Twelve Days (29 page)

Carcetti stepped toward him—

Shafer bit back the words. Let Carcetti crack his ribs, blacken his eyes. He’d be digging an even deeper hole. And Shafer would prove, to himself, to Wells, or both, that he wasn’t afraid.

Though he was.

Carcetti pushed over Shafer’s chair, sent him sprawling, his knees clapping the concrete floor. Shafer lay on his back. That quick, his fear vanished. This was Langley, not North Korea. Carcetti hadn’t earned three stars in the Marines by making dumb mistakes. He wasn’t going to hurt Shafer, no matter how furious he was.

“Last chance.” Carcetti squatted beside him. “I will break your neck.” Carcetti put a hand on Shafer’s throat, squeezed lightly.

Time to end this nonsense. “You will not. And fyi, Lucy Joyner saw me this morning. I was down at her office while you and Bunshaft were waiting for me. She’s got a picture to prove it.”

Carcetti cursed, stepped away from Shafer, kicked the table over. The metal clattered against the concrete, as loud and empty as Carcetti’s threats.

“I’d say you have three options. Put us all under quarantine down here. Lucy and my wife and Vinny, too. It could get cramped. Though maybe if we have snacks. Everyone loves snacks.” Shafer pulled himself to his feet, hoping Carcetti didn’t notice the tremble in his legs. “Two, let me go. Though I have a feeling that isn’t on the agenda. Three, go for a warrant, do this right.”

“You want me to call that bluff? We have tapes of what you told Wells. We play them, you spend the rest of your life in prison.”

Carcetti might be right. Federal judges didn’t love CIA officers who disclosed classified information. Stopping a war would be a mitigating circumstance, but only if Shafer succeeded.

Yet at this point Shafer didn’t care. To get a warrant, even in a case that supposedly presented an immediate national security threat, Carcetti and Hebley would have to talk to the CIA’s lawyers, who would insist on calling the Justice Department. Justice would be predisposed to believe whatever version of the story Carcetti gave. But once they got involved, Hebley would have a much harder time ordering the CIA’s black-ops teams after Wells—who, if nothing else, had constitutional protections as an American citizen.

—

Carcetti opened the door, stepped out. Then turned back, looked at Shafer from the doorway.

“Just one thing, Ellis. I know you and your buddy have looked all over the world for that HEU. So have we, believe it or not. We can’t find it. Tell me, if it’s not Iranian, whose is it?”

Shafer could only shake his head.

“Whose?” Carcetti shouted now. “Tell me.
Whose?
”

Shafer felt no choice but to answer “I don’t know.”

“And you know why? Because it’s from
Iran.”
Carcetti slammed the door so hard as he left that the plaster wall beside it cracked from floor to ceiling.

Shafer sat alone, wondering how long Carcetti would leave him here, whether he’d have a warrant when he returned. Either way, Shafer believed he had done all he could to take the red dot off Wells’s chest. He wasn’t the praying type. Never had been. So he settled for crossing his fingers and hoping Wells would use that freedom.

CAIRO, EGYPT

W
ells found a computer in the corner of a crowded café off Tahrir Square and logged into the account he’d created to email Adina Leffetz. He wasn’t expecting a response. To his surprise, he found not one but two replies.

Both from her, though from two different accounts. The first was blank. Wells suspected it contained a tracking virus, because his computer briefly froze when he opened it. No matter. Let Salome try to find him in Cairo.

It was the second email, sent a few hours after the first, that stopped him.
John. So good to hear from you. And yes, I miss you, too. I’d love to see you. So would my boss. Let’s meet in Tel Aviv tomorrow . . . Adina.

She was offering the ultimate honeypot, a chance to talk to the man himself. Still, the meeting stank of a Hotel California trap. Once she had him inside Duberman’s mansion, why would she let him leave?

He ought to forget the offer, move on. He could book a flight to South Africa and Witwans. Or call Shafer again, see if he had anything new. Although Shafer had gone dark since the morning.

