The Wolves (22 page)

Everyone in the room was itchy and wide-eyed except for Gideon and Wells, who stared at each other like two bucks about to lower their heads and charge. Wells had nothing in his hands, but he didn’t seem to care.

“This what you want?” he said. “Gunfight at the Hyatt.”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t. For Avi, Uri, Adina, and all the others—” Gideon spoke Hebrew to Wells’s English. They couldn’t possibly have understood each other, but they did all the same.

“They paid their money, they took the ride.” The words not cruel, but matter-of-fact. For the first time, Orli saw the steel under Wells’s skin, saw why Gideon, who didn’t fear anyone, feared him.

“You think you’re going to live forever?” Gideon said. “That you won’t be judged—”

“Enough,” Orli said. “Put that little thing back in your pants before I get up and take it from you. Then tell them what you know.”

“You don’t want to hear what I know.” An ironic smile curled Gideon’s lips. She knew he was right, she would regret whatever he had to say. But they had all gone much too far to turn back.

“Now.”

“Yes, Mrs. Duberman. Whatever you like.” Gideon stuffed the pistol inside his waistband. After a moment, the other men nodded at one another and holstered their weapons, their faces half embarrassed, half relieved.

Gideon sat next to Orli, leaned toward Shafer. “You’re right. Buvchenko came to us, offered this bargain, Aaron took it. He’s already delivered his first fish. A Chinese air force general, Cheung is his name, Cheung Han, very senior—”

“He turned a PLAAF general?” Shafer said, after the other American translated. “In a month? How?”

“Cheung likes little girls—”

“You misunderstood.” Orli’s voice sounded strange in her own ears. “He wouldn’t.” Speaking not of Cheung, but her husband. “He’s a good father—”

“I’m sorry, Orli, it’s true. He brought Cheung to the new casino, the VIP room.”

“It’s not even open.”

“Exactly. Brought him where no one could see and convinced him to admit what he wanted and gave him to the FSB. What happened after that, I don’t know, but it must have worked or the Russians wouldn’t be protecting him.”

“How little?”

“What?”

Gideon was silent. “The girls, how little?”

“Gideon, I’m not sure exactly. Not, you know, developed.” The shame made his voice a whisper.

“Prepubescent, you mean.
Children.
”

“It was only one—”

“Oh, good. Only one. And Aaron gave her to this general?” What had he said to her after he helicoptered back from Macao that night?
It worked.

“Orli, I swear, I don’t know what happened exactly. I didn’t want to be part of it. That’s why I wouldn’t go to Beijing with him today.”

What had her husband become? One step, another, the next . . . a man looked in the mirror and a wolf looked back. Now the tears came, and she was crying, not for herself but for him, the choices he’d made, the life he’d thrown away.

Yet beneath the sadness, fury. Aaron had no right to do this, betray her after what she’d told him about that day in Paris, make himself a criminal . . . to throw away the billions that belonged to their children. She hated thinking of the money so soon, but how could she not? It was overwhelming.

Though it hadn’t saved her husband.

She was finished with him. She wiped the tears, knew she wouldn’t cry again.

“I’m sorry,” Wells said. “People go crazy when they’re cornered.”

“Go to hell.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Then Shafer stood. “Now that we’ve all had a chance to
tell
each other how we
feel
—”

“You, too, old man—”

“Gideon, when was the last time Aaron met Buvchenko?”

Gideon waited for the translation. Then: “A few days ago. Four or five.”

“After Macao.”

“Correct. That was when Buvchenko told him to go to Beijing.”

“Do they have a contact number, a regular drop, anything like that?”

“I don’t think so. Buvchenko came to the mansion the first time, but that wasn’t set up, Aaron didn’t know he was coming. Since then, Aaron calls him or he calls Aaron. They saw each other a few times in Macao to arrange this thing with Cheung. Last time, at an office Aaron has in Kowloon.”

“You go every time?”

“So far. Two other FSB guys come to the meetings, too.” Gideon picked out two photos from the stack that Wells had shown Orli. “These two. Nikolai and Sergei. Nikolai’s the boss.”

“But Buvchenko handles Aaron?”

Gideon nodded.

“Do you have Buvchenko’s number, his email? Or the others’?”

“No. Probably on Aaron’s phone, but I’m not sure. Maybe he memorizes it.”

“If you asked him for it—”

“He’d wonder. He knows what I think of Buvchenko. You don’t have eyes on the Russians already? You have these pictures—”

Shafer ignored the question. “What about you?” To Orli. “Can you get his phone?”

“Sure. I know his passcode. No secrets in our family.” A smile died on her lips.

