“Save me the fortune-cookie wisdom. I’ll bring him in, get back to Langley before tomorrow morning.”
“You planning to fly commercial or just flap your cape and go?”
“Funny, Ellis.”
“I have to call the BND. But I’ll give you an hour. Plenty of time to get there.”
“Two hours.”
“Two hours.”
The late-afternoon Hamburg traffic was heavy, and Wells wished he had left the Mercedes at the hotel and taken the U-Bahn. Forty minutes passed before he reached the Reeperbahn, quiet and gray in the twilight. The long cold winter nights were enough to keep even the most debased whoremongers at home. On the south side of the avenue, he saw the Stern—
Surrounded by German police cars and dozens of officers in riot gear. Wells looked twice, hoping that the cops were there coincidentally to bust an unlicensed brothel or a heroin-dealing kebob shop. But as he watched, three men in helmets and face shields ran into the hotel. Shafer hadn’t given him two hours. Shafer hadn’t given him five minutes.
Wells parked the Mercedes in an alley off the Reeperbahn and grabbed his sat phone.
“Tell me I’m not seeing this.”
“I had to, John. Their country, their op.”
“Their op? Who found him? Who’s been playing him?”
“What are you gonna do with him? You can’t arrest him. And they say no renditions.” A delivery truck turned into the alley behind the Mercedes and honked, a quick double-tap, move along. “He’s a German national, he stays on German soil. I promised them.”
“You promised me, Ellis. Two hours.” Wells hung up. He would deal with Shafer later. Betrayal and betrayal and betrayal. He jumped out of the Mercedes, ignoring the shouts of the delivery driver, and dodged traffic as he ran across the Reeperbahn, heading for the armored police van parked outside the hotel’s entrance.
“Halt! Halt!” A big man in a black flak jacket, Polizei emblazoned across the chest in white, trotted at Wells, right hand hovering over the pistol on his hip. Wells slowed.
“I need to talk to the agent in charge, whoever’s running the show—”
“You are American?” the officer said. “This is a police action. Very serious. You must leave.”
“I know the guy in there,” Wells said desperately. “I gave him to you.”
The officer put a heavy hand on Wells’s shoulder and steered him away from the hotel.
“Listen, my name’s John Wells—”
From above, the thump of a flash-bang grenade, and then another. Wells and the officer swung around, watching as a window blew at the west end of the hotel, three stories up, glass pouring like confetti toward the pavement, a pair of hookers screaming and shielding their mascaraed eyes—
Then a single gunshot.
The officer pushed Wells to the street, landed on top of him, 250 pounds of German cop protecting him. Wells barely restrained himself from rolling the guy over and punching him in the face. “Let me up.”
“When it is safe.”
“It’s safe now,” Wells said, staring down at the Reeperbahn pavement, cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans. “Unless that guy up there can shoot when he’s dead.”
The officer rolled over and Wells stood. A team of medics ran into the hotel, carrying a stretcher and a defibrillator. Too late, Wells was sure. They’d gone in hard and slow and given Bernard plenty of time to take the coward’s way out. Or the hero’s. Depending on who was telling the story. Either way Bernard wouldn’t be much help.
Three minutes of explanations later, Wells found himself outside the hotel’s front door, pleading with the BND agent in charge to let him inside.
“You want to see the room? But the man inside is dead. He killed himself, yes?”
“No doubt. Maybe he left me something.”
“We will find it.”
“I’d like to look for myself.” You guys blew this top to bottom, so please don’t make me beg, Wells didn’t say.
But the agent seemed to understand. “As you wish. Jergen will accompany you.”
THE STERN CATERED to British chavs who piled into cheap charter flights for weekend vacations in Hamburg: all the pilsner they could swallow and a stop at the brothels on Herbertstrasse. Good times. The third-floor carpet had once been blue. Now it was closer to black and covered with cigarette burns. The plaster in the hallway was laced with fist-sized holes where guests had traded punches with each other and maybe a few unlucky hookers. A dozen BND agents stood outside the room, murmuring to one another, knocking around what had happened, what had gone wrong, the stories they would tell their bosses and the internal investigators who would second-guess every decision they had and hadn’t made. They fell silent as Wells passed.
