The television muted. The man opened the door and Shafer glimpsed Asha Miller walking down the stairs, a pretty black woman, but tending toward fat. Oprah had ruined a whole generation, Shafer thought.
“Shoo, Bernard,” she said.
“Look at him. He look like an FBI agent to you?”
“He knows that name, he is FBI. Federal something anyway. Now shoo.”
Bernard trudged down the hall. “I’ll make coffee,” he said over his shoulder. Keeping his dignity. Asha took his place at the door and looked at Shafer. She had merry eyes. Or maybe she was just amused by the sight of him in his blue suit.
“What’s your name, Mr. FBI?”
“Ellis Shafer. May I come in?”
“You may not. Unless you have a warrant. First thing Daood taught me.”
“Daood went to Dubai a month ago.”
She didn’t ask how he knew.
“He hasn’t come back.”
“That a question?”
“When was the last time you heard from him?”
She sighed. “Somebody arrest him again?”
“I don’t know. But I think he’s in trouble. And you didn’t answer me.”
“He’s always in trouble, always gets out. The last I heard from him was in London.”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Sounds about right. He said something had happened and he had to go back to Dubai.”
“Do you know how he made his money?”
“This is how it went. We were together when he got arrested the first time, and I stuck by him, and he liked that. Didn’t expect it, I think. Couple years later, we got married. Maybe ’cause I told him I was leaving him if he didn’t. Maybe so he could be sure I couldn’t testify against him. Maybe he just liked the idea of getting married. It was an excuse for a party and he loves parties. But I was never under any illusions that I was his only woman. That wasn’t his style.”
“So you knew?”
“Please. Man never had a job in his life, and look at this house. But I figured he was playing both sides. He was too lucky for too long in terms of not getting arrested. Nobody’s that lucky. Plus every so often, I’d see cars at that same hydrant you parked at. American cars with tinted windows and two men in suits inside. Never came to the house, never knocked on the door, just sat and watched.”
“Letting you know they knew.”
“Something like that. And also that’s just how David is. Playing both sides, he thinks that’s style.”
“I understand.”
She smiled. “Bet you grew up just that way. So, yes, I knew that he wasn’t any Boy Scout, but I never asked any details.”
“Anything change the last year or so?”
She shifted her weight and some of her spirit creaked out. “You out to get him?”
“No. Truth? I think he got into something deep and I might be able to help.”
She looked him over, weighing his sincerity. Finally, she nodded. “I think you’re telling at least half the truth. But it don’t matter, because I don’t know anything. Just recently he seemed more stressed out. Drinking more, too. But I don’t know why.”
“He ever mention anyone in particular from the FBI, the DEA, the CIA? Anyone leaning on him?”
She shook her head.
“Could he have left anything important on a computer here?”
“Not here. He was careful about that.”
“You have a phone number for him? E-mail?”
She gave him both. Shafer was happy to hear that the cell wasn’t the one he’d already found. But he sensed she was keeping something back. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“When I said I hadn’t heard from him since London. That’s true, I mean actually hearing his voice. But about a week ago, he e-mailed. Said he was in Pakistan and might be there awhile, and he didn’t know when he’d be back and he wanted to tell me he loved me. Wasn’t like him to write that. Like he wanted me to understand that he was in deep.”
“Thank you. You get anything from him, please let me know.” Shafer handed her his card.
“Long as you promise to do the same.” She lowered her voice. “I know what you’re thinking about Bernard, but if you look close, you’ll see he’s just a big old queen who keeps me company when David’s not here. My husband’s not a one-woman man, but I’m stuck with him and him alone.”
Everybody overshares these days, Shafer thought. He blamed Oprah for that, too. “Call me anytime, day or night,” he said, and backed away from the door.
17
DUBAI
Wells was happy to leave Kandahar Air Field. Even in war zones, the military needed big, well-defended bases to house its planes, coms networks, all the stuff that made the guys on the front lines so effective. But the guys at KAF sometimes seemed to forget that their job was supporting the soldiers outside the wire, not the other way around. Massive resources went into making sure that the airfield’s forty thousand inhabitants had plenty of creature comforts. Meanwhile, some infantry units lacked basics like showers.