“Could he have a burner? A spare phone?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So will you?”

“Will I
what
?”

Shafer looked away from her. His exasperation might have been real, she couldn’t tell.

“Get his phone for us. At least tell us if you hear him call Buvchenko.”

She wanted to be out of this room, away from this man Shafer, his obnoxious questions, his demands.

“What if I don’t?”

“We can help you, too,” Wells said. “Protect you.”

“How long? A month? Six months? I betray my husband, betray the Russians. You forget about what I’ve done soon enough. They never do.”

“You don’t want to help us, don’t,” Shafer said. “Either way, it might be best if you took your children to Israel as soon as possible.”

“And you kill Aaron?”

“We won’t be inviting him to any Fourth of July parties.”

She shook her head:
Answer me.

“It’s a long shot, but if we can find a way to work with him we will,” Wells said.

“Use him against the Russians and the Chinese, you mean.” She was surprised how little she cared. “Something I don’t get. My husband told me you used to work for the CIA, but you don’t anymore.”

“You can assume we speak for the government,” Shafer said.

Now she saw. “The President wants to kill him without making the Russians mad.”

“The President prizes flexibility.”

“And nobody’s more flexible than we are,” Wells said.

She stood. “I’m going home, to talk to my husband—”

“That’s a mistake.”

“You’re afraid he’ll tell me you’re lying?”

“I’m afraid you’ll start something you can’t stop.”

“You can’t seriously expect I’ll desert him without talking to him.”

“I thought he was in Beijing to meet the general, anyway,” Shafer said to Gideon.

“Yes,” Gideon said, after the translation. “But not staying over. Home tonight. He might be back already.” He looked at Orli. “I’ll pick up the boys. You go to Tel Aviv.”

“You’re a bigger fool than he is if you think I’d trust you after this.” Anyway, she wanted to hear what Aaron had to say for herself. After five years and two kids, she owed him that much. Maybe Shafer and Wells had lied.

Though she knew they hadn’t.

“When you decide what to do—” Shafer handed her a card, two mobile numbers, two email addresses. “Friendly advice. Sooner is better than later.”

“For me or my husband?” She walked out without waiting for the answer.

—

A
FTER SHE LEFT
, Shafer dismissed the other Americans, grabbed his phone.

“I need a report on a Chinese general named Cheung Han, PLAAF, yes . . . Glad you’ve heard of him, that’s your job. I’d like everything we have. In one hour . . . Yes, an hour. Pull your thumb out of your ass.” He hung up without waiting for an answer.

“Channeling Duto?” Though Wells couldn’t entirely blame Shafer for the attitude. After so many years on the margins, they finally had the full weight of the agency behind them. They’d had seven operatives on this floor, and they could have had more. They would leave Narita just after midnight on an agency charter, clear HKIA in the morning with clean passports—and, even more impressive, clean fingertips.

The Hong Kong immigration checkpoints had fingerprint scanners, of course. But the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology had found a way to beat the scanners, millimeter-thick molds made of a combination of silicon and gelatin. The molds carried real prints from the FBI’s fingerprint database. The agency used prints only from people who had died before 2000, a ghoulish but effective way to be certain that the prints weren’t already in immigration databases.

The agency’s engineers vacuum-packed the molds in sterile plastic containers about the size used to store contact lenses. They could be carried in a diplomatic pouch or even mailed and stored at room temperature for years. The molds were single-use, but the agency made dozens of copies of each unique print. That way an operative could clear immigration repeatedly with the same print and thus the same passport and identity.

Because the molds were so thin, they easily warmed to human body temperature, and the gelatin had conductive properties similar to human skin. The combination meant that they could easily fool even third-generation fingerprint scanners that measured temperature and electrical resistance—though most airports still relied on basic devices that did little more than photograph prints and check their whorls and ridges against their databases.

With more and more immigration agencies deploying scanners, the molds had proven incredibly useful. Every station now carried
them. Best of all, an operative who ran into border trouble for some other reason could simply put finger to tongue. The gelatin and silicone dissolved within seconds and left no trace. Of course, he’d then be stuck with his real fingerprints.

Wells had tested the molds at Langley before coming to Tokyo. As far as he could tell they were foolproof. And as much as working for the agency had frustrated him, he had to admit that its technical wizardry made life in the field easier.

