The Wolves (5 page)

—

A
S A RULE
, Wells didn’t favor disguises like wigs and colored contacts. They only worked in movies. And even the most expertly applied masks couldn’t beat biometric tools, which measured features like retinal pigmentation that couldn’t be changed. Of course, Wells had successfully infiltrated al-Qaeda. But the jihadis had known he was American. Wells had not hidden his identity as much as subsumed it. He had convinced them, and maybe even himself, that he was one of them.

Hong Kong had more than fifty thousand white residents, mostly bankers, lawyers, and executives. Wells decided his best bet would be to pose as a rich investor new to the territory. If he were lucky, he might find an apartment on the Peak itself, close to the mansion. If not, he would settle for an apartment on the top floors of one of the fifty- and sixty-story buildings that rose from its lower slopes, an area called the mid-levels.

Even the closest of those apartments would be a mile or more from Duberman. But if Duto kept his promise of gear, Wells could set up long-lensed cameras to monitor the mansion. He would learn Duberman’s patterns. What hours did he keep? Did he ever drive to the city below? The slopes of the Peak were too steep for helicopters to land on the mansion’s narrow lawn. So where was the helipad that Duberman used to commute to Macao? What roads did he take to it, and how big a convoy? Who visited the mansion, and for how long?

After he was settled in Hong Kong, Wells would consider traveling across the Pearl River Delta to Macao. He didn’t think he could risk spending time in Duberman’s casinos, but maybe he would throw around a couple hundred thousand dollars, talk to managers and staff at competing properties, find out what he could about 88 Gamma.

Wells couldn’t be sure what bit of information would open the
door to a clean kill. But he knew that the more string he gathered, the better chance he would have. He also knew his plan had holes. To say the least. In reality, it was not a plan as much as an idea for a plan:
I’ll go to Hong Kong, see what happens.

—

H
E WAS SURE
of one thing, anyway: He would need money. The President hadn’t kept his promise on Duberman, but he’d sent the ten million dollars on schedule. At a Chase near his apartment, Wells withdrew two hundred thousand dollars in cash, twenty neat packets of hundred-dollar bills that formed two solid bricks.

He stuffed the money into his backpack and found his way to the nearest big mall, where a Bloomingdale’s awaited. He would need new clothes to play this part. A blonde with bored blue eyes waited at the personal shopper counter. “Sir? May I help you?” Her lips hardly moved, as if she’d decided Wells wasn’t even worth the energy to shoo away.

“I need five good lightweight suits. Ten button-down shirts and ties. Four pairs of shoes, two dress and two casual. Also jeans and casual shirts.”

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

“It should be expensive. Smart-looking.”

“You mean like Hugo Boss?”

“What would a hedge fund manager wear?”

“You’re a hedge fund manager?”

“I want to dress like one.”

She smiled. “You’re cute. Diane sent you, right? She keeps threatening to set me up—”

Wells handed her a credit card. “Check the limit.”

She disappeared through a door marked
ASSOCIATES ONLY
, returned a minute later. “Let’s go shopping.”

“Just so you know, I don’t know anything about this stuff. I hope you have good taste.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “The best.”

Four hours, twenty-three thousand dollars, and some flirting later, Wells had exactly the clothes that a fortyish banker would wear.
I’m going on a trip,
he’d said, when she asked why he needed the suits so fast, no time for tailoring or alterations. She hadn’t prodded him.

“We’ll deliver everything this afternoon,” she said. “Will I see you again?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“So no.”

Wells tilted his head to concede the point.

“Good luck, then. With whatever you have planned.”

“At least I’ll know I’ll look sharp.”

—

A
S HE STEPPED OUT
of the store into the California sunshine, his phone buzzed. Duto.

“Garry Wright knows you’re coming. I’m sending you his number. He says get a clean phone when you get there, text him. I told him whatever you want, it’s yours.”

“Thanks, Vinny.”

“I don’t need to tell you this, but if it goes bad—”

“You’re right. You don’t need to tell me.”

Wells hung up. He felt a surge in his chest, a feeling he didn’t want to acknowledge. Excitement, raw and rank. He started to call Evan, but hung up before he finished dialing. They’d said what they needed
to say the night before, and neither of them was a fan of tearful good-byes. Instead he thumbed in a text:
Off to Hong Kong. Stay cool.
Evan didn’t need his advice on staying cool. He deleted the last two words, replaced them with
I love you
. Anything else? No.

