammed target. Easterman thumbed the red button on top of the joystick for two seconds. The Raptor tugged slightly as the right missile bay slid open and a thousand-pound bomb released. Easterman pulled the joystick down and left, pushed the button again. His left missile bay opened. The second bomb dropped out. The plane immediately felt lighter and more agile. He leveled out, swung the Raptor north. The hard part, such as it was, was over.

“Sorcerer, this is Tiger 1. GBUs out.”

“Tiger 2 here,” the second Raptor pilot chimed in. “GBUs out.”

The letters stood for Guided Bomb Unit. Each bomb carried a Global Positioning System receiver and a package of software, gyroscopes, and motion sensors. The gyroscopes and sensors predicted the bomb’s direction in real time. The software controlled motorized fins on the bomb’s tail to guide the bomb to the coordinates preprogrammed into the GPS.

The bombs were shockingly accurate. Ninety-six percent of the time, they landed within ten feet of their target coordinates. Even in crowded cities, they had sharply reduced civilian casualties. Tonight civilians weren’t an issue. No one lived within a quarter mile of the warehouse. A bomb dropped from an aircraft in level flight required eighteen seconds to fall five thousand feet. But these bombs had a head start, because the Raptor had released them in a dive. Easterman dropped them almost exactly as Ayoub and Habibi realized the trap. They had seven seconds of warning.

Theoretically, the men on the ground might have survived if they had reacted immediately. A fit man could sprint as far as fifty meters in seven seconds, enough under ideal circumstances to escape the worst of the blast wave. But in the real world almost no one had the situational awareness to take off at a full run with no warning. And the bigger the group, the more time required for the warning to spread and men to get out of each other’s way.

Ayoub had time to hear a high whistle, and then another and another. The men around him looked at one another, processed the danger, scattered, running in every direction, a starburst pattern, an uncanny echo of the blast wave that was about to hit. Ayoub made for the lemon grove, hoping somehow that he’d find safety in the burned stumps—

As they’d been programmed to do, the bombs landed in a one-hundred-twenty-degree arc centered on the back door of the warehouse. The Pentagon’s simulators had predicted that configuration would produce maximum lethality. It did. Four superheated overpressure waves tore through the parking lot, each moving faster than the speed of sound, powerful enough to tear through metal and glass, hot enough to incinerate anything they touched. Seventeen of the eighteen men in the parking lot died instantly, twelve cut into pieces barely recognizable as human. Ayoub ran farther and faster than anyone else. The blast picked him up, tore the skin off his back, threw him twenty-five feet. For just a moment, he thought he’d survived. He might have, too, if not for a freakish bit of bad luck. He landed headfirst on a stump and cracked his neck. A million buzzing honeybees filled his brain and then, Inshallah—

Easterman wished he could check the damage for himself. But the briefers at Incirlik had said in no uncertain terms they wanted the Raptors out of Lebanese airspace as soon as possible after the mission was done. So he and Tiger 2 set a course northwest at twenty-five thousand feet, Mach 0.98. No sonic booms tonight, please.

The after-action survey came from the Avenger. The drone descended to two thousand feet, below the cloud layer, for a brief live feed of the carnage below. Its cameras picked up only six bodies, but the fact that the others had vanished didn’t surprise anyone. Five of the six vehicles in the convoy were pulverized past recognition, and the back half of the warehouse had collapsed. After two quick passes over the site, the drone pulled back to five thousand feet and made another loop, this one wider. Anyone who had escaped would have to be on foot or hiding inside the warehouse, leaving an obvious signature on radar or the infrared cameras. But the Avenger found nothing. The analysts and drone pilot agreed. Eighteen enemy killed in action, no wounded, no survivors, no friendly casualties. Success.

The President didn’t watch the mission. He was eating dinner with his wife and kids. He wanted the illusion of normalcy for at least a few minutes. The White House chef seemed to have caught his mood. Tonight’s meal was spaghetti and meatballs with a simple tossed salad.

The President was just tucking into his second meatball when his steward stepped into the dining room, phone in hand. “Sir. I have Ms. Green.”

“Donna.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir.”

“I asked you to.” He had told her to call as soon as the bombs hit.

“It’s done. We count eighteen red KIA. Including Ayoub and Habibi. No survivors.”

“Anything I need to worry about?”

“No, sir. The Raptors are en route to Incirlik.”

“And you’re sure we got them.”

“Unless they had a teleporter.”

In the past, these missions had knotted the President’s stomach. He didn’t love playing judge and jury. He wanted to believe the best about his enemies, that they might disagree with America’s intentions but that they shared the same morals and values.

Not tonight. Green had briefed him on Ayoub’s background, how he’d killed the IDF soldiers in 2006. No surprise the man was happy to do Tehran’s foul bidding, destroy a jet filled with innocent people from a dozen different countries. The world was better off without him.

“Good. Please congratulate the team on my behalf. All the way down.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

His steward took the phone and vanished.

“Everything okay?” his wife said. Dinner was supposed to be a bubble for her, too.

“Sorry about that.”

“No calls at dinner, Daddy,” his daughter said.

“You’re right.”

The President looked around the table at his family and, not for the first time, considered how lucky he was.

More than lucky. Blessed.

16 FOUR DAYS…

Israel and Jordan had signed a peace treaty in 1994, making Jordan the second Arab state to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But the end of war didn’t make the countries the best of friends. Israel still closed its borders to millions of Palestinian refugees that Jordan desperately wanted to send back to Israel. And Israel knew that Jordan’s rulers had agreed to peace for practical reasons rather than any love for the concept of a Jewish state.

The Wadi Araba border station between the Jordanian resort town of Aqaba and its Israeli counterpart Eilat reflected that wariness. Hundreds of tourists crossed each day, many on their way from Eilat to Petra, the ancient rock city in the Jordanian desert that had provided the spectacular backdrop for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But neither side allowed vehicles registered in the opposite country on its roads. To cross, tourists had to trudge across hundreds of meters of empty blacktop hemmed in by high fences as bored soldiers watched. The scene was half Checkpoint Charlie, half baggage claim. The stations themselves were blocky concrete buildings, ugly and utilitarian, though the Jordanian side included a souvenir shop for any traveler who had somehow escaped Petra with a few dinars.

Now Wells walked past the hookahs inside the shop’s dusty windows and handed his passport to the final border guard. After his troubles in Russia, part of him expected another hassle. But the guard merely nodded and handed back his passport. Wells stepped past a white-lettered blue sign that read “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Good Bye,” the broken English oddly pleasant, and entered the no-man’s-land.

He had the walk west to himself. The checkpoint had just opened.Everyone else was heading the other direction, looking forward to a day among the ruins. Wells felt a little like Petra himself, battered and eroded but still standing.

The day before, in Lubyanka, a splash of cold water had woken him. He opened his eyes to find his interrogator smirking, a bucket in her hand. “Wake up, pretty. It’s nearly two.”

So she’d let him sleep. A kindness Wells hadn’t expected, and the reason he felt halfway human. Though he realized he was famished. He hadn’t eaten properly since the dinner at Buvchenko’s mansion the night before last. Too bad he wouldn’t have a chance at those pelmeni again.

She threw him his jeans and shirt and boxers and stood in the doorway as he pulled on his clothes. Let her look. Let her do whatever she wanted, as long as she let him go.

“So many scars,” she said.

Mostly on his back, where the surgeons had saved him after Omar Khadri shot him. He hadn’t thought of Khadri in a long time. The living left the dead behind. For a while.

“Want to touch them?”

“Broken bones, too. I see where they’ve healed. Though they never fully heal, do they?”

Her fortune-cookie psychoanalysis irritated him. “I assume you’re not getting me dressed to leave me in here.”

“Domodedovo.”

Again. “Didn’t think that word could sound so good.”

On the ride to the airport she told him that Duto had backed his story, and the FSB had decided keeping him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. “I told him you’d missed somehow your flight yesterday,” she said, the misplaced word making her sound more Russian than she had the night before. “That you’d taken sick and we brought you to the hospital, but you felt much better now. He asked you to buy a ticket to Amman. There’s a flight this afternoon, a nonstop.”

Amman. Jordan. Why? But Wells didn’t bother to ask. Duto would never have told this woman. Wells wondered if the United States and Iran had moved closer to war in the last day and a half, or if, perhaps, Duto or Shafer had made progress. By the time he reached Amman, the sun would be down. Another day wasted. Three lost in Russia. Before that, two in Saudi Arabia. By the morning, they would be less than one hundred hours from the President’s deadline—

Wells stopped himself. Obsessing over the ticking clock wouldn’t help. Besides, maybe Shafer had found the uranium already. Wells could imagine Shafer’s glee. Yeah, I just Googled “HEU where to buy” and there it was.

Domodedovo was déjà vu all over again, the same business travelers and rich kids, the same blue-uniformed paramilitaries giving Wells the stink-eye. Wells bought a ticket on Royal Jordanian and his interrogator led him to a VIP line at the exit station. After a ten-second conversation and a flashed badge, the border guard nodded and stamped Wells’s passport.

They sat in silence at the gate until boarding began.

“Before you go, want to tell me the truth? Why you were here?”

“Looking for a pony.”

“Stand.”

He did. She reached between his legs, wrapped her fingers around his crotch, squeezed. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to hurt or arouse him. Maybe both. “You’re still in my country. Be polite.”

“Bad touching.” Wells peeled off her hand.

“You know, some of us wanted to kill you. Dump you in the forest like those Poles.” The Katyn Wood massacre. In 1940, on Stalin’s orders, the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, had executed thousands of defenseless Polish prisoners of war.

“No man, no problem,” Wells said. One of Stalin’s most famous sayings: Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.

“I told them, no, a little girl like you, not even worth the bullet.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Wells turned away.

She reached for his shoulder, twisted him toward her, hissed in his ear.

“Don’t come back to Russia, Mr. Wells.”

In Amman, he called Duto from a fresh prepaid mobile.

“Fun trip?”

Wells didn’t curse much, but he was sorely tempted. “The best.”

“I don’t suppose I get any thanks for bailing you out.”

Now he did curse, potently and in Arabic.

“Don’t know what that means, but I’m guessing Miss you sweetheart. Sounds like you didn’t suffer any permanent damage.”

Wells didn’t see any reason to answer.

“Get anything?” Duto said after a few seconds.

“Bumped into my buddy from Istanbul. We had a nice chat. She’s sweet as ever.”

“How about a photo?”

“Maybe.” Wells wondered if Nemkov, the narcotics colonel, had sent the surveillance shots of Salome from the hotel. He’d check as soon as he could find a semi-safe Internet connection. A photo would get them Salome’s real name and new paths to chase.

“What does maybe mean?”

“It means maybe.”

“Your friend have anything to say?”

“Nothing we didn’t know.” Aside from the threat to his family. “Heather and Evan—”

“They’re fine.”

Wells felt a weight real as a barbell come off his shoulders. “Thank you.”

“Thank Robin.” Meaning Shafer.

“Tell me we’re making progress, I’m in Jordan for a reason.”

“Just getting to that. Someone wants to meet you at the Wadi Araba border crossing. That’s down in Aqaba, by the Red Sea. The Israeli side. Eight a.m. tomorrow. He’s not well, so don’t make him wait.”

Meaning Rudi, Duto’s old friend, the former chief of the Mossad. It was now past 9 p.m. in Amman, and Aqaba was several hours south. Another long night.

“You know what he has?”

“No. But I know we have something to ask him, too. Call Robin. He’ll explain.”

“Anything else?”

“I think that’s it.”

Wells hung up without saying good-bye and called Shafer.

“Your Audi 5000?”

Shafer was showing his age. Audi hadn’t made that model in decades.

“They told me not to come back to Mother Russia, and I think that’s advice I’m going to take.”

“You’ll always have your memories.”

Wells could only laugh.

“I saw your favorite hoops player, by the way. And his mommy. They’re fine. Staying put, and they seem safe.”

“Vinny told me. He also told me you had something for me.”

“You know who you’re meeting tomorrow?”

“I think so.”

“Ask him what he knows about a deal his people made a few years back to bring in stuff from South Africa.”

“I assume we’re talking about the stuff we’ve been looking for.”

“No, we’re talking about contraband Viagra,” Shafer said.

“Point taken. Why South Africa?”

“I think closed programs may be our best bet, and they got the furthest.”

Wells couldn’t argue the logic. “You know how much?”

“I have on good authority it was just over fifteen kilos. Fifteen point three, to be exact. The guy on the RSA side was named Rand Witwans.”

“I’ll ask.”

“Stay cool.”

“As a cucumber.”

The only cabbie in all of Amman willing to take Wells to Aqaba in the dark had a lazy eye and a habit of steering with his knees. The ride on the Desert Highway proved more frightening than the previous night in Lubyanka. Still, they arrived in Aqaba intact a little past midnight. Despite the lateness of the hour, the town bustled with European and Arab tourists. Wells found an Internet café, emailed Evan and Heather asking for patience. Then he logged on to the account he’d given Nemkov.

There it was.

A photo of Salome and her bodyguard, sent from a Yahoo account in the name of Roger Bishop, Wells’s own pseudonym. The quality was better than Wells expected, Salome’s face clear. Nemkov had cropped it so it couldn’t be directly identified as having come from the hotel, but still he’d taken an enormous risk. I am not sure why but I trust you, the message said. Volgograd hadn’t been a dead end after all. Wells would show the photo to Rudi in the morning. The Mossad and the other Israeli security services were tiny by American standards. If Salome had been part of them, Rudi would know her.

Now Wells walked through the empty space where Israel met Jordan, toward two men who stood at the gate at the edge of the Israeli border station. They could have been a diorama representing the stages of life, the first a soldier, young and strapping, the second withered, barely holding himself upright. As Wells walked close, the second man stepped into the neutral zone, extended a dry hand to Wells.

“Rudi. You’re a legend.” In truth, Wells knew very little about Ari Rudin or the Mossad. He’d never operated in Israel.

“Save it. I’m not dead.” Rudi brought a hand to his mouth, began the impossible process of clearing his throat. “Yet. Since we’re such friends, let me ask you a question. How would you spend your last few weeks? Family? Skydiving? Lying on the beach looking at the beautiful girls you’ll never see in the afterlife? Apologizing for your sins?”

Wells had never heard the question posed quite so baldly. The right answer had to be family, he supposed, even if he was no longer sure who his family was. “Family, sure.”

“Everyone says that. You know what you wind up doing? Nothing. Watching TV. Grunting on the toilet like a monkey because the pills make it impossible to… Bitching at your wife about dinner, the lights she left on, the electric bill, everything, and really what it’s about is you’re dying. All of it. Every last sentence and thought and breath. Family.”

“Tell me how you really feel, Rudi. I’m tired of the sugarcoating.”

Rudi patted his arm. “When your time comes, just hope it’s a bullet in the back of the head. Nice and easy. Meanwhile, I’m wasting time, and we’re both short on that. Tell me, where have you been?”

“Russia. And Saudi.” Duto had arranged this meeting, so Wells saw no reason to lie.

“Find anything?”

“Only that a lot of people don’t like me.”

Rudi laughed. He sounded like he was chewing gravel. “An honorary Jew. You know, we think the Americans are going to invade. Especially after the Bekaa.”

Wells had seen the reports at his hotel in Aqaba. A bomb had killed Hezbollah’s top general. No survivors, no civilian casualties. Sayyed Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, had issued a statement promising revenge on the United States. The Americans have again proven their devilry. Just as they attacked our Iranian cousins last week, so do they turn their weapons on us. We will not be intimidated. We remain the faithful servants of Allah, and we will respond at the time and place of His choosing.

“Hezbollah isn’t even blaming us,” Rudi said. “Unusual for them. If they have more of those SA-24s, I wouldn’t want to be on an American plane anywhere within ten thousand kilometers of here.” His smile revealed brown misshapen teeth. “Though I guess it doesn’t matter so much for me.”

Wells liked this tough dying Jew. “War. Off one kilo of HEU.”

“You’re the American, not me. But it feels like a lot of things coming together. So many reasons to be angry with Iran. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. You have considered that letting it happen would be best, maybe? A new regime.”

“Not my choice.”

“Of course. You can’t be bothered with these big thoughts.”

“Your people say they expect a war,” Wells said. “Seen any casualty estimates?”

“A few thousand dead—”

But Rudi’s voice faded, as if he found the argument too tiring to continue. The sun peeked out from behind the brown mountains east of the checkpoint. Rudi lifted his head like a basilisk. “Sunshine on my face. That I’ll miss.”

“Vinny said—”

“I tried to answer his questions.” Rudi went silent. Wells thought he might explain why he was helping, even at the risk of betraying Israel. But he said only, “I have a few names. I’m not sure any of them are right. Maybe I’m not good at this anymore.”

Wells handed him the photo of Salome he’d printed. “Is she one of them?”

“You’re sure this is her?”

Wells nodded.

Rudi’s face tightened like the cancer had clenched him. He balled up the paper, threw it down on the blacktop. “If I’m this stupid, I might as well be dead already.”

“You know her?” A break. At last. For the first time since he’d seen Glenn Mason in Istanbul, Wells was doing more than groping blindly in the dark.

“I didn’t think of her, because she was never Mossad. Name is Adina Leffetz. Adina means ‘gentle.’”

“She goes by Salome now.”

“Never spoken to her, but she worked for a right-winger in the Knesset who takes money from your friend Duberman. Daniel Raban. Raban’s on the Defense Committee, which means he gets regular briefings from the Mossad.”

“Worked? Or works?”

“I haven’t heard her name come up for a few years, so I doubt she still works for him. But Raban’s dumb enough to keep talking to her even if she isn’t on his staff anymore.”

Another mystery solved. Salome hadn’t needed a source at Langley giving her information, as Wells and Shafer had always assumed. The CIA and Mossad worked closely on Iran, so she would have heard plenty through Raban. Of course, Wells still couldn’t figure out how she’d found Mason, but that question was less important.

Rudi reached down, picked up the crumpled-up photo, unfolded it. “Lot of ifs. You’re sure that’s her.”

“Yes. Can you get me her mobile number? An email?”

Rudi fell silent as an Israeli fighter jet passed northeast, tracing the line of the border.

“Number, yes. But I’m not going to find her for you. That you have to do yourself.”

“Thank you.” Wells paused. “I have one more question. Not about her.”

“What, then?” Rudi looked exhausted, with Wells and himself. Wells reminded himself the man had spent his whole life stealing other people’s secrets while keeping his own. Trading information was fine, but in this case Wells had nothing to give. Yet another reason Rudi must find this conversation painful.

“You remember, in the nineties, a deal where the South Africans transferred all their highly enriched uranium to you? Gave it or sold it, I’m not sure which.”

Rudi nodded. “This was ’90, maybe ’91. The Afrikaners knew they couldn’t hold on much longer. They just wanted to be rid of the stuff. The Defense Minister brought us in, asked us if we saw any reason not to take it. We said no.”

“You know how much it was?”

Rudi shook his head. “Not much. Maybe enough for one bomb. It wasn’t like we needed it. We didn’t even pay for it.”

The story matched what Shafer had said. Another dead end.

“But the deal did have one odd bit,” Rudi said. “Probably why I remember it after all this time. The South Africans insisted on bringing us the stuff themselves. In fact, one of their guys literally flew the stuff up in a shielded trunk on a commercial jet. HEU, you know, it’s not that dangerous.”

“Why do it that way?”

“If they gave us a reason, I wasn’t close enough to hear. My impression was that the South Africans wanted the stuff to disappear quietly, and we were fine with that.”

“Can you find out exactly who brought it, not who did the deal, but who actually brought it, and how much he brought? I know it’s a long time ago—”

Rudi coughed, lightly, then harder. Harder. His eyes bulged and his veins strained at his throat. Finally, he opened his mouth and spat a peach pit of phlegm and blood, beige and brown and crimson, liquid and fibrous. As rich and repulsive as an alien life-form that demanded to be vaporized by a plasma rifle.

Rudi raised his hands like a magician: See what I’ve given you?

“The ladies must love that.”

Rudi’s eyes were wide with hate. Wells wasn’t sure if it was meant for him, or the world. “I’ll try to get you what you ask. It may take a day or two. But we all have so much time.”

Rudi opened the gate, stepped in. Wells wasn’t sure whether to follow.

“You plan to stay out there?” Rudi said.

“I didn’t know if Israel would have me.”

“I’ll take you to Taba—” The station on Israel’s border with Egypt, about ten kilometers south of this one. “Walk you through with no stamps on our side. What you do from there is up to you. I hear you get on fine in Arabic countries. But I want no record you were here. This dies with me.”

“Shokran,” Wells murmured. The Arabic word for “thank you.”

“Shokran yourself.”

On the way to Taba, Rudi made three quick phone calls. When he was done, he scribbled an Israeli phone number and an email address on a notepad and pushed it at Wells without explanation.

“The email is strong, the phone not so much,” Rudi said.

“Hers?”

“Smart boy.”

“You ever meet Ellis Shafer, Rudi?”

Rudi shook his head.

“You two would get along.”

Rudi marched him to the Taba exit gate. In place of good-bye, his last words were: Please don’t try to come back this way after I’ve left. It won’t go well.

Getting into Egypt wasn’t a problem. The border guard was far more concerned with making sure that Wells had the proper entry fee than his lack of an Israeli exit stamp. Wells bought yet another fresh phone, called Shafer.

“I’ll call you back.”

Thirty seconds later, Wells’s new phone buzzed, another number. Burner to burner. “Go,” Shafer said.

“First, Vinny’s friend confirms what you said about the stuff. Enough for one bomb. He says there was one odd part. Whoever delivered it insisted on bringing it in person. As in, flying up with it.”

“Like in an icebox? A kidney to transplant.”

“He didn’t have details, but yes, more or less.”

“He know who flew it up?”

“He didn’t have a name. I asked.”

“Even before he comes back with an answer, I think you should go down there, talk to Witwans.”

“Every time we guess wrong, we lose another two days.”

“You have a better idea?”

“I have the woman. Her real name.” Wells hesitated, decided that if the NSA was already up and listening on these new phones they had less than no chance. “Adina Leffetz. A-D-I-N-A—”

“Nice Jewish girl.”

“L-E-F-F-E-T-Z. She worked for an Israeli MP named Raban. Who was in the pocket of our friend in HK.”

“You’re sure?”

“I showed Vinny’s friend her picture. He knew right away.”

“You did good, John. I’ll find her.”

“I want to shake her. Make her play defense.”

A pause.

“That business or pleasure?”

Sometimes Wells wondered if Shafer was psychic. Despite everything, Wells couldn’t stop remembering Salome’s hand on him in that hotel bathroom. He hated her, but even hate meant something. “You have anything better?”

“I made my suggestion. South for the winter.”

“I’ll consider it. Anything else I should know?”

“Just that our friend from Pennsylvania burned his last bridge with POTUS. More than burned. Nuked. We’ll need something airtight to get another audience over there.”

Wells wanted to ask Shafer what he meant, ask about the Bekaa, too. But even on a new burner three minutes was too long. And the men around him were giving him odd looks. With his perfect Arabic, Wells could pass for Jordanian or maybe even Egyptian under the right circumstances, but right now he was whispering in English. “I gotta go.”

Wells hung up, considered his next move. Cairo. A five-hour drive west from Taba. Cabbies were happy to make the trip. From Cairo International, he could be in Western Europe in four hours or South Africa in eight. He could hide in Cairo, too. He had before. The city had no shortage of hostels and one-star hotels that were happy to take cash and not picky about identification. Worst case, he could sleep on the street.

Meantime, Wells decided to press his luck. He found another Internet kiosk. Set up another dummy email account. She could probably trace it here, but by the time she did, Wells would be gone.

He typed: Adina. John Wells here. You weren’t nice to me in Volgograd but I’m the forgiving sort. He reread the last sentence. No. Less whiny, more vaguely menacing. He deleted it, replaced it with—

Sorry you had to run in Volgograd, but now that I know how to find you I look forward to seeing you soon. Maybe I’ll even drop by.

He looked it over. Just so. Send.

17

The job was babysitting, and Amos Frankel hated it.

Frankel was Salome’s bodyguard, the man who’d drawn on Wells in Volgograd. He’d never been to South Africa before. If he wanted lions and elephants and giraffes, he would go to the zoo. Right now he belonged at Salome’s side, not a twelve-hour plane ride away. He’d told her so. She disagreed.

For that matter, he wished she had let him shoot Wells in Volgograd. A simple trigger squeeze. A few kilograms of pressure with his index finger. Nothing Wells could have done. They could have left the body in the hotel, been gone from Russia in two hours. Buvchenko had a jet at the airport. But Salome wouldn’t let him. Duberman didn’t want them to kill Wells, and anyway the drugs they’d planted would destroy him, she said. By the time the Russians are finished with him, he’ll wish he was dead.

Frankel believed Salome had other reasons, ones she wouldn’t admit. He’d seen how they looked at each other in Volgograd. Alpha males provoked her. Years before, Frankel had caught her staring at a photo of Duberman’s supermodel wife Orli in a bikini. Frankel wondered sometimes if Salome had proposed this whole scheme to impress Duberman. She may be the stuff of a million slack-jawed teenage fantasies, Aaron, but can she start a war for you?

Lust and love and lust chasing each other in a circle without end, as Frankel watched the follies from afar. A decade before, he’d skidded his motorcycle onto gravel to avoid a stump-tailed dog, sliding off the blacktop at one hundred thirty kilometers an hour. He’d broken his jaw and his hip. Worse, the stones had scraped his legs and face past raw. The pain from the accident and the botched surgeries afterward unwound his interest in sex. He hadn’t been with a woman since. He saw himself as almost a eunuch now, emotionally if not physically.

He loved Salome, but without heat. He felt at once close to her and a million kilometers away, like the childhood friend of a famous actor. He knew what drove her, or thought he did. Yet what she’d achieved shocked him. Her intensity and focus unnerved him. They’d grown up together in the Tel Aviv suburbs. After the accident and the surgeries, she had come to his hospital bed and sat with him in silence. By an alchemy even Frankel did not fully understand, he belonged to her now.

Frankel didn’t know if she understood his feelings for her. He didn’t plan to ask, not ever. When she’d asked for his help with this scheme, he’d figured that they wouldn’t last long. The CIA or Mossad would discover their plans. But somehow they’d survived long enough for Frankel to imagine that they might succeed. He tried not to think what Salome might become then.

First they had to make sure that Wells didn’t blow up their plan at one minute to midnight. The man had escaped the trap Salome had set in Volgograd. Talked his way out of Lubyanka. He was harder to kill than a Negev spider. And Salome was worried that he’d heard about Rand Witwans. They might have found him, she said. She didn’t explain how she knew.

Can’t we trust Witwans to be quiet? Frankel said.

He’s a whipped old man. We can’t trust him with anything. He drinks.

Why don’t I just kill him, then?

If I let you, you’d kill everyone in sight, Amos.

Only the ones who deserve it.

Long as he’s alive, no one cares about him. If he dies suddenly, the CIA and the Mossad will notice.

What about Wells? What if he comes for you?

I can handle Wells.

So Frankel took an overnight flight from Istanbul to Johannesburg and drove to the Free State province, the rural heart of South Africa, where Witwans had an estate.

Now Frankel arrived at the man’s front gate, two meters of wrought iron set between two brick pillars. “Witwans Manor,” a bronze plaque announced. Atop a hill behind the gate was a tall brick house that wouldn’t have been out of place in the fanciest London suburbs, set on a manicured lawn where two beautiful brown horses munched grass. In truth, the Free State was too dry for such greenery. The estate radiated a dedication to appearance at any cost. Frankel hated it on sight. He pressed the gate buzzer, rang it long and hard. Nothing happened. He rang again, this time gluing his finger to the buzzer.

His patience was gone by the time Witwans walked down the driveway, a shotgun slung over his shoulder, a German shepherd trotting beside him. The gates swung about a half meter and Witwans stood between them. Up close Frankel could see that the dog and the weapon were both more annoyance than threat. Witwans was a gnarled old man, mid-seventies at least, with a drinker’s red nose.

Frankel stepped out of his rented SUV, keeping both hands visible. “Rand.”

“Who are you?”

“From Natalie.” Natalie was the name Salome used with Witwans. “She told you I’d be coming.” A moment later, the gates swung open. Had Witwans really been too frightened or stupid to remember? Frankel saw why Salome had sent him here.

