BACK INSIDE THE HOSPITAL the hours passed miserably. David and Jessica, Exley’s kids, showed up, along with Randy, Exley’s ex-husband, had brought them. The kids hugged Wells, but Randy didn’t even shake his hand. He was everything Wells wasn’t. Wearing business casual, a little paunchy, with close-cropped hair and a black laptop bag. He’d loved Exley, Wells knew. Maybe he still did. He stared across the waiting room at Wells, his eyes shouting an accusation: You did this. Your fault.
Finally, around 2 p.m., a man in clean blue scrubs emerged from the double doors that marked the entrance to the emergency rooms. His surgical mask dangled from his neck and his eyes were tired, but he moved confidently.
He looked around the waiting area and signaled to Wells. Randy also rose and the three of them stood in an unfriendly huddle.
“I’m Dr. Patel. Are you both relatives?”
“I’m John Wells. Her fiancé.”
“When did that happen?” Randy said.
“We were planning to tell you.”
“And you are?” Patel said to Randy.
“Her ex-husband.” He pointed to David and Jessica. “Those are our kids.”
“In that case, Ms. Exley’s injuries were quite severe. She’s fortunate she arrived at the hospital so quickly. The bullets were fired from behind, at an angle. They entered through her back.” Patel touched his back to indicate where the wounds had been. “One damaged her lower spine, the L-two and L-three vertebrae. The other pierced her liver. That was our immediate focus, since liver injuries bleed heavily. Indeed, Ms. Exley lost several pints of blood, but we’ve now stanched the bleeding and I believe she’s out of immediate danger. We’ve left the damaged vertebrae alone. She’ll need a second operation to repair her spine tomorrow. But I would say her long-term prognosis is favorable. As you may know, the liver is adept at renewing itself.”
“Thank you,” Wells said.
“Thank God,” Randy said.
Patel raised his hand. “Understand. Even if the second operation goes smoothly, she has rehabilitation ahead to regain full use of her legs.”
“She’s paralyzed,” Randy said.
“We believe it’s temporary. There’s severe inflammation around the spinal cord, but the nerve bundles appear intact. The swelling ought to fade over time and she’ll regain motor control. But there are no guarantees with this type of injury.”
“Can we see her?”
“For a minute.” Patel nodded at Exley’s kids. “I wouldn’t recommend letting them see her yet. She’s quite tired.”
“Quite,” Randy said. He turned to Wells. “Happy, John? Get everything you came for?” His breath was middle-manager minty and he had a forced grin on his face, the smile of a vampire about to plunge his teeth into a victim’s neck. Wells took a half-step back, wondering whether Randy would really be foolish enough to swing at him in here.
“Gentlemen,” Patel said. “Are you all right?”
“Fine and dandy,” Randy said.
“All right. Mr. Wells, please come with me.” To Randy: “You can wait here, sir, with your children.”
Wells followed Patel down a wide corridor and into a room marked “ER Recovery 1.” As soon as he stepped in, Wells understood why the doctor hadn’t wanted David and Jessica to see Exley. Her eyes were closed and sunken, her face drawn, exhausted, nearly white under the room’s harsh lights. Monitors beeped around her, measuring her pulse, respiration, and other vitals. Bags of solution fed a tube into her arm. Two more tubes, one slowly pulsing with clear liquid, the other bright red with blood, poked from the gauze that covered her stomach. His dear girl. And this was his fault, his and his alone.
Wells wrapped her hand in his. Her pulse fluttered fast and weak in his palm. Her eyes opened, slid shut, opened again and found him.
“John.” Her voice was dull and dry.
“Jenny.”
“Where?”
“You know if I’m here, it can’t be heaven.” Her eyes flickered and he saw that she hadn’t gotten the joke. “It’s GW Hospital.”
“The motorcycles.”
He squeezed her hand.
“Yes. I’ll tell you later. The whole story. Are you okay? In pain?” She grunted, a soft sigh that seemed to indicate that her consciousness had been dulled beyond quotidian concerns like pain.
