The Wolves

by Alex Berenson

  Wells didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you want to ask me how I know?”

  Not even a little.

  “It’s after midnight there. You don’t call this late unless you have something good or you’re desperate. And I know you don’t have something good.”

  When Shafer was in these moods, talking to him was like arguing with the world’s cleverest ten-year-old. “I always want to talk to you until I actually have to.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s impenetrable. Might as well have a moat and ten thousand archers.”

  “You knew that from the first overhead.”

  “There’s knowing, and then there’s seeing. And I thought I’d catch him coming and going. Getting ready for the new opening. But he’s locked up tight.”

  “Can’t blame him. Any luck with the channel changers?”

  Channel changers, a/k/a remote controls, a/k/a drones. Shafer had nicely avoided using a word that would perk up any voice analysis software monitoring this call.

  “If I had a team going over the wall, they might help. As it is, it’s like a National Geographic feed. Watching lions sleep next to a watering hole.” Wells decided not to explain that he couldn’t keep the drones airborne for more than a couple hours a day. “I thought I had a move tonight. I talked to the guy who runs security up there. I don’t mean Gideon or anyone from the personal detail. British. Ex-SAS. I figured maybe he’d help if he knew the real story.”

  “That was optimistic.”

  “Believe it or not, Duberman told him they needed all this security because I’m a stalker, I’m after Orli—”

  “You do have your difficulties with women.”

  Wells could only laugh.

  “He believed that?” Shafer said.

  “She backed it up.”

  A pause as Shafer considered the implications. “Did she, now? I’ll admit I’m surprised. But putting that aside. You told him the truth, now what? He gonna help?”

  “He pretty much said it’s not his fight.”

  “He going to narc?”

  “I don’t see him going that way, either. But he said Duberman already knows I’m here.”

  “So they were waiting for you at the airport?”

  “He said no. That was somebody else.”

  Shafer stopped talking. But he was still there. Wells heard the slow rattle of his breathing. A good sound. It meant Shafer was circling the problem, trying to pop it open.

  “You’re all groping in the dark. Bunch of kids playing Spin the Bottle. If kids still play that anymore. Who knows? Everybody hoping somebody else screws up first. What about that new opening, the casino?”

  “Haven’t heard much. I think he was hoping I’d go to Macao and when I didn’t bite—”

  “Right. So he knows you’re casing him. Meanwhile, he’s doing the same, fishing, to find you while you’re looking. You’ve got some help from us, he’s got all he can buy, which is plenty, but neither of you wants the local constabulary involved.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Ellis.”

  “Maybe if you had more active help from the station. Not just gear.”

  “No.” Only Duto could open that door, and Wells was done asking favors of Duto.

  “You have any other ideas?”

  “Nothing that’s not terrible.”

  “Share with the group.”

  “Like, loading up the flying machines with C-4, dive-bombing them into the house.” Wells had wondered if the drones could be converted into unmanned kamikazes.

  “Tell me you didn’t just say that.”

  “I said it was terrible.”

  “How about this? Get yourself a latex mask that looks like him, go up there, and knock on the gate. The guards get confused, let you in. Then he sees you in the mask and freaks. If I’m not me, den who the hell am I?” The last line spoken in a terrible Schwarzeneggerian accent.

  “Ellis—”

  “A race around the island. Ferrari versus motorcycle. You win, he turns himself in. He wins, you spend twenty years as a bathroom attendant in Macao, picking pubes out of urinal cakes.”

  “Ellis—”

  “Duel at ten paces. Cliffside sumo match. One hand, one million dollars—”

  Wells hung up. Called back five minutes later.

  “Arm-wrestling.”

  “I’m glad you find this so funny.”

  “Nobody made you go over there.” But Shafer had amused himself enough. He went quiet again, the good quiet. Five minutes passed, enough time for Wells to hear a mouse prowl inside the wall behind him, disappear, return.

  “Still there or did you stroke out?”

