The Wolves (13 page)

You’ll know right away,
Nemtsov had said.
If he doesn’t say no right away, he’ll say yes. Eventually.

Duberman didn’t say no right away. He pressed his hands together, considered the idea. “The Russian government will protect me. Make me a refugee? Like Snowden?”

“Exactly.”

“So I’ll be stuck in Moscow. Or somewhere even less pleasant.”

“No. You’d have a Russian diplomatic passport. Your family, too. All the privileges of the Russian state, none of the winters.”

“And when the United States says this is ridiculous, a farce, that I’m in no danger—”

“We would explain that you’ve provided specific information showing otherwise. If the United States disagrees, if it has information relevant to your asylum application, the Russian government will be glad to hear it. But such information would of course become public.”

“You’d dare them to tell the truth.”

“As of now, you face no criminal charges in the United States or anywhere. You’re a businessman whose casinos employ tens of thousands of people around the world. A major charitable donor. A man Russia would be glad to have as a citizen.”

Gideon said something in Hebrew to Duberman. The interruption seemed to annoy Duberman, but he answered and the two men had a back-and-forth. Finally, Duberman raised his hand—
Enough
—and turned back to Buvchenko.

“So I become Russian. Of course my assets will become the property of the state. Sooner or later.”

Buvchenko shook his head. “Perhaps over time you’d donate to charities in Russia, groups for soldiers’ widows and the like. But that would be your choice. Better for us if your casinos run normally.” A lie, Buvchenko knew. The Kremlin’s greed would be boundless.

“Widows and orphans. Good of me. And what would I tell my shareholders about my citizenship change?”

“What business is it of theirs? I’m sure all your lawyers could come up with an explanation, or a reason not to give one. You miss the forest, Aaron. You worry too much about your stock price, not enough about your heartbeat.”

Another Hebrew interruption from Gideon.

“Quiet,” Duberman snapped in English. But Gideon kept talking, and Duberman stepped around the Bugatti and put a finger in Gideon’s chest. Buvchenko didn’t need to know Hebrew to understand:
You work for me, and don’t forget it.
Gideon listened and nodded and stepped back and pulled his Sig and pointed it at Buvchenko. Before Buvchenko even had time to be frightened, Gideon swung the pistol down and away and fired—

A pop that echoed in the garage—

The hiss of a leak of pressurized air—

And the Bugatti listed on its side.

The door from the house flew open. Two men ran in, rifles up, but Gideon and Duberman yelled to them in Hebrew. They backed slowly out, their eyes wide in shock.

Buvchenko understood their surprise. If one of his men had been insubordinate this way, Buvchenko would have broken his jaw to start, and gone from there. Duberman seemed stunned himself. He murmured and put out his hand. After a moment, Gideon laid the Sig in it and walked into the house.

Then Buvchenko and Duberman were alone.

Duberman tucked the Sig into his waistband. “Lucky me, he didn’t mess up the body, only the tire.” He rubbed a hand over the flattened rubber like he was patting a child on the head. “He thinks I should throw you off the side of the mountain. That no one ever wins a deal with the FSB.”

“We’ll be partners. You keep your side of the bargain, we’ll keep ours.” Buvchenko had no qualms about lying this way. He had his own masters to please. “May I ask you something? Gideon, you’ve known him a long time?”

“Before Orli gave me sons of my own, he was my truest family.”

“Now you
do
have sons of your own. Maybe he doesn’t like that.”

Duberman didn’t answer. Buvchenko knew he’d pushed too far, made the wrong play. He’d felt this way once in Grozny. He came around a corner, saw that he’d led his squad into a three-sided ambush. The feeling was not terror, but the sure knowledge of failure.

The terror came next.

“You need to leave, Mikhail.”

“Sure. But remember, in the end, this house can’t save you, your guards can’t save you. Only a government can fight a government. You know it’s true. It’s why you tried to make America attack Iran in the first place.” He handed Duberman a slip of paper. “My number. When you’re ready, you call me.”

—

D
UBERMAN LEANED AGAINST THE
B
UGATTI
. In his heart and his head, he knew the truth. This offer was poison. The FSB hadn’t even bothered to send one of its own men. It had given him Buvchenko, a thug in an expensive suit who made his millions selling AKs to Africans.

