The Wolves (2 page)

“The other five, yours to keep.”

“Now that I’m freelance, I don’t have someone to call at Langley if I need a plane or a dozen guys with guns. My winning smile only goes so far. I usually find I need to offer cash, too. I had a couple of million from the Saudis, but I spent it. So, a refill.”

The President nodded. Wells sensed he was looking for a reason to say no but couldn’t find one. “Fine. Tell Donna where to send the money and we’ll get to you Monday. Anything else? Your own aircraft carrier?”

“Stay out of the way while I take care of Duberman.”

The President shook his head.

“Then forget it.” Wells stood.

“John—”

“Please don’t call me John. We don’t know each other that well.” What he needed to say came to him all at once, a speech brewing for years. “You know what’s always the same? The top guys always skate. We never touch them. American, Saudi, whatever, they make their
messes and everybody else cleans up. I don’t mean to sound naïve, but I’ve had enough compromises for the greater good. Duberman, we can take him. Nobody’s protecting him.”

The President nodded. “Somebody spends two hundred million dollars to get you reelected”—as Duberman had done for this President—“he’s not just a donor. He’s a friend. He’s been in this room. Then he tries to fake the United States into a war? Fake
me
? You think I don’t want him to pay?”

“Then let me do something about it.”

“Not you. We’re going to do this the right way, even if it takes time. We have to take him out in a way that doesn’t blow back on us—”

“On you—”

“Me and the country, yes. You can have everything else. But not Duberman. You don’t like it, call the papers.” The President reached into his inside suit pocket, came out with an iPhone. “Secret Service lets me keep it as long as I’m in here and can’t lose it.”

He pressed his thumb to the home button to unlock it, tossed it to Wells. Then sat back on the sofa, as studiously casual as a poker player who had shoved all his chips into the middle of the table.
Over to you. Call or fold.

This guy. He’d humiliated himself and the country. Yet he still acted like he was in charge. Like sheer force of personality would see him through. The world’s best bluffer.

Wells saw the irony. He complained no one ever held the men in charge accountable. Now he had the chance to make the most powerful man in the world pay. Only he couldn’t do it. He handed the phone back. “You promise me, I stay out of it, you’ll get him.”

“I will do everything possible. Understand, that doesn’t mean blowing up his mansion or his plane with his family on it. No collective punishment. No civilians and especially not his wife and kids.
Him only, and maybe that one bodyguard, the one who’s always with him—”

“Gideon.” Wells wouldn’t forget Gideon Etra’s name soon. Or ever.

“Yes. Gideon’s a legitimate target. So? Will you give me a chance?”

“One condition. Get him out of Israel. Within a week.”

The President shook his head in confusion.

“Tel Aviv’s the hardest place to kill him. The Mossad and Shin Bet will know the second you bring in a team. He can hole up in his mansion. And he probably figures you won’t come after him if he has his family around. Flush him, make him move, maybe he makes a mistake. Goes to that island he owns, nice fat target.”

“They won’t kick him out without a good reason,” Green said. “We’ll have to tell Shalom”—Yitzhak Shalom, the Israeli Prime Minister—“the whole story.”

What Wells wanted. The more people knew, the more pressure to act the President would face.

The President and Green whispered briefly.

“Okay,” the President said. “But he winds up in some underground compound in Moscow where we can’t touch him, don’t blame me.”

Wells looked at Shafer. “What do you think, Ellis?”

“I’d like to know what Duto wants.”

“Nothing you wouldn’t expect,” the President said. “Carte blanche in naming the new DCI. All my donor files, plus all the oppo research we have on every potential candidate, both parties.”

“You told him no to that?”

“I told him yes to everything.”

“You gave him your dirt.”

“It isn’t that juicy. Politicians are boring these days.”

“What are you going to do when he tells you he wants you to endorse him?”

