Twelve Days (7 page)

“Soon enough. Meantime. Notice anything different?”

Now she did. On her last visit, the room’s couches had been white leather over steel frames, a vaguely Nordic look. The frames were the same, but the leather was now red. The change had probably cost fifty thousand dollars.

“You redecorated.”

“Tinker Bell.” Duberman’s impolite name for his five-hundred-dollar-an-hour decorator. Every so often he said something like that, reminding her he was from a different generation. “He didn’t ask. I should have fired him, but I feel a certain loyalty since he set me up with Orli.”

Salome refrained from pointing out that putting a billionaire with a supermodel didn’t exactly qualify as groundbreaking in the matchmaking department. For whatever reason, Duberman felt talkative today, not ready for business.

“You have to live it to understand, being this rich makes you the center of your own little solar system. Somebody buys my furniture, somebody drives. It’s not just that somebody else gardens. Somebody else
hires
the gardeners. All I do is breathe and write checks. Though somebody else signs them, mostly.”

“I’m having a hard time sympathizing.”

“I feel sometimes like I’m not living my own life. This thing we’ve done, it’s the only thing in the world that’s really
mine.
”

“And your kids.”

“They’re Orli’s, really. They love me, but if I vanished tomorrow
she’d have a thousand men at her door. She’d pick a good one and it’d be like I was never there.” Duberman looked vaguely embarrassed, as though he’d said more than he meant. She had never seen that expression on him before, and she didn’t like it. Embarrassment didn’t suit him.

“So you’re telling me you decided to start a war because firing your decorator would have been too difficult.”

“Exactly.” He grinned. “Anyway. You didn’t come halfway around the world because you have good news.”

—

His library was a square room with books on every side, an old-school gentlemen’s club. He flipped a light switch to expose a keypad. He tapped in a code. A section of books on the back wall slid into the floor, revealing a safe room.

“Does it connect to the Bat Cave, too?”

He led her in, closed the door. The room was a cube, ten feet on each side. Two narrow twin beds were pushed against the walls and a three-foot-high gray safe occupied the center. The place looked like an unfinished art installation, a parody of itself:
The Safe Room, a/k/a The Billionaire’s Mind.

She patted the safe. “Let me guess. Five hundred thousand euros and a pistol.”

“Why don’t you tell me the problem.” A statement, not a question. Now he was the one who was annoyed. So she explained how Wells had escaped, killed Mason and the others, fled Turkey.

“Now? Where is he?”

“Back in the U.S. I had a lawyer hire detectives to watch for him at airports all across the East Coast. Didn’t say who he was, just that we were looking for him. One picked him up coming through Boston.”

“So we have eyes on him?”

“No. Too dangerous. I let him go. I’d rather have guys on Ellis Shafer. That’s his main contact inside the agency. Even so, it’s tricky. These
private detectives, the good ones won’t touch anything that crosses wires with the CIA. It’s one thing to look for a guy at an airport, but once they know Shafer works for the agency, only the low-rent ones will go near it.”

“So Wells is loose.”

A few minutes ago she’d thought they were friends. Now his voice was quiet. Icy. She wished he would shout at her. Anything but this. She waited.

“We’re close on this,” he said finally. “Especially after what those animals did in Mumbai—”

His words brought Salome back to the reports from India. She had focused so closely on Wells that she hadn’t thought much about the downing of the jet. But Duberman was right. The war drums were beating.

“They must want a war,” Duberman said.

“Want it or think it’s inevitable.” Most Iranian Muslims were part of the Shia branch of Islam. And the drive to martyrdom had been part of Shia culture from the very founding of the sect. The first Shia had believed Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, was his true heir. Other Muslims, calling themselves Sunnis, opposed Ali. At a battle near the Iraqi city of Karbala, the Sunnis killed Ali and slaughtered his men. They had dominated Islam ever since. Today, ninety percent of Muslims were Sunni.

But the Shia remained faithful to Ali. In fact, the name Shia meant “followers of Ali.” Each year, hundreds of thousands of Shia made pilgrimages to Karbala to commemorate
that first battle. Recently, Sunni terrorists had made a habit of attacking the pilgrims. No matter. They kept coming.

When Salome heard analysts say that Iran would never use a nuclear weapon against Tel Aviv because it knew that the Israelis would respond with a hundred bombs of their own, she thought of those pilgrims shuffling along, unarmed, unprotected, awaiting their fates.

She pushed the pilgrims out of her mind. “So have you talked to Donna?” The National Security Advisor.

“Not since the uranium turned up. It’s better if I don’t get involved right now. They know I want them to attack. I can’t seem like I’m celebrating. At this point, if I do call, it’ll be directly to POTUS. And it’ll be one time only. Best to keep that card tucked away in case of emergency. The question is, does your friend Wells know enough to make a case? And will anyone listen?”

