The Wolves

by Alex Berenson

  He turned left onto Hip Tong, keeping to the south side of the street, opposite the garage, looking for an angle. He had wrapped the pistol in black gauze so it wouldn’t rattle against the H&K inside the pack. The street’s silence surprised Wells, no televisions playing or apartment dwellers chatting, only a distant mechanical banging, metal on metal.

  Then a scream. A woman’s voice, pitched to shatter glass, echoing between the apartments—

  Gone, no more than two seconds, no follow-through, like someone had flipped a switch, the silence more frightening than the sound itself—

  Wells pulled the H&K from the bag, slung it across his chest. He grabbed the suppressed pistol, dropped the bag in the street, ran for the front of the garage, watching the steel door, ready to shoot at any movement. The street was too narrow to offer cover. If the Russians knew he was here, they might be setting a trap, forcing Orli to scream to lure Wells close so they could drop him.

  At the edge of the garage door, Wells stopped to listen. He heard low male voices speaking Russian, arguing, maybe. No woman, no sounds of movement, no signs that anyone knew that he and Gideon were closing. He crept to the concrete wall that separated the garage door and the front door, reached for the front door’s dull steel knob.

  It turned.

  Wells gave himself five seconds to think through the layout inside. From his position, he could see only the wall on the far side of the door. He didn’t know whether the door opened directly into the main garage bay or whether the building’s thick concrete support pillars walled it off. He hoped for an open bay. He could pull the door wide, get low, open up with the H&K. A pillar would block his angles, make him an easy target for anyone watching the front.

  No matter. He couldn’t wait. He knew, too, that on the far side of the building, Gideon must have heard the scream. Wells wanted to get in first. He put a hand on the knob, opened the door fractionally, eased it the rest of the way with his right foot, peeked inside.

  As he’d feared, the door didn’t open directly into the bay. A support pillar inside formed a short corridor. Behind the pillar, the garage opened up. The light inside revealed racks of equipment stacked against the wall to Wells’s left. Behind them, a card table with three metal chairs. Beside it, a 250cc motorcycle. At the far end, maybe fifty feet away, Wells saw a brighter square of light, a doorway that he guessed led to the garage’s back office.

  The voices started again. Then a low rip, fabric tearing.

  Wells left the H&K against his chest, lifted the suppressed pistol. He stepped inside, peeked around the pillar. A BMW sedan was parked in the front of the garage, nose out. Behind it, in the back right corner of the garage, a huge man faced away from Wells, naked except for a pair of tight black boxers. Wells couldn’t be sure because he couldn’t see the guy’s face, but he didn’t think the man was Buvchenko. Beside the giant, a second, smaller man squatted beside Orli’s splayed legs. As Wells watched, he pushed them together, reached for her waist, grabbed her white panties and pulled them off.

  Wells still didn’t know where Buvchenko was, if he and more guys might be in the back. Didn’t know and didn’t care. He came around the column so he had an open take. No hesitation, no second thoughts, he lifted the pistol at the standing man, aiming center mass. The guy was so big he could hardly miss, he pulled the trigger, once, twice, three times, the pistol hummed its notes—

  Three rounds struck true, the guy’s back arched. But he didn’t go down, not right away. He roared like a bear that had been hit with a too-small tranquilizer. No matter, Wells could finish him in a few seconds. Wells put the pistol on the second Russian, who was standing and turning in response to the shots. As Wells had hoped. By moving up and away from Orli, the guy was giving Wells a clean high shot, one that wouldn’t kill her if Wells missed. He fired twice. The angle was tougher than he thought, he heard one shot slap the corner of the garage, he wasn’t sure about the other, he pulled the trigger again—

  When to his right, peripherally, he glimpsed motion—

  Buvchenko, coming through the doorway from the back office. He was shirtless, a blurred blue-black tattoo covering his massive pecs. He’d seen Wells already and was reaching for a pistol on a table beside the doorway. Wells spun toward him, knowing he was too late, Buvchenko had him covered and would get shots off, but he had no choice, he had to try, hope Buvchenko missed—