KAF’s size was part of the problem. The people who worked there could be forgiven for forgetting that Afghanistan even existed. Almost no Afghans lived or worked on the base. The Taliban fired rockets blindly from the ugly brown mountain that loomed over the base to the north, but they rarely did much damage. Like bases back home, KAF even had a full complement of military police officers who wrote parking tickets and enforced other petty regulations, like making soldiers wear reflective belts after dark.
The Air Force didn’t run flights from Kandahar to Dubai, so Wells booked a ticket on Gryphon Air, a Pentagon-approved charter service. Most of Gryphon’s passengers worked for DynCorp, a contracting company that filled thousands of jobs at Kandahar.
The contractors at Kandahar split into two broad groups. The English-speaking ones were mostly ex-military, soldiers and Marines who’d cultivated special skills like training bomb-sniffing dogs. When their contracts expired, they jumped to private contracting companies that paid a hundred and fifty thousand or more a year.
“Same job, but three times the money and a tenth the risk,” one said to Wells over lunch at the giant Kandahar mess hall called Luxembourg. “PMCs”—private military contractors—“never go outside the wire. No such thing as desertion or dereliction of duty. No brig. Worst they can do is fire you and tell you they won’t pay. Plus I got no sergeants telling me what to wear or how to salute or what time to be in bed. Course, back when I was wearing the uniform, I bitched about the contractors, said they all were useless as tits on a bull.”
“You feel differently now.”
“I do and I don’t. Not saying I work like a Joe. But how was I gonna turn this deal down? Hundred and sixty K. My wife doesn’t work and we got three kids. I put in my time, spent five years getting shot at. Fair’s fair. I don’t make the rules.”
Wells had had several similar conversations. He figured that the contractors were honest guys who felt guilty about their windfall. So they overexplained, justified themselves. Wells wanted to tell them not to worry, that Alex Rodriguez got paid as much to play one baseball game as they did in a year. But he thought that kind of reassurance would just piss them off, so he kept his mouth shut.
The second set of contractors didn’t talk to Wells. They hardly spoke English. They were the Filipinos and Indians who cooked and scrubbed and took out the trash, the scut work that the United States military no longer did for itself. Wells supposed that they freed up American soldiers to fight. They weren’t making a hundred and fifty thousand a year, either, so they might even have been cost-effective.
Still he found their presence disconcerting. They made Kandahar feel like an old-school colonial occupation. Brown men taking care of white men who were fighting other brown men.
THE GRYPHON JET FLEW southwest over the empty desert that dominated southern Kandahar province and then swung over Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. It landed in late afternoon at Dubai’s massive airport. Wells grabbed
his bag and joined the parade of unshaven contractors thirsting for Dubai’s bars.
But along the way to the immigration hall he disappeared into a men’s room. When he walked out, he was wearing a dishdasha and thobe. Once again he was Jalal Haq, Saudi adventurer. Wells had considered entering Dubai on his real passport, setting a lure to see who at the agency was tracking his moves. He and Shafer decided that the plan had too much risk. They couldn’t be certain of finding whoever was tracing him. Better for Wells to use the invisible Saudi passport.
Saudis were favored travelers in Dubai. The immigration agent barely bothered to look at Wells before waving him through. Two minutes later, he stood in the humble-jumble at the front of the airport and listened to deals being made in English and Arabic and a dozen other languages. Pakistani taxi drivers and Indian hotel hawkers competed for business from Russian tourists in velour sweat suits. Dubai was a long way from anywhere, a six-hour flight from Europe and Russia, twelve from the United States. Despite the jet lag, everyone seemed excited.
By rights, Wells should have disliked Dubai. As much as anywhere in the world, the city represented the triumph of empty consumer culture. Yet he found the city strangely compelling. It had no natural advantages. Its weather was miserable most of the year. It lay thousands of miles from the major cities of Europe and Asia. It didn’t have a good natural harbor. Unlike the rest of the region, it didn’t even have oil. Yet since the 1980s, Dubai had grown as fast as anywhere on earth, sprouting thousand-foot-high sand castles built with cheap labor and cheaper money.
