The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  Two sets of sirens were howling close by, oo-ooo, oo-ooo. But as Salome had hoped, they were headed for the front gate, the natural first choice. And the front gate was chained, padlocked, and rusting. It obviously hadn’t been opened in months. The cops would poke at it for a minute or two before they realized they needed to try the back.

  The BMW took the most time. It wouldn’t start. The men had to push it while Salome steered. By the time they were done hiding it behind the Dumpster, the cops had already reached the front gate, spent several minutes yelling in Turkish, and left. The sirens screamed away. But she knew where they were headed, to a cross street about two kilometers away that offered access to the road behind the factory.

  Salome and her men covered themselves in blood and brains and charred flesh shoving the corpses into the cars. No one spoke, but she knew her men wondered how Wells had done all this by himself. She did too.

  They finished and hid in the alley alongside the building just as the sirens rolled to the back gate. Someone shouted angrily through a megaphone in Turkish.

  What she’d feared. Ari had locked the gate from the outside, once he was through. But unlike the reinforced front gate, the back had a single chain holding it shut. It would easily give if the cops rammed it. And if they got inside they would see the cars. The game would be up.

  Everything rested on Ari.

  Suddenly, the cop began shouting even more loudly, but not at them.

  Yes.

  She’d ordered Ari to come around the corner of the factory just after the police arrived. An H&K in his hands. Not to shoot. A firefight would only make matters worse. He was to play dumb, a barely functional Syrian refugee who had found his way to Istanbul. He was wandering around outside the factory when he stumbled on the H&K. He decided to shoot off a few rounds. He was sorry for any trouble he’d caused. He had no identification, no money. He was very sorry.

  The cops would take the H&K. Maybe they’d arrest him. She didn’t know what charges he’d face. But ultimately he hadn’t done anything terrible. He’d work his way through the system and be released. Or maybe they wouldn’t bother bringing him back to the station. They’d beat him, drive him back to the highway, tell him to get out of Istanbul. No matter. Ari could handle himself.

  As long as they believed that the shots had come from outside, they’d have no reason to bother coming inside. Whoever had called 155, the Turkish police emergency number, had obviously been too far away to know what was really happening. If the caller had reported anything more than hearing shots, a dozen police cars would have shown up. And they wouldn’t have stopped at the gate, they would have driven through.

  Low voices.

  Just go. We’ll clean this mess up like it never existed. John Wells can tell whoever he likes whatever he likes. He’ll sound even crazier than he is.

  A minute passed. Another. Then the sirens flicked off. The police cruisers turned away from the gate, crunched down the road, their engines fading into the distance.

  Forty-nine minutes later, she and her men rolled away. She would wrap the bodies in chains and dump them in the Black Sea. As she should have done with Wells. She should have believed the stories she’d heard. Unarmed, chained to a wall, he’d broken free, killed five of her operatives. Now she had to decide whether to go after Wells with what was left of her team, or disappear and hope that nothing he or Shafer did could stop the war. What the President had done in Tehran this morning couldn’t be undone. The Iranians knew the uranium wasn’t theirs. They wouldn’t understand why the United States had said it was, or why it had attacked them. They would believe the White House and CIA were faking evidence to support an invasion. They would be frightened. And furious. They would never agree to negotiate, much less to open their doors. Their refusal would further inflame the United States. The situation would spiral. By the end of the President’s two-week deadline, the two sides would be headed for war.

  Could Wells or Shafer find her by then? Could they find the man behind her?

  Duberman had given her carte blanche. But she couldn’t make this decision herself. She reached for a burner phone, punched in a number that began with an 852 prefix. Hong Kong. “We need to talk. I’m coming to Olympus.”

  Olympus was Duberman’s mansion on Victoria Peak, which overlooked Hong Kong Harbor. The world’s most expensive real estate. A house near the top of the Peak had recently sold for $230 million. Duberman’s had a better view.

  Salome flicked off the phone, tossed it onto the highway. She had hundreds more. She wished she could replace her men as easily. But even with her team crippled, she had to hunt Wells down. She couldn’t just hope he would go away. He knew too much.

  She would kill him. The sooner, the better.

