The Wolves (14 page)

Tomorrow, or the day after, Wells would put himself close by. He wouldn’t have to look for the men or guess where they might be eating. Shafer would simply have the NSA alert him the next time Peretz and Makiv used their cards, and pass the name of the restaurant to Wells. Wells should have several minutes to reach it. The cards had to be swiped and authorized before a waiter brought the bills back to be signed. By the time the men paid and walked out, Wells would be waiting.

Not nice,
Shafer had said, but Wells had no qualms. Unlike William Roberts, Peretz and Makiv knew why Wells wanted their boss. They could have quit. Instead they had come halfway across the world with Duberman. They were willing soldiers who would capture or kill Wells if they could.

This was not assassination, or even a sniping, but a slow-motion duel.

—

W
ELLS PRINTED
the credit card receipts and the restaurant map, left the gamers to their virtual destruction while he walked up Jordan Road considering his own killing spree. He would need the pistol and suppressor he’d left in his apartment on the island, but he was in no rush. All around him the city buzzed, storekeepers shouting in Chinese, kids in school uniforms jostling. He felt more focused, at once adrenalized and relaxed.
Better.
Had he been born to hunt, or had all the hunting made him what he’d become? He supposed the answer hardly mattered anymore.

At a bookstore on Jordan, Wells bought detailed maps of Hong Kong. Back at his crash pad, he studied the area around the restaurants, trying to memorize every building and alley and intersection. Afternoon turned to evening, and Wells itched to recite the
maghrib
,
the fourth of the five prayers Muslims were supposed to offer each day. He might not understand himself entirely, but he was sure that religion had nothing to do with his pursuit of Duberman. Over the years, most of the men he had killed had been Muslim. Should Duberman escape justice because he happened to be Jewish?

He had just finished his prayers when his phone buzzed.

“You understand what I sent? Or do you need turn-by-turn directions?”

All their missions together, Shafer still liked to pretend that Wells was dumb muscle.

“I was confused, but the guy at the next computer helped me out.”

“Good of him.”

“I assume you can set up an alert the next time they pay.”

“Correct.”

“And what’s the delay?”

“One to three minutes. You might have to jog, but you’ll get there in time for an after-dinner mint.”

“Any chance of a mousetrap?” Meaning had Peretz and Makiv intentionally used their cards to lure Wells into coming after them? An ambush within an ambush. But even as he asked the question, Wells knew the answer.

“That, what, they ate out for weeks to build this trail because they realized I’d find their names, trace the cards—”

“I get it.”

“You will have the drop. I promise you. Up to you what you do with it.”

They both knew what Wells would do with it. Two head shots. He would have to figure the Israelis for bullet-resistant vests, the police style that fit under clothes and could stop a medium-weight pistol round.

“Assuming I get away clear, what happens next?”

“Two of his guys go down. He has no idea how you found them, what went wrong.”

“He’s not the panicky type.”

“Maybe not. But the British guy, I’ll bet he quits right away. He doesn’t need this. Maybe some core guys walk, too. Not Gideon, but the others, the ones I’m still trying to find. Even Orli, maybe she decides enough already, time to take the kiddos back to the promised land. What we really want. That would open things up nicely.”

Probably a good read. “Hope you’re right. Should I tell your coworker here about this?” Meaning Wright, the chief of station.

“I think he’ll be happier not knowing.”

Wells agreed on that score, too. “Anything else I need to know about my lunch dates?”

“They both spent some time in Lebanon, so I wouldn’t underestimate them. But no.”

“It was a neat trick, Ellis.”

“What’s that?”

“Figuring it out. Thank you.”

“Thanks for noticing.” Genuine pleasure in Shafer’s voice. “You thinking tomorrow?”

Hitting fast was usually the right choice. Peretz and Makiv might stop using their credit cards, or disappear for a hundred other reasons. But lunch tomorrow was less than eighteen hours away, hardly time for Wells to gin up a viable escape plan. He worried less about live witnesses, who would barely have time to recognize what was happening before Wells vanished, than the public and private cameras that covered every block of the central business district. Having a wheelman would make the hit easier, but Wells didn’t. Plus the forecasters were promising more rain tomorrow, making escape even more complicated.

