The Wolves (20 page)

The taller paramilitary extended a hand. “Mr. Wells. I’m Mr. Black. This is Mr. Blue.”

“Inventive.”

“Thank you.” The answer was so perfectly deadpan that Wells didn’t know at first if Black was in on the joke. “Flight okay?”

“I get antsy when guys like you act polite.”

“Makes you feel better, I’m only doing it on orders. This way.” Black led Wells toward the larger of the two jets, a G5. Its cockpit and cabin lights were on and a Jetway was already in place. Black waved Wells up the steps.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re airborne.”

“Now.”

“A stop in Anchorage to refuel. Then Andrews.”

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.
Not for the first time, Wells found himself stunned by the power of the U.S. government. From a cell in the middle of the ocean to the homeland in less than a day, no explanation given, no passport required.

“What’s at Andrews?”

“My job is to get you there, full stop.”

“Has something happened to Duberman?”

“Who?”

“Your phone.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need your phone. To make a call.” Wells spoke slowly, being a jerk now, not caring. “No call, no jet.”

“How about I do it—”

“Promise, all that gay porn on your browser, your secret’s safe with me.”

Black fished an iPhone from his pocket.

Shafer picked up on the first ring.

“Ellis.”

“John.” For a change, Shafer sounded genuinely excited. “Where are you?”

“Just landed in Manila. POTUS had me on an aircraft carrier.”

“We would have found you.”

Maybe.
“I’m here with two guys who want me to get on another plane. They claim we’re going home, Andrews. You know anything about it?”

“I do not. But give me the tail number.”

Wells did.

“See you soon.”

—

E
IGHTEEN HOURS LATER
, the G5 touched down in Maryland. They had crossed the international date line over the flight, gained twelve hours, so it was around noon, a beautiful late spring day in the mid-Atlantic. Not that the sun did Wells much good. The Gulfstream was nice, but he’d hardly slept. He shuffled like a zombie to the tarmac, where four men in suits waited. Wells pegged them as FBI or Secret Service. They guided him to a black Suburban and set off, emergency lights flashing. Wells didn’t bother asking where they were taking him. He was unsurprised when they came up 295 and over the Anacostia and ten minutes later swung onto West Executive Drive, the White House looming.

Duto and Shafer waited in the Oval Office anteroom.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Shafer said.

“How’d they get you out of Hong Kong?” Duto said. “Garry Wright swore up and down he had no idea—”

“He didn’t. MI6 picked me up, put me on a boat, handed me over. Long story.”

“Doesn’t sound that long.”

“I guess not. You have any idea what this is about? I haven’t seen a newspaper or a website in a month. Something happen to Duberman?”

The door to the Oval Office opened, and Donna Green waved them in. “Gentlemen.”

Again the President sat on the yellow couch in the center of the room. Again a pitcher of water and glasses waited on the center table. But this time, the President’s posture felt different to Wells. Not quite defeated, but worn. Like he was done acting.
Good.
Wells couldn’t take another
just-trust-me
performance.

“Please, sit.”

“That was a neat trick with MI6,” Wells said. “Sir.”

“You were treated all right?”

“Held illegally, incommunicado, no trial, no hearing. Aside from that, it was fine. Sir.”

“You killed Duberman’s guards in Hong Kong last month.”

“I’m not answering that. Sir. Unless you’ve suspended the Constitution here, too. Sir.”

The repeated
sir
s were provoking a tic around the President’s right eye.

“Why are we here?” Shafer said.

The President looked to Green.

“Must be bad if you don’t want to tell us yourself,” Shafer said.

“The Kremlin has asked for asylum on behalf of Aaron Duberman,” Green said.

Shafer cupped a hand to his ear. “
Ring-ring.
Hello? Yes. I see. Cluck you, too. Adios.” He pretended to hang up. “Sorry. Those were the chickens.”

“Chickens?”

Shafer pointed a finger at Green, though everyone in the room knew it was meant for the President. “Coming home. To roost.”

“Do I get to tell you what happened now?” Green explained that Paul Kutsunov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, had called two days before to tell her Duberman was applying for political asylum in Russia. Based on its review, the Kremlin believed he had a well-founded fear of persecution, Kutsunov said.

“I said, ‘Well-founded or well-funded?’ He didn’t think that was funny. I told him we didn’t think that Aaron Duberman made a credible political prisoner. Considering he’s the biggest donor in the history of American politics. I said I didn’t know why he thought Russia
would protect him, considering how Russia has treated Jews over the years.”

