The Wolves (8 page)

A doorman hustled over.

“Checking in, sir?”

“Anything’s possible.” Wells stepped out, snapped the Toyota’s door shut. Henry rolled away, and Wells trotted for the hotel. He thought about waiting in the lobby, confronting his pursuers. But he had no idea if they were holding. Plus he sensed that they, whoever they were,
wanted
a public scene. In lieu of attacking him directly, maybe they hoped to involve the police, put him on a flight back to the
United States before he’d even unpacked, a cheap but effective way of keeping him from Duberman.

The lobby was as lavish as the cars outside. Wells hustled past the overstuffed couches where the hotel served high tea each afternoon and turned left into the arcade. He was trotting now, pants rubbing against his legs. This new Hugo Boss suit fit a little too well.

At the back exit, Wells checked over his shoulder. Two men were following him, one white, one Chinese, both with a lean, hungry, clipped look, foxhounds on two legs. They wore unbuttoned sport coats, loose enough to hide pistols. They ran toward Wells as he pushed his way out.

The entrance for the Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station was almost directly across Middle Road. Wells dodged a delivery van, hurtled down the escalator two steps at a time. He found himself at the intersection of brightly lit tunnels that stretched east, west, and north. Overhead signs indicated that the station’s gates and platforms lay north. Wells ran that way, weaving through backpack-wearing students. He checked over his shoulder. His pursuers were still about a hundred feet back, and as far as he could tell their hands were empty.

As he neared the entrance gates, the passageway widened into a subterranean village, complete with coffee shops, fast-food restaurants, even clothing stores. The train platforms were another level down. Wells decided not to go for them. Buying a ticket would take too long, and he didn’t want to risk arrest by jumping the gates. He felt more and more that his pursuers wanted him to make just that kind of mistake. Instead he turned right, down another long tunnel, this one even more crowded than the first. A teenager who had her nose in her phone nearly slammed into him, but he spun past her like a running back dodging a tackler and stayed upright.

After several hundred feet, the tunnel intersected at a sharp left
with a narrower passageway. Overhead signs indicated that the new tunnel led to three exits. Wells took it. At the least he’d force his pursuers to guess which exit he’d taken. He ran up a set of stairs and found himself on a narrow pedestrian street crowded with restaurants and shops. He was sweating now, his face flushed, a spectacle to the Chinese around him.

Overhead, the street followed the same diagonal as the passageway underneath. Wells turned and doubled back, looking for a taxi. At Mody Road, he saw one. “Stop!” The driver looked at Wells, hesitated, pulled over. Before the guy could change his mind, Wells wrenched open the door and dove inside.

“Happy Valley racetrack.” Wells had memorized twenty or so of the city’s big landmarks so that he wouldn’t have to waver in these moments. Hong Kong had two big tracks, Sha Tin on the mainland side and Happy Valley on the island. The driver looked at him, but the taxi didn’t move.

“No race today.”

Come on.
Wells saw one of his pursuers, the white guy, come out of the exit, scan the street. The guy saw the cab and ran for it.

Wells pulled a $500 HK note from his suit pocket. “Go. Please.”

The cab eased into traffic. Wells wondered if his pursuer would reach under his coat and start blasting, but instead he only grinned at Wells and pointed to his eyes.
Eye C U . . .
Wells didn’t know what to make of the seemingly cavalier attitude. Hard to imagine Duberman’s guys acting that way. But who else could they be?

—

H
APPY
V
ALLEY WAS CLOSED
, as the cabbie had warned. Wells paid him off and walked down to the Causeway Bay MTR stop, mopping the sweat from his face. After ninety minutes shuffling from train to train,
simple countersurveillance, he found himself back in Kowloon’s Mong Kok district. In a no-name electronics store Wells bought four low-end phones, Chinese brands with unfamiliar names, and a dozen SIM cards. He wondered if he should call Henry, but he couldn’t take the chance that his pursuers had gotten the cab’s plate and tracked him down. Instead he texted Garry Wright, the station chief. An answer came back in seconds. Wright had obviously been waiting.
Running late?

Traffic problems,
Wells wrote.
All clear now.

U sure?

Yes.

