Twelve Days

by Alex Berenson

  Bunshaft might be a friend of Salome’s, but he was no friend of Shafer’s. A month before, when Shafer first tried to warn Hebley that he and Wells had stumbled onto a false-flag plot, Hebley sent Bunshaft to talk to Shafer. The conversation went badly. Shafer had found Glenn Mason, but at the time he didn’t know that Mason was connected to Salome or Duberman. Bunshaft and his boss Max Carcetti later dismissed the theory on the apparently unimpeachable grounds that Glenn Mason was dead. Ever since, Shafer had been on the seventh floor’s no-fly list.

  Now—at last—Shafer could prove what he’d suspected all along. Salome was linked to the agency’s new guard. Of course, the photo didn’t prove that Bunshaft knew what Salome was doing. But, as Donna Green had told Duto at their midnight meeting, the White House had wanted for years to replace Duto with Hebley. Maybe Green or the President himself hinted at those plans to Duberman. A hundred ninety-six million bought a lot of access. Salome would have cultivated Bunshaft carefully. Maybe she’d told him she worked for Duberman. Maybe not. A case officer would have been innately suspicious of the approach, but Bunshaft wasn’t a case officer.

  Shafer knew he had entered the realm of guesswork, what his old friend and Wells’s old love Jennifer Exley sometimes called his string theories. This lone photo just didn’t prove anything. Maybe Salome had never seen Bunshaft again after that Brookings talk.

  But Shafer could be sure of one thing: Salome hadn’t wanted her photo taken with Bunshaft. She had refused to give her name, figuring that without it the Jpeg would be dumped into a forgotten file along with a million others. And it had, until now.

  Shafer double-checked the dates in the all-contacts log. As he’d expected, the entries about Leffetz stopped after the photo. Probably she’d been more careful afterward, staying away from public events.

  On one level, the depth of Salome’s connection to the agency hardly mattered. At this point, everyone on seven would be destroyed if Shafer and Wells proved the plot was fake. Incompetence and naïveté would be treated nearly as harshly as outright treason. Shafer wondered if he ought to go straight at Bunshaft, figure he was a dupe rather than a traitor. Maybe he could convince Bunshaft that Iran and the United States could still avoid war. Whatever he did, he needed to let Duto know what he’d found. Better phone than email. Of course, the agency was monitoring both, but it could delete his outgoing emails before they left the Langley servers. Shafer reached for his handset—

  And saw that his computer screens had gone blank. He jabbed at the keyboards on his desk. Nothing. His office phone was also dark. He grabbed his mobile, tried his wife. The screen showed five bars, but the call wouldn’t go through. The voice of a National Geographic narrator played in his head: Just that quickly, the hunter becomes the hunted . . .

  Had Adina Leffetz’s name triggered an alarm? Or was Bunshaft watching Shafer’s computers in real time?

  Either way, Shafer needed to get off the campus. His office had been shoved to the fourth floor, a nowhere land of analysts and database managers. Fortunately, the New Headquarters Building had fire stairs at the corners as well as the core. Unfortunately, those corner stairs were alarmed at the ground and roof exits, and Langley’s guard teams answered sirens in a hurry.

  Shafer wondered if Hebley would risk a scene by grabbing him in the lobby. Probably not. In that case, the stairs by the elevators made sense. He ran for them, his feet flapping heavily. He was shocked how slowly he moved, like he was running through water. Luckily, it was still only 7:15 and the hallways were empty. No curious looks.

  He reached the stairs, ducked inside. After barely a hundred feet, his lungs burned. He took three steps down the empty gray stairwell and wondered why he was bothering. Even without a fifteen-foot wire fence, Langley’s perimeter was as well guarded as any supermax. Theoretically, the barriers were meant to keep intruders out, but they worked both ways. Even if he escaped the building, the guards could pick him up at an exit gate, a quick and almost surgical grab.