And in Room 317, Bernard Kygeli, the top of his head split like an overcooked egg. He lay on his back on the queen-sized bed, his blood soaking through the cheap wool blanket. The medics weren’t even pretending to work on him. Bernard hadn’t taken any chances when the BND came through the door. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and swallowed eternity. His brains were splattered on the grimy yellow wall behind the bed.
Wells knew he ought to feel a touch of pity for Bernard, or at least disgust at the ugly way he’d died. But he could muster only annoyance, the annoyance of a district manager whose top salesman had just quit. Bernard should have stuck around a little bit longer, instead of bailing this way, leaving him shorthanded with the end of the quarter coming up. Not a team player.
From the neck down, Bernard was undamaged, oddly dapper in a blue suit with a pale pink shirt and dark red tie, his black leather dress shoes hanging limply off the bed. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered window, carrying in the rising blare of European sirens—Ooh-Ooh! Ooh-Ooh!—from the flotilla of police vehicles below. Wells peeked out the window. A television truck had already appeared at the end of the block, just beyond the east edge of the hotel.
“Anyone search him yet?”
Jergen consulted with the other cops. “No.”
Wells grabbed latex gloves from one of the medics, strapped them on, sifted through Bernard’s pockets, hoping for a cell phone, a flash drive, an engraved pen, a business card, a hotel receipt, any clue at all. In Bernard’s inside suit pocket, he found six keys—house, office, and warehouse, most likely. In the right front pants pocket, a wallet, smooth black leather. Wells flipped through it. A gold Amex card, seven 50-euro notes, a creased headshot of two young women, pretty, both wearing headscarves. His daughters, presumably.
And in the left pocket, a thickly folded piece of lined notebook paper. Wells unfolded it and found a scrawl in Arabic, shakily written in thin blue pen—
Why, when it is said to you, Go and fight in God’s way, do you dig your heels in the earth? Do you prefer this world to the life to come? How small the enjoyment of this world is, compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place, but you cannot harm Him in any way. God has power over all things.
“What is it?” Jergen said.
“A suicide note. From the Quran.” The ninth Surah, if Wells remembered right. He tucked the paper and Bernard’s wallet and the keys where he’d found them. He pulled open the squeaking closet doors, looked inside the particleboard dresser, stuck his head in the bathroom, ducked his head under the bed. He found nothing but two roaches in the tub and a couple of dusty condom wrappers, surely pre-dating Bernard’s arrival.
“He say anything when you came in?” Wells said to the agent in charge. “Allahu Akbar? Anything at all?”
The cop shook his head. “Just the pistol in his mouth, and—”
“Yeah.”
When Wells and Jergen returned to the front entrance, they found a tall man in a gray suit. He extended a hand to Wells.
“Mr. Wells,” he said. “I’m Gerhard Tobertal. Assistant director of the BND for Hamburg—”
“Yeah, you’re the one who lost him.” Wells leaned fo
rward, put his face close to Tobertal’s, staring into the German’s blue eyes. “Get your men out of here. All of them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t you see anything?” Wells knew that his rage was counterproductive, but he couldn’t help himself. First Shafer and now this. “You blew the surveillance and the takedown, too, and now you want CNN here, talking about how a terrorist killed himself on the Reeperbahn? So all Bernard’s friends know he’s dead.”
“Mr. Wells—”
“Make it go away. Pull your guys and make it a no-name junkie overdose. And when you hit his house, do it fast and quiet in the middle of the night. If you know how. Maybe we’re lucky and the compartmentalization saves us, and his buddies don’t find out for a few extra hours.”
“I don’t appreciate being talked to this way—”
“Then do your job.” Wells turned away. If he hurried, he could still make his flight.
