Twelve Days (3 page)

“Life lessons from you, Johnny? Definition of irony.”

“Boys. Already?” Shafer clapped his hands like a cheerleader trying to
distract a drunken crowd from a blowout. “Same team here. Same team. We have bigger fish to fry,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Shafer’s horrendous French broke the spell. “Did you just say
n’est-ce pas
?” Duto said.

“He did,” Wells said.

“You two ready to be grown-ups?”

They both nodded.

“Then let’s move on. Please tell us you have something CNN doesn’t, Vinny.”

The new CIA director, Scott Hebley, had tried to freeze Duto out. But Duto still had sources in the National Clandestine Service, the former Directorate of Operations.

“Video analysis says the missiles traveled at least five kilometers from launch, maybe six. Based on distance and speed, the betting is they’re late-model Russian SAMs. Possibly SA-24s. Which only came into service in 2004. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much untraceable. The Russians have sold them all over, including Libya. After Qaddafi went down in 2010, we had a report that both Iran and Hezbollah agents got their hands on a bunch.”

“And could easily have moved them to India,” Shafer said.

“The White House will see it that way for sure. At this point, I don’t think we have any way to know whether this is Duberman pushing buttons or the Iranians firing across the bow.”

“Anything on the ground?”

“The Indian security services have responded with their usual efficiency,” Duto said.

Meaning none. In 2008, terrorists had attacked hotels, a synagogue, and the central train station in Mumbai. The police didn’t respond in force for hours, allowing ten attackers to kill 166 people and wound hundreds more. “Good news is that the Bureau”—the FBI—“has a five-man forensic team permanently in Delhi. They’ve flown in, along with some of our guys. Bad news is that there are a bunch of slums around the
airport. Very dark at that hour, no security cameras. It’s just possible whoever did this was dumb enough to leave the firing tube on the ground. Otherwise.” Duto raised a mock missile to his shoulder. “Drive in, pow-pow, drive out.”

“Pow-pow,” Wells said.

Shafer grunted at him:
You made your point, now lay off.

“White House planning anything?”

“If they are, they’re not telling me. But at the moment, I don’t think so. They suspect Iran, but they’ve got no evidence. I think for us the best bet is to stay away from Mumbai, stick with the original plan.”

—

That morning, before the attack, the men had met at Duto’s office in Philadelphia and agreed that finding the real source of the Istanbul uranium was their only chance to stop the plot. They were caught in the world’s worst game of chicken-and-egg. With the President already having launched a drone strike against Iran, the CIA wasn’t about to chase new theories. Especially one that accused the President’s largest campaign donor of treason.

Wells, Shafer, and Duto would have to find their own proof. But they were stuck on their own. They couldn’t have NSA crack open the servers at Duberman’s casino company. They couldn’t go to the CIA for surveillance or Special Operations Group help.

But if they could prove that someone other than Iran had supplied the uranium, then the President and CIA would at least have to consider their theory about Duberman. And no matter how careful Duberman and his operatives had been, the agency and NSA could unravel what he’d done if they focused on him.

Unfortunately, at the moment they had no idea who might have supplied the uranium. They faced the same blank wall that had led the agency to conclude that Iran had been the source. And they were short on time to find out. The President had given his speech, with its
two-week deadline, almost three days earlier. They had less than twelve days left, if they were lucky.

Wells saw that Duto was right. Mumbai was a blind alley. Let the FBI and CIA work it. Their first plan was still their best option.

“Fine,” Wells said. “Zurich it is.” Zurich was home to Pierre Kowalski, an arms dealer, both friend and enemy to Wells over the years. Kowalski was dirty enough to know who might have been sitting on a stash of weapons-grade uranium. Wells could only hope he was clean enough to want to stop this war.

“You going tonight?”

“Through London.”

“He know you’re coming?”

“He knows.”

“He gonna help?”

“He said he’d see me. Not sure he knows anything.”
Must we do this?
Kowalski had asked when Wells called. To which Wells had said,
Yeah. We must.
And hung up before Kowalski could object.

“But he’ll
see
you? How sweet.”

