The Wolves (26 page)

“Do yourself a favor. Don’t forget that number. It may be handy.”

“839 . . .”

“839653.”

“839653. Even if you’re right, we don’t know the apartment is Nikolai’s, just FSB.”

“You think the senior ops guy at the station lets somebody else have the AMG?”

The door opened, and Wright entered. Shafer explained what they’d found.

“We can put up a drone, watch the apartment while you keep tracing,” Wright said.

A sensible idea. But it spiked an instant fever in Wells. No more robot eyes in the sky, especially ones that could look but not touch. It was now past 5 p.m. By the time he got to West Kowloon, it would be six at least. This time of year, the sun set in Hong Kong around seven, so it would be nearly dusk, one of the safest times for a break-in. After nightfall, people naturally increased their suspicion of strangers. But at sunset their instincts hadn’t fully kicked in. If anything, they relaxed as the workday finished and they headed home. Anyway, Wells couldn’t afford to wait past dark. Cheung and Duberman were set to meet in less than eight hours, and this apartment was more likely to be a lead than the end of the trail.

“No drone,” Wells said. “You have another bike for me?”

“If you must.”

“I must.”

W
ells rode northwest on Ki Lung Street, looking for the watch store that marked 231. There. He pulled the Honda to the curb for a peek. Up close the building had all the charm of an air-raid shelter, a thousand water stains flecking its pale yellow paint. Its entrance was beside the watch store, a narrow glass door protected by steel bars. Behind it, a vestibule ended in a second barred door, a good sign. Some buildings around here had night watchmen, but the ones that did rarely bothered with double security doors.

Above the doors, windows glowed in the gathering dusk. The building had more than a hundred apartments. Hundreds of potential witnesses, hundreds of innocent bystanders. Not the place for a gun battle, especially with a police station only blocks away on Prince Edward Road.

Wells kicked the bike into gear and rolled off. A block down, he parked in an alley, tucking his helmet beside the front wheel. The bike was a Honda CB600F, the same model he’d used when he’d shot Peretz and Makiv, down to the year and color. Shafer wouldn’t approve. The police could easily connect two identical bikes. But Wells appreciated
the familiarity. This time, he carried two pistols, one loose in his backpack with a suppressor already screwed on, the second hidden in his waistband
. Sometimes you feel like a nut . . .

The traffic from Hong Kong Island had been light. Wells was a couple minutes ahead of schedule. He wanted to rush inside and so made himself do the opposite. He sat sidesaddle, listened to the neighborhood, truck engines thrumming and kids shouting, pigeons cooing and chickens squawking. Despite the very real dangers of avian flu, more than a few Hong Kongers still raised poultry in their apartments. Strange city, its modernity skyscraper tall, an inch deep.

More distantly Wells heard a muezzin sound the call to the
maghrib.
He wanted to begin his ablutions, join the prayer. He fought the impulse, knowing he couldn’t afford the attention or the time. He slipped off the bike, tucked a baseball cap low over his forehead. In his backpack he felt the comforting weight of the pistol and the black calfskin gloves beside it. He was alone tonight. Wright had offered backup, but Wells said no, and Wright didn’t push. The agency and the FSB kept each other at arm’s length for obvious and good reason. No station chief looked forward to the prospect of tit-for-tat assassinations, officers shot in the street. Anyway, Wells didn’t mind running without backup. On a fast, simple op, going in alone could be safer than working with a partner you didn’t know and hadn’t learned to trust.

A hundred dinners hung in the dusk, the sweet, heavy smells of grease and onions and garlic and chicken frying. For once Hong Kong seemed something more than a petri dish for loneliness. Wells was calm as he walked. Aware.
Awake.
Near the building’s front door, he pulled his autopick, a cigarette-lighter-sized tool that could beat any civilian lock in seconds. Wells had always considered it the most useful device the agency had ever invented, though the fake fingerprints were about to take that prize.

He stepped to the door—and a commotion from the street turned his head. A boy, no more than four, zigzagged across the pavement toward Wells as the kid’s father hollered and gave chase. Wells stuffed the autopick away and ran for the kid. Fortunately no cars were coming, and he scooped up the boy a moment before the father reached him. The dad was panting, out of shape, potbelly poking from his workingman’s white T-shirt.

“Thank you,” the father said. “He sees you, want to say hi.”

The guy seemed to be blaming him, like Wells was the Peter Pan of jaywalking. “Sorry.” Wells turned away, hoping to end the conversation quickly.

“It okay. We live here, anyway.” The father nodded at the entrance to 231. A bad break. Dad would remember him if the police came knocking. The kid pointed at Wells, jabbering, “He says you have backpack, too. Like him.” The kid was wearing a tiny Snoopy pack.