Back in the day in Vegas, Duberman had seen this game. Guys started with second mortgages. Then pawnshops. Then Jimmy the
Roller. For most, Jimmy was the last stop, the lowest rung. But some jumped off the ladder into the void. To pay Jimmy, they borrowed money from guys who didn’t bother with nicknames. Miss one week of vig with those guys, you paid another way. You got in your car and drove a suitcase of heroin from Vegas to Chicago or New York. They sat in your house with your family as insurance against you taking off. If you messed up, got stopped, lost the drugs, they bailed you out. So they could bring you home. Then you watched them gangbang your wife before they shot you both in the head and dumped your corpses in the desert, a snack for the vultures.

Duberman had heard the stories enough times to know they were true. He’d always wondered, why didn’t the losers just stop with Jimmy? Jimmy liked breaking bones. But he wasn’t a psychopath. He preferred money to pain. He’d proven as much when he let Duberman buy him out of the Saloon.

For the first time, Duberman understood. The losers simply couldn’t accept the reality that had already hammered them into submission.
This time, I’ll turn it around.
Or else, maybe, they just wanted to buy whatever extra time they could, never mind the price.

Then again . . .

He wasn’t one of those guys. He wasn’t a cokehead who owed a loan shark a hundred grand. The FSB had come to him, not the other way around. And the plan had a certain crazy logic. The President had lied about Iran for months. The Russians would dare the President to come clean. He wouldn’t. After that Duberman would be worth plenty to the Russians, and Buvchenko was right. They protected their assets.

Even better, Duberman already had a way to prove his value. Cheung Han. A Chinese general with a taste for young girls. The Russians would certainly be interested in Cheung.

But who would he be then? A pimp, a procurer. In the service of Vladimir Putin.

He was pacing without even realizing, round and round the garage and the ridiculous cars. Decisiveness was his great secret. Lesser executives hesitated. Demanded more information. For forty years, Duberman had followed his gut. To Vegas, Reno, Macao. Everywhere he’d gone, he’d won. Until the last three months, he hadn’t realized how simple his life had been. Strange to be past sixty and yet know so little about yourself.

Bill Gates and his other super-wealthy peers immersed themselves in the world’s problems. Malaria. Women’s rights. Not Duberman. He had cocooned himself away. Until, with Salome’s help, he decided to start a war. Imperial ambition.

Even then, he would have won if not for Wells.

Of all the games in his casinos, he found roulette the stupidest, a white ball skidding over a spinning wheel, red to black and back. The players leaning close, believing they’d won, then shaking their heads as one last jump took everything away. Duberman felt like one of them now. Or the ball itself. He was sick of thinking, of being imprisoned in this nine-figure castle on a hill.

The door to the house swung open, and Gideon stepped through. This problem, at least, Duberman could handle. “Close the door, come here.” He didn’t speak again until he stood face-to-face with Gideon. “What was that?” Without waiting for an answer, Duberman swung, a straight right cross. He was past sixty, yes, but he worked out every day and had taken testosterone supplements for years. Gideon didn’t try to protect himself. The punch caught him on the chin, knuckles on bone, sent him stumbling back.

“I’m sorry, Aaron. Truly. I lost control.”

The only other time Duberman had seen Gideon so upset was
when the doctors told him they were out of treatments for his son, that all he could do was enjoy the months Tal had left.
He’s not dying,
Duberman had said.
I don’t care what it costs, but we’ll save him.

Tal was alive today, married, three sons of his own.

“Quitting, Gideon? Too hot for you? Melted your promises?”

Gideon went to a knee like a knight before a king. “Never. But you say no to this. You say no.”

“
You
give
me
orders?”

“You can’t dance with these people. You think you know, but you don’t. You let them in, they destroy you. Destroy everything.”

“So what, then, I wait here until Wells gets to me, or the President decides it’s time?”

“The worst is that you’ll lose your honor, too. You won’t even recognize yourself.”

“Why are you so sure I can’t beat them?”

“What will you tell Orli?”

Gideon had a point there. Orli’s parents were Russian émigrés. She hated the country, its government, everything about it. How would he explain to her that he was now working with the FSB?
For
the FSB?

He could wait, he supposed.