“Truth is, that would barely move the needle. Even in the primary. Nobody cares what I think. I’m the past. The past can’t sign bills. The only way I can guarantee he gets the job would be to make the Veep resign, name Duto Veep, then resign myself. That would be a constitutional crisis in a can. I’d rather have it all come out.”

“Plus you’d be out, anyway,” Shafer said.

“Correct. So that’s not happening.”

“Just don’t underestimate him.”

“Lesson learned. So? You on board?”

Shafer tapped Wells on the leg. “Good enough for him, good enough for me.”

“And vice versa,” Wells said. “For a while.”

“How long?” Green said.

“Time limits only cause trouble.” An unsubtle reference to the President’s failed deadline. “Last thing. I don’t want anyone on me. I find out you’re watching, it’s off.”

“Fine.”

Then they had nothing else to say. Green gave Wells and Shafer cards without names, just numbers on the front and back. “Cell and home. Call anytime.”

“Let’s go to Shirley’s,” Shafer said, when they were finally off the White House grounds. A run-down bar in northeast D.C., left over from the District’s bad old days as the Murder Capital. It sold two-dollar shots of no-name booze, and its bathroom sent customers to the back alley. The perfect place for a defeat celebration.

“Your wife won’t mind?”

“My wife is just happy I’m out of jail.”

“Drinkers wanted—inquire inside” read the sign taped to Shirley’s front door. The room inside it was dirtier than ever. Like going
downmarket was a strategy. Wells wanted to summon some nostalgia for the place, irritation for the eight-dollar-a-beer gastropub that would replace it as Washington’s gentrification spread ever farther east. He couldn’t. It could have been cheap and local and still have had pride.

Wells ordered a Budweiser and didn’t drink it. Shafer ordered whiskey and did. One shot, a second, a third. Shafer wasn’t a big drinker, and the shots added up. A rheumy film blanked his eyes. After his fourth shot, he poked Wells in the side, his finger hardly denting the muscle over Wells’s ribs. “I ever tell you about Orson Nye? My first COS?” Chief of station. “In Congo? That first posting in Africa, back in the day, I had the worst case of Nile fever.”

“West Nile?”

Shafer smirked. “No, like Potomac fever.” Washington residents used the term to describe the naïve excitement that young arrivals to the city displayed over their proximity to power.
That intern’s got Potomac fever so bad, we could have him research the weather service budget for a month and he’d love it.

“Hard to imagine.” Wells peeled the label from his Budweiser and sloshed the liquid inside back and forth. Muslims didn’t drink. He was Muslim. Thus, he didn’t drink. The rules were the rules.

He missed beer, though.

“Oh, but I did. Loved it, all of it. The embassy parties. Chartering a plane so some twenty-year-old could fly me into the jungle for a meeting with the Angolan rebels. The weekly briefings in the secure room. The safe with the gas masks and the mines and the grenades. All the coms protocols we had to use, back then it wasn’t just some encrypted phone. Our secretaries practically needed Ph.D.s. Checking out the surveillance photos we had of the KGB residents, knowing that they had the same photos of us. Spy versus spy. So glamorous.”

“I’m waiting for the
but
.”

“But. Took me maybe a year to figure out that everything we did was for show. Mobutu was all that mattered in Congo.” Mobutu Sese Seko, the country’s president for thirty-two years, until just before his death in 1997. “And all he cared about was money. Carter talked a good game about human rights, but he kept the man’s palms greased. Reagan didn’t even pretend to care.”

Shafer raised his glass and the bartender shuffled over.

“One more?” The guy looked like he belonged in a nursing home, not a bar.

“At least. Your name’s Ed, right?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“You’ll never guess where we were today, Ed.”

“Got that right.” The bartender filled Shafer’s glass, swiped a pair of dollar bills from the counter, walked away.

“Gonna miss this place,” Shafer said.

“Makes one of us. Mobutu?”