“Observant little guy, isn’t he?” Wells resisted the urge to substitute another word for
guy
. Now the kid was taking off his pack, holding it for Wells. Bad to worse.

“He says, can he see what’s in your pack?” Dad said. “Trade. I’m so sorry—”

Sure. I’ll just unscrew the suppressor so junior can hang on to the nine more easily.
“I wish I could, but I have to go.”

The dad translated, and the kid screamed like Wells had stuck a knife in him. Wells stuck out his hand to shake, but the kid yelled even louder. Wells backed away quickly, the kid shouting the whole time. What no one explained about real-world fieldwork, what Hollywood always misunderstood, was that success or failure on an op could come down to a break as trivial as a child’s outstretched finger.

At the corner Wells turned left, walked into the first store he saw, a no-name mini-market. He bought a Coke, made himself nurse it for
ten minutes, giving the kid and his dad a chance to go inside. Like sand through the hourglass. Finally, with the dusk settling into night, he returned to the building, making sure that this time he had the entrance to himself.

The autopick solved the outer and inner locks as quickly as a key. Inside, Wells found a dirty beige-tiled hallway and rows of mailboxes scratched with indecipherable graffiti. He wondered why the Russians had chosen the place. The neighborhood was hardly glamorous, and almost one hundred percent Chinese. Though probably they’d come here for the same reason Wells and Wright had picked Mong Kok. The neighbors might notice a white face, but they would hardly ask questions. The building offered a break from endless surveillance, too. Only one CCTV camera watched the hallway and it dangled from its mounting bracket in a way that suggested it hadn’t worked in a while. Still, Wells couldn’t imagine that the Russians had brought Orli here. She would have attracted too much attention, and if she’d fought, the whole neighborhood would have heard.

The fire stairs were at the back of the hall. Wells pulled on his gloves, made his way up. On the sixth-floor landing, he picked up faint voices above. He stopped, inched his hand back toward his pistol. The voices quieted, then picked up. A boy speaking Cantonese, a girl laughing. Probably on the roof, or the top landing. Teen lovers didn’t have many chances to be alone in this city. Wells walked on.

At twelve, he left the stairs and found himself in a narrow hallway lit by shaky fluorescents that gave it a faintly haunted feeling. He counted twelve apartment doors, more than he’d hoped to see since he didn’t have an apartment number, only the floor. Still, the process of elimination was quick. Kids’ voices, no way. Dinner wafting out, unlikely. Cantonese-language television, probably not. The Russians might understand the language, but Wells didn’t see why they would
subject themselves to it. He checked off nine apartments, left himself with three. He heard an elevator rattling up, knew he needed to decide. He went for the door with the most security, two deadbolts instead of one, no lights visible under the door. As soon as he chose, he was sure he was right.

He pulled the autopick, put it to the top lock. It clicked through, snapped back the bolt. The lower lock was tougher, with a flat metal frame around the lock itself. Wells was just putting pick to keyhole when the elevator stopped. He had no choice but to duck back into the fire staircase. From the landing, Wells heard the chime of the elevator’s electronic bell. Footsteps came toward the back of the hallway. Wells pulled his pistol. If the Russians found the top lock undone—

In the hall a man muttered softly in Cantonese. A woman answered. A door opened and closed. Then silence.
Friends? Lovers?
Wells had guessed at a thousand lives over the years. He counted ten, holstered his pistol, crept into the hall. Empty again. This time, he took the time to examine the apartment door for simple tripwires, like a piece of Scotch tape stuck to the frame and the door. He didn’t see any, a surprise. Intrusion monitoring was basic tradecraft. Maybe he’d chosen the wrong apartment. Still, he had already picked one lock. No reason not to take a look. He pulled his autopick, lined it up with the lower lock, set it to work.

When it was done, Wells put an ear to the door to listen for rustling inside the apartment, whispers in Russian. Nothing. He flattened himself beside the door, reached across it to twist the knob, pushed the door open slowly with his left hand, in case someone had set a shotgun or other trap inside. Wells silently answering Evan, seven thousand miles away,
Starting to wonder how you make it out there.

As the door opened, Wells heard not a shotgun blast but an alarm’s insistent beep. Just inside he saw a control panel, its numbers now
glowing orange. No wonder the Russians hadn’t bothered with Scotch tape. Wells looked inside. The room was dark, blackout shades drawn. Entry was the most dangerous moment of any break-in. Wells would be silhouetted against the open doorway, giving anyone inside an easy shot. He stepped through, flipped on the light switch beside the alarm, spun to cover the room, closed the door behind him.