  Of course they would. Like most traps, this one seemed head-slappingly obvious once Shafer saw it. They, whoever they were, wanted him to run. Why else turn off his computers instead of just grabbing him at his office? If he was a flight risk, the agency could justify holding him without charges. Eventually, of course, they’d have to present him to a judge, but when they did, they would lean heavily on the fact that he’d fled. He ran, Judge. As soon as he realized we were looking for him. Under the circumstances, we had no choice but to search his office down to the studs, check phones, bank records, his house and car. We didn’t realize we would need seventy-two hours, Judge, and we apologize. But here he is, safe and sound.

  Worst of all, even Shafer’s wife wouldn’t know exactly where he was. She would figure he’d gone to Langley this morning, but she couldn’t be sure. He had left the house while she was still asleep.

  No running, then. But Shafer needed someone he trusted to see him, to know what was happening. He didn’t have much time. No doubt they had put sensors on his car and had the guards looking for him. They would be confident he couldn’t escape the campus. Still, they wouldn’t wait long. When they realized after a few minutes that he hadn’t taken the bait, they’d come for him. At this hour, only one person he absolutely trusted was likely to be here. He hated to drag her into this mess, but he didn’t see any choice.

  —

  The lights of her office suite were on. He knocked and without waiting for an answer stepped inside. “Lucy.” Lucy Joyner, the CIA’s human resources director, among Shafer’s oldest friends at Langley. She was a brassy Texan who had handled the agency’s most thankless jobs for thirty years. A month before, she’d helped him uncover Mason’s role and start this roundelay. They both knew the seventh floor was looking hard at her.

  “Ellis.”

  She sounded worse than wary.

  “Why do I feel like I’m your crack addict kid and you’re waiting for me to beg twenty bucks?” he said.

  “Twenty doesn’t buy much crack.”

  “Take my picture.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Shafer raised an imaginary iPhone to his eyes. “Snap snap. And sometime today tell my wife you saw me this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “So she doesn’t worry.”

  Joyner nodded, as if requests like this came her way all the time. “That all?”

  “Yes. No. One more thing.” Shafer tore a page from a sexual harassment reporting handbook on Joyner’s desk, wrote Salome-Jess Bunshaft-DCsuperparty.com in the margin. “Give this to Vinny—”

  “Duto—”

  “Of course Duto. And do yourself a favor, don’t look at it—”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Long story.”

  “No one’s going to disappear you, Ellis.”

  “They might misplace me for a few days.”

  “This ends badly for both of us.”

  “I don’t know. Truly.” Shafer tapped the nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Yes or no on the picture? Places to go, people to see.”

  She reached for her phone. “Smile.”

  He raised both middle fingers.

  “Perfect. Everyone will know it’s you.” The phone clicked.

  “I think you left your lipstick at home, Lucy. Better get it.” Meaning: leave Langley and store the photo somewhere safe.

  “That bad?”

  Shafer turned for the door, blew a kiss over his shoulder at Joyner. “Later, my love.”

  “I’m not even your like, Ellis—”

  —

  His mood swung between grim and weirdly jaunty as he made his way back to his office. Whatever Carcetti had planned would not be pleasant. On the other hand, now that Joyner had seen him they wouldn’t be able to make him vanish.

  He was not at all surprised to find Carcetti and Bunshaft waiting at his desk
. As a lieutenant three decades earlier, Carcetti had been a heavyweight on the All-Marine boxing team. His gut had thickened notably since then, but his legs and shoulders were still solid. He looked like a bouncer at a biker bar.

  “Mr. Shafer—” Bunshaft said.

  “Jess. Max. Call me Ellis. As far as I’m concerned, it’s first names for us.”

  “Where were you?” Carcetti said.

  Shafer smirked.

  “Believe it’s known in the trade as dropping the kids off at the pool.”

  “We’ve been here fifteen minutes.”

  “I’m an old man.” Shafer tapped his belly. “Things get stuck—” Shafer grinned, not even hiding what he was doing, riffing like a drunk comedian at the late show on Friday night. Carcetti had followed his boss Hebley up the Marine Corps ladder. He’d retired with three stars on his collar and the nickname Mad Max, a commander who shouted and intimidated subordinates into submission. Shafer had learned over the years that playing the fool worked surprisingly well against that personality type. He hoped to drive Carcetti into useless and counterproductive rage, as he had Duto a dozen times.