They sat on Witwans’s back porch, drinking coffee, eating fresh blueberries and clotted cream. He’s old-style Afrikaans, Salome had told Frankel. Thinks the natives exist to serve him. Even worse, thinks they want to. Don’t talk politics with him or you’ll throw up. Just ask him what I told you and put the taps on his phone and wait.

Babysitting.

“So what’s happened?”

Witwans raised the porcelain cup to his lips with a shaking hand. “I’ve told Natalie all this. One call from my old friend Joost. Two days ago. Wish I’d never mentioned it. Natalie asked me to call if anything seems wrong, so I called. I didn’t tell her to send you. I take care of myself.”

As far as Frankel could see, all Witwans could take care of was a bottle of scotch. “Since Joost called, has anything out of the ordinary happened?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No calls from the police.”

“Of course not.”

“Has anyone come around? The electrician. The plumber—”

“The plumbing’s fine.”

“You know what I mean. Has anyone shown up who shouldn’t be here?”

“Only you.”

Frankel reached out, squeezed Witwans’s biceps. He forced himself to be gentle, though he wanted to tear the old man’s arm clean off.

“You haven’t told anyone about Natalie? Or what you sold her?”

“Never, never.”

“Your children.”

“You think I want them mixed up in this? You know, Natalie told me she’d burn all this down if I did. With me inside.”

If the tremor in his voice was any indication, the threat had stuck.

“John Wells?”

“Who?” Witwans’s face registered genuine surprise.

“And there’s no way anyone could know what you’d done?”

“No. I told Natalie when she bought the stuff. We produced fifteen-point-three kilos, I brought the Israelis fourteen, stored the difference here. One HEU ingot, thirteen hundred grams in all. It was in a safe downstairs. I destroyed the records. Back then, everything was paper. No computers. There were three sets of files, two with us, one at the Defense Ministry. I took them all, burned them. No way for anyone on either side to know.” Witwans rubbed his hands together, gone like this.

“No one asked questions about you destroying the files.”

Nobody wanted anything to do with them. They were afraid the blacks would take revenge on all of us in the secret services.”

“You’re sure there were only three copies.”

“I suppose it’s possible the Defense Ministry made another set, they’re in an archive somewhere. But I don’t think so. And all the years the blacks have been in power, no one’s ever asked me about the program. Until Natalie. You see?”

“Sure.”

Though Frankel saw only that Witwans was lucky. If Frankel had been in charge instead of Salome, he would have put a round in the man and sent him and his story to the grave.

“She seems to have put what I sold her to good use.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t say another word about that. Not even dream about it.”

“Of course. Now what? You go back to Natalie, tell her everything is fine.”

“Oh no, Rand. I’ve come all this way. I’m staying.”

“No need — I promise—”

Frankel shook his head and Witwans trailed off.

“That’s fine, then.” Trying to play the country squire. “I have plenty of room.”

“What about weapons? Beyond your shotgun.” Because he’d flown commercial, Frankel had needed to leave his pistol in Istanbul.

“Of course. A whole cabinet, pistols, rifles. Out here you can’t be too careful.”

For the first time since he’d arrived in South Africa, Frankel felt a smile crease his lips.

18

Hey Adina!

The subject line was strangely cheery. But the sender’s name was what froze her.

John Wells.

Some part of Salome had known this moment was coming. Even wanted it, maybe. She clicked the email open.

She had come to Bucharest the night before, from Istanbul, after Buvchenko told her that the FSB had let Wells go. The Romanian capital was unpleasant at the best of times. In winter, when the sidewalks and buildings and sky blended into the same pallid gray, the city induced despair and an overwhelming desire to flee to Brazil.

But Bucharest also had some of the best hackers around. So Salome had a safe house here, occupied by a young man named Igor. He wore cheap leather jackets and heavy cologne that didn’t hide his disinterest in showering. Online, where he spent most of his life, he called himself IbalL.

“Didn’t expect to see you again,” he said over his shoulder as she walked in. She didn’t need to wonder how he knew who she was. No one else came here. In her experience, hackers were either compulsively neat or crazily messy. Igor was the latter. Like he’d moved his consciousness onto the Internet already and no longer cared about the space his body occupied. Empty Red Bull cans and pizza boxes covered the scuffed wood floor. Dozens of partly disassembled laptops filled the couch and the coffee table. Generations of PlayStations, Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis occupied the kitchen. Amazingly enough, the place was bug-free. Igor had sprayed it a few months before with an insecticide banned everywhere in the world except Romania and Africa.

“I missed you,” Salome said.

“I think one day you come to kill me.”

“Never.”

“No. You send your boyfriend.” What Igor called Frankel.

Good call. She stood behind him, but he didn’t look up. He was simultaneously playing online poker, Gchatting with four different people, and on the third and highest-resolution screen watching truly foul pornography.

“Is that a dog?”

“Be glad it’s not a horse.”

“Off, Igor.” He hated when she used his real name. “And get out.”

“I’m in a tournament—”

“A tournament—”

“Poker.” He pointed at the first monitor. “See, a horse.” Indeed, a stallion was now being led onto the third screen. “Always a horse sooner or later.”

Salome kept a pistol and silencer in a safe in the apartment’s bedroom. She was tempted to blow out the monitors and the boy-man sitting at them. Maybe the fanatics were right. Maybe the modern world was so mired in sin that God needed to wipe it away, start anew. “Igor—”

“Fine.” He flicked off the screens. She knew he didn’t want to make her too angry. He liked her, or at least liked the jobs she offered, more interesting than credit-card scams. He dragged himself up. He spent so much time on his rear and so little on his feet that he sometimes seemed unacquainted with gravity, his bones brittle as needles.

“Not far. I may need you.”

He nodded.

“If I want to get online—”

“They’re all clean. Safe to use, I mean. I wouldn’t touch the one in the bathroom.”

“Lovely. Phones?”

He walked into the kitchen, came back with three. “These.”

She opened the windows as he left. The Bucharest air wasn’t great, but at least it didn’t coat her mouth like the inside of a paint can.

Thirty hours before, she had left Volgograd assuming she was done with Wells. But even before Buvchenko’s private jet landed at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, she’d learned she was wrong. She and Buvchenko went to their backup plan, convincing the FSB to pick Wells up. She’d much preferred the local police. Buvchenko had told her the plan couldn’t fail. When they find the heroin—he drew a hand across his throat.

What about a bribe?

Buvchenko shook his head. This colonel, he’s the only clean police officer in all of Russia.

But somehow Wells had gotten out, and they were stuck with the FSB, which acted solely in its own interest. She wasn’t sure how the FSB would view Wells. But she imagined it would keep him at least a couple days while it sorted him out.

And from what she saw when she landed in Istanbul, Wells was very short on time. Though the city was fifteen hundred kilometers from the Iranian border, the Turkish police and army were gearing up for war. Soldiers stood at the terminal doors, their faces hard and ready. Five-ton army trucks were lined up along the runway fence and outside the airport’s main gate. Plainclothes police officers looked over every vehicle coming in and out.

The security made sense. Turkey was run by conservative Sunni Muslims who supported the rebels in Syria and didn’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. The Turkish government was letting the United States use its mountainous eastern border with Iran as a base for the invasion. It had every reason to fear that Tehran would respond with terrorist attacks.

Salome’s safe house was in the city’s wealthy Nisantasi District. By the time she and Frankel reached it, the winter sun had slid behind the luxury apartment buildings that dominated the area’s narrow streets. At this hour, shoppers and commuters should have filled the sidewalks. Instead, they were nearly empty. A neighborhood full of Western luxury brands was a ripe target for a Hezbollah bomb.

“They think it’s coming,” Frankel said.

“Looks that way.”

“Let’s hope they’re right.”

Frankel had never before expressed an opinion about what they were doing. “Now you tell me,” Salome said.

He smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “Everyone loves a good war.”

The apartment was a big two-bedroom with a view that stretched over central Istanbul from the Bosphorus Bridge to Topkapi Palace. All the wealth of a country in these blocks. Frankel brought up her bags and was about to leave when her phone buzzed.

Rand Witwans.

“Natalie.” His voice slurred, a day of drinks clogging his tongue.

Frankel opened the door to leave. She shook her head. She was sure Witwans would have unpleasant news. She was right. He didn’t want to tell her, but ten minutes later she had teased the story out of him. Ellis Shafer had found his name from a man in Nevada, some other South African fossil named Joost. Then Joost called Witwans like the tattletale he was. Playing all sides. Why couldn’t the old Afrikaners have the good sense to die?

“Don’t worry about it,” she said when he finished. Keeping him calm was her first priority. “What does he know about the program?”

“That I ran it. Nothing more.”

“Then you’ll be fine. And has anyone contacted you?”

“Besides Joost?”

“Yes. Called or come to the house.”

“The manor?” Even now he insisted on playing a country gentleman. “No.”

She had questions, but she wasn’t asking them over the phone. “I’m going to send someone to you.”

“There’s no need, Natalie.”

“Would you rather I come myself?” They both knew she terrified him. She clicked off, checked schedules. Turkish Airlines had an overnight flight to Johannesburg that left in a few hours. A lucky break. Frankel wanted to stay with her, as she knew he would, but she ignored his objection. She told him he was not to kill Witwans. He was there to watch the man, keep him from calling the police or doing anything dumb. If the police came, Frankel was to leave Witwans to them. Killing him would raise a red flag that even the CIA couldn’t ignore.

If Wells showed up, on the other hand…

Her mood darkened after Frankel left. She sat in bed, watching Italian game shows, big-breasted hostesses leering at the contestants. They didn’t soothe her. She was conscious of a creeping feeling that she pretended she didn’t recognize. The hole. Strange that her brain’s sickness began with physical symptoms. Her peripheral vision furred, as if the world’s edges were coming apart.

She shouldn’t be depressed right now. Excited. Or fearful that the tide was turning. Not depressed. All the years of scheming and hiding and lying were almost over. But, of course, the end of the mission was the problem. If she lost, she knew what would happen. A bullet to the temple, a needle in her arm. The prospect scared her only theoretically. But what if she won? What would replace the mad beauty of this double-triple-quadruple life? Nothing. She should have asked Wells in Volgograd how he walked away when his missions were done.

Of course, Wells had his own problems. No doubt the FSB interrogators were working him over at this moment. She imagined him enduring his punishment, blaming her, knowing that she had put him there. Would he ask for mercy if she came to Lubyanka? She would bet everything she had that he wasn’t the begging type.

Thinking of him chased the black from her mind. She settled back in her bed, turned off the television, closed her eyes, and slept.

The buzzing of her phone woke her. In her confusion, she imagined that Wells was calling. But the number was Israeli and included three eights, the code that meant it belonged to Duberman. She sat up, fully awake. 4:40 a.m. Outside, Istanbul was as dark as it would ever be.

“Shalom.”

“Did you hear?” he said in Hebrew. As soon as he spoke, she knew the news was good. When Duberman was pleased, his voice turned soft and guttural, like a late-night radio host’s. “They took the bait. The Americans. In Lebanon. You’ll see.” Then he was gone.

Duberman now had a half-dozen ex — Mossad agents on his staff, mainly to protect Orli. Salome assumed that one had passed along gossip about the United States attacking Lebanon. Meaning Hezbollah. The hit must have been big enough for Israel to find out quickly.

She gave up on sleep and spent the predawn hours flipping through news channels. By 6:30 a.m., the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation had live footage of a building smoldering in the Bekaa. Soot-coated men tossed broken bricks into piles.

We are told that at least two senior Hezbollah officials were killed in an attack on this warehouse in Zahle early this morning. No word yet on who is behind this attack. Stay with LBC for more…

No wonder Duberman was excited. The FSB had Wells. Now the United States was bombing Hezbollah’s leaders, a move just short of attacking Iran outright.

They were going to win.

A few hours later, Buvchenko ruined her mood. Wells had talked his way free of the FSB. “They just wanted to be rid of him,” he said. “They didn’t know what he wanted or why he’d come, and they decided he was more trouble than he was worth.”

“I know the feeling.”

“They sent him to Amman. Not sure why. But don’t even try looking for him there. He speaks Arabic. Unless he wants you to find him, you won’t. Not there.”

She asked a few useless questions, hung up. She assumed Wells would land in Amman and board the next plane to Istanbul, less than two hours by air. He could easily track Buvchenko’s jet to Istanbul. He knew she had a safe house in Nisantasi.

She’d underestimated him too many times. She decided to hop to Bucharest, just a ninety-minute flight from Ataturk. Wells wouldn’t look for her there, and she could play the card she’d been holding for just this moment.

Jess Bunshaft.

She had nurtured her relationship with Bunshaft for three years. He had no idea she was behind this plot. But he knew who she was and that she worked for Duberman. She had met him years before. At the time, he was a mid-level civilian aide to Hebley, who had just earned his fourth star. Salome saw he was sensitive about his role. The Marines treated him like they treated all their male civilian employees, as a eunuch who didn’t have the guts to do what they did.

She took Bunshaft to lunch every few months, usually at the Capital Grille, which she couldn’t stand but he seemed to like. She was careful never to ask him for war stories from Afghanistan. Instead, they traded Jerusalem and Washington gossip, and she begged his opinions on geopolitics. No, Jess, I want to hear what you think… In all her years, Salome had never met a man immune to that flattery. She always kept her work for Duberman vague. I’m a consultant. A problem solver. Bunshaft never asked. He was more interested in talking about himself than hearing about her.

A year before, she pushed the conversation to Iran. At the time, nuclear disarmament talks were progressing in Vienna. “You know what my boss thinks about the ayatollahs,” Salome said. “Trusts them about as much as the Hitler Youth.”

“Scott feels the same.” Bunshaft loved to call Hebley Scott.

“But your side must believe the Iranians want a deal or you wouldn’t be going ahead with these talks. Your Guard sources—”

“Our Guard sources?” Bunshaft’s tone was ironic. “All those Guard sources.”

“That bad.”

He nodded.

“You know I can’t go into details—”

“Say no more, Jess.”

He wasn’t quite done. “Let’s just say that there’s some space between my boss and those midgets at the State Department. But the President, he wants this deal, you know. This would be a big hit for him. And he doesn’t have a lot of those.”

She came away from the lunch confident that if she could find enough highly enriched uranium and tell a plausible story, the CIA would run with it.

In the year since, she’d spoken with Bunshaft a half-dozen times. She left Iran alone and instead dangled a job with Duberman. At first he denied interest. Then she told him Duberman would sign a seven-figure contract for someone with his skill set.

“My connections, you mean,” he said.

“Look, you ought to meet with him. I’ll set a time. Doesn’t have to be soon.”

“All right.”

So she sent him an email, vaguely worded, but not vaguely enough. Anyone who saw it would understand that Bunshaft was thinking about taking a payday from Duberman. Perfect.

Now Wells was on the loose. Again. Salome needed Bunshaft to see where he stood. From the rancid apartment in Bucharest, she picked the cleanest of the phones that Igor had left. It was early evening in Romania, about noon in Washington.

Bunshaft didn’t answer. Probably he wasn’t in the habit of picking up random calls. She called again, and a third time. Finally, he picked up.

“Jess. It’s Adina Leffetz.”

“This is not a good time.”

“I need your help. Please.” He had a chivalrous streak, or pretended to.

“What’s this about?”

“I think you know.”

A faint grunt.

“Jess?”

“I’ll get out of here, call you in ten.”

Not ideal. He could easily get the NSA involved in ten minutes. But he probably didn’t want anyone listening to this call either. A half hour later, her phone buzzed.

“Adina.”

“My boss is furious, Jess.”

“But we know there’s no truth to it, he has nothing to worry about—”

“He’s not the one who needs to worry.”

“Excuse me?”

“You need to stop this man Shafer who’s running around telling these lies. And everyone who’s helping him. If this goes public, Aaron will lose his mind. He’ll blame me and you.”

“What?” Bunshaft’s voice jumped an octave.

“He’s afraid that Shafer will use the connection between us against him. All those meetings, and me offering you a job—”

“I didn’t take it.” Now he was practically a soprano. “Adina. None of this matters, because what Shafer is saying isn’t true.”

A question in the form of a statement.

“Of course not. But that doesn’t make it any less toxic. People hate Aaron. A rich Jew with a beautiful wife. Any excuse to smear him.”

“I’m telling you, we’re watching Shafer. His email accounts, his phones.”

Not closely enough, since Shafer had learned Rand Witwans’s name without the CIA finding out. But that bit of information was one Salome didn’t plan to share.

“Whatever you’re doing hasn’t stopped him spreading this story.”

“Your name has never come up.”

Wrong again. Wells knew her name, so Shafer surely did, too.

“You need to stop watching and do something. Not just Shafer. His friend, too. John Wells. He was in Russia, and the FSB picked him up and then let him go—”

“How do you know?”

She let the question hang. She had entered dangerous territory. She was playing both sides, insisting that Duberman had nothing to do with the plot and was only worried about his reputation, and at the same time disclosing information she probably shouldn’t have had in order to force Bunshaft to act.

If Bunshaft were stronger, he might have confronted her over the contradiction. But he was afraid. He didn’t want to know how she could be so connected. The reason she’d chosen him for this call.

“What you should be asking, Jess, is why these men are pursuing this crazy agenda. When the only ones who benefit are the Iranians.”

“All right.”

“You understand.”

“Yes.”

“And what it means if my name comes up. For both of us.”

“I said all right.” His voice was soft. Beaten. “I’ll deal with it. I can’t do anything before tomorrow, though.”

“If I hear more, I’ll let you know.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.” But his tone suggested he didn’t have much say in the matter.

“Good-bye, Jess.” She hung up. She’d given him a way to handle Shafer: accuse him and Wells of working for Iran, wittingly or not. Now she just had to hope he, and more important his betters on Langley’s seventh floor, would follow it.

Bucharest sank into night. She lowered the bedroom’s blackout shades and watched the news. CNN was calling its coverage “The March to War,” and alternating between shots of American troop transports taking off from North Carolina and the aftermath of the attack in the Bekaa, now eighteen hours old. The United States still wouldn’t confirm it had dropped the bombs. But at a White House press conference, the President’s spokesman said that the United States and India had captured two Lebanese men who had confessed to shooting down United Airlines 49 for Hezbollah.

“Given the relationship between Hezbollah and the Iranian government, we must conclude that Hezbollah carried out this missile strike for its Iranian sponsors,” the spokesman, Josh Galper, said. “Again we call on Iran to agree to the very reasonable terms the United States has set. We do not want war with Iran. But if the Iranians give us no choice, rest assured that we will fight.”

Asked where the men were, Galper would say only that they were “en route” to the United States but might not arrive for some time. “We are trying to learn exactly what they know and whether other aircraft are at risk.”

Salome fell asleep with the television on. She dreamed she was sitting in a plane with Wells and Duberman on either side of her. She knew she was dreaming because they were in economy class, not a private jet. Wells turned to her, opened his mouth. She thought he might kiss her. She raised a hand to block him, but his jaw opened wider, like he was a snake eating a rat, and he stuck his arm down his throat and pulled out a plastic-wrapped brick, the same brick she’d left under the bed in his room in Volgograd. You shouldn’t have done that.

I thought you’d like it.

But her voice was squeaking like Bunshaft’s. They both knew she was lying.The plane raced down the runway, and Salome knew suddenly that the brick was not heroin at all but a bomb. Wells shoved it at her, and she cradled it like a baby.

The plane leapt from the runway and the brick glowed red in her hands and—

She woke. She imagined when she pulled the shades she’d find dawn still hours off. But the sun glowed wanly through the city’s haze. She couldn’t imagine how but she’d slept through the night. She stretched, showered, dressed. And only then checked her email:

Adina. John Wells here. Sorry you had to run in Volgograd, but now that I know how to find you I look forward to seeing you soon. Maybe I’ll even drop by.

He’d sent it about three hours before. Bad luck she’d slept so long.

She read it a dozen times. But the only word that mattered was the first. Adina. He had found her real name. Disaster. Now that Wells knew who she was, he could easily link her to Duberman. She hadn’t advertised the connection, but she hadn’t buried it either. And if Wells knew, Shafer did, too. She wasn’t sure how quickly he could hook her to Bunshaft, but he surely could search the Langley visitor records and figure out how she’d found Glenn Mason.

Wells and Shafer still couldn’t prove that she was behind what Mason had done. Mason was the only man who could connect her to it, and he was dead. But her protection was suddenly paper-thin. All along, she had known her plan would only succeed if the uranium fanned the latent distrust and anger between the United States and Iran. And it had. Both sides had reacted as if war wasn’t just inevitable but overdue, the only way to settle their generation-long battle for influence in Iraq and all over the Middle East.

But if Wells and Shafer convinced the President that the uranium might not be from Iran, the momentum for war would fade. The appeasers would raise their voices and beg for time. And if the President used that time to order the NSA and CIA to look at Duberman, they would find him. All the shell companies and wire transfers and single-use phones in the world couldn’t keep the American government at bay.

She should have listened to Frankel, disobeyed Duberman. She should have learned from the way Wells had broken out of his shackles in Istanbul two weeks before. She should have shot Wells in Volgograd.

But she hadn’t. Now he was emailing her. Practically taunting her. Look forward to seeing you soon. She imagined him sitting at a station in an Internet café somewhere in Amman or Istanbul, his big hands poised over the keyboard, picking out one letter at a time. Those tired brown eyes of his would have some extra life, and when he was done he’d rub his thumb and forefinger over his square jaw, as she’d seen him do in Volgograd. He wanted to incite her.

So she had to stay cool.

First things first. She texted Bunshaft. They have my name. Nothing more. Even he was smart enough to know what she meant: Move.

Then she called Igor. “Are you close?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Come as soon as you can.”

“I knew you wanted it.”

“Idiot.” She went out hunting for some drinkable coffee. Igor arrived seventy minutes later, freshly showered and shaved, wearing a shirt that passed for clean from him. He really was hoping to play horny hacker.

“Tell me where this was sent from.” She had printed out the header, not the message.

“Can I see the email?”

“No.” She wasn’t letting him see her real name.

“It will help.”

“No it won’t.” She knew that much.

He grabbed the page from her. Two minutes later: “Good news. Whoever sent it either didn’t know how to route it through anonymizing servers or didn’t care. I can narrow it down to Egypt. Eastern Egypt. The Sinai Peninsula.”

“You’re sure.”

He didn’t bother to answer.

“And there’s nothing more you can tell me?”

“Past that you need government-grade technology. But if I had to guess, I would say somewhere on the Red Sea. Not so many Internet cafés in the desert.”

Not what she had expected. Wells had gone south instead of north from Amman. And on the way, he picked up her name and her email address. He hadn’t had them in Russia, she was sure.

Jordan. Egypt. Between them, Israel. Had someone there given her up? She couldn’t believe another Jew would betray her, even if the chronology suggested otherwise.

“Do you want me to try to track him? I can send him an email with a virus, if he even clicks on it it’ll infect whatever computer he’s using. It’s a long shot, because he’d have to use this account again, but there’s no downside.”

“Do it, then.”

While Igor hunched over the laptop, Salome went into the bedroom. She dialed a number that wasn’t written down anywhere. Hesitated. Hung up without hitting send.

But she had no choice. She redialed. Called.

Duberman picked up on the second ring. “Wait a moment.”

In the background, she heard a toddler yelling. “Not now, Rafael.” Rafael was one of his twins. “Take him away.” Then: “All right.”

“They know my name.”

“You said that was impossible.”

“I thought it was. I don’t know how. The one — the troublesome one who travels — he emailed me.”

“So he has that, too. Anything else? What you ate for dinner?”

“I think he doesn’t know as much as he’s pretending.”

“If there’s other bad news, tell me now.”

“They know about our friend in the southern hemisphere.”

“If he talks.” Duberman didn’t need to finish the sentence.

“He won’t. I have someone watching him. Believe me, he doesn’t want trouble.”

“I wish I shared your confidence. Tell me you’re doing something more than watching the roof doesn’t cave in.”

“I’m dealing with the one who stays at home.” She hoped.

“There are two of those.”

“The Jew.” Shafer. “The other”—Duto—“we can’t touch. But he needs the others. He can’t beat us himself.”

“The one who travels. The one who emailed you. Any idea where he is?”

“He sent it from Egypt. The Sinai.”

Duberman was silent. “That gives me an idea,” he finally said. “How quickly can you get here? The beach?” Meaning Tel Aviv.

If she left for the Bucharest airport now, she could be in Istanbul by early afternoon, catch a quick flight to Tel Aviv. “Maybe six hours.”

“Then come.”

“You’re not going to tell me why?”

He laughed. Nothing more. All these years, he was still a showman. “When we’re face-to-face.”

19

Shafer walked past the guard station to the glass-paned entry gates in the lobby of the New Headquarters Building, swiped his identification card—

And nodded with a confidence he did not feel as the glass parted. He had lived to spy another day. He had given up asking why Hebley and the seventh floor didn’t put him on leave or flat-out fire him. Maybe he and Wells had stirred enough doubt that someone upstairs was letting them push as a just-in-case insurance policy. Over the years, Duto had used that strategy effectively. But Shafer figured another answer was more likely. Max Carcetti, Hebley’s chief of staff and nut-cutter, wanted to keep him close. Better inside the tent pissing out, et cetera.

Outside, the sun hadn’t yet risen. The Langley parking lots and garages were mostly empty. Wells had called around 1 a.m. Washington time with Adina Leffetz’s name. Shafer had lain awake through the night debating whether to run it through the only classified database he could still use. Inevitably, someone on seven would see.

Just as inevitably, he decided to roll the dice.

He sat at his computer, plugged Adina Leffetz into the ACFND, the all-contacts foreign nationals database. The all-contacts log was not the master list of the CIA’s foreign agents — the men and women who betrayed their countries to spy for the United States. The agency kept those names, and their associated cryptonyms, on coded disks that were not physically stored at Langley and were of course not connected to any network. Sometimes called the Kingdom List, the master database could be viewed only with the approval of the DCI, the deputy director for the clandestine service, or the President.

Of course, station chiefs and their bosses at Langley knew the real identities of the spies their case officers ran. But the agency strongly discouraged them from sharing those names with anyone who wasn’t directly involved in handling them. Its caution was a legacy of the Aldrich Ames case. In the 1980s, Ames, a counterintelligence officer with a drinking problem and an expensive wife, sold the agency’s Soviet networks to the KGB.

In turn, Ames was himself betrayed by a Russian defector in the early 1990s. He was now serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. But during its internal investigation of Ames’s crimes, the CIA discovered that almost two hundred employees had access to the real names of its Russian spies. The agency had taken internal security more seriously ever since.

In the CIA’s view, Edward Snowden’s massive NSA leaks had vindicated that caution. Whether Snowden was a whistle-blower or a traitor — and arguments could be made on both sides — he had been a mid-level contractor at a minor NSA office in Hawaii at the time he stole the data. He should never have had access to so many crucial documents and programs.

Yet the agency could not ignore the fact that case officers and analysts needed to be able to trade data, rumors, and tips. The all-contacts log gave them that chance. The log was less sensitive than the Kingdom List, or even a third database where case officers reported serious relationships with foreign nationals. It wasn’t tied to specific operations. Instead, it gave case officers a place to report contacts that had not offered actionable intelligence or clear recruiting opportunities. Officers had some discretion over reporting, but it wasn’t unlimited. As instructors at the Farm told trainees, Taking a cab in Paris is not a significant contact, no matter how chatty the driver. But if the same guy picks you up two days in a row, his name’s probably worth logging. The list was intentionally massive and unfiltered. The agency was trying to create a Top Secret Wikipedia of sorts, a way to draw on the day-to-day contacts of thousands of case officers.

Unlike the Kingdom List — or operational reports, of course — the database was broadly available. Anyone in the clandestine service could see or update it. After some initial resistance, case officers had bought in. The log now included tens of thousands of names. Some offered long, detailed biographies. Others were a single line. It was searchable by dozens of fields, including time of contact, station, reporting officer, and of course contact name.

Given the breadth of the list, Shafer figured he had a decent chance of finding Leffetz. Sure enough, he did. The surprise was not the entry but the photo, a head shot of an attractive if harsh-looking woman with deep brown eyes. The existence of the photo didn’t result from any NSA wizardry. It had been taken at Langley about five years earlier. She’d been here. According to the log, Leffetz/Salome had come to discuss “Transnational Human Resources Strategies to Manage Troubled Case Officers, Based on the Israeli and American Experience.” Like nearly all foreign nationals, she’d received a black-bordered badge, requiring her to have an escort anywhere on campus.