  “I have an idea. A way to shake the tree. Maybe. But it’s not nice.”

  “Not her.” Even if Orli had backed Duberman’s lie about the stalking, Wells didn’t see her as a target. Not yet. Not unless he could prove she knew about the original false-flag plot.

  “No. You know the names of any of his bodyguards? The inner circle, I mean.”

  “Only Gideon.”

  “Would you recognize them?”

  Aside from Gideon, Wells had seen Duberman’s guys for only a few minutes at the mansion in Tel Aviv. “If I saw them on the street, probably. But if you’re thinking you’ll run pictures of ex-Mossad past me and I pick out the ones who work for him, it’d be a long shot.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking.”

  “You gonna tell me?”

  “Go to sleep. I should know before you get up if I can make it work. Check your email then. And if you come up with any more terrible ideas—”

  “I’ll keep them to myself.”

  —

  WELLS FOLDED UP his two-thousand-dollar jacket for a pillow, unlaced his sneakers, stretched on the floor. He was asleep in minutes. He woke to a downpour, rain lashing the apartment’s single window. It was afternoon. He’d slept twelve hours. Proof, not that he needed any, that rooms like this were his natural home.

  The apartment had no computer, no Internet connection. Inconvenient but safe. Wells walked until he found the store he needed, a cubbyhole with tinted windows. The sign above promised Gamers Paradise in English. Inside, a dozen slack-faced teenagers hunched before wall-mounted televisions, muttering in Cantonese. Their hands crawled over keyboards as they destroyed the twenty-second century. A game of Spin the Bottle would have done them all good.

  “I just need an Internet connection.”

  The guy behind the counter pointed to a battered Samsung laptop that sat in the corner like a rusted-out Pinto in a Mercedes showroom.

  Wells logged on, found Shafer’s emails. Individually each could have been innocent. Collectively they were deadly as a smallpox vial.

  First, old public pictures of Duberman. More important, his bodyguards. Wells recognized Gideon. He’d seen some of the others, too. He didn’t know their names. But Shafer had figured out a way to identify at least two of them. His second email included photos from a decade earlier, headshots from a Pentagon database. The men had participated in joint American-Israeli seminars on fighting insurgencies at the Army War College. Uri Peretz and Avi Makiv. Captains in the Israel Defense Force. Trim, handsome men, both with dark, curly hair and brown eyes.

  Wells wondered how Shafer connected the public bodyguard photos to the Pentagon identification shots. Probably through the facial-recognition software at the National Security Agency. Wells figured Duto had told the NSA to give Shafer what he wanted, as long as he didn’t seem to target Duberman actively. Looking at former Israeli army officers would hardly raise eyebrows. Anyway, Wells didn’t doubt the matches. Peretz and Makiv were exactly the kind of guys Duberman favored as bodyguards.

  Wells wondered if the third set of emails would include immigration records or closed-circuit
shots from Hong Kong International showing the men’s arrival. That trick would have been impressive even for the NSA. Instead, the file included a year of credit card charges for Peretz and Makiv. The first few months were predictable, restaurants in Tel Aviv, gas stations in Jerusalem. Peretz had run up a week of bills in Rome. Makiv liked scuba diving.

  After Duberman came to Hong Kong, the charges mostly stopped for a while, aside from recurring cable and phone bills. Peretz had a few charges at high-end Hong Kong hotels like the Peninsula. Less than fifty dollars each, so they weren’t rooms. Wells imagined he’d stopped in for a drink or two. Makiv was a regular at a Nike store in Kowloon. He also had a charge in Macao at a place called the Grand Lisboa, which Wells thought was a casino.

  Wells didn’t know yet where Shafer was going with the credit cards. The relative lack of charges implied that Peretz and Makiv had holed up in the mansion since coming to Hong Kong. But the move was hardly a surprise. Duberman was keeping his bodyguards close.

