“All right. If she’s home and doesn’t mind.”
She led him to the doorman’s station.
“Miguel. Call 2106.”
The doorman buzzed, handed Julianna the phone. After a rapid-fire Spanish conversation: “She asks, can you turn to the camera so she can see you?”
Wells did. He was giving Ramos a choice. He’d proven he could find her at home. She could see him under these relatively controlled conditions, or send him away and risk that he wouldn’t be so polite the next time he wanted to meet.
He took the phone. “I brought my down payment.” He held up the open envelope so she could see the money inside. “A hundred thousand.”
“This wasn’t what we agreed to.”
“No, this place is perfect.” Wells gave Julianna a thumbs-up. “I’d really like to talk. I’m giving you back to Julianna now. Just let her know it’s okay.”
—
Wells rode the elevator alone. He had to admit he was pleased. In Guatemala, Montoya had treated him like a fool. Here he’d forced a meeting on his terms.
He was lucky the elevator was slow. Around twelve, he wondered why Ramos had agreed so readily. Why she hadn’t asked Julianna to come up, too, if only to have a second set of eyes on him?
He heard Raviv in his head again. Never trust it when it’s too easy. He jabbed at the button for twenty, stepped off, flipped the fire alarm to freeze the elevator. Wells ran for the fire stairs as the alarm bell shrieked. If she had a pistol and was waiting in the corridor when the elevator doors opened, he had no play.
Wells vaulted up the stairs to twenty-one, opened the door a crack. Ramos stood outside the elevator bank, a pistol in her hands. So much for forcing the meeting on his terms. He wondered if she was any kind of shot. She was holding the gun too hard, her arms rigid. On the other hand, she was barely fifty feet away. Even someone who’d never pulled a trigger before could get lucky that close. Only one choice left. He opened the door.
“Sophia.” She looked to him. He raised his hands. “Do not put a hole in me.”
“Qué?”
“Don’t shoot. Please.”
She swung toward him. Even from fifty feet, he saw the pistol barrel shaking.
“Leave me alone.”
“Let’s go inside. Talk.”
“Eddie said someone like you would be coming.”
He feared if he took even a single step, she’d start shooting.
“Think it through. If I’d wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t come in such an obvious way. With the doorman and Julianna knowing I’m here. And I wouldn’t have brought the money.” He raised the envelope.
Her arms sagged, like the pistol weighed a hundred pounds. The strain would rise in her until she surrendered or pulled the trigger.
“We were supposed to meet tonight.”
He didn’t answer. Inch by inch, the pistol drooped, until finally the barrel was vertical. The elevator alarm still rang crazily a floor below.
“I don’t want you in my apartment.”
Too late. “There’s a pool on the roof, right? Put away the gun, we’ll go up, talk there.”
“Not the roof.”
“The gym?” Julianna would have been pleased. All the Oro Blanco’s amenities were making an appearance.
—
The developers had skimped on the gym. Behind the frosted glass double doors of the Oro Blanco Fitness Center were two small rooms of treadmills and Nautilus equipment. Second-floor windows overlooked the street. Wells and Ramos sat side by side on a padded exercise bench.
“Let me see.”
He handed the envelope to her. She thumbed through a packet of bills. Then she tucked the envelope at her feet and without further ado told him what he’d come to hear. “I met Eddie five years ago. I was working as a masseuse.” She spat the word. “You understand?”
“I think so, yes.” A prostitute.
“He came from Mexico a year or two before. He drank all day. But quietly. Rum and Diet Coke. He wasn’t an angry drunk, a showy drunk like a lot of our men. This was to hide something very deep inside him. When I told him I was a singer, he came to hear me. After that, he decided to support me, get me out of the life.”
“He believed in your music.”
“Of course.” Matter-of-factly, as though Nuñez was one of a legion of fans. “He kept drinking. I didn’t try to stop him. We didn’t get married or anything. I’m barren—” A word Wells couldn’t imagine an American woman using. “I didn’t used to be, but I had a bad abortion. I told him. He didn’t care. He said he didn’t want children, didn’t deserve any.”
“Did he tell you about Mexico?”
“Enough. He didn’t seem like one of those men, but I never doubted him. Then—this must have been a year, a year and a half after we met—an American called him, came to meet him.”
“You met this man?”
“No. And Eddie never told me his name. He said the less I knew, the safer I would be. He said he’d known the man in Peru. Anyway, the man wanted to hire him.”
“So this was more than three years ago?”
“Right. And Eddie didn’t take long, he agreed. I was born to be a mule, he told me. It’s time for me to get back in the harness. He stopped drinking. I didn’t think he could, but he had three bad nights and then it was gone. Like he’d never touched the stuff.”
“But he wasn’t doing anything then. For this man.”
“No, he was. That first year, he went away several times.”
“He say where?”
“Europe. That was all. But I’m sure he was doing jobs.”
“Three years ago.” Wells couldn’t understand how this group had operated so long without being noticed, much less caught. Either Nuñez hadn’t been killing anyone back then, despite what Montoya and Ramos thought, or an intelligence agency was funding these guys and maybe helping with coms and transport.
