The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  “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.

  29

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  How 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 mo
ney 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.”

  30

  ISTANBUL

  Salome mumbled under her breath, the filthiest curses she knew. Directed at herself.

  She was a fool. The proof was the corpse leaking blood all over the trunk of her Mercedes. This day should have been the sweetest of her life, the finish of everything she had worked toward for a half-decade and more.

  Instead, she was forced to wonder if John Wells knew enough, could prove enough, to undo what she’d done. Wells. A man she’d already caught, a man who should already be dead. The threat to his family had been fake, a bluff. She wished it were real. At this moment, she would gladly kill his son, everyone he cared about.

  She shifted her curses to Glenn Mason. Why had she let him convince her that keeping Wells was a good idea? A few days, he’d said. Just to tie Shafer up until this moves past the point of no return. Plus we might have questions for him.

  As a rule, she didn’t like keeping prisoners. They had to be hidden, fed, guarded. There was always a risk they’d escape. They could ask Wells whatever they needed to know when he woke up, then shoot him, dump his body into the Black Sea. Mason told her not to worry. We’ll chain him to a wall, won’t even unlock him for the toilet. The guy’s tough, he’s not Houdini. And he won’t want to risk his kid. A week at most, then I watch him beg for mercy, put a bullet in his head like he deserves. Those last words should have told her what Mason was doing. So desperate to prove he was a hard case, a killer.

  Until today, when Wells showed Mason what a killer really looked like. Now all the king’s horses and all the king’s money couldn’t put Mason’s brain back together again. Salome was short on
sympathy. Duke. Over the years he’d proven more skilled at running ops than she’d expected. Somehow she’d forgotten that he was a broken toy. Stupid.

  She went back to cursing herself.

  —

  The morning could have been much worse. By the time she and her men reached the factory, the sirens were close, only a couple minutes out. She stepped out of her car and looked at the bloody mess around her, the corpses and wrecked car. Nothing would explain it away.

  She wondered if she should just bundle Mason’s body in the trunk and take off. But even without Mason, the factory offered plenty of evidence to support the story Wells would tell once he reached safety. She and her men needed to make the bodies disappear, empty the office where the guards lived, even rip out the post where Wells had been chained. At least she had been smart enough to have tarps and tools stored in the trunks of her cars. When she realized that the feed from the camera in Wells’s cell had gone dead, she’d feared the worst. So the cleanup job wouldn’t take long, an hour at most. But they didn’t have an hour.

  A fire wouldn’t work, either. It would just attract more attention. She needed to make sure the cops didn’t come inside. Otherwise she might as well just lock herself in, go down shooting.

  Lock herself in—

  The answer came to her.

  “Ari.” Her bodyguard, the man she trusted more than anyone. He spoke some Turkish, not much, but enough for her purposes. She told him what she wanted. “Just be sure you wait until they’re out of their cars—”

  He nodded.

  “Your clothes. You can’t look like that.”

  He tossed off his suit jacket, pulled off his tie, tore a hole in his shirt, swabbed his arms and legs in the gasoline residue on the pavement. From well dressed to vagrant in seconds. He grabbed the machine pistol lying on the pavement, ran for the gate.

  She turned to the others. “We move the burned BMW behind there”—she nodded at the Dumpster—“so no one outside the gate can see it. We wrap the bodies in the tarps, throw them in the trunks. We move the cars into the alley. Then we hide there, too. When the cops get to the back gate, they won’t have anything to see. Let’s go.”