  Yet in the last two weeks, Peretz and Makiv had started using their cards again regularly. The same names came up over and over: Yung Kee Restaurant, Yat Lok Restaurant, Nha Trang Vietnamese Café . . . All restaurants, or so it seemed. The time stamps showed lunches and dinners, nothing too cheap or expensive, in the range of one to three hundred Hong Kong dollars, fifteen to forty U.S. Weirdly, the bills seemed to duplicate one another, each with the same amount on the same day. Wells wondered if Shafer had made a mistake, double-counted the receipts somehow. No. The men were eating together, splitting their checks.

  Okay. So they were coming down from the Peak now. Why? Wells thought he knew. The fourth email confirmed the answer. It was the only one with a subject line: I always feel like . . . Shafer couldn’t help his adolescent cleverness. Somebody’s Watching Me. Wells remembered the song from his adolescence, a hit from the mid-eighties, the lyrics cute and creepy at once:

  I wonder who’s watching me now / Who? The IRS . . .

  Wells looked up the lyrics online, discovered the song had belonged to a one-hit wonder named Rockwell. But unlike Rockwell, Wells knew exactly who was watching him. Now he knew where they were looking. The fourth email included street and satellite maps. Shafer had marked them with the restaurants where Peretz and Makiv used their cards. They formed a rough semicircle around the southern exits of the Central MTR station, the subway stop nearest the roads that led to the Peak.

  Duberman had sent his men down as pickets. He and Gideon hoped to catch Wells on his way to the mansion. Wells would bet that Peretz and Makiv weren’t the only team, just the only one that Shafer had found so far. The move made sense. The area was crowded but compact. Wells was a head taller than the average Chinese man. He would stand out even if he tried to disguise himself.

  But Wells had foiled the plan, mainly because he’d wasted so much time on the drones that he’d barely left his apartment since coming to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Peretz and Makiv had their own problems. The Central MTR station was huge, more than a dozen exits, hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. The men couldn’t set up in a van or car for more than a few minutes without blocking traffic and drawing police attention. Probably they were using an office as a static viewing post, splitting their time between it and the streets. Even so, the search would be boring and tiring.

  Wells didn’t doubt they were doing whatever they could to stay focused, keep their eyes up. They knew how dangerous Wells could be. Probably they were limiting their calls and emails to essentials, using burners instead of their usual phones. Otherwise, Shafer would have sent along a communications file, too. No doubt Duberman had used a shell company to rent the office they were using as their base, so Wells couldn’t find them that way.

  But they had made one mistake. A small mistake, sure. But fatal nonetheless.

  They were rewarding themselves with lunch and dinner breaks. And paying with credit cards instead of cash. In doing so, they had given Wells what he needed to find them. He wouldn’t need phone intercepts, much less anything fancy like the feeds from security cameras around the MTR station. Peretz and Makiv ate around the same time every day, and restaurants they had chosen were clustered within a few blocks, a diamond-shaped area near the heart of the central business district.

  Tomorrow, or the day after, Wells would put himself close by. He wouldn’t have to look for the men or guess where they might be eating. Shafer would simply have the NSA alert him the next time Peretz and Makiv used their cards, and pass the name of the restaurant to Wells. Wells should have several minutes to reach it. The cards had to be swiped and authorized before a waiter brought the bills back to be signed. By the time the men paid and walked out, Wells would be waiting.

  Not nice, Shafer had said, but Wells had no qualms. Unlike William Roberts, Peretz and Makiv knew why Wells wanted their boss. They could have quit. Instead they had come halfway across the world with Duberman. They were willing soldiers who would capture or kill Wells if they could.

  This was not assassination, or even a sniping, but a slow-motion duel.

  —

  WELLS PRINTED the credit card receipts and the restaurant map, left the gamers to their virtual destruction while he walked up Jordan Road considering his own killing spree. He would need the pistol and suppressor he’d left in his apartment on the island, but he was in no rush. All around him the city buzzed, storekeepers shouting in Chinese, kids in school uniforms jostling. He felt more focused, at once adrenalized and relaxed. Better. Had he been born to hunt, or had all the hunting made him what he’d become? He supposed the answer hardly mattered anymore.

