The Wolves (24 page)

“Hello?” The word carried a thick Hebrew accent.
Gideon,
he mouthed to Shafer.

“This is John.”

“Are you in Hong Kong?”

“Yes.”

Wells listened. “When? All right. I’ll be there.”

He ended the call. “That was Gideon. He says Orli wants to meet at noon at the International Commerce Centre.” Another of the landmarks that Wells had memorized before coming to Hong Kong, the territory’s tallest skyscraper, more than fifteen hundred feet high. It was on the Kowloon side of the harbor, not the island.

“So Orli wants to meet?” Shafer said. “He mention her field trip with the Russians?”

“He did not. Maybe he didn’t think I’d come unless he dangled her.”

“Or maybe he’ll shoot you in the head as soon as he sees you.”

“What’s the point? They have bigger problems.”

“Doesn’t have to be a point, John. He knows they’re all circling the drain. Maybe he just wants to take you down, too.”

Shafer might be right. Gideon had been on a hair trigger in Tokyo, and he was almost certainly lying about Orli. The Russians had taken her only a couple of hours before. Why would they have given her back already?

Still, Wells had to go.

“You just supposed to go floor by floor until you find her?” Wright said.

“He said there’s an ice rink.”

“Yeah, there’s a mall next to the tower and it has a rink. I’ve never been, but it was a big deal when it opened.” Wright glanced at his watch. “Forty-five minutes. Not much time to get a team together.”

“He said no teams. Just me and him and Orli.”

“Did he?” Shafer said. “I’m shocked.”

S
hafer and Wright insisted on backstopping Wells. He didn’t argue. If Gideon only wanted to talk, he’d understand why Wells had protected himself. And if not . . .

A check online revealed that the mall next to the rink was called Elements and had a vaguely naturalistic theme, a way to distinguish it from every other luxury shopping center in Hong Kong. “Guessing you don’t spend much time there,” Wells said to Wright.

“Sadly, no. Though I have been to the bar on top of the ICC. Crazy views.”

The rink had its own entrance at the southeastern end of the mall, the opposite side from the International Commerce Centre’s lobby. Wells, Shafer, and Wright quickly sketched a plan. Wright would enter on the rink side, see if Gideon had a team in place. Wells would come in from the skyscraper end, make his own surveillance-detection run. The mall was relatively long and narrow and had multiple levels, an unusual footprint that had probably come from the need to build around the massive infrastructure supporting the skyscraper, MTR line, and highways around it. The setup had dozens of good places to
hide, ideal for watchers, tough for countersurveillance. Still, Wells had to try. Shafer would give Wells a five-minute head start before following from the skyscraper side.

Wright didn’t have tac radios at the safe house. They were stuck with their phones. They decided Wright would text
555
if he saw Orli or Gideon,
000
if he didn’t spot anyone,
911
and then the number of guys if he made a surveillance team. Wells wouldn’t text unless he decided to abort, in which case he’d go with
999
.

“Call Duto?” Wright asked, when they’d finished the plan.

“No.”

“Good luck, then. See you there.” Wright adjusted his holster and left.

“He’s not bad,” Shafer said, once Wright’s footsteps were gone. The guy going in first was usually at the greatest risk, but Wright had taken the job without complaint.

“Yeah.”
Not bad
summed Wright up nicely. Wells still didn’t understand the Muslim John joke from a month earlier. Maybe he never would. That hiccup aside, he couldn’t complain. He gave Wright three minutes, headed out, hailed a cab. He felt calm, ready for action. This journey, so much longer and stranger than he had expected, would soon be over.

—

T
HE TAXI DROPPED HIM
at the skyscraper’s entrance at ten minutes to noon, and he trotted down the escalator to Elements, passing from Water to Metal on his way to the Fire zone, which weirdly enough was home to the rink. Each zone carried its own perfunctory decorations to invoke the theme. Otherwise, the mall was simply another marble-floored tribute to the Western luxury brands that the Chinese loved, and mostly empty on a weekday morning.

Wells ducked into stores at random and stopped in an oddly sweet-smelling bathroom for about ninety seconds. He wasn’t trying to lose any watchers. They knew where he was going in any case. But if he could surprise or frustrate even one into showing himself, he’d be ahead.

No one jumped out, but as Wells passed the Prada store, a man drew his attention, a trim curly-haired guy in a suit. The guy was either one of Gideon’s team or an investment banker on a coffee break. Wells pretended to be interested in a three-thousand-dollar jacket as the guy picked up a bag that could be described only as a male purse. He poked at the seams, ignored the price tag. An operative would have checked. So, banker.

Probably.

Wells moved back down the hallway, felt his phone buzz. He pulled it, found a message from Wright:
000.
He tucked the phone away, looked up—and saw Gideon staring at him. The Israeli had materialized a hundred feet away, four stores down, at the Y-junction of three corridors. His right hand was tucked beneath the left flap of his suit coat. The Sig Sauer P238 that he favored was small enough to hide there without attracting attention.