  EPILOGUE

  NORTH CONWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  His life fit in the back of a Subaru, with room to spare.

  A suitcase of clothes. Books, a few framed photos, his pistols and gear. All he’d accumulated in more than forty years. A blessing, maybe, but at the moment it felt like a curse.

  It was the coldest night of the year in New Hampshire, fifteen below. Old snow crushed the earth, but above the sky was clear, the stars bright and impossibly close, the air itself frozen to death.

  Anne and Tonka stood a few feet away. Tonka whined and looked from Wells to the door and back: Why did you bring me out here? Even so, when Wells opened his door, the dog forced its way between him and the driver’s seat, teeth bared, trying to keep him from the car. Wells pulled a hand from a glove and ran it over Tonka’s back and knelt low until the dog stopped growling and licked his face.

  “One day—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Anne’s face was tight.

  “Sorry—”

  “Or that.”

  Wells reached for her.

  “No.” But she closed her eyes and opened her arms and hugged him through her thick down jacket.

  “You’re in there somewhere,” he said.

  She tilted her head up to him. When she opened her eyes, the tears came. Then Wells was crying, too, the tears shocking and hot against his frozen cheeks.

  “I didn’t know you could cry.”

  “Maybe I’m in there somewhere, too.” He broke away. “Wish me luck?”

  She shook her head. He wanted to tell her he loved her. That one day, sooner or later, he’d find the strength to give up the game and come back. But he knew the words would only hurt her more.

  He leaned forward, kissed the tears from her cheeks. And silent as the air, he went.

  —

  Two days since his escape. On the afternoon he’d broken out, a Turkish-flagged fishing ship had picked him up at Sife, a Black Sea resort forty miles from central Istanbul. Wells sat in the ship’s cabin for the next eight hours. He wondered what had happened at the factory, why the police hadn’t found the bodies. At an Internet café, he scanned English-language Turkish news websites. There should have been dozens of articles. But somehow she—whoever she was—had escaped. Had she paid off the cops?

  He had no problem finding articles about the drone attack on Tehran, though. Iran’s supreme leader, His Eminence Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had called the bombing “a Zionist-Satanist plot” a few hours before. “The Islamic Republic will never negotiate. The United States must know it will not escape the consequences of this unprovoked attack.”

  In Washington, congressional leaders from both parties announced their support for a hard-line stance. “This danger transcends partisanship,” the Speaker of the House said. “Iran must understand it cannot hold the United States hostage.” Oil was up twenty-seven dollars a barrel, the biggest one-day rise ever. European stock markets had fallen seven percent, and American stocks were expected to plunge even further when they opened.

  Wells knew he should call Evan and Heather, give them some idea what ha
d happened. But the escape had left him exhausted beyond measure. He couldn’t face those conversations. He settled for tapping out a short email, apologizing and promising to explain further in a day or two.

  When the ship came, no one spoke to him. He was grateful.

  The ship ran west-northwest, along the curve of the coast, one more trawler in the Black Sea’s crowded waters. Just past midnight, it turned toward the dim lights of the coast. After another half hour, it angled into a narrow cove and stopped twenty meters from a narrow beach. Two cars waited on a low bluff above. A man standing between them waved a flashlight to the ship. The captain hitched an aluminum ladder to the railing.

  “You swim?”

  Wells made his way down the ladder, flopped off in the world’s worst racing dive. The frigid water shocked him, but he forced his way to shore. The man with the flashlight walked down to meet him.

  “Welcome to Bulgaria.”

  “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that.”

  The man led Wells to the backseat of the second sedan. A gray-haired man looked him over as the two-car convoy rolled off, silently flashing the blue lights used by secret police across Eastern Europe and Russia.

  “Mr. Wells. I am Director Kirkov of the NIS.” The Bulgarian National Intelligence Service.

  “Guess Vinny still has some friends.”

  “He said to tell you you owe him another favor.”

  “I think I owe you.”

  Kirkov smiled. “You look like you could use a night’s sleep, Mr. Wells. You will stay at my house. Tomorrow morning, a Bulgarian passport and a flight through Warsaw to New York. I’m sorry, no nonstop from Sofia. You arrive in the afternoon.”