As for Witwans, Wells didn’t want to go unless he knew the man had
something. Without a private jet, he’d lose the next day getting to Johannesburg and then Witwans’s home. If he was wrong, he’d lose yet another day getting back. He couldn’t afford to waste that time. And he feared that the NSA was now up on the only passports he was carrying. As soon as he boarded an international flight, they and the CIA would know exactly where to find him. Until he knew if the agency wanted to bring him in, he couldn’t take that chance.

Tel Aviv, for better or worse, was less than five hundred miles from Cairo, less than an hour by air if Wells could figure out how to fly there without being caught. Plus, truth be told, he wanted to see Duberman. He couldn’t help himself. The offer tempted him. He was sniffing at it like a mouse at a hunk of cheese, trying to convince himself the net overhead wasn’t a trap.

—

No. He’d made this mistake in Istanbul. He needed someone with him to guarantee that Duberman wouldn’t hold him indefinitely. Who? Shafer was out of pocket. Rudi was old and sick and had done all he could.

Which left Duto.

Wells bought yet another new phone, ducked into an alley off Talaat Harb, one of the avenues that spoked north off Tahrir. He pushed himself against a wall as men strolled by. Since the riots and the revolution and the counterrevolution and the gropes and rapes that had come with them, women were invisible around Tahrir after dark.

Duto answered after two rings.

“Get yourself arrested again?”

“Not yet.”

“Too bad.”

“I need a private plane. Now. With you on it.”

“Where am I going?”

Wells debated being coy, but if anyone was tracing Duto’s phone, they would see the Egyptian prefix anyway. “Cairo.”

“Why?”

“Tell you when you get here.”

Duto was silent.

“And don’t forget the bag I left with Ellis.” Before heading out from Washington the week before, Wells had left a knapsack stuffed with the kind of goodies that cause problems at border control. It would come in handy for the meeting with Duberman.

“Ellis.” Duto stopped. Something he didn’t want to tell Wells on an open line.

“It’s at his house. Is that a problem?”

“No, but I need a few hours to put this together. Plus, what, eleven in the air?”

“As long as you can get here by noon tomorrow.”

“If you aren’t at the airport, I’ll kill you.”

Join the crowd.
Wells hung up, found a two-window café and ordered an oversize pita stuffed with greasy chicken and falafel. Delicious. Before the 2011 revolution, some Cairo restaurants had served beer and wine. A handful had even served hard liquor. Although Islamic law banned alcohol, the sales were a concession to Western tourists, the millions of Coptic Christians who still lived in Egypt, and Cairo’s own cosmopolitan past.

But after the revolution the Muslim Brotherhood had sharply raised taxes on alcohol. Some restaurants that served it had seen their windows smashed. Even though the army had forced out the Brotherhood in 2013, the alcohol seemed to have disappeared, or at least been forced into the back rooms. Another way that Egypt had become more like Saudi Arabia, its neighbor across the Red Sea.

Wells washed down the last of his pita with a lukewarm Coke and set out on a countersurveillance run. He didn’t think anyone was following him, but he wanted to be sure. Tahrir Square was an excellent place to find out. The passageways that ran underneath the plaza allowed for an almost infinite variety of moves. Wells spent twenty minutes wending
his way through them and then doubled back and at a near run came back to the entrance on the square’s northeast corner, where he’d entered. He stepped into one of the cabs that were ubiquitous in Tahrir.

“Salaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam.
Where
to, my friend?”

“Ramses Square.” Another massive square to the northeast, this one home to the city’s main railway station.

At a traffic light a block south of the square, Wells handed the cabbie his money.

“But we haven’t arrived yet.”

“I like to walk.” Wells opened the door and stepped out, walking southeast, away from both Ramses and Tahrir. He was now sure no one was on him. He had run across the Egyptian security services before. They were decent trackers, but they weren’t subtle. Americans would have stood out even more. He found a café with an Internet station and checked in. Shafer still hadn’t replied, but Duto had, with a jet tail number and an arrival time. And something else, a phone number.
Col. Alim Bourak.
Tell him I said hello.