The problem with using phones instead of radios. By accident or design, Gideon had stepped into the hall in the seconds when Wells dropped his eyes to check the text. Now Wells was in a tough spot. He couldn’t look over his shoulder to see if he’d been wrong about the Prada banker, or if anyone else was coming. If he reached for his pistol, Gideon would get off a half-dozen shots before Wells fired one. Gideon was probably a better shot than Wells, anyway. At a hundred feet, Wells had barely a one in four chance of putting a round center mass.

Gideon nodded to Wells,
Come on, come on.
Instead Wells raised a hand, crooked his fingers,
No, you.
Then ran like the ball-hogging
linebacker he’d been at Dartmouth, not away from Gideon but
toward
him. His only play, a way for Wells to change the angles without turning his back. A safe move, if Gideon was enough of a pro to understand it. Wells couldn’t reach behind his back for his pistol while he was sprinting. In motion, he was no threat to Gideon. Of course, if Gideon did mean to shoot him, then Wells was making his life easier by shrinking the distance. But even then, Wells had an out. If Gideon pulled his right hand, Wells would dive for the nearest store entrance, out of the line of fire.

Wells ate the floor with long strides, just conscious of the shops on either side, mannequins promising three-hundred-dollar T-shirts as a path to happiness. Gideon kept his hands steady under his suit. After two seconds, fifty feet, Wells stopped himself, trying not to slide on the slippery polished marble. All along, he kept his eyes on Gideon’s right arm and readied himself to jump if it started to move. His heart thumped, fast and steady, ready for action. Wells had believed Gideon would see they were on the same side now. But if he was wrong—

A second passed. Another. Instead of pulling his pistol, Gideon made an oddly precise quarter turn to his left, so he was no longer facing Wells. Accepting the ceasefire without a word before either man had even shown his weapon.

Gideon looked across his body at Wells. “All right?”

“All right.” Wells brought his palms together prayerfully in front of his chest. Another de-escalation. The sequence would no doubt have seemed bizarre to any sales clerks who might have happened to be watching it, the language open and secret at once. Like lovers exchanging pleasantries at a dinner party, their spouses beside them.
What have you been up to? Oh, keeping busy.

“You have men?” Gideon called.

Wells held up two fingers.

“None for me.” Gideon reached up with his right hand inside his suit and holstered the pistol under his left armpit.

“We walking now?”

Gideon turned and they came toward each other, slow, almost ceremonial steps.

“All right,” Gideon said again, when they were face-to-face.

“This’ll go quicker once the translator shows.” They’d brought the guy they’d used in Tokyo. Young, mid-twenties, a CIA contract employee named Ben. He spoke English, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew flawlessly.

Five minutes later, Wells, Gideon, and Ben sat in the food court. Shafer and Wright were at the other end of the room.

“Where’s Orli?” The crucial question. If Gideon lied, Wells couldn’t trust anything else he said.

“She’s not coming.”

“You said—”

“The Russians have her. I didn’t know if you’d come to meet only me.”

The right answer. The truth. “But she only came home this morning.”

“Seven a.m., Aaron sent me to a bank in Mong Kok. When I got back, Orli was gone. Our guards said Buvchenko came in a van, she and Aaron talked with him, not for long, she kicked Aaron and they left.”

Exactly what the video had shown. “What were you doing at the bank?”

“Aaron gave me a letter for them. I think he’s moving money. Maybe going to run.”

“He can’t think—”

“I don’t know what he thinks anymore.”

“You’ve worked for him a long time.”

Gideon explained how Duberman had saved his son, news to Wells, a story the agency hadn’t cracked. “After it happened I pledged my life to him. And still I would. But something’s come loose in him.”

“He tell you why Orli went with Buvchenko?”

“He says because the Russians threatened the kids. But there must have been something else, too, Aaron did something and she decided she couldn’t trust him anymore. When I saw him he told me Buvchenko gave him two conditions to give back Orli, one that I kill you. I didn’t argue, but why would the Russians care about you? Aaron’s the one who wants you dead, he’s obsessed, blames you for everything. Like if he kills you, it’ll all go back to the way it was.”

“Magical thinking.” The same reason gamblers came to Duberman’s palaces.

“But in a way, he’s right. You’re responsible for Orli at least. She didn’t know the risks.”

“You heard us last night. We tried to explain. We told her we’d protect her.”

“You knew she wouldn’t believe you. Or maybe you didn’t, but he did.” Gideon slid his eyes to Shafer. “If you cared, you would have pulled her and the kids out, found some pretext, held them until this was done. Even if she didn’t want to go.”

How could Wells argue? Wright had pulled the drone off Orli this morning.
Daddy’s the one we want.
He and Shafer were playing a different game than he was.

“Men like you and me, we’re not even the guns,” Gideon said. “We’re the bullets.”

“What was Buvchenko’s other condition?”

“He told Aaron to meet Cheung again in Macao. Tonight. Tomorrow morning, really. One a.m.”

Barely thirteen hours away. And why?
Because the Russians know they’re out of time.
The FSB’s ultimate play almost didn’t matter at this point. They were rolling the op.

