The Wolves

by Alex Berenson

  By the time it happens, he’ll be blind drunk. Plus he’ll think it’s just me and him.

  Are you sure? You can do this?

  Yes.

  I hope.

  —

  AND DUBERMAN HAD. One week ago this night. He’d badgered Cheung into confessing what he craved, then gave him a shot of tequila spiked with Dilaudid, a powerful opiate. The drug hit Cheung in seconds. He staggered toward the baccarat table, pupils pinprick-tight, tongue lolling like an overheated dog’s. After Chou-Lai led him away, Duberman gave Xiao and Jian a million-dollar plaque each, warned them never to tell anyone what they’d seen.

  Then Duberman was alone. And exhausted. The fire stairs smelled of freshly poured concrete as he walked up to the helipad atop the Sky Tower. Only a waist-high wall protected him from the five-hundred-fifty-meter drop. A southerly wind swept away the smog from a thousand Guangdong factories. Beneath Duberman, casinos rose from land that had once been sea. From above they looked strikingly similar, Y-shaped forty-story hotels rising beside flat-roofed sheds big as city blocks. Underneath those sheds, casinos. Even at this hour, thousands of people stood inside them, casting chips on tables. Ants marching, only they were taking food from their nests. Above, Duberman, a wingless Icarus. Fitting that all his scheming had brought him here. Without Macao, he would have been just another billionaire.

  —

  THE TERRITORY was a hilly speck of land bordered by the People’s Republic on one side, the South China Sea on the others. Portugal had controlled it for hundreds of years before returning it to China in 1999. Under Portuguese rule, a couple of grubby casinos had survived on Hong Kong day-trippers. The Chinese government decided to expand the business. It offered Western casino companies the chance at licenses. But established operators like MGM hesitated. Macao was run-down and corrupt, a distant second fiddle to Hong Kong.

  Still, the opportunity intrigued Duberman. Gambling was practically the Chinese national sport. Yet the People’s Republic banned casinos within its borders. Macao would give them a chance to bet legally. Duberman saw Macao as a city-sized version of the Sizzlin’ Saloon, a dump with potential and a great location. In 2001, he and another Vegas outsider, Sheldon Adelson, grabbed licenses.

  The decision was the most lucrative of Duberman’s life. Wall Street analysts mocked him when he said Macao might one day be as big as the Las Vegas Strip. He was wrong. Within a decade Macao was far larger. As it exploded, so did 88 Gamma’s stock, and Duberman’s wealth. By the middle of the aughts, he was worth ten billion dollars. An unthinkable sum.

  He had grown up middle-class. After World War II, his parents had emigrated from Shanghai to Atlanta. They were cautious and thrifty, and encouraged the same habits in their kids. At thirteen, Duberman bagged groceries at the local Winn-Dixie for spending money. A wrestling scholarship paid his college tuition. Into his thirties, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment near McCarran Airport. Aside from his appetite for women, he had no vices, no expensive habits. Mainly he worked. He enjoyed casinos, at once the most ethereal and the grittiest of businesses.

  What do people buy from us? he asked his new managers every year. The regulars know they’ll walk out poorer than they entered. They should, anyway. They’re buying the chance to step out of themselves, live in the moment, risk everything on a card. Then the money runs out, the moment ends. We are the ultimate expression of consumer culture. We sell a product that doesn’t exist. They leave with nothing. Yet if we do it right, they leave happy. They’re buying time.

  Duberman wanted his customers to leave happy. But part of him hated them, too. For their stupidity. Their greed. Their inability to understand that their desires mattered not at all to the games they played. Math governed his palaces, and math alone would undo the people on the wrong side of the tables. They talked of running hot, but if they stayed too long a chill inevitable as death gripped them. Duberman wished they would see his casinos as places to be entertained for a day or two. On the surveillance cameras, he recognized the ones who had given too much. They trudged out slow as cancer patients, glancing slyly over their shoulders at paradise lost. He took their blood by the gallon. Yet they wished for his grace as desperately as Adam and Eve.