—

“Salaam aleikum.”

Bourak’s voice was wary.

“Colonel. A mutual friend suggested I call,” Wells said, in English.

“Does he have a name?”

“Duto.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

A long pause.

“All right. Where are you?”

Wells told him.

“Stay there.”

Words that made Wells want to be anywhere else.

Bourak showed a half hour later. He was a tall man, mid-fifties, with a slight limp and the dull eyes of a
mukhabarat
officer who had seen more than he wished.

—

“
Salaam aleikum.”

“As-aleikum salaam.”

“You speak Arabic.”

“Nam.”

“All right, come with me,” Bourak said in Arabic. “But no talking.”

Bourak turned out to live in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Cairo’s better neighborhoods. Wells didn’t know why the breadth of Duto’s contacts still surprised him. The man had been DCI for almost a decade. “One night, yes?” Bourak said, as he closed the apartment door behind Wells. “Then you can tell your friend we’re even.”

“I can talk now?”

“As long as you don’t tell me your name. Would you like something to drink? Unfortunately, I don’t have alcohol.”

Not a complete surprise. A five-foot-wide photo of the
hajj
pilgrimage to Mecca dominated the living room.

“I don’t drink.” Wells examined the photo.

“You know the
hajj?
”

“I’m Muslim.”

Bourak squinted at Wells.

“Even without your name, I think I know you.”

“Did you take the pilgrimage?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always wanted to go.”

“What they say is true. It’s difficult. So many people, not nearly enough space. The crush. The smells. No one has bathed properly in weeks. Yet sooner or later you stop fighting the pressure. Then something strange happens. I can’t describe it exactly. Not so much that you’re
closer to Allah as that He’s closer to you. If you die there, no matter. Maybe this is what heaven is, so many people and no space to think about anything. No thoughts of the heat and the dust and the thirst. No concerns about money or comfort. Just these people bending together under some will bigger than their own. I wish every Muslim could do it.”

“Not exactly how the Quran describes paradise.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in seventy-two virgins.”

“I’m not sure I believe in virgins, period.”

Bourak laughed.

“How did a man with your convictions rise so far in the
muk?”
The secret police were not exactly fans of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“They need a few of us who know the prayers. But colonel is as high as I’ll ever get.”

Wells put his hand over his heart. “Let’s pray, then, Alim. For Egypt.”

“And peace.”

THREE DAYS . . .

CAIRO

C
airo International Airport was as ramshackle as everything else in Egypt, a maze of potholed access roads and unfinished construction. Hall 4, the airport’s VIP wing, was the inevitable exception, modern and high-ceilinged. Nearly empty, too. Wealthy travelers weren’t visiting Cairo much these days.

So Wells had a lounge to himself as he waited for Bourak. Duto’s jet had landed, but Wells couldn’t reach it without a new passport. Bourak didn’t have the juice to walk Wells through border control without identification. And Wells didn’t want to use either of his current passports. The NSA was surely watching for both John Wells and Roger Bishop.

Duto held the solution. The bag of toys he’d picked up at Shafer’s house included a fresh passport. Wells had never used it before, and he was sure it wasn’t on any watch lists. Even better, it was several years old, with a slightly blurred photo, so face-recognition software wouldn’t jump it. Wells could again travel without fear of being picked up, at least for a few hours.

One day he’d run out of spares, and life would get even trickier. For
now, he was still in the game. As soon as Bourak returned from the tarmac, Wells would be on his way to Duberman. He stuffed away his impatience and he watched the headlines scroll across CNN International:

AMERICAN DEADLINE LESS THAN 72 HOURS AWAY . . . NO TALKS SCHEDULED . . . PENTAGON: 82ND AIRBORNE FULLY DEPLOYED . . . IRANIAN PRESIDENT ROUHANI: NUCLEAR ENRICHMENT IS “RIGHT AND DUTY” . . . SUPREME LEADER KHAMENEI: “ALLAH WILL PROTECT US” . . .