He found himself in what looked to be the combined living area and kitchen for a two-room apartment. The place seemed empty, but the alarm screeched a warning and its control panel flashed orange. Wells stared at the panel, wondering how he could possibly decipher the code—

Then he knew. The six-digit “name” of the shell company, the one Shafer had told him to remember. Only he couldn’t.
839 . . .
the first three digits were right, he was sure. He keyed them in, stopped, hesitantly tried
536
, knowing he was close but wrong, Julia for Juliette wrong. He punched enter. The alarm beeped three times fast, a decisive rejection.

839 . . . 563 . . .
enter. Again three fast beeps, and the backlighting for the panel’s numbers went from orange to red, he must be almost out of time—

839 . . . 653 . . .
enter.

The alarm quieted and the backlighting on the panel turned green. Shafer was a pain in the ass, but his instincts were gold. Wells stepped back, took in the room. Oddly, silver cylinders about the size of soda cans were attached to the front door’s hinges. Motors, Wells guessed. He wondered if the alarm included a trigger to turn them on, force the door shut, trap would-be thieves inside.

The room had surveillance, too, golf-ball-sized cameras mounted in the corners. Wells assumed that they weren’t routinely monitored and instead checked only if the alarm went off. No spy agency on earth
had enough men to watch empty safe houses. Still, the cameras were another good reason for Wells not to linger. Wherever Orli might be, she wasn’t here. The alarm and the strange automatic hinges made the apartment feel more like a stash house than a safe house, a hiding place for money and weapons rather than people.

The room where Wells stood was about fifteen feet square, with functional furniture. A week-old copy of the
South China Morning Post
lay on the coffee table, along with a stack of Cyrillic-language magazines. So the place was in active use. Someone had been here a week ago, or less.

The room had no rugs, pictures, or bookcases, no obvious hiding spaces. Wells turned to the galley kitchen, pulled open cabinets and drawers, found nothing of interest. The fridge held a takeout box of chicken tikka masala, a six-pack of Tsingtao, a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. Wells put the chicken to his nose. It didn’t smell, so it could be no more than a couple of days old. Which only increased the odds that someone would be back soon.

Wells peeked at his watch, found he’d been in the room almost two minutes already, on the twelfth floor for five. The odds of being caught increased exponentially with time on target. Two minutes was ideal, five acceptable. Anything past ten was worse than amateurish. He hurried into the inner room, found a sloppily made queen-sized bed, a closet that was open to reveal men’s shirts and jeans, a steel desk with a Wi-Fi router on top. No laptop. No surveillance cameras in here, at least none Wells could see. Beside the closet another door led to what had to be a bathroom.

Then he saw a two-drawer filing cabinet tucked under the desk. Both drawers were reinforced with steel and closed with dial combination locks that would be immune to the autopick. Wells holstered his first pistol, pulled the one with the suppressor from his backpack. He
squatted down, sighted, shot both locks at their weakest point, where the steel bolt entered the lock’s housing. The suppressor quieted the pistol, but the metal ping of round against lock was louder than Wells would have liked. At least the ricocheting rounds didn’t catch him in the face.

The bottom drawer stuck when he pulled on it. When he finally muscled it open, he saw why. Thick rubber-banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills filled it nearly to the top. Maybe two million dollars in all, Wells guessed. On top of the stacks, a plastic bag a couple inches square that held a half-dozen shiny stones. Diamonds. Big ones. Worth a few hundred dollars if they were fake, a few million if they were real; only a jeweler would know. Finally, one more bag, this one a standard Ziploc, filled with a white powder that wasn’t baking soda. Wells resisted the impulse to steal it all, just to piss off the FSB. None of it would help him find Orli.

He closed the lower drawer, pulled open the top. He found a less lucrative but more promising stash. A pair of Makarov 9-millimeter pistols sat atop a thick stack of papers. Wells thumbed through the stack. Statements in English from a half-dozen banks, corporate records in Cyrillic, a rubber-banded sheaf of documents in Chinese that seemed to be related to a property development. Wells grabbed everything, including the pistols, stuffed it all in his backpack. He had no idea what might matter. Let Shafer sort through it back at the consulate. Anyway, Makarovs had been his preferred pistol until Anne had shamed him into going with Glocks, far more reliable.

A wastebasket was tucked beside the cabinet. Wells peeked inside, found nothing but a crumpled receipt from Calcutta Best Indian Restaurant, presumably the source of the tikka masala in the fridge. He shifted his attention to the desk’s only drawer. It was unlocked. Inside, pens, business cards in Chinese and English and Cyrillic, blank invoices
from what appeared to be a local car repair shop, a burner phone with a cracked screen and a charger still attached to its body, a roll of condoms, and the apartment’s sole personal note, a picture of Nikolai with his arm around a pretty Slavic woman. Wells took everything but the condoms.