  His best customers were fools, and fools were hard to love.

  He escaped the contradiction with logistics, making sure visitors had the best possible experience, however they gambled. Each 88 Gamma casino was a giant enclosed city, with malls and Broadway-sized theaters, serving thousands of meals and handling millions of dollars in cash every hour. Duberman learned to lavish attention and money where customers noticed, skimp where they didn’t. His obsession with details made his casinos even more popular. Ten billion dollars was only the start. The money flowed to him quick as air.

  Inevitably, he picked up the trappings of wealth, mansions and bodyguards, modern art and classic cars. Yet he couldn’t escape the idea that somehow God had played a joke on him, giving him so much more money than he could ever spend. He found himself increasingly interested in his Jewish faith. He never forgot that if his parents hadn’t fled Vienna, the Nazis would have sent them to the concentration camps, and he would never have been born.

  Duberman came to believe that only a powerful Israel could permanently keep Jews safe. He supported right-wing Israeli politicians. He bought mansions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and spent months every year in Israel. Then he met Salome. She worked for one of his politicians. Like him, she understood that an Iranian nuclear bomb was the greatest threat to the Jewish state. She proposed that Duberman pay for a plot to frighten the United States into attacking Iran. A false-flag operation, she called it.

  The plan was the longest of long shots. It was also treason. Yet Duberman agreed. Without sleeping on the choice, without wondering if Salome was trapping him somehow. As he made all his biggest decisions, borrowing from Jimmy the Roller, risking his fortune on Macao. In this way, he was like his customers, slapdash mystics who waggled their fingers and demanded more cards, whatever the odds. I just knew a seven was coming.

  Sure you did.

  At the time, the decision seemed noble. Necessary, even. In retrospect, Duberman wondered if his fortune had changed him more than he knew. Had he unconsciously grown to believe that he was, if not God, at least a saint, anointed by the almighty dollar? He knew he’d had a harder time imagining his own death as the billions mounted. He couldn’t die. Men like him didn’t die.

  Was it not his right to start a war?

  With that choice, he’d thrown all the others away.

  —

  ORLI’S MODELING SHOOT in Australia had ended three days after Wells shot Peretz and Makiv. Duberman knew her bodyguards had told her about the killings. But when he called her, she didn’t answer or call back. Finally, on the third day, she texted: Home tomorrow. Face-to-face. Part of him wondered whether she was returning only to collect the boys and take them to Israel. He showed the text to Gideon.

  “Did you say anything? About the Russians?”

  “I work for you.”

  “No half answers, Gideon.”

  “Not a word. And I won’t.” Gideon shook his head: You want to lie to your wife, it’s your business. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  The next morning, Duberman waited at the VIP terminal at HKIA, clutching a fat bouquet of blue orchids. Orli’s favorite. She stepped through the frosted glass doors of the immigration checkpoint tan and lean and more beautiful than ever, the sun shining from every strand of her honey-blond hair. No wonder he’d lost his perspective on his place in the universe. He tried to hug her. She raised her arms to fend him off, looked at him clinically, as she had that night in Tel Aviv when the Shin Bet came.

  “How was the shoot? Was that little photographer there, the one you don’t like?”

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s do this at home.”

  “
What happened?”

  “Not here. You’ll understand when I tell you the details.” He’d bet his fortune that the Chinese security services had this terminal bugged.

  The eight-minute helicopter ride from Lantau Island to the Peak felt like a month. She led him straight to their bedroom after they landed. “Now.”

  “You were never in danger, Orli.”

  Her face tightened and he knew he’d made a mistake.

  “You think I was scared?”

  “Of course not—”

  “Start again, then. It was Wells?”

  “It must have been. It feels like a one-man show, and that’s his specialty. And the CIA wouldn’t aim for two random bodyguards.”

  “That’s what you call them? Avi and Uri? After how many years?”

  For the first time since they’d come to Hong Kong, Duberman felt irritated with her. “You know, I’m the one who had to identify them. The police came here, asked me about it. Wanted to know if I knew who did it.”