“Back then, nobody worried about terrorism; the COS and the ambassador threw parties all the time. Open bar, wide open. One night, I’m drunk, I start spouting to Orson, the people of Congo are starving, Mobutu’s stealing with both hands. We’re standing by, letting him; why don’t we do something about it? He’s drunk, too, big guy, old-school agency, country-club type. Pretty wife. He puts his hands on my shoulders, leans in—he smelled great, by the way—”

“I’m not sure what to make of the fact you remember that.”

“I can’t say a man smells good? And he said, ‘Look, you want me to send a cable,
Time to get rid of MSS
? We’ll go to the secure room, do it right now. Just promise me one thing.’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Whoever comes next will be better. At least Mobutu’s greedy first and
a sadist second. At least I can go over to the palace, ask him to lay off the fingernail pulling and leg breaking when it gets too bad.’”

Shafer had delivered this monologue in a Jimmy Cagney–esque voice that apparently was meant to be Nye’s. He raised his glass. “Here’s to you, Orson. You shut me up good. You know what I said back to him?
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay, my oh my—
”

Wells didn’t like seeing Shafer drunk. “Had to have been guys who were better.”

“And worse. We couldn’t tell ’em apart. Whoever we picked would say the right things until he took over. Then maybe we’d find out the truth. And plenty of broken glass along the way. Plenty plenty. Even after only a year over there, I was sure of that.”

“So Mobutu stayed in power for another twenty years, almost, and destroyed Congo.”

“Sure did. Hasn’t improved since he died, though.”

“How come you never quit, Ellis?”

“I have a good marriage, right?”

“I don’t know much about marriage, but it looks that way.”

“Great family. All the drama I didn’t have in my personal life, it went to the agency. I always thought of the CIA as a woman. A beautiful woman. She cheats, she fights, she lies, but you get addicted to the drama. Of course I only went out with three women in my life, so what do I know?” Shafer downed what was left of shot number five and reached for the bottle in front of Wells. “May I?”

“Please don’t.”

Shafer took a pull, belched. “Nectar of the gods. Though not Allah.”

“You think we did the right thing by letting him skate? The President, I mean.”

“Heck if I know, John. I know you weren’t ready to do it, and I
wasn’t, either. Let’s see what happens. Donna Green was right about one thing. We can always change our minds.”

Wells was done with this crusty bar. And with Shafer. “Let’s get a cab.”

“One more.”

“No more.” Wells lifted Shafer off the stool. He was light as an empty sack and Wells wondered if he might be sick.

Not that. Not Shafer, too.

“You want to stay over?”

“So you can watch me sleep, report my nightmares to the President?”

“It happened.”

“
Once.
You poured it on thick enough.”

Outside, Wells led Shafer south and west until they found a taxi.

“Get out of this town,” Shafer said, as he slid inside. “It doesn’t agree with you. Sort out your love life. If you can’t do that, at least go see your kid. Give our fearless leader a chance to keep his word.”

“He can’t get away with this.” Wells wasn’t sure whether he was talking about Duberman or the President.

“You’ll know when it’s time. We all will.” Shafer hauled the door shut. He didn’t look back as the cab rolled away.

HONG KONG

A
aron Duberman owned estates all over the world. But since marrying Orli Akilov, an Israeli supermodel, he had spent more and more time in Israel. After the President’s speech, he was glad he had. Since its very beginnings, Israel had been a haven for Jews who faced persecution. A “law of return” gave all Jews the right to gain Israeli citizenship. Duberman wondered if he should take advantage.

At the least, he planned to stay inside Israel indefinitely. The United States would hesitate to kill him here without telling the Israeli government of its plans. And Duberman doubted the government would let another country kill a Jew inside Israel. Especially him, especially under these circumstances. The Prime Minister would surely see that Duberman had done what he’d done to protect Israel from Iran.

Five days after the President’s speech, Duberman learned how wrong he was. He was eating dinner with Orli and their twin sons at the mansion when his gate guard called.