“Not bad,” Shafer said.

“He said that if we had contrary evidence, the Kremlin would gladly examine it. But not in private, since as a rule asylum hearings are public in Russia. Which is nonsense. He said Aaron Duberman’s human rights were his only concern. He said that even before the Kremlin made a final decision, it had given Duberman preliminary protected diplomatic status—”

“Something else that doesn’t exist—” the President said.

“And the Kremlin would view quote-unquote interference with Duberman as equivalent to action against one of its own diplomats.
He will have our full protection.
I told him I hoped Duberman would enjoy the winters in the Moscow. And that was that.”

“I guess your first move is to inform the Russians about our friend’s role in our little Iranian misadventure,” Shafer said. “Let them know who they’re dealing with.”

“Of course they know—” The President stopped himself, leaned toward Shafer. “I’m tired of your attitude, Ellis.”

“Me, I’m tired of you holding people without trial. Was John ever going to see a judge? Or was this a permanent vacation?”

“Eight months,” Wells said, “if I didn’t get moved to another carrier the night before we landed.”

Shafer and the President stared holes in each other until Duto clapped his hands and startled them both.

“I take it we all view this the same way,” Duto said. “The Russians know what happened. They’ve decided to play banker of last resort for our friend. In return, he’s letting them use his casinos as honey traps. They figure you won’t go public, because you haven’t so far.
Duberman knows this will end badly, but he doesn’t see any other options. Especially with John running around shooting his bodyguards.”

“More or less,” Green said.

“I further take it that they are correct?” Duto said to the President. “That you
still
won’t go public? That you intend to ride this ship all the way down.”

The President looked at Wells. “I want you to kill him.”

“I’m right
here
,” Duto said. “At least wait until I take a piss to put out the hit.”

“Bunch of comedians.”

“No, that’s Graham Greene,” Shafer said.

“Yesterday I was locked up in a floating dungeon because you were protecting your buddy,” Wells said. “Now he’s gone too far, and the Russians have you scared to use the agency, so you come running. Everybody’s favorite off-the-books option. And I’m supposed to pretend we’re friends.”

“What can I say? I was wrong. I didn’t think—”

“That it would leak? That someone would figure out how to use it?”

“I understand how it looks—”

“Just tell me,” Wells said. “You ever plan to take care of Duberman?”

The President’s silence was the only answer Wells needed.

“You get to clean this one up all by yourself.”

“John,” Green said. “However we got here, this is what you wanted, right? Nobody in your way. Line him up, take him down however you like. You finally get the guy at the top.”

“Not quite.” Wells stood, turned for the door.

Green opened her attaché case, came out with a slim file. “I wondered if the Russians really are protecting Duberman or just bluffing. So I asked Garry Wright to check our surveillance on the FSB station
over there. Look for an uptick in action, new faces. NSA pulled some files, too.”

“I care because—”

Green handed the file to Wells. “Anyone you know?”

She obviously knew the answer, because Wells didn’t have to look past the first photo.
Mikhail Buvchenko.
He hadn’t even bothered to disguise himself, not that he could. He was big enough to be visible from space. Wells wondered why the Russians were using Buvchenko. He wasn’t a real FSB officer. The answer could only be that they knew of his connection to Salome and Wells.

“What happened to the Red Notice?”

“Best guess, they gave him a diplo passport.”

“Donna tells me if he’d had his way, you’d be doing time in a Russian prison right now,” the President said.

And if you had yours, I’d be doing it in the Pacific Ocean.

“Two for the price of one,” Green said.

“Could you lay it on any thicker?” Wells said.

But Green and the President had pulled the winning card from the bottom of the deck. Wells wanted Buvchenko even more than he wanted the President to pay. “I’ll think about it.” Wells knew as he spoke that he’d already agreed. Like any good whore, he was only arguing over price.

“Take your time.”

—

I
NEVITABLY
, after they left the White House, Shafer dragged Wells back to Shirley’s. The bar hadn’t improved. In fact, Wells could have sworn that no one in the place had moved in the four months since their last trip. Again they sat at the bar and Shafer ordered a shot for himself and Bud for Wells.

“Do me a favor and don’t get sloppy this time,” Wells said.

“I wasn’t sloppy.”