Before Wells could swipe back, Shafer intervened. “You talk to Rudi, Vinny?” Ari Rudin, who had run the Mossad until two years before, when the Israeli Prime Minister forced him out.

“Yeah. He tried to tell me he was too sick to meet.”

“Sick?”

“He has lung cancer. Been keeping it quiet. Told him I’d come to Tel Aviv. I’m not expecting much. I fly out tonight. Twenty-two-hour round-trip for a ten-minute meeting.” Duberman’s wealth and his importance in Israel meant that the Mossad must have watched him over the years.

“Too bad you don’t have lung cancer, too,” Wells said. “You could make him meet you halfway.”

“What about you, Ellis?” Duto said. “You going to look for the leak?”

The final thread. Duberman’s team seemed to have a source inside Langley. Wells, Shafer, and Duto weren’t sure whether the leaker knew
the truth about the plot or had simply been fooled into giving up bits of information that Duberman could use. In any case, they saw the leaker as an opportunity as well as a threat. He was another potential avenue to Duberman. But they risked alerting Duberman to what they knew if they went after him.

“At this point, no. Ice is too thin. I’m just going to go into my office, keep my head down for a couple days. May try to talk to Ian Duffy. Mason’s station chief in Hong Kong. He’s back in D.C. now. Lobbying. Maybe he knows something about how Mason connected with Duberman.”

The move was a long shot at best, but all they had right now were long shots.

“So we go our separate ways,” Duto said. “John, in terms of”—Duto made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger—“I know you’ve had difficulties getting hooked up.” Without access to a diplomatic pouch, Wells had trouble getting weapons across borders. “Some places, I still have friends. Russia, for example.”

Wells wasn’t entirely sure why Duto was working so hard. Getting involved with this mess carried serious risk. Duto wouldn’t bother unless he smelled a bigger payoff.

Then Wells realized. “You think this is your ticket, don’t you?”

Duto must have expected the Senate seat would be his last stop. He had won his race as a conservative Democrat, a breed that rarely survived presidential primaries. But now he had a chance at the biggest prize of all. If he could prove that the President’s largest donor was trying to lure the United States into war, he could demand whatever he wanted from the White House. A promotion to Secretary of State or Defense. Done. The President’s endorsement in the next election? Absolutely.

Duto had used Wells and Shafer before. But never for stakes this high. And Wells had never seen the con so early in the game.

“La, la, la,”
Wells said. Arabic. No, no, no.

Duto nodded.
“Nam.”
Yes. “Unless you prefer the alternative.”

He tapped his wrist. “Come on, you can ride with me to Dulles.”

“I’ll get there myself.” Wells couldn’t bear sharing a car with this man.

“As you wish.” Duto walked out.

Wells and Shafer sat side by side on the edge of the bed.

“We can’t,” Wells said.

“Can’t what?”

“He’s not fit.” Wells wasn’t one hundred percent sure about much, but he was sure that Duto shouldn’t be President. Part of him wanted to flip on the television and watch ESPN for the next eleven days. Let Duto solve this, if he could.

“You want another war, John? Me neither. Take a minute so you don’t run into him in the elevator. Then go. You have a plane to catch.”

Wells had nothing left to say. He
went.

ELEVEN DAYS . . .

HONG KONG

T
he woman who called herself Salome had spent three hours running countersurveillance, MTR to taxi to Star Ferry and back to MTR, the Hong Kong subway. She reached the pickup spot, an alley behind a run-down Kowloon hotel, just as the gray Sprinter van arrived. She pulled open its cargo doors and stepped inside.

She was certain that she hadn’t been followed. Wells had no way of knowing where she was. But she was furious with herself for what had happened in Istanbul four days before. She couldn’t afford another mistake.

Now she squatted inside the van’s cargo compartment, holding a cheap white nylon bag. Gleaming white urinals and dull plastic pipe surrounded her. Anyone who happened to check the van’s license plate would find it was owned by HKMCA Plumbing PLC. The corporation was real enough, one of forty-five hundred subsidiaries of Duberman’s casino company. Thus the Sprinter had every reason to make its way through the tunnel that connected Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and fight through the island’s congested avenues until it reached the narrow
roads that led up the side of Victoria Peak. Its destination was Duberman’s $200 million mansion. The house was one of just a handful of private homes on the upper slopes of the Peak, the eighteen-hundred-foot mountain that provided a lush green backdrop to Hong Kong’s skyscrapers.

