The Wolves

by Alex Berenson

  At least they hadn’t handcuffed him.

  The deadbolt slammed as they left. Without watch or phone, Buvchenko couldn’t track how long he waited. Finally, the deadbolt slid back and Nemtsov appeared. The FSB chief was in his early fifties, medium height and trim. He wore his wavy gray hair combed back from his forehead. His face was ordinary except for his eyes, which were blue and absolutely without feeling. He sniffed as he walked in, like Buvchenko was a rotting piece of meat. He was alone, no bodyguards or aides, the day’s first good sign. A thin manila folder was tucked under his arm.

  “Director General—” Buvchenko stood.

  “Sit.” Like he was talking to a dog. “Do you know why you’re here, Mikhail?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You are so stupid.” In fact, Nemtsov used the words dolbo yeb, a far more profane phrase. “A gorilla in a suit.” He took a photo out of the folder, slid it across the table.

  Buvchenko’s turn to curse.

  “John Wells.”

  “You know him.”

  “Three months ago, he came to me in Volgograd.”

  “Why? Not the story you told us then, the real one.”

  Buvchenko didn’t consider lying. Not to this man, not in this building. “He asked me if I knew where he could buy a nuclear weapon, or the material to make one.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “Because of Aaron Duberman. That Jew billionaire who owns casinos. He thought that Duberman was behind the uranium the United States found in Turkey. To be honest, I didn’t believe him. But a woman I had dealt with before, Israeli—”

  “Her name, please—”

  “She called herself Salome.”

  “And how did you know this Salome?”

  Buvchenko sensed Nemtsov knew the answer to every question he asked. “She’d bought weapons from me. I put her in touch with hackers. She paid well. This was years before.”

  “Did you know her real name at the time? Where her money came from?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me either one. I asked a few times and then dropped it.”

  “This is how you do business.”

  “I only met her on my terms, in Moscow or Volgograd. She wasn’t a threat to me or Russia. The weapons she wanted were small. She was obviously setting up a cell of some kind. To be honest, I thought they were high-end thieves—jewel thieves, maybe. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while and suddenly she called, brought up Wells.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe ten days before he came. She said he might approach me and that if he did, I should play along, find out what he wanted, then call her. She said she would give me a million euros. I thought the whole thing was strange, but I said fine.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Only that he was causing trouble. I didn’t know about the uranium or Duberman until Wells asked. As I said, I didn’t believe any of it. It seemed impossible.”

  “Did you know Wells?”

  “Only that he was former CIA. Never come across him before. He’s tough, though.”

  “Spare me the pedik talk. Wells came. And you called this Salome as she asked.”

  “She told me to keep Wells at my mansion overnight. She had an idea for a way to take care of him. Tell the Volgo police he was smuggling drugs. A kilo of heroin.”

  “Which you would provide from your stash.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t ask why she was so anxious to be rid of him. If maybe his story was true.”

  “I didn’t see any advantage in knowing.”

  “And she agreed to this brilliant plan?” Nemtsov sarcastically emphasized the word brilliant.

  “Sure. But it didn’t work. Wells got rid of the heroin before the police came. I never did figure out how. When they couldn’t find it, they put him on a plane to Moscow. Salome said I had to call up here and make sure Wells didn’t leave the country. But she told me not to mention Duberman.”

  Buvchenko wondered if he was as stupid as Nemtsov said. How had he deluded himself into believing this episode would disappear?

  “So you came up with another stroke of genius. Telling Colonel Fyodorov that Wells had come to you to buy weapons to smuggle to the jihadis in Syria.”

  “As I said, Salome—”

  “I don’t care what the Jewess told you. You lied to us. Take off your suit coat, gorilla. Lay it on the table.”

  Buvchenko didn’t ask why. When he was done, Nemtsov whistled, a single piercing screech. A big man stepped into the room, with a blue nylon bag a meter long. He unzipped it, pulled a dark wooden rod with a black leather strap wrapped around it.

