The Counterfeit Agent (33 page)

Wells raised his Glock, fired through the windshield, again, again, until the back of the merc’s head exploded. The machine pistol fell from his hands and clattered against the hood. His corpse sagged off the wall, his upper body leaning forward, his legs still pinned. Wells shoved the BMW into reverse, feathered the gas. And went nowhere. He reached for the starter and then remembered that deploying airbags automatically killed a car’s battery and cut its engine. He was stuck in a dead car.

The front and back passenger-side windows exploded almost simultaneously, kicking glass through the car like a burst piñata. Mason. Wells had forgotten him. He couldn’t be more than twenty feet away.

Get out.
Wells popped open his door and twisted his body onto the pavement so that he faced the BMW. Mason was somewhere on the other side, though Wells couldn’t see him. The driver’s-side window exploded in a rain of glass over Wells’s head.

He grabbed the machine pistol, lifted it sideways, squeezed the trigger, firing blindly across the car, five shots and then five more, anything to force Mason away. Wells didn’t know how big a magazine the H&K had, probably thirty- or forty-round. Most of them had to be gone. He still couldn’t see Mason, but he heard a grunt and wondered if he’d scored. Then footsteps backing off, and more shots.

Wells edged to the back of his ruined BMW and peeked out over the trunk. Mason was crouched maybe fifty feet away behind the other BMW. Wells wondered why he hadn’t simply taken off and then realized he must not have the key.

Mason saw him peeking. And waved.

In answer, Wells popped off a single shot with the Glock. He felt like one of those dumbass jihadis he’d trained beside in Afghanistan, pistol in one hand, H&K in the other. All he needed was a sword strapped to his belt.

Mason appeared content to wait. He crouched silently, his pistol propped on the trunk, almost daring Wells to come at him. He raised his head long enough for Wells to see that he was smiling.
Enjoying
himself. Somehow the smirk made Wells think of Evan and Heather. Maybe Duto had messaged him. Maybe they were safe. But Wells couldn’t afford to take his eyes off Mason long enough to find out. The thought of the phone in his pocket maddened him. He forced himself to forget it, focus on the problem at hand.

Mason’s grin widened. Like he knew exactly what Wells had just done. Like he’d read Wells’s mind. “What now?” Mason said.

“Put the pistol on the ground, walk out where I can see you, and lie prone. It’s over.”

“Please.”

Shots echoed from the front of the building.

“He’s out now,” Mason said. “Coming around the building. He comes up my side, we’ll get in this car and drive away. He’s got the key. He comes up your side, he’ll be behind you and we’ll have you.”

“Whatever happens to me, this game you’re running, it’s done.”

“You don’t know what happened today in Tehran.”

“Tell me.”

“You don’t have me in custody, you don’t have anything—”

As if on cue, the first siren sounded, European-style,
woo-oo, woo-oo,
a long way off—

Mason’s head cocked toward the sound. It was a small mistake.

Wells left the H&K on the trunk and stood with the Glock in both hands and sighted Mason’s head and locked in and squeezed the trigger three times,
one two three,
the pistol solid in his hands. Mason raised his own pistol and managed to get one round off before Wells’s second shot caught him in the jaw and tore through his throat. He dropped the pistol and sat on his ass on the cracked pavement. Wells ran for him, ready to put him down if he managed to raise the pistol. But every time he lifted it off the ground, it slipped through his fingers like it weighed a thousand pounds.

Wells knelt beside him, put the Glock to Mason’s forehead. The blood leaked out of his mouth and half his jaw lay on the pavement next to him.

“Month ago, I didn’t even know you existed.”

Mason grunted.

“We were both better off. Any last words?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Mason whispered.

Wells shoved the gun in what was left of Mason’s mouth and put the pistol against his soft palate and pulled the trigger.

—

He ran back to the second merc he’d killed, the one he’d pinned against the wall. The guy’s pants were soaked with blood, but Wells sifted through his pockets until he found a BMW key fob. Mason and the first guy he’d killed had carried keys to the car Wells had wrecked, so this fob must belong to the undamaged sedan.

Once the police arrived and found these corpses, the game would be over. It would have to be. Whatever Mason had meant about Tehran, the fact that his body was here would prove beyond doubt that he’d faked his own death. Everything else would follow. The obvious conclusion would be that he’d killed James Veder and that he’d been running an op here. The agency and White House would have to throw out the evidence the mole had given them.

Wells slipped into the undamaged BMW, pushed the starter. The engine came to life. As it did, the phone he’d taken from the guards buzzed. He pulled it, looked down. A text from Duto. Two words.
Everyone safe.

He put the car in reverse, swung around, cruised for the gate. He put down the windows and let the winter air rush in. Outside the gate he found a paved two-lane road. He turned right, toward the power lines and highway, already thinking of his next move. He’d have to call Duto, arrange to get out of Turkey.

