Twelve Days
Page 29
“And now you get to start your own war, kill somebody else’s father. Circle of death. Congratulations.”
A crimson flush spread up Carcetti’s neck. His big hands bent into fists. Shafer knew he’d gone too far.
“General,” Bunshaft said.
Carcetti exhaled long and loud. “An angel on my shoulder. Lucky for you.” He took a phone from his pocket. “I answered your question. Time for you to do your part.”
“Call John, you mean? You get service down here?”
“We’ll go outside.”
If he hadn’t just almost talked himself into a beating, Shafer would have laughed. “I don’t know his number. He’s on a different burner every time we call—”
“So email him, tell him you have to talk to him—”
“More important. Did you really think I’d call him for you?”
—
Bunshaft broke the silence that followed.
“But you promised.” The shock in his voice sounded genuine.
Carcetti looked from Shafer to Bunshaft like he was trying to figure out which one to shoot first. He grabbed Bunshaft’s arm, tossed him off his chair. Bunshaft was hardly skinny, but he flew like a bag of sticks.
“Get out,” Carcetti said. “Close the door. And walk. Until you can’t hear anything.”
Bunshaft opened his mouth and closed it again and did what Carcetti had told him. Shafer and Carcetti waited in silence as Bunshaft’s footsteps receded down the hall.
When they were gone, Carcetti stood. “People fall down stairs.” He swung his head side to side, rolled his shoulders like a boxer trying to get loose.
Shafer realized he needed to make sure Carcetti knew that Lucy Joyner knew what was happening. She had to have cleared the campus by now.
Carcetti stepped toward him—
Shafer bit back the words. Let Carcetti crack his ribs, blacken his eyes. He’d be digging an even deeper hole. And Shafer would prove, to himself, to Wells, or both, that he wasn’t afraid.
Though he was.
Carcetti pushed over Shafer’s chair, sent him sprawling, his knees clapping the concrete floor. Shafer lay on his back. That quick, his fear vanished. This was Langley, not North Korea. Carcetti hadn’t earned three stars in the Marines by making dumb mistakes. He wasn’t going to hurt Shafer, no matter how furious he was.
“Last chance.” Carcetti squatted beside him. “I will break your neck.” Carcetti put a hand on Shafer’s throat, squeezed lightly.
Time to end this nonsense. “You will not. And fyi, Lucy Joyner saw me this morning. I was down at her office while you and Bunshaft were waiting for me. She’s got a picture to prove it.”
Carcetti cursed, stepped away from Shafer, kicked the table over. The metal clattered against the concrete, as loud and empty as Carcetti’s threats.
“I’d say you have three options. Put us all under quarantine down here. Lucy and my wife and Vinny, too. It could get cramped. Though maybe if we have snacks. Everyone loves snacks.” Shafer pulled himself to his feet, hoping Carcetti didn’t notice the tremble in his legs. “Two, let me go. Though I have a feeling that isn’t on the agenda. Three, go for a warrant, do this right.”
“You want me to call that bluff? We have tapes of what you told Wells. We play them, you spend the rest of your life in prison.”
Carcetti might be right. Federal judges didn’t love CIA officers who disclosed classified information. Stopping a war would be a mitigating circumstance, but only if Shafer succeeded.
Yet at this point Shafer didn’t care. To get a warrant, even in a case that supposedly presented an immediate national security threat, Carcetti and Hebley would have to talk to the CIA’s lawyers, who would insist on calling the Justice Department. Justice would be predisposed to believe whatever version of the story Carcetti gave. But once they got involved, Hebley would have a much harder time ordering the CIA’s black-ops teams after Wells—who, if nothing else, had constitutional protections as an American citizen.
—
Carcetti opened the door, stepped out. Then turned back, looked at Shafer from the doorway.
“Just one thing, Ellis. I know you and your buddy have looked all over the world for that HEU. So have we, believe it or not. We can’t find it. Tell me, if it’s not Iranian, whose is it?”