  “Did you tell them about Wells?”

  Duberman shook his head, explained how they were caught between the Hong Kong police, Wells, and the President. He didn’t mention the FSB.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  You. Not we. He decided he needed to tell her the truth about Cheung. Part of it, anyway. “There’s a Chinese general, senior, who’s run into trouble at 88 Gamma. A lot of trouble—”

  “You’re going to spy on the Chinese?”

  A Mossad-trained technician swept the mansion for bugs each month. Reflective coatings covered its windows to defeat the laser microphones used by spy services to pick up the vibrations that voices created in glass. Still, Duberman found himself raising a finger to his lips.

  “You see why I didn’t want to talk about this at the airport.”

  “This can’t work, Aaron.”

  “I have help.”

  “From where?”

  The letters FSB were on his lips. “I can’t tell you. Safer for us both. Truly.” Though he wanted her to ask again. If she did, he’d tell her, let her decide.

  She didn’t. “If it works, what then? You trade what you find to the Americans and hope it’s enough to buy your freedom?”

  “More or less.” Duberman wondered as he spoke whether her idea didn’t make more sense than Buvchenko’s bargain. Maybe he should go directly to the White House. But Wells and Duto would never agree, and Duto controlled the CIA. No. The Russians were all he had.

  She looked past him to the city below. “If the police make us leave—”

  “They’re bluffing, trying to pressure me.”

  “If. I’m taking the boys back to Israel.”

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.” Or never. He didn’t understand how she could so casually threaten to take away their sons, his sons, after she’d promised to stay with him. No matter, though. Even if the police followed through on their threat, a Russian diplomatic passport would give them new options. London and New York would still be out, but Rio and even Paris might not be. However much she disliked Russia, once he showed her what he’d done, she would see he’d made the right choice.

  “Time, Orli. That’s all I’m asking.”

  She came to him, wrapped a hand around his neck. She seemed about to kiss him and her face was the world. She brushed her lips to his ear, whispered: “I’m not the one you have to worry about.”

  —

  THAT AFTERNOON, Hargrove Lo, the chief of detectives for the Hong Kong police, came back to the mansion to blush his way through a ten-minute interview with Orli. He followed up the next morning with Duberman, polite but dogged, asking the same questions a dozen different ways. When the interview was done, Lo admitted that his detectives didn’t have a suspect. Their inability to make headway made Duberman’s own protestations of ignorance more convincing. Still, Duberman knew he needed to do more. He called Geoffrey Crandall, the lawyer handling his residency application.

  Crandall was Hong Kong legal royalty. He’d argued more cases before the territory’s Court of Final Appeal than anyone else. “Aaron. I understand the police visited again—”

  “Can you make a list of the best five or seven charities here? Ones above reproach?”

  “Certainly. Tung Wah, Caritas—why, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “This week. I’m giving them two hundred million—no, three hundred million HK.”

  “You want to pledge—”

  “Not pledge. Give. As in, the money hits as soon as they accept. Split it however you like. Keep my name out of it.”

  “I should probably hire another lawyer to handle it, then. Our relationship is no secret, and a donation of this size—”

  Exactly. “I’d like you to take care of it yourself.”

  Crandall fell silent.

  “I imagine you’d like to do this as quickly as possible,” he finally said.

  “Correct.”

  “I’ll send a list.”

  —

  CRANDALL CALLED BACK two days later, after Duberman made the donations.

  “Aaron. I’m pleased to report that the police have dropped their threat of immediate deportation. However, you and your family still have to apply for a visa when the hundred-eighty-day waiver expires.” Duberman’s American passport gave him an automatic 180-day exemption from Hong Kong’s visa rules. The countdown had started when he arrived from Israel. “And the police plan to recommend that the immigration department reject that application. Of course, if circumstances change, their position might as well.”

  Three hundred million dollars had bought him less than three months in the territory. An expensive rental. Luckily, he could afford it.