Until the words BREAKING NEWS flashed in foot-high letters, and the scroll changed:

AMERICAN AIRLINES JET MISSING OFF SOUTH AMERICAN COAST . . . 767 LEFT RIO FOR JFK 7 HOURS AGO, LOST FROM RADAR 2 HOURS AGO . . . AA 964 CARRIED 229 PASSENGERS, CREW . . . BRAZIL, US, VENEZUELA SENDING SEARCH TEAMS . . . DEBRIS FIELD REPORTED . . .

Then the real surprise:

SECOND PLANE FROM RIO ALSO MISSING . . . DELTA FLIGHT LOST IN SOUTHERN CARIBBEAN . . . DISAPPEARED SAME TIME AS AA JET . . . DELTA: 257 PASSENGERS, 14 CREW ON BOARD . . .

Five hundred more people dead, and the war hadn’t even started. The odds that two planes from the same airport had both crashed accidentally at the same time were infinitesimal. The Iranians were warning the President that they would disrupt aviation worldwide if the United States attacked. This time, they had covered their tracks, sending the evidence
to the bottom of the Atlantic. Washington would accuse, Tehran would deny, and the deadline would tick closer. Wells hated Duberman for causing this chaos, and himself for not finding a way to stop the man.

The lounge door swung open. Bourak walked in, passport in hand. “Yours, I think, Mr. Michael.” The passport was in the name of Michael Ishmael Jefferson. Wells made sure he had its biographical data memorized, then tucked it away and gave Bourak his other passports. They could only cause trouble.

“I should hold them?”

“Burn them.” His lives, real and fake, turning to ash.

—

But nothing came easy this mission. The immigration agent took immediate exception to the new passport. “Bad photo.”

“Sorry.”

“No entry stamp. You came through Cairo?” The guard tapped at his keyboard. “I don’t see it.”

They’d run across the only government worker in Egypt who wanted to do his job. Bourak flipped out his
mukhabarat
identification. “This man has been a guest of mine.”

“Then maybe you tell me why there’s no record,” the guard said in Arabic.

“Because your computers don’t work,” Bourak said. “I appreciate your boldness, taking this tone with a colonel in the GID.” The General Intelligence Directorate, the
muk
’s
official title. “Call your supervisor. I want to tell him you’re such a good officer.”

The guard muttered under his breath.

“What?”

“I said, I’ll take his picture, and yours, too, and send him on.”

A minute later, they were through. Wells followed Bourak downstairs to an unmarked door that led outside the terminal, onto the tarmac.
Bourak embraced Wells, the emotion genuine. “Maybe one day we’ll take the
hajj
together.”

“I’d like that.”

—

The jet was a Gulfstream G650, long, sleek, and white. No corporate insignia, nothing but the registration number tattooed on the engine. Duto didn’t stand, instead offering Wells a cheap finger-to-temple sideways salute. “Cap’n.”

“Crunch,” Wells said. “Do I want to know whose ride this is?”

“For now, it’s ours. I told the people who lent it to me you were good for it. More important, where are we going? Pilot says we have fifteen hundred miles of fuel left. We need to top up?”

“Not yet. Tel Aviv.”

“You hear that?” Duto yelled through the open cockpit door to the pilots. “Ben Gurion. Refuel there. Make sure they know it’s an American jet so they don’t give us any trouble about landing rights.”

“Yessir.” The cockpit door swung shut.

“We meeting Rudi?”

“Duberman.”

Duto grunted in surprise. “How’d you work that?”

“I didn’t. He asked. Through Salome. Didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s not a confession.”

“So he wants a meeting, and you come running to me to protect you.” Duto gave Wells an
I’m-not-going-to-let-you-live-this-one-down
smirk.

“I don’t know any other senators, and after what happened in Russia I needed someone who could guarantee safe passage.” As soon as he explained, Wells wished he hadn’t. Duto surely already understood. “Speaking of. Where’s Ellis?”

