Twelve Days (36 page)

“Pretty much. Loop around the block, once, see what we can see. If the houses are as close as they look on the map, maybe we try to come in from the side.”

“What about me?” Jacob said.

“You’re the wheelman. You know what that means?”

Jacob shook his head.

“Means we get Rand out, throw him in the back of the car, and you drive us to the airport.”

“You want me to stay in the car?”

“That’s what the wheelman does.”

“You think I can’t handle a gun? Covered you easy enough.”

“Let’s talk about it after we see the place.”

—

After the tunnel, the N1 became a true divided highway, two lanes each side. Duto sluiced the Audi through the morning commuter traffic. Twenty-five minutes later, they reached Durban Road, which led into Bellville’s commercial center, ten- and fifteen-story office towers.

South on Durban, east on another arterial, then south again on the M10, Robert Sobukwe Road, the big boulevard that connected Bellville to the airport. On the right, west, they passed a massive train yard. They were nearly on top of the Mercedes now, less than a kilometer away. It was parked in the residential neighborhood just east of Sobukwe.

“Left here.”

Duto turned, and they were in Bellville Lot 3, not a slum but certainly
scrappier than the city center to the north. The houses sprouted clotheslines, the cars rust. The neighborhood looked to be mainly
coloured,
the term South Africans used for people of mixed race. The Audi stuck out. The car’s conspicuousness wouldn’t matter before the attack, but it might afterward, when the neighbors made emergency calls. Wells wondered if they ought to park around the corner, but then they would have to drag Witwans from the house to the car. Street kidnappings were rarely a good idea.

“Right here,” Wells said, as they reached Industry Road, which marked the district’s eastern edge. The neighborhood had been laid out in an imperfect grid. Its east–west streets stacked neatly, but the north–south roads started and stopped. The GPS showed the Mercedes parked on one of the north–south stubs, Octovale Street between Kosmos and Lily Roads.

“You know where we’re going?”

Even with time desperately short, Wells wanted to spin through the neighborhood’s main streets once. They might see a parked police cruiser, or road construction that blocked an escape route. “Just drive. Right here—”

“On Mimosa?
Mimosa?
” Mimosa marked the south end of Octovale.

“Calm yourself, Vinny.” Though Wells did like the jumble of names. He couldn’t imagine a neighborhood back home having a similarly random set—American developers were too careful.

“Here. Right. Slow.”

If the tracker was correct, then they would see the Mercedes almost two short blocks up, on the right side. “We’re only going to take one pass, so go easy—”

“You think you’re the only one who’s ever been in the field?”

Wells focused on the street. He liked what he saw. American building codes wouldn’t allow houses built as closely as these. In some cases, their eaves almost overlapped. If Witwans was inside one like that, Wells could jump roof to roof and break in from the back while Duto attacked from the front.

Duto touched his brakes as they rolled through the intersection of Octovale and Lily. The GPS showed the Mercedes just a few houses ahead. Duto eased the Audi up the street at twenty miles an hour. And—

“There,” Jacob said. The car was parked nose-out for an easy getaway, in the gated driveway of a squat yellow house. Eighty-four Octovale. The house nearly touched its neighbor to the right, but it was a relative fortress, with gated front windows, high walls on both sides, and a five-foot-tall fence in front of a short front yard. Thick white curtains blocked Wells from seeing who might be inside, but he glimpsed lights.

Then the house was behind them. Duto turned left on Kosmos, and Wells considered what he’d seen. Despite the possible roof access, the setup wasn’t ideal. Duto would have no way to reach the front door easily. The back door was sure to be locked, the back windows gated. The pack that Duto had brought from Virginia included Wells’s auto lock picker, a tool that had saved him before. Even so, Frankel would hear him enter.

“Fortress Octovale,” Duto said.

“Maybe.” Wells looked back at Jacob. “You said you wanted in. That still true?”

Jacob nodded.

“Sure about this,” Duto muttered.

Wells ignored him. “You’re going to distract them. You go next door, the house to the left, one up from Rand.”

“Over the wall?” A four-foot-high concrete wall separated that house from the street.

“That Ford is parked right in front. You step over the wall, no problem.”

“Then what?”

“Then you knock on the door, hammer it. You yell,
I know you’re in there, come out.
Not in English. In Afrikaans. You speak Afrikaans?”