  Buvchenko grabbed the pistol and in one motion flung it at Wells, a hard forearm strike. Wells realized he wasn’t looking at a pistol at all, he’d misunderstood, the thing was a wrench, a foot of steel. It came out of Buvchenko’s hand with incredible speed. The guy was a beast. It spun sideways at Wells’s head, and Wells ducked and raised his arm, bailing out like a batter caught wrong-footed by a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, trying to, anyway, but he was spinning into its path—

  The wrench caught Wells on the right shoulder and temple, the shoulder, mostly. Better than a straight strike to the head, but not much, because the blow opened his right hand as neatly as if he’d willed it, some accident of nerves. Wells dropped the pistol. He stumbled backward, already feeling the blood streaming down his face. Darkness inked his eyes. He would have gone down, but the building’s pillar caught him.

  He leaned against it, blinked the black away, made himself lift his head as Buvchenko ran for him, charged him, obviously planning to finish him with his hands rather than going for his pistol, wherever it was. Wells looked for his own pistol. It had skidded halfway under the BMW, out of reach. He grabbed for the H&K on his chest, tried to lift it. Too late. Buvchenko was on him—

  Wells turtled, ducked low. Buvchenko turned a shoulder and slammed Wells into the concrete and hit him on the side of the head above the ear with a sledgehammer right hand. Wells had never been punched so hard before, again, again, a hurricane, the Russian was so strong—

  Wells tried to hit back, but he had no leverage, couldn’t even raise his hands—

  He felt himself slipping, the black rising. He knew that if he went under he’d never wake up, Buvchenko would put him on his back and choke him out—

  The concealed carry—

  The pistol on his back, Wells remembered it now, no way was Buvchenko expecting it, no way would Buvchenko figure Wells for another pistol on top of the one he’d dropped and the H&K, only he couldn’t get to it, Buvchenko had him against the wall and he had no room—

  Wells made his left hand a claw and scratched at Buvchenko’s face, tearing at the Russian’s skin with his nails, grabbing for eyes and mouth, a move so cheap and desperate that Buvchenko stopped punching him long enough to grab his wrist and bend it back. The pain was enormous, enough to clear the cobwebs the wrench had left. Wells wondered if Buvchenko was strong enough to break his wrist with one hand. Probably.

  “The famous John Wells.” Buvchenko smiled. “This is all you have? Dress like a ninja, fight like a bitch.”

  “Fuck you, Mikhail.” Not exactly the strongest comeback, but—Just lay off for a second, give me one second to come off this wall—Wells tugged his arm ineffectually, wriggled sideways like all he cared about was freeing his arm. “All the Viagra in the world won’t fix your two-inch khuy.”

  “Fight like a bitch, bleed like a bitch. When I’m done with you, you’ll beg like a bitch.” Buvchenko gurgled and spat on Wells’s face. He forced Wells’s wrist back, focused on the arm, staring at it, watching it bend. Wells turned his hips sideways like they were the world’s two worst dancers and scraped his back away from the concrete and reached for the pistol in his waistband with his right hand—

  Buvchenko pulled harder, and Wells’s wrist gave, snapped like an oak branch cracking. The pain soared into Wells, a miracle of agony, but he was ready, he’d known, he’d made himself ready, this was the only way, and he had the pistol in his hand. He screamed and jammed it into Buvchenko’s side and pulled the trigger—

  The unsilenc
ed shot echoed in the garage and skin and muscle sprayed off Buvchenko’s side and his back, two holes, entry and exit. The Russian’s eyes went wide and his mouth sagged. He grabbed at Wells’s broken wrist like he didn’t know what else to do. Wells pulled the trigger again, and this time Buvchenko stepped back and sagged like he’d tried to squat with too much weight. He went to one knee and braced himself against the ground. “Blyad,” he said. “Blyad, blyad, blyad.”

  Wells kept the pistol on him and watched the life spurting out of the holes in Buvchenko’s side and back, the blood coming slow and steady, a red stream washing his waist. The wounds were a couple inches above the waist