  —

  NOW DUBERMAN HAD SOME TIME. Too bad he couldn’t have helped the police find Wells even if he’d wanted to. The man had vanished. Maybe he feared that the cops were closing on him and had left Hong Kong. Maybe he was lying low and waiting for another chance.

  William Roberts was gone, too. He’d quit before they could put him on leave, disappearing from the mansion on the afternoon Peretz and Makiv were shot and never coming back. After four days, Duberman sent Gideon and his men to Roberts’s apartment. They found it cleaned out, his family gone. The disappearance had to be related to Wells, but Duberman couldn’t see how. He wondered if Roberts was helping Wells plan an attack on the mansion. But with each day, that explanation became less plausible.

  In any case, Duberman had bigger problems. The Russians wouldn’t protect him until he delivered Cheung. He needed to convince Cheung to come down. To be sure that that ninny Malcolm Garten didn’t hear about the trip. And to be sure that the Chinese security services didn’t stumble on Cheung.

  Ten days after the shootings, Duberman helicoptered to Macao to meet Buvchenko. As he flew in, he saw his new casino towering over Cotai, its structural work finished months before, ready to open as soon as the workers installed beds and furniture and of course the baccarat tables. He realized he was looking at the perfect four-billion-dollar excuse.

  —

  CHEUNG HAD BITTEN. Now Duberman stood on the roof of the Sky, looking at the bridges that connected Cotai with the old Macao. Cheung was out there, an 88 Gamma limousine delivering him to an apartment north of the city center. Duberman had already sent Buvchenko the video of Cheung demanding nine, ten, eleven at most. Past that, he didn’t know and didn’t want to know what the Russians had planned.

  He stepped onto the concrete wall at the edge of the roof, peeked down the glass cliff. A third of a mile straight down. From this height, the avenues and bridges below were as tiny and perfect as the veins in his palm. To jump, unthinkable. Duberman thought back to his high school physics class, the acceleration of gravity, nine-point-eight meters per second. Sixteen feet the first second, almost fifty the second . . . he coul
dn’t do the math. Ten seconds of free fall, more, accelerating the whole way. Yet at the World Trade Center that day, dozens of men and women had smashed windows and chosen air over fire.

  Unthinkable? Nothing was unthinkable when the inferno came.

  The wind picked up, caught him in a gust, pushed him to the edge of the wall, his alligator boots scuffing the concrete. He windmilled his arms as desperately as a cartoon character, heart thumping madly, eighteen hundred feet—

  Not now—

  The gust died and he turned and stepped onto the roof. He went to a knee and stared up into the sky. The light pollution from the casinos occluded the stars, and he could see only a few unnaturally bright specks that had to be satellites. So far from God, so close to the FSB. If he escaped this trap, he would make good on all his promises. He would find a hundred worthy charities. He would spend more time with his sons. He would, he would.

  He heard his helicopter before he saw its lights. He looked around, not realizing at first that it was flying below the casino’s roofline. Finally, he spotted it, a Bell 429, rising toward him in the dark. Its spotlight flicked on and it approached the giant encircled H painted in white on the roof and set down with an odd balletic grace. He dodged the rotor wash and ran for it. For Hong Kong and his family.

  As the helicopter leapt into the sky, Duberman knew he’d beaten fate once again.

  —

  OR NOT.

  He met Buvchenko the next day in a two-room Kowloon office rented by an 88 Gamma subsidiary. Gideon waited outside with the two FSB officers who chaperoned Buvchenko everywhere.

  Buvchenko put his palms together, offered a mocking bow. “Sensei.”

  “It went all right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “And the girl?”

  “We killed her.”

  Duberman tried to speak, couldn’t. The room’s sour air seemed to choke him.

  “You think we could leave her to cry to the police after what that pig did to her? Anyway, she was just a whore. She’s better off. Trust me.”

  “Mikhail—”

  Buvchenko squeezed his shoulder. Buddies. “Don’t look so shocked. I’m joking. She’s hundred percent good. Back in Vietnam where she belongs. Nothing happened.”