Shafer could only shake his head.
“Whose?” Carcetti shouted now. “Tell me. Whose?”
Shafer felt no choice but to answer “I don’t know.”
“And you know why? Because it’s from Iran.” Carcetti slammed the door so hard as he left that the plaster wall beside it cracked from floor to ceiling.
Shafer sat alone, wondering how long Carcetti would leave him here, whether he’d have a warrant when he returned. Either way, Shafer believed he had done all he could to take the red dot off Wells’s chest. He wasn’t the praying type. Never had been. So he settled for crossing his fingers and hoping Wells would use that freedom.
20
CAIRO, EGYPT
Wells found a computer in the corner of a crowded café off Tahrir Square and logged into the account he’d created to email Adina Leffetz. He wasn’t expecting a response. To his surprise, he found not one but two replies.
Both from her, though from two different accounts. The first was blank. Wells suspected it contained a tracking virus, because his computer briefly froze when he opened it. No matter. Let Salome try to find him in Cairo.
It was the second email, sent a few hours after the first, that stopped him. John. So good to hear from you. And yes, I miss you, too. I’d love to see you. So would my boss. Let’s meet in Tel Aviv tomorrow . . . Adina.
She was offering the ultimate honeypot, a chance to talk to the man himself. Still, the meeting stank of a Hotel California trap. Once she had him inside Duberman’s mansion, why would she let him leave?
He ought to forget the offer, move on. He could book a flight to South Africa and Witwans. Or call Shafer again, see if he had anything new. Although Shafer had gone dark since the morning.
As for Witwans, Wells didn’t want to go unless he knew the man had something. Without a private jet, he’d lose the next day getting to Johannesburg and then Witwans’s home. If he was wrong, he’d lose yet another day getting back. He couldn’t afford to waste that time. And he feared that the NSA was now up on the only passports he was carrying. As soon as he boarded an international flight, they and the CIA would know exactly where to find him. Until he knew if the agency wanted to bring him in, he couldn’t take that chance.
Tel Aviv, for better or worse, was less than five hundred miles from Cairo, less than an hour by air if Wells could figure out how to fly there without being caught. Plus, truth be told, he wanted to see Duberman. He couldn’t help himself. The offer tempted him. He was sniffing at it like a mouse at a hunk of cheese, trying to convince himself the net overhead wasn’t a trap.
—
No. He’d made this mistake in Istanbul. He needed someone with him to guarantee that Duberman wouldn’t hold him indefinitely. Who? Shafer was out of pocket. Rudi was old and sick and had done all he could.
Which left Duto.
Wells bought yet another new phone, ducked into an alley off Talaat Harb, one of the avenues that spoked north off Tahrir. He pushed himself against a wall as men strolled by. Since the riots and the revolution and the counterrevolution and the gropes and rapes that had come with them, women were invisible around Tahrir after dark.
Duto answered after two rings.
“Get yourself arrested again?”
“Not yet.”
“Too bad.”
“I need a private plane. Now. With you on it.”
“Where am I going?”
Wells debated being coy, but if anyone was tracing Duto’s phone, they would see the Egyptian prefix anyway. “Cairo.�
�
“Why?”
“Tell you when you get here.”
Duto was silent.
“And don’t forget the bag I left with Ellis.” Before heading out from Washington the week before, Wells had left a knapsack stuffed with the kind of goodies that cause problems at border control. It would come in handy for the meeting with Duberman.
“Ellis.” Duto stopped. Something he didn’t want to tell Wells on an open line.
“It’s at his house. Is that a problem?”
“No, but I need a few hours to put this together. Plus, what, eleven in the air?”
“As long as you can get here by noon tomorrow.”
“If you aren’t at the airport, I’ll kill you.”
Join the crowd. Wells hung up, found a two-window café and ordered an oversize pita stuffed with greasy chicken and falafel. Delicious. Before the 2011 revolution, some Cairo restaurants had served beer and wine. A handful had even served hard liquor. Although Islamic law banned alcohol, the sales were a concession to Western tourists, the millions of Coptic Christians who still lived in Egypt, and Cairo’s own cosmopolitan past.