Americans didn’t have a good word for cities like Dubai, or the buccaneers who made and lost fortunes in them. The English did: flash. Flash was the shiny toy that broke the day after its warranty expired. Flash was the drunk buying rounds for everyone with a credit card a buck short of its limit. Flash was the late-night investment guru promising to give up the stock market’s secrets at a $799 weekend seminar. Act now and save $100.
At their worst, flash men carved misery into the lives around them. They lived high and skipped town, leaving behind thousand-dollar suits and unpaid child support. But mostly they meant no harm. Mostly they were lazy dreamers who couldn’t multiply or divide any better than their customers. Every so often, almost by accident, they came up with something great. As they had in Dubai with the Burj Khalifa, which Wells saw from the cab taking him to his hotel.
The Burj was the tallest skyscraper ever built, a half mile high, an incredible feat of engineering. To withstand the desert winds, the Burj was built of a dozen rounded towers that buttressed one another as they rose. One by one the supporting towers fell away until only the tallest remained, impossibly long, a fingerclaw puncturing the sky. Most of the Burj was empty, and as a business venture the tower was no doubt a disaster. But who cared? Like Notre Dame or the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall, the Burj would awe visitors long after its architects were gone. It was a hundred-and-fifty-story monument to flash, with an almost magnetic pull. Wells stared at it until lesser skyscrapers nearer the highway blocked his view. “Have you been to it?” he asked his driver.
“Not me, no. Very expensive. One hundred dirhams.” About twenty-five dollars. “Also I am afraid of heights.” The driver sounded sheepish. To prove he wasn’t a coward, he cut in front of a tanker truck.
The Grosvenor was a five-star hotel, marble and sleek. Wells used one of his Saudi credit cards to take a high-floor suite that overlooked the gulf. Dubai was located on a western-facing shoreline of the Arabian peninsula, so the dusky red glow of the setting sun echoed in the waters of the gulf.
Wells wondered what Shafer was doing in Chicago, ten time zones behind. Probably about to knock on Asha Miller’s door. Wells hoped he didn’t get himself in trouble. He supposed Shafer qualified as his best friend these days. An atheist Jew and a Christian turned Muslim. But Wells trusted Shafer as deeply as he’d ever trusted anyone. He had lied to Shafer over the years, and Shafer had done the same to him. But never out of malice, on either side. Shafer had his back. Wells wondered whether he could ever build similar trust with Anne, if he had the strength to open himself to her that way.
In Dubai, the calls to prayer sounded more quietly than in most Muslim cities. The hotels and nightclubs didn’t want to remind Western tourists that Dubai wasn’t really Las Vegas East, that a different set of laws applied. Even so, as the sun descended into the gulf, Wells heard faint calls for the Maghrib. He knelt before the sunset — for Mecca was almost straight west of Dubai — and lowered his head. He prayed to an Allah who might accept him and Shafer and Anne alike, for forgiveness for the blood he had shed and would shed again. His more orthodox brothers might find his prayers wanting. But in the end only Allah could judge. And He was keeping His thoughts about Wells — and everything else — to Himself.
AFTER HIS PRAYERS, Wells showered, brushed his teeth, opened the FedEx box that the concierge had given him. He found a black leather carrying bag with a shoulder strap. Anne would have called it a man purse. The thought made Wells smile. The bag held what looked like the leftovers from an estate sale: a flash drive, a Zippo lighter, two garage door openers, two strips of white plastic, two handkerchiefs, a flat gray rock, high-resolution satellite photos of David Miller’s house in Dubai, and a credit card — size Sony camera. Only the camera and the photos were what they appeared to be. Everything else came from the basement labs at Langley, the Directorate of Science and Technology.