“I think the day after.”

Shafer’s silence told Wells that he disagreed.

“Tell you what, Ellis, come over, we’ll do it your way—”

“Fine. I hear anything new, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, look for a text. Around one-thirty, based on the last few days. Happy hunting.”

Then Shafer was gone. Leaving Wells with nothing but the echo of his last two words.

—

W
ELLS WAITED
in the Kowloon crash pad past midnight before he hailed a cab for the island. He spent the night’s empty hours walking the area where the men ate each day. Topography and history had covered it with a jumble of streets that bumped into each other at odd angles and changed names almost at random. Wells didn’t mind the maze. It would work to his advantage, letting him sneak up on Peretz and Makiv without warning and then disappear almost as fast.

Unfortunately, the video surveillance was as ubiquitous as Wells had feared. Cameras were mounted to the sides of buildings, over doorways, on traffic lights. At a minimum, Wells would need to hide his face with a Unabomber-style hood and oversized sunglasses. An actual Halloween mask would be better. But masks drew stares and camera phones. If he used one, Wells would have to discard it immediately in a blind spot without cameras.

Ultimately Wells decided the simplest solution was one he had used before, a motorcycle. Not just because bikes were far more maneuverable than cars. Motorcycles meant helmets. No one looked twice at a rider in a full-face shield. Even better, many of the skyscrapers nearby had underground parking garages open to the public. Instead of risking a chase, Wells would race for a garage a few blocks away. Inside, he would ditch the bike and his helmet and jacket. He
would be back on the street before the police even reached the shooting. The plan wasn’t foolproof, but no plan was.

Of course, ditching a motorcycle meant Wells needed one that couldn’t be connected to him. He could try to steal one. Many older models had simple locks that could be broken open and turned with a screwdriver. Wells could also try Craigslist again, see if he could find another kid willing to trade keys for cash. But this time, going to the agency seemed simpler. Wright had already given him a pistol, after all. He could hardly object to providing a motorcycle.

Wells hoped.

It was nearly dawn. Wells decided to wait until morning to call Wright, ask the favor. Instead he stopped at his banker apartment to pick up the necessities: his pistol and suppressor, knife, a change of clothes. As he looked through his closet, he would have traded all the fancy suits for a pair of broken-in motorcycle boots. In retrospect, Wells felt dumb for thinking that he could disguise himself from Duberman, or fit into the world of the ultra-rich in Hong Kong, with a few expensive outfits.

The clean white sheets on the king-sized bed looked tempting. But as the night turned from black to gray, Wells left the luxury behind. If Duberman was looking for him on the island, he belonged in Kowloon.

The rain started just as he reached the crash pad. Wells catnapped for a couple of hours, then called Wright. Who got straight to business. “You talk to the man?” Meaning Roberts. Wells reminded himself that Wright was still a move behind.

“Yeah. Didn’t get far.”

“Now what?”

“Maybe I was calling to hear your voice.”

“Ever deeper in the favor bank.”

“Lucky I have good credit.” Wells wondered about setting a
face-to-face meet, decided not to waste the time. These burners were safe enough to risk asking straight out. “I need a motorcycle.”

“Touring the countryside, are we?”

“Best if nobody can connect it to you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Today, if you can.”

“You think I can just snap my fingers on something like that?”

Yes, as a matter of fact. It’s a motorcycle. Not a Trident sub.
Wells waited.

“Keys for you tonight,” Wright finally said. “Back where we first met. Don’t expect anything fancy.”

“As long as it’s not a moped.”

“Don’t give me any ideas.”

—

W
HATEVER
W
RIGHT
thought of Wells or this mission, he seemed to have decided that playing along was in his interest. The bike was a black Honda CB600F, a common sportbike, probably about a decade old, with a legal Hong Kong plate. The tires were worn but useable and the odometer read sixty-eight thousand kilometers. Wright had even thrown in a helmet with a tinted face shield.

By midnight the rain had blown through. For a change, the air felt clear and clean. Wells took the Honda for a run on the airport highway. If it was going to blow a cylinder or a tire, he preferred to find out now. And every bike had its own quirks. Some responded to only the lightest toe taps or throttle pulls, while others needed real pressure.
If you understood women half as well as motorcycles,
Anne had once told him . . .