“You practically confessed your love for Orson Nye.”

“I only said he smelled good.” Shafer sniffed at the shot. “Speaking of, should I be concerned about the faint odor of turpentine I’m picking up out of this?”

“At your age, a preservative is probably helpful.”

“The answer I hoped to hear.” Shafer put the glass to his lips. “Umm. Wonderfully terrible. So how do we do this?”

“I didn’t hear myself agree to anything.”

“We all did.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of being used?”

“Never.”

Wells tried to imagine weaknesses in Duberman’s security. None came to mind.

“What about Orli?” Shafer said.

“I told you, from what Roberts said, she was on board.”

“Was,” Shafer said. “Maybe she reconsidered after two guys she knew got shot in the street. If we can find a way to talk to her without him finding out—”

“She’ll go running back to him.”

“Worst case, that leaves us where we are now.”

“Fine. You have any way to reach her?”

Shafer raised his empty glass. “Matter of fact, I do.”

BEIJING

D
uberman had made Buvchenko promise the FSB wouldn’t let Cheung hurt any girls. Instead, he and the Russians would trick Cheung into thinking that he’d had sex. The drugs and booze would erase Cheung’s memory. As added leverage, Duberman would tape Cheung admitting his pedophilic desires.

You’re sure he’ll say what he wants,
Buvchenko said.

By the time it happens, he’ll be blind drunk. Plus he’ll think it’s just me and him.

Are you sure? You can do this?

Yes.

I hope.

—

A
ND
D
UBERMAN HAD
. One week ago this night. He’d badgered Cheung into confessing what he craved, then gave him a shot of tequila spiked with Dilaudid, a powerful opiate. The drug hit Cheung in seconds. He staggered toward the baccarat table, pupils pinprick-tight, tongue
lolling like an overheated dog’s. After Chou-Lai led him away, Duberman gave Xiao and Jian a million-dollar plaque each, warned them never to tell anyone what they’d seen.

Then Duberman was alone. And exhausted. The fire stairs smelled of freshly poured concrete as he walked up to the helipad atop the Sky Tower. Only a waist-high wall protected him from the five-hundred-fifty-meter drop. A southerly wind swept away the smog from a thousand Guangdong factories. Beneath Duberman, casinos rose from land that had once been sea. From above they looked strikingly similar, Y-shaped forty-story hotels rising beside flat-roofed sheds big as city blocks. Underneath those sheds, casinos. Even at this hour, thousands of people stood inside them, casting chips on tables. Ants marching, only they were taking food
from
their nests. Above, Duberman, a wingless Icarus. Fitting that all his scheming had brought him here. Without Macao, he would have been just another billionaire.

—

T
HE TERRITORY
was a hilly speck of land bordered by the People’s Republic on one side, the South China Sea on the others. Portugal had controlled it for hundreds of years before returning it to China in 1999. Under Portuguese rule, a couple of grubby casinos had survived on Hong Kong day-trippers. The Chinese government decided to expand the business. It offered Western casino companies the chance at licenses. But established operators like MGM hesitated. Macao was run-down and corrupt, a distant second fiddle to Hong Kong.

Still, the opportunity intrigued Duberman. Gambling was practically the Chinese national sport. Yet the People’s Republic banned casinos within its borders. Macao would give them a chance to bet legally. Duberman saw Macao as a city-sized version of the Sizzlin’ Saloon, a
dump with potential and a great location. In 2001, he and another Vegas outsider, Sheldon Adelson, grabbed licenses.

The decision was the most lucrative of Duberman’s life. Wall Street analysts mocked him when he said Macao might one day be as big as the Las Vegas Strip. He was wrong. Within a decade Macao was far larger. As it exploded, so did 88 Gamma’s stock, and Duberman’s wealth. By the middle of the aughts, he was worth ten billion dollars. An unthinkable sum.

He had grown up middle-class. After World War II, his parents had emigrated from Shanghai to Atlanta. They were cautious and thrifty, and encouraged the same habits in their kids. At thirteen, Duberman bagged groceries at the local Winn-Dixie for spending money. A wrestling scholarship paid his college tuition. Into his thirties, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment near McCarran Airport. Aside from his appetite for women, he had no vices, no expensive habits. Mainly he worked. He enjoyed casinos, at once the most ethereal and the grittiest of businesses.