Duto’s momentary hesitation told Wells the news wasn’t good.

“Lucy Joyner gets in early. Lucky for us. She came to me yesterday about an hour before you called. Shafer showed up at her office around
seven a.m., made her take his picture. He thought the seventh floor was going to grab him, and he was right.”

“He’s under arrest?”

“Not yet. But Justice is involved. Best I can tell, they’re holding him as a material witness right now, no charges.”

“Any idea why now?”

“He passed Lucy the name of a website he found that connects Salome and Jess Bunshaft. I don’t think you’ve met Bunshaft. He’s a Hebley guy. Mid-level. It’s nothing that proves anything, just a picture from a couple years ago. But maybe that freaked them out.”

“But they can’t hold him indefinitely—”

“Long enough. From their point of view the easiest move would be to toss him in a cell for a couple weeks. But maybe he told them that Lucy had his picture. So, for whatever reason, they decided to get Justice involved.”

“Good, right?”

“Maybe. Means somebody’s watching. But also a criminal process. Justice, they’ll say he’s a U.S. citizen, we can’t hold him without charges. Fine. Hebley gives them enough for a one-count complaint for leaking classified material, a couple excerpts from the tapes.”

The tapes of Shafer calling Wells. Wells had blocked them out.

“He was stupid, John. Should never have talked to you from his office. They don’t mention your name in the complaint, just co-conspirator A. As long as you weren’t cleared for the information, they don’t even have to prove you misused it. The fact he passed it is enough.”

“Then?”

“Then tonight they find some friendly federal judge who believes in hanging ’em high, and they ask for no bail. And they get it. Remember, Shafer doesn’t even have a lawyer at this point, nobody’s arguing the other side. Presto, they have an excuse to transfer him tomorrow to the detention center in Alexandria. And you know, short ride, but delays, he gets stuck in processing. All that time, he can’t call anyone. That’s tomorrow
gone. Then, the next morning, his wife is screaming, finally somebody lets him make a phone call, he gets a lawyer. Even so, whoever he hires has to figure out what’s going on and file for an emergency hearing. That’s the day
after
tomorrow gone. Then, the hearing, Justice pushes back, says national security, they’re still looking for safe-deposit boxes, secret bank accounts—”

“Anyway, we’ve attacked Iran by then.” Wells hated the thought of Shafer in jail. He would backtalk a guard, get himself in trouble. “And you’re so sure about this—”

“Because it’s what I’d do.”

The cockpit door swung open. “Plans filed,” the pilot said. He was tall, with hair so blond it was almost white. “We’ll push in a minute. I know you want privacy, so the flight attendant won’t bother you, but please strap in. We should be in the air forty minutes, give or take.” He disappeared again.

“All these years, everything you’ve seen,” Duto said. “Still can’t admit the game only has one rule.”

“And what’s that?” Though Wells knew what Duto would say.

“Just win, baby. I know you think Hebley should know better—”

The jet’s engines spooled. Wells buckled up as the plane rolled back. He didn’t want to hear this speech, yet he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t fascinated by Duto’s cynicism.

“But he’s neck-deep in this now, and the only way out is right through Tehran—”

“We can’t go to war on a lie.”

“We have the best army in the world, John. We can go to war because our beer was flat. And the guys in Tehran aren’t our friends. Long as we win, this unpleasantness gets forgotten. One thing I’ve learned about the folks back home in my brief political career, they are results-oriented.”

“And if we lose?”

“Nobody starts a war expecting to lose. I promise you what the Pentagon is telling the President right now is that we’ve learned from Iraq and
Afghanistan, we’ll roll right up to the nuclear factories, blast ’em open, see what’s inside. Let the Rev Guard try to hit us from the flanks, the back, our airpower will destroy them as soon as they mass. That’s one thing we know how to do. That this isn’t about roadside bombs, that for a change we’ll fight the war that we want and then get out. No occupation.”