“No problem. But Rand
next
door—”

“We want to make them wonder what’s going on. Get them looking
the wrong way, toward you, while I’m coming from the other side. If we’re lucky, Rand will recognize your voice and stick his head out the front door. He won’t be able to see you because of the wall, but he’ll wonder why you’re there. He’ll know what you’re saying, but Amos won’t. If we’re
really
lucky, Amos’ll come out himself and make himself a target.”

“Don’t know who’s inside that house next door, what biscuit he got.”

“You don’t want to, you don’t have to. In or out?”

Asked that bluntly, the question could only have one answer.

“In.”

—

Duto made a right, north, driving slowly away from the house. “And while Jacob is yelling nonsense and hoping he doesn’t get shot, what about you?”

“I’m going to the house on the other side, one down. With the carport on the right side. I’ll pull myself up that, run across the roof—”

“They might have a biscuit, too,” Duto said. “Even a gat.”

“Thank you for that, Vinny. I didn’t see any cars, so I’m guessing whoever lives there is at work. Even if they’re home, by the time they figure out what’s going on, I should be on top of Witwans’s house.”

“Where am I?”

“The way the timing works, Jacob and I will get out of the car at Mimosa and Octovale”—the intersection almost two blocks south of the house. “We’ll walk up Octovale to Lily”—one block up—“while you circle around up to the top of the street, the Kosmos intersection. When we see you there, Jacob goes ahead of me, runs up, jumps the fence at the house on the left. Just about the time he starts yelling, I’ll be scaling the carport. It shouldn’t take me more than a few seconds to get across. By then, Vinny, you’ll have swung the Audi onto Octovale to give yourself a view of the front door of Rand’s house. If it opens and anyone comes out, you’ll honk to let me know. If it’s Amos, I’ll pop him from
the roof and jump down. It’s only one story. Then I’ll grab Witwans from the house and throw him in the Audi. If Witwans comes out instead, I’ll have to decide whether to grab him right away or go in the back door. And if nobody comes out, I’m going in the back for sure.”

“What do I do then?” Jacob said.

“No matter what, you go back to the car after two minutes.”

“Let me make sure I have this right,” Duto said. “This all hinges on whether Amos opens the front door when Jacob starts yelling? What if he doesn’t? You think you’re going to get across the roof of a one-story house and then in the back door without him hearing?”

“I think Amos, who hasn’t slept all night, is all of a sudden going to have to figure out what’s going on when the neighbors start yelling and the dogs start barking. His first thought is not going to be that someone’s on the roof coming for him. If he goes outside, I can blow off his head, and if he doesn’t, I’ll just creep along the house while he’s distracted and go through the back.” Wells knew that he was trying to convince himself as much as Duto.
A plan so crazy it just might work.

“Give me best case, John.”

“Best case, Jacob shouts for a minute, Amos comes out, I pop him with one shot. It takes me thirty seconds to get in the house and grab Rand, another thirty to get him to the car. That’s two minutes and one shot and we’re gone. The cops won’t even be close. By the time the first car responds, we’re at the airport. Worst case, nobody opens the door after a couple minutes and I have to go in the back and it takes a little longer.”

“Worst case, you and Rand both get killed.”

“That would be worse. You have anything better? I’m open to suggestions.”

Duto pulled over. They sat for two long minutes as cars rolled by. In the distance a train whistled, but inside the Audi no one spoke.

“SOG team would be nice,” Duto said. “Real surveillance. A magical unicorn. How did I get myself into this?”

“You know exactly.”

“True. And I still can’t figure it. If you get caught in there, what then? I grab the Mossberg and come over the fence? Not entirely senatorial. But I guess I burned that bridge a while ago.”

Duto folded his hands across his chest as the Audi’s clock counted off another two minutes. Wells wished Shafer were here. He’d understand the absurdity of the situation better than anyone.
America’s fate depends on three men in Bellville, South Africa. Two can’t stand each other. The third is a civilian they met the night before. Will they kidnap the old racist drunk in time to fly him to D.C.? Or get killed trying?

But long experience had taught Wells that too much second-guessing at these moments was not just pointless but dangerous. Climbing a carport to jump a roof to kidnap Witwans might seem bizarre, but they had no better option, and no time to find one. The choices they had made over the last few weeks had led them here, and without a time machine those choices couldn’t be undone.