What do people buy from us?
he asked his new managers every year.
The regulars know they’ll walk out poorer than they entered.
They should, anyway. They’re buying the
chance to step out of themselves, live in the moment, risk everything on a card. Then the money runs out, the moment ends. We are the ultimate expression of consumer culture. We sell a product that doesn’t exist. They leave with nothing.
Yet if we do it right, they leave happy. They’re buying
time
.

Duberman wanted his customers to leave happy. But part of him hated them, too. For their stupidity. Their greed. Their inability to understand that their desires mattered not at all to the games they played. Math governed his palaces, and math alone would undo the people on the wrong side of the tables. They talked of running hot, but if they stayed too long a chill inevitable as death gripped them. Duberman
wished they would see his casinos as places to be entertained for a day or two. On the surveillance cameras, he recognized the ones who had given too much. They trudged out slow as cancer patients, glancing slyly over their shoulders at paradise lost. He took their blood by the gallon. Yet they wished for his grace as desperately as Adam and Eve.

His best customers were fools, and fools were hard to love.

He escaped the contradiction with logistics, making sure visitors had the best possible experience, however they gambled. Each 88 Gamma casino was a giant enclosed city, with malls and Broadway-sized theaters, serving thousands of meals and handling millions of dollars in cash every hour. Duberman learned to lavish attention and money where customers noticed, skimp where they didn’t. His obsession with details made his casinos even more popular. Ten billion dollars was only the start. The money flowed to him quick as air.

Inevitably, he picked up the trappings of wealth, mansions and bodyguards, modern art and classic cars. Yet he couldn’t escape the idea that somehow God had played a joke on him, giving him so much more money than he could ever spend. He found himself increasingly interested in his Jewish faith. He never forgot that if his parents hadn’t fled Vienna, the Nazis would have sent them to the concentration camps, and he would never have been born.

Duberman came to believe that only a powerful Israel could permanently keep Jews safe. He supported right-wing Israeli politicians. He bought mansions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and spent months every year in Israel. Then he met Salome. She worked for one of his politicians. Like him, she understood that an Iranian nuclear bomb was the greatest threat to the Jewish state. She proposed that Duberman pay for a plot to frighten the United States into attacking Iran. A false-flag operation, she called it.

The plan was the longest of long shots. It was also treason. Yet
Duberman agreed. Without sleeping on the choice, without wondering if Salome was trapping him somehow. As he made all his biggest decisions, borrowing from Jimmy the Roller, risking his fortune on Macao. In this way, he was like his customers, slapdash mystics who waggled their fingers and demanded more cards, whatever the odds.
I just knew a seven was coming.

Sure you did.

At the time, the decision seemed noble. Necessary, even. In retrospect, Duberman wondered if his fortune had changed him more than he knew. Had he unconsciously grown to believe that he was, if not God, at least a saint, anointed by the almighty dollar? He knew he’d had a harder time imagining his own death as the billions mounted. He couldn’t die. Men like him
didn’t
die.

Was it not his right to start a war?

With that choice, he’d thrown all the others away.

—

O
RLI
’
S MODELING SHOOT
in Australia had ended three days after Wells shot Peretz and Makiv. Duberman knew her bodyguards had told her about the killings. But when he called her, she didn’t answer or call back. Finally, on the third day, she texted:
Home tomorrow. Face-to-face.
Part of him wondered whether she was returning only to collect the boys and take them to Israel. He showed the text to Gideon.

“Did you say anything? About the Russians?”

“I work for you.”

“No half answers, Gideon.”

“Not a word. And I won’t.” Gideon shook his head:
You want to lie to your wife, it’s your business. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The next morning, Duberman waited at the VIP terminal at HKIA,
clutching a fat bouquet of blue orchids. Orli’s favorite. She stepped through the frosted glass doors of the immigration checkpoint tan and lean and more beautiful than ever, the sun shining from every strand of her honey-blond hair. No wonder he’d lost his perspective on his place in the universe. He tried to hug her. She raised her arms to fend him off, looked at him clinically, as she had that night in Tel Aviv when the Shin Bet came.

“How was the shoot? Was that little photographer there, the one you don’t like?”

“What happened?”

“Let’s do this at home.”

“What happened?”

“Not here. You’ll understand when I tell you the details.” He’d bet his fortune that the Chinese security services had this terminal bugged.