As he read the log, Shafer felt the cold thrill that only detectives and investigative reporters truly understood. The game was on now. She’d been so careful for so long, but the wind had turned, the fog lifted. He’d glimpsed her on a distant hillside. A speck, but clear enough. He didn’t have to wonder anymore. She was out there, and he’d never let her go. Across the river and through the trees, to Grandma’s house or wherever you please… Shafer wanted to howl at the moon, now setting over the parking lot.

Shafer had tried to explain this feeling to people outside the building a few times over the years. But knew he came off sounding creepy. Maybe he was. So be it. Wells played God in the most elemental way: Who shall live and who shall die, who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast… But snatching the world’s secrets from their graves gave Shafer his own taste of absolute power.

On a more practical level, the entry explained to Shafer how Leffetz had found Mason. Hey, HR — I want to hear about your most screwed-up case officers. No worries, American friends. It’s for a project. Trust me! Shafer couldn’t believe the human resources managers would have given her actual names, but with enough biographical details she could have back-traced Mason easily.

At the same time, the fact that Salome had told such an elaborate cover story suggested to Shafer that no one at the agency had known what she really wanted, at least back then. From the first day that he and Wells had stumbled onto Mason, Shafer had wondered. Politicians had used the CIA to pull the United States into war before. But this plot was so risky that Shafer couldn’t imagine anyone would go near it.

Not before Scott Hebley became DCI, anyway.

Leffetz’s name popped up a few more times after that first entry, but not for anything interesting. She’d never come back to Langley. As far as Shafer could tell, she’d shown up occasionally on the lower rungs of D.C.’s lobbyist/embassy cocktail circuit, where wannabe arms dealers mingled with attachés looking for kickbacks. Wondered if she was Mossad but I’m pretty sure she’s not, a Middle East desk officer wrote after a party at the Turkish embassy three years before. Seems harmless/useless. Another offered: Casino consultant? Entry to Macao?

Officers were not allowed to discuss recruiting potential agents on the all-contacts database because it was so widely read, but the entry hinted that someone had approached Leffetz. Shafer couldn’t access those files, but he was sure that Leffetz would have brushed off the approach. She would have wanted to avoid the scrutiny that came with an official relationship.

Shafer left the log open as he considered his next move. The seventh floor had cut him off from other internal databases. But, probably because of simple bureaucratic oversight, he could still access some files outside Langley. He started with the National Crime Information Center, the FBI-managed database of property and court records that police officers used to investigate crimes and track fugitives. Adina Leffetz’s name didn’t return any hits. Other federal and state files also came back blank. Leffetz had never registered as a lobbyist for a foreign government, never filed an American tax return, never applied for citizenship or a driver’s license. Local property and court records were incomplete, but her name didn’t show up in those either. Immigration records would have told him when she’d entered the United States, but not what she’d done once she’d arrived, and they were off-limits to Shafer anyway.

The NSA might have credit-card or phone records for her. But if she’d been really careful, she could have used a card that belonged to a limited-liability shell company and carried a false name. For local travel, she could have hired a driver and paid cash. For hotel reservations, third-party services like Hotwire. For coms, all the usual tricks, single-use burners and email accounts. In any case, Shafer had no chance at the NSA, and he was less interested in finding Salome at this moment than dredging up her current link to the agency, if one existed.

He turned to open-source records, looking for Leffetz’s name in newspaper archives, Internet gossip columns, photo databases, Facebook and Twitter. He found references to an Adina Leffetz, but not the one he wanted, not unless she moonlighted as a high school gymnast in Orlando. He tried translating her name into Hebrew and struck another blank on the Israeli newspapers.

Then he reverse-searched her badge photo. The NSA had sophisticated photo-recognition software, but Shafer didn’t need it, thanks to the head-on shot. TinEye, a free site, did the trick. On DCsuperparty.com, which advertised itself as “your source for Washington events,” Shafer found a photo of Leffetz from a fund-raiser at the Brookings Institution almost three years before. She frowned at the camera, apparently not thrilled to have her photo taken. She stood next to a man Shafer knew well. The caption: Jess Bunshaft and friend.

Bunshaft might be a friend of Salome’s, but he was no friend of Shafer’s. A month before, when Shafer first tried to warn Hebley that he and Wells had stumbled onto a false-flag plot, Hebley sent Bunshaft to talk to Shafer. The conversation went badly. Shafer had found Glenn Mason, but at the time he didn’t know that Mason was connected to Salome or Duberman. Bunshaft and his boss Max Carcetti later dismissed the theory on the apparently unimpeachable grounds that Glenn Mason was dead. Ever since, Shafer had been on the seventh floor’s no-fly list.

Now — at last — Shafer could prove what he’d suspected all along. Salome was linked to the agency’s new guard. Of course, the photo didn’t prove that Bunshaft knew what Salome was doing. But, as Donna Green had told Duto at their midnight meeting, the White House had wanted for years to replace Duto with Hebley. Maybe Green or the President himself hinted at those plans to Duberman. A hundred ninety-six million bought a lot of access. Salome would have cultivated Bunshaft carefully. Maybe she’d told him she worked for Duberman. Maybe not. A case officer would have been innately suspicious of the approach, but Bunshaft wasn’t a case officer.

Shafer knew he had entered the realm of guesswork, what his old friend and Wells’s old love Jennifer Exley sometimes called his string theories. This lone photo just didn’t prove anything. Maybe Salome had never seen Bunshaft again after that Brookings talk.

But Shafer could be sure of one thing: Salome hadn’t wanted her photo taken with Bunshaft. She had refused to give her name, figuring that without it the Jpeg would be dumped into a forgotten file along with a million others. And it had, until now.

Shafer double-checked the dates in the all-contacts log. As he’d expected, the entries about Leffetz stopped after the photo. Probably she’d been more careful afterward, staying away from public events.

On one level, the depth of Salome’s connection to the agency hardly mattered. At this point, everyone on seven would be destroyed if Shafer and Wells proved the plot was fake. Incompetence and naïveté would be treated nearly as harshly as outright treason. Shafer wondered if he ought to go straight at Bunshaft, figure he was a dupe rather than a traitor. Maybe he could convince Bunshaft that Iran and the United States could still avoid war. Whatever he did, he needed to let Duto know what he’d found. Better phone than email. Of course, the agency was monitoring both, but it could delete his outgoing emails before they left the Langley servers. Shafer reached for his handset—

And saw that his computer screens had gone blank. He jabbed at the keyboards on his desk. Nothing. His office phone was also dark. He grabbed his mobile, tried his wife. The screen showed five bars, but the call wouldn’t go through. The voice of a National Geographic narrator played in his head: Just that quickly, the hunter becomes the hunted…

Had Adina Leffetz’s name triggered an alarm? Or was Bunshaft watching Shafer’s computers in real time?

Either way, Shafer needed to get off the campus. His office had been shoved to the fourth floor, a nowhere land of analysts and database managers. Fortunately, the New Headquarters Building had fire stairs at the corners as well as the core. Unfortunately, those corner stairs were alarmed at the ground and roof exits, and Langley’s guard teams answered sirens in a hurry.

Shafer wondered if Hebley would risk a scene by grabbing him in the lobby. Probably not. In that case, the stairs by the elevators made sense. He ran for them, his feet flapping heavily. He was shocked how slowly he moved, like he was running through water. Luckily, it was still only 7:15 and the hallways were empty. No curious looks.

He reached the stairs, ducked inside. After barely a hundred feet, his lungs burned. He took three steps down the empty gray stairwell and wondered why he was bothering. Even without a fifteen-foot wire fence, Langley’s perimeter was as well guarded as any supermax. Theoretically, the barriers were meant to keep intruders out, but they worked both ways. Even if he escaped the building, the guards could pick him up at an exit gate, a quick and almost surgical grab.

Of course they would. Like most traps, this one seemed head-slappingly obvious once Shafer saw it. They, whoever they were, wanted him to run. Why else turn off his computers instead of just grabbing him at his office? If he was a flight risk, the agency could justify holding him without charges. Eventually, of course, they’d have to present him to a judge, but when they did, they would lean heavily on the fact that he’d fled. He ran, Judge. As soon as he realized we were looking for him. Under the circumstances, we had no choice but to search his office down to the studs, check phones, bank records, his house and car. We didn’t realize we would need seventy-two hours, Judge, and we apologize. But here he is, safe and sound.

Worst of all, even Shafer’s wife wouldn’t know exactly where he was. She would figure he’d gone to Langley this morning, but she couldn’t be sure. He had left the house while she was still asleep.

No running, then. But Shafer needed someone he trusted to see him, to know what was happening. He didn’t have much time. No doubt they had put sensors on his car and had the guards looking for him. They would be confident he couldn’t escape the campus. Still, they wouldn’t wait long. When they realized after a few minutes that he hadn’t taken the bait, they’d come for him. At this hour, only one person he absolutely trusted was likely to be here. He hated to drag her into this mess, but he didn’t see any choice.

The lights of her office suite were on. He knocked and without waiting for an answer stepped inside. “Lucy.” Lucy Joyner, the CIA’s human resources director, among Shafer’s oldest friends at Langley. She was a brassy Texan who had handled the agency’s most thankless jobs for thirty years. A month before, she’d helped him uncover Mason’s role and start this roundelay. They both knew the seventh floor was looking hard at her.

“Ellis.”

She sounded worse than wary.

“Why do I feel like I’m your crack addict kid and you’re waiting for me to beg twenty bucks?” he said.

“Twenty doesn’t buy much crack.”

“Take my picture.”

“Why would I do that?”

Shafer raised an imaginary iPhone to his eyes. “Snap snap. And sometime today tell my wife you saw me this morning.”

“Why?”

“So she doesn’t worry.”

Joyner nodded, as if requests like this came her way all the time. “That all?”

“Yes. No. One more thing.” Shafer tore a page from a sexual harassment reporting handbook on Joyner’s desk, wrote Salome-Jess Bunshaft-DCsuperparty.com in the margin. “Give this to Vinny—”

“Duto—”

“Of course Duto. And do yourself a favor, don’t look at it—”

“What’s going on?”

“Long story.”

“No one’s going to disappear you, Ellis.”

“They might misplace me for a few days.”

“This ends badly for both of us.”

“I don’t know. Truly.” Shafer tapped the nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Yes or no on the picture? Places to go, people to see.”

She reached for her phone. “Smile.”

He raised both middle fingers.

“Perfect. Everyone will know it’s you.” The phone clicked.

“I think you left your lipstick at home, Lucy. Better get it.” Meaning: leave Langley and store the photo somewhere safe.

“That bad?”

Shafer turned for the door, blew a kiss over his shoulder at Joyner. “Later, my love.”

“I’m not even your like, Ellis—”

His mood swung between grim and weirdly jaunty as he made his way back to his office. Whatever Carcetti had planned would not be pleasant. On the other hand, now that Joyner had seen him they wouldn’t be able to make him vanish.

He was not at all surprised to find Carcetti and Bunshaft waiting at his desk. As a lieutenant three decades earlier, Carcetti had been a heavyweight on the All-Marine boxing team. His gut had thickened notably since then, but his legs and shoulders were still solid. He looked like a bouncer at a biker bar.

“Mr. Shafer—” Bunshaft said.

“Jess. Max. Call me Ellis. As far as I’m concerned, it’s first names for us.”

“Where were you?” Carcetti said.

Shafer smirked.

“Believe it’s known in the trade as dropping the kids off at the pool.”

“We’ve been here fifteen minutes.”

“I’m an old man.” Shafer tapped his belly. “Things get stuck—” Shafer grinned, not even hiding what he was doing, riffing like a drunk comedian at the late show on Friday night. Carcetti had followed his boss Hebley up the Marine Corps ladder. He’d retired with three stars on his collar and the nickname Mad Max, a commander who shouted and intimidated subordinates into submission. Shafer had learned over the years that playing the fool worked surprisingly well against that personality type. He hoped to drive Carcetti into useless and counterproductive rage, as he had Duto a dozen times.

“Least you can’t say I’m full of—”

“Enough.” Carcetti’s voice was level, but his eyes bulged like a blocked artery.

Now Shafer needed to shift gears, remind Carcetti that he wasn’t a fool after all. “You think this is still the Corps, General? You have me confused with a terminal lance?” A Marine who ended his enlistment as a lance corporal, the lowest possible rank after four years. “You think you say jump and I say how high, sir?”

Carcetti grabbed Shafer’s arm. “I think you’re coming with us.”

Carcetti and Bunshaft had detained Shafer briefly a month before. Back then, they’d locked him in a cell disguised as an executive suite, a room meant to preserve the illusion of dignity. Not today. Today Carcetti led him through a tunnel that connected the New Headquarters Building with its older cousin, the Original Headquarters Building. Down a grimy fire staircase that dead-ended on a subbasement that Shafer had never seen before in all his years at Langley. Through a maze of corridors lined with aging air handlers. Carcetti seemed to know the layout by heart. Finally, they reached a room whose concrete floor and grease stains suggested that it had once housed a furnace. Now it was stagnant and empty but for a steel table and three chairs, two on one side, the third on the other.

Carcetti shoved Shafer into the third chair. “Where’s John Wells?”

Good. He’d asked a question Shafer couldn’t answer. “Dunno.”

“We suspect him of aiding the Iranian government. And we suspect you of aiding him.”

Shafer felt the ground shift. The accusation was desperate, proof of the pressure Carcetti and Hebley felt. But if they could convince the President to sign a finding that Wells was aiding a foreign government, the agency would be authorized to snatch Wells without warning. The finding wouldn’t specifically call for Wells to be killed, but once black-ops teams were involved, anything could happen. If Wells pulled a gun, and he probably would, they’d shoot him in the street. A tragic accident.

And Shafer had no way to warn Wells.

“You can’t seriously believe that.”

“He’s a Muslim convert.”

“You know there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia, right?”

“I know that about twenty-four hours ago the FSB released him from Lubyanka following a call from Iran’s Foreign Minister to the Russian Interior Minister.”

“Two things that have nothing to do with each other.”

“I know he got on a plane from Moscow to Amman. And I know he hasn’t been seen since. You tell us where he is, we can pick him up safely. Nobody wants him to get hurt.”

“Why don’t you check the files, find out what Wells has done for this agency, this country, before you accuse him of treason?”

“Like those Deltas he killed in Afghanistan, you mean? Or when he was five minutes late in Mecca?”

Shafer didn’t think he was naïve. But he had never imagined anyone spinning Wells’s record that way.

“Max—”

“Look, maybe he’s got the best of intentions here, but he’s acting as a foreign agent whether he means to or not.” Carcetti nodded like a salesman trying to close a deal. “Do everyone a favor. You don’t want to tell me where he is, I get it. Just tell him, go to an embassy. Somewhere safe for him and our guys, so nobody makes a mistake.”

“Somewhere safe.” The line a parody of good-cop reasonableness. In reality, the offer was poison. Wells would never agree to come in, and Shafer’s phone call would give the agency and NSA a chance to pinpoint him.

Shafer closed his eyes, like the pressure was getting to him. Let Carcetti believe he’d won. He needed time to think through his next move, get Carcetti back inside the lines so that Wells wasn’t at risk.

Carcetti’s hand squeezed his wrist. “You know I’m right.”

Shafer looked at Carcetti and Bunshaft. Their posture was telling. Carcetti sat forward, eager. Bunshaft was back, arms folded. Nervous. Shafer ticked his head at Bunshaft.

“Jess. You’re sweating.” The furnace room’s harsh overheads highlighted the sheen of perspiration-occupying territory ceded by Bunshaft’s receding hairline. “You on board with this? Bringing me someplace with no cameras. No warrant, nobody watching. Your boss doesn’t like the law much.”

“Exigent circumstances,” Carcetti said. “National security exception.”

“He’s got to do it this way, because even Taylor wouldn’t come near this.” Cliff Taylor, the agency’s new deputy legal counsel, handpicked by Hebley. Bunshaft glanced at Carcetti. Cleared his throat like he’d forgotten how to talk.

“Worry less about us, more about yourself,” Carcetti said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten. Duto’s a senator. He’s protected. Not you. All those leaks to Wells and he doesn’t have a security clearance—”

“We’ve gone from treason to leaking in two minutes. Next you’ll accuse me of parking in a handicapped spot.”

“This kind of leaking is treason. And, your age, twenty years in jail is a life sentence. Bright side, your wife’s old, too. No worries about her leaving you.”

Carcetti went silent and Shafer found that he, too, had nothing to say. They were both breathing hard. Like the bell had rung and they’d gone back to their corners to sit on their stools, get ready for the next round, the arena empty, only Bunshaft watching, a silent, unreliable referee.

Shafer realized he’d forgotten the most important question of all. He opened his palms and dropped his head like he was ready to surrender. Rope-a-dope.

“All right, General. I’d like to ask something. Tell me the truth, I’ll call Wells.”

“Why would I trust you?”

“Because I don’t want him to get shot.”

An answer Carcetti would believe. He nodded. Now we’re getting somewhere.

“You really think Iran produced that HEU?”

Carcetti hesitated for half a second. “Yes. I mean, that’s what our experts concluded—”

“Translation, you have no idea. And the worst part is you don’t care. Like the Gulf of Tonkin or WMD.” The excuses that Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, respectively, had offered for Vietnam and Iraq. “You’ve decided that invading Iran is the right war. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.”

“You rather they get the bomb, Mr. Shafer? That what you’re telling me?”

“Do the President and Donna Green agree?”

Carcetti’s thick black eyebrows rose, the movement as surprising as an Easter Island statue coming to life. They came down fast, but Shafer saw that he’d scored. Carcetti didn’t know what Hebley was telling the White House. Shafer suspected that Hebley was keeping his doubts, if he had any, to himself.

Shafer looked at Bunshaft. “Hebley’s taking all of you over Niagara Falls. Except he’s the only one with a barrel.”

“If only you and Duto had actual evidence for this crazy theory you’re peddling. Aaron Duberman, right? Who just happened to give two hundred million dollars to the same President who fired Duto.”

“That’s a feature, General. Not a bug.”

“What?”

“Ask your friend here about Adina Leffetz.”

Another score. Carcetti’s big Marine head wobbled a fraction on his big Marine neck.

“You don’t know her, but she ran the job for Duberman. Used to work for a Knesset member named Daniel Raban. Nice guy. One of those Jews who think Israel should treat the Palestinians like crap for the next two thousand years to make up for what happened in the last two thousand. I can say that because I’m Jewish. You can’t.” Shafer shifted his attention to Bunshaft. “Come on, tell the general about her.”

Bunshaft shook his head.

“I still don’t hear any evidence,” Carcetti said.

Shafer wondered if he should mention Witwans and decided to hold off.

“You can do the right thing, General. You can walk this back.”

“They blew up a plane.” Carcetti tapped the table, clanking metal against metal.

For the first time, Shafer noticed that in addition to his heavy yellow gold wedding ring, Carcetti wore a thick platinum ring etched with the Marine Corps insignia. On his right hand was yet another ring, this one dull steel, almost black with wear. Intentionally or not, the rings looked like makeshift brass knuckles on Carcetti’s meaty hands.

Carcetti caught Shafer’s glance. He tapped the steel ring. “This was my granddad’s. He died on Tarawa. November 22, 1943. My dad lost his right eye at Khe Sanh, March 7, ’68.”

“And now you get to start your own war, kill somebody else’s father. Circle of death. Congratulations.”

A crimson flush spread up Carcetti’s neck. His big hands bent into fists. Shafer knew he’d gone too far.

“General,” Bunshaft said.

Carcetti exhaled long and loud. “An angel on my shoulder. Lucky for you.” He took a phone from his pocket. “I answered your question. Time for you to do your part.”

“Call John, you mean? You get service down here?”

“We’ll go outside.”

If he hadn’t just almost talked himself into a beating, Shafer would have laughed. “I don’t know his number. He’s on a different burner every time we call—”

“So email him, tell him you have to talk to him—”

“More important. Did you really think I’d call him for you?”

Bunshaft broke the silence that followed.

“But you promised.” The shock in his voice sounded genuine.

Carcetti looked from Shafer to Bunshaft like he was trying to figure out which one to shoot first. He grabbed Bunshaft’s arm, tossed him off his chair. Bunshaft was hardly skinny, but he flew like a bag of sticks.

“Get out,” Carcetti said. “Close the door. And walk. Until you can’t hear anything.”

Bunshaft opened his mouth and closed it again and did what Carcetti had told him. Shafer and Carcetti waited in silence as Bunshaft’s footsteps receded down the hall.

When they were gone, Carcetti stood. “People fall down stairs.” He swung his head side to side, rolled his shoulders like a boxer trying to get loose.

Shafer realized he needed to make sure Carcetti knew that Lucy Joyner knew what was happening. She had to have cleared the campus by now.

Carcetti stepped toward him—

Shafer bit back the words. Let Carcetti crack his ribs, blacken his eyes. He’d be digging an even deeper hole. And Shafer would prove, to himself, to Wells, or both, that he wasn’t afraid.

Though he was.

Carcetti pushed over Shafer’s chair, sent him sprawling, his knees clapping the concrete floor. Shafer lay on his back. That quick, his fear vanished. This was Langley, not North Korea. Carcetti hadn’t earned three stars in the Marines by making dumb mistakes. He wasn’t going to hurt Shafer, no matter how furious he was.

“Last chance.” Carcetti squatted beside him. “I will break your neck.” Carcetti put a hand on Shafer’s throat, squeezed lightly.

Time to end this nonsense. “You will not. And fyi, Lucy Joyner saw me this morning. I was down at her office while you and Bunshaft were waiting for me. She’s got a picture to prove it.”

Carcetti cursed, stepped away from Shafer, kicked the table over. The metal clattered against the concrete, as loud and empty as Carcetti’s threats.

“I’d say you have three options. Put us all under quarantine down here. Lucy and my wife and Vinny, too. It could get cramped. Though maybe if we have snacks. Everyone loves snacks.” Shafer pulled himself to his feet, hoping Carcetti didn’t notice the tremble in his legs. “Two, let me go. Though I have a feeling that isn’t on the agenda. Three, go for a warrant, do this right.”

“You want me to call that bluff? We have tapes of what you told Wells. We play them, you spend the rest of your life in prison.”

Carcetti might be right. Federal judges didn’t love CIA officers who disclosed classified information. Stopping a war would be a mitigating circumstance, but only if Shafer succeeded.

Yet at this point Shafer didn’t care. To get a warrant, even in a case that supposedly presented an immediate national security threat, Carcetti and Hebley would have to talk to the CIA’s lawyers, who would insist on calling the Justice Department. Justice would be predisposed to believe whatever version of the story Carcetti gave. But once they got involved, Hebley would have a much harder time ordering the CIA’s black-ops teams after Wells — who, if nothing else, had constitutional protections as an American citizen.

Carcetti opened the door, stepped out. Then turned back, looked at Shafer from the doorway.

“Just one thing, Ellis. I know you and your buddy have looked all over the world for that HEU. So have we, believe it or not. We can’t find it. Tell me, if it’s not Iranian, whose is it?”

Shafer could only shake his head.

“Whose?” Carcetti shouted now. “Tell me. Whose?”

Shafer felt no choice but to answer “I don’t know.”

“And you know why? Because it’s from Iran.” Carcetti slammed the door so hard as he left that the plaster wall beside it cracked from floor to ceiling.

Shafer sat alone, wondering how long Carcetti would leave him here, whether he’d have a warrant when he returned. Either way, Shafer believed he had done all he could to take the red dot off Wells’s chest. He wasn’t the praying type. Never had been. So he settled for crossing his fingers and hoping Wells would use that freedom.

20

Wells found a computer in the corner of a crowded café off Tahrir Square and logged into the account he’d created to email Adina Leffetz. He wasn’t expecting a response. To his surprise, he found not one but two replies.

Both from her, though from two different accounts. The first was blank. Wells suspected it contained a tracking virus, because his computer briefly froze when he opened it. No matter. Let Salome try to find him in Cairo.

It was the second email, sent a few hours after the first, that stopped him. John. So good to hear from you. And yes, I miss you, too. I’d love to see you. So would my boss. Let’s meet in Tel Aviv tomorrow… Adina.

She was offering the ultimate honeypot, a chance to talk to the man himself. Still, the meeting stank of a Hotel California trap. Once she had him inside Duberman’s mansion, why would she let him leave?

He ought to forget the offer, move on. He could book a flight to South Africa and Witwans. Or call Shafer again, see if he had anything new. Although Shafer had gone dark since the morning.

As for Witwans, Wells didn’t want to go unless he knew the man had something. Without a private jet, he’d lose the next day getting to Johannesburg and then Witwans’s home. If he was wrong, he’d lose yet another day getting back. He couldn’t afford to waste that time. And he feared that the NSA was now up on the only passports he was carrying. As soon as he boarded an international flight, they and the CIA would know exactly where to find him. Until he knew if the agency wanted to bring him in, he couldn’t take that chance.

Tel Aviv, for better or worse, was less than five hundred miles from Cairo, less than an hour by air if Wells could figure out how to fly there without being caught. Plus, truth be told, he wanted to see Duberman. He couldn’t help himself. The offer tempted him. He was sniffing at it like a mouse at a hunk of cheese, trying to convince himself the net overhead wasn’t a trap.

No. He’d made this mistake in Istanbul. He needed someone with him to guarantee that Duberman wouldn’t hold him indefinitely. Who? Shafer was out of pocket. Rudi was old and sick and had done all he could.

Which left Duto.

Wells bought yet another new phone, ducked into an alley off Talaat Harb, one of the avenues that spoked north off Tahrir. He pushed himself against a wall as men strolled by. Since the riots and the revolution and the counterrevolution and the gropes and rapes that had come with them, women were invisible around Tahrir after dark.

Duto answered after two rings.

“Get yourself arrested again?”

“Not yet.”

“Too bad.”

“I need a private plane. Now. With you on it.”

“Where am I going?”

Wells debated being coy, but if anyone was tracing Duto’s phone, they would see the Egyptian prefix anyway. “Cairo.”

“Why?”

“Tell you when you get here.”

Duto was silent.

“And don’t forget the bag I left with Ellis.” Before heading out from Washington the week before, Wells had left a knapsack stuffed with the kind of goodies that cause problems at border control. It would come in handy for the meeting with Duberman.

“Ellis.” Duto stopped. Something he didn’t want to tell Wells on an open line.

“It’s at his house. Is that a problem?”

“No, but I need a few hours to put this together. Plus, what, eleven in the air?”

“As long as you can get here by noon tomorrow.”

“If you aren’t at the airport, I’ll kill you.”

Join the crowd. Wells hung up, found a two-window café and ordered an oversize pita stuffed with greasy chicken and falafel. Delicious. Before the 2011 revolution, some Cairo restaurants had served beer and wine. A handful had even served hard liquor. Although Islamic law banned alcohol, the sales were a concession to Western tourists, the millions of Coptic Christians who still lived in Egypt, and Cairo’s own cosmopolitan past.

But after the revolution the Muslim Brotherhood had sharply raised taxes on alcohol. Some restaurants that served it had seen their windows smashed. Even though the army had forced out the Brotherhood in 2013, the alcohol seemed to have disappeared, or at least been forced into the back rooms. Another way that Egypt had become more like Saudi Arabia, its neighbor across the Red Sea.

Wells washed down the last of his pita with a lukewarm Coke and set out on a countersurveillance run. He didn’t think anyone was following him, but he wanted to be sure. Tahrir Square was an excellent place to find out. The passageways that ran underneath the plaza allowed for an almost infinite variety of moves. Wells spent twenty minutes wending his way through them and then doubled back and at a near run came back to the entrance on the square’s northeast corner, where he’d entered. He stepped into one of the cabs that were ubiquitous in Tahrir.

“Salaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam. Where to, my friend?”

“Ramses Square.” Another massive square to the northeast, this one home to the city’s main railway station.

At a traffic light a block south of the square, Wells handed the cabbie his money.

“But we haven’t arrived yet.”