31
This time Wells had no problem at immigration. The opposite, in fact. A Homeland Security officer waited for him when the flight arrived at Newark. “Mr. Wells,” she said as he walked out of the companionway, the first passenger off. “This way.”
She led him along the glassed-in second floor that overlooked the C Concourse, a long walkway, no exits, that connected international arrivals with the Newark customs hall. She was young and strong and Wells had to jog to keep up. He felt heavy and slow. He’d lost a night’s sleep—it was nearly 10 p.m. in Newark, 4 a.m. in Germany—and even the frigid jetway air hadn’t shocked him awake. Maybe he was getting old.
When Wells had come home after his decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wealth of the United States had overwhelmed him. Not just the size of the stores, aisle upon aisle of products for every conceivable desire, but the buildings themselves, high-ceilinged and fitted tightly together. Even the lights, banks of bright fluorescents where Afghans would make do with a single sixty-watt bulb. Americans might complain about the price of electricity but they sure weren’t afraid to use it. For his first few months back, Wells found himself wondering whether he had landed in a fifty-state Potemkin village, if the malls and office parks and highways he saw were nothing more than stage sets. So much abundance couldn’t be real.
Fortunately or not, the feeling faded. Now, after two years of motorcycles and perfect teeth and flat-screen televisions and grocery stores filled with fresh fruit, Wells was again used to, if not exactly comfortable with, his country’s riches.
Tonight, though, he felt a different dislocation, a kind of real-time nostalgia for the people on the concourse below him. The family clumped together slurping sodas outside the Subway, two tiny kids dressed identically in puffy red jackets and jeans and white sneakers, not a fashion statement, just a sale at Wal-Mart. The sales rep in a demure gray suit-and-skirt set, leaning against a wall, checking her BlackBerry, then pumping her fist in quiet triumph, deal closed and bonus won. The middle-aged man with the darkest skin Wells had ever seen, stepping up to gate C-89 to hug an equally dark woman wearing a bright orange and green dress under her winter coat.
No matter where it blew, the bomb would destroy this place. The buildings would be rebuilt. Maybe, eventually, the economy would recover. But the idea of the United States as the world’s lighthouse, the land given peace and justice and prosperity so that it could export those gifts everywhere else, would never return. And maybe America had never lived up to that promise. Maybe it had never become the shining city that the plastic patriots claimed. But dreams had power even if they didn’t come true. The world would be a poorer place if the American dream died.
WHEN THEY REACHED CUSTOMS, Wells didn’t even have to hand over his passport. The agent simply guided him through to the booths, and then he was back officially on American soil. Five minutes later, he was at C-101, catching the last flight of the night to D.C.
At National, another surprise, Shafer waited. He extended his hand, a wrinkly paw sticking from his too-short shirt cuffs. Wells let it dangle until Shafer pulled it back.
“All right,” Shafer said. “I earned that. You want to talk about it? Hug it out?”
Wells ignored him and headed for the exit. Shafer trotted behind him, yapping at his heels. “I wanted you to see that you can’t fly solo all the time. An object lesson. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out how I expected—”
“Enough,” Wells said. When this ended, if it ever ended, they’d have a chance to discuss what Shafer had done. Or, more likely, to bury it along with all the other miscommunications and fibs and flat-out lies that Wells and the agency had traded over the years.
At the front of the terminal, a Crown Vic and two SUVs waited, black Suburbans with armored windows and antennas jutting from their roofs. Two agents in suits stood outside the lead truck. As Wells and Shafer approached, the back doors to the front Suburban popped open. Wells and Shafer slipped inside and the Suburbans took off, their red-and-blues flashing, roaring up the George Washington Parkway at eighty miles an hour.
“Subtle, Ellis.”
“Duto’s orders.”
“So tell me where we stand.”
“Maybe two hours ago, we got good news. They broke Haxhi. The captain. Don’t ask me how.”
Wells didn’t need to ask. He knew. A few months before, in China, he’d been on the receiving end of a torture session that had left his ribs broken and his shoulder loose in its socket. Even now his ribs ached at the thought. Round and round it goes, he didn’t say. Where it stops nobody knows.