He had driven halfway to the power lines when he saw two cars speeding toward him. Another BMW, followed by a Mercedes, two men in the front seats of each. As the cars blew past, the drivers looked at him like they recognized him but couldn’t figure out why. Wells had the same eerie feeling. Then he saw the woman sitting in the backseat of the Mercedes. The woman who’d captured him, who’d put the needle in his neck.

Good. Let her go to the factory, see what he’d done.
The police would take care of her, too.

Only later—much too late—would Wells realize he’d made a mistake. And not a small one.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

H
ow often have I said to you that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

Shafer and Duto sat in Duto’s suite in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the curtains open to a glimpse of the Capitol dome. It was nearly two a.m. Normally the Capitol complex would be empty at this hour. Tonight the echoing footfalls outside were constant, as aides scurried to their offices to put out press releases and figure out what their bosses should think and say about the attack.

Real surprises were even rarer in Washington than anywhere else. The never-ending war between congressional Democrats and Republicans was as tightly choreographed as a Hollywood fight scene, with the same goal: milking maximum audience response at minimum risk to the players. The White House used focus groups, polls, and trial balloons disguised as leaks to test public reaction to every move the President might make.

But tonight’s attack counted as a real surprise. Now CNN played silently on a television beside Duto’s desk, drones flying, men and women running along a broad boulevard. The words crawling below announced the arrival of a new global crisis:
PRESIDENT SETS ULTIMATUM OVER NUCLEAR PROGRAM . . . THREATENS WAR . . . DRONES STRIKE TEHRAN AIRPORT . . . IRAN FOREIGN MINISTER: ATTACK “CRUEL, COWARDLY, UNPROVOKED” . . .

Duto flicked off the television. “What are you talking about, Ellis?”

“Sherlock Holmes to Watson. Eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth? Good enough for a fictional nineteenth-century detective, good enough for me.”

“Point?”

“Motive is the key. Always. But we keep tripping on the same rock, the countries that want Iran’s nuclear program stopped bad enough to try this are our
allies
.”

Duto roused himself, rummaged in his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of Dewar’s and one glass.

“I would have thought Dewar’s beneath a connoisseur such as yourself.”

“Notice I’m not offering you any.” Duto poured an inch into the glass. “Wells gets out and you come right back to life with the sassy talk and everything else. It’s worse than a crush. You’re a groupie. Groupies don’t get to drink. And even worse, you’re repeating yourself. You’ve been talking about motive for two weeks. When do we get to the part I don’t know?”

“Eliminate the Mossad, every other national intelligence service that could do this as a false flag, who’s left?”

“Iran. Trying to get under our skin.”

“Makes even
less
sense. Why now? They have every reason to want to get the bombs here in secret.”

“So you’re telling me what? That Langley’s right, Reza’s real? After all this.”

“No. Reza tipped us to the Veder assassination, which Mason pulled. If Reza’s real, he and Mason aren’t on the same team. So why would Mason be in Istanbul now? Why kidnap Wells? Only possible explanation is that Mason and Reza are working together, Mason and his guys ran the earlier ops that Reza leaked. Now they’re watching Reza’s back. Ergo, Reza’s not real.”

Duto sipped his scotch. “So Reza’s fake, it’s not Iran, it’s not Israel, it’s nobody.”

“What’s left?”

“Remember at Langley, I tried to brain you with that depth gauge?”

“You weren’t actually hoping to
hit
me.”

Duto nodded.

“Okay, not Iran, not another intel service—”

“It’s us?”

Shafer was momentarily stumped. He had to admit he had never seriously considered that possibility. He turned the pieces to see if they fit. “Interesting idea . . . but no. Unless
us
is actually you, given how long ago it started. And who else would it be? Too complicated for DOD. State isn’t interested in starting wars.”

“NPR.”

Shafer laughed.

“Just tell me, Ellis.”

“If it’s not a national service, the only possibility left is a private group.”

“No. Way too expensive. Not just the ops, but the way they’ve covered their tracks. Coms, logistics, SOG-class operators. Low nine figures, minimum.”

“That’s my point. The money makes it improbable. Not impossible. Look at the evidence. A small team, and as far as we can tell, Mason did all the recruiting himself. They’ve gone to incredible lengths to make sure we never get pictures. Like they know that if a single thread unravels, it’s all over, because they’ve got no government protection. And the ops are medium-tech, not high.”

“Tell me who has two hundred million to spend on this. And don’t say a Saudi prince. Abdullah isn’t putting up with that nonsense anymore. Moving that much money is a problem, too. You gotta have a clean source.”

“Like a casino.”

Duto put down his scotch, closed his eyes, massaged his temples like he’d come down with the world’s worst migraine. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Shafer took advantage of Duto’s momentary blindness to grab his glass.

Duto opened his eyes. “Aaron Duberman. Am I right?”

Shafer raised the tumbler. “Salud, Vinny.”