  “Least you can’t say I’m full of—”

  “Enough.” Carcetti’s voice was level, but his eyes bulged like a blocked artery.

  Now Shafer needed to shift gears, remind Carcetti that he wasn’t a fool after all. “You think this is still the Corps, General? You have me confused with a terminal lance?” A Marine who ended his enlistment as a lance corporal, the lowest possible rank after four years. “You think you say jump and I say how high, sir?”

  Carcetti grabbed Shafer’s arm. “I think you’re coming with us.”

  —

  Carcetti and Bunshaft had detained Shafer briefly a month before. Back then, they’d locked him in a cell disguised as an executive suite, a room meant to preserve the illusion of dignity. Not today. Today Carcetti led him through a tunnel that connected the New Headquarters Building with its older cousin, the Original Headquarters Building. Down a grimy fire staircase that dead-ended on a subbasement that Shafer had never seen before in all his years at Langley. Through a maze of corridors lined with aging air handlers. Carcetti seemed to know the layout by heart. Finally, they reached a room whose concrete floor and grease stains suggested that it had once housed a furnace. Now it was stagnant and empty but for a steel table and three chairs, two on one side, the third on the other.

  Carcetti shoved Shafer into the third chair. “Where’s John Wells?”

  Good. He’d asked a question Shafer couldn’t answer. “Dunno.”

  “We suspect him of aiding the Iranian government. And we suspect you of aiding him.”

  Shafer felt the ground shift. The accusation was desperate, proof of the pressure Carcetti and Hebley felt. But if they could convince the President to sign a finding that Wells was aiding a foreign government, the agency would be authorized to snatch Wells without warning. The finding wouldn’t specifically call for Wells to be killed, but once black-ops teams were involved, anything could happen. If Wells pulled a gun, and he probably would, they’d shoot him in the street. A tragic accident.

  And Shafer had no way to warn Wells.

  “You can’t seriously believe that.”

  “He’s a Muslim convert.”

  “You know there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia, right?”

  “I know that about twenty-four hours ago the FSB released him from Lubyanka following a call from Iran’s Foreign Minister to the Russian Interior Minister.”

  “Two things that have nothing to do with each other.”

  “I know he got on a plane from Moscow to Amman. And I know he hasn’t been seen since. You tell us where he is, we can pick him up safely. Nobody wants him to get hurt.”

  “Why don’t you check the files, find out what Wells has done for this agency, this country, before you accuse him of treason?”

  “Like those Deltas he killed in Afghanistan, you mean? Or when he was five minutes late in Mecca?”

  Shafer didn’t think he was naïve. But he had never imagined anyone spinning Wells’s record that way.

  “Max—”

  “Look, maybe he’s got the best of intentions here, but he’s acting as a foreign agent whether he means to or not.” Carcetti nodded like a salesman trying to close a deal. “Do everyone a favor. You don’t want to tell me where he is, I get it. Just tell him, go to an embassy. Somewhere safe for him and our guys, so nobody makes a mistake.”

  “Somewhere safe.” The line a parody of good-cop reasonableness. In reality, the offer was poison. Wells would never agree to come in, and Shafer’s phone call would give the agency and NSA a chance to pinpoint him.

  Shafer closed his eyes, like the pressure was getting to him. Let Carcetti believe he’d won. He needed time to think through his next move, get Carcetti back inside the lines so that Wells wasn’t at risk.

  Carcetti’s hand squeezed his wrist. “You know I’m right.”

  Shafer looked at Carcetti and Bunshaft. Their posture was telling. Carcetti sat forward, eager. Bunshaft was back, arms folded. Nervous. Shafer ticked his head at Bunshaft.