“He gave us the names of the smugglers?”
“Not that. Says he doesn’t know and maybe it’s true. But he did give up the drop point. It’s not Nova Scotia. Southeastern Newfoundland. Near St. John’s. That’s the capital.”
“Newfoundland?” Wells tried to picture eastern Canada. “That’s an island, right?”
“Correct. Best guess, they went in that way because they thought there wouldn’t be a big Canadian navy presence. Which there isn’t. So they land those crates, ferry them to Nova Scotia, drive them in.”
“But somebody’s got to meet them.”
“Looks like it.”
“Anything else? The magicians”—the NSA—“have any luck?”
Shafer shook his head. “There was one sat phone left on the boat. Not activated. The cell number you have for Bernard didn’t go anywhere. Neither did his e-mail addresses. The Germans hit his house and office and warehouse while you were in the air, but so far they haven’t gotten anything useful.”
“The laptop?”
“Tough to recover anything from a melted hard drive. Though they’re trying.”
“The son, Helmut, he knew something,” Wells said. “I’m sure of it. Maybe a name.”
“They’ll push him. Anything else, John? It’s the fourth quarter now, late.”
“Yeah, and they got the ball.”
Wells closed his eyes, tried to think. But sleep was on him like a glove and all he could remember was the airport, the family on Concourse C—
“You’re assuming the crates came in by land, but maybe the courier handled the crossing and the bad guys flew in. Anybody check flights from St. John’s?”
“I don’t know if it’s happened yet, but it’s on the top sheet. If there’s a direct flight between the United States and Newfoundland, so they didn’t get lost in a transfer in Toronto or somewhere, maybe we’ll catch a break.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, they reached Langley. And then the biggest surprise yet. Exley, on Shafer’s couch, leaning forward, staring intently at a wall map of the North Atlantic and North America that was posted to a corkboard in the middle of the office. She’d cut her hair. Wells had never seen it so short, cropped on the sides and almost spiky on top. She looked like a punk singer. Wells didn’t know what the haircut meant. Otherwise, she was as beautiful as ever. The short hair accentuated her blue eyes and she’d lost a few pounds, not many, but she hadn’t been very big to start with and now her cheeks had a sorrowful sharpne
ss to them. She stood when she saw him and he crossed to her and picked her up and hugged her like he was trying to meld their bodies together. She put her arms around him, but when he tried to kiss her she ducked her head. He set her down and she put a hand on his arm.
“You stayed,” Shafer said.
“Couldn’t miss this,” she said. A smile flitted across her lips, narrow, quiet, almost maternal. “The prodigal son returns.”
“You look great,” Wells said. He ran a hand over her hair.
“Last time it was this short, I was in college,” Exley said.
“But I thought—” Wells broke off, not wanting to say the wrong thing, or anything at all, just to look at her.
“Old habits,” she said. “I swore I’d just come in to see Ellis, and then I swore I’d only work for a day or two, and then I swore I wouldn’t be here when you got back, and look at me. Nothing changes but the hair and the hole in my liver. But now I swear when this one’s done, so am I.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She smiled and Wells felt his heart take two beats at once. Maybe they would find a way to be together after this, maybe they wouldn’t, but he was sure she would always love him.
“Reunion’s over, kids,” Shafer said. “Work to do. Anything new?”
“We gave the RCMP what we know”—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—“and they’re hitting the ferry offices now. They’ll get records of trucks that sailed from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia since January 1. We can check those against our border crossing records. But they’re telling us not to expect much. Passenger vehicles don’t register and there aren’t any cameras on the boats or the docks.”
“What about the flights?”
“Better news there. One nonstop a day out of St. John’s to Newark.”
“That’s the only nonstop to the United States?”
“The one and only. The FBI is getting a warrant for the manifests. And we’re sorting the immigration records at Newark. If they came in on that flight, we ought to have their names and faces and passports within a couple of hours.”
The Silent Man Page 32