  A whip.

  Nemtsov unrolled the leather lash from the whip’s handle, and when he was done held up the tip to show Buvchenko the steel barbs studding the leather.

  Now Buvchenko knew why the room had a drain.

  “Will you take this like a man or does he have to stay?”

  Buvchenko leaned forward, pressed his arms against the table, exposing his broad back. Suddenly he was ten years old, in Volgograd, his father staring with blank, furious eyes as he unbuckled his belt, angry because he was down to his last bottle of vodka. Because Buvchenko was home too late or too early. Or for no reason at all. Buvchenko begged for mercy while his mother and Dasha hid in the bathroom. He was as powerless now as he’d been then. He reminded himself to clench his jaw, press his tongue into his mouth, a trick he’d learned as a child.

  Nemtsov circled behind him—

  Buvchenko heard the snap of the whip and felt its sting at once. These barbs went deeper than his father’s, into the meat of his back. Truly Buvchenko was glad for the pain. Otherwise, his rage might have overcome him, sent him for Nemtsov’s throat.

  “One.”

  The whip cracked again—

  “Two.”

  Buvchenko choked back a howl. He wouldn’t give this man the pleasure.

  “Three.” Each cut a centimeter or two from the next, rising toward his shoulders. Nemtsov an artist. Buvchenko wondered how many men he had lashed.

  “Four. Five.” Two quick ones, then a pause. As Nemtsov moved behind him, Buvchenko felt blood trickling down his back. He’d need a new shirt. This one had cost four hundred dollars. A grunt, half cough, half laugh, came from low in his throat. As an answer, Nemtsov cracked the whip five times more in quick succession, neatly scissoring the first cuts. The pain was a wet fire burning, promising scars red and rough and as thick as fingers. The metallic tang of blood filled the room.

  Nemtsov came to the front of the room. “Sit up.”

  Buvchenko raised his head, made himself look at Nemtsov.

  “Beg me to stop.”

  Buvchenko shook his head. The motion set his back ablaze. Nemtsov raised the whip and snapped it past Buvchenko’s face, so close that Buvchenko saw the barbs release their cargo of skin and muscle. His skin. His muscle.

  “I can take out your eyes, if you like. Or if you want something else, put you in a coffin. Breathing air through a straw. Of course we’d have to build a big one for you, but it wouldn’t take long. Or we could stuff you in a regular one, hope your heart doesn’t stop. You think you won’t beg for mercy?”

  Buvchenko had seen the truth in Chechnya. Every man had a limit. The harder Buvchenko resisted, the harder Nemtsov would work to break him. Still, he wanted to fight. “Whatever you like.”

  He wanted for Nemtsov to raise the whip. Instead the FSB director looked at him with an almost clinical detachment. “I’ve read your Spetsnaz files. I know you’re not afraid.” Nemtsov’s voice was suddenly gentle. He sat across the table from Buvchenko, reached over to squeeze his hand. “Not a traitor either. Otherwise, you’d be dead already. I promise I don’t want to hurt you. You made a mistake. You looked at the money this woman offered, didn’t see the consequence. Yo
u must know that you should have told us the truth about Wells from the start. Now say you’re sorry so we can leave this behind.”

  Nemtsov had given Buvchenko permission to confess without cowardice. Better than a priest. An unexpected wave of gratitude filled Buvchenko’s throat. He wanted to admit everything, suffocating his mother, stabbing those two pediks in Moscow who’d tried to grab him in Izmailovsky Park, the time in Grozny he’d killed the mother and father and three little girls—

  He knew Nemtsov was playing him, breaking him with false kindness instead of real pain. But understanding the manipulation didn’t lessen its power.

  “You’ve wanted to say you’re sorry for a long time. Probably since your sister died.”

  Of course Nemtsov knew. “I wish we’d had interrogators like you in Grozny,” Buvchenko said.

  Nemtsov smiled, maybe the first genuine expression Buvchenko had seen from him.