After fifty minutes, the van stopped. Through the wire mesh that split the cargo compartment from the front seats, Salome heard the driver lower his window and mumble in Chinese. A buzzer sounded. The van turned, rolled forward, stopped again. “Here,” the driver said. Salome pushed aside a sink and hopped out the back.

She found herself in the center of a five-car garage, its concrete floor spotless. Around her: a yellow Lamborghini Aventador, a red Ferrari 288 GTO, a white Rolls-Royce Phantom, and an orange Porsche Carrera GT, a twin of the car that had killed the actor Paul Walker
.
All spit-shined each week so that they gleamed under the halogen lights that hung from the ceiling.

The cars were flawless, worth millions of dollars. They were protected by a fire-suppression system that could fill the garage with a nontoxic foam in twenty-five seconds. Yet as
vehicles
they were basically useless. Duberman drove them once a year at most. They didn’t even have gasoline in their tanks. Gas was flammable and corrosive, and its impurities might leach out and damage their fuel lines since they were run so infrequently. They might as well have been gold bricks with rubber tires.

Still, they served a purpose. Duberman brought in his biggest 88 Gamma bettors to see them, along with his other collections in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Lose $2 million, you can sit in them. $5 million, start their engines. $10 million, maybe I’ll let you drive one.
The whales coveted these invitations, though Salome couldn’t imagine why. For the money they gambled away, they could have bought the cars themselves.

Duberman himself traveled in a four-ton gray Bentley sedan outfitted with armor plates and inch-thick windows that would stop anything up to a .50-caliber round. The security at his mansion was similarly
over-the-top. The property was hidden from the street by a reinforced concrete wall ten feet high and three feet thick, built to survive a five-ton truck bomb. A mantrap ringed the inside of the wall. Five feet wide and fifteen deep, the trap was hidden under the narrow green lawn that Duberman’s engineers had carved out of the mountain.

Duberman’s security hadn’t always been so oppressive. He’d added a lot of it since his wedding two years before. Salome supposed the additional protection made sense. His wife, Orli, was a celebrity in her own right, a Victoria’s Secret supermodel. And they had two infant children, obvious kidnap targets. But Salome wondered sometimes if Duberman had added the extra security to make himself feel better about the risk he’d taken funding their operation. Though he surely knew that all the mantraps in the world wouldn’t stop a Delta team.

The van pulled out. Salome was briefly alone with the cars. Then the house door opened to reveal Gideon Etra, Duberman’s personal bodyguard.

“Salome.”

Etra knew her real name. But both he and Duberman usually used her cover name, which she had borrowed from a famous biblical vixen. According to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Salome danced before her stepfather Herod so seductively that he offered her whatever she wanted. She demanded the head of John the Baptist. Despite his misgivings, Herod gave it to her.

For a dance.

She had picked the name as her legend almost ironically. She was no one’s courtesan. She could have been pretty, but she didn’t want to be. She didn’t wear makeup and left her brown hair in a boring shoulder-length cut. Though she had an athlete’s body, trim and fit, she hid it behind neutral-colored suit sets. She wore a wedding ring, too, discreet white gold, though she had never married. The clothes and ring were the female version of camouflage, her way of making herself forgettable.

Nonetheless, she had grown to love her chosen name. Lately, as her
plan moved ahead, she found herself wondering if it didn’t carry its own biblical magic. A foolish thought, but one she couldn’t shake.

“Gideon.” She reached for the Ferrari’s door. “Want to go for a ride?”

Etra blinked, then computed that she was joking and smiled. Humor wasn’t his strong suit. He was in his early fifties, with close-cropped gray hair, an old-school bodyguard. He could have passed for one of Duberman’s executives. He wore tailored gray suits and carried a Sig Sauer P238, an undercover officer’s weapon meant for close-range use, easily hidden but short on stopping power.