“Yaakov Ayalon is here.” The guard’s voice carried unmistakable respect. Ayalon headed the Israeli Security Agency, the famous Shin Bet, Israel’s FBI. “He asks you meet him at the gate.”

“Tell him I’ll be glad to see him inside.”

The response came back seconds later. “He asks you meet him at the gate.”

“I have to go,” Duberman said to Orli.

“At dinner?” She treated dinners with the twins as close to sacred. Even on nights when they ate out, they often had a first meal at home. Duberman had joked she wanted him to become bulimic.
Just like your friends in the business.

He kissed her and the boys, wondering if he’d ever see them again, stepped through his cavernous mansion, past the Jeff Koons balloon-animal sculptures and the Keith Haring paintings. Fifty million dollars’ worth of modern art in the front gallery alone. Barely a rounding error in his thirty-billion-dollar fortune.

What good was any of it now?

Outside, the night was calm, the air fresh and clean. Three Ford Mondeos sat nose to tail, two men in each. Ayalon waited by the gate. He was a bantam of a man, with black nerd-chic glasses, a neatly tailored suit, close-cropped gray hair. He looked like a psychiatrist with a rich clientele.

“Your phone, please.”

Duberman handed it over. Ayalon turned it off, tucked it in his pocket.

“You can come with me.”

Surely the Israelis wouldn’t pluck him from dinner to put a bullet in his head. But then what exactly was the protocol for an assassination?

Ayalon led him to the middle Ford. “I know it’s less fancy than what you’re used to.” Within minutes, they were on Highway 1, headed southeast, toward Jerusalem. Whenever Duberman made this drive, he was struck by how small Israel was. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were barely
forty miles apart. The whole country was about the same size as New Jersey, though longer and narrower, less strategically defensible. When the Muslims threatened to push the Jews into the sea, they weren’t speaking rhetorically.

Yet the hills outside Jerusalem were beautiful, even in the dark. For one short stretch, the highway coursed through a canyon that offered the illusion of being wild country. Then it turned and rose toward the glowing lights that marked the newest western tendrils of the ancient city.

Minutes later, they turned onto the road that led up the hill that was home to Israel’s central government complex. “Knesset?” Duberman said, the name of the Israeli parliament. Ayalon didn’t answer.

Instead, they turned into the parking lot of the Israel Museum, a low cluster of modern buildings that occupied prime real estate near the parliament. A loading bay big enough for a tractor-trailer was open. The lead and chase cars waited outside as the Ford carrying Duberman drove to the back of the bay. Duberman reached for the door.

“We wait inside,” Ayalon said. Fifteen minutes later, a five-car convoy sped into the bay, an armored Cadillac limousine in the center.

“Out.”

Duberman stepped out as the Caddy stopped beside the Ford. A burly bodyguard emerged from the right back door. “Fine,” he said, and a tall man unfolded himself from the back seat. Yitzhak Shalom. Ayalon and the guards walked away, leaving Shalom with Duberman. The two men were about the same height, but Shalom was painfully thin. His breath carried the oily smell of grape leaves. They’d met dozens of times. Duberman had donated millions of dollars to Shalom’s political party. But Shalom’s face suggested that neither the money nor their friendship nor Duberman’s marriage to Orli would help him.

“Mr. Prime Minister—”

“I’ve spoken to your President.” A slight emphasis on
your
, a reminder that Duberman was American, not Israeli
.
“You need to leave.”

“But Tel Aviv is just getting nice.”

“You
joke
?”

“The right of return.”

“Doesn’t apply to murderers.”

“If you’ve spoken to the President, you know I only aimed at Israel’s enemies.”

“What about the Americans your people killed?”

Duberman couldn’t deny the accusation. As part of the plot, his operatives had killed a CIA station chief and his bodyguards, hoping Iran would be blamed.