When Wells trained at the Farm, these toys hadn’t existed. He needed to give them a dry run. He looked through the online Dubai real estate listings until he found a target. Then he called the Avis office in the Grosvenor’s lobby and rented a Toyota. Nothing fancy. Nothing memorable.
He drove east through the Dubai night, away from skyscrapers on the coast, toward the industrial neighborhoods near the airport. The roads stayed fantastically wide, eight- and ten-lane boulevards, but the traffic steadily lightened. Wells saw a sign for “Dubai Oasis Super East” and turned right onto a long, curving boulevard. Suddenly he entered a ghost city.
Beginning in 2008, developers abandoned housing projects all over Dubai, especially in the unsexy neighborhoods far from the gulf. These developments were the tinsel side of flash, paid for with 100 percent borrowed money. Now the banks had stopped lending, and these half-built houses literally could not be given away. Finishing them would cost more than any buyer would pay. They sat empty, waiting for cheap money to start flowing again, or the desert to retake them.
The boulevard narrowed and then turned left into a cul-de-sac. Eight lanes into none. Urban design at its worst. One finished house and three shells were scattered around the teardrop. Halfway down the block, a single street lamp leaned drunkenly over the asphalt. The winds had tilted it, or the summer heat had buckled its base. Or both. To the east, helicopters fluttered around the Burj Khalifa. But the cul-de-sac occupied another universe, postapocalyptic in its desolation. Wells half expected to see a sentient robot scuttling by.
He parked outside the wire fence protecting the lone finished house. “No Trespassing/Alarmed Response,” signs warned in Arabic and English. Wells pulled himself over and trotted for the house. The front door had two locks, a dead bolt up high and a standard knob below. Inside, a red light blinked on an alarm box.
Wells turned the door handle. Locked. As he’d hoped.
He flipped open the Zippo lighter Shafer had sent him. Where the metal cage around the wick should have been, the lighter had a notch that looked like a USB port. Wells slipped the head of the flash drive into the port. Then he pulled off the plastic casing at the back of the drive, revealing two narrow metal picks with oddly shaped tips. When Wells plugged the flash drive into the Zippo, a light on the side of the drive blinked green.
Wells lined up the tips of the picks with the deadbolt’s keyhole. He pushed a tiny button next to the light, and the picks slid into the keyhole. Metal scraped on metal inside the lock. Then the flash drive made a quarter turn sideways, and the
deadbolt slid back with a solid thwack.
Wells repeated the procedure with the bottom lock. He reached for the handle and the door opened smoothly. Wells stepped inside, let his eyes adjust. The rooms were empty. The house was hot and stale and stank of varnish and something sharp, maybe mold. The windows and doors hadn’t been opened in years, but grit and sand covered the floors.
Ten seconds after Wells walked in, the alarm beeped frantically, as if it were guarding a nuclear weapon, not an empty house. Wells pulled out the device that looked like a garage door opener, a black plastic box with a single black button. He peeled a plastic sheet on the box’s back, revealing a sticky adhesive, and pressed it on the wall next to the alarm system. He pushed the button on the front.
Shafer had promised him that the device would beat any standard household alarm. Something about a short-range electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to disrupt circuits. The pulse caused the software inside the alarm to run very slowly. An alarm that normally sounded thirty seconds after a break-in would instead need an hour or more to go off.
“Just make sure you give the thing a couple of feet when it’s on.”
“Why?”
“Just make sure.”
So Wells pressed the button and stepped away. The response was immediate and gratifying. The alarm no longer warned of the end of the world. Now it sounded like a heart monitor, with long pauses and dignified single beeps. Incredible. Wells walked through the empty rooms for a few minutes. The house was nearly finished. The bathrooms even had sinks, though when Wells turned the taps he heard only a faint hiss.
He took one final look and walked out, grabbing the alarm disruptor. The device did have one flaw. It stopped working once it was removed. An operative who used it had to pull it and run, or leave it and prove that he wasn’t an ordinary thief. But the advantage the device offered was worth the trouble. The next time he came home, Wells wanted to meet the engineers who’d built it — and the lock picker.
The Shadow Patrol jw-6 Page 20