He sent it. Even before he’d put the phone away, it buzzed with a response.
Love you, too, Pops. Knock ’em dead.

Now he wanted to call Anne, to tell her where he was and where he was going. To tell her that at least he’d connected with Evan. He wanted to ask her about the spring in North Conway, whether the mud had dried and the trees blossomed at last, whether the red fox that hunted mice in their backyard had survived the winter, how Tonka was doing. Whether she’d had time to hike, whether the state police had finally scheduled her detective training.

But he’d quit his claim on her. He had no right to ask her for emotional support. Even less to offer her the same. He put away the phone and booked himself a flight to Hong Kong. Good-bye, San Diego.

MOSCOW

M
ikhail Buvchenko sold death for a living. Proudly.

Buvchenko was the biggest arms dealer in Russia. For the right price, he could deliver 9-millimeter Makarov pistols or surplus T-54 tanks. Dictators and drug lords were welcome to his merchandise. He’d sold surface-to-air missiles to Bashar al-Assad of Syria and flamethrowers to rebels in the Congo. Flamethowers.
I leave the judgments to you American moralists,
he’d told
GQ
years before, his only published interview in English.
The ones who brought us napalm and Hiroshima.

Buvchenko had even created a twelve-hundred-man militia of former Russian soldiers. They met at his estate twice a year for training. His very own National Guard. A year earlier, the Kremlin had paid him fourteen million dollars to send them into Ukraine. In two months of fighting, they’d shot down four Ukrainian army helicopters and destroyed a dozen tanks. Buvchenko had cleared four million dollars in profit.

—

N
OT BAD FOR
A MAN
who had grown up in a two-room apartment on the edge of Volgograd, the southwestern Russian city once called
Stalingrad. By any name, the town was best known for its role as a human slaughterhouse during World War II. More than a million Germans and Russians had died in a terrible five-month battle for the city.

Volgograd hadn’t changed much since. Buvchenko’s childhood had been bad by Russian standards, which meant it was unimaginable by American. When he was twelve, his father bled to death from an alcohol-rotted stomach. His mother died three years later. They bequeathed him only one gift, uncanny size and strength.

In fall 1991, just as his mother received a diagnosis of lung cancer, the Soviet regime finally sputtered out. In Saint Petersburg, the intellectuals raised their glasses to the end of tyranny. In Moscow, the Communist elites plotted to steal Russia’s incredible natural resources, their final revenge on the nation they’d ruined. But in hinterlands like Volgograd, the state’s collapse created a vacuum. Then winter came.

Buvchenko never spoke of that time. And never forgot it. A surgeon convinced his mother to spend the family’s savings on an operation to remove the top lobe of her right lung. The surgery went badly, no surprise, considering that the surgeon was an alcoholic. His mother was left with a wound in her chest that wouldn’t heal. Morphine and antibiotics at Volgograd Clinical Hospital No. 12 were reserved for patients who could pay. After watching his mother writhe for a week, Buvchenko brought his sister Dasha to the hospital.

“Tell Mamma good-bye,” he told her. So she did. She was a year younger, an obedient, foolish girl. One of her school friends had given her a Bible months before. Now she read it each night. As if God had any use for their broken lives.

“We have to pray for her, Mikhail. Ask Jesus for help—”

“Leave the fairy tales, Dasha. Stand by the door and make sure no one’s coming.” Like anyone would bother. Her room had four cots,
but the other three were empty. Most of the nurses had quit after months without pay. The good citizens of Volgograd preferred to die at home.

Buvchenko lifted his mother’s head and pulled out her pillow, thin and flimsy inside its greasy case. Even a few months ago, she’d been heavy. Now she was a skeleton with lips. She stank of death, or something worse, her insides rotting through the hole in her breastbone. She’d been a decent enough mother, he supposed. Though she’d never saved him from his father’s belt. The scars stippled his back.

Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth to speak. Before she could, he shoved the pillow on her face. She kicked and squirmed and clawed. Then, even faster than he expected, she sank into the bed.

“It’s a sin,” Dasha said. But she didn’t try to stop him, or even raise her voice.

He felt something leave that room when his mother stopped kicking. Not her soul. Another fairy tale. No. A piece of
him
. He knew now the truth of the world’s cruelty, and what he needed to do to survive it. The realization was equally frightening and freeing.