“I like to walk.” Wells opened the door and stepped out, walking southeast, away from both Ramses and Tahrir. He was now sure no one was on him. He had run across the Egyptian security services before. They were decent trackers, but they weren’t subtle. Americans would have stood out even more. He found a café with an Internet station and checked in. Shafer still hadn’t replied, but Duto had, with a jet tail number and an arrival time. And something else, a phone number. Col. Alim Bourak. Tell him I said hello.

“Salaam aleikum.”

Bourak’s voice was wary.

“Colonel. A mutual friend suggested I call,” Wells said, in English.

“Does he have a name?”

“Duto.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

A long pause.

“All right. Where are you?”

Wells told him.

“Stay there.”

Words that made Wells want to be anywhere else.

Bourak showed a half hour later. He was a tall man, mid-fifties, with a slight limp and the dull eyes of a mukhabarat officer who had seen more than he wished.

“Salaam aleikum.”

“As-aleikum salaam.”

“You speak Arabic.”

“Nam.”

“All right, come with me,” Bourak said in Arabic. “But no talking.”

Bourak turned out to live in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Cairo’s better neighborhoods. Wells didn’t know why the breadth of Duto’s contacts still surprised him. The man had been DCI for almost a decade. “One night, yes?” Bourak said, as he closed the apartment door behind Wells. “Then you can tell your friend we’re even.”

“I can talk now?”

“As long as you don’t tell me your name. Would you like something to drink? Unfortunately, I don’t have alcohol.”

Not a complete surprise. A five-foot-wide photo of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca dominated the living room.

“I don’t drink.” Wells examined the photo.

“You know the hajj?”

“I’m Muslim.”

Bourak squinted at Wells.

“Even without your name, I think I know you.”

“Did you take the pilgrimage?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always wanted to go.”

“What they say is true. It’s difficult. So many people, not nearly enough space. The crush. The smells. No one has bathed properly in weeks. Yet sooner or later you stop fighting the pressure. Then something strange happens. I can’t describe it exactly. Not so much that you’re closer to Allah as that He’s closer to you. If you die there, no matter. Maybe this is what heaven is, so many people and no space to think about anything. No thoughts of the heat and the dust and the thirst. No concerns about money or comfort. Just these people bending together under some will bigger than their own. I wish every Muslim could do it.”

“Not exactly how the Quran describes paradise.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in seventy-two virgins.”

“I’m not sure I believe in virgins, period.”

Bourak laughed.

“How did a man with your convictions rise so far in the muk?” The secret police were not exactly fans of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“They need a few of us who know the prayers. But colonel is as high as I’ll ever get.”

Wells put his hand over his heart. “Let’s pray, then, Alim. For Egypt.”

“And peace.”

21 THREE DAYS…

Cairo International Airport was as ramshackle as everything else in Egypt, a maze of potholed access roads and unfinished construction. Hall 4, the airport’s VIP wing, was the inevitable exception, modern and high-ceilinged. Nearly empty, too. Wealthy travelers weren’t visiting Cairo much these days.

So Wells had a lounge to himself as he waited for Bourak. Duto’s jet had landed, but Wells couldn’t reach it without a new passport. Bourak didn’t have the juice to walk Wells through border control without identification. And Wells didn’t want to use either of his current passports. The NSA was surely watching for both John Wells and Roger Bishop.

Duto held the solution. The bag of toys he’d picked up at Shafer’s house included a fresh passport. Wells had never used it before, and he was sure it wasn’t on any watch lists. Even better, it was several years old, with a slightly blurred photo, so face-recognition software wouldn’t jump it. Wells could again travel without fear of being picked up, at least for a few hours.

One day he’d run out of spares, and life would get even trickier. For now, he was still in the game. As soon as Bourak returned from the tarmac, Wells would be on his way to Duberman. He stuffed away his impatience and he watched the headlines scroll across CNN International:

Until the words BREAKING NEWS flashed in foot-high letters, and the scroll changed:

Then the real surprise:

Five hundred more people dead, and the war hadn’t even started. The odds that two planes from the same airport had both crashed accidentally at the same time were infinitesimal. The Iranians were warning the President that they would disrupt aviation worldwide if the United States attacked. This time, they had covered their tracks, sending the evidence to the bottom of the Atlantic. Washington would accuse, Tehran would deny, and the deadline would tick closer. Wells hated Duberman for causing this chaos, and himself for not finding a way to stop the man.

The lounge door swung open. Bourak walked in, passport in hand. “Yours, I think, Mr. Michael.” The passport was in the name of Michael Ishmael Jefferson. Wells made sure he had its biographical data memorized, then tucked it away and gave Bourak his other passports. They could only cause trouble.

“I should hold them?”

“Burn them.” His lives, real and fake, turning to ash.

But nothing came easy this mission. The immigration agent took immediate exception to the new passport. “Bad photo.”

“Sorry.”

“No entry stamp. You came through Cairo?” The guard tapped at his keyboard. “I don’t see it.”

They’d run across the only government worker in Egypt who wanted to do his job. Bourak flipped out his mukhabarat identification. “This man has been a guest of mine.”

“Then maybe you tell me why there’s no record,” the guard said in Arabic.

“Because your computers don’t work,” Bourak said. “I appreciate your boldness, taking this tone with a colonel in the GID.” The General Intelligence Directorate, the muk’s official title. “Call your supervisor. I want to tell him you’re such a good officer.”

The guard muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“I said, I’ll take his picture, and yours, too, and send him on.”

A minute later, they were through. Wells followed Bourak downstairs to an unmarked door that led outside the terminal, onto the tarmac. Bourak embraced Wells, the emotion genuine. “Maybe one day we’ll take the hajj together.”

“I’d like that.”

The jet was a Gulfstream G650, long, sleek, and white. No corporate insignia, nothing but the registration number tattooed on the engine. Duto didn’t stand, instead offering Wells a cheap finger-to-temple sideways salute. “Cap’n.”

“Crunch,” Wells said. “Do I want to know whose ride this is?”

“For now, it’s ours. I told the people who lent it to me you were good for it. More important, where are we going? Pilot says we have fifteen hundred miles of fuel left. We need to top up?”

“Not yet. Tel Aviv.”

“You hear that?” Duto yelled through the open cockpit door to the pilots. “Ben Gurion. Refuel there. Make sure they know it’s an American jet so they don’t give us any trouble about landing rights.”

“Yessir.” The cockpit door swung shut.

“We meeting Rudi?”

“Duberman.”

Duto grunted in surprise. “How’d you work that?”

“I didn’t. He asked. Through Salome. Didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s not a confession.”

“So he wants a meeting, and you come running to me to protect you.” Duto gave Wells an I’m-not-going-to-let-you-live-this-one-down smirk.

“I don’t know any other senators, and after what happened in Russia I needed someone who could guarantee safe passage.” As soon as he explained, Wells wished he hadn’t. Duto surely already understood. “Speaking of. Where’s Ellis?”

Duto’s momentary hesitation told Wells the news wasn’t good.

“Lucy Joyner gets in early. Lucky for us. She came to me yesterday about an hour before you called. Shafer showed up at her office around seven a.m., made her take his picture. He thought the seventh floor was going to grab him, and he was right.”

“He’s under arrest?”

“Not yet. But Justice is involved. Best I can tell, they’re holding him as a material witness right now, no charges.”

“Any idea why now?”

“He passed Lucy the name of a website he found that connects Salome and Jess Bunshaft. I don’t think you’ve met Bunshaft. He’s a Hebley guy. Mid-level. It’s nothing that proves anything, just a picture from a couple years ago. But maybe that freaked them out.”

“But they can’t hold him indefinitely—”

“Long enough. From their point of view the easiest move would be to toss him in a cell for a couple weeks. But maybe he told them that Lucy had his picture. So, for whatever reason, they decided to get Justice involved.”

“Good, right?”

“Maybe. Means somebody’s watching. But also a criminal process. Justice, they’ll say he’s a U.S. citizen, we can’t hold him without charges. Fine. Hebley gives them enough for a one-count complaint for leaking classified material, a couple excerpts from the tapes.”

The tapes of Shafer calling Wells. Wells had blocked them out.

“He was stupid, John. Should never have talked to you from his office. They don’t mention your name in the complaint, just co-conspirator A. As long as you weren’t cleared for the information, they don’t even have to prove you misused it. The fact he passed it is enough.”

“Then?”

“Then tonight they find some friendly federal judge who believes in hanging ’em high, and they ask for no bail. And they get it. Remember, Shafer doesn’t even have a lawyer at this point, nobody’s arguing the other side. Presto, they have an excuse to transfer him tomorrow to the detention center in Alexandria. And you know, short ride, but delays, he gets stuck in processing. All that time, he can’t call anyone. That’s tomorrow gone. Then, the next morning, his wife is screaming, finally somebody lets him make a phone call, he gets a lawyer. Even so, whoever he hires has to figure out what’s going on and file for an emergency hearing. That’s the day after tomorrow gone. Then, the hearing, Justice pushes back, says national security, they’re still looking for safe-deposit boxes, secret bank accounts—”

“Anyway, we’ve attacked Iran by then.” Wells hated the thought of Shafer in jail. He would backtalk a guard, get himself in trouble. “And you’re so sure about this—”

“Because it’s what I’d do.”

The cockpit door swung open. “Plans filed,” the pilot said. He was tall, with hair so blond it was almost white. “We’ll push in a minute. I know you want privacy, so the flight attendant won’t bother you, but please strap in. We should be in the air forty minutes, give or take.” He disappeared again.

“All these years, everything you’ve seen,” Duto said. “Still can’t admit the game only has one rule.”

“And what’s that?” Though Wells knew what Duto would say.

“Just win, baby. I know you think Hebley should know better—”

The jet’s engines spooled. Wells buckled up as the plane rolled back. He didn’t want to hear this speech, yet he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t fascinated by Duto’s cynicism.

“But he’s neck-deep in this now, and the only way out is right through Tehran—”

“We can’t go to war on a lie.”

“We have the best army in the world, John. We can go to war because our beer was flat. And the guys in Tehran aren’t our friends. Long as we win, this unpleasantness gets forgotten. One thing I’ve learned about the folks back home in my brief political career, they are results-oriented.”

“And if we lose?”

“Nobody starts a war expecting to lose. I promise you what the Pentagon is telling the President right now is that we’ve learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ll roll right up to the nuclear factories, blast ’em open, see what’s inside. Let the Rev Guard try to hit us from the flanks, the back, our airpower will destroy them as soon as they mass. That’s one thing we know how to do. That this isn’t about roadside bombs, that for a change we’ll fight the war that we want and then get out. No occupation.”

Duto made the case so enthusiastically that Wells wondered why he had come here at all. But of course he wanted the White House. Taking down this plot was his only chance. And with Shafer out of action, Wells had had no choice but to ask Duto for help.

Duto, who had betrayed him a half-dozen times.

Duto seemed to read Wells’s mind. “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

“This isn’t politics.”

“Everything’s politics.”

The Gulfstream turned onto an access runway, bounced along the rough concrete.

“But Shafer will get out, right?”

“Make bail, sure.”

“And after that?”

“You know the answer. Depends who wins.”

Wells feared yet more immigration headaches in Tel Aviv, but Duto’s black VIP passport smoothed the way.

“Before we tell Salome we’re here, I want to check in with the embassy,” Duto said. The American embassy to Israel was based in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. The building was the usual recessed-windows concrete fortress, though weirdly enough it sat only a block from the beach. The juxtaposition made for odd photos when protesters showed.

So Duto wanted to be sure that the government knew he was in Israel. Duberman probably wouldn’t be crazy enough to kidnap a senator, but the move was prudent just in case.

Duto walked out of the embassy ninety minutes later, joined Wells on the promenade. The afternoon was unseasonably warm, and the Israelis were taking advantage. Four bikinied women knocked a volleyball.

“Nice scenery.”

In fact, Wells was thinking mainly of the three-inch blade he had taped to his left thigh, just below the groin. It was ceramic, sharp enough to cut glass. On his right leg he’d taped the handle, two and a half inches of rigid plastic. A metal detector wouldn’t pick either one up. A full-body airport-style scanner might, but even Duberman probably didn’t have one of those at home. And no matter how well-trained they were, guards were reluctant to frisk too far up the thighs. Of course, the knife wasn’t much use to Wells in its current spot either. He’d need an excuse to spend a couple of minutes in a bathroom once he got past the frisk.

“Embassy ask what you were doing?”

“I told them I was meeting Duberman. They were smart enough to leave it there. Equal branch of government and all that. Come on, let’s go.”

Wells had figured that Duto agreed to back him on this mission because he didn’t see any choice, because he realized that after his fight with Donna Green he had gone too far to back out. But the enthusiasm in his voice suggested another possibility. The former DCI wanted to be here, back in the field. They found an Internet kiosk and Wells typed a six-word email: In Tel Aviv. See you soon. “Good?”

“Let’s hope he’s home.”

“He’s home.” Wells hit send.

Duberman’s mansion sat two blocks from the ocean, in Tel Aviv’s fanciest neighborhood, north of downtown. A high concrete wall along the sidewalk blocked any view of the house. A Range Rover limousine was parked in front of the main gate. Two unsmiling men sat inside the Rover. Two more stood beside it.

Duto stepped onto the sidewalk as Wells pushed a hundred-dollar bill into the cabbie’s palm. “Wait.”

The driver nodded, but when Wells stepped out, he pulled away, tires screeching. The guards beside the Rover stepped forward. Thick, Slavic-looking men. Part of the Russian emigration to Israel, maybe.

“Your boss is waiting for us.”

The lead guard murmured in Hebrew into a shoulder-mounted radio.

Five minutes passed before the door beside the main gate opened, and Salome stepped out. Despite himself, Wells couldn’t help but notice that she wore a black T-shirt and calf-length gray pants that showed off her best feature, her smoothly muscled arms and legs.

“Senator. What a pleasant surprise. I’m Adina.”

She smiled at Wells. He recognized the look from Volgograd. “John. Wonderful to see you again. Are you carrying a weapon?”

“To a fancy place like this? ’Course not.”

“You don’t mind if we check.”

Wells stepped up, spread his hands against the wall. The bodyguard wanded him with a metal detector, then frisked him, a thorough, two-handed job, down one arm and the other from wrist to pits, around the torso. He squatted low and came up from the ankles. He reached mid-thigh and Wells had a moment of worry. But with a couple inches to spare, he pulled off.

“And you, Senator?” Salome said.

“You want to frisk me?”

“I want him to frisk you.”

Duto stepped next to Wells.

Two more guards joined them as Salome led them into the mansion’s fifty-foot-long front entrance gallery, filled with modern art that Wells didn’t recognize, oversize balloon animals, and what looked like a massive pile of Play-Doh.

They walked up a staircase that tracked into a hallway with a half-dozen bubble surveillance cameras in the ceiling. The corridor ended at a windowless door. Its deadbolt snapped back even before they reached it. Salome pulled it open, waved in Wells and Duto. The guards stayed behind.

Inside, a square white room that Wells guessed was Duberman’s outer office. Televisions displayed the casinos that formed the 88 Gamma empire, mostly night shots taken from helicopters. Their hotel towers were fifty stories or more of black glass and white neon, sleek futuristic cylinders that dominated the cities around them. Interspersed with the photos were corporate statistics: 88 Gamma had 49,000 employees in eighteen countries, yearly profits of $3.2 billion, a stock-market value of $60 billion. And Duberman owned almost half of it. No wonder he could afford to spend $200 million on a presidential campaign. He wasn’t the richest man Wells had ever met. That honor, if honor was the right word, belonged to King Abdullah. But he was certainly the richest self-made man.

And the richest enemy.

Aside from the pictures, the outer office had two desks for assistants who were nowhere in sight, plus a white couch where anyone who got this far could wait to beg Duberman’s favor. Based on its spotless leather, few people did. More than ever, Wells wanted to meet Duberman, see for himself what drove the man. If he could.

Salome knocked on the inner door. It opened fractionally. She murmured in Hebrew. Waited. Turned to them. “Come.”

22

Since the first American drone strike, the Iranian government had said it would never meet the President’s demands to open its nuclear program. Both publicly and through the French foreign ministry, which was secretly passing messages between Tehran and Washington, Iran insisted it would not even consider negotiations until the United States retracted its invasion threat.

But the previous afternoon, the Iranians had seemed to blink. The French Foreign Minister, Marie le Claire, called Green herself. “Behzadi says he’ll meet you tomorrow, if you wish.”

Fardis Behzadi was an Iranian parliamentary deputy, one of the few Iranian politicians trusted by both moderates and hardliners. As a teenager in Tehran in 1979, he had helped lead the takeover of the American embassy. Four years later, as a junior officer in the Iran — Iraq war, he had lost both legs to a mine, forever ensuring his revolutionary bona fides. At the same time, he was known to believe that Allah gives us life, but full bellies make full hearts. Unpoetically translated, the slogan meant the Shia regime wouldn’t survive unless it improved the Iranian economy and reduced unemployment.

Behzadi couldn’t negotiate a deal himself, but Green could be certain that Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, would hear whatever she told him. “Best news I’ve heard all week.” She was tempted to agree on the spot, but her own president might not approve. “Give me five minutes.”

She needed only two.

“This guy’s the real deal?” POTUS said.

“The realest. Sir.”

“Go, then.”

They agreed to meet at 2 p.m. the next afternoon at Istres — Le Tubé, a big French air base near the Mediterranean coast. They would each bring one advisor/translator. No guards. The French would handle security.

Their only disagreement came over where exactly they should meet. Neither would board the other’s plane. They were less worried about being kidnapped than taped. But neither wanted to give the French a chance to record them, either. Ultimately, they agreed to talk on the tarmac, a ridiculous but necessary solution.

Once she’d iced the details, Green spent a half hour going over talking points with the President and the SecDef. The only other officials who knew about the meeting were the DCI and the CIA’s top Iran expert, a forty-something man named Ted Rodgers who would go with Green and serve as her translator and advisor.

Unfortunately, Rodgers couldn’t give her much insight into what Behzadi might want. The CIA had no reliable sources inside the top ranks of the Iranian government, much less the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. And in recent years, the Iranians had grown expert at keeping the National Security Agency out of their computer and telecom systems. The NSA believed that military and Quds Force commanders used a network of motorcycle couriers to send written notes to one another. The couriers functioned almost as a mail service, running both point-to-point and through a central facility outside Tehran.

So Rodgers had no better idea than anyone else why Behzadi had asked for this meeting. Still, Green was glad to have him along. He spoke perfect Farsi and knew every detail of Behzadi’s biography.

To preserve secrecy, Green insisted on flying on a NetJets charter rather than an Air Force jet. The Secret Service objected. Only sat connection is in the cockpit, her security chief told her. You’ll be unreachable.

I’ll manage, Green said. She didn’t tell him she saw the lack of coms as a positive. For the first time in the years since she’d taken this job, she would have a few hours to herself.

She spent the hours before her flight reading the plans for the war that would come if her meeting failed. The attack would begin with two days of bombing raids and missile strikes to knock out Iran’s fighters and air-defense systems. On the third day, with complete air superiority, the Air Force would level the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr and attack border garrisons, setting the stage for a ground invasion at dawn on the fourth day. The 82nd Airborne Division would strike from Turkey while three Marine regiments would advance from Iraq, close to thirty thousand soldiers and Marines in all. They would aim for Natanz and Fordow, the two complexes where the Iranians performed their most important nuclear work. Both were close to the holy city of Qom — and, not coincidentally, near the geographical center of Iran, hundreds of miles from any border.

Rather than trying to take both at once, the 82nd and the Marines would converge on Natanz, the most crucial site of all. Natanz was an underground factory housed inside a military base, protected by more than ten thousand soldiers and the best air-defense system anywhere in Iran. The United States would depend on speed and airpower to take Natanz within five days of crossing the border. Over the next forty-eight hours, the Marines and the 82nd would search and destroy the facility while using the base’s airfield to resupply their troops and evacuate their wounded. They would then fight north to Fordow, the second crucial enrichment factory, where they would repeat the drill. They would then retreat almost five hundred miles south to the Persian Gulf for evacuation.

The 75th Ranger Regiment and a fourth Marine regiment would be held back in case the first invasion forces ran into trouble. If neither did, the twenty-two hundred Rangers and four thousand Marines in the reserve would be flown into Natanz to reinforce the initial units for the second half of the fight. Still, the total invasion force would be only about one-twentieth the size of the Iranian army, which included three hundred fifty thousand soldiers and an equal number of reservists. Of course, the United States had far superior weaponry, battlefield surveillance, and communications, but the sheer numerical imbalance was not comforting.

Even under the best case, the planners believed that several hundred American soldiers and Marines would die. The Iranians knew exactly the sites the United States was targeting. They could concentrate artillery and armor on the highways and bridges that led to Natanz and Fordow. American airpower would shred the Iranian positions, but not before they had inflicted plenty of casualties on the invading units. The Iranians would also try to lay the massive roadside bombs that guerrillas had used so lethally against Americans in Iraq, though the Pentagon had a countermeasure, round-the-clock drones overflying the roads the ground forces would use and destroying bomb-planting teams before they could even dig holes.

But the real concern was that Iran would block the advance of one or both invasion forces. Neither the 82nd nor the Marines had nearly enough men to protect long supply lines. Instead, they would advance in tight clusters, relying on the ammunition, fuel, and food that they brought with them until they reached Natanz and resupply. Along the way, they would have to depend on the Air Force to defend their flanks and rear. The attack would be almost a blitzkrieg, though aiming to take territory rather than encircle and destroy enemy armies. It ran counter to the doctrine the Pentagon had used to invade Iraq in 1991 and 2003. In both those cases, the United States had slowly assembled massive armies and then demolished the undermanned Iraqi forces that faced them.

The plan gave the United States the chance to destroy Iran’s nuclear program quickly, and potentially with far fewer casualties than a multiyear occupation. But if it failed, the invading forces risked being surrounded and trapped in a way no American soldiers had been since the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War. After three days of simulations, the Pentagon put the odds of rapid success at 75 percent, of a campaign that was longer and bloodier than expected but ended in American victory at 15 percent, and of failure at 10 percent. Both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense told the President that 10 percent was too high a risk and that he should consider a bigger invasion force. “It will take longer, both to put together and to move once we cross the border, but it’ll be safer.”

“Maybe the first few days will be safer,” the President said. “Then we’re stuck. It’s your job to make sure that ten percent doesn’t happen.”

As she reread the plan, Green understood the military’s concerns. The United States had lost almost seven thousand soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those deaths had occurred during more than a decade of fighting. Here, the United States could see hundreds of soldiers killed in a day. And that wasn’t even the worst case. The worst case was that the entire invasion collapsed and that the 82nd or the Marines were forced to retreat to their bases in Turkey or Afghanistan. Or to surrender. Americans couldn’t even imagine that their soldiers would ever be forced to throw down their weapons and put up their hands. The psychic damage would be unthinkable. Green believed that a major defeat would cause America to retreat from the world, becoming isolationist in a way it had not been in generations. And history suggested that whatever the problems with American leadership, the world was a more dangerous place without it.

But the President had made up his mind. Despite all the uncertainties, including the fact that the CIA still couldn’t find the Revolutionary Guard colonel who had first told it about the highly enriched uranium in Istanbul, he would not back down from his ultimatum. At the same time, he did not want another long war in a Muslim country. He would live with a ninety percent chance of success. And the decision belonged to him, no one else.

Green had done her best to help him sort the pros and cons. But as she finished rereading the briefing book that night, Green was happy she hadn’t had to decide.

She and Rodgers left Dulles just after midnight and ran into a winter storm over the western Atlantic. She was so tired that even the bumps couldn’t keep her awake. She woke to bright blue skies, the sun already behind them. “Where are we?”‘

“Western France.” Rodgers looked grim.

“What’s wrong? Weather make us late?” She checked her watch: 7 a.m., so 1 p.m. local. Right on time, a few minutes late at most.

He handed her his CIA BlackBerry. “Reception just kicked in.”

The headline jumped out at her. American Airlines Jet Lost Off South America…

Iran’s hardliners had just incinerated five hundred people to send her, and maybe their moderate counterparts in Tehran, a message: You’re wasting your time. Point made. This meeting, their last best hope for peace, was over before it even began.

She wondered if she should order the pilots to land in Paris, refuel, turn around. But they were barely an hour from Marseilles. Might as well go ahead. At least she’d get to see Behzadi in person, judge for herself whether he’d had advance knowledge of the attack.

“I should call in,” Rodgers said.

“No.” Besides two hundred new emails, his BlackBerry had seventeen unheard voice mails. No doubt hers had dozens more. She didn’t want advice or opinions. Not now. She handed it back to him. “Keep reading so we don’t miss any updates, but don’t send any emails, don’t take any calls. I don’t want to talk to anyone until I hear for myself what he has to say.”

The runway at Istres — Le Tubé stretched three-plus miles, the longest in Europe. NASA had considered using the base for emergency space shuttle landings. The Bombardier taxied for what seemed like an eternity. When they finally reached the apron at the end of the overrun, Behzadi’s jet was nowhere in sight. Insult to injury. Instead, five armored SUVs waited, along with a dozen French paratroopers, red berets cocked jauntily, short sleeves cuffed smartly over their biceps. They rolled a Jetway to the cabin door. A French air force officer in a perfectly pressed uniform mounted the steps.

“Madame National Security Advisor”—only a Frenchman could make those four words sound like an invitation to dance—“I’m Colonel Muscoot. I regret to tell you your friend is not so punctual. We expect him within twenty minutes. Would you like something to eat while you wait? I have sandwiches.”

Muscoot’s manner suggested he hadn’t heard yet about the downed jets, and Green couldn’t bring herself to tell him. “No thanks.”

“They’re excellent, I assure you.”

Why not? They would be back in the air soon enough. Might as well ride on a full stomach. “All right, then.”

He whistled sharply and a paratrooper trotted up the stairs with a picnic basket, a ridiculous and perfect flourish. Under better circumstances, Green would have been thrilled. Muscoot took it and stepped past her into the cabin. She realized that the lunch had been an excuse for him to peek inside the Bombardier, make sure it didn’t have a kidnap team stowed in back.

Still, she was glad she’d agreed. The basket held salads, tomato-and-mozzarella sandwiches on black bread, a thermos of steaming hot coffee. She had a feeling that if she’d asked for a bottle of wine, Muscoot would have snapped his fingers and produced it. While they ate, she asked about the SUVs on the tarmac, which seemed to have come straight from a Mad Max set.

“We call them VBLs. Not so armored as the Humvee, but quick. Also, it — how do you say this — it swims.”

“Amphibious.”

“Oui, amphibious.” Muscoot gave her a thousand-watt smile. Before she could come up with a suitably witty answer, his radio buzzed. After a brief back-and-forth in French: “Please excuse me. Monsieur Behzadi’s plane is arriving.” He trotted outside.

Green put down the sandwich. She had lost her appetite.

Ten minutes later, Behzadi’s jet rolled close. Muscoot’s men brought a wheelchair ramp to its front cabin door. A minute later, two men emerged, one pushing the other down the ramp. Green could wait no longer. She pushed open her own jet’s cabin door, trotted down the staircase, across the tarmac. Rodgers followed.

She reached the base of the wheelchair ramp just as Behzadi rolled off it. He was in his fifties but looked older. His eyes were pouchy, his skin sallow. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and an elaborately knitted shawl over the stumps of his legs.

He reached up with a fleshy hand. “Ms. Green,” he said. “I’m Fardis.”

Either he was the world’s best liar, or he didn’t know. Green didn’t know which was worse. “Can we have a moment, Colonel?” she said to Muscoot. As the Frenchman retreated, Green pulled Rodgers close.

“No pleasantries. Ask him if he knows. If he doesn’t, tell him. Make sure he understands that we’re blaming his bosses for killing five hundred civilians.” No matter how good Behzadi’s English, she wanted this stretch of conversation in Farsi so she could be certain he understood.

Rodgers squatted beside the wheelchair, spoke for about thirty seconds. Behzadi shook his head, no no no. He interrupted, but Rodgers talked over him. After a few seconds more, Behzadi reached out and grabbed Green’s wrist with his right hand. She pulled back, but he held her tight, his grip strengthened by a lifetime working the wheelchair.

“I didn’t know of this,” he said in English.

She wrenched her arm away from Behzadi and squatted down beside Rodgers. International diplomacy at its finest. “You don’t even deny your side did this?”