“Gimme back my scotch.”

—

Aaron Duberman was a billionaire twenty-five times over, according to
Forbes
. In the nineties, he had turned around his failing casino company by rebranding it as the sci-fi-themed 88 Gamma and aggressively courting young Asian players. But it was Macao that had made Duberman one of the wealthiest men in the world. Along with Sheldon Adelson, Duberman had expanded into the former Chinese colony when more-established casino companies stayed away.

Now Duberman’s 88 Gamma dwarfed its competitors. The company ran casinos on six continents, an empire that reached from Sydney to Buenos Aires. Duberman’s fortune defied the imagination.

Two years before, he had married an Israeli model who at the time was precisely half his age, twenty-eight to fifty-six. The wedding was held in the Bahamas, on Gamma Key, Duberman’s private island. To entertain the eight hundred guests, he’d hired The Rolling Stones, The Who, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. He and his wife now had twin one-year-old boys. Besides Gamma Key, they divided their time between estates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, London, Cannes, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Hong Kong.

In the last election, Duberman had given $196 million to support the President’s campaign. No one had ever spent more. Political analysts still argued whether the President could have won without it. Yet Duberman had never publicly discussed what, if anything, he wanted in return.

During 88 Gamma’s first few years in Macao, Duberman had spent tens of millions of dollars to promote a better relationship between the United States and China. News organizations had questioned the spending, and human rights groups accused him of being a pawn of a totalitarian government and letting greed cloud his judgment. Duberman called them fools. “I’ll make just as much money in Macao even if there’s a new Cold War,” he said. He’d spent even more money to promote Israel’s ties to the United States, and been even more vocal.

But about five years ago, he had suddenly slashed his spending on both causes. And while he donated more money than ever to presidential and congressional campaigns, he refused to discuss politics.

“People come to my casinos to have a good time, they don’t care what I think about legalizing pot or the West Bank or health care,” he told
The Wall Street Journal
in his last interview, eighteen months before
.
“For every customer who likes what I say, I risk losing two more. So I decided to shut my mouth.”

“Okay, make the case,” Duto said.

“One. He can spare the money. Man spent forty million dollars on his wedding.”

“One.”

“Two. He has endless untraceable cash. Macao alone must handle millions of dollars in paper currency every day. The company as a whole has to be wiring hundreds of millions of dollars a week. Even if we were looking we couldn’t find the problem transfers.”

“Two.”

“Three. He’s got an open line to the President. Not saying the man does whatever he says, just that Duberman has a chance to push his views quietly.”

“Three.”

“Four. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he’s gone totally quiet about Israel? I found an op-ed he wrote for
Haaretz
six years back, he called Iran the greatest threat to both the Middle East and the United States and said America had to stand with Israel. He was so vocal, and now nothing? He cut off his China funding, too. Like he’s trying to keep anyone from wondering what he’s doing, why he’s spending all that money to get close to the President.”

“I’m not sure that’ll convince anyone. It’s too easy to say the guy just changed his mind, realized politics and casinos don’t mix.”

“Nobody changes their mind about anything past fifty.”

“Give me
something
that’s not open-source.”

“Five. When Mason went off the rails in Hong Kong, you know where he spent most of his time? None other than the 88 Gamma Macao, according to his file.”

“Thought he was fired for failing a drug test.”

“He also lost at least two and a half million dollars playing blackjack.”

“Nobody investigated?”

“There was no point. The money was his, an inheritance, and he hadn’t done enough work in HK to know anything anybody would pay for. Hassim Sharif, the captain of the
Kara Six
, he had a gambling jones, too. How much you want to bet the 88 Gamma Corporation got some of his cash?”

Duto reached for the Dewar’s bottle and tipped it to his mouth. He drew a long slug, nearly coughed it back, but sputtered it down.

“Nicely done,” Shafer said.

“Accusing the President’s biggest donor of treason. Next best thing to the man himself.”

“I’m right, Vinny.”

“I don’t disagree. In terms of actual evidence. We have a connection from Mason, who’s dead, as far as the seventh floor is concerned, to 88 Gamma Macao. Anything else?”

—

They sat in silence, Shafer sipping his glass, Duto sipping his bottle.

“Least you see why I didn’t tell you before,” Shafer said finally. “Why I said we were beat. Especially with Wells in the tank.”

“Maybe your boy got that picture of Mason on the way out.”

“Let’s hope so.” Shafer looked at his watch. “Wells called, what, two hours ago?”

“Yeah. I didn’t tell you yet, but he said Mason threatened his kid. And the ex, Heather. He made me promise to call the Feds, get them protected.”

“Tell me you did, Vinny.”

“Of course I did. Threatened to cut me up if I didn’t.”

“At least now I know why he rolled for them,” Shafer said.

“Point is, if Wells finds Mason, I seriously doubt the man will be alive for a debrief.”

“A body would do just fine.”