“You need to help me find her,” Gideon said.

Wells understood. Buvchenko wouldn’t have much use for Orli after he squeezed what he could from Duberman. The FSB would have no problem murdering them both in a semi-plausible accident. A plane crash, maybe, or, even more plausibly, a helicopter. Even billionaires’ helicopters weren’t immune from the weather.
Casino magnate Aaron Duberman and his wife Orli died today when their helicopter slammed into the South China Sea in heavy rain on what is normally a routine fifteen-minute flight from Hong Kong to Macao . . .

“We’ll find her. If you haven’t noticed, she’s hard to miss. And Hong Kong’s not that big.” Though Wells knew firsthand that if the Russians managed to put her on a ship, the task would be far tougher.

“Nor that small. Do your people know where to find Buvchenko?”

“No. If we can get his phone—”

“I couldn’t find a way to ask Aaron the number this morning.”

Wells considered. “Give me Aaron’s number. Maybe we can trace it from there.”

Maybe. Buvchenko no doubt knew the risk that the NSA could back-trace him and was using single-use burners and Internet telephony to call Duberman. Still, he couldn’t avoid having one semi-permanent number, a way for Duberman to reach him on short notice. That incoming phone would be their best chance.

Gideon gave Wells Duberman’s number. “Now what?”

“Go back to the mansion, tell Duberman I didn’t show, I got nervous. He’ll like that. First priority is Buvchenko’s number.”

Gideon pushed back from the table. Wells raised a hand.

“Also. Your front gate must have cameras. Can you get the video, the make and model and plate of the van?”

“Yes.”

“What about last month, when Buvchenko came the first time? Was that the same van?”

When he heard the translation, Gideon smiled. “A BMW. Nice. Blue. We should have that also. The video’s saved a year at least.”

“Get us that, maybe we’ll pull a rabbit out of the technical hat.” Wells knew he should end the conversation there, but he couldn’t help himself. “Are we good? What’s done is done?”

Gideon hesitated after he heard the translation. He looked at the tabletop, seemed to consider a half-dozen answers. “If I’d wanted to shoot you, I would have already,” he said finally. “Let’s get Orli.”

He pushed back, walked out without a word to Shafer or Wright. He still had the limp.

BEIJING

C
heung sat alone in his office, trying to focus on a report on the problems with the air-to-air missiles for the J-31, when his phone rattled. Somehow he knew even before he looked at the screen who was calling. He picked up the handset with his fingertips, like an archaeologist pulling a cursed relic from a tomb.

When he saw the number, a wish-prayer came to him:
Erase what I’ve done.
The most selfish and juvenile of pleas. He wasn’t asking for the girl, only for himself. Anyway, even the most powerful god couldn’t make time run backward.

Cheung sent the call to voice mail and pushed the phone into his top desk drawer. Hide the relic, hide the curse. Irrefutable logic. Inside the drawer, it rattled again. Cheung felt his panic slide into something else, a sick eagerness.
Do it to me already, whatever
it
is. Finish it.
He grabbed the phone.

“General.”

Xiao. For some reason Cheung had expected Duberman. But Duberman didn’t speak Chinese.

“My employer would like to extend another invitation for a visit.”

Cheung laughed now, the sound backfiring in his throat. Was this how it felt to go mad? Each individual word made sense but together they added to less than nothing.

“He would, would he?”

“Tonight. One a.m., to be precise.”

“Not possible.”

“He can send his own plane if you’d like. If that would be more convenient.”

“Did you hear me, Xiao? I said no.”

“He says your friends insist. That they have questions they need answered, and soon.”

Xiao’s voice was as small and deferential as ever, yet the words turned the phone to lava in Cheung’s hand. Questions, indeed. His friends, indeed. The thumb drive that Duberman had passed to him the day before asked for detailed technical specs on the J-31 and the next-generation ballistic missile program that the Chinese were secretly designing. Cheung had imagined the Americans would start slowly and build, but they seemed intent on grabbing all the information they could right away. What would they want next time? Every drone program?

Typical American impatience.

“Also if you’d like, he can promise you more entertainment like last week.”

Now Cheung knew he was going mad. Doubly so, because despite everything, he felt himself stir. They’d slapped him, and now they were offering him a plate of dates. A treat. He still couldn’t remember what had happened the week before.

Didn’t he deserve a time that he remembered? Next time he’d remember.

No. There would be no next time.

To silence the voices in his head, he snapped at Xiao. “Does he think I’m some functionary? That I drop everything and come south whenever he asks—”

“I understand your importance, I promise. So does he. I can tell you that he intends to give you a very good excuse for meeting on such short notice.”

“What’s that?”

“The plane order he plans to place with you.”

Duberman had that much right. No one would question Cheung’s visit if he came back to Beijing with a launch order for the Smoothwind. Anyway, Cheung knew he couldn’t say no. “All right. Tell him I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll even come early, so I have some time to gamble.” The last words escaped Cheung’s lips before he could stop himself.

Mad, truly.