Behzadi spoke for a minute in Farsi. When he was done, Rodgers said, “He doesn’t know who did it. He says he wishes that this hadn’t happened, civilian deaths are always a tragedy, but it doesn’t change the reality that an invasion would be a disaster for both our countries—”

The worst possible answer. Green felt a surge of pure fury. She wanted to tip the wheelchair over. “You were human for thirty seconds, now you’re back to toeing the party line.”

“Leave us,” Behzadi said to Rodgers. “I speak English well enough for this.”

“Donna?”

Green nodded. Rodgers stepped back.

“All right. Speak, then.”

“Iran has no need to apologize. Your country provoked all this. Your President. On false evidence. As you must know.”

“Prove it. Let us in.”

“Never.”

“When I left Dulles last night, I was in a good mood. Had my speech all planned out. I wanted to tell you, what the President’s said publicly is true. That we have our differences with you, but we’re not interested in regime change. Occupying Iran. We learned that lesson. We just want to be sure that your nuclear program isn’t a threat. Give us a chance to see for ourselves and this ends.” She shook her head. “Turns out you don’t want it to end.”

“I don’t make these choices—”

“I know you don’t. I don’t know if you’re a bad guy or not, Fardis. I don’t even know what you came here to say. At this point, I don’t care either. Here’s what I know. You’re just a guy with no legs who wastes my time while your bosses blow up planes full of Americans.”

Green stood, walked around the wheelchair, spun it to face the ramp. “Roll on home now, and tell Rouhani and everyone else they have two days to agree to what the President has asked. Otherwise, we’re coming in. To Natanz, Fordow, every other factory you’ve ever built. We’re going to figure out exactly what you’ve put there. How much uranium you’ve made. Then we’re going to blow them up. Every last one of them. Then, if you’re lucky, we’ll leave.”

Behzadi stared at her in silence.

“Your English good enough to pass that message on, Fardis? Or you need a translation?”

“You’ll regret this. You think you frighten me? And eighty million of my people? You think we don’t know what to do with Americans? I saw your guards at the embassy begging for their lives with my own eyes.” Behzadi pointed at his eyes. “Those brave Marines. I watched them piss themselves.”

Before she could do something truly foolish, like tip the wheelchair, Green walked away.

The last, best hope for peace.

23

Duberman’s office had the windows the outer suite lacked, overlooking the city to the south and the flat sea to the west. The winter sun hung low over the water, reminding Wells that this day, too, was mostly done. So many lost hours in this chase, so few left.

Duberman leaned against his desk. He was bigger than Wells expected, handsome, with a wide, square face. His brown eyes were flecked with something lighter. Leonine. He wore linen pants and buttery brown shoes, a plain white shirt, a simple wedding ring.

The man next to him carried a stubby pistol on his hip, the only weapon openly displayed so far in this mansion. The bodyguard was in his early fifties, with a trim body, a hollow face, and eyes as mirrored as if he were wearing sunglasses. He would shoot them without question if Duberman gave the order, Wells knew.

Duberman grinned like they were gamblers who had shown up at his casino with a million dollars each and a reputation for bad luck. “Mr. Wells. Senator Duto. A pleasure. I’m Aaron. This is Gideon.” The bodyguard shook his head. “Excuse him. He doesn’t like strangers.”

Duberman’s voice carried a touch of Southern twang. He’d grown up in Atlanta, Wells remembered. Like the room and the clothes, his voice broadcast an easy, overwhelming confidence. Wells wondered whether the attitude had come with the money or vice versa. He wanted to hate the man, but he had nothing to grip yet. Duberman was a thousand-foot rock face with no visible holds.

Gideon mumbled in Hebrew. “He’d like to search you,” Duberman said.

“Sure.” Though Wells didn’t want to be frisked again. He sensed Gideon would be unafraid to get up close and personal.

“No,” Duto said. He knew about the knife. “He’s got the gun. We were searched outside. Enough is enough.”

Duberman said something in Hebrew to Salome and she answered, presumably explaining that they’d been thoroughly checked already. Wells realized that her personal bodyguard, the one with the scars, wasn’t around. He ought to be. Wells couldn’t imagine an errand more important than this meeting. But asking about him would only call attention to the fact that Wells had noticed his absence.

“All right. No frisk.” Gideon muttered something else, and Duberman smiled. “But know he’ll shoot you even faster then.”

The office was thirty feet long, divided into three sections, with Duberman’s desk in the center, a couch on one side, a square wooden table on the other. Duberman led them to the table and they sat, Wells facing Duto, and Duberman Salome. Like bridge teams.

“Mr. Wells. Senator. I’m sure you won’t try to tape this meeting. If you do, know that this room has a jammer that disables microphones. Also, your mobile phones will not work here. Only the outer suite.”

“Great,” Duto said. “We can focus on work.”

Duberman ignored him, leaned toward Wells. “Let me start by asking, do you think your religion is playing a role in your efforts here? Maybe subconsciously.”

Wells knew Duberman wanted to provoke him, but he rose to the bait anyway. Duberman had insulted his faith, his honor, and his intelligence all at once. Maybe subconsciously suggested that Wells couldn’t understand his own motives.

“You’re Jewish, but your casinos stay open on Friday nights.”

“That’s business.”

“So is this, for me. I don’t want you to trick the United States into war.”

“And that’s all.”

Wells decided to believe that Duberman’s question was sincere. “I came to Islam to survive. In a place where I was the only American, surrounded by people who wanted to destroy my country. I needed something to hold on to and I had to choose, their religion or their hate. I chose their religion.”

“All right. I respect that.” Duberman spread his hands as if to push away the unpleasantness he’d created. He radiated charm like a banked furnace. “You strike me as a plainspoken man.”

This close, Wells saw the unnatural tightening of the skin around Duberman’s jaw, the fullness in his cheeks. “It’s good.”

“What’s that?”

“Your face-lift.”

“Thank you. For what I paid, it should be.” You’ll need more than that to rattle me, his smile said. “You know our former operations officer is no longer with us. Early retirement.” A sly joke. They all knew Wells had killed Mason. “We have a vacancy. I doubt the new DCI will invite you back to Langley. And you’ve seen my resources.”

Could Duberman really be pitching? He was using a classic technique. Unbalance Wells by opening the conversation with an unpleasant question, then dismiss it and focus on what they had in common. E and E, Wells remembered an instructor at the Farm telling him. Empathize and emphasize.

“Even if we disagree about Iran, we have plenty in common. We both know the world would be safer without certain members of the Saudi royal family. Those Hamas cowards who live in Qatar and let their people serve as human shields. Salome tells me you have unique talents. The fact you’ve stayed alive for the last month suggests she’s right.” Duberman was laying on the flattery thick now.

“Mainly, I’m lucky.”

“You would have complete operational freedom. We, the three of us, would choose projects together. But after that you’d make every decision. Hire one person, a hundred, none. I can give you whatever resources you need. Salome has spent years setting up safe houses and communications all over the world.”

The offer tempted the way a syringe of heroin might. A bubble of sweet venom at the tip. Try me. Once. Once can’t hurt. Wells wondered if Duberman had planned this offer all along or whether he’d invented it when Salome told him that Wells hadn’t come alone.

“You’re serious.”

“Why not? I’d rather have you working for me than against.”

“Killing people you don’t like.”

“We both know that’s not what this is.”

Wells looked at Salome. “You on board? We’d be working closely.”

She gave him a real smile, the one that lit her face. “Oh, I think so. Look how much Mason pulled off. And that was Mason.”

“What about Iran?”

“Forget Iran,” Duberman said. “It’s done.”

“Maybe not.” Wells nodded at Salome. “We have her CIA contact. Jess Bunshaft.”

Duberman didn’t blink. “So? My customers come from all over. China. Russia. I know who has money problems, who likes little boys, who’s an addict. Of course she talks to the CIA sometimes. I admire you, Mr. Wells. Truly. But you have no chips left.” Duberman looked at Duto. “He’s the only one who can protect you, and his enemies are even bigger than yours. You played as best you could, but the cards didn’t come. Let’s move forward. Please. For all of us and our families.”

Families. The threat, again.

“My turn to ask a question.”

“Anything.”

“The Iranians say they don’t even want the bomb. Why are you so sure you’re doing the right thing? I’m sure you heard what happened today. Two more planes, five hundred more dead.”

“Do you think that means we should trust Iran more, John?”

Wells didn’t have an answer.

“What do you know about me? Besides that I’m rich.”

“That you’re very rich.”

“I was lucky to be born. My parents were Austrian. Nathan and Gisa. They came to America from Shanghai. I know, I don’t look Chinese.” A wisp of a smile. A joke he’d made before. “They spent World War II in Shanghai. Before that, they lived in Vienna. They had a store on the north side of the city that specialized in trinkets and cameras. I never understood the connection, but that’s what they sold. Silver candlesticks and Leicas. One day they saw the future goose-stepping in from Munich. They’d been successful. The kind of Jews the Nazis hated.”

Salome said something in Hebrew. Duberman nodded.

“Right. How silly of me. The Nazis hated every Jew. The ones who prayed, and the ones who didn’t. The ones in Berlin who spoke perfect German and the ones who never left their shtetls. The homosexuals and the ones with families of ten. The rich and the poor. They were all guilty of the same crime. They all received the same punishment. You see?”

Wells nodded.

“You think so, but you don’t. Anyway. My parents had a piano, an apartment. They sold all of it in two weeks, took whatever they could get, so they could pay for visas and passage to China. Shanghai was practically the only place left still taking Jews by ’38. The United States sent an ocean liner filled with them back to Europe. No more refugees, Roosevelt said. Except if they knew physics. Those Jews were fine.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you didn’t. Why would you? Your friends from Afghanistan, it’s not on their curriculum. So. Shanghai was still open. Nathan’s parents, Gisa’s brother Josef, they said, Don’t go. The Germans want to scare us. Steal our money. They’re jealous. Hitler doesn’t mean those terrible things. He’s playing to the crowds. We’ll keep our heads down and this storm will pass. Like all the others. You know what happened to those people, John?”

Wells didn’t want to answer, but Duberman’s stare insisted the question wasn’t rhetorical. “They died.”

“Todt. The Austrians were even more thorough than the Germans. Not one person my parents knew in Vienna survived. So excuse me when I tell you that when the Iranians publish maps that don’t show Israel, that when Ahmadinejad”—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president—“says the Holocaust didn’t happen, that the Jews must be eradicated, I listen. If I can manage it, those people will never have a nuclear weapon. Not now. Not ever.” He leaned forward, squeezed Wells’s biceps. “I want you on our side, John. The right side.”

Duberman smiled like he believed Wells might agree. Maybe he did. All those billions would bolster anyone’s confidence.

“Can I have a minute alone? To think.”

“In here? You want us to leave—” Duberman shook his head in puzzlement.

“No, of course not. Bathroom’s fine.”

Duberman nodded at a door on the wall behind Duto. “Right there.”

“You can’t seriously be considering this,” Duto said.

“Worried you’ll need a new errand boy, Vinny?”

Wells closed the bathroom door, eyed the tired face in the mirror. Duberman had made a surprisingly persuasive pitch. Asking Wells about Islam had been a brilliant move. The question had planted a seed of doubt. Was it possible he was anti-Semitic? No. No. He knew himself that much, anyway.

What would Shafer say?

Don’t let him play you, John. You can’t let him start a war on faked evidence. End of story. Anyway, he isn’t the only one who remembers the Holocaust. Israel doesn’t depend on anyone else to defend itself. If it needs to attack Iran, it will.

Then, maybe, Shafer would smirk. And sing: I’m starting with the man in the mirror / I’m asking him to grab his knife…

“Shut up,” Wells mumbled, unsure if he meant the words for Shafer, Michael Jackson, or himself. He turned on the tap, leaned over, and lapped from the sink like a dog, letting the water skid across his face, down his neck.

He left the taps on as he pushed his jeans down to expose the blade and handle attached to his legs. He pulled off the tape, snapped the pieces together. The assembled knife was five inches long, half blade, half handle. Any shorter and it wouldn’t have been useful. But even at five inches, it was too big for Wells to hide in a pocket.

He had a nylon sheath tucked into his underwear. He pulled up the left leg of his jeans, strapped the sheath low on the inner calf, just above the nub of his ankle. An ankle sheath made a slow draw, but Wells feared Gideon would spot the knife anywhere else. He double-checked to be sure the jeans hid it. He flushed the toilet, washed and dried his face. Stepped out.

“You all right?” Duto said.

“Never better.”

“And have you decided?” Duberman said.

“I’ll do it.”

“John—” Duto said.

Salome muttered in Hebrew.

“You’re serious.”

“That I am.”

Duberman stood, extended his hand. “Welcome.”

Wells left him hanging. “Just one condition. That you confess to the President.”

“That’s funny.” But Duberman wasn’t smiling.

“Or if that’s too much, tell us where you got the HEU. We’ll pass it on. Keep your name out.”

Duberman’s hand sank to his side with the slow finality of a castle gate dropping. He stared at Wells, an angry god who couldn’t believe that a mortal had refused his wish. Behind him, Gideon the bodyguard put a hand on his holstered pistol.

“I made a serious offer, John. I don’t appreciate this.”

Wells felt a familiar itch in his fingers. “Then we should go. We have a plane to catch.”

“Mossad may feel differently.” Duberman gave Wells a gargoyle’s stone grin. “I promised you safe passage. And you’ll have it. Right to them.”

“Come on, Aaron.” The words were meaningless, a way to buy a few seconds as Wells figured out how to get to his knife and corral Duberman before Gideon shot him. He could imagine his move, could see it—

He’d take a big step forward with his left leg, almost a squat, pulling up his jeans, exposing the knife. He’d reach down and across his body with his right hand as he grabbed Duberman with his left and reeled him in—

But Gideon was too close, and watching too closely. Wells couldn’t make the combination work without an extra second or two. A diversion.

Duto stood. “I’m not leaving without him. And you can’t keep me. Embassy knows where I am.”

“You’re right,” Duberman said. “Israel can’t keep you. But it can send you home. Alone.”

Duto reached down, flipped the table over, sending it toward the bodyguard. The distraction Wells needed. As the heavy wood cracked against the floor Gideon turned to Duto and drew his pistol—

And Wells lunged forward, came up with his knife, squeezed his left hand around Duberman’s arm, pulled him close. Duberman was strong enough for a man past sixty, but against Wells he had no chance. Wells twined his arm across Duberman’s chest, twisted him so that Duberman’s body hid his own. Gideon half turned toward Wells. But he didn’t raise the pistol. He didn’t have a clear shot.

Wells touched the knife to Duberman’s neck, tugged Duberman backward, toward the bathroom. Duberman sagged against Wells, not struggling but not helping either. Subtly looking for a way to free himself.

Wells jabbed the blade into Duberman’s neck, hard enough to break the skin. Duberman yelped as his blood bubbled out. “No games.”

“All right,” Duberman said.

Gideon brought the pistol up, stepped to the right, looking for an angle.

“Drop it,” Wells said. “Now.”

Gideon hesitated. Then shook his head, turned the pistol on Duto.

“Let him go or I shoot.”

“Then shoot.” Wells probed the knife deeper. Blood flowed from Duberman’s neck. “Tell him, Aaron. He kills Vinny, you die.”

Wells meant his words. He would slice Duberman’s throat open if Gideon shot Duto. His own life would end seconds later, but he didn’t care. No one could hide the simultaneous deaths of a senator and one of the world’s richest men. The United States and Israel would have to investigate. Maybe they’d uncover the plot.

Anyway, he and Duto wouldn’t go down alone.

“Three—”

Gideon shook his head—

“Two—”

Cursed in Hebrew.

“One—”

Squatted. Laid down the pistol. Muttered at Duberman.

“Yes,” Duberman said in English. “This is why we should have let you frisk him.” He tilted his head into Wells. “What now, John? You’re the expert.” His voice was level, impassive. Like he was still in charge despite the knife against his neck.

“Now he kicks the pistol. To Vinny.”

Duberman explained. Gideon nudged it with his foot. Too late, Wells realized Salome had a chance at it. It skittered close and she looked at it—

But let it slide. Duto grabbed it.

“Now tell him to sit on the floor.”

Duberman translated, and Gideon complied.

“I’m figuring you didn’t call the Mossad before I got here, because why would you? You didn’t know Vinny was coming, so you assumed you could hold me as long as you liked. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Tell Gideon to take off his shoes. When he’s done, he lies down on his stomach with his hands laced behind his head. Then bends his knees and lifts his lower legs off the floor.”

“What is this? Yoga?”

“I’m going to cut his Achilles tendons so he can’t follow us when we leave.”

“Cut him?”

“That or a bullet in his head.” Wells shifted the knife under the artificially tightened flesh of Duberman’s chin. “You think I won’t, ask Salome what I did in Istanbul.”

“Listen to him,” Salome said in English.

Duberman spoke and Gideon did what Wells had demanded.

“Now you two stand by the bathroom, so I can do it without you in the way.” Wells spun Duberman, shoved him away, sending him stumbling against the wall.

“You’re an animal,” Salome said.

Maybe she wasn’t his soul mate after all.

When Wells knelt on Gideon’s back, the guard looked over his shoulder at him.

“Just one, please.”

“You’re too dangerous for that.” Wells grabbed Gideon’s left ankle and slashed into the tough tendon there. Even with the sharp ceramic blade, he had to hack like he was sawing a rope. Gideon screamed, but Wells cut until the tendon snapped in two, its halves retracting, hiding under the skin. Gideon’s foot hung limp and useless. Blood spurted from the hole in his ankle. He made a single mewling moan, a cat in a coyote’s jaws.

Wells looked over the damage. “All right. Just one.”

He stood, looked at Duto. Who waved him over with two fingers.

“We can end this now,” he murmured. He nodded at Duberman and Salome, who stood with their backs pressed against the wall like they hoped to melt into it. “They know. Where it came from.”

Meaning that Duberman or Salome could tell them where they’d bought the HEU.

“I won’t hurt them, Vinny.”

“Not saying that. Nothing permanent.”

“What, then?”

Duto explained. A cruel play, revolting and brilliant. Wells shook his head.

“I’ll do it,” Duto said. “If you can’t.”

As an answer, Wells reached for Gideon’s stainless-steel pistol, a little Sig Sauer that felt oddly small in his palm.

“Cute, isn’t it?” Duto said.

“As long as it shoots.”

“By the way. Would you really have let him shoot me?”

“In a heartbeat.” Wells covered Salome and Duberman with the pistol. “Salome. Go in the corner. Stand facing out, hands flat against the walls. Aaron. Lie facedown on the floor next to your desk.”

“No.”

“If you don’t I’ll shoot you.”

“How do I know you won’t do that anyway?”

Wells shook his head: You don’t. Duberman took two steps. Went to his knees. Lay down. The rustling of his linen pants was the room’s only sound. Wells came over, racked the slide to be sure he had a round chambered. Duberman flinched at the metal-on-metal click.

“Put your hands behind your head.” Wells put a knee into Duberman’s back.

“I can pay. Whatever you like.”

“Shh.” Wells shoved the pistol into Duberman’s neck — and flashed back to the hotel in Volgograd where Boris Nemkov had done the same to him. An ouroboros came to him, the mythical snake that ate its own tail. He should have let Duto handle this. It was Duto’s idea—

No. He would own what happened next. No one else. Most of all, not Duto.

“It’s time for you to tell us where you got the uranium.”

Duberman shook his head. Wells pressed the pistol down harder, wrinkled the tanned skin of Duberman’s neck. “Tell me. You have my word, we’ll keep your name out of it. Your life goes on. Your wife, your kids—”

No.

This wasn’t who he was. He didn’t threaten to execute defenseless prisoners. Then he made himself think of the Americans and Iranians who would die by the thousands for Duberman’s lies if the United States invaded. He tightened his grip, shoved the pistol harder into Duberman’s neck, where the spine bent into the skull.

“I count to three. Then I blow your brains out.”

“No.”

“One.”

“I don’t know.”

“Two.”

“I swear, I don’t, I don’t—”

“Lie.” Wells shifted the pistol, pressed it against the thin bone of Duberman’s temple. Duberman tried to raise his head, but with his left hand Wells forced him down, forced him to see the pistol. “I want you to live, but you have to tell me.”

“Tell him,” Salome said. “Please. Aaron. Please.”

“She loves you.” As Wells spoke, he knew the words were true. “Listen to her.”

Duberman tried to shake his head under Wells’s hand. Blood from the cut on his neck dribbled to the floor. Wells looked at Salome. He’d threatened Duberman instead of her because he’d expected she’d be the stronger of the two, more willing to die. Maybe he’d guessed wrong. “You tell me, then. Tell me and he lives.”

“Aaron,” she said.

Duberman answered in Hebrew.

“He says he’d rather die.”

“Yes,” Duberman said.

“Then you will,” Wells said.

“Do it, then.”

“Three. Last chance. Now.”

But of course Wells didn’t pull the trigger.

Duberman’s body shook under Wells’s knee, ripples that ran the length of his back. Wells wondered if Duberman was crying. No. Laughing. Maybe he had never believed Wells would shoot him. Maybe he truly was willing to sacrifice himself for this war. Either way, he had called Wells’s bluff.

During all his years in the field, Wells had sworn he would never torture. Mock executions might not leave bruises or broken bones, but they were psychic torture nonetheless. He had tossed aside one of his most important principles. Humiliated himself.

For nothing.

What would Anne say? Or Exley?

“John.” Duto’s voice brought Wells back to the room. They still had to escape.

Wells stood, nudged Duberman’s leg. “Get up.”

Duberman rose. His hands trembled, but he raised his head and stared at Wells, his eyes shining. Triumphant. At this moment, Wells wanted more violence not at all, but he needed to reestablish his authority quickly. He shifted the pistol to his left hand. With his right, he jabbed Duberman beneath the ribs, a single vicious punch. Duberman doubled over, his breath shallow and fast. With his left hand, Wells brought the Sig down on Duberman’s skull. He didn’t put all his weight into the blow. He didn’t want to knock Duberman out or break bone. Duberman groaned, went to his hands and knees, his head hanging low, drool threading from his mouth. “What are you?”

“This meeting is officially over.” Wells forced himself to keep his voice calm. Steady. “But we’re not done with each other yet. You’re going to lead us out of here, Aaron. I’ll be a step behind you. Salome behind me. Vinny’s going to be the caboose. A happy little train. Right, Vinny?”

“Absolutely.”

Wells pulled Duberman up. “Your job is to make sure your guards don’t do anything dumb so I don’t have to gut you. Understand?”

Duberman wiped the spittle from his lips, nodded.

“Say it.”

“I understand.”

“You have your passport in this office?”

“Yes.”

Wells looked at Salome. “And you have yours on you, I’ll bet.”

She nodded.

“Good. We’re taking a ride in that Range Rover outside. The four of us only. Guards and phones stay here. Salome drives, Vinny sits up front with her, I sit in back with you. We’re going to Ben Gurion. Anyone tries to stop us, we kill you. You ask anyone for help, we kill you. At the airport, we go through the general aviation side. Vinny has a jet there. You two are coming with us. We’ll fly to Cyprus and drop you off there.”

“No,” Salome said.

“Why would we agree to this?” Duberman said.

“I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

“Another bluff.”

Wells shook his head. “You think I want this? It’s our only play. We can’t leave you here. Soon as we go, you make a call, we’re done. We have to keep you close until we’re off Israeli soil. I just proved I won’t kill you if you’re my prisoner. But if you won’t come, we’ll shoot you and take our chances, see how far we get.”

“Not a hundred meters.”

“Probably. But you’ll be dead already. Your choice.”

Duberman looked Wells over, seemed to see he wasn’t bluffing. “Fine. Cyprus. And Gideon?”

“He stays. Make sure he understands what happens if he calls anyone.”

Duberman and Gideon spoke in Hebrew, and Duberman laughed.

“He says after you land there, he hopes you have a rocket to the moon, because nowhere in the world will be safe.”

Thirty-five minutes later, they reached the general aviation terminal at Ben Gurion Airport. At the security checkpoint, Duto flashed his diplomatic passport, walked around the metal detector. A guard reached for him, and Duto shrugged him off.

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“I’m a United States senator.”

“Not for long,” Duberman muttered.

“I flew twelve hours here for a meeting, now I have to turn around. My back is killing me. Don’t touch me.”

“Sir—”

“You can walk me straight to my plane if you like, but don’t put a finger on me.”

The guard reached for a phone at the X-ray station, but Duberman said something in Hebrew and he stopped.

Five minutes later, they stepped into the G650. The blond-haired pilot poked his head out of the cockpit. “Four passengers? For Cyprus?” Duto had called on the drive over.

“Correct.”

“No weather, no line, we should be airborne in five minutes. On the ground in forty-five.”

As he closed the cockpit door, Wells pulled two pairs of plastic flex-cuffs from the bag that Duto had brought him. “I need you both to put your wrists together in front of you.”

“Are we such a threat to a trained killer?” Duberman said. He let Wells cuff him and settled into his seat, his smirk wider than ever. He’d shaken off the mock execution and pistol-whipping in record time. Wells knew what he was thinking. That he would call his guards when they landed and be back in Israel within hours. That he had this jet’s tail number and could track it. That he would either have Wells arrested right away or, more likely, let him flail until the deadline passed and then put Gideon on him. Most important, that Wells and Duto didn’t have any idea where Salome had gotten the HEU and didn’t have the time to find out.

Duberman was thinking that he’d won.

Wells feared he was right.

Where could they go after Cyprus? Their best bet would probably be to fly to the United States, see if they could shake Shafer loose from CIA custody. Maybe he’d come up with something before the seventh floor grabbed him.

And if they lost? When they lost? Being a senator gave Duto protection, though it wasn’t unlimited. Wells would have to decide whether to take his chances with the Justice Department or go off the grid. Maybe a year or two in the mountains would do him good. Catching steelheads and salmon for supper. Sleeping in a one-room cabin without electricity or a toilet. Chopping wood or going to bed cold. Good old-fashioned basic survival. Maybe this life had made him too hard and too soft at the same time. Or maybe he was deluding himself, pretending life as a fugitive would be anything but exhausting and lonely. He’d fall asleep each night wondering whether the FBI or Duberman would find him first.

A song he’d first heard lying in bed with Anne came to him:

The singer’s voice breathy and quiet. The band was called The Killers, Wells remembered now, the song “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Both about right.

He wasn’t beaten. Not as long as he breathed. Let the world break him. He wouldn’t surrender.

He settled into his seat and waited for Cyprus.

24

The Gulfstream’s engines spooled up.

And Wells felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. An Israeli number. Had the Mossad tracked them already? He sent the call to voice mail.

The phone buzzed again. Same number. Wells knocked on the cockpit door. “Hold tight a minute.” He stepped to the back of the jet. “Yes?”

“The question you asked me.” Rudi’s rasping voice. “About the stuff. The man who brought it, his name was Witwans.”

“Rand Witwans?”

“That’s right. First name R-A-N-D. The amount was fourteen kilos.”

“One-four?” Wells’s heart drummed a mad song in his chest.

“Yes, dummy. Fourteen. Fourteen exactly. Does that help?”

“Maybe.” Yes, yes, yes.

“No more questions. No more favors.”

“Thank you, Rudi.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I’ll see you at my funeral. Unless yours comes first.” Click.

Joost Claassen had told Shafer that South Africa produced 15.3 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Joost remembered the amount because the program had beaten its goal of 15 kilos. But Rand Witwans had brought only 14 kilograms to Israel. He’d held on to those missing 1.3 kilograms all those years. Until Salome found him.

Witwans held the answer, if they could track him down in time. Cyprus was the wrong move, the wrong way. Wells needed at least twelve hours. To fly to South Africa, find Witwans’s house. He’d be alone there, only his servants for company—

No. Wells suddenly realized why Salome’s personal bodyguard hadn’t been at their meeting. She’d sent him to watch Witwans. He needed to put Salome and Duberman someplace they couldn’t immediately call the guard. Wells could think of only one place in the world from which Duberman couldn’t use his billions to free himself immediately. The last card in the deck. His last play.

He reached for his phone.

“Again?” Abdullah said. “And after our conversation last week. Truly?”

“I know I’ve stretched your generosity, King.”

“What you did for my family, I didn’t think I could repay it, not in the time I had left. But maybe I’ve lived longer than I expected. What is it now?”

Wells explained.