“Three years, yes. He worked for more than a year. Then everything stopped. He was home several months. He bought this apartment. I thought it might be done, but Eddie said they were still paying him.”
“All this time, he didn’t tell you anything specific?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t mean targets. What about how many men he worked with? Who was behind it? He never showed you a fake passport? Nothing?”
“You don’t understand.”
She was wrong. Wells had lived for seven years among al-Qaeda guerrillas who would have gutted him if he’d ever hinted at how he felt about them. He knew the value of silence.
“So he was—off duty, let’s say—for a while. Then what?”
“Last May, he left again. Said he might not see me for a while. He came back for a few weeks in September and October. Then gone again. Finally, two weeks ago, he called me. He was angry.”
“He said that?”
“No. But he spoke in a way I’d never heard before. ‘This man wants revenge for something that happened a long time ago. A woman. It’s a mistake.’ I told him, leave. He said he had never quit halfway through a job, that he would try to make Hank change his mind. He said he could handle Hank.”
“He mention the CIA? A station chief?”
“No. Since then, nothing. No call, no email. Of course, he has disappeared before, but this is different. I think he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to keep asking the same questions, but this American who hired him, all Eddie said about him was that they worked together a long time ago in Peru?”
She reached down, picked up the packet of money.
“That’s right. I don’t think I know anything more. But you could ask, if you like.”
Wells had a thousand questions for the woman who sat beside him. How could she be so clear-eyed about Nuñez, who he was, what he’d done for her, the sadness
of their partnership, yet so delusional about her ability as a singer? How had she wound up as a prostitute? Was she in on the joke at Cortes Frescos? Or did she think she was one song away from her big break? And, on a more personal note, how close had she come to pulling the trigger upstairs?
But a judge would strike them all as irrelevant, and potentially upsetting to the witness. Wells would carry only speculation in his baggage.
“Did Eddie ever mention Iran?”
Her face was a blank. “No.”
“Revolutionary Guard? Hezbollah?”
“I never heard of those.” She tucked the packet to her chest like she feared he might change his mind and take it. “Gracias for this.”
“Can I call you if I have questions?”
“I’m going away from Panama City. I have family in Bogotá. No one can find me there. But I’ll have my phone.”
“If you have your phone, someone can find you. Leave it. Get a new one.” He scribbled one of his email addresses on the envelope. “Set up a clean email account, send me your number at this address, and then never use that account again.”
“It’s like that.”
“Yes.”
At the door, she turned to him. “You think Eddie’s alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“He’s a survivor type.”
“Like you.”
“Sí.”
“Remember this, then. When you remember me. Mr. Bishop or whatever your name is. Everyone dies. Even the survivor types.”
He half expected her to pull a pistol and plug away. Instead, she pushed open the door and bowed her head as she walked off. He understood her not at all, but he was sure she’d told him the truth about Eddie.
—
Back at the hotel, he passed the word to Shafer.
“‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice.”
“Who’s Alice?” Wells said.
“My sister-in-law. Got Alzheimer’s. All she can remember are nursery rhymes. You went a long way for that story. Spent a lot of money.”
“I believe you pointed out it wasn’t ours. Anyway, we have a timeline now that dates back three-plus years.”
“Which doesn’t make sense.”
“I know.”
“So we’re looking for an officer who was in Lima back in the day.”
“And got into it with someone else—”
“Over a woman. To the extent that this officer holds a grudge a decade or more later.”
“Sounds like someone should remember it,” Wells said.
“So what’s your next move?”
Wells found himself wanting to see Ramos settled to safety. He read the feeling as protective, not sexual. Her singing career seemed no less noble for its inevitable failure. He wondered if she had touched a similar streak in Nuñez. “Lima, maybe?”
“Whole station’s turned over two, three times since then. Anyway, we’re low on time. Nuñez has been gone for a couple weeks. The Iranian warning came in last week. Assuming they’re connected—”
“You think the Rev Guard would hire an American to put together a hit squad?”
“Not impossible. A few years back, the Iranians tried to hire a Mexican cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador to D.C. Lucky for the Saudis the guy they went to was a DEA agent. Check the court records if you don’t believe me. Come on home, we can talk this through in person.”
“Plus I’ll have the joy of seeing you face-to-face.”
“I thought that was understood.”
10
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
White-knuckle night driving was another of aging’s indignities. Oncoming traffic streaked blurrily by. The road itself seemed as narrow and slick as stones in a stream. Shafer kept his hands at ten and two, stayed below the speed limit. He’d never been much of a speed-limit guy. But then he’d never been old. Worse, he was sure the drivers stuck behind him were thinking Outta my way, geezer. He’d have thought the same, a few years back.
Fortunately, he hadn’t misplaced his mind. Not yet. He hadn’t visited Duto’s house in years, but he knew every turn. He rolled up to find a black Chrysler 300 parked outside the front gate. He handed his license to the unsmiling man inside.
The guard looked it over, handed it back. “The senator’s expecting you.”
“You mean Vinny.”
The guard ended the conversation by raising his window.
“Don’t you need to frisk me?” Shafer knew he was acting up. The security annoyed him, though Duto needed it. Former agency directors made ripe terrorist targets, none more than Duto, who had run the CIA’s drones as enthusiastically as a queen bee.