“If you’d done your job and taken care of Wells in Tel Aviv, none of this would ever have happened.”

“Talk to Orli, at least. See what she says.”

“You’ve made your speech and I’ll think about it. Now out. Leave me.”

A
fter his failed effort to recruit Roberts, Wells trudged toward the skyscrapers that lined Victoria Harbor. The thought of going back to his apartment and trying again to spy on Duberman’s mansion made him feel weirdly like the stalker that Duberman had said he was.
We’re so perfect for each other. If you would only see.

Past midnight, the island’s central business district was mostly empty, the action on the other side of the harbor. Kowloon. Wells suddenly wanted crowds and noise. Let Duberman have the Peak. Wells would stay close to the ground, where he belonged.

The MTR was closed for the night. Wells hailed a cab and five minutes later was speeding through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel for the crash pad he had rented off Jordan Road. He’d found the place through Craigslist, a sublet from an American student going home after two semesters studying Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.
Looking to book flight ASAP! Any reasonable offer considered!
the ad said. Wells offered eighteen hundred dollars in cash for the month left on the lease. The guy agreed without even asking to see a passport.

“Had enough of Hong Kong?”

“It’s an amazing city, but it grinds you down after a while.”

“Aren’t you worried I’m gonna trash the place? Cost you your security deposit?” A joke. The furniture consisted of a stained air mattress, a leaky refrigerator, and a chipped wooden desk.

“What are they going to do, sue me in Chicago?” The kid tossed Wells the keys. “Big for the front gate, little for the front door. Go nuts.”

“I will.”

—

W
ELLS HADN
’
T BEEN BACK SINCE
. The place was even smaller than he remembered. Nine feet by ten at most. Dirtier, too. Stale cigarette smoke infused the walls. A single naked bulb dangled from the ceiling. The perfect safe house. No one in the world knew it was his. Though Wells wished he’d invested in a new air mattress. And a can of Lysol. He propped himself against a wall, fished out his newest burner.

One ring, then—

“That bad, huh?” Shafer’s voice had roughened in the years that Wells had known him. Yet he still sounded permanently amused, cheered rather than frozen by his cynicism. Like a late-night sports talk radio host who proudly rooted for losers and would dump any team that became too good.

Wells didn’t answer.

“Don’t you want to ask me how I know?”

Not even a little.

“It’s after midnight there. You don’t call this late unless you have something good or you’re desperate. And I know you don’t have something good.”

When Shafer was in these moods, talking to him was like arguing with the world’s cleverest ten-year-old. “I always want to talk to you until I actually have to.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s impenetrable. Might as well have a moat and ten thousand archers.”

“You knew that from the first overhead.”

“There’s knowing, and then there’s seeing. And I thought I’d catch him coming and going. Getting ready for the new opening. But he’s locked up tight.”

“Can’t blame him. Any luck with the channel changers?”

Channel changers, a/k/a remote controls, a/k/a drones. Shafer had nicely avoided using a word that would perk up any voice analysis software monitoring this call.

“If I had a team going over the wall, they might help. As it is, it’s like a
National Geographic
feed. Watching lions sleep next to a watering hole.” Wells decided not to explain that he couldn’t keep the drones airborne for more than a couple hours a day. “I thought I had a move tonight. I talked to the guy who runs security up there. I don’t mean Gideon or anyone from the personal detail. British. Ex-SAS. I figured maybe he’d help if he knew the real story.”

“That was optimistic.”

“Believe it or not, Duberman told him they needed all this security because I’m a stalker, I’m after Orli—”

“You do have your difficulties with women.”

Wells could only laugh.

“He believed that?” Shafer said.

“She backed it up.”

A pause as Shafer considered the implications. “Did she, now? I’ll admit I’m surprised. But putting that aside. You told him the truth, now what? He gonna help?”

“He pretty much said it’s not his fight.”

“He going to narc?”

“I don’t see him going that way, either. But he said Duberman already knows I’m here.”

“So they
were
waiting for you at the airport?”

“He said no. That was somebody else.”

Shafer stopped talking. But he was still there. Wells heard the slow rattle of his breathing. A good sound. It meant Shafer was circling the problem, trying to pop it open.

“You’re all groping in the dark. Bunch of kids playing Spin the Bottle. If kids still play that anymore. Who knows? Everybody hoping somebody else screws up first. What about that new opening, the casino?”