“This is one of the richest men in the world, not some maid from Pakistan,” Abdullah said. “You think no one notices?”

“A day, two at the most—”

“An American. A diplomatic nightmare. And what’s our excuse? No, it’s not possible.”

“How about this? Not even a day. Just until the afternoon tomorrow, and then put him on a plane back to Amman.” Amman was less than a hundred kilometers from Jerusalem, close enough that Duberman and Salome could find their way back to Israel without trouble. At the same time, the jet would stay outside Israeli airspace, so Abdullah wouldn’t have to worry that it or its pilots would be detained. “Say it’s a terrible mistake. Blame me.”

“Of course I’ll blame you.”

The King laughed, and Wells knew he would agree. “All right. In return, I want a promise.”

Wells waited for the inevitable.

“This repays our debt. Now and forever.”

“It’s already repaid, King.”

“I know.”

Wells came forward, ignored the others, knocked on the cockpit door.

“Ready to push?” the pilot said.

“Can I come in?”

The cockpit was sleek and black and angular, with four big flat-screen panels side by side under the windshield. It looked like a cross between a BMW dashboard and a video game.

“What can I do for you?”

“Mind if I ask your name?”

“On these sorts of missions, I go by Captain Kirk,” the pilot said.

Fair enough. “We have a new destination. And I’d rather you not call it in until we’re in the air.”

“Where’s that, sir?”

“Riyadh.”

“We can get cleared to land? From Tel Aviv?”

Wells scribbled down the number for Abdullah’s private secretary. “He’ll arrange it. All he needs is the tail number and an ETA.” Wells hesitated. “I don’t suppose you can turn off the transponder.”

Civilian jets carried transponders so that air-traffic control systems could track them and distinguish them from military aircraft. In response to radio signals from ground stations, a transponder emitted a unique call sign that included the location and altitude of the plane carrying it. Public tracking services like flightaware.com now tracked the transponder signals of planes worldwide in real time, which meant that Duberman’s guards could easily follow this flight and would know when it changed course and turned away from Cyprus.

But pilots could turn off transponders from the cockpit, as had famously happened in the case of Malaysia Airlines 370. They were supposed to do so only in extraordinary circumstances, such as a malfunctioning transponder that was sending the wrong altitude, or an electrical fire. Any plane that wasn’t sending transponder signals was presumed to be a military aircraft and risked being shot down.

The pilot shook his head. “Not in this neighborhood. The Israelis get squirrelly. In fact, even with it on, they won’t like the change of plans. We’ll have to give them plenty of room, go over the western Sinai and the Red Sea before we make the turn into Saudi airspace.”

“How about when we get over the Kingdom?”

“I trust you, sir, but not that much.”

Not what Wells wanted to hear, but he could hardly argue.

“I gotta ask.” The pilot nodded at the door. “Do they know about this little course correction?”

Wells hesitated, all the answer the pilot needed.

“I can lock this door, get you where you need to go, but if you can’t control them—”

“We can control them.”

“Sure about this? Because it’s about five felonies.”

Just put ’em on my tab. “Ask the senator if you like.”

“I don’t even know who you’re talking about. What happens in Riyadh?”

“We’ll leave the two we brought now and go straight to Johannesburg.”

The pilot shook his head. “By the time we land, it’ll be midnight local, we’ll have been flying about twenty-four hours straight. I’ll do my best for you, but Spock and I have to sleep a few hours before we go. Can’t be flying over Africa on a route we’ve never seen in the middle of the night with no rest.”

More bad news. Wells would have to check, but he imagined Riyadh was at least eight hours from Johannesburg. If they left the Kingdom tomorrow morning, they wouldn’t reach South Africa until midafternoon at best. By the time they found Witwans’s mansion, night would have fallen. Even if they could grab him quickly, they’d have barely one full day left before the President’s deadline, and South Africa was a sixteen- or seventeen-hour flight from Washington. Wells was sure that they would have to bring Witwans to the President or Donna Green in person to have any chance.

“You can’t sleep in Joburg?”

The pilot shook his head. “Everyone thinks these things fly themselves, but there’s a reason for the rules. We’re over the duty limits already. And I’m guessing that won’t be our last stop, that you’ll want us to come back here or the U.S. or somewhere else pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow night.”

“Possibly.”

“Even more reason, then. If you have a relief crew in Saudi—”

Wells shook his head. He was out of favors with Abdullah.

“Then we need seven hours minimum in Riyadh.”

Wells couldn’t argue. The pilot had already done as much as Wells could have hoped. By changing his destination after takeoff, he was essentially kidnapping Duberman and Salome. “Thanks.”

Back in the cabin, Duto, Duberman, and Salome waited expectantly.

“You’ll be happy to hear that was Shafer,” Wells said to Salome. As he’d expected, she shook her head, not possible. “If I can talk my way out of Lubyanka, you don’t think he can outsmart those mouth breathers on the seventh floor?

“And that’s why you went to the cockpit?” Salome said.

“He told me we had to talk on a clean phone. I asked the pilot for his, but he told me I had to wait until Cyprus. Anyway, I’m sure whatever he has to tell me is bad news for you.”

The explanation didn’t even qualify as paper-thin, but the engines went to full power before anyone could argue. “Buckle up,” the pilot said through the intercom. “We should be in Cyprus in about forty-five minutes.”

Ten minutes later, the G650 was high above Israel’s coast. The plane turned slowly right, to the northwest, and soared uneventfully toward Cyprus for fifteen minutes. And then they settled into an easy left turn. They were more than one hundred kilometers offshore already, with a thin scrim of clouds before them, nothing to provide any perspective. Even so, Salome figured out what was happening.

“What is this?”

This G650 had been equipped with two seats per row, one on each side of the aisle. Salome and Duberman were in the third row from the cockpit door. Wells was one seat up. He unbuckled his belt, stepped into the aisle, put one big hand on each of their shoulders.

“Change of plans. We’re going to Riyadh.”

“You think that’s going to save you?” Duberman said. “You think Gideon can’t track this plane? He’ll find you even before you land. You think they don’t know who I am in the Kingdom? Half the royal family has spent time at my tables. Those Gulf Arabs, they like roulette and baccarat. The classy games. Never craps. They don’t like to touch the dice that the infidels have touched. They have such funny rules.”

Wells had seen enough of the royal family to know Duberman was telling the truth. “Sure.”

“They’re not great gamblers, they get bored, don’t size their bets, blow through their bankrolls. They want big comps, too, always the fanciest brands, the biggest suites. One of Abdullah’s grandsons, he lost three million dollars in Macao in a week, we gave him a Ferrari convertible, a Spider 458, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car. You know what he said? ‘Not bad, but I like the Bugatti.’ Which runs more like a million, a million-one.”

“Sounds like we’re doing you a favor,” Wells said. “You can set up shop in Riyadh.”

“Or are you hoping they won’t care who I am, they’ll lock us up because we’re Jews?”

A cheap shot, though Wells supposed he had it coming. “You’ll be safe enough. I want a decent head start”—let Duberman think he was running—“and they’re going to keep you for a couple of days.”

“All the head start in the world won’t help you.”

“Then maybe I should just kill you now.”

Duberman waved his hand, dismissing Wells, a remarkable gesture under the circumstances. “Whether I’m alive or dead, Gideon will hunt you down. And after what you did he won’t be satisfied with just putting a bullet in you.”

Wells sat back next to Duto, whose unhappiness was plain. He grabbed a pad, scribbled, That really Shafer on the phone?

Wells shook his head. But good news, he wrote.

What happens in Riyadh?

Tell you when we get there. Wells wasn’t asking permission. Whatever Duto had expected when he came to Cairo, he was committed now. Duto shook his head, but wrote only, Hope you know what you’re doing. Wells did, too.

Outside, the sky turned orange-pink for a few glorious minutes before night came. They were all silent as the jet followed the course the pilot had outlined to Wells, over the Sinai and the Red Sea. After almost two hours, the G650 turned left, over the Arabian Peninsula, the desert’s blackness broken only by a few small outposts. Mecca and Medina were down there somewhere. Wells wondered if he’d ever see them properly. He thought not.

He stood, faced Duberman.

“That offer you made me, Aaron—”

“Off the table.”

Wells smiled. “But you were serious?”

“You would have had to stay with me until after the war started. But yes.”

Wells believed him.

“You should have taken it. You know I’ve seen you at my casinos a dozen times.”

“I don’t—”

“All the years I’ve been doing this. You come and you’re lucky, and you’re lucky, and you’re lucky. And it starts to feel like something more. Even the dealers, the bosses, the shift managers, they start to believe. That’s when they call me. Guy came in with ten thousand last night, he’s been playing craps, now he has six hundred K and the whole casino wants to bet with him. He’s hit six straight blackjacks and let it ride every time, he wants to do it again for a quarter million.”

“That happens?” Duto said from the seat ahead.

“You run a casino long enough, everything happens. I tried to figure out once how many separate bets I’ve taken over the years, not even counting the slots. I couldn’t. It had to be billions. Sooner or later, you get these streaks. You know what I always tell my managers? Take the bet. In fact, they know what I’m going to say, they’re not even calling to ask as much as to let me know what’s going on. I like to hear. So we take the bet. In all those years, you know how many times the guy, it’s always a guy, has walked out ahead? Once. In 1999. The blackjack guy, I couldn’t believe it, I’ll never forget it, he won that seventh bet.”

“Another blackjack?” Wells didn’t much care about gambling, but Duberman could tell a story.

“No, a six-card twenty-one to beat two tens for the dealer.”

“Bull,” Duto said.

“Why would I lie? I’m guessing you don’t play much blackjack, John, but trust me when I tell you that’s incredibly rare. I wasn’t there, but my manager told me that he said, That was fun. I guess I’m done. Picked up a half-million dollars in chips and walked out. We never saw him again, either. My security guys looked at the tapes to make sure he wasn’t cheating, colluding with the dealer. I still think that’s probably what happened, but we could never find it. But every other time, those guys, they crashed and burned. Because it’s just luck, John, that’s all it is. That’s all you are. The luck eventually runs out. The house always wins.”

Wells had to fight not to mention the call from Rudi. Instead, he said only, “We’ll see,” an answer that sounded lame even to him. Duberman didn’t bother to answer.

Wells turned away, looked at Salome, but he found no succor in her face. Only hate. He had questions for her: Did you feel it, too? And How did you end up here? But he didn’t feel like asking. And he supposed he already knew what she’d say: Yes. And How does anyone end up anywhere?

“I should have killed you in Volgograd.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I wouldn’t have gotten to hear your boss’s stories.”

A reluctant smile creased her lips, and Wells knew her thoughts, knew they mirrored his. Ninety minutes later, the jet began to descend. “We’ll be at King Khalid International Airport in approximately thirty minutes,” the pilot said over the intercom. “After landing, we’ve been told to remain on the auxiliary runway, so that’s what we’ll do. Rendition Airways looks forward to serving you again soon.”

As the jet stopped, a dozen unmarked police SUVs surrounded it. The armada taxied slowly away from the lights of the main terminal, to an apron beside a blocky concrete building at the airport’s northeastern edge, as far from the city of Riyadh as possible. “Quarantine Station,” its sign read in Arabic and English.

“If they offer us a welcome shower, I’m going to get nervous,” Duberman said.

“Holocaust humor,” Duto said. “Classy.”

The police trained a half-dozen spotlights on the jet and rolled a staircase to the front cabin door. The flight attendant, who had spent the entire flight in the rear galley with wraparound Beats headphones over his ears, the literal definition of hearing no evil, stepped forward and popped it open. The desert wind kicked dust inside as a spotlight glared through the open door.

Wells stepped forward. A uniformed Saudi officer stood at the base of the stairs and waved him down. Three soldiers stood around him, their rifles trained on Wells. Wells wondered if he might finally have exhausted his credit with Abdullah, if the Saudis might arrest him and everyone on the plane. But when he reached the stairs, the officer extended a friendly hand. He was short, stocky, and handsome, with the close-cut beard that Saudi royals favored. Wells tried to ignore the fact that he looked about twenty.

“Salaam aleikum.”

“As-aleikum salaam.”

“Mr. Wells. I’m Colonel Faisal. A grandson of Miteb.” Prior to his death a year before, Prince Miteb had been Abdullah’s closest ally in the royal family. If his grandson was here, Wells was safe.

“Thank you for coming here.”

Faisal smiled. “Rami”—Abdullah’s most senior secretary, basically his chief of staff—“said it might be the most interesting mission of my career. He said when you were involved, his life was never boring.”

Wells had sometimes wondered why Abdullah let him draw so many favors over the years. He suspected that Faisal had given him the answer. Genuine excitement was as hard to find for a king as anyone else. Maybe harder.

“Do you know why you’re here, Colonel?”

Faisal shook his head.

“A man and a woman aboard that plane have requested asylum in the Kingdom.” This explanation failed to answer any number of important questions, including Who are they? Why are they claiming asylum? What’s your relationship with them? And, even more obviously, Why did you land here in the first place? Whether out of deference, or, more likely, because he’d been told to keep his mouth shut and do what Wells said, Faisal asked none of them.

“Yes. I see.”

“I imagine you don’t get many asylum seekers, but I think it would be best if you kept them out here in the quarantine station. Instead of taking them back to the terminal to start a more formal process.”

“Are they dangerous, sir?”

“Not unless you like to gamble.” The joke sailed past Faisal. “No. They aren’t.”

“And shall I question them, sir? To determine whether they have legitimate business here?”

Absolutely, positively not. “Just hold them, make sure they’re comfortable. Food, a hot shower, whatever they like. Don’t touch them under any circumstances.”

“But then how will I know what to do with them?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, you’ll release them,” Wells said. Of course. Makes perfect sense. “Rami will tell you exactly when, but it won’t be too late. Certainly before dark.”

“Release them where, sir?”

“A flight to Amman. Rami will arrange the jet. But don’t tell them that you’re going to let them go until Rami tells you so. Most important, don’t let them make any phone calls. Whatever they promise or threaten, no communication of any kind.”

“I understand, sir. And will you be leaving now?”

“Not yet. We’ll sleep on the plane until morning and then take off.” Wells figured the Gulfstream would be at least as comfortable as the quarantine rooms.

Faisal nodded, though his expression remained puzzled. “This seems like a lot of trouble, sir. If they’re going to leave tomorrow anyway.”

Wells shook the young Saudi’s hand. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you, Colonel?”

“Twenty-five, sir.”

Nice to be a prince.

Back in the cabin, Duberman and Salome hadn’t moved.

“Go on,” Wells said. “I give you my word you won’t be hurt.”

Duberman stood, turned to Duto. “Senator. Your friend is obviously mentally ill. Are you going along with this? It’ll destroy you, too.”

“Good-bye, Aaron,” Duto said.

At the cabin door, Duberman turned to Wells. “You’re going to wish you’d killed me.”

“I already do.”

As they watched Faisal and his men usher Duberman and Salome into the station, Wells told Duto what had happened, beginning with Rudi’s call.

“So all of this was to buy an extra day. Not even.”

“Yes.”

“Ever think that maybe we should just have shot them?”

“Shot Aaron Duberman.”

“He’s the one who suggested it. They’re going to come at us as soon as they get out of here. And if we win he’s dead anyway. You think the President’s going to give Duberman a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

“I don’t shoot prisoners, Vinny.”

“All right. Better hope Witwans is home when we get down there.”

A possibility Wells had not even considered. “He’ll be home, Vinny.”

Finally, the jet reached an apron where dozens of other private jets were parked. The pilot opened the cockpit door. “We’ll sleep here. Wake at 0800 and be in the air by 0815.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Good night to all, and to all a good night.”

25 TWO DAYS…

With no bags, Salome and Duberman walked untouched past the customs posts at Queen Alia International Airport. They stepped into the arrival hall, a wide, low room crowded with money-changing stations, coffee stands, and men hawking hotel leaflets. Duberman stopped so abruptly that Salome had to dodge his heels and looked around as wide-eyed as an aquarium-bound fish. Salome thought she understood his confusion. The superrich never spent time by themselves in uncontrolled public spaces. Duberman had no guards or minders or drivers to tell him where to go, clear his path. Being threatened with execution didn’t faze him. Having to find his way through this terminal on his own, on the other hand…

“Over here.” She led him to a mobile phone kiosk.

The previous night in Riyadh, the young colonel had ushered them inside the quarantine station, where a pair of cots were waiting. “Sleep,” he said. “We will discuss in the morning.”

“Discuss what?” Salome said. She lay down and, to her surprise, fell asleep almost immediately.

She woke in confusion, certain she’d had the strangest of dreams. Wells had taken her and Duberman to Riyadh. Then she tasted the desert dust in her mouth.

She’d slept in her clothes, but the Saudis had shielded her cot with a sheet anyway. She pulled it open to reveal a concrete room covered with posters encouraging hand-washing. The colonel sat in the middle, playing a video game on his phone. Duberman was still asleep, lying on his back, his arms folded prayerfully across his chest. The world’s richest monk.

She still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t cracked in Tel Aviv. She almost had. After seeing how Wells had eviscerated his guards in Istanbul, she was certain he would follow through on his threat to kill Duberman. She’d been trying to play out what might happen after she gave up Witwans’s name. Maybe they could still stop Wells from getting to him. Maybe she could buy time by giving Wells a fake name. Anything to get him away from Duberman. But she saw that once she spoke, Wells would keep threatening her until he was sure that she was telling the truth and that he had a way to Witwans.

Still, she wanted to tell. She loves you, Wells had said to Duberman. More accurate to say that Salome couldn’t imagine a world without Duberman. She understood her hypocrisy. For five years, she had insisted they had to stop Iran from building a bomb at any cost. Now, with victory days away, she was about to risk their success to save one man.

Luckily, Duberman had somehow known that Wells wouldn’t pull the trigger. He had called Wells’s bluff.

Yet Wells still wasn’t finished. She supposed his ability to adapt to crisis, never give up, was the reason he’d survived so long. So they had wound up at this concrete quarantine station at an airport in Riyadh, watched over by this ridiculously young colonel.

He put away his phone as Salome rose from her cot and approached him.

“Salaam aleikum.”

“Don’t pretend to be polite. We’re your prisoners.”

“Not at all.”

“Then let us go.”

“Miss”—he pulled her passport from his pocket, made a show of looking at it—“Leffetz. I understand you’re upset, but there’s nowhere for you to go. You’re in quarantine.”

“Then let me call my office. Or email.”

He tucked away the passport. “Once you’re out of quarantine.”

“And when will that be?”

“Soon.”

“Days, weeks, months?”

“Soon.” He wasn’t smiling, but she couldn’t help feeling he was mocking her.

“What kind of quarantine is this, anyway? We’re not sick.” As she spoke, she knew she’d lost. Even speaking the word meant accepting his ridiculous premise.

“We are processing your request for asylum.”

“We haven’t—” She broke off, forced herself to keep her voice level. “That man over there. You know who he is?”

This time, he pulled Duberman’s blue American passport. “Aaron Duberman. Born Atlanta, Georgia.”

“He’s worth almost thirty billion dollars. Why would he want asylum in Saudi Arabia?”

“We have excellent free health care.”

Now she knew he was mocking her.

“When the processing is complete, we’ll inform you of the outcome.”

“I hope you’re enjoying this, because it’s going to end badly for you.”

“Would you like some coffee?”

When Duberman woke, she explained what had happened.

“How long do you think they can hold us like this?”

They were speaking Hebrew, ignoring the stares of the guards.

“Not long. No doubt they’re already getting calls from Jerusalem. Washington soon enough.”

Gideon would have realized quickly that Riyadh was their most likely destination, especially since Duberman had investigated Wells and knew of his relationship to the Kingdom.

The more important question was why Wells had dumped them here instead of Cyprus. Presumably, the phone call he’d taken in the minutes before takeoff held the answer. He would have needed a good reason for such a desperate play, and Salome could think of only one.

“Someone told him where we got the stuff.” Though she couldn’t understand who’d tipped him off. Maybe Shafer really had talked his way clear of the CIA. “If he gets to Witwans—”

“I understand, Adina.” He used her real name only when he was annoyed. “If I thought shouting would do any good, I’d shout. But it’ll just piss them off. And no matter what, I’m sure they’ll put us on a plane soon enough.”

Once again Duberman’s instincts proved right. As the digital wall clock over the door turned to 3:00, the colonel handed back their passports.

“I regret to inform you that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia cannot accept your asylum request. You’re going to have to leave Saudi soil.”

“Too bad,” Salome said.

“We will provide a flight to Jordan, free of charge. Further transport will be your responsibility.” The colonel walked into a back room, returned with a dusty black abaya and headscarf. “You don’t have to cover your face, but please put these on until you are clear of our airspace.”

“Come on.”

“Your flight leaves in forty-five minutes.”

She would argue over Saudi dress codes for women another time. She wiped off the shapeless gown as best she could, threw it over her clothes, stuck her hair under the scarf.

“Gorgeous,” Duberman said.

The colonel drove them to the main terminal, where they boarded a Saudi Arabian Airlines 737. Salome had figured they’d be given a private charter, but this was a standard public flight to Amman. More evidence that the Saudis wanted to resolve their detention without fanfare.

The colonel and a nameless man in a suit whom they’d picked up in the boarding area walked them into coach. Despite herself, Salome had to smile. She wondered when Duberman had last sat in cattle class. Three empty seats awaited them near the back. Salome took the window and smirked as the man in the suit gently steered Duberman to the middle seat.

“I’m sorry we weren’t able to grant your request,” the colonel said. “Gabir will accompany you to Amman. After that, as we’ve discussed, you’re on your own. Safe journeys. Ma-a salaama.”

Gabir didn’t speak during the two-hour flight. Salome and Duberman didn’t, either. It seemed safe to assume he was a mukhabarat officer who spoke Hebrew and English. But when they landed, he disappeared and the Jordanians treated them like ordinary passengers.

Now they were back in the world. It was just past 6 p.m. A day had passed since Wells kidnapped them, eighteen hours since he dumped them in Riyadh. If he and Duto had flown to Johannesburg overnight, they could already have found Witwans. Worse: They might already have grabbed him. They might already have put him on a plane to the United States.

“You call South Africa,” Duberman said. “I’ll call home, get us a jet.”

Salome punched in Frankel’s mobile number, wondering what she would do if he didn’t answer. After five rings, the phone went to voice mail. She reminded herself that he would be seeing a Jordanian number on his screen, called again. One, two, three—

“Shalom.”

“Amos.”

“Adina? Where have you been?”

“Don’t worry about it. What’s important, do you still have Witwans?”

“Of course.” He sounded surprised at the question.

“Can you control him? He’ll do what you say?”

“Without a doubt. He’s been drunk since I got here, and he’s scared out of his mind.”

“Take him and go.”

“Where?”

“Cape Town, a safe house not far from the airport. I’ll fly down, meet you there.” Witwans’s mansion was in the Free State province, the middle of South Africa. She guessed it had to be eight or ten hours by car to Cape Town. The city was on the Atlantic Ocean, in the country’s southwest corner. She had a safe house in Johannesburg, too, but keeping Frankel and Witwans on the road as long as possible seemed smart. For her, the difference was immaterial. Depending on how quickly Duberman arranged the jet, she would arrive in Cape Town a couple hours after Frankel and Witwans.

“That must be a thousand kilometers from here. More. You want me to leave now, drive all night? Why not just let me shoot him?”

“Wells is on his way to you. Get out of there. No bodies. Nothing to find. Give Witwans a few more drinks, he’ll sleep the whole way.”

“He smells terrible, you know. Old shicker—” Yiddish and Hebrew slang for drunk. “Probably throw up in the seat.”

“Amos. Go.”

“The address.”

“I’ll text it.” She hung up.

Beside her, Duberman cooed into his phone in Hebrew, “No, everything’s fine… I’ll explain as soon as I’m home… I love you, too, babe. Bye.”

Babe. She supposed she was happy to hear that he was as banal in love as everyone else.

“They were waiting for us to call. There’s a jet fueled up at Ben Gurion. Be here in half an hour, forty minutes.”

Salome explained the call with Frankel.

“So you’re going to Cape Town?”

“Yes.” She wanted to ask him to come, though she knew he wouldn’t possibly.

“We’ll stop at Tel Aviv, drop me off. Gideon has four guys on the jet. You can have two, I’ll take two, just in case you’re wrong and Wells somehow got back to Israel.”

Wells wasn’t in Israel, and Duberman no doubt had another squad of guards at his mansion anyway. But two reinforcements was better than none.

Ninety minutes later, they were back in Israel, their round-trip complete. Salome suddenly was certain that she wouldn’t see Duberman again.

As the cabin door opened, she hugged him, too long and too close. She bent her head to his chest and smelled his musk, his scent true and ripe after almost two days without a shower. “Aaron.”

“Adina.” His voice was gentle and as distant as the break of the ocean. She would have told him she loved him, but why? He didn’t love her. The words would have been just one more coin for his fortune. So she pulled away, unwound her arms.

“I’m going to find him,” she said instead. “And I’m going to kill him.”

26

The countdown clock was more than ticking now.

Flying Riyadh to Johannesburg took eight hours. Even after gaining a time-zone hour, Wells and Duto didn’t clear South African immigration until 4 p.m. local. Worse, they didn’t have the prearranged help that would have come if they’d been on agency business. No car waiting in the O. R. Tambo International parking garage. No dossier with Witwans’s address. Most important, no pistols, silencers, or box of ammunition in the trunk.

They solved the first two problems easily enough, thanks to Avis and the Internet. Thirty-five minutes after immigration, they had an Audi A3 and turn-by-turn directions to Witwans’s mansion. He lived in farm country a couple hundred kilometers southwest of Johannesburg. The location was a blessing and a curse. They would waste at least three hours getting there. But once they did, they wouldn’t have to worry about neighbors or a quick police response.

Their lack of weapons was far more serious. The bag that Duto had brought to Wells had all manner of helpful paraphernalia, including several pieces he’d already used. What it didn’t have was a pistol. Wells hadn’t packed one because he feared losing the entire bag to an airport screen. He hadn’t known in advance Duto would be bringing it to him, or flying private. As a result, they had only one pistol, the Sig P238 that Duberman’s bodyguard had handed over in Tel Aviv. It was an undercover weapon, small, underpowered, and with just a six-shot magazine. Salome’s bodyguard would be waiting on them, and they didn’t know how many guys he had with him.

“You have anyone who can hook us up?” Wells said.

“Not on this continent.”

“Then let’s find a gun shop.” Given South Africa’s crime rate and hunting culture, Wells expected that they could legally pick up a rifle or shotgun. He scrolled through the phone he’d picked up at the airport. “How about this one? Great Guns of Sandton?” Sandton was a wealthy white neighborhood north of downtown Johannesburg.

But Wells was wrong. The Great Guns manager explained that South Africa had strict firearms laws. Police performed background checks on all buyers. “Backlog is years now. Typical of this regime.”

The man’s contempt for the black-run government gave Wells a glimmer of hope that he might break its laws. “Any way around it?”

“I wish,” the manager said. He had the friendly but wary expression that Wells had seen before on gun enthusiasts. Sure, we’re buddies. For now. “Why the rush? Come to Joburg on business, now you want to hunt the mighty dik-dik? Your guide will gladly supply everything you need.”

Wells looked at Duto. “Can I talk to you outside?”

In the lot, Wells handed over the Audi’s keys.

“I’m going to have to do something I don’t like. Get in and keep it running.”

“You’re not—”

“No.” Gun store robbers were instant Darwin Award finalists. Sir, I see that you believe deeply in your right to use firearms to protect yourself, but please stand aside while I take these. “I’m going to ask. Politely. Even so, he might make a citizen’s arrest.”

“Good luck with that,” Duto said.

The manager conspicuously laid a pistol on the counter when Wells reappeared. “More questions, brother?”

Wells had two choices here, wink-and-a-nod—We’re hunting, but not dik-dik, see what I’m saying—and straight-up desperate. This guy didn’t strike him as the wink-and-a-nod type. “My friend and I, we’re in a bind.”

“I wish I could help.” Though his tone implied the opposite.

“If you know anyone. A friend who needs cash.”

“What’s your name?”

“John.”

“Looking for anything in particular, John?”

A pop quiz to see whether Wells knew what he was talking about. “I used to be partial to Makarovs. I know they’re junk, but they were popular where I operated. Plenty of ammo and spare parts. Then, a couple years ago, my girlfriend made me switch to a Glock. Which I admit is more accurate, more stopping power.”