A week later, he told Dasha he was leaving Volgograd. She followed him like a dog as he packed up his canvas backpack with clothes and cigarettes and the two sharpest knives in their kitchen.
Please. Help me.
The very reason he had to go. She was too soft. He couldn’t save her. Even if he could, the price would be his own life. She trailed after him all the way to the train station, sobbing like the child she was:
Mikhail, what will I do?

He knew the answer. In a year or two, she would be on the streets, finding out firsthand about sin.
You’ll be all right,
he said.
In a few years, I’ll find you and we’ll live together in Moscow, a prince and princess.

You promise, my brother?

I promise.

He never spoke to her again.

—

H
E LIVED ON THE STREETS
of Moscow for a year, twelve cold and desperate months that finished what was left of his humanity. Then the Red Army took him. By eighteen, he had fought his way into the Spetsnaz, the
spetsialnogo naznacheniya
, the Russian army’s Special Forces unit. He was nearly two meters tall, one hundred ten kilograms, a bundle of muscle and rage. He made even his commanders nervous.
We’ll send you to Grozny—
the capital of Chechnya, where Russia was fighting a vicious war against Muslim separatists—
and you can kill all the rats you like.

The same year, Buvchenko learned his sister had died of a heroin overdose. He got the news in a call from a police detective from Volgograd.
We can postpone the cremation if you want to come down, Sergeant.

Burn her as soon as you can. Get her out of this world.

He spent four years in Chechnya. The rebels there were a vicious bunch, in every way the forerunners of ISIS, down to their snuff videos. They hated the Spetsnaz, and Buvchenko knew what they’d do to him if they caught him. He was equally merciless to the ones he captured. He came home with a dozen medals for combat bravery and a jar full of ears. Two sides of one coin.

Away from the front lines, the military’s rules bored him senseless. He quit three months after his last deployment, went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work as a quote-unquote technical advisor. Unlike a lot of wannabe mercenaries, he had real experience. Within months, he was ferrying AKs and RPGs to the eastern Congo, where a half-dozen militias fought for the jungle’s diamonds. He spent three years in Africa before coming back to Volgograd, where he had
easier access to advanced weapons like helicopters. Year by year, his deals grew. To add to his profits he brought heroin and cocaine back into Russia on the same jets that flew weapons out.

In the seventies and eighties, the legendary arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi had made billions of dollars brokering weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. Buvchenko would never be in that league. These days the biggest orders went country to country, making nine-figure skims impossible. Still, by his thirty-ninth birthday, Buvchenko had seventy million dollars in banks in Moscow, Geneva, and the Cayman Islands.

—

B
UVCHENKO
’
S LINE OF WORK
did have drawbacks. Two years before, a federal grand jury in Virginia had charged him in absentia with arms trafficking, supporting terrorism, and money laundering. He’d never sold a single weapon on American soil, or to a group like ISIS. He’d sell to everyone, but not those savages. Not after what he’d seen in Chechnya. No matter. The meddlers in the United States believed they ruled the entire world.

The warrant led Interpol to issue a Red Notice for him, asking its members to arrest him at their borders or if he passed through their airspace. Now he chose his destinations with care. Western Europe was out. He would land on the moon before he set foot in New York. But thanks to long-range jets and carefully edited flight manifests, he could still get to the Middle East, Africa, even South America.

But he spent most of his time on Russian soil, where the Americans couldn’t touch him. And Russia was more than comfortable for him. Along with an apartment in Moscow, he had an estate outside Volgograd with a shooting range, a stable, and what might have been the best-equipped gym anywhere in Russia. Buvchenko’s body was his only religion. He rose at dawn each day to lift weights and inject
himself with a steroid regimen that three doctors had helped him design. Nearing forty, he had biceps bigger than most men’s legs. His eyes were too small for his face and his neck too big, but he was handsome in a bruising way. He had no problem finding girlfriends, though he tired of them quickly.

As long as he kept himself too busy to think about the cruel pointlessness of existence, Buvchenko couldn’t complain. Life was good.

Still, he had to keep Papa happy. Papa Putin, and the men around him. Without the Kremlin, Buvchenko didn’t have a business. The Defense Ministry arranged the arms-transfer licenses he needed for open-market deals. For his
other
sales, the Foreign Ministry quietly orchestrated clearances so his cargo planes could fly to the Caspian Sea and then over Iran to the Gulf of Oman. From there, the jets could travel all the way to the east coast of Africa over open water.