“Haven’t heard much. I think he was hoping I’d go to Macao and when I didn’t bite—”

“Right. So he knows you’re casing him. Meanwhile, he’s doing the same, fishing, to find you while you’re looking. You’ve got some help from us, he’s got all he can buy, which is plenty, but neither of you wants the local constabulary involved.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Ellis.”

“Maybe if you had more active help from the station. Not just gear.”

“No.” Only Duto could open that door, and Wells was done asking favors of Duto.

“You have any other ideas?”

“Nothing that’s not terrible.”

“Share with the group.”

“Like, loading up the flying machines with C-4, dive-bombing them into the house.” Wells had wondered if the drones could be converted into unmanned kamikazes.

“Tell me you didn’t just say that.”

“I said it was terrible.”

“How about this? Get yourself a latex mask that looks like him, go up there, and knock on the gate. The guards get confused, let you in. Then he sees you in the mask and freaks.
If I’m not me, den who the hell am I?
” The last line spoken in a terrible Schwarzeneggerian accent.

“Ellis—”

“A race around the island. Ferrari versus motorcycle. You win, he turns himself in. He wins, you spend twenty years as a bathroom attendant in Macao, picking pubes out of urinal cakes.”

“Ellis—”

“Duel at ten paces. Cliffside sumo match. One hand, one million dollars—”

Wells hung up. Called back five minutes later.

“Arm-wrestling.”

“I’m glad you find this so funny.”

“Nobody made you go over there.” But Shafer had amused himself enough. He went quiet again, the good quiet. Five minutes passed, enough time for Wells to hear a mouse prowl inside the wall behind him, disappear, return.

“Still there or did you stroke out?”

“I have an idea. A way to shake the tree. Maybe. But it’s not nice.”

“Not her.” Even if Orli had backed Duberman’s lie about the stalking, Wells didn’t see her as a target. Not yet. Not unless he could prove she knew about the original false-flag plot.

“No. You know the names of any of his bodyguards? The inner circle, I mean.”

“Only Gideon.”

“Would you recognize them?”

Aside from Gideon, Wells had seen Duberman’s guys for only a
few minutes at the mansion in Tel Aviv. “If I saw them on the street, probably. But if you’re thinking you’ll run pictures of ex-Mossad past me and I pick out the ones who work for him, it’d be a long shot.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“You gonna tell me?”

“Go to sleep. I should know before you get up if I can make it work. Check your email then. And if you come up with any more terrible ideas—”

“I’ll keep them to myself.”

—

W
ELLS FOLDED UP
his two-thousand-dollar jacket for a pillow, unlaced his sneakers, stretched on the floor. He was asleep in minutes. He woke to a downpour, rain lashing the apartment’s single window. It was afternoon. He’d slept twelve hours. Proof, not that he needed any, that rooms like this were his natural home.

The apartment had no computer, no Internet connection. Inconvenient but safe. Wells walked until he found the store he needed, a cubbyhole with tinted windows. The sign above promised
Gamers Paradise
in English. Inside, a dozen slack-faced teenagers hunched before wall-mounted televisions, muttering in Cantonese. Their hands crawled over keyboards as they destroyed the twenty-second century. A game of Spin the Bottle would have done them all good.

“I just need an Internet connection.”

The guy behind the counter pointed to a battered Samsung laptop that sat in the corner like a rusted-out Pinto in a Mercedes showroom.

Wells logged on, found Shafer’s emails. Individually each could have been innocent. Collectively they were deadly as a smallpox vial.

First, old public pictures of Duberman. More important, his bodyguards. Wells recognized Gideon. He’d seen some of the others, too.
He didn’t know their names. But Shafer had figured out a way to identify at least two of them. His second email included photos from a decade earlier, headshots from a Pentagon database. The men had participated in joint American-Israeli seminars on fighting insurgencies at the Army War College. Uri Peretz and Avi Makiv. Captains in the Israel Defense Force. Trim, handsome men, both with dark, curly hair and brown eyes.