Nonetheless, underestimating Etra was a mistake. His nickname was Chai-Chai,
though only Duberman used it. Etra had earned it as a sniper for the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces. The name was more than slightly ironic. In Hebrew,
chai
had two meanings. Eighteen, and life. Etra had finished Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon with thirty-six confirmed kills, more than any other IDF soldier.

“Any problems?”

“The plumbing and I had a fine time.”

“That means no?”

“Not that I could see.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Phones. Burners. For your boss. And a picture. For you.”

—

She tossed him the bag. He unzipped it, pulled out a photo.

“Who’s this?”

“His name’s John Wells.” She had taken it in Istanbul. The only smart decision she’d made about Wells. “He’s not a friend.”

“Can I share this with my team? Or is it just for me?”

“They can see it, but don’t tell them who he is.”

He opened the house door, and she followed him inside.

The house had been cantilevered over the mountainside, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the city. This view always awed
Salome. Enormous skyscrapers soared from Hong Kong Island and the mainland, looming over a forest of smaller towers. Hovercrafts, ferries, fishing boats, and even a few antique Chinese junks churned across the roiling gray waters of Victoria Harbor. Cars, trucks, and motorcycles fought for space on the causeways. When the sun set, the city’s neon would glow in the dark and the view would be even more spectacular.

“Boss’s running late. Be here in a few minutes,” Etra said.

“Few meaning five? Or an hour?”

Etra didn’t answer. He treated even basic questions about Duberman as state secrets.

“You’re so helpful, Gideon.”

“Thank you.”

She wasn’t sure if he knew she was mocking him. She nodded at the city below. “You know, this is what we’re trying to protect.”

Out of necessity, a dozen mid-level functionaries at 88 Gamma had helped support Salome’s operation. They were the lawyers who created shell companies that she used for safe houses and vehicles. The accountants who funneled money to the accounts that paid her mercenaries and hackers. Even the pilots who shuttled her from country to country.

But none had any idea what she was doing. She and Duberman had chosen employees whose evaluations showed that they followed orders unquestioningly. Inside 88 Gamma, Salome was known as an independent consultant who worked with the company on development projects in countries where it couldn’t advertise its presence.

But she and Etra could speak honestly. He had known what they were doing as soon as Duberman agreed to fund her plans. The men spent nearly every hour together. And Salome didn’t worry about Etra’s loyalty. A decade before, Duberman had spent two million dollars on an experimental leukemia treatment for Etra’s son Tal, a prototype gene therapy. The treatment, which no insurer would cover, saved the boy’s life.

“Hong Kong is what we’re trying to protect?” Etra parroted back to her. “Not too many Jews here.”

Salome wondered if she should explain. Of course, a city of eight million Chinese wouldn’t be at the top of the Iranian hit list. But like Tel Aviv and New York, Hong Kong stood as a monument to modern civilization. Iran’s mullahs pretended that they hated Israel and the United States. Salome knew better. They hated freedom in all its forms. Religious, economic, sexual. They hated women. They hated
success.
They couldn’t compete, so they threatened to lash out with the most destructive tools they could find. A few kilograms of dull yellow metal would tear a hole in this city, kill hundreds of thousands of people. Worst of all, the Iranians could never have invented a nuclear bomb on their own. But they had no shame about stealing the West’s discoveries and using them against their creators.

“It’s not just us. They hate all this.”

“I don’t care who else they hate. Or who else they love. They hate me, that’s enough for me.”

Etra’s phone buzzed with a text message.

“He says fifteen minutes.”

“But he’s here, right? In the house? You’re here, he’s here.”

“I guess.”

Not exactly a definitive answer. “And what’s keeping him? Casino business?” Of course, Duberman wouldn’t poke his head out and tell her himself. Billionaires rarely explained. And never apologized.

A shrug.

“Gideon. You probably know him as well as anyone.”

“Maybe.”

“Ever met his friends?”

“Maybe.”

“I mean, his real friends. People he grew up with.”