Wells had rock climbed a few times in his teens and twenties. The best climbers weren’t necessarily the strongest, the most agile, or even the bravest, though those qualities helped. They were the ones who resisted the temptation to look down, who spidered up the face, always recognizing where they were and looking for the best solution, and with luck, the best after that.

“Time’s a-wasting,” Wells said.

Duto put the car in gear. “What a cluster.”

“So it’s a go?”

“Like our friend in Tel Aviv would say, shuffle up and deal.”

BELLVILLE

S
alome was sitting in a wrinkled leather chair in the living room, watching the deadline clock tick away on CNN International:
21:35:42 . . . 21:35:41 . . .
when the party started. Fists banging metal, a man screaming in a language Salome guessed was Afrikaans. He seemed to be at the next house over, on the other side of the wall to the north. Seconds later, a woman began yelling back.

Maybe screaming fights were common in this neighborhood. And Frankel had been sure Wells couldn’t have tracked him here. But in moments like these, she didn’t believe in coincidence. She drew the curtain a few centimeters, peeked into the yard and the street beyond. Something was different, though she couldn’t figure what.

“Go look,” she said to Binyamin.

“Take the gun?”

“Yeah.”

He grabbed the shotgun and stepped out as a dog on the other side of the house added its howl to the chorus. Salome looked at Frankel, still sleeping on the couch. “Amos!”

A car honked, once, long and loud. She realized what had bothered
her outside. The car. She tugged aside the curtain to double-check. A white Audi was parked across the street, diagonally north, twenty or twenty-five meters away. She couldn’t see if it was running or anyone was inside, but she was sure it hadn’t been parked there when she came to the house.

“What’s happening?” Frankel said behind her.

“I think Wells. Go check Rand for a phone.”

“I already did—”

She flapped her hand,
Don’t argue, just do it.

Outside, Binyamin stepped toward the people yelling next door.

“This wall. I can’t see anything—”

—

When Duto honked, Wells crept to the front of the roof.
Eureka.
The play had worked.

Only, it hadn’t. The man in the yard wasn’t Frankel. Even from the back, Wells knew. He’d seen Frankel in that Volgograd hotel room. This guy was much taller and broader.

Maybe Frankel had found the tracker and shucked the Mercedes overnight. He and Rand were a thousand miles away, and Wells was about to cut down a sucker paid by Frankel to drive the Mercedes here.

Or else Frankel had brought in reinforcements somehow. In that case, Wells was about to start a gunfight without knowing how many guys he faced. Either choice was bad, but the first was worse. Wells couldn’t shoot an innocent man. And just because the guy had a shotgun didn’t prove he worked for Duberman. The man stepped close to the wall and the Mercedes, yelled back to the house—

In
Hebrew
.

Good. At least Wells didn’t have to worry he was shooting a civilian. He pulled the Glock. The tile on the roof was cheap and cracked and didn’t offer great footing. But the roof itself was only slightly sloped and
Wells was not even twenty-five feet away from the guy. An easy shot. The man never looked back. Never even turned his head.

Wells sighted, wasted a second wondering if his target knew what was really happening here. Probably not. Probably he’d taken a bodyguard job for the pay, been told the night before to get on a plane.
Excellent benefits. Must be willing to travel on short notice.
An employee. Nothing more. Maybe he would have thrown down his shotgun and surrendered if Wells gave him the choice. Maybe not. The answer didn’t matter. Wells had no choice himself.

Wells squeezed the trigger twice. He aimed center mass, missed a few inches high. The back of the guard’s head exploded in a slaughterhouse spray of blood and bone and brain. He crumpled face-first onto the scrubby lawn next to the Mercedes, dead before he knew what death was. Rudi would have been jealous.

From the room below, a woman yelled, “Binyamin!” Wells knew that voice. Salome. She must have flown directly from Jordan. So she and Amos were inside. How many others? Only the Mercedes was in the driveway, and no other cars were parked in front. They had taken a cab here. Which meant two or three people. Unless they’d taken more than one cab.

Wells fired two shots into the air, hoping that Duto would understand his message:
That wasn’t Frankel and this isn’t over.
Now he had to move. Where?

—

Two shots, then two more. From the roof. Of course Wells was on the roof. He was a vulture. A vampire. Salome looked out. Binyamin lay in the grass not ten meters away, his head a cracked egg. She lifted her pistol, hoping Wells would jump down.

“Wells!”

No answer. No noise at all.