  “Thank you for this.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what happened?”

  “After it’s over.”

  Kirkov put out a fleshy hand. “Let’s shake on it, then.”

  —

  From Kirkov’s mansion, he called Evan and Heather. The FBI was watching them at a safe house in Utah. They weren’t happy, to say the least. Heather: Provo? Anybody consider the threat of death from boredom? Evan: I hope this was real. Because you ruined my season. Both insisted that they hadn’t seen anyone or anything unusual in the days before the FBI came. Wells wondered if Mason had been bluffing. Even so, he asked them to wait a few days, and they both agreed.

  From JFK, he went straight to North Conway. He owed Anne that much, at least. Himself, too. One last good-bye. One last look at the house where he’d spent the best part of the last four years, in every sense. Some part of him was foolish enough to believe the words he hadn’t had the strength to say, that one day he would retire and come back to her.

  —

  Now he was in Duto’s office in Philadelphia, where everything had begun a month before. Again Duto and Shafer sat side by side on the couch. This time they were drinking coffee, not beer.

  “Trying to stop a war and you think it’s a good time to visit your girlfriend,” Duto said. “Tearful bye-bye.”

  Wells thought of the cell, what he’d done to get free. “Come with me next time, Vinny. See how long you last.”

  “Problem with you, you want points for fixing your own mistakes.”

  Shafer and Duto were all he had. An exhausting thought.

  “You win, Vinny. I’m done arguing.” Wells reached for a Dunkin’ Donuts cup big enough to fuel an airplane. Normally he drank his coffee black, but now he salted it with milk and sugar until it could have passed for a Frappuccino. Anything to take the bitterness away. “Can we talk about the matter at hand? Who’s behind this? Who’s the woman? And how do we stop it?”

  “Don’t know about the woman,” Shafer said. “But I can tell you who’s paying the bills.” For the next ten minutes, he outlined his theory.

  “You agree?” Wells said to Duto when Shafer was done.

  “It makes more sense than anything else.”

  “Fits with what I saw. Money no object and yet it felt like they had no backup.”

  “So Duberman hired this woman,” Shafer said. “She brought in Mason. Got the HEU.”

  “Do we have any evidence?” Wells said.

  “Not without Mason,” Duto said.

  “Can’t you go to Hebley, man to man, DCI to DCI, get him to see reason?”

  “Before the drones, maybe. Not now. Now it’s all public.”

  Duto was right, Wells saw. At this point, without absolute proof the plot was fake, Langley, the Pentagon, and the White House couldn’t back off the narrative they’d created.

  “And you haven’t come up with anything, Ellis? Not a single lead?”

  —

  They sat in silence.

  “Twelve days,” Duto said finally. “That’s what we have. Assuming the President sticks to what he outlined in his speech.”

  “HEU’s the key,” Shafer said. “They got it from somewhere. We figure that out, we can unravel the chain. Maybe.”

  “So all we have to do is find a supplier of highly enriched uranium nobody else in the world knows about. So we can take down a guy with twenty-five billion dollars in the bank. The President’s richest donor.”

  “Tell me that smile means you have an idea,” Duto said.

  I’m smiling because I’m not tired anymore. Because right or wrong, I live for the chance to play this game. I know what it costs and I don’t care.

  And the higher the stakes, the better.

  “Twelve days,” Wells said. “Twelve days.”

  —

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/berensonchecklist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without Putnam, these pages would only be a Word file. Neil Nyren hasn’t made a bad edit yet, and Ivan Held and his team are the best in the business. Thanks also to Heather Schroder, who knew John Wells when he was just a gleam in my eye, and Tom Young and Matthew Snyder (your faith will be rewarded, I promise).

  Most of all, to Jackie, who juggles being a doctor, wife, and mother more dexterously every day. The best is still ahead.

  This is the greatest job in the world, and I wouldn’t have it without you. As always, I welcome comments and suggestions at alexberensonauthor@gmail.com. I read every email, and so far I’ve kept my promise to respond to each one personally. I hope to continue that practice. If you want more frequent updates, feel free to follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

  Now, back to work . . .