Wells and the Honda got along fine. The bike was lighter than the one-thousand-cubic-centimeter monsters he favored but had plenty of pull. On the bridge to Lantau, he rolled the throttle and it surged to
one hundred fifty kilometers an hour. It had more kick left, but Wells didn’t press. The Honda handled nicely, too. Wells felt connected to the road in a way that he didn’t on bigger machines. He leaned side to side, dancing over the rain-freshened asphalt, black and gleaming in the moonlight. After about three minutes, he forced himself to ease up. The bike might be legal, but he didn’t have a local driver’s license, much less a motorcycle endorsement. He rode slowly back to Kowloon, the engine’s song buzzing in his head. If Wells could have found an excuse, he would have ridden all night. Instead he took the bike to the bottom level of a massive garage in Kowloon, four levels underground.

Wells had brought the pistol and suppressor with him on the ride. He walked to the back wall of the garage, looked for surveillance cameras. He didn’t see any and fitted the long black tube to the end of the barrel. He aimed at a metal sign that read
PL 4
twenty feet away, squeezed the trigger. The pistol let out a soft wheeze, a weirdly human sound, and a single hole appeared inside the
P
. Good. Wright had done his job. Wells didn’t doubt Shafer would do his.

The rest would be up to him.

—

I
N THE MORNING
, Wells picked up the Honda, took his place in the heavy commuter traffic making its way through the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, the bike burbling happily. He got to the island just past 10 a.m. Weirdly, he now faced the same problem as Peretz and Makiv. He couldn’t hang around the Central MTR station without attracting attention. But he had to be sure he was no more than a couple minutes away when Shafer’s text came.

He burned two hours with two slow loops around the island, countersurveillance if nothing else. Then he found a parking lot off
Queen’s Road East, barely a mile from the district where Peretz and Makiv usually ate. So far, he’d carried the pistol and suppressor in his backpack. Now he hid them inside a dark green nylon bag that he tucked between his legs.

At 12:45—earlier than he’d expected—the burner phone buzzed.
Yung Kee.
A big restaurant on Wellington Street near D’Aguilar. Famous for its gold-painted exterior and its roasted goose. Not the name Wells had hoped to see. Wellington Street lay in the very heart of downtown, and Yung Kee was popular with tourists, increasing the crossfire risk. Still, Wells switched off the phone and rode out, down Queen’s Road East to Queensway, surrounded by heavy midday traffic, buses and Bentleys and taxis. Ahead, a light turned yellow, but Wells accelerated through, then slowed as the nylon bag juggled between his legs. Just another messenger on a motorcycle, speeding between deliveries. Queensway became Queen’s Road Central. Ahead Wells saw D’Aguilar Street.

He turned left on D’Aguilar, gave the bike more juice as he came up the hill. Wellington was not even a hundred yards up. Wells turned right and saw the big gold-colored façade of Yung Kee directly ahead. A dozen people milled outside. Wells edged the bike to the curb, kicked it into neutral. He was now twenty-five feet from the front door. He unzipped the bag, reached inside, wrapped his right hand around the pistol. No one gave him a second look.

With the traffic, he’d needed almost five minutes to reach Wellington. Too long. Peretz and Makiv might already have left. Unlikely but not impossible, depending on how quickly the NSA had picked up the card authorization and sent it to Shafer. He’d wait five minutes more and then go.

Three minutes passed before two white men stepped out of the
restaurant’s front door. Medium-height, the telltale bulk of bullet-resistant vests just visible under their sport coats. Brown-eyed and curly-haired. Peretz and Makiv. Side by side.

They turned right, toward D’Aguilar. Toward him.

Wells locked his hand around the pistol in the bag—

And
froze
.

He couldn’t draw.
The thought of shooting them on the street in cold blood, with a lunchtime crowd around them, tourists waiting their turn to eat roast goose—

Never. Never never never had this happened before.

They stepped toward him. Still, he couldn’t move. Then Peretz tilted his head, and Wells saw the realization, knew almost before Peretz himself did that Peretz had recognized Wells from the way he was standing or the nylon bag or the tinted faceplate itself.