In the morning, they would meet with Garry Wright, who was even now trying to find Buvchenko. Unfortunately, the Russian seemed to have gone to ground. As always, language skills remained a problem for the agency, and Hong Kong station had only three field officers who spoke Cantonese. They were watching the Russian consulate in downtown Hong Kong, but they hadn’t spotted Buvchenko in a week. Another technical problem, this one easily solvable if they could convince Gideon or Orli to give them Buvchenko’s phone number. The NSA’s ability to track mobile signals was astonishing, and the FSB was using rudimentary techniques to communicate with Duberman. Maybe because it didn’t expect him to last long.

But of course Shafer had alienated Orli, their best lead.

“You didn’t need to push her that way,” Wells said.

“She wasn’t exactly jumping to help us.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t been such a jerk.”

“You and your supermodel crushes. He told her what he’d done and she got on a plane and went halfway around the world with him. Don’t give me that kids-need-Daddy crap. She thought they were untouchable.”

“She doesn’t think that anymore.”

“Yeah, and she’s not the only one. Gideon’s awful twitchy for a pro. Get the feeling he’s had it with the boss man?”

“Wonder what he meant about owing him.”

Shafer reached for his phone. “I’ll ask the geniuses if they can find anything.”

“We shouldn’t have let her go, Ellis. She’s in way over her head.”

“She’s free, white, and twenty-one, she can do what she likes.”

“Think she’ll call?”

“No way she goes down with him. But maybe she just takes the kids and goes back to Israel on her own, says to hell with all of us.”

“I don’t have any problem with that.”

“Don’t get too hooked, John. We may need to squeeze her yet.”

HONG KONG

O
rli spent the flight from Tokyo turning over what that ridiculous little man Shafer had told her, trying and failing to find some answer for her husband’s behavior. She landed at 6 a.m., seeing spots from exhaustion, not sure how she could face him, knowing she had no choice. “You should have told me,” she said to Gideon, as he led her onto the helicopter that would bring them to the Peak.

“Try not to judge him. He was desperate.”

As if desperation absolved her husband’s sins. His betrayal.
We’re partners,
she’d told him in Tel Aviv. All she’d asked, in return for running across the globe with him. Instead he’d turned to the Russians. Though he knew she hated them.

Then the girl.

She didn’t understand how he could have betrayed her so completely. Or how she could have known so little about him.

—

A
NOTHER STORM WAS FORMING
off the coast and the winds shoved their helicopter sideways as it flew over the bay and toward the Peak.
As they bounced, Orli thought of a model she’d known, Renee. A surfer’s body, short spiky hair, real muscles. She worked mostly for alternative brands that specialized in girl power. They didn’t compete for the same jobs, no jealousy, so they were real friends, rare in the business. They got married within a month of each other, tried to get pregnant around the same time, too. A friendly competition.

A few weeks after Orli found out she was pregnant, Renee called.
Ever get dizzy and fall down the first couple of weeks?
She was waking up with night sweats, too. Nothing like that had happened to Orli.
Go see your gyno.
Who checked her out, sent her to a clinic for scans.
Routine, but let’s do it today just to be sure.

By dinner, Renee had her diagnosis: a glioblastoma multiforme, an inoperable brain tumor.

Orli saw her the next day for coffee, which quickly became cocktails, because why not. Renee told Orli the story tightly, coolly, not a single tear, like she was talking about someone else, someone she didn’t know all that well. The cosmic unfairness seemed impossible. Orli instinctively focused on the practicalities, finding an answer.

“Is there anything? There must be something—”

“We all pretend the world doesn’t have teeth, Orli. That it never wants a sacrifice.”

“How’s Jake taking it?” Her husband.

“Haven’t told him.”

For once, Orli’s face betrayed her. “I know it’ll tear him up, but you need to tell him.”

“You think it’s for
him
I’m not saying?” Renee laughed. “If I don’t”—her voice shrank, the humor gone now—“then it’s not real. You see?”

She was dead eight months later.

—

N
OW
O
RLI WAS THE ONE
staring into the world’s maw. Now she understood why Renee had wanted to stay silent, to erase the truth by ignoring it. The logic of a child sticking her fingers in her ears as a tornado shrieked close.

The mansion was silent as she walked through the family quarters. For the first time, the absolute mechanical perfection of the place struck her, the walls skim-coated with nontoxic paint, floors radiant-heated, the air filtered and allergen-free. Everything just so. Did Aaron see her the same way? Another perfect accessory? Did he even know why he wanted her?

The twins slept down the hall from the master suite. She had insisted that they live in the same room. They’d been together inside her, and she wanted to keep them together as long as she could. They lay side by side in their little cedar beds, handcrafted in Sweden for twelve thousand dollars each.

Her life had turned absurd without her notice.