“He and Shafer weren’t getting anywhere with the agency. That’s why Wells came to Istanbul by himself. Everything he did, he did on his own. As far as the CIA is concerned, Glenn Mason’s been dead for years.”

“You think Wells knows about me?”

Salome hesitated.

“Tell me the truth.”

“I’m trying to think it through, Aaron. He found Mason, so he and Shafer must know about the money Mason lost in Macao. Whether they jumped to you, I don’t know.”

“Let’s assume they have. What about anything Wells might have seen in Istanbul. License plates? IDs? The factory?”

“We’re safe on the factory. Paid for from an account that doesn’t come anywhere near us. Wells did steal a laptop when he broke out, but all our computers have software on them that erases the hard drive if the wrong password is used or someone tries to copy it. Wipes it clean.”

“You’re confident in that.”

“I’ve seen it happen.”

“So what do you think we should do? About Wells.”

—

The ultimate question. The reason she had flown more than ten thousand kilometers to see Duberman.

“I think he’s too much of a risk. We have to neutralize him.”

“You mean kill him.”

“We already took him captive, and that blew up.”

“He have a family?”

“A son and an ex-wife. But they’re gone. Probably Wells has the FBI looking after them. Anyway, going after families usually causes more problems than it solves. The same with Duto and Shafer. A senator, a CIA officer, they’re untouchable. But Wells, he takes chances. He’ll come at us. We catch him—”

“Last time you caught him, he killed five of your guys. What makes you think you’ll have better luck this time?”

“We’ll be ready.” She knew the answer sounded lame.

“As far as you know, Wells doesn’t have anything more than he did last week.”

“Unless he’s put you and Mason together.”

“So what, some dead CIA officer lost money at my casino. Millions of people do that every year. I never met the guy.”

“But—”

He raised a hand to silence her. “As a rule, I don’t like waiting. I want the other side reacting to me. But right now this war has its own momentum. We keep our heads down a few more days, the United States will attack. After that, John Wells can say whatever he wants.”

“If you’d seen what he did in Istanbul.”

“Then you should have killed him when you had the chance.” He’d made up his mind, she saw. “Assuming you find him again, you watch him. You think he’s getting close, we’ll talk. Those phones you gave me are clean?”

She nodded. He opened the door and let them out of the ridiculous little panic room. Salome had a sudden premonition that she’d never see him again. She wanted to kiss him on the lips. Just once.

“Don’t,” Duberman said.

“What?”

“Don’t go after him, Salome. I can see it in your eyes, that’s what you’re thinking.”

In the living room he hugged her again, lightly this time, for show. Then he walked off to the family quarters of the house. Where he
lived.
Without a thought of her. She was alone, looking out over Hong Kong.

Why did she let him tell her what to do? She’d devoted her life to this project. Every hour, every day, for years. He hadn’t done anything except reach into his bank accounts and give her orders. Yet somehow, he was the boss. She couldn’t disobey him.

She would do what he said. She would watch Ellis Shafer. She would find John Wells and watch him. She wouldn’t touch them, either of them.

Not
yet.

ZURICH

T
he boxy Mercedes Geländewagen waited outside Zurich Airport’s Terminal B, a police placard attached to its front windshield so it didn’t have to circle like everyone else in the world. As Wells emerged from the terminal, an awesomely ugly man slid out of the SUV’s back seat. Blond hair sprouted in random patches from his skull. His eyes were so small they didn’t even qualify as beady. He wore a baggy nylon sweat suit that Wells knew concealed a snub-nosed pistol.

Wells had met him once before. He was a Serb who went by the nickname Dragon. A bodyguard for Kowalski. Wells remembered him as skinnier, more feral, and even uglier. The years living in Zurich had softened him. Though Wells guessed that he still knew how to squeeze a trigger.

“Dragon.”

The man smiled in surprise, touched a finger to his chest. “Goran now.”

“You’ll always be Dragon to me.”

“You have weapon?”

Wells shook his head. “More’s the pity.”

Dragon pulled open the
SUV’s front passenger door, waved him in. The windows were cracked, but the Mercedes stank of stale Eastern European tobacco.

“Uncle Pierre know you smoke in here?” Wells said. No answer. “Bad for the leather.”

The driver turned up the radio. Lousy German pop. Not that there was any other kind.

Wells closed his eyes and tried to rest. It was midafternoon in Switzerland, the winter sun disappearing behind the jagged snowcapped mountains west of the airport. Wells had slept a few hours over the Atlantic on the first leg of the trip, his overnight flight to London. Not nearly enough to make up for the sleep he’d lost in the last two weeks. Especially the nights he’d spent chained to a wall in Istanbul. Many Special Forces operatives used amphetamines to keep themselves awake during long missions. Wells had never tried speed, but the idea seemed especially tempting today. He felt dull and slow, gray around the edges.