But after the revolution the Muslim Brotherhood had sharply raised taxes on alcohol. Some restaurants that served it had seen their windows smashed. Even though the army had forced out the Brotherhood in 2013, the alcohol seemed to have disappeared, or at least been forced into the back rooms. Another way that Egypt had become more like Saudi Arabia, its neighbor across the Red Sea.
Wells washed down the last of his pita with a lukewarm Coke and set out on a countersurveillance run. He didn’t think anyone was following him, but he wanted to be sure. Tahrir Square was an excellent place to find out. The passageways that ran underneath the plaza allowed for an almost infinite variety of moves. Wells spent twenty minutes wending his way through them and then doubled back and at a near run came back to the entrance on the square’s northeast corner, where he’d entered. He stepped into one of the cabs that were ubiquitous in Tahrir.
“Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam. Where to, my friend?”
“Ramses Square.” Another massive square to the northeast, this one home to the city’s main railway station.
At a traffic light a block south of the square, Wells handed the cabbie his money.
“But we haven’t arrived yet.”
“I like to walk.” Wells opened the door and stepped out, walking southeast, away from both Ramses and Tahrir. He was now sure no one was on him. He had run across the Egyptian security services before. They were decent trackers, but they weren’t subtle. Americans would have stood out even more. He found a café with an Internet station and checked in. Shafer still hadn’t replied, but Duto had, with a jet tail number and an arrival time. And something else, a phone number. Col. Alim Bourak. Tell him I said hello.
—
“Salaam aleikum.”
Bourak’s voice was wary.
“Colonel. A mutual friend suggested I call,” Wells said, in English.
“Does he have a name?”
“Duto.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No.”
A long pause.
“All right. Where are you?”
Wells told him.
“Stay there.”
Words that made Wells want to be anywhere else.
Bourak showed a half hour later. He was a tall man, mid-fifties, with a slight limp and the dull eyes of a mukhabarat officer who had seen more than he wished.
—
“Salaam aleikum.”
“As-aleikum salaam.”
“You speak Arabic.”
“Nam.”
“All right, come with me,” Bourak said in Arabic. “But no talking.”
Bourak turned out to live in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Cairo’s better neighborhoods. Wells didn’t know why the breadth of Duto’s contacts still surprised him. The man had been DCI for almost a decade. “One night, yes?” Bourak said, as he closed the apartment door behind Wells. “Then you can tell your friend we’re even.”
“I can talk now?”
“As long as you don’t tell me your name. Would you like something to drink? Unfortunately, I don’t have alcohol.”
Not a complete surprise. A five-foot-wide photo of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca dominated the living room.
“I don’t drink.” Wells examined the photo.
“You know the hajj?”
“I’m Muslim.”
Bourak squinted at Wells.
“Even without your name, I think I know you.”
“Did you take the pilgrimage?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve always wanted to go.”
“What they say is true. It’s difficult. So many people, not nearly enough space. The crush. The smells. No one has bathed properly in weeks. Yet sooner or later you stop fighting the pressure. Then something strange happens. I can’t describe it exactly. Not so much that you’re closer to Allah as that He’s closer to you. If you die there, no matter. Maybe this is what heaven is, so many people and no space to think about anything. No thoughts of the heat and the dust and the thirst. No concerns about money or comfort. Just these people bending together under some will bigger than their own. I wish every Muslim could do it.”
“Not exactly how the Quran describes paradise.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in seventy-two virgins.”
“I’m not sure I believe in virgins, period.”
Bourak laughed.
“How did a man with your convictions rise so far in the muk?” The secret police were not exactly fans of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“They need a few of us who know the prayers. But colonel is as high as I’ll ever get.”
Wells put his hand over his heart. “Let’s pray, then, Alim. For Egypt.”