Duto made the case so enthusiastically that Wells wondered why he had come here at all. But of course he wanted the White House. Taking down this plot was his only chance. And with Shafer out of action, Wells had had no choice but to ask Duto for help.

Duto, who had betrayed him a half-dozen times.

Duto seemed to read Wells’s mind. “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

“This isn’t politics.”

“Everything’s politics.”

The Gulfstream turned onto an access runway, bounced along the rough concrete.

“But Shafer will get out, right?”

“Make bail, sure.”

“And after that?”

“You know the answer. Depends who wins.”

—

Wells feared yet more immigration headaches in Tel Aviv, but Duto’s black VIP passport smoothed the way.

“Before we tell Salome we’re here, I want to check in with the embassy,” Duto said. The American embassy to Israel was based in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem. The building was the usual recessed-windows concrete fortress, though weirdly enough it sat only a block from the beach. The juxtaposition made for odd photos when protesters showed.

So Duto wanted to be sure that the government knew he was in Israel. Duberman probably wouldn’t be crazy enough to kidnap a senator, but the move was prudent just in case.

—

Duto walked out of the embassy ninety minutes later, joined Wells on the promenade. The afternoon was unseasonably warm, and the Israelis were taking advantage. Four bikinied women knocked a volleyball.

“Nice scenery.”

In fact, Wells was thinking mainly of the three-inch blade he had taped to his left thigh, just below the groin. It was ceramic, sharp enough to cut glass. On his right leg he’d taped the handle, two and a half inches of rigid plastic. A metal detector wouldn’t pick either one up. A full-body airport-style scanner might, but even Duberman probably didn’t have one of those at home. And no matter how well-trained they were, guards were reluctant to frisk too far up the thighs. Of course, the knife wasn’t much use to Wells in its current spot either. He’d need an excuse to spend a couple of minutes in a bathroom once he got past the frisk.

“Embassy ask what you were doing?”

“I told them I was meeting Duberman. They were smart enough to leave it there. Equal branch of government and all that. Come on, let’s go.”

Wells had figured that Duto agreed to back him on this mission because he didn’t see any choice, because he realized that after his fight with Donna Green he had gone too far to back out. But the enthusiasm in his voice suggested another possibility. The former DCI wanted to be here, back in the field. They found an Internet kiosk and Wells typed a six-word email:
In Tel Aviv. See you soon
. “Good?”

“Let’s hope he’s home.”

“He’s home.” Wells hit send.

—

Duberman’s mansion sat two blocks from the ocean, in Tel Aviv’s fanciest neighborhood, north of downtown. A high concrete wall along the sidewalk blocked any view of the house. A Range Rover limousine was
parked in front of the main gate. Two unsmiling men sat inside the Rover. Two more stood beside it.

Duto stepped onto the sidewalk as Wells pushed a hundred-dollar bill into the cabbie’s palm. “Wait.”

The driver nodded, but when Wells stepped out, he pulled away, tires screeching. The guards beside the Rover stepped forward. Thick, Slavic-looking men. Part of the Russian emigration to Israel, maybe.

“Your boss is waiting for us.”

The lead guard murmured in Hebrew into a shoulder-mounted radio.

Five minutes passed before the door beside the main gate opened, and Salome stepped out. Despite himself, Wells couldn’t help but notice that she wore a black T-shirt and calf-length gray pants that showed off her best feature, her smoothly muscled arms and legs.

“Senator. What a pleasant surprise. I’m Adina.”

She smiled at Wells. He recognized the look from Volgograd. “John. Wonderful to see you again. Are you carrying a weapon?”

“To a fancy place like this? ’Course not.”

“You don’t mind if we check.”

Wells stepped up, spread his hands against the wall. The bodyguard wanded him with a metal detector, then frisked him, a thorough, two-handed job, down one arm and the other from wrist to pits, around the torso. He squatted low and came up from the ankles. He reached mid-thigh and Wells had a moment of worry. But with a couple inches to spare, he pulled off.