“What about your friend?”

“Never asked him.”

The man shook his head. Wells felt weirdly negligent. You’ve known him all these years and you can’t even name his favorite pistol? What do you two talk about, anyway?

“What were you doing, in the places you needed the Mak?”

So he still had the guy’s interest. “About what you’d expect.”

“And this? Today?”

Wells shook his head. “Better if I don’t say.” You’d never believe me anyway.

“You look like the real deal, John. But you can’t trust me, I can’t trust you. You’d best go.”

Never argue with a man standing in front of an arsenal. Wells turned away.

“Where will you try next?”

“Soweto, maybe.” The district lay on the other side of the city. Decades after the end of apartheid, it remained ninety-eight percent black and desperately poor.

“Foolishness. By the time you get there, it’ll be dark. They’ll take your money and your car and leave you in a ditch. That’s if you’re lucky. Otherwise, they’ll just—” The man raised his index finger, pop-pop.

“My friend has a Sig if it comes to that.” Wells barely kept himself from adding You racist prick as he opened the front door.

“John—”

Wells stopped.

“I can’t help you. My boss finds out, he’ll sack me on the spot. But Soweto, no. I know a man who might have something.”

Now the guy’s racism was working for Wells.

“In Roodepoort. West of here. Your saloon has a navvy?”

Wells needed a second to understand—Does your car have a GPS? “Yes.”

The man scribbled a phone number and address, handed it over. “Name’s Pieter. Tell him Marion sent you. Make sure you have plenty of geld.” He rubbed his fingers together.

“Thank you.”

“You look like you need a break.”

Outside, Wells plugged the address into the GPS. “Twenty minutes. Let’s go.”

“Great.” But Duto didn’t sound happy.

“What?”

“I just talked to Roy Baumann. My chief of staff. Had to be sure my events are canceled for the next couple of days.”

Chief of what? Wells almost said. With everything that had happened in the last day, he had nearly forgotten that Duto was still a senator. “So?”

“FBI came to my office yesterday. This morning they showed up at Roy’s house. Six a.m. Four guys, wanting to know if he had any idea where I am.”

“Does he?”

“Dummy. It doesn’t matter. I’m traveling under my own name. On a diplo passport. They don’t even have to ask the NSA to look, those get tracked automatically. And as soon as they look at the Tambo landing logs, they’ll find the plane.”

“So they know where you are—”

“Know what else they asked? Whether Roy knew who I was traveling with or what I was doing. He said no, which is true, because he’s been smart enough not to ask. Then they brought up Shafer, did Roy know when I’d last spoken to him, what we’d talked about. Of course he said no to that, too. They asked him if he’d be willing to tell them if he got a call from me. That’s when he told them that they’d gotten their three free questions at the top of the mountain and if they wanted more they’d better come back with a subpoena.”

“Sounds like he handled it.”

“He’s been around. But you get what’s happening here, right? They’re looking to put us on Shafer’s indictment, an excuse to bring us in as material witnesses. Or just arrest us.”

“We knew it could happen.”

“Difference between knowing it could and seeing that it has.”

“So they track you to Tambo. You dead-end there. I rented the car, not you. If they’re smart, maybe they figure I’m with you, look for the alias I used to clear immigration. But that means getting the NSA involved to see who else arrived when you did. And correct me if I’m wrong, Vinny, that’s a big step. Way bigger than sending the FBI to talk to your chief of staff. If that blows up, they just say they were worried that Shafer and I duped you, they wanted to give you a friendly heads-up. But that excuse won’t wash with the NSA. Before it starts chasing a U.S. senator, it’ll want paperwork. An active criminal investigation.”

“At this point the AG”—Attorney General—“or even the President will have no problem signing off on that.”

“Fine. Let’s say they make that move today and NSA figures out who I am right away. Even then, they won’t get the car that fast.”

“Credit cards,” Duto said.

“You may not have noticed, but the credit card I used didn’t exactly match the passport.”

“That’s why the rental guy was giving you a hard time?”

“Yes. Used my middle name instead of my first and misspelled the last by one letter, Ishmael Jeferson instead of Michael Jefferson.” Shafer had taught Wells the trick. Amazing how big a difference a one-letter change could make.

“Then how come he let you rent it?”

“Because Ishmael’s my middle name on the passport, and I gave him an extra five hundred bucks as a cash deposit. But the NSA isn’t looking for Ishmael.”

“If he hadn’t bit—”

“I had a card with the right spelling if I needed it. Point is, it won’t come up right away. They’ll have to start canvassing hotels and car companies in person, and you can’t do that from Langley. In fact, they can’t do it without local help, no matter what. And guess what, it’s past five here already and this is a tricky story for the chief of station to be giving South African intel. Much less the local cops. Way I figure it, we have at least until tomorrow morning, probably the afternoon, before we have to worry about this car being hot. If we can’t find Witwans by then, we’re done anyway. And if we do, and he confirms he sold Salome the HEU, it won’t matter how many Feds are waiting when we land at Dulles, the White House has to listen.”

Wells watched in silence as Duto considered the case he’d made.

“Starting to understand how you’ve lasted so long,” he finally said.

“Let’s just hope that Pieter in Roodepoort doesn’t prove me wrong by shooting us both.”

Pieter arranged to meet them in the parking lot of a Steers, a popular South African burger chain. Orange Honda, his text explained. He was there when they arrived, eating a messy-looking burger and leaning against a beat-up Accord. The car was more red than orange, but Wells wasn’t arguing.

“You’re the ones from Marion?” Pieter crammed down the last of his burger and stepped toward them. He was a wiry man with tattoos that curled up his neck like his chest was on fire. He wore a baggy T-shirt emblazoned with the South African rugby logo. Wells would have been shocked if the shirt didn’t hide a pistol.

“That’s us.”

“Wait in your car,” Pieter said to Duto. He led Wells to the back of the Honda and popped the trunk. Inside, an unzipped blue canvas bag held two Glock 19 pistols and a pump-action Mossberg shotgun, along with a box of 9-millimeter ammunition and a dozen or so 12-gauge shells loose in a plastic bag.

“Fifty thousand rand.” About five thousand dollars. Almost three times what these weapons would cost in a store. A black-market price for black-market guns.

“I take a look?”

Pieter nodded. Wells reached into the bag. The pistols were unloaded. Wells racked their slides, made sure their magazine releases were smooth, dry-fired them. He couldn’t be sure without actually shooting them, but they felt right. He didn’t care about the shotgun. The pistols were what mattered.

“Okay, then, chief?”

“Can we give it to you in dollars. Five thousand?”

“What bills?”

“Hundreds, mainly. New.” Guys like Pieter didn’t always like hundreds, the denomination most targeted by counterfeiters.

“Six, then. Your friend has it?” Pieter dumped out the fries from his Steers paper bag and handed it to Wells. “Put it in the sack. I’ll put the duffel on the ground. You toss me the sack and I drive off.”

Wells didn’t like the sequence. There was a tarp in the trunk behind the bag that could be hiding a second bag that looked identical to the first but was filled with junk instead of guns. Pieter could grab the second bag and throw it down while Wells got the money from Duto. By the time Wells looked inside it and realized the con, Pieter would be on his way out of the lot, the money in his pocket and the weapons still in his trunk. He’d be making a stupid move, since Wells and Duto were paying far more than the firearms were worth. But guys with neck tattoos were rarely strategic thinkers.

“Vinny. Bring over six thousand.”

“I told him to stay,” Pieter said. He stepped back from Wells, lifted his rugby shirt to reveal a black pistol tucked into his waistband. He made the move in a half-assed wannabe gangster way that told Wells he had no intention of using it.

“Good for you.” Wells nodded at Duto. “He has one, too. Take out the bag, put it on the ground.”

From the way Pieter looked at the trunk, Wells knew he’d tried to scam them.

“Seriously? After your buddy brought a tear to my eye with the white-solidarity speech?”

Pieter ignored him, tossed down the bag.

“We’re going to pay you anyway. Give him two thousand dollars, Vinny.”

“I said six.”

“Before you tried to rob us. Two thousand is what they’re worth.” Now Wells was the one acting stupid. Two thousand or six thousand made no difference. But Wells was all out of patience. He felt like a walking incarnation of that T-shirt favored by bratty five-year-olds: I only have one nerve left and you’re getting on it. The last month had been exhausting, and the longest night was still to come.

“He’ll put it under the wiper, I’ll grab the bag, and we’re done.”

Duto reached into his pocket, counted out the money, fanning the bills so Pieter could see them. He stuffed them under the wiper blade. Wells picked up the bag, backed away carefully. Pieter grabbed the money and made a show of counting it. “Good.”

“Everybody’s happy, then.”

Pieter offered Wells his twin middle fingers.

The Audi’s GPS led them southwest, toward the N1, the sun low in their eyes. “You think putting one over on that kid makes up for the way Duberman beat you in Tel Aviv?”

“Just drive, Vinny.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Wells didn’t want to talk about it. Not with Duto. Not now, not ever. He had let Duto bait him over a moral line he had sworn not to cross. Now the man wanted to — what, exactly? Absolve him? Condemn him for failing? Wells wasn’t sure which choice repulsed him more.

He closed his eyes and recited the Quran’s first Surah, Bis-millahi rahmani rahim / Al hamdu-lillah rabbi alamin… In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate / All praise due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds…

“I know you’re just spouting that to piss me off, John—”

Wells filled himself with the prayer, and soon enough Duto had nothing to say.

When he opened his eyes, the sky outside was full dark. He must have slept. They were deep in the countryside, speeding down a two-lane road that curved through fields cut as tightly as a Marine’s first haircut and speckled with barrels of hay.

“You have a nice nap?”

Wells tilted back his head, rubbed his eyes. “We close?”

“We’re not far, Sleeping Beauty.”

“You must want me to start praying again.”

“Dear Jesus, no.” Duto’s idea of a joke. “Any ideas how we’re going to play this? Since I left the satellite shots at home.”

“Look for the weak spot, then come in hard. Guns drawn. Don’t waste time. Shoot first. Try not to kill anyone we shouldn’t. The usual.” Wells supposed the last two words were his idea of a joke.

“Sounds good.”

Ten minutes later, the GPS told them that they had arrived. A fence marked by lightning-bolt pictographs ran along the road, ending at the property’s main gate, eight feet of wrought iron set between brick posts. Witwans Manor, a bronze plaque announced.

“Classy,” Duto said. The house itself stood on a low hill a couple hundred feet from the gate. Wells expected it would be mostly dark. Instead, the entire first floor was lit like Witwans was having a cocktail party. Between the Audi’s high beams and the light coming out of the house, they could see up the driveway and the lawn around it. Empty, no guards visible.

Salome’s bodyguard could have set up in a sniper’s nest on the second floor of the mansion to pick off Wells as soon as he jumped the gate. But Wells didn’t see a way around the risk. Shorting out the fence so he could climb it would take longer and be even more conspicuous. Anyway, he had a sinking feeling that they had arrived too late, that Salome’s bodyguard had already left with Witwans.

“I’ll go over the gate, pop it for you from the inside,” Wells said.

“You think he’s gone, don’t you?”

Wells reached into the back seat for a Glock, jammed it into his waistband. He stepped out of the car and scaled the gate, ignoring the iron tines prodding his hands and feet. The gate’s motor was on the inside of the right brick post. Wells turned it on and the gate churned open. Easy enough.

A dog’s howl erased his satisfaction. Not one dog. Two, three, a pack. They tore down the driveway at him, three German shepherds and two Great Danes, their jaws wide open, galloping like they were thoroughbreds and Wells the finish line. Wells reached for his pistol and then realized that shooting them wasn’t an option. Even if he could take out two or three, the survivors would shred him.

He ran for the corner where the gate met the brick post and scrabbled up the iron, a clumsy game of parkour. The pack leader, a giant gray Great Dane, arrived just as Wells pulled himself onto the post. The dog’s jowls snapped shut an inch beneath Wells’s feet. Wells stood atop the post as the pack growled and howled and snapped and jumped for him, lemme at ya, come on down and fight fair, you can’t stay up there forever. Now Wells could shoot them all. But he didn’t like shooting dogs. Anyway, killing them wouldn’t gain him any points with Witwans or whoever was inside the house.

Duto edged the Audi forward and cracked his window. “Now what?”

“I’m gonna jump on the roof and you drive to the house.”

“John—”

Wells jumped. His bad ankle nearly gave and he had a moment imagining himself on the ground with the dogs at him, but he steadied. Beneath him, the Audi rolled through the gate and up the driveway. The dogs followed the car, howling all the way, outriders from hell.

The mansion’s wide front door swung open. An African man stepped onto the porch, pointing a shotgun at the Audi. From a window on the floor above, a second black man covered them with a pistol. Salome’s bodyguard and Witwans were nowhere in sight.

Wells raised his hands.

“You have a gun?” the man on the porch said. He looked at least seventy, his skin wrinkled and his hair short and gray, but he held the shotgun steady.

“Yes.”

“Throw it down.”

“We’re looking for Rand.”

“Throw it down.”

Wells plucked out the Glock by its butt and spun it softly to the right, onto the grass at the edge of the driveway. The man whistled sharply and shouted in Afrikaans. The dogs snapped their jaws shut and looked up at him. One by one, they backed away from the car. The man whistled again and they trotted through the front door. The gray Great Dane went last, unwillingly, eyeing Wells as he disappeared into the house.

“Get down,” the man said. “This side.” He nodded the shotgun to his right, the direction opposite where Wells had thrown the pistol. Smart. Wells jumped down.

The man stepped off the porch, keeping about fifteen feet from Wells. The man on the second floor shouted down in an African language Wells had never heard. The first man didn’t answer. He seemed to be enjoying his control of this situation. Wells tried to imagine how he must feel, a servant who suddenly had absolute power over these white men who had bizarrely come to the house where he worked. Yet he seemed polite, almost friendly.

“Your name?”

“John.”

“I’m Martin. What is it you want?”

“We’re looking for Rand.”

“He’s not here.”

“The man with the scars took him?”

Martin hesitated, obviously wondering how Wells knew, then nodded. “Amos, yes. Around six p.m.”

“Don’t suppose he told you where?”

“No.”

Wells grunted, just once. Like he’d taken a shot to the stomach. He and Duto had come so close. They’d missed Witwans by three hours, no more. But three hours or three months made no difference. Witwans could be anywhere, and they had no way of finding him. In the wind, the cops said.

“This man comes, now you. What is it you want with him?” Martin appeared sincerely interested.

“To stop a war.”

“Rand? He can’t get out of bed without a drink.” The man upstairs laughed.

“Did a woman come here a few months ago? In her thirties, brown hair, pretty. Big nose. Maybe take something from the house?”

Martin’s eyes widened. “Natalie, yes.”

Wells tented his hands together in supplication. “I promise you, if you have any idea where he went—please.”

“Tell me more about why you want him.”

“He sold that woman uranium — stuff for a nuclear bomb. She’s pretending it’s from Iran. And that’s why America wants to attack Iran tomorrow.”

“This is true?”

“I swear on my family.”

“You catch him, then what?”

“We take him back to the States, to the people who need to know the truth.” A more than slightly oversimplified answer. Wells hoped it was right.

“They put him in jail?”

“I don’t know.”

“Drunk greedful fool. You know he thinks we like him.”

“So help us find him.”

“I tell you I don’t know.”

Wells bowed his head. Maybe Martin would let them look through the house for clues. Though Wells couldn’t imagine that Frankel had left anything useful.

Then Martin grinned, nodded to the man on the second floor. “But Jacob, my nephew, he does.”

Inside, Jacob explained. Every couple of weeks, Witwans drove his Mercedes to bars around Bloemfontein and drank himself to blackout. The bartenders took his keys and called him taxis home. Their motive was not so much altruism as the cut of the fare they received. The next day, Jacob had to find the Merc. To simplify the process, he installed a GPS tracker.

This evening, when Frankel told Witwans that they would have to leave, Witwans had set only one condition, that they take the Mercedes. After a minute of arguing, Frankel agreed.

“Does Rand know about the tracker?” Duto said.

“Not sure. He loves the car. So maybe it was a fortune—”

“Coincidence—” Martin said.

“Or maybe he wants us to find him. No matter.” Jacob pulled out his phone, a big-screen Samsung. “Here he is.” A white dot pinged on a bright orange highway.

“That’s the N1?”

“Yes. He’s in the Northern Cape now. Almost three hundred kilometers from here. Going good, maybe one hundred kilos.”

“Can we have the phone?” Wells said.

“No no no.” Jacob tucked it away.

“Name your price.”

“No price.”

Not now. They couldn’t afford more delays. Wells couldn’t imagine hurting these people, but he would for the phone. “Please.”

“This is too good. I’m coming.” Jacob grinned. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

27 ONE DAY…

Wells expected to stay at the wheel until they caught the Mercedes. But just after midnight, the Audi demanded gas. At the station, Wells went inside for a pit stop of his own. He came out with coffee and water and found Duto in the driver’s seat.

“Move.”

Duto grabbed the coffee instead. “You’re not the only control freak in this car. Besides, big day tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep.”

So Wells took his place in the passenger seat. Their new friend Jacob sprawled across the back, cradling the phone that was his ticket to the party. He was a big man, and spherical, round eyes in a round head atop a round body, fat, but strong, too. Wells wasn’t sure how they would make him stay in the car when they caught Frankel and Witwans. He looked to be having too good a time.

Wells dozed fitfully as Duto raced down the N1. He hoped they might reel the Mercedes in over the night, but the road didn’t give them much chance. It was not a divided highway but a single strip of asphalt, often with only one lane in each direction. A county road, with an interstate’s traffic, even in the small hours of the night. Twice oncoming trucks forced them onto the shoulder.

Every few minutes, Jacob let them know that the Mercedes was still moving, still ahead of them. But Wells couldn’t shake a creeping fear that Frankel had shucked them somehow. Maybe he knew about the tracker. Maybe he’d passed the car to another driver and taken Witwans the opposite direction, toward Johannesburg. Paranoia, yes, but Salome and Duberman had more than matched him this last month. Why wouldn’t they have one more trick?

Around 6 a.m., Wells jerked out of a haze of not-quite-sleep to see a three-foot chunk of steel pipe bouncing at them from the bed of an overloaded pickup. Duto pulled the wheel hard left, and the Audi, down on its shocks, missed the pipe by six inches.

“I’d hate to disappoint Duberman by dying in a car accident,” Wells said.

“Didn’t you learn at the Farm that they’re among the top risks case officers face?”

Indeed. Wells had joined the service in the halcyon days before 9-11, when drunk driving, paper cuts, and herpes were the major health threats in the clandestine service. A few minutes later, as they came through a bump of a town called Matjiesfontein, the sky went from black to blue, wisps of dawn creeping from the east. The light revealed an arid, scrubby land, low hills flecked with scattered shrubs and bushes.

“I thought the Cape was supposed to be beautiful,” Duto said.

“This the Karoo,” Jacob said.

“Did you sneeze?”

“Something else. Witwans off the N1.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

Wells reached back for the phone. Sure enough, the Mercedes had turned south off the highway about twenty kilometers east of central Cape Town. The giant slum called Khayelitsha lay a few kilometers south, as did the Cape Town airport. Wells feared Frankel might be taking Witwans to the airport, but he had chosen a strange route in that case, along surface streets rather than the R300 ring road, which ran directly to the airport.

After their all-night chase, the Mercedes held a lead of about two hundred kilometers, two and a half hours, give or take. Seeing the airport on the map reminded Wells that their jet was still in Johannesburg. They needed it in Cape Town.

The pilot answered on the first ring. “This is Kirk.”

“Hope you and your first mate got a decent night’s sleep, because you have a long day ahead.”

“Tell me we’re going home.”

“We’re going home.” Inshallah. “Can you meet us in Cape Town this morning?”

“Done. I’ll check the charts, but I think we can be there in two and a half hours, three at most. Quick turn?”

“With any luck. Back to Dulles. You can file the flight plan now. Three passengers.” Wells hoped he wasn’t jinxing himself. But better to do this now, with time, than as they were racing to the airport.

“Who’s the third?”

“Rand Witwans. South African national. Shouldn’t raise any flags.”

“As long as you have his passport number.”

“I do.” Not just the number. The passport itself. Witwans had left it in the bedroom safe at his mansion. His not-so-faithful servant Martin knew the combination.

On the ground, the Audi raced southwest. On Jacob’s phone, the Mercedes turned right, left, right again. It stopped, then doubled back a few seconds later. Wells guessed Frankel was trying to find a safe house he’d never seen before. The Merc made another right and moved slowly south, into an area the map marked as Bellville Lot 3. There it stopped.

The squarish road grid and setting near highways and airport suggested a middle-class suburb. Wells imagined houses set on narrow lots, plenty of residents around to hear a gunfight and call the police. Worse, he and Duto would reach the neighborhood around 9 a.m. Some straggling commuters would still be heading out, along with parents taking their toddlers to day care. All potential victims of stray bullets.

But the location came with positives, too. The executive terminal at Cape Town International was barely ten kilometers down the M10, which the map indicated was a big surface road. Even in traffic, they ought to be able to reach it in under fifteen minutes. Better still, the police had no obvious choke points for roadblocks. Wells and Duto were looking at the human equivalent of smash-and-grab. Go in fast, take Witwans, stuff him in the Audi, dump him on the plane while the police were still making sense of what had happened.

They had a second edge. Martin had told them the night before that Frankel was the only guard watching Witwans. Of course, he might have reinforcements at the safe house, but then why hadn’t they come to Bloemfontein and helped at the mansion? Duberman didn’t have casinos in South Africa, so Wells doubted he had a local guard force. More likely that Salome had sent Frankel down by himself. Then, after the Saudis released her, she must have called him and told him to move Witwans from his mansion to this safe house a thousand kilometers away. The likely reason was that she had figured out that Wells was on his way to South Africa and wanted to hide Witwans from him. Her plan would have worked if not for the GPS tracker on the car, something she couldn’t possibly have expected.

But if Frankel was alone at the mansion, he would have had to make the entire thousand-kilometer drive himself. Witwans had been too drunk to walk, much less drive, the night before, according to Jacob. Frankel would be exhausted. No matter how good they were, exhausted soldiers made mistakes.

With that thought, Wells leaned back in his seat and made himself rest.

Ten minutes after Wells closed his eyes, the G650 carrying Salome went wheels-down at Cape Town International, the first landing of the new day. She’d flown in the darkness over Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, seeing none of them. The flight was smooth, and she’d slept the whole way.

She couldn’t remember her dreams. But she woke with a clear-eyed, cold anger at Wells. Duberman had thrown him a lifeline in Tel Aviv, and he had not just rejected it but sneered at it. She hadn’t understood until then how small-minded Wells was. He couldn’t grasp the strategic catastrophe that would come if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Worse, he lacked the imagination to realize the elegance of the story she and Duberman had told. He was stuck on the fact that they’d lied about the uranium. Of course they had. Human beings lied every day in every conceivable way. Iran had lied about its nuclear program for twenty years.

How had she ever considered Wells her match? He was a more skilled version of the men around her on this plane. A bruiser with a great survival instinct. Nothing more. She would shed no tears when she killed him.

At last, as their jet rolled to a stop, she saw the full significance of the name she’d given herself. The Bible told the tale of Salome, who danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist as her reward. But two millennia had passed. The new Salome didn’t need a man to do her dirty work. She would kill Wells — John the American, John the Troublemaker, John the Muslim—herself.

First, though, she needed to run out the clock. South Africa was seven hours ahead of Washington, where it was now 11:30 p.m. In a half hour, the final day of the President’s deadline would officially begin at the White House. She turned on her phone, found CNN.com reporting that in a speech from the Oval Office three hours before, the President had repeated his deadline. “Iran’s efforts to terrorize the United States by killing innocent civilians and disrupting travel and commerce around the world will fail,” he said. “Our resolve is unshaken. Iran must agree to open its nuclear facilities by midnight tomorrow, or face the consequences.”

The New York Times wrote that the United States planned its first air raids “minutes or hours” after the cutoff passed. A ground invasion would follow “within days,” though of course no one would say exactly when. Military analysts were split over the wisdom of the President’s willingness to invade with a small and lightly armored force, instead of the massive armies it had mustered in Iraq. Whole new way of fighting. If it works, it’ll give the United States options all over the world, one retired three-star said. But if it doesn’t, we’ll lose more thousands of men. In a week.

If that prospect worried the President, he wasn’t admitting it publicly. “We will fight, we will win, and we will destroy the factories that you use to build weapons of mass destruction,” he’d said at the end of his speech. “Do not doubt our resolve. The United States can never allow Iran to threaten it with nuclear attack. My fellow Americans, of every faith and creed, may God bless us all.”

Her phone buzzed with a message, a single word from Frankel: Here.

Me, too, she wrote.

An hour later, after an unexpected and frustrating wait for immigration to open, she and her men stepped out of a taxi outside the safe house. She had never seen the place before. She had set up safe houses all over the world, but in cities like Cape Town, where she had no operations and no plans for any, she sometimes let real-estate agents choose their locations. In this case, she’d made a mistake. The neighborhood was anonymous and close to highways and the airport, as she liked, but the house was small and run-down. Worse, it stretched almost to the edges of the lot.

She preferred bigger houses in gated communities. Still, the place should be fine for a night, and Wells couldn’t possibly find it. Of course, she couldn’t find him either, not yet. But tomorrow morning, she would make Witwans call Wells, tell him they needed to meet. Wells would be suspicious, but he would know that the FBI and CIA were closing in on him and that Witwans was his only hope. He would take the chance. This time Salome wouldn’t leave Wells to Russian cops or Glenn Mason. She would pull the trigger herself. And after Wells was finally gone, Witwans would get what he deserved, a bullet in the back of the head.

Then she would rest.

Frankel barely looked up when she walked into the house. He sat on the couch, a pistol on the coffee table in front of him, a bag at his feet stretched by the shotguns inside. The scars on his chin shone and he stank of cheap coffee and too many hours behind the wheel.

“Amos.” She knelt on the couch, wrapped an arm around him. “Long drive?”

“Fine.”

“Wells—”

“No way could he have followed me.”

“Rand?”

“In the bedroom. He was all right. Spent most of the ride with his tongue hanging out.”

“Once he gets us Wells, you can do whatever you like with him.”

Frankel smiled. Put his head against Salome. Almost that quickly, he slept.

She gave him two minutes, then extricated herself and unzipped the bag. Inside, she found a pistol and two shotguns. She kept the pistol, gave the shotguns to Binyamin and Gil, the reinforcements Duberman had sent down with her.

“There shouldn’t be any problem, but just in case.”

Wells opened his eyes and found himself in a tunnel. Not a metaphorical tunnel, a real one, cut through rock, with headlights speeding uncomfortably close. He couldn’t see entrance or exit, but the grumbling in his stomach assured him he was very much alive and not in purgatory.

“Where are we?”

“Huguenot Tunnel, it’s called. We get out, we’re fifty klicks from Bellville.”

Seconds later, the exit came into view, a white speck that grew steadily. Wells felt his pulse kick up. Past 8 a.m. now, 1 a.m. in Washington. Twenty-three hours to go. Plenty of time.

Only it wasn’t. South Africa was a long way from anywhere, and a very long way from North America. The eight-thousand-mile flight from Cape Town to Dulles would take at least sixteen hours, more if the Atlantic headwinds were strong, plus a refueling stop in Dakar that added another hour.

Seventeen hours minimum, less a seven-hour time difference. If everything went right and they captured Witwans with no hitches and took off from Cape Town by 11 a.m., they still wouldn’t arrive at Dulles until at least 9 p.m. Washington time. And at some point during that flight, they would need to convince Donna Green to talk to them rather than send the FBI to arrest them on landing. The equation was simple but punishing. They had used every inch of their slack and could no longer afford a single misstep. Even an error as small as a botched refueling in Senegal might destroy their chances.

“What are you thinking?” Duto said.

“That I wish we had some silencers.”

“And a teleporter.” Duto could count, too.

They sped out of the tunnel, and Wells saw Table Mountain in the distance, the famous thirty-five-hundred-foot plateau that rose behind Cape Town and offered a perfect view of the city and ocean. A must-see destination, by all accounts, but Wells wouldn’t. The world’s worst tourist. He always missed the big sights.