  “I’m sorry, Director. I shouldn’t have lied.”

  “Good.” Nemtsov whistled again. This time, a medic entered, gauze and tape and tubes of ointment in his gloved hands. He sliced off the remains of Buvchenko’s shirt and bandaged the wounds. Nemtsov left, returning as the medic finished. He held a bottle of water and two glasses. He set them down on the table but didn’t pour.

  “So. Finish the story. You sent Wells to us.” Picking up just where he’d left off before the whipping.

  “I did. Fyodorov told me you’d caught him at the airport, brought him here. I thought that would be the end of it, but the next day I heard you’d let him go. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t want to ask any more.”

  “He told a story, outsmarted his interrogator. Did you ever speak to him again?”

  “No. He didn’t contact me, nor I him. I promise you.”

  “What about Salome?”

  “Only to tell her that we’d let Wells go. She was angry, even angrier when I reminded her about the money she’d promised. She said I hadn’t kept my side, that Wells should never have gotten out of Russia. She told me not to call again. I told her I wasn’t finished with her, but it turned out I was. We haven’t spoken since.”

  “Then a few days later the President of the United States calls off the attack on Iran, you didn’t think you should tell us all this?”

  “I swear, Director, I didn’t realize the connection. The story the President told had nothing to do with Duberman. Just that he wasn’t invading. I called Salome a few times, sent her emails, but she never answered. The months passed and the thing seemed to fade away.”

  “You didn’t want to think about it.”

  “I suppose.” Nemtsov was right, of course. Buvchenko saw now that he hadn’t wanted to chase the truth, had feared the implications. He’d been worse than a fool.

  He only hoped Nemtsov would give him a chance to redeem himself.

  Nemtsov reached into his file, set two photos on the table. A woman, pretty, slightly mannish. Salome.

  “That’s her,” Buvchenko said.

  “Her real name is Adina Leffetz. Was. She was Israeli. She was shot in South Africa three months ago. Near Cape Town. Almost certainly by your friend John Wells.”

  “Did she work for Duberman?”

  Nemtsov nodded.

  “So Wells told me the truth about the uranium?”

  “We aren’t certain yet, but we think so.”

  “If Duberman tried to lure America into war and failed, and the United States knows the truth, why is he still alive?”

  “I imagine their President fears killing him might raise too many questions. And he’s in Hong Kong now. Hard to hit.”

  Nemtsov poured two glasses of water. Buvchenko’s mouth was dry, his throat a rasp. He wondered how much blood he’d lost. He reached for a glass, drank deep.

  “You want to make matters right, Mikhail?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I have something for you to do.”

  Buvchenko nodded. Yes. Anything.

  5

  BETHESDA, MARYLAND

  Trevor Robinson ducked his head, spread his legs, waggled his hips, dug his cleats into the manicured fourteenth fairway of the Congressional Country Club’s Blue Course.

  “Pretty,” Vinny Duto said.

  “Hush.” Robinson took a couple of practice swings and then lifted his four-iron high, brought it down smooth, a perfect stroke that sent his ball exploding into the clear blue sky. He and Duto watched in silence as it arced to the green and bounced close to the flagstick.

  “Ain’t easy being this good. I almost feel sorry for you, Vinny.”

  “Shareholders know how much time you spend practicing?”

  Robinson laughed. He was a seven handicap, a West Point graduate who had earned a major’s golden oak leaf at twenty-nine. The Army marked its stars early, and it had marked him. Instead he’d quit to join Lockheed Martin. Now he was chairman, the first black man to run a major defense contractor. The year before, he’d made twenty-three million dollars. His looks surely hadn’t hurt his rise. He was tall and handsome, with dark skin and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Easy to imagine four stars on his shoulders.

  Duto, not so much. After years of 5 a.m. workouts, he remained as thick and stubby as the cigars he favored. He was bulky rather than fat, cocooned in the soft muscles of late middle age. Easy to imagine him wrapped in a towel in a Turkish bath. His face was a cross between Nixon’s and LBJ’s, jowly and sagging, a caricaturist’s dream.