“When he told me what you’d done, I nearly offered to solve the problem myself.” Shalom lifted his head and huffed, a single short exhale, like a witch casting a spell. This close, Duberman smelled his stomach bile. “Please don’t think about begging your right-wing friends for help. Yaakov and I are the only ones who know the truth. If that changes, you won’t benefit.”

“Don’t you see that what I did, I did for Israel?”

“If you think that, you’re an even greater fool than I thought. You have forty-eight hours. Of course you can keep your properties here, but you can never come back.”

Me and Moses. Banished
from the Promised Land.
Duberman feared the Prime Minister wouldn’t appreciate the comparison. “What about Orli?”

“Did she know?”

“Of course not.”

“Then she can stay. The children, too.” Shalom turned away. Just before he stepped into his limousine, he looked back. “Two days, Aaron. Don’t make the Shin Bet come again. They won’t be so polite.”

—

A
YALON DIDN
’
T RIDE
with him back to Tel Aviv. Duberman had the Ford to himself. The highway rolled by as he considered his next move. If Israel was closed to him, Europe was out, too, and of course the United States. Isolating himself on his island would only make him an easier target.
A mysterious early-morning explosion has destroyed the mansion belonging to casino billionaire Aaron Duberman on his private island of Gamma Key. Duberman is missing and presumed dead in the explosion . . .

Presumed dead. What about faking his death, taking off with a few million dollars? Duberman doubted he could stay hidden for long, even with plastic surgery to disguise his features. He was too well known, and facial reconstruction wasn’t effective for people in their sixties. Like the people inside them, faces turned grooved and worn, their features difficult to change. Even if the surgery succeeded, where could he go? Besides English and Hebrew, he spoke a little Spanish, nothing else. Would he move to a village in the Peruvian jungle and act the part of an overaged hippie interested in the local shamans?

No matter where he went, he’d have no contact with Orli or his children. The CIA and NSA would watch them forever. He’d have no friends, no possibility of making any. He’d have no way of spending his millions without attracting attention that he couldn’t survive. He’d be in an open-air prison of his own design, waiting for the day when a hit team knocked on his door.

He had to have a better choice.

China.
The country that had saved his parents from certain death. They had escaped the Holocaust by fleeing from Vienna to Shanghai after Hitler’s troops crossed the Austrian border in 1938. Almost eighty years later, maybe China could do the same for him. He had a mansion on Hong Kong Island, near the top of Victoria Peak. The President had
told Israel the truth, but he wouldn’t want to show the same weakness to the Chinese. If the United States decided to come after him in Hong Kong, it would do so on its own, without Chinese help. Of course, the President still might try, but the risks were even bigger than they’d be in Tel Aviv. Hong Kong was as densely populated as any city in the world, and the Chinese wouldn’t look kindly on an attack that killed their citizens.

Plus Duberman had a good excuse to live in Hong Kong for a while. His casinos in Macao, forty miles west of Hong Kong across the Pearl River Delta, were the heart of his company. He would add even more security guards to convince the President that killing him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Maybe in a few months, tempers would cool. Maybe he could secretly offer to donate his fortune to the President’s favorite charity, buy himself penance.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Duberman knew the odds were long. But he knew, too, that he had no choice. For the first time, he understood in his bones why gamblers stayed at his tables long after they should have left. Why they reached for the last credit card in their wallets, the one they had promised themselves never to touch, the one for the groceries. Whatever the odds, they were in too deep to leave. Once you’d lost everything, why not hope for a miracle?

—

A
S HE WALKED
through the mansion toward his bedroom, he found himself hoping Orli would be asleep. Or even out. Anything to avoid having to explain what had happened tonight.

Duberman had been a legendary playboy. He’d long since lost track of how many women he’d bedded. A thousand, at least. As he’d neared sixty, he realized he wanted to leave something besides casinos and stained sheets behind. He wanted children, and to him children
meant a wife. Orli wanted kids, too, and she’d figured out rock stars might not be her best bet. She was cynical enough to understand the deal they were making, smart enough to stick to it, to know that he wouldn’t tolerate her stepping out.