“You have a plan?” Duto said. “Or pretty much the same as last time?”

“Pretty much. Loop around the block, once, see what we can see. If the houses are as close as they look on the map, maybe we try to come in from the side.”

“What about me?” Jacob said.

“You’re the wheelman. You know what that means?”

Jacob shook his head.

“Means we get Rand out, throw him in the back of the car, and you drive us to the airport.”

“You want me to stay in the car?”

“That’s what the wheelman does.”

“You think I can’t handle a gun? Covered you easy enough.”

“Let’s talk about it after we see the place.”

After the tunnel, the N1 became a true divided highway, two lanes each side. Duto sluiced the Audi through the morning commuter traffic. Twenty-five minutes later, they reached Durban Road, which led into Bellville’s commercial center, ten- and fifteen-story office towers.

South on Durban, east on another arterial, then south again on the M10, Robert Sobukwe Road, the big boulevard that connected Bellville to the airport. On the right, west, they passed a massive train yard. They were nearly on top of the Mercedes now, less than a kilometer away. It was parked in the residential neighborhood just east of Sobukwe.

“Left here.”

Duto turned, and they were in Bellville Lot 3, not a slum but certainly scrappier than the city center to the north. The houses sprouted clotheslines, the cars rust. The neighborhood looked to be mainly coloured, the term South Africans used for people of mixed race. The Audi stuck out. The car’s conspicuousness wouldn’t matter before the attack, but it might afterward, when the neighbors made emergency calls. Wells wondered if they ought to park around the corner, but then they would have to drag Witwans from the house to the car. Street kidnappings were rarely a good idea.

“Right here,” Wells said, as they reached Industry Road, which marked the district’s eastern edge. The neighborhood had been laid out in an imperfect grid. Its east — west streets stacked neatly, but the north — south roads started and stopped. The GPS showed the Mercedes parked on one of the north — south stubs, Octovale Street between Kosmos and Lily Roads.

“You know where we’re going?”

Even with time desperately short, Wells wanted to spin through the neighborhood’s main streets once. They might see a parked police cruiser, or road construction that blocked an escape route. “Just drive. Right here—”

“On Mimosa? Mimosa?” Mimosa marked the south end of Octovale.

“Calm yourself, Vinny.” Though Wells did like the jumble of names. He couldn’t imagine a neighborhood back home having a similarly random set — American developers were too careful.

“Here. Right. Slow.”

If the tracker was correct, then they would see the Mercedes almost two short blocks up, on the right side. “We’re only going to take one pass, so go easy—”

“You think you’re the only one who’s ever been in the field?”

Wells focused on the street. He liked what he saw. American building codes wouldn’t allow houses built as closely as these. In some cases, their eaves almost overlapped. If Witwans was inside one like that, Wells could jump roof to roof and break in from the back while Duto attacked from the front.

Duto touched his brakes as they rolled through the intersection of Octovale and Lily. The GPS showed the Mercedes just a few houses ahead. Duto eased the Audi up the street at twenty miles an hour. And—

“There,” Jacob said. The car was parked nose-out for an easy getaway, in the gated driveway of a squat yellow house. Eighty-four Octovale. The house nearly touched its neighbor to the right, but it was a relative fortress, with gated front windows, high walls on both sides, and a five-foot-tall fence in front of a short front yard. Thick white curtains blocked Wells from seeing who might be inside, but he glimpsed lights.

Then the house was behind them. Duto turned left on Kosmos, and Wells considered what he’d seen. Despite the possible roof access, the setup wasn’t ideal. Duto would have no way to reach the front door easily. The back door was sure to be locked, the back windows gated. The pack that Duto had brought from Virginia included Wells’s auto lock picker, a tool that had saved him before. Even so, Frankel would hear him enter.

“Fortress Octovale,” Duto said.

“Maybe.” Wells looked back at Jacob. “You said you wanted in. That still true?”

Jacob nodded.

“Sure about this,” Duto muttered.

Wells ignored him. “You’re going to distract them. You go next door, the house to the left, one up from Rand.”

“Over the wall?” A four-foot-high concrete wall separated that house from the street.

“That Ford is parked right in front. You step over the wall, no problem.”

“Then what?”

“Then you knock on the door, hammer it. You yell, I know you’re in there, come out. Not in English. In Afrikaans. You speak Afrikaans?”

“No problem. But Rand next door—”

“We want to make them wonder what’s going on. Get them looking the wrong way, toward you, while I’m coming from the other side. If we’re lucky, Rand will recognize your voice and stick his head out the front door. He won’t be able to see you because of the wall, but he’ll wonder why you’re there. He’ll know what you’re saying, but Amos won’t. If we’re really lucky, Amos’ll come out himself and make himself a target.”

“Don’t know who’s inside that house next door, what biscuit he got.”

“You don’t want to, you don’t have to. In or out?”

Asked that bluntly, the question could only have one answer.

“In.”

Duto made a right, north, driving slowly away from the house. “And while Jacob is yelling nonsense and hoping he doesn’t get shot, what about you?”

“I’m going to the house on the other side, one down. With the carport on the right side. I’ll pull myself up that, run across the roof—”

“They might have a biscuit, too,” Duto said. “Even a gat.”

“Thank you for that, Vinny. I didn’t see any cars, so I’m guessing whoever lives there is at work. Even if they’re home, by the time they figure out what’s going on, I should be on top of Witwans’s house.”

“Where am I?”

“The way the timing works, Jacob and I will get out of the car at Mimosa and Octovale”—the intersection almost two blocks south of the house. “We’ll walk up Octovale to Lily”—one block up—“while you circle around up to the top of the street, the Kosmos intersection. When we see you there, Jacob goes ahead of me, runs up, jumps the fence at the house on the left. Just about the time he starts yelling, I’ll be scaling the carport. It shouldn’t take me more than a few seconds to get across. By then, Vinny, you’ll have swung the Audi onto Octovale to give yourself a view of the front door of Rand’s house. If it opens and anyone comes out, you’ll honk to let me know. If it’s Amos, I’ll pop him from the roof and jump down. It’s only one story. Then I’ll grab Witwans from the house and throw him in the Audi. If Witwans comes out instead, I’ll have to decide whether to grab him right away or go in the back door. And if nobody comes out, I’m going in the back for sure.”

“What do I do then?” Jacob said.

“No matter what, you go back to the car after two minutes.”

“Let me make sure I have this right,” Duto said. “This all hinges on whether Amos opens the front door when Jacob starts yelling? What if he doesn’t? You think you’re going to get across the roof of a one-story house and then in the back door without him hearing?”

“I think Amos, who hasn’t slept all night, is all of a sudden going to have to figure out what’s going on when the neighbors start yelling and the dogs start barking. His first thought is not going to be that someone’s on the roof coming for him. If he goes outside, I can blow off his head, and if he doesn’t, I’ll just creep along the house while he’s distracted and go through the back.” Wells knew that he was trying to convince himself as much as Duto. A plan so crazy it just might work.

“Give me best case, John.”

“Best case, Jacob shouts for a minute, Amos comes out, I pop him with one shot. It takes me thirty seconds to get in the house and grab Rand, another thirty to get him to the car. That’s two minutes and one shot and we’re gone. The cops won’t even be close. By the time the first car responds, we’re at the airport. Worst case, nobody opens the door after a couple minutes and I have to go in the back and it takes a little longer.”

“Worst case, you and Rand both get killed.”

“That would be worse. You have anything better? I’m open to suggestions.”

Duto pulled over. They sat for two long minutes as cars rolled by. In the distance a train whistled, but inside the Audi no one spoke.

“SOG team would be nice,” Duto said. “Real surveillance. A magical unicorn. How did I get myself into this?”

“You know exactly.”

“True. And I still can’t figure it. If you get caught in there, what then? I grab the Mossberg and come over the fence? Not entirely senatorial. But I guess I burned that bridge a while ago.”

Duto folded his hands across his chest as the Audi’s clock counted off another two minutes. Wells wished Shafer were here. He’d understand the absurdity of the situation better than anyone. America’s fate depends on three men in Bellville, South Africa. Two can’t stand each other. The third is a civilian they met the night before. Will they kidnap the old racist drunk in time to fly him to D.C.? Or get killed trying?

But long experience had taught Wells that too much second-guessing at these moments was not just pointless but dangerous. Climbing a carport to jump a roof to kidnap Witwans might seem bizarre, but they had no better option, and no time to find one. The choices they had made over the last few weeks had led them here, and without a time machine those choices couldn’t be undone.

Wells had rock climbed a few times in his teens and twenties. The best climbers weren’t necessarily the strongest, the most agile, or even the bravest, though those qualities helped. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to look down, who spidered up the face, always recognizing where they were and looking for the best solution, and with luck, the best after that.

“Time’s a-wasting,” Wells said.

Duto put the car in gear. “What a cluster.”

“So it’s a go?”

“Like our friend in Tel Aviv would say, shuffle up and deal.”

28

Salome was sitting in a wrinkled leather chair in the living room, watching the deadline clock tick away on CNN International: 21:35:42… 21:35:41… when the party started. Fists banging metal, a man screaming in a language Salome guessed was Afrikaans. He seemed to be at the next house over, on the other side of the wall to the north. Seconds later, a woman began yelling back.

Maybe screaming fights were common in this neighborhood. And Frankel had been sure Wells couldn’t have tracked him here. But in moments like these, she didn’t believe in coincidence. She drew the curtain a few centimeters, peeked into the yard and the street beyond. Something was different, though she couldn’t figure what.

“Go look,” she said to Binyamin.

“Take the gun?”

“Yeah.”

He grabbed the shotgun and stepped out as a dog on the other side of the house added its howl to the chorus. Salome looked at Frankel, still sleeping on the couch. “Amos!”

A car honked, once, long and loud. She realized what had bothered her outside. The car. She tugged aside the curtain to double-check. A white Audi was parked across the street, diagonally north, twenty or twenty-five meters away. She couldn’t see if it was running or anyone was inside, but she was sure it hadn’t been parked there when she came to the house.

“What’s happening?” Frankel said behind her.

“I think Wells. Go check Rand for a phone.”

“I already did—”

She flapped her hand, Don’t argue, just do it.

Outside, Binyamin stepped toward the people yelling next door.

“This wall. I can’t see anything—”

When Duto honked, Wells crept to the front of the roof. Eureka. The play had worked.

Only, it hadn’t. The man in the yard wasn’t Frankel. Even from the back, Wells knew. He’d seen Frankel in that Volgograd hotel room. This guy was much taller and broader.

Maybe Frankel had found the tracker and shucked the Mercedes overnight. He and Rand were a thousand miles away, and Wells was about to cut down a sucker paid by Frankel to drive the Mercedes here.

Or else Frankel had brought in reinforcements somehow. In that case, Wells was about to start a gunfight without knowing how many guys he faced. Either choice was bad, but the first was worse. Wells couldn’t shoot an innocent man. And just because the guy had a shotgun didn’t prove he worked for Duberman. The man stepped close to the wall and the Mercedes, yelled back to the house—

In Hebrew.

Good. At least Wells didn’t have to worry he was shooting a civilian. He pulled the Glock. The tile on the roof was cheap and cracked and didn’t offer great footing. But the roof itself was only slightly sloped and Wells was not even twenty-five feet away from the guy. An easy shot. The man never looked back. Never even turned his head.

Wells sighted, wasted a second wondering if his target knew what was really happening here. Probably not. Probably he’d taken a bodyguard job for the pay, been told the night before to get on a plane. Excellent benefits. Must be willing to travel on short notice. An employee. Nothing more. Maybe he would have thrown down his shotgun and surrendered if Wells gave him the choice. Maybe not. The answer didn’t matter. Wells had no choice himself.

Wells squeezed the trigger twice. He aimed center mass, missed a few inches high. The back of the guard’s head exploded in a slaughterhouse spray of blood and bone and brain. He crumpled face-first onto the scrubby lawn next to the Mercedes, dead before he knew what death was. Rudi would have been jealous.

From the room below, a woman yelled, “Binyamin!” Wells knew that voice. Salome. She must have flown directly from Jordan. So she and Amos were inside. How many others? Only the Mercedes was in the driveway, and no other cars were parked in front. They had taken a cab here. Which meant two or three people. Unless they’d taken more than one cab.

Wells fired two shots into the air, hoping that Duto would understand his message: That wasn’t Frankel and this isn’t over. Now he had to move. Where?

Two shots, then two more. From the roof. Of course Wells was on the roof. He was a vulture. A vampire. Salome looked out. Binyamin lay in the grass not ten meters away, his head a cracked egg. She lifted her pistol, hoping Wells would jump down.

“Wells!”

No answer. No noise at all.

“Wells! Don’t be a woman! Quit hiding!”

Still nothing. Was he creeping around up there? Or keeping still, hoping she would come out? She wondered how far the nearest police station was, how many minutes they had. The cops would take everyone into custody. They would need to sort out this strange house where Americans and Israelis were slaughtering each other. When they realized Witwans was a South African citizen, they would separate him and question him alone. Salome couldn’t imagine what he would say. She’d peeked in on him a few minutes before. He’d deteriorated badly since she’d last seen him. The broken blood vessels in his nose had advanced to his cheeks. Even in sleep he smelled sweet, sickly, his liver fighting a losing battle against the poison he poured down his throat.

And what if Duto was here? An American senator and the former CIA director. The police would listen to his story, no matter how bizarre it sounded. Salome’s mere presence here would help to confirm his accusation. How could she explain her sudden trip to South Africa, or how she’d ended up in this house with the former director of the South African nuclear program?

No, she and Witwans had to disappear. As long as they could escape this neighborhood and reach the highway, they should be safe. South Africa was huge, and she had plenty of cash. They could take the N1 all the way to Johannesburg, or head along the coast to Port Elizabeth. The police would have no way to connect them to this house. They’d been here only a couple of hours. No one knew who they were.

But they couldn’t go anywhere until they put a stake in the vampire on the roof.

Frankel ran back into the living room, his pistol drawn. “What happened?”

“Wells shot Binyamin. From the roof.” Luckily, they could speak openly in Hebrew. “Stay with him in case Wells tries to break into his room. Now.”

“What’s happening?” Gil, the second guard, yelled from the kitchen, at the back of the house.

“Guard the back door. Wells is on the roof.”

“How’s that?”

“Just watch it.”

She imagined how Wells might attack. The house was only about fourteen meters wide, eight across. Forty-five feet by twenty-five. Its layout was simple. In front, the living room spanned the width of the building. In back, the kitchen did the same. A center hallway connected the two rooms. The main bedroom ran along the right side of the hallway. A smaller bedroom and a bathroom shared the left. Witwans had naturally grabbed the big bedroom. Even in a kidnapped alcoholic haze, he acted the king.

The shouting next door stopped. In the silence, Salome listened for Wells. Nothing. Yet she was sure he hadn’t jumped down. The noise would have been obvious. She wondered why he hadn’t already tried to come at them. He’d just blown a man’s head off, so he couldn’t be planning to stick around for the cops. But if he figured that they would run, he might wait on the roof for the chance to pick them off.

On the flatscreen, CNN’s countdown clock ticked away. 21:34:51… 21:34:50… But she and Wells had their own countdown. She would give Wells exactly one minute to make his move. She hadn’t heard any sirens, so they still had a little time before the police arrived. Ideally, Wells would blink first, come off the roof to attack the house. As long as he was up there, they couldn’t touch him.

If Wells hadn’t moved in sixty — now fifty-five — seconds, she would tell Frankel to grab Witwans and hustle him out the back door and along the north wall of the house to the Mercedes. Gil and his shotgun would lead the way. She would cover the front yard from the living room. They would dare Wells and his friends to stop them. The alleys along the north and south sides of the house were narrow, and the edge of the roof overhung them. Wells would have to perch over the eaves for a shot. He’d have to be accurate. Gil wouldn’t.

Still, she’d rather have him on the ground.

She checked to be sure she had a round chambered and flattened herself beside the front door. As she waited, every cell in her body came to life. The opposite of the depression that had once swallowed her.

She knew she would kill Wells.

At that moment, Wells would have traded what was left of his soul for a CS grenade, or even the homemade Molotov cocktail that had served him in Istanbul. Too bad the devil was serving other clients. Wells didn’t even have the shotgun. He’d left it with Duto, knowing he would need both hands to shimmy up the carport.

After killing the bodyguard, Wells stepped off the roof onto the wall that divided Salome’s house from its southern neighbor. The wall was no wider than a single concrete block, with glass bits embedded in its top, so Wells had to tread carefully. But the wall gave him the chance to move quietly, rather than pounding the roof and giving away his position.

As he tightroped along, he heard Salome yell twice to him. At him. Did she think he’d answer? That she could convince him to throw away his tactical edge by insulting his masculinity? He understood the trick. Still, the words goaded him.

A window was cut into the house’s south wall about halfway down. Through its bare glass, Wells glimpsed an unmade bed. He saw a shadow in the room. He guessed Witwans was down there, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept moving. Six inches past the back right corner of the house, he stopped. The wall on which he stood ran another six feet to the rear lot line, then swung left around the back of the house and left again around its north side. Cracked concrete covered most of the narrow backyard below, creating a patio with all the appeal of an exercise pen in a supermax prison.

Next door, Jacob stopped shouting. He’d done his job. In the silence, Wells listened for sirens, heard none. Yet. Nor any movement inside the house. Salome was playing defense. Probably she figured he was still up front staking out the Mercedes. She hoped he would come down, open himself to a counterattack. He understood. The house had only two obvious entry points, the doors in front and back, both easily covered. But Wells was left with no choice now but to do what Salome wanted. He had to move, and quickly.

The back of the house had two windows that looked out on the patio, one on each side of the back door. Wells inched to his right along the wall. Through the nearer window, he spotted a yellowish Formica countertop and a couple of glasses. Kitchen in back, living room in front.

He craned his head, but he couldn’t see if anyone was inside. The kitchen lights were out, and the sun was hidden behind clouds. Keeping the room in shadow. Then, an answer to a prayer that Wells hadn’t uttered, the sun broke through. Wells caught a glint of light off metal, a shotgun barrel. The man holding it was against the wall a few inches left of the back door.

Just that fast, the sun was gone. The break Wells needed. Now he knew where to aim.

His phone buzzed. He pulled it, found a text from Duto: Where you? Wells decided to take the seconds to respond. Back of house. More men inside.

He shoved away the phone and jumped into the backyard, as far from the wall as he could. He wanted to land close to the door. He could aim and fire the Glock faster than the guy could bring the shotgun around, a life-or-death advantage in a close quarters firefight.

He heard his left foot break almost before he felt the pain, a loud pop as he landed on the concrete and then an electric spike running up his ankle, into his leg. He fell forward and braced himself with his left hand and kept his head and his right hand up. He was not even ten feet away from the door. As the guard spun and tried to bring up the shotgun, Wells fired once, twice, three times, not caring whether the rounds went through the door itself or its center window. Against a 9-millimeter round at close range, a painted plywood door offered no more protection than a piece of cardboard. The wood burst and blood spattered through the sudden holes in the guard’s white short-sleeved shirt. But he was still raising the shotgun.

Wells scrambled forward, toward the house, left of the door. The shotgun blast tore the door off its hinges and echoed off the concrete walls. For a second, Wells couldn’t hear anything at all, and then sound came back bit by bit.

He was squatting with his weight on his right leg, his face pressed to the house’s back wall, maybe two feet to the left of the doorway. His right hand, his gun hand, was closer to the doorway. He leaned over and fired twice for cover and peeked inside. The guard lay on the linoleum kitchen floor, three feet inside, almost close enough for Wells to touch, the shotgun beside him. Blood soaked his shirt from shoulder to waist.

Salome yelled in Hebrew from the front of the house and the guy coughed and tried to answer, but he could manage only a bubble of blood. No saving him. He would be dead in minutes.

Wells fired twice more and reached into the house and grabbed the shotgun by the barrel, its steel slick with blood. The guard’s fingers were still wrapped around the stock, and Wells had to wrench it away. He looked up to see Frankel in the hallway, maybe thirty feet away. Frankel fired three times as Wells spun back to the safety of the wall. One shot smacked the door frame and the second was close enough for Wells to hear it whistle by. The shotgun was a pump-action Remington 870, a 12-gauge. Wells checked the tube magazine, found four shells. He wiped off the blood as best he could and racked a round, the chk-chk as unsubtle a warning as a sidewinder’s rattle. He set the gun aside, hoping he’d bought a few seconds to figure out how badly he’d injured his leg. He turned, putting his back against the wall, and pushed himself up with his good leg, thankful for all the squats he’d forced on himself over the years. When he was standing, he put a feather of pressure on his left leg. The pain flared as he bore down. But Wells could handle pain. The deeper problem was that he couldn’t put weight on the front half of his foot. He’d broken at least one bone, maybe torn the big ligament, too. He couldn’t remember the name but it was the one that always bothered basketball players. Even the light pressure he’d applied caused his foot to rearrange itself in real time, and not for the better. Evolution in reverse.

He’d broken the foot in Afghanistan years before and banged it up again in Istanbul three weeks earlier, but he’d thought he was fully recovered.

Wrong.

He could stand. And he could hobble, if he used his heel and kept all the weight off the front of his foot. But he sure couldn’t run. What do you call a woman with one leg? Eileen.

Lucky he wasn’t in the middle of a gunfight or anything.

Frankel fired twice more from inside the house. He seemed to be moving closer, coming down the hallway. Wells reached across his body, grabbed the shotgun, fired blindly through the door. One shot and one shot only. Even after grabbing the Remington, he was still far too close to black on ammunition for comfort. He had just three rounds in the shotgun, five in the Glock. The pistol had a seventeen-round magazine, but Wells had already fired eleven rounds, four in front and seven back here. He had a plastic bag with loose ammunition in his pocket, but he couldn’t imagine Frankel would give him the time he needed to reload.

Duto had better get inside before then.

Again Wells caught Salome wrong-footed. She was watching the yard, but the shots came from the back, the kitchen. Three. Then a shotgun blast. She turned and ran, trying for the hallway. But Wells stuck a pistol through the remains of the back door and fired twice more. She skidded into the back wall of the living room to stop herself.

She peeked down the corridor. Gil, the second of the bodyguards she’d brought, lay on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. “Gil!” she yelled. He turned his head a fraction, but if he spoke she couldn’t hear him.

“Adina,” Frankel said from the bedroom halfway down the hall, just as Wells appeared again in the kitchen doorway.

“Amos, he’s coming for the kitchen—”

Frankel spun out of the bedroom and into the hall and fired as Wells reached down and grabbed the shotgun from Gil’s hands. But Frankel missed, and Wells vanished again. Now Wells had the shotgun and could keep Frankel out of the kitchen. But Frankel had an open shot at the hallway, so he could keep Wells from coming inside. A standoff.

They had to take him down while they knew where he was, before he disappeared again. And Salome saw how.

“We can pin him. You stay, keep shooting, make him think you’re coming down the hall. I go through the window in there”—she nodded at Witwans’s room—“come around the side of the house. The alley’s not even ten meters. He won’t have a chance. I’ll blow his head off.” And once Wells was dead, she and Frankel could grab Witwans and shoot their way out against whoever was outside without worrying that Wells was behind them.

“What if he turns that way?”

“Even better. He’ll run right into me.”

“Unless he figures out what you’re doing and starts shooting around the corner. Then you’ll be the one who’s trapped.”

Five seconds to get through the window, five to get down the alley. Ten in all. “Ten seconds,” Salome said. “Keep him busy back there that long.”

“Let me do it—”

She shook her head. She would kill Wells. No one else.

She fired twice down the hallway toward the kitchen. She pushed past Frankel into the bedroom where Witwans huddled in a corner, his hands over his ears, a seventy-five-year-old child.

“Please,” Witwans yelled in English. “Please.”

She ignored him. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. Salome pushed up the window, twisted her body into the alley. Ten seconds.

Wells heard Salome and Frankel in the hallway, a low conversation in Hebrew. Making a plan. He wondered if he should try to limp out the alley, but he couldn’t possibly move silently or quickly enough. He was furious with himself, with his body for its betrayal. Would this be where the trip ended for him, boxed in behind this ugly yellow house?

He had come too far. Witwans was too close. He needed one more move. One more.

From inside the house Witwans yelled “Please” twice in English. Like Salome was planning to shoot him. But why would she?

Amos shot three times and Wells chanced a peek around the door. Frankel had crouched at the far end of the hall. He was almost taunting Wells, daring Wells to step in with the shotgun and try for him. Wells knew he wouldn’t have a chance even on two good legs. He would have to expose himself for a decent shot. As soon as he moved, Frankel would light him up.

But where was Salome?

Frankel raised his pistol, fired twice more—

And everything clicked. The conversation. Why Witwans had yelled. Wells had used misdirection against Salome. Now she was doing the same to him. She was coming down the alley while he focused on the doorway.

He couldn’t stay on the wall. She would use the corner for cover and he had no defense. And he couldn’t go for the door. Frankel was waiting. To survive, he needed to give himself an angle to shoot her as she reached the corner.

With his foot wrecked, he had only one play.

He put his weight on his left heel, ignored the screaming in his foot, took one big stride with his right leg toward the rear right corner of the backyard. He planted on his right foot and spun right ninety degrees while his momentum still carried him forward. He pulled up the shotgun just as Salome reached the corner—

She took her last step down the alley, ready to flank him. She wasn’t going to shoot him right away, she wanted him to know what she’d done, how she’d beaten him—

Then she saw him moving, he wasn’t against the wall by the door like she expected, or coming flush around the corner of the house, instead he was lunging for the back corner of the yard, spinning toward her, she needed a moment to understand why, he wanted the angle, he was raising a shotgun to her—

And she swung the pistol around, knowing she was too late, no time to speak, to curse or beg, she screamed a half-note for her death to come—

Her chest exploded, but she felt no pain, and for a moment she thought he might have missed. But then, why was she lying on her back looking at the concrete walls and the clouded sky? Everyone was wrong about dying, the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t even have to move, didn’t fly anywhere, it was the other way, the world and all the sky raced away from her, faster and faster until a single point of light was left at the end of a million-mile tunnel, the tiniest pinprick—

With just one good leg Wells couldn’t handle the Remington’s recoil. It knocked him back and down and the shotgun came out of his hands. He looked up at the doorway to the kitchen and saw Frankel running toward him, raising his pistol, and Wells scrabbled for his own pistol, but he couldn’t find it, he had tucked it in his waist, but the fall must have knocked it out—

And the shots came from the house, one-two-three—

But it was Frankel whose mouth opened in surprise, Frankel whose body arched forward and windmilled down—

Duto.

Wells forced himself to his feet, hobbled toward the corner of the house. The pain was intense, but if he kept the weight on the heel he could move. Salome was dead, a baseball-size hole in the center of her chest, her eyes open in death. Another second and she would have had him. Wells had never killed a woman before. Funny. And funny that he couldn’t think of a better word, a more powerful word for his feelings. But it wasn’t just his weapons that were low on ammunition. Wells was as exhausted as he had ever been. He supposed he ought to close her eyes, but he couldn’t imagine touching her. He left her on her back staring at nothing as Duto appeared in the back door, his mouth open wide. Grinning.

“Thank you? Huh? Maestro?”

Wells wanted to shoot him right there, this man who had just saved his life. Six weeks before, Duto had asked Wells to meet a man in Guatemala City. All this madness had started then. Wells hadn’t wanted to go, but he’d owed Duto a favor, and he’d hated the idea of being in Duto’s debt.

So what did he owe Duto now?

A second siren joined the first. The question would have to wait. “Thank you.”

“The pleasure’s mine. What happened to your leg?”

“Tell you later.”

They found Witwans on the living room couch, staring at the television. His face was flushed, his cheeks swollen, his eyes wide and watery.

“You know why we’re here, Rand?”

His head bobbed yes over his slumped shoulders. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.” Thinking about himself to the end. Nothing about anyone else in the house. Hard to believe that this pathetic specimen was their only chance to stop a war. But they didn’t need him to be a hero. They just needed him to tell the truth about what he’d done to the President. Looking at him, Wells knew he would.

Rand Witwans didn’t have the strength to lie.

“Lucky man,” Duto said to Wells. “Going to the White House.”

Without waiting for Witwans to answer, they pulled him off the couch to begin his trip.