“You’ll be fine,” Wells said. “Better than new. I promise.”
She closed her eyes. Patel touched his arm. “She needs to rest.”
“Jenny. David and Jessica are outside.” He kissed her cheek. “We’ll all be waiting. I love you.” She didn’t answer.
SHE STARTED TO BLEED AGAIN an hour later. The nurses called Wells over and whispered the bad news. She was back in surgery. He endured another two hours of miserable waiting before Patel emerged again, not as dapper or as confident this time. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke so quietly that Wells had to lean in to hear him.
“It’s not surprising, given the severity of the initial injury. We have it controlled now, but we had to give her more blood.”
“Can I see her?” Wells was alone now. The nurses had moved Randy, David, and Jessica to a separate waiting area.
“Certainly not tonight. Tonight she rests. Possibly tomorrow.”
WELLS LEFT A FEW MINUTES LATER, sitting in the back of an ambulance, the only sure way to get through the media cordon. He emerged at his house to find three Suburbans parked in front. Two men sat inside each of the SUVs, peering out. Two more men were on the porch, all wearing Kevlar flak jackets. Agency guards. Michaels had told Wells to expect them. Wells supposed he understood the logic. But he hated the idea of having the house he shared with Exley turned into a fortified garrison.
The guard nearest the front door raised a hand as Wells inserted his key into the lock. “Mr. Wells. Leon Allam,” he said. He raised his identification.
“Good to meet you,” Wells said.
“Mind if we come in with you? Just to be sure everything’s cool.” Allam had a soldier’s tight haircut, and his Kevlar looked ridiculous over his suit and tie. Wells tried not to dislike the guy. He was just doing his job.
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Wells turned the key in the lock. “I’ll holler if I need you.”
“Yes, sir. But I’d be a lot more comfortable if I could come in.”
Wells felt his temper rise. “You asking or ordering?”
“I’m asking.”
“In that case, you can come in. As long as you and your men agree to trade in those flak jackets for bulletproof vests that’ll fit under your suits. No need to scare the neighbors.”
Allam paused. “All right, sir. If Mr. Michaels agrees.”
“And stop saying ‘sir.’ I can’t stand it. I’m John.”
Wells turned the lock in the door and Allam grabbed his arm.
“I’d like to go in first, secure the entry.”
“Secure the entry. By all means.” Wells restrained himself from pointing out that anyone inside the house would be well aware by now that they were coming in. He stepped out of the way and Allam pushed open the door and jumped inside.
“Secure!” he yelled a few seconds later.
“Where do they get you guys?” Wells murmured to himself.
A few minutes later, with Allam downstairs, Wells stepped into the shower and hit himself with a blast of frigid water. He wanted to hurt himself, run in the dark until his knees burned and his feet blistered, but the shower would have to do for now. He needed to catch up on the investigation. He dressed, packed a kit bag. He would sleep at Langley until Exley came home. He couldn’t bear to spend his nights in this empty house, with her gone and the guards outside.
He refused Allam’s offer of a ride in an armored Suburban and instead took his little Impreza out from the garage. But Allam insisted that the Suburbans ride shotgun front and back, their emergency lights flashing as the convoy rolled out.
And as they flew toward Langley with the Suburbans running their sirens at eighty miles
an hour, Wells realized that even if Exley recovered completely, and for the sake of his sanity he had to believe she would, their lives wouldn’t be normal for a very long time. This attack had destroyed whatever privacy they had left. They’d live in a bubble for the foreseeable future.
Another reason to make Kowalski pay.