A longer pause this time. Wells guessed that Wright was considering backing out. Then:
186 Hong Ling Street, #605. 1600.
They had arranged to use a simple code for their first meet. The street address would have an extra 1 in front, the room number would be one floor higher than the real room, the meeting time one hour later. So Wright wanted to meet in suite 505 of 86 Hong Ling at 1500, 3 p.m.

Forty-five minutes from now. Wells found a local map at a 7-Eleven. The stores were weirdly ubiquitous here. Hong Ling was only a few blocks away. Apparently, Wright liked Mong Kok for meetings, too.

—

T
HE BUILDING
was blocky and concrete and stuffed with massage parlors. Wells ignored the elevator and trudged up the fire stairs, which smelled faintly sweet, like they’d been sprayed months before with cheap perfume. The stairs and the fifth-floor hallway were empty. A pinhole camera was mounted above the door to 505, and its lock snapped open before Wells knocked.

Inside, Wells found himself in an apartment smaller than a one-car garage. A kitchenette with a hot plate and a pint-sized fridge occupied the wall to his right. The only window stared into a concrete airshaft.
The ceiling fan dangled low enough to give Wells a haircut. Wright sat on a neon yellow couch that belonged in a home for the blind. A pistol sat on the table in front of him, a laptop beside it.

“Clean?”

“Yeah.”

“Water in the fridge. Look like you could use it.”

Wells grabbed a bottle of water and sat. Wright hadn’t gotten the job on his looks. He was chubby and unhandsome. His eyes were pouchy, half-masted, his skin sallow, vaguely jaundiced. As if the years he’d spent in East Asia had seeped into his blood. He reminded Wells of Shafer, and Wells liked him straightaway.

Though he wasn’t sure the feeling was mutual.

“Welcome to my happy home,” Wright said.

“Trying to win a Guinness competition for World’s Crappiest Safe House?”

“I wanted a place I could pay for out of petty cash. Only me and my DS”—director of security—“know it exists. Unless you messed it up. Did you?”

“I picked up a tail at the airport. Were they yours?”

“You wouldn’t have seen ours.”

“These guys wanted me to see them.”

“Round or slant?”

Wells needed a moment to understand.
Eyes.

“One each.”

Wright grunted in surprise. “Can’t have been the Chinese, then. They don’t trust white folk enough to team up. And you think they meant you GBH?” Grievous bodily harm.

“Not sure. They had a chance. It would have been messy and public, but it was there. They didn’t take it.”

“Get the plate? We have access to the Hong Kong database and a lot of China, too.”

Wells shook his head. “Could Duberman have an in at the airport?”

“The Macao casinos are connected at the top hotels here. If big players come to Hong Kong, they want to know. But I’ve never heard they have an in at HKIA. Maybe his guys leaned hard on somebody at an immigration counter.”

But Wright sounded doubtful, and the theory seemed like a long shot to Wells, too.

“You know him well.”

“Yes and no. After Gamma took off, this was about eight or nine years ago, we started paying attention. He bought the mansion seven years ago. Wanted something that would really impress the whales. You know much about gambling in Macao?”

“Just that it’s huge.”

“Correct. Hardly existed before 2001, a couple crummy casinos in downtown Macao. Now it’s way bigger than Vegas. The biggest players come from the mainland. Guys betting a hundred thousand dollars a hand on baccarat. Or more. But they want a lot of hand-holding. One reason that Duberman’s so big here is that he gives it. Even before he moved in this year, he was here glad-handing these guys two or three times a year.”

“They like him?”

“Why wouldn’t they? He’s charming, hangs around with models, likes bling the way they do. Thing about China is that it’s nouveau riche in a way you can hardly imagine. Some of the older guys remember the famines of the sixties. Imagine being afraid you’d starve to death when you were a kid, now you have billions of dollars.”

“Whiplash.”

“Yes. Plus they know they might lose it if they get sideways with whoever’s in power. Upshot is they have this insane attitude toward money.”

“They sound like Russians.”

“Even richer. They literally come to an important meeting with a shopping bag full of Rolexes, one for everyone. Which sounds like a bribe, and it is, but it’s something else, too.”

“And Duberman played along.”

“I don’t know if he liked it, but he put up with it. Spent time with them. Which isn’t easy, because these guys are seriously insecure. The biggest guys, you can’t even put them in the same room with each other, they get pissy if they don’t think they have your full attention. Anyway, the reason I remember when he bought the mansion is that three months later, the COS told me to put together a file, go to him, ask for his help.”