“And peace.”
21
THREE DAYS . . .
CAIRO
Cairo International Airport was as ramshackle as everything else in Egypt, a maze of potholed access roads and unfinished construction. Hall 4, the airport’s VIP wing, was the inevitable exception, modern and high-ceilinged. Nearly empty, too. Wealthy travelers weren’t visiting Cairo much these days.
So Wells had a lounge to himself as he waited for Bourak. Duto’s jet had landed, but Wells couldn’t reach it without a new passport. Bourak didn’t have the juice to walk Wells through border control without identification. And Wells didn’t want to use either of his current passports. The NSA was surely watching for both John Wells and Roger Bishop.
Duto held the solution. The bag of toys he’d picked up at Shafer’s house included a fresh passport. Wells had never used it before, and he was sure it wasn’t on any watch lists. Even better, it was several years old, with a slightly blurred photo, so face-recognition software wouldn’t jump it. Wells could again travel without fear of being picked up, at least for a few hours.
One day he’d run out of spares, and life would get even trickier. For now, he was still in the game. As soon as Bourak returned from the tarmac, Wells would be on his way to Duberman. He stuffed away his impatience and he watched the headlines scroll across CNN International:
AMERICAN DEADLINE LESS THAN 72 HOURS AWAY . . . NO TALKS SCHEDULED . . . PENTAGON: 82ND AIRBORNE FULLY DEPLOYED . . . IRANIAN PRESIDENT ROUHANI: NUCLEAR ENRICHMENT IS “RIGHT AND DUTY” . . . SUPREME LEADER KHAMENEI: “ALLAH WILL PROTECT US” . . .
Until the words BREAKING NEWS flashed in foot-high letters, and the scroll changed:
AMERICAN AIRLINES JET MISSING OFF SOUTH AMERICAN COAST . . . 767 LEFT RIO FOR JFK 7 HOURS AGO, LOST FROM RADAR 2 HOURS AGO . . . AA 964 CARRIED 229 PASSENGERS, CREW . . . BRAZIL, US, VENEZUELA SENDING SEARCH TEAMS . . . DEBRIS FIELD REPORTED . . .
Then the real surprise:
Five hundred more people dead, and the war hadn’t even started. The odds that two planes from the same airport had both crashed accidentally at the same time were infinitesimal. The Iranians were warning the President that they would disrupt aviation worldwide if the United States attacked. This time, they had covered their tracks, sending the evidence to the bottom of the Atlantic. Washington would accuse, Tehran would deny, and the deadline would tick closer. Wells hated Duberman for causing this chaos, and himself for not finding a way to stop the man.
The lounge door swung open. Bourak walked in, passport in hand. “Yours, I think, Mr. Michael.” The passport was in the name of Michael Ishmael Jefferson. Wells made sure he had its biographical data memorized, then tucked it away and gave Bourak his other passports. They could only cause trouble.
“I should hold them?”
“Burn them.” His lives, real and fake, turning to ash.
—
But nothing came easy this mission. The immigration agent took immediate exception to the new passport. “Bad photo.”
“Sorry.”
“No entry stamp. You came through Cairo?” The guard tapped at his keyboard. “I don’t see it.”
They’d run across the only government worker in Egypt who wanted to do his job. Bourak flipped out his mukhabarat identification. “This man has been a guest of mine.”
“Then maybe you tell me why there’s no record,” the guard said in Arabic.
“Because your computers don’t work,” Bourak said. “I appreciate your boldness, taking this tone with a colonel in the GID.” The General Intelligence Directorate, the muk’s official title. “Call your supervisor. I want to tell him you’re such a good officer.”
The guard muttered under his breath.
“What?”
“I said, I’ll take his picture, and yours, too, and send him on.”
A minute later, they were through. Wells followed Bourak downstairs to an unmarked door that led outside the terminal, onto the tarmac. Bourak embraced Wells, the emotion genuine. “Maybe one day we’ll take the hajj together.”