  At a bookstore on Jordan, Wells bought detailed maps of Hong Kong. Back at his crash pad, he studied the area around the restaurants, trying to memorize every building and alley and intersection. Afternoon turned to evening, and Wells itched to recite the maghrib, the fourth of the five prayers Muslims were supposed to offer each day. He might not understand himself entirely, but he was sure that religion had nothing to do with his pursuit of Duberman. Over the years, most of the men he had killed had been Muslim. Should Duberman escape justice because he happened to be Jewish?

  He had just finished his prayers when his phone buzzed.

  “You understand what I sent? Or do you need turn-by-turn directions?”

  All their missions together, Shafer still liked to pretend that Wells was dumb muscle.

  “I was confused, but the guy at the next computer helped me out.”

  “Good of him.”

  “I assume you can set up an alert the next time they pay.”

  “Correct.”

  “And what’s the delay?”

  “One to three minutes. You might have to jog, but you’ll get there in time for an after-dinner mint.”

  “Any chance of a mousetrap?” Meaning had Peretz and Makiv intentionally used their cards to lure Wells into coming after them? An ambush within an ambush. But even as he asked the question, Wells knew the answer.

  “That, what, they ate out for weeks to build this trail because they realized I’d find their names, trace the cards—”

  “I get it.”

  “You will have the drop. I promise you. Up to you what you do with it.”

  They both knew what Wells would do with it. Two head shots. He would have to figure the Israelis for bullet-resistant vests, the police style that fit under clothes and could stop a medium-weight pistol round.

  “Assuming I get away clear, what happens next?”

  “Two of his guys go down. He has no idea how you found them, what went wrong.”

  “He’s not the panicky type.”

  “Maybe not. But the British guy, I’ll bet he quits right away. He doesn’t need this. Maybe some core guys walk, too. Not Gideon, but the others, the ones I’m still trying to find. Even Orli, maybe she decides enough already, time to take the kiddos back to the promised land. What we really want. Tha
t would open things up nicely.”

  Probably a good read. “Hope you’re right. Should I tell your coworker here about this?” Meaning Wright, the chief of station.

  “I think he’ll be happier not knowing.”

  Wells agreed on that score, too. “Anything else I need to know about my lunch dates?”

  “They both spent some time in Lebanon, so I wouldn’t underestimate them. But no.”

  “It was a neat trick, Ellis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Figuring it out. Thank you.”

  “Thanks for noticing.” Genuine pleasure in Shafer’s voice. “You thinking tomorrow?”

  Hitting fast was usually the right choice. Peretz and Makiv might stop using their credit cards, or disappear for a hundred other reasons. But lunch tomorrow was less than eighteen hours away, hardly time for Wells to gin up a viable escape plan. He worried less about live witnesses, who would barely have time to recognize what was happening before Wells vanished, than the public and private cameras that covered every block of the central business district. Having a wheelman would make the hit easier, but Wells didn’t. Plus the forecasters were promising more rain tomorrow, making escape even more complicated.

  “I think the day after.”

  Shafer’s silence told Wells that he disagreed.

  “Tell you what, Ellis, come over, we’ll do it your way—”

  “Fine. I hear anything new, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, look for a text. Around one-thirty, based on the last few days. Happy hunting.”

  Then Shafer was gone. Leaving Wells with nothing but the echo of his last two words.

  —

  WELLS WAITED in the Kowloon crash pad past midnight before he hailed a cab for the island. He spent the night’s empty hours walking the area where the men ate each day. Topography and history had covered it with a jumble of streets that bumped into each other at odd angles and changed names almost at random. Wells didn’t mind the maze. It would work to his advantage, letting him sneak up on Peretz and Makiv without warning and then disappear almost as fast.