Despite the age difference, they got along. Like him, she was fundamentally unpretentious, street-smart rather than bookish, and a hard worker, even if her work consisted of two-hour Pilates regimens. They even had a solid sex life. Duberman couldn’t perform like a twenty-something anymore, but he was still in shape, and what he lacked in vigor he made up in experience. With the help of a drug called Clomid—beloved of steroid cheats and fertility doctors—Orli was soon pregnant with twins.

The pride Duberman felt surprised him slightly. Orli’s offer to take a DNA test didn’t. He’d made her sign a prenuptial agreement. If they divorced, she would receive tens of millions of dollars. But they both knew that money was a fraction of his wealth. She wanted him to have no question about his paternity, so that he would leave everything to her and their children without hesitation. He agreed to the test. Why not? He didn’t think she was bluffing, but he saw no reason to take the chance. Sure enough, the children were his.

Orli was a better mother than Duberman had expected. She threw herself into the dirty details of being a parent, changing diapers and mashing food. He was embarrassed he’d ever questioned her motives for having them. In a way, he envied her. He loved the twins, but on a minute-by-minute basis he wasn’t much interested in their pooping or their squirming or the mushy noises that they made.

He stepped into their bedroom and found her awake and in bed, typing on her laptop. She flipped it shut, stared at him. Even furious, she was distractingly beautiful. Every part of her fit together perfectly, and she had the natural grace of a gymnast.

“The head of Shin Bet?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“The truth is, better if I don’t.”

“Then I leave. The boys with me.” She slid from the bed, picked black yoga pants up off the floor. “You think I need your protection, Aaron? I’m beautiful, I must be stupid. Did I ever tell you how I lost my virginity?”

He knew her secrets. Even some she thought belonged only to her. Not this one. “I assumed it was to me.”

No one was smiling at his jokes tonight.

“I was fifteen, I went to Paris, my first big round of shows, Dior picked me to walk. A big deal, Dior. My agent, Nicholas was his name, he said he needed to stop at his office before he dropped me at my hotel. We get there at six-thirty, you know, France, nobody works past five, the place is empty. He takes me into his office, says, ‘Let’s have glass of wine to celebrate. Your first big score.’ I said, ‘No’; he said, ‘One glass.’”

“Wasn’t Natalia with you?” Her mother.

“At the hotel. Anyway, he gives me the wine, and it tastes a little funny, but I don’t know anything about wine. I drink it. Five minutes later, I don’t feel so well. Five minutes after that, the room is spinning, I pass out. When I wake up, I’m on the floor of his office, and he’s inside me. Blood all over the floor, and it
hurts
. No one tells you that, how much it hurts. I screamed. I begged him to stop. He told me I’d get used to it, next time I’d like it better—”

She rubbed her hand across her mouth, closed her eyes, fifteen again and back in Paris.

“Finally, he’s done. A virgin, he says. Didn’t think those existed anymore. I tell him he’d better kill me, I’m telling my mother when I
get back to the hotel, I’m calling the police. He says go ahead. He holds up my wineglass, says I was drinking, no one will believe me, everyone knows models are little whores. Anyway, if I do, I’ll never get another job, not in Paris or anywhere.”

“So you didn’t tell your mother?”

Orli laughed, small and bitter. “I did. The very minute I came to our room.”

Duberman sat beside her. She edged away.

“She told me I’d get over it. You know, good money, and there was something else, too. Mothers and daughters, I don’t think men can understand, my mother was pretty enough, but forty-seven, her looks were fading, and I was—”

“This.”

“She told me I would remember for the rest of my life, the way men really are. That being beautiful makes you a target. She said I shouldn’t think anyone would believe me. Understand, I was still bleeding, bruises on my legs.”