AT LANGLEY, Shafer briefed Wells that the CIA and FBI had set up a joint task force, eighty agents, with the promise of more to come if they were needed. Following the card key, the investigators had tracked the Russians to the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington. The Marriott staff reported that the men had checked in six days before, to rooms 402, 403, and 404. They’d used a single credit card, a MasterCard from Bank Zachodni in Warsaw. They’d kept to themselves, saying they were visiting Washington on business and expected to stay about a week, possibly longer. They’d parked only the Pathfinder, not the motorcycles, which they’d apparently stashed elsewhere. They’d asked for quiet rooms. When they’d checked in, the clerk had gotten a plate number for the Pathfinder from them, which caused a brief whirr of excitement at the agency, but when the agency ran the number, it was fake. In all, no one at the Marriott found anything odd about them. They weren’t American, but so what? People from every nation in the world had business in Washington.
While the hotel staff was questioned, rooms 402, 403, and 404 were searched to their foundations, every piece of furniture removed and disassembled. So far, the investigators hadn’t found much. In 402, a Russian copy of The Da Vinci Code, lightly read. In 403, a pack of Marlboro Reds, crumpled and empty, and an empty pack of matches from Reverse, a Moscow nightclub. The agency’s Russia desk, which was assisting the investigation, reported that Reverse was known to be popular with Russian intelligence officers. In 404, a bottle of vodka, half-empty, and three clean glasses.
But no passports, real or fake. No cash. No computers. No cell phones. No Pathfinder in the Marriott’s parking lot. The assassins had apparently planned to ditch their motorcycles, pull off their masks, take a cab or the Metro to the Pathfinder, and disappear. With their faces hidden and the motorcycles bought under fake names, their tracks would be lost.
Wells had rendered that plan inoperative. The task force now had faces and fingerprints from the corpses. Investigators were checking the prints against the FBI national criminal database, as well as the prints that foreign visitors to the United States were required to provide when they entered the country. The criminal database hadn’t matched any hits. The immigration records had, for two of the men. They’d entered the United States three weeks earlier, on a nonstop Delta flight from Warsaw to Atlanta. They had valid Polish passports with valid U.S. tourist visas, issued a few weeks before in Warsaw. They were brothers, and their names were Jerzy and Jozef Godinski, according to the record.
Already, Langley had asked the Polish government, which unlike the Kremlin was a good friend of the United States, to help it track down the men — if they existed at all. Everyone at Langley figured that both the names and the passports would be fake. As for the third man, the passenger on the Ducati, his fingerprints didn’t match any on file. Which meant he’d come in on a foreign diplomatic passport. Or illegally over the Mexican border. Or by car from Canada, where fingerprint checks were not yet routine. Put another way, the investigators had no idea how he’d gotten in. Not yet, anyway.
“So that’s what we know,” Shafer said when he was done.
“Have we called the Russians yet?”
“No proof they were Russian yet. The credit card’s the best lead so far. Until we find the Pathfinder.”
“You think they stowed everything in it?”
“They had to keep their passports and cells somewhere. Unless they had a safe house. And if they had a safe house, why stay at a hotel?”
THE MAINTENANCE STAFF found a cot and brought it to Wells’s office on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. But when Wells closed his eyes, he couldn’t sleep. He swore he could smell her, her lemony perfume. Near midnight, Shafer walked in. “Come on. Get dressed.”
“Did they find something?”
“I’m taking you home. To Casa Shafer. We’ll have a beer, watch TV, pretend today never happened.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Get dressed. I promise, you’ll have lots of time for whatever bloody revenge fantasy you’re cooking up.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
8
Finding the Pathfinder didn’t take long. Fifteen hours after the attack, just about the time that Wells and Shafer got home, a D.C. cop spotted the Pathfinder parked in Northeast, two blocks from the Rhode Island Avenue Red Line metro stop.
Inside the Pathfinder’s glove box were two Polish passports, $12,000 in cash, and a disposable cell phone. The passports had been issued two months before. They were the same ones the would-be assassins had used to enter the United States through Atlanta. A few hours later, four thousand miles away, the famously bad-tempered agents of the WSI, the Polish military intelligence service, arrested the clerk who’d issued the passports. He confessed immediately — a wise choice — but insisted he’d had no idea what the men who’d bought the passports had planned to do with them. They were Russian, he said, and paid cash.