As they often did, the boys had turned in the night to face each other. They were a beautiful pair. Boaz took after her, blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed, verging on pretty. Rafael was his father’s son, brown eyes, curly hair, even Aaron’s square chin. She kissed them, tasting the faintest sweat on their foreheads. They were all that mattered. She backed silently out of the room before they woke.

She was almost surprised to find Aaron in bed and asleep, not pretending, his breathing steady and even. She edged between the thousand-count cotton sheets, put a hand on his naked hip, slipped her fingers around him, felt him stir.

Whatever desire she had for him was long gone. She squeezed him
hard, nothing erotic in the motion, and he yelped, sat up, grabbed for her arm. She slipped out of bed, stood above him, watched without mercy as he tried to gather himself. His skin was looser than she remembered, his hair grayer.

“Is it true?”

“Is
what
true?” He sat up. The steroids and the workouts gave him a younger man’s muscles, but they couldn’t change his sagging skin. He tried to stare her into submission, but she was used to men staring at her. “I don’t know what Gideon told you—”

All the answer she needed. “It wasn’t Gideon.”

“Just tell me.” He’d never spoken to her this way before, clipped, angry, like she was an employee who’d screwed up.

“That meeting in Tokyo, the Americans set it, Wells and that other one, Shafer, they told me about you and the FSB.”

She realized her mistake as the words left her lips. Better to let Aaron believe Gideon had told her. Now he knew the Americans were moving against him.

“You went to meet
Wells
?”

“I didn’t know he’d be there, I thought the meeting was real, they set it up.”

“He told you a story and you believed him?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Gideon agreed.”

“No, no, no.” As if she and Gideon had betrayed him rather than the reverse. He padded across the bedroom to his walk-in closet.

“Tell me,” she said to his back, quietly. Though what could he tell her that she didn’t already know? Her anger was fading more quickly than she could have imagined. The poets were wrong. The opposite of love wasn’t hate. It was the absence of hate, and every emotion.

The opposite of love was death.

“You know I saw Cheung yesterday.” He stepped out of the closet wearing a gray T-shirt and the silk boxers he favored. How had he ever seemed anything but ridiculous to her? “He wants to help us.”

“Us, you and the Russians?”

“I don’t know exactly what Wells told you. But yes. I’ve talked to the Russians.” He sounded almost bored, like she was wasting his time. “They’ve offered us citizenship.”

So Wells and Shafer had told the truth. But Aaron’s confirmation made the prospect less real instead of more. Like a camera crew was about to jump out of the closet shouting
Surprise!

“Live in Siberia?”

“Diplomatic passports. We could live anywhere.”

“You think the Americans will respect that? If they know you’re working for the FSB?”

“This isn’t the Americans. It’s Wells and his friends—”

“They said they’re working officially this time
,
Aaron.”

“They’re lying.”

Orli thought of all the men she’d seen in Tokyo, the hotel suite, the way they’d convinced her agent to play along. Tiffany was no fool, she would have insisted on talking to someone at CIA headquarters before agreeing. “I don’t think so.”

“Either way, they can’t do anything about it, not unless the President is ready go public with everything. If he was going to do that, he would have already. I’m not worried about the Americans. The FSB can handle them.”

“When were you going to tell me? When we landed in Moscow?” Like she was a child. She’d believed he respected her for more than her looks. Maybe he’d believed it, too. They’d been wrong, both of them.

“Don’t you see? It would solve everything.”

What she saw was that he’d lost his mind, caught himself in a fantasy world, pretending as always he could push reality aside by sheer force of will. Not this time. This time, reality wasn’t going anywhere.

“You think you can dream the Russians away?”

“What are you talking about, Orli? Let me play this out, it’s
working
—”

“Sure. Anything else you want to tell me?”

He looked at her in apparent sincerity. “I don’t think so.”

“The girl? The one you gave Cheung.”

“There wasn’t any girl. I mean, yes, but she was a decoy. Nothing happened to her—”

“How old? Gideon called her a child.”

“Gideon never saw her, and I didn’t, either. That’s the truth, Orli. Never even met her. She was Vietnamese, she’s already back in Hanoi. We worked out a plan, they promised—”

“Oh, they
promised
. What was her name?”

He reached for her. She raised her hands.

“Tell me you know her name, Aaron.”

“I made the best choice I could, Orli. For us.”

“I’m taking Boaz and Rafael to Tel Aviv.”

“Not now.”

The certainty in his voice unsettled her. He was telling, not asking.

“The boys need a father. A man in their lives. And we need to be together.”

“Remember. When this started. You said I could leave anytime?” No. She didn’t need permission. She tried again. “Keep the prenup, the money—” His billions didn’t matter, they were as tainted as everything else. “We’re going home. Where we belong.”