  “Jess. You’re sweating.” The furnace room’s harsh overheads highlighted the sheen of perspiration-occupying territory ceded by Bunshaft’s receding hairline. “You on board with this? Bringing me someplace with no cameras. No warrant, nobody watching. Your boss doesn’t like the law much.”

  “Exigent circumstances,” Carcetti said. “National security exception.”

  “He’s got to do it this way, because even Taylor wouldn’t come near this.” Cliff Taylor, the agency’s new deputy legal counsel, handpicked by Hebley. Bunshaft glanced at Carcetti. Cleared his throat like he’d forgotten how to talk.

  “Worry less about us, more about yourself,” Carcetti said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten. Duto’s a senator. He’s protected. Not you. All those leaks to Wells and he doesn’t have a security clearance—”

  “We’ve gone from treason to leaking in two minutes. Next you’ll accuse me of parking in a handicapped spot.”

  “This kind of leaking is treason. And, your age, twenty years in jail is a life sentence. Bright side, your wife’s old, too. No worries about her leaving you.”

  —

  Carcetti went silent and Shafer found that he, too, had nothing to say. They were both breathing hard. Like the bell had rung and they’d gone back to their corners to sit on their stools, get ready for the next round, the arena empty, only Bunshaft watching, a silent, unreliable referee.

  Shafer realized he’d forgotten the most important question of all. He opened his palms and dropped his head like he was ready to surrender. Rope-a-dope.

  “All right, General. I’d like to ask something. Tell me the truth, I’ll call Wells.”

  “Why would I trust you?”

  “Because I don’t want him to get shot.”

  An answer Carcetti would believe. He nodded. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “You really think Iran produced that HEU?”

  Carcetti hesitated for half a second. “Yes. I mean, that’s what our experts concluded—”

  “Translation, you have no idea. And the worst part is you don’t care. Like the Gulf of Tonkin or WMD.” The excuses that Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, respectively, had offered for Vietnam and Iraq. “You’ve decided that invading Iran is the right war. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.”

  “You rather they get the bomb, Mr. Shafer? That what you’re telling me?”

  “Do the President and Donna Green agree?”

  Carcetti’s thick black eyebrows rose, the movement as surprising as an Easter Island statue coming to life. They came down fast, but Shafer saw that he’d scored. Carcetti didn’t know what Hebley was telling the White House. Shafer suspected that Hebley was keeping his doubts, if he had any, to himself.<
br />
  Shafer looked at Bunshaft. “Hebley’s taking all of you over Niagara Falls. Except he’s the only one with a barrel.”

  “If only you and Duto had actual evidence for this crazy theory you’re peddling. Aaron Duberman, right? Who just happened to give two hundred million dollars to the same President who fired Duto.”

  “That’s a feature, General. Not a bug.”

  “What?”

  “Ask your friend here about Adina Leffetz.”

  Another score. Carcetti’s big Marine head wobbled a fraction on his big Marine neck.

  “You don’t know her, but she ran the job for Duberman. Used to work for a Knesset member named Daniel Raban. Nice guy. One of those Jews who think Israel should treat the Palestinians like crap for the next two thousand years to make up for what happened in the last two thousand. I can say that because I’m Jewish. You can’t.” Shafer shifted his attention to Bunshaft. “Come on, tell the general about her.”

  Bunshaft shook his head.

  “I still don’t hear any evidence,” Carcetti said.

  Shafer wondered if he should mention Witwans and decided to hold off.

  “You can do the right thing, General. You can walk this back.”

  “They blew up a plane.” Carcetti tapped the table, clanking metal against metal.

  For the first time, Shafer noticed that in addition to his heavy yellow gold wedding ring, Carcetti wore a thick platinum ring etched with the Marine Corps insignia. On his right hand was yet another ring, this one dull steel, almost black with wear. Intentionally or not, the rings looked like makeshift brass knuckles on Carcetti’s meaty hands.

  Carcetti caught Shafer’s glance. He tapped the steel ring. “This was my granddad’s. He died on Tarawa. November 22, 1943. My dad lost his right eye at Khe Sanh, March 7, ’68.”