Buvchenko paid well for the help. He gave to Papa, too, always through a bagman, never directly, of course. He never asked for anything in return. Simply by taking the money, Putin confirmed Buvchenko’s status as a friend. So Buvchenko didn’t mind the fact that his fortune would have been three times as big if not for the bribes. Better to be part of the pack. Among the hunters, not the hunted.

—

A
ND SO THE SUMMONS
the night before had come as a deeply unpleasant surprise. Buvchenko was eating dinner with his newest girlfriend when his phone buzzed, a series of zeros filling its screen. The FSB used that code when it wanted to be known and answered.

Buvchenko waved the woman out, reached for his phone.

“Mikhail.” The voice was slurred yet commanding, a particularly Russian combination. Like the speaker was too important to bother to speak clearly.

“Director Nemtsov?”

For five years, Oleg Nemtsov had been Director General of the FSB. He’d won the job the old-fashioned way, by destroying his rivals. One was now serving eighteen years in a Siberian prison for “anti-Russian activities.” Another had died in an avalanche in Switzerland.
An avalanche!
Polonium poisoning was child’s play compared to burying a target under a wall of snow in the Alps without hurting anyone else. Even the old KGB would have been impressed.

“I need to see you, Mikhail. Ten a.m. tomorrow. At Lubyanka.” The FSB’s headquarters, a stone fortress near the Kremlin.

Buvchenko rummaged his brain, wondering what he’d done. Nemtsov’s tone suggested trouble, but Buvchenko had no thoughts of trying to flee. Nothing would anger the wolves more.

—

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Buvchenko arrived at Lubyanka’s main entrance fifteen minutes early. He’d driven himself at dawn to the airport. He wore his best suit, handmade by an English tailor who visited Moscow to outfit wealthy Russian men who had what the tailor delicately called “border issues.”

In the lobby, guards passed Buvchenko through a metal detector, took his phone and his Rolex, told him to wait. An hour passed before three unsmiling minders appeared. They brought Buvchenko to a windowless room that stank of the sour sweat that came with fear. The only furniture consisted of three chairs and a bare metal table. Beneath the table, brown stains circled a drain covered by a rusty grate. Buvchenko asked no questions. The men wouldn’t have answered, anyway.

At least they hadn’t handcuffed him.

The deadbolt slammed as they left. Without watch or phone, Buvchenko couldn’t track how long he waited. Finally, the deadbolt slid
back and Nemtsov appeared. The FSB chief was in his early fifties, medium height and trim. He wore his wavy gray hair combed back from his forehead. His face was ordinary except for his eyes, which were blue and absolutely without feeling. He sniffed as he walked in, like Buvchenko was a rotting piece of meat. He was alone, no bodyguards or aides, the day’s first good sign. A thin manila folder was tucked under his arm.

“Director General—” Buvchenko stood.

“Sit.” Like he was talking to a dog. “Do you know why you’re here, Mikhail?”

“No, sir.”

“You are so stupid.” In fact, Nemtsov used the words
dolbo yeb
, a far more profane phrase. “A gorilla in a suit.” He took a photo out of the folder, slid it across the table.

Buvchenko’s turn to curse.

“John Wells.”

“You know him.”

“Three months ago, he came to me in Volgograd.”

“Why? Not the story you told us then, the real one.”

Buvchenko didn’t consider lying. Not to this man, not in this building. “He asked me if I knew where he could buy a nuclear weapon, or the material to make one.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“Because of Aaron Duberman. That Jew billionaire who owns casinos. He thought that Duberman was behind the uranium the United States found in Turkey. To be honest, I didn’t believe him. But a woman I had dealt with before, Israeli—”

“Her name, please—”

“She called herself Salome.”

“And how did you know this Salome?”

Buvchenko sensed Nemtsov knew the answer to every question he asked. “She’d bought weapons from me. I put her in touch with hackers. She paid well. This was years before.”

“Did you know her real name at the time? Where her money came from?”

“She wouldn’t tell me either one. I asked a few times and then dropped it.”

“This is how you do business.”

“I only met her on my terms, in Moscow or Volgograd. She wasn’t a threat to me or Russia. The weapons she wanted were small. She was obviously setting up a cell of some kind. To be honest, I thought they were high-end thieves—jewel thieves, maybe. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while and suddenly she called, brought up Wells.”