“We belong
together
, Orli, we’re a family. You’re not thinking clearly. Buvchenko will tell you himself, how it’s going to work. The
Russians need me, they need me as much as I need them. We’re in this together
.”

“So we’re all partners, you and me and Buvchenko?”

“Mamma! Mamma!” A cry from down the hall. Rafael. He usually woke first.

“Go check on our son, give me five minutes.” He grabbed her forearm, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to remind her that even at twice her age he was far stronger than she. He pushed her toward the door, slammed it closed.

She wanted to believe she was still on the plane, sleeping. But the finger-shaped welts already rising on her arm said otherwise, the cause-and-effect peculiar to reality.

—

B
OTH BOYS WERE STIRRING NOW
. Seeing them, she realized she’d been a fool for fearing she’d ever use again. Heroin had been a cheap and bright and ultimately useless pleasure. Her love for these two brought her joy without end. She didn’t want to take them from Aaron, but he couldn’t undo what he’d done. He would understand.

Even if he didn’t, he couldn’t keep her, this was Hong Kong, not Saudi Arabia, she wasn’t a prisoner, she wasn’t his property. Maybe he wouldn’t let her use the Dreamliner, maybe she and the twins would fly commercial for a change. The thought made her smile, and Rafael sensed the change in her mood.

“Mamma.” He blinked open his wide brown eyes. “Mamma.”

“Raffy.” She scooped him up, thinking now about how she could get out of Hong Kong, what to leave and take—

Aaron walked in, iPhone in hand.

“Mikhail Buvchenko would like to speak to you.”

She took the handset, ended the call, threw the phone past him
into the hall as hard as she could. It smacked the wall and her husband looked at her dead-eyed, as her agent had that day in Paris.

“We’re going.”

“You’re going nowhere.” He stood in the doorway. In her arms, Rafael screamed
“Mamma! Mamma!”
with big gasping sobs.

She tried to push past. He didn’t move. “You want to desert me, I can’t stop you, Orli. The boys, they stay.”

She reached for Boaz. The boys were big now, but she could carry them both—

“Have fun trying to get them out of Hong Kong without passports.”

She stopped moving like a cartoon character mid-frame, one foot in the air. Even infants couldn’t travel without passports. The twins had had theirs since they were three months old. Rafael’s photo made even the crustiest immigration officers smile, he was curly-haired and wide-eyed and grinning toothlessly like a little old man.

She put him down in his Swedish bed, pushed past Aaron, ran for their bedroom. She kept the passports in her nightstand with her own, they’d been there the day before when she went to Tokyo. She was sure, she’d seen them when she grabbed hers.

Gone.

She rifled through the drawer, pulled it out and tipped it over, a thief in a hurry, scattering change and phone chargers and a dusty spare tampon. Down the hall, Rafael screamed, and now Boaz had picked up the chant,
Mammamammamamma
—

She ran to them. She felt fear beneath her rage, like she had stepped off a forest path into a hidden swamp, the ground soft, sucking at her shoes, tugging them off. She was alone, no one to throw her a rope or a branch, she needed to slow down, no panic, or before she knew it, the mud would take her, a strange slow-motion death—

Instead of hitting her husband, her first instinct, she reached for Rafael and picked him up. She turned for Boaz, but Aaron grabbed him first. They stood on either side of the beds, patting their sobbing children, a temporary truce. Holding Boaz seemed to soothe both son and father. Aaron had always been a good dad in an old-school way, not much of a diaper-changer or a bottle feeder, but he loved the kids and they loved him.

The stress is making him crazy, that’s all. He’s afraid to lose them.
She wanted to ask about the passports, but challenging him wouldn’t help. Anyway, she knew where they had to be. Besides the vault in the panic room, he had a safe in his walk-in closet. He must have hidden them when she was in here with Rafael.

Every beautiful woman had experience dealing with irrational men. “Let’s figure this out.” She made her voice quiet, soothing. “Together.”

“Everything’s going to be okay.” His voice mirrored hers, soft now, almost tender.

“I just think, wouldn’t it be better to wait for you in Israel. You’ll be a hero when you come back—” She stopped, knowing she was laying the honey on too thick.

“We left together and it’s better if we come home that way. Besides, you can’t expect me to trust my kids to a junkie.”

One word, and the quicksand was waist-deep. She didn’t know what to say, what he knew,
how
he knew. No one knew.

“You think I didn’t check you out before I proposed? Your little habit.”

“I don’t have a
habit
, Aaron. Never did.”