Etra shook his head as if he couldn’t believe she’d had the audacity to ask the question. And walked out holding her bag of phones, leaving Salome to consider what she knew about her boss.

—

Duberman’s parents had arrived in the United States in 1946 and settled in Atlanta. After escaping the Holocaust, they dreamed no great American dreams. Or just one: to keep their heads down and survive. Nathan managed a rent-to-own store in Oak Knoll, a poor neighborhood southeast of downtown. Gisa taught kindergarten.

After five years, they had scrimped enough money for a down payment on a fourteen-hundred-square-foot house in the city’s Midtown District. They quickly had three sons. Aaron was the youngest and by far the most ambitious. He attended the University of Georgia on a wrestling scholarship, majored in business, moved to Las Vegas to work for Hilton.

I was tired of the South,
he’d told
Fortune
for a cover profile a decade before.
It had all this history that didn’t have anything to do with me. I liked Vegas from the minute I saw it. Empty space, blue sky. It seemed like anything was possible.
He rose quickly at Hilton, but he didn’t stay.
When you work for a company that has somebody else’s name on the door, you know there’s a limit to how high you can get.
At the tender age of twenty-six, he and two other junior Hilton executives struck out, buying a scrubby hotel-casino in Reno called The Sizzling Saloon.

Duberman had never fully explained how he came up with the eight hundred thousand dollars for his one-third share, though he hinted at the answer in
Fortune
.
I had friends. The kinds of friends that the Nevada Gaming Commission looked down on. But they were always decent to me. If I paid on time. Besides, what’s the casino business without a little gamble?
So he began his march toward fortune.

He didn’t get far at first. The Sizzling Saloon’s blackjack tables were scorched with cigarette holes, its waitresses with stretch marks. After three years, his partners tired of the grind. They wanted to sell to the casino next door. Duberman refused. He bought them out instead.

Now I owned the place, but my
friends owned me.
Duberman had a streak of Donald Trump in him, a natural talent for self-promotion. He dropped Sizzling from the casino’s name, calling it simply The Saloon:
Where
the West Comes to Play.
He promised to take any bet. He put up billboards around Reno showing himself wearing a ten-gallon hat and holding a revolver in each hand.
Can You Out-Gun The Saloon-Keeper? Take Yer Best Shot!

The fact that the Saloon-Keeper was a Jew from Atlanta was part of the joke. And Reno laughed. Within three years, the casino was the city’s most profitable. Duberman branched out to Las Vegas, opening two more Saloons. They were miles from the Strip and catered to locals. They, too, were hits. He bought out his silent partners.
Finally, I had the money to say good-bye to my old friends. Not cheap, but money well spent.
He expanded to Iowa and Mississippi and took Saloon Gaming Inc. public. At thirty-seven, his fortune topped $100 million.

Then Saloon started to lose ground. Its casinos couldn’t compete with the eye-catching attractions that its bigger competitors offered. Its Western theme seemed dated and cheesy. Still, its customers were loyal. Duberman could have milked them for years. Instead, he changed Saloon’s name to 88 Gamma. He mortgaged his fortune to redesign his casinos with a sci-fi theme. He installed oxygen bars, shark tanks, brushed aluminum tables, huge flat-panel screens dangling above the casino floor. He wanted to attract young Asians, who were often heavy gamblers. He succeeded wildly. By 2001, he was a billionaire.

Then Duberman made his biggest bet yet, a $2 billion casino in Macao. The only other casino mogul to invest in Macao at the time was Sheldon Adelson, who like Duberman was an outsider in the gambling industry. MGM and other, more established companies avoided the territory. It had a reputation as a lawless place dominated by Chinese gangs called triads
.
But Adelson and Duberman saw opportunity.
The big companies were afraid of the crime, the triads, the Chinese government,
Duberman
told
Fortune.
They were doing risk analysis, hiring consultants, blah blah blah. Me, I’m a simple guy. I didn’t get an MBA from Harvard. I had a simple theory. I said, wait a minute, you’re letting me build a casino across the border from a billion people who love gambling more than breathing? And who can’t do it legally anywhere else? Uhh, sounds okay to me.