The eight-minute helicopter ride from Lantau Island to the Peak felt like a month. She led him straight to their bedroom after they landed. “Now.”

“You were never in danger, Orli.”

Her face tightened and he knew he’d made a mistake.

“You think I was
scared
?”

“Of course not—”

“Start again, then. It was Wells?”

“It must have been. It feels like a one-man show, and that’s his specialty. And the CIA wouldn’t aim for two random bodyguards.”

“That’s what you call them? Avi and Uri? After how many years?”

For the first time since they’d come to Hong Kong, Duberman felt irritated with her. “You know, I’m the one who had to identify them. The police came here, asked me about it. Wanted to know if I knew who did it.”

“Did you tell them about Wells?”

Duberman shook his head, explained how they were caught between the Hong Kong police, Wells, and the President. He didn’t mention the FSB.

“So what are you going to do?”

You.
Not
we
. He decided he needed to tell her the truth about Cheung. Part of it, anyway. “There’s a Chinese general, senior, who’s run into trouble at 88 Gamma. A lot of trouble—”

“You’re going to spy on the Chinese?”

A Mossad-trained technician swept the mansion for bugs each month. Reflective coatings covered its windows to defeat the laser microphones used by spy services to pick up the vibrations that voices created in glass. Still, Duberman found himself raising a finger to his lips.

“You see why I didn’t want to talk about this at the airport.”

“This can’t work, Aaron.”

“I have help.”

“From where?”

The letters
FSB
were on his lips. “I can’t tell you. Safer for us both. Truly.” Though he wanted her to ask again. If she did, he’d tell her, let her decide.

She didn’t. “If it works, what then? You trade what you find to the Americans and hope it’s enough to buy your freedom?”

“More or less.” Duberman wondered as he spoke whether her idea didn’t make more sense than Buvchenko’s bargain. Maybe he should go directly to the White House. But Wells and Duto would never agree, and Duto controlled the CIA. No. The Russians were all he had.

She looked past him to the city below. “If the police make us leave—”

“They’re bluffing, trying to pressure me.”

“
If.
I’m taking the boys back to Israel.”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Or never.
He didn’t understand how she could so casually threaten to take away their sons, his sons, after she’d promised to stay with him. No matter, though. Even if the police followed through on their threat, a Russian diplomatic passport would give them new options. London and New York would still be out, but Rio and even Paris might not be. However much she disliked Russia, once he showed her what he’d done, she would see he’d made the right choice.

“Time, Orli. That’s all I’m asking.”

She came to him, wrapped a hand around his neck. She seemed about to kiss him and her face was the world. She brushed her lips to his ear, whispered: “I’m not the one you have to worry about.”

—

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, Hargrove Lo, the chief of detectives for the Hong Kong police, came back to the mansion to blush his way through a ten-minute interview with Orli. He followed up the next morning with Duberman, polite but dogged, asking the same questions a dozen different ways. When the interview was done, Lo admitted that his detectives didn’t have a suspect. Their inability to make headway made Duberman’s own protestations of ignorance more convincing. Still, Duberman knew he needed to do more. He called Geoffrey Crandall, the lawyer handling his residency application.

Crandall was Hong Kong legal royalty. He’d argued more cases before the territory’s Court of Final Appeal than anyone else. “Aaron. I understand the police visited again—”

“Can you make a list of the best five or seven charities here? Ones above reproach?”

“Certainly. Tung Wah, Caritas—why, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“This week. I’m giving them two hundred million—no, three hundred million HK.”

“You want to pledge
—
”

“Not pledge.
Give.
As in, the money hits as soon as they accept. Split it however you like. Keep my name out of it.”

“I should probably hire another lawyer to handle it, then. Our relationship is no secret, and a donation of this size—”

Exactly.
“I’d like you to take care of it yourself.”

Crandall fell silent.

“I imagine you’d like to do this as quickly as possible,” he finally said.

“Correct.”

“I’ll send a list.”

—

C
RANDALL CALLED BACK
two days later, after Duberman made the donations.

“Aaron. I’m pleased to report that the police have dropped their threat of immediate deportation. However, you and your family still have to apply for a visa when the hundred-eighty-day waiver expires.” Duberman’s American passport gave him an automatic 180-day exemption from Hong Kong’s visa rules. The countdown had started when he arrived from Israel. “And the police plan to recommend that the immigration department reject that application. Of course, if circumstances change, their position might as well.”