Wells wondered how Shafer connected the public bodyguard photos to the Pentagon identification shots. Probably through the facial-recognition software at the National Security Agency. Wells figured Duto had told the NSA to give Shafer what he wanted, as long as he didn’t seem to target Duberman actively. Looking at former Israeli army officers would hardly raise eyebrows. Anyway, Wells didn’t doubt the matches. Peretz and Makiv were exactly the kind of guys Duberman favored as bodyguards.

Wells wondered if the third set of emails would include immigration records or closed-circuit shots from Hong Kong International showing the men’s arrival. That trick would have been impressive even for the NSA. Instead, the file included a year of credit card charges for Peretz and Makiv. The first few months were predictable, restaurants in Tel Aviv, gas stations in Jerusalem. Peretz had run up a week of bills in Rome. Makiv liked scuba diving.

After Duberman came to Hong Kong, the charges mostly stopped for a while, aside from recurring cable and phone bills. Peretz had a few charges at high-end Hong Kong hotels like the Peninsula. Less than fifty dollars each, so they weren’t rooms. Wells imagined he’d stopped in for a drink or two. Makiv was a regular at a Nike store in Kowloon. He also had a charge in Macao at a place called the Grand Lisboa, which Wells thought was a casino.

Wells didn’t know yet where Shafer was going with the credit
cards. The relative lack of charges implied that Peretz and Makiv had holed up in the mansion since coming to Hong Kong. But the move was hardly a surprise. Duberman was keeping his bodyguards close.

Yet in the last two weeks, Peretz and Makiv had started using their cards again regularly. The same names came up over and over: Yung Kee Restaurant, Yat Lok Restaurant, Nha Trang Vietnamese Café . . . All restaurants, or so it seemed. The time stamps showed lunches and dinners, nothing too cheap or expensive, in the range of one to three hundred Hong Kong dollars, fifteen to forty U.S. Weirdly, the bills seemed to duplicate one another, each with the same amount on the same day. Wells wondered if Shafer had made a mistake, double-counted the receipts somehow. No. The men were eating together, splitting their checks.

Okay. So they were coming down from the Peak now. Why? Wells thought he knew. The fourth email confirmed the answer. It was the only one with a subject line:
I always feel like . . .
Shafer couldn’t help his adolescent cleverness.
Somebody’s Watching Me.
Wells remembered the song from his adolescence, a hit from the mid-eighties, the lyrics cute and creepy at once:

I wonder who’s watching me now / Who? The IRS . . .

Wells looked up the lyrics online, discovered the song had belonged to a one-hit wonder named Rockwell. But unlike Rockwell, Wells knew exactly who was watching him. Now he knew where they were looking. The fourth email included street and satellite maps. Shafer had marked them with the restaurants where Peretz and Makiv used their cards. They formed a rough semicircle around the southern exits of the Central MTR station, the subway stop nearest the roads that led to the Peak.

Duberman had sent his men down as pickets. He and Gideon hoped to catch Wells on his way to the mansion. Wells would bet that
Peretz and Makiv weren’t the only team, just the only one that Shafer had found so far. The move made sense. The area was crowded but compact. Wells was a head taller than the average Chinese man. He would stand out even if he tried to disguise himself.

But Wells had foiled the plan, mainly because he’d wasted so much time on the drones that he’d barely left his apartment since coming to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Peretz and Makiv had their own problems. The Central MTR station was huge, more than a dozen exits, hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. The men couldn’t set up in a van or car for more than a few minutes without blocking traffic and drawing police attention. Probably they were using an office as a static viewing post, splitting their time between it and the streets. Even so, the search would be boring and tiring.

Wells didn’t doubt they were doing whatever they could to stay focused, keep their eyes up. They knew how dangerous Wells could be. Probably they were limiting their calls and emails to essentials, using burners instead of their usual phones. Otherwise, Shafer would have sent along a communications file, too. No doubt Duberman had used a shell company to rent the office they were using as their base, so Wells couldn’t find them that way.

But they had made one mistake. A small mistake, sure. But fatal nonetheless.

They were rewarding themselves with lunch and dinner breaks. And paying with credit cards instead of cash. In doing so, they had given Wells what he needed to find them. He wouldn’t need phone intercepts, much less anything fancy like the feeds from security cameras around the MTR station. Peretz and Makiv ate around the same time every day, and restaurants they had chosen were clustered within a few blocks, a diamond-shaped area near the heart of the central business district.