“As in spying on his customers?”

“A lot of these guys are high-ranking CCP”—Chinese Communist Party—“and most of the rest are in tight. They have to be. I set a meet with Duberman, low-key approach, the pitch was
We have dirt on the guys at your tables, you have dirt on the guys at your tables, maybe we should trade dirt, good for you, help you with credit risks, good for us, too.
”

“And?”

“Pfft. Shot down before we made it back to the office. Our customer relationships are sacrosanct, the lifeblood of our business, blah blah blah . . .”

“The usual.”

“Worse. Langley actually reamed us out, had we followed the proper rules involved in approaching U.S. nationals, blah, blah. We got the message. He was way involved in politics back home, he didn’t want us messing up his business, we better stay away. We didn’t stop
watching him entirely, he was too important, but we laid off. And we never went back to him.”

“Then, three months ago, he moves here.”

“Sure. Right after we decide not to invade Iran. Then the DCI gets fired and the President stops just short of bending over for Vinny Duto on national television. Now you show up and my new boss tells me to extend you every courtesy.” Wright gave a smile that emphasized the lumpiness of his face. “I have all that right? That fact pattern?”

“I’d say you understand completely.”

“Tell me something, then. Just us chickens. If Duberman did what I think he did, why are we not handling this officially? Why Muslim John?”

Muslim John? Wells let it slide. “Better ask the White House.”

“We’re
protecting
this guy? After he tried to jam us into a war.”

“Looks that way.”

“Were Hebley and the President working with him?”

Wells couldn’t let that rumor spread, as much as he wanted to. “About a ninety-nine-point-nine-percent chance he duped them, too.”

“Now POTUS thinks it’s too messy to unwind.”

“He claims he’ll take care of it. In time.”

“But you’re tired of waiting.”

“I’m more of a self-starter.”

Wright snorted, a strange sound from his chubby little body.

“So I hear. Sounds like you have yourself a legitimate gripe, though.”

Glad you agree.
“What about Duberman’s security?”

“So, in Macao, the casino has two heads of security. One is a former FBI agent from San Francisco. He’s there to look good for Americans who come along chasing violations of the FCPA”—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—“or whatever.”

“Is he clean?”

“Unclear. We’ve heard he’s making a couple million a year.” Giving him a couple million reasons not to ask questions. “Then there’s a local, a guy they hired away from the Macao police. Not very nice. I wouldn’t go over there unless you think you can get in and out without them seeing. Macao looks bright and shiny, but there are alligators in the basements. Much more than here.”

“And who runs his security at the mansion?”

“Four years ago, he brought in an SAS guy”—the Special Air Service, the British equivalent of the Deltas.

“Don’t suppose you know his name?”

“Figured you might ask, so I looked it up. William Roberts. But from what I can tell, he’s mainly a caretaker.”

“Yeah, the Mossad guys run the show.”

“Anyway, that’s about all I have. Before you ask, we haven’t tried to get inside the mansion or recruit any of his guys. Nothing that needs verification.”

Overseas stations had to ask Langley for formal approval—what the agency called plan verification—before targeting any American citizen for anything more than surveillance.

“Mainly drones, then?”

“Yeah. Not Predators, nothing like that. No way we can run those in this airspace. Souped-up versions of little commercial guys, just about this big”—Wright held his arms about three feet apart—“helicopter style, quad rotors. They don’t have great optics, so they have to stay close. No weapons, either. But we like ’em because they have no markings, no way to prove they’re ours. Even so, we’ve already lost two. Either he or the Chinese has some system that’s frying their guts.”

“But you’ve clocked him going to and from Macao.”

“Yeah, with passengers every time. I gave the headlines to Vinny, but the details are on there.” Wright nudged the laptop with his toe.
“Have at it.” Wright picked up the pistol, a snug 9-millimeter that would fit nicely in an inside waist holster, handed it to Wells. “Yours to keep. Spare magazines and a holster in the safe behind the fridge. Ka-Bar and a boot knife, too, if your tastes run that way. If you need something bigger, I can get it, leave it here.” He fished a key from his pocket, tossed it to Wells. “No alarm or anything, just the door.”