  But Duto had learned politicians didn’t have to be pretty. Tough worked fine, and he had no problem with tough. He had been the longest-serving CIA director in the agency’s history. After the President forced him out, he won a senatorial race in Pennsylvania. He feared he would end his career as one of a hundred gasbags fighting for airtime. Then fate, in the form of a retired Colombian army officer named Juan Pablo Montoya, had intervened. Montoya, not to be confused with the Formula One driver, gave Duto a tip that ultimately led him and Wells to the truth about Aaron Duberman.

  Now Duto had the President in his pocket. The White House was a real possibility. Duto was a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic. He took Communion twice a year, mouthed down stale wafers and cheap red wine. He wanted to believe, but he knew he didn’t. When he closed his eyes in church, he felt nothing but an urge to nap.

  Too bad. He wished that when he ate dirt, he would have a chance to thank the big guy for the breaks that had come his way.

  —

  “DO MY SHAREHOLDERS KNOW? Hell, they pay for my lessons.” Robinson’s Darth Vader baritone brought Duto back to the Congressional. “Business development, Senator. Your shot. Your third shot, I may remind you. That second one barely rustled the ball, but it counts nonetheless.”

  “Rustled? Big word from a guy who makes bullets.” Duto saw his caddie approaching. “Ross? That a five I see in your hand? You want me to lay up when Trevor’s already on the green?”

  “There’s a tough bunker if you miss to the right.”

  “He’s trying to tell you that I’m a better golfer than you,” Robinson said.

  Duto couldn’t argue. His handicap was in the mid-twenties. Maybe the high twenties, if he counted his extra tee shots. The low thirties. No matter. As far as he was concerned, the game’s only fun lay in going for broke. “Gimme the four.”

  The caddie came back with the four. Duto grabbed it, waggled his hips in conscious imitation of Robinson, let loose with a vicious rip. He shocked himself by catching the ball flush, his best shot of the day by far. The Titleist traced a perfect arc, bounced at the edge of the green, stopped eighteen inches from the pin.

  “Knew you had it in you,” Robinson said.

  Haven’t shot that good since Bellville, Duto wanted to say. He felt twelve feet tall. Let his lefty buddies whine about golf, the Congressional’s membership policies, the water it wasted to perfect
its fairways. They would never understand the sunshine filling his veins.

  “Now it’s in you.”

  “Don’t get too excited. Still have to make the putt.” Robinson stepped close to Duto, spoke low. “Though the way things have been going for you, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Smart, Trev. Wait all day for me to hit a shot that puts a smile on my face, now you talk business.”

  Robinson grinned. “Governor Barnett. How about that? When everyone thought he was in.” The California governor had called a surprise press conference the week before to announce he didn’t want to subject his family to a presidential race and wouldn’t seek the Democratic nomination. “Lucky for you.”

  “Better to be lucky than good.” Duto set off down the fairway, Robinson a step behind.

  “What’s funny is that maybe two days before that press conference, I heard a crazy story about Barnett in Vegas.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him.” Barnett was an old-school liberal blowhard. Unions and environmental groups loved him. He would have made Duto’s life tough during the primaries. Lots of Democrats were ready for a hard left turn.

  “Yeah. I didn’t believe it myself. Sanctimonious SOB. Doesn’t care about all the manufacturing we do out there. A Democrat who makes me want to vote Republican.” Robinson was one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. Democratic Presidents buy F-35s, too, he’d once told Duto. Besides, my company gives to Republicans 70-30. Best if I balance the scale.

  “Like that would ever happen. So what was the Barnett story, anyway?”

  “Keep pretending your people aren’t the ones spreading it.”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Word was he wound up in an ER in North Las Vegas at four a.m. with chest pains.”

  “Lots of guys our age get chest pains, Trevor.”