The Chrysler edged into the street and the gate swung open, revealing two more sentries in a black Chevy Tahoe. Shafer waved at them. They stared back like they were looking for an excuse to shoot.
The front door was unlocked. Shafer let himself in, found the man himself sitting on a rocking chair in his glass-walled back porch, sipping a glass of something brown. A cigar smoldered in an old-school black plastic ashtray at his feet. The Post and Times lay on the table at his elbow, alongside a BlackBerry and iPhone. Shafer had known Duto for decades. Even so, he couldn’t be sure if he was watching a subtle self-parody: I, Washington Insider.
“Is Ward Just eavesdropping in the kitchen?”
“Ward who?” Duto reached down, came up with a square bottle. “Straight from Kentucky. Delicious. Have a splash, take your cares away.”
“Have a what? When did you turn into Lyndon Johnson’s love child?” Nonetheless, Shafer dribbled a finger of the stuff into his glass, took a sip. Duto was right. It was delicious. Too bad he couldn’t drink more of it. Not until his car learned to drive itself.
“What do you think?”
“That it violates a gift limit. Can I tell you what Wells found or do I have to gaze with wonder at the backyard first? I sho’ do love yo’ oak trees. Mulberries, too.”
Duto exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke at Shafer for his insolence. “Go.”
Three minutes later, Shafer was done.
“One hundred grand for that? Glad it wasn’t my money.”
“Whose, if you don’t mind sharing?”
“Someone who’s in my office a lot. Told him the truth. Not for me, not illegal, might mean a lot to the country. Two hours later, I had a cashier’s check for ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars. At a hundred, he would have needed an extra signatory.”
“You threw in the last dollar yourself? On a senator’s measly salary? Charity lives.”
“Let’s assume the story’s true. That the station chief who’s been targeted misbehaved back in the day in Lima. Then what?”
“Any tales of one-sided wife-swapping make it over the Andes to your happy house in Bogotá?”
“Assuming we can trust the timeline, this happened right around 2000. I was gone.”
“Beginning your climb up the skull ladder.”
“Exactly.”
“Would Cannon know?” John Cannon had followed Duto as Bogotá station chief.
“Too nose-in-the-air to care about who diddled who. Spencer might, but he hates me. Maybe Hatch—”
“Don’t know that name.”
“Chip Hatch. He was in Colombia for around five years about that time. At Lockheed now.”
“Course he is. It’s a wonderful world.”
“There’s a couple other guys, too. I’ll make calls.”
“They won’t talk to me.”
“Sadly, no.”
The great irony. Shafer couldn’t stand Duto, but he wished the man had never quit. Everyone senior at Langley had known that Duto used Shafer and Wells when he wanted to steer clear of agency rules. As long as Duto was DCI, Shafer had juice. Even when h
e wasn’t working for Duto, people assumed he was.
Now Shafer needed to beg for even small favors. So far he’d worked mostly as a conduit on this mission. Not the way he hoped to end his career. He sucked down the last of his bourbon, hoping to anesthetize his self-pity. As soon as it hit his throat, he knew he’d made a mistake. The Honda would feel like an eighteen-wheeler on the way home.
“Care for a cigar?”
“Pass.” Shafer’s bones creaked like a bridge in a hurricane as he sat up. “I have to go.”
“Call you if I hear something. Though I have to say if anybody but Wells came back with this, I would have laughed. If we had to worry about every ex–case officer with a grudge, we’d be in a world of hurt.”
Every ex–case officer with a grudge. The words gave Shafer an idea. Sure, Duto had the money, the power, and maybe even the friends. But Shafer had the brains. The bourbon filled his stomach and warmed his heart. He upgraded his self-assessment. Not just brains. Genius.
—
The next morning, Shafer reached his desk before sunrise. He spent two hours concocting a realistic-sounding memo, printed it out, called Lucy Joyner. It was barely 7:30, but he wasn’t surprised when she picked up.
“Lucy.”
“Ellis.” Which sounded like A-lis. Three decades in Washington hadn’t touched Joyner’s Texas accent. She used it as she did her bleached-blond hair, to hide a fierce intelligence and loyalty to the agency.
“We’re overdue for dinner.”
“How come you only call when you want something?”
“Who said I wanted something?”
Joyner didn’t bother to answer.
“Let me explain in person. Five minutes. Ten at most.”
“This going to be”—gun be—“ten minutes I regret? Had a few of those in my life.”
“Maybe.”
“Then get down here primo pronto. ’Fore my admin gets here and this becomes an official and scheduled visit.”
During much of Duto’s time as director, Joyner had served as the agency’s inspector general, its second-worst job. When he left, her reward was a transfer to the worst job of all, director of human resources. A less committed employee would have taken the hint, retired, cashed her pension. But Joyner, who had never worked as a case officer, had deep and unrequited love for those who did. Shafer had seen the attitude in other support staffers. I’m not worthy of front-line duty, but I will carry water as best I can. Abuse me. I deserve it. In her twenty-ninth year at CIA, Joyner still worked sixty hours a week.
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