“Wells! Don’t be a woman! Quit hiding!”

Still nothing. Was he creeping around up there? Or keeping still, hoping she would come out? She wondered how far the nearest police station was, how many minutes they had. The cops would take everyone into custody. They would need to sort out this strange house where Americans and Israelis were slaughtering each other. When they realized Witwans was a South African citizen, they would separate him and question him alone. Salome couldn’t imagine what he would say. She’d peeked in on him a few minutes before. He’d deteriorated badly since she’d last seen him. The broken blood vessels in his nose had advanced to his cheeks. Even in sleep he smelled sweet, sickly, his liver fighting a losing battle against the poison he poured down his throat.

And what if Duto was here? An American senator and the former CIA director. The police would listen to his story, no matter how bizarre it sounded. Salome’s mere presence here would help to confirm his accusation. How could she explain her sudden trip to South Africa, or how she’d ended up in this house with the former director of the South African nuclear program?

No, she and Witwans had to disappear. As long as they could escape this neighborhood and reach the highway, they should be safe. South Africa was huge, and she had plenty of cash. They could take the N1 all the way to Johannesburg, or head along the coast to Port Elizabeth. The police would have no way to connect them to this house. They’d been here only a couple of hours. No one knew who they were.

But they couldn’t go anywhere until they put a stake in the vampire on the roof.

Frankel ran back into the living room, his pistol drawn. “What happened?”

“Wells shot Binyamin. From the roof.” Luckily, they could speak openly in Hebrew. “Stay with him in case Wells tries to break into his room. Now.”

“What’s happening?” Gil, the second guard, yelled from the kitchen, at the back of the house.

“Guard the back door. Wells is on the roof.”

“How’s that?”

“Just watch it.”

She imagined how Wells might attack. The house was only about fourteen meters wide, eight across. Forty-five feet by twenty-five. Its layout was simple. In front, the living room spanned the width of the building. In back, the kitchen did the same. A center hallway connected the two rooms. The main bedroom ran along the right side of the hallway. A smaller bedroom and a bathroom shared the left. Witwans had naturally grabbed the big bedroom. Even in a kidnapped alcoholic haze, he acted the king.

The shouting next door stopped. In the silence, Salome listened for Wells. Nothing. Yet she was sure he hadn’t jumped down. The noise would have been obvious. She wondered why he hadn’t already tried to come at them. He’d just blown a man’s head off, so he couldn’t be planning to stick around for the cops. But if he figured that they would run, he might wait on the roof for the chance to pick them off.

On the flatscreen, CNN’s countdown clock ticked away.
21:34:51
 . . .
21:34:50 . . .
But she and Wells had their own countdown. She would give Wells exactly one minute to make his move. She hadn’t heard any sirens, so they still had a little time before the police arrived. Ideally, Wells would blink first, come off the roof to attack the house. As long as he was up there, they couldn’t touch him.

If Wells hadn’t moved in sixty—now fifty-five—seconds, she would tell Frankel to grab Witwans and hustle him out the back door and along the north wall of the house to the Mercedes. Gil and his shotgun would lead the way. She would cover the front yard from the living room. They would dare Wells and his friends to stop them. The alleys along the north and south sides of the house were narrow, and the edge of the roof
overhung them. Wells would have to perch over the eaves for a shot. He’d have to be accurate. Gil wouldn’t.

Still, she’d rather have him on the ground.

She checked to be sure she had a round chambered and flattened herself beside the front door. As she waited, every cell in her body came to life. The opposite of the depression that had once swallowed her.

She knew she would kill Wells.

—

At that moment, Wells would have traded what was left of his soul for a CS grenade, or even the homemade Molotov cocktail that had served him in Istanbul. Too bad the devil was serving other clients. Wells didn’t even have the shotgun. He’d left it with Duto, knowing he would need both hands to shimmy up the carport.

After killing the bodyguard, Wells stepped off the roof onto the wall that divided Salome’s house from its southern neighbor. The wall was no wider than a single concrete block, with glass bits embedded in its top, so Wells had to tread carefully. But the wall gave him the chance to move quietly, rather than pounding the roof and giving away his position.

As he tightroped along, he heard Salome yell twice to him. At him. Did she think he’d answer? That she could convince him to throw away his tactical edge by insulting his masculinity? He understood the trick. Still, the words goaded him.

A window was cut into the house’s south wall about halfway down. Through its bare glass, Wells glimpsed an unmade bed. He saw a shadow in the room. He guessed Witwans was down there, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept moving. Six inches past the back right corner of the house, he stopped. The wall on which he stood ran another six feet to the rear lot line, then swung left around the back of the house and left again around its north side. Cracked concrete covered most of the narrow backyard below, creating a patio with all the appeal of an exercise pen in a supermax prison.

Next door, Jacob stopped shouting. He’d done his job. In the silence, Wells listened for sirens, heard none. Yet. Nor any movement inside the house. Salome was playing defense. Probably she figured he was still up front staking out the Mercedes. She hoped he would come down, open himself to a counterattack. He understood. The house had only two obvious entry points, the doors in front and back, both easily covered. But Wells was left with no choice now but to do what Salome wanted. He had to move, and quickly.

The back of the house had two windows that looked out on the patio, one on each side of the back door. Wells inched to his right along the wall. Through the nearer window, he spotted a yellowish Formica countertop and a couple of glasses. Kitchen in back, living room in front.

He craned his head, but he couldn’t see if anyone was inside. The kitchen lights were out, and the sun was hidden behind clouds. Keeping the room in shadow. Then, an answer to a prayer that Wells hadn’t uttered, the sun broke through. Wells caught a glint of light off metal, a shotgun barrel. The man holding it was against the wall a few inches left of the back door.

Just that fast, the sun was gone. The break Wells needed. Now he knew where to aim.

His phone buzzed. He pulled it, found a text from Duto:
Where you?
Wells decided to take the seconds to respond.
Back of house. More men inside.

He shoved away the phone and jumped into the backyard, as far from the wall as he could. He wanted to land close to the door. He could aim and fire the Glock faster than the guy could bring the shotgun around, a life-or-death advantage in a close quarters firefight.

He heard his left foot break almost before he felt the pain, a loud
pop
as he landed on the concrete and then an electric spike running up his ankle, into his leg. He fell forward and braced himself with his left hand and kept his head and his right hand up. He was not even ten feet away from the door. As the guard spun and tried to bring up the shotgun,
Wells fired once, twice, three times, not caring whether the rounds went through the door itself or its center window. Against a 9-millimeter round at close range, a painted plywood door offered no more protection than a piece of cardboard. The wood burst and blood spattered through the sudden holes in the guard’s white short-sleeved shirt. But he was still raising the shotgun.

Wells scrambled forward, toward the house, left of the door. The shotgun blast tore the door off its hinges and echoed off the concrete walls. For a second, Wells couldn’t hear anything at all, and then sound came back bit by bit.

He was squatting with his weight on his right leg, his face pressed to the house’s back wall, maybe two feet to the left of the doorway. His right hand, his gun hand, was closer to the doorway. He leaned over and fired twice for cover and peeked inside. The guard lay on the linoleum kitchen floor, three feet inside, almost close enough for Wells to touch, the shotgun beside him. Blood soaked his shirt from shoulder to waist.

Salome yelled in Hebrew from the front of the house and the guy coughed and tried to answer, but he could manage only a bubble of blood. No saving him. He would be dead in minutes.

Wells fired twice more and reached into the house and grabbed the shotgun by the barrel, its steel slick with blood. The guard’s fingers were still wrapped around the stock, and Wells had to wrench it away. He looked up to see Frankel in the hallway, maybe thirty feet away. Frankel fired three times as Wells spun back to the safety of the wall. One shot smacked the door frame and the second was close enough for Wells to hear it whistle by. The shotgun was a pump-action Remington 870, a 12-gauge. Wells checked the tube magazine, found four shells. He wiped off the blood as best he could and racked a round, the
chk-chk
as unsubtle a warning as a sidewinder’s rattle. He set the gun aside, hoping he’d bought a few seconds to figure out how badly he’d injured his leg. He turned, putting his back against the wall, and pushed himself up with his good
leg, thankful for all the squats he’d forced on himself over the years. When he was standing, he put a feather of pressure on his left leg. The pain flared as he bore down. But Wells could handle pain. The deeper problem was that he couldn’t put weight on the front half of his foot. He’d broken at least one bone, maybe torn the big ligament, too. He couldn’t remember the name but it was the one that always bothered basketball players. Even the light pressure he’d applied caused his foot to rearrange itself in real time, and not for the better. Evolution in reverse.