Zurich was a city of bankers. Yet the global financial crisis hadn’t touched its wealth. Audis, BMWs, and Mercedeses filled the highway from the airport to the center of town. Farther east, in the wealthy neighborhood along the Zürichsee where Kowalski lived, the mansions gleamed, their walls not so much painted as polished.

Wells hadn’t been to Zurich in years, yet he remembered the tiniest details of the place. The city had imprinted itself on him then because his emotions had been so high. On that trip he’d come intending to kill Kowalski. The arms dealer had tried to assassinate Wells, but his shooters had botched the job. Instead, they’d wounded Wells’s fiancée, Jennifer Exley, a CIA officer. Exley, who was pregnant, had lost the baby. From her hospital bed, she begged Wells to stay with her, not seek revenge. Wells went to Zurich instead.

Ultimately, Kowalski bought back his life by giving up information that helped Wells stop a terrorist attack. They would never be friends,
but they weren’t exactly enemies. But Exley had never forgiven Wells for leaving her. She’d quit him and the agency both.

In the years since, Wells had met Anne, a New Hampshire cop. Now Anne had left him, too, rejecting his marriage proposal. The two women were very different. Exley was a brilliant blue-eyed pixie who judged herself more harshly than the world ever would. She had worked herself to the brink of exhaustion after 9-11 to punish herself for failing to foresee the attacks, even though no one else had either. Anne was tall, brown-eyed, athletic and strong, practical and cynical. Wells wasn’t sure the two women would have liked each other. Yet they’d both reached the same conclusion about him. That he cared for his missions more than either of them. That he would rather die than leave the field.

He’d been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

And now Wells found himself aching for Exley as the big Mercedes rolled through Zurich’s silent streets. Her absence centered on his shoulders, his upper back, where she had wrapped herself around him on their motorcycle rides. The fact that Kowalski was still in his life while Exley was gone seemed a cosmic joke.

Or maybe not. When she’d needed him most, he had left her. Not exactly proof they were soul mates. Maybe he had preserved his memories of Exley in amber, romanticized a love that would inevitably have faded. Even a child wouldn’t have guaranteed anything. Wells had walked away from a child and a wife once already.

—

He put aside these unpleasant speculations as the Mercedes pulled up outside Kowalski’s red-brick mansion. He reached for his door, found it locked. Behind him, Dragon slid out, opened it from the outside.

“Step out, turn around, hands on the roof.”

Wells did as he was told. Dragon frisked him thoroughly, an unapologetic and professional job. When he was done, he yelled something over
his shoulder and the front door swung open. Pierre Kowalski. He’d gained weight since Wells last saw him. He had a ruddy complexion, two ample chins. He wore a blue polo shirt and folded his thick arms across his chest. His bulk came across as aristocratic. A European trick, one that fat Americans could rarely pull off.

Wells reminded himself to be friendly as he walked up the slate front steps. He needed a favor, and he was short on leverage and time.

“John Wells.”

“Pierre.” Wells extended a hand.

Kowalski took it in both of his. “You must be in trouble if you’re being polite to me.”

—

The mansion looked as Wells remembered, its walls covered with nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. “You still have that thing in the other room?”

“
Romulus and Remus?
The AK and the RPG?”

“That’s the one.” The piece consisted of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an assault rifle preserved for eternity inside a clear plastic box, buffed in a way that made their murderous details hyperreal and beautiful.

“A few weeks ago, a Qatari tried to buy it from me. Seven million dollars. I said no. Probably my favorite piece. I’m surprised you remembered.”

“It stuck with me. And the art history lesson.”

“Oh yes.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
The tiger shark in the box.”

“You told me it was at the Metropolitan Museum. I tried to see it once when I was in New York, but I couldn’t find it.”

“The man who owned it took it back. Never trust a hedge fund manager.” Kowalski was as smooth as Wells remembered. His practiced finesse no doubt played well with the dictators who bought his weapons.
He led Wells into the kitchen, more suitable for a restaurant, twin six-burner stoves and Sub-Zero refrigerators, along with a fleet of copper pans hanging from the ceiling.

Kowalski nodded at the granite-topped island in the center of the room. “Sit, please. Would you like a drink? Something to eat?”

“Nein.”

But Kowalski pulled two Heinekens from the nearest Sub-Zero. “If you change your mind.” He popped them open and they sat catercorner on the island. Dragon lurked at the edge of the room.

“You look healthy, John.”

The phony gentility suddenly irked Wells. Kowalski paid for this mansion and its art by selling weapons to third-world countries. At best, he encouraged poor governments to spend money they couldn’t afford on helicopters and personnel carriers they didn’t need. At worst, he spread untold misery in shabby little wars that rated five minutes a year on CNN.