Meanwhile, the phone was handed over to the wizards at the National Security Agency. The phone shouldn’t have yielded any information. It was a disposable. Its call registers had been deleted. And it hadn’t even been used to place any calls. But through some magic Wells didn’t claim to understand, the NSA’s engineers found records for two incoming calls in the phone’s memory. Both had been received the night before the assassination attempt. They were sixteen-digit numbers, international, country code 7, city code 495. Moscow, Russia. When the agency first tried to trace them, neither existed. Like the northern Virginia extensions that led to CIA headquarters, they couldn’t be found in conventional telco databases.
The next day, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador to Russia, asked for a meeting with the Russian interior minister, Aleksandr Milov. Without mentioning the cell phones, Purdy said that evidence connected Russia with the terrorist attack in Washington.
What evidence? Milov asked. Had the assassins been definitely identified? Not yet, Purdy conceded. But the assassins were traveling on false Polish passports, and the passport clerk who issued them said the men were Russian. Would Russia allow the United States to send its own agents to Moscow to investigate further leads?
First, Milov said, allow him to express the Kremlin’s outrage at the attack. In broad daylight. And so close to the White House. Terrible. Of course the Russian government would offer whatever help it could, Milov said. Of course, of course, of course.
But. unfortunately. the Kremlin could not allow American investigators on Russian soil. To do so would violate Russian sovereignty and be an affront to the FSB, which was certainly as skilled as the FBI. At least as skilled. In any event, Milov was certain that no Russians would ever commit an attack. The Poles were notorious liars and probably trying to deflect attention from their own guilt.
Nonetheless, the FSB wanted to prove its goodwill. If the United States would share the evidence it had gathered so far, the FSB would gladly send its own agents to Washington to aid the investigation. They could be on their way on the next Aeroflot flight. A joint Russian-American effort to combat terrorism. No? Well, then, the Kremlin would wait for instructions from the United States.
“And yadda yadda yadda,” Shafer said, when he’d finished telling Wells what had happened. They were in a conference room at GW Hospital. Exley had just undergone surgery to clean up her spine. The early report from the doctors was positive. The center of her spinal cord was undamaged. Her rehab would be difficult but she should be able to walk again.
“They gave us nothing?”
“Pretty much. But I do have some good news from Fort Meade—” the NSA. “They think they can trace the Moscow end of the call to a specific a
ddress.”
“Even though the numbers don’t exist?”
“Correct. And even if they’re never used again. Don’t ask me how.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“But there’s a catch. Even if they can track it, they say we can’t ever disclose what they’ve found, either publicly or privately, to the Russians. NSA doesn’t want the Kremlin to know how far we can get inside their phone networks.”
“And how far is that?”
“All the way, give or take.”
“But even if we can’t go public with it, we’ll know.”
“Apparently. Though if the numbers track to some ninety-year-old babushka, we may have to reconsider.”
“We’ll have a name.”
“Maybe a company, maybe a person. What then? Planning a trip to Moscow?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“You have. It’s obvious. How about a better idea? Help her get better and let everyone else work this for a while.”
“Ellis Shafer, giving the team-player speech. Did Duto put a chip in your brain?”
“Don’t be stupid. The whole agency wants what you want.”
“And what’s that?”
Shafer paused.
“I was going to say justice. But you don’t want justice. You want a scalp.”
Wells didn’t disagree.
“You always told me violence was a last resort for you. That you’d never killed unless you had no choice.”
Wells closed his eyes and looked at the faces of the men he’d killed. In Afghanistan, in Atlanta, in New York, in China. “It’s been a last resort an awful lot,” he said. “Rarely as deserved as this.”
“Prosecutors have a name for this, what you’re planning: ‘with malice aforethought.’ Premeditated murder. First degree. Exley told me you were thinking about quitting after what happened in China. Maybe you should have.”
Wells said nothing.
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