“We’re such good buddies, how come Dragon had to feel me up before I could see you?”

“Goran. He’s respectable now.” Kowalski sipped his beer. “You came all this way to reminisce. Or no?”

Wells had told him only that they needed to meet as soon as possible.

“It’s about Iran.”

“No surprise.”

“You want the long version or the short?”

“I think the short might be safer. For both of us.”

“Know anyone who might have been sitting on a hunk of HEU?”

“You think Iran is getting it from an outside source?” Kowalski shook his head. “No, not that. You think someone fooled the CIA. The Iranians are telling the truth, the HEU isn’t theirs. Someone wants America to invade Iran. Mossad?”

“I thought you didn’t want the whole story.”

“It’s impossible, John. Even the Mossad couldn’t do it.”

“My question is, if I came to you, said, Pierre, I need weapons-grade
uranium, cost doesn’t matter, but it’s got to be enough to make someone sit up and notice, where would you send me?”

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” North Korea. “If you were crazy enough to go. But they would take your money and put a bullet in you.”

“Plus they can’t enrich to ninety-four percent.”

“That’s right.”

“Where else?”

“Nowhere. Nowhere else.”

Footsteps. Wells turned to see a tall blonde, high cheekbones and full lips. “Nadia,” he said. Kowalski’s girlfriend. She was a Ukrainian model, the most beautiful woman Wells had ever seen. He had met her on his previous trip. She’d kissed his cheek as he left, gently. Even in his rage over Exley, he had felt the pull of her beauty.

Now she looked at him blankly. Wells saw she didn’t remember him. And something else, too. Her arms and legs were as slim as ever, but her belly swelled under a loose T-shirt. She was pregnant. “Congratulations.”

She laid a hand on her stomach. “Thank you.”

“Nadia, do you remember John Wells? You met years ago.”

She looked at him, and he saw the realization in her face. “Yes. Of course.” She smiled, but warily. Wells realized that he reminded her of a time when life hadn’t been quite so certain.

“Nadia and I are married now,” Kowalski said.

“Congratulations again.” Married. And pregnant. Even the arms dealer and the model had moved on with their lives while Wells wasn’t looking. “You’re a lucky lady.”

“I think so, yes.” She came to Kowalski, rubbed his cheek. “Just remember we have the banquet tonight. No snacks.”

She floated off, beautiful as ever. Wells watched Kowalski watching her go.

“I love her,” Kowalski said.

“You want me to applaud for your good taste?”

“You think she’s easy to love because she’s beautiful?”

An odd tack from Kowalski, considering he was the one who’d chosen her. Wells wasn’t in the mood to pursue the argument. “North Korea aside, you have no idea where I might pick up a kilo of HEU?”

“I do not.”

“You want me out of your happy home, give me
something
, Pierre. You can’t find it for me, send me to someone who might. The dirtiest guy you know.”

“When you say it like that, it’s easy. Mikhail Buvchenko. Russian.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“Spetsnaz, until he figured out he could make a lot more money in my business. He’s in his mid-thirties, connections all up and down the Red Army.”

“You’ve dealt with him.”

“We’ve bumped into each other a few times. He’ll sell to anyone. Assad, Burma, Congo. Places where the Kremlin has an interest but doesn’t want to do business directly. You want chemical weapons, he can help. Even has a little private army.”

“Army?”

“That’s too strong. A battalion, say. Several hundred men. They were the first ones on the ground in Ukraine, a way for Putin to make a low-risk move, see how Europe and the U.S. would react.”

“Or not react.”

“Exactly.”

“But if he’s so connected to the Kremlin, would he deal HEU without their say-so?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think his agreement with them is that he answers when they call. In return, they don’t interfere with his other arrangements, as long as he doesn’t do anything directly opposed to Russian interests.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

“Mistake. He’s not so nice. And he won’t come west. You’ll have to go to Russia.”

“Set it up, Pierre.”

Kowalski drummed his fingers nervously against the granite countertop.

“Even if I vouch for you, I can’t promise he won’t kill you.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you cared, Pierre.” Wells found himself smiling. “You’re afraid if you vouch for me and I kill him, his mercenaries will be here five minutes later. Blowback.”

“Maybe I care a little, too.”

“Maybe you don’t.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“I promise you, I’m not interested in him. Compared to what’s at stake, he’s nobody.”

“I wouldn’t try that argument with him.”

“Fair enough.”

“I do this, we’re even, John?”

“Sure.”
Until the next time I need you.

“It may take a couple days.”

“Sooner is better.” Though Wells didn’t mind getting at least one decent night’s sleep. But he couldn’t wait here. And then, suddenly, he knew his next stop. A city that aside from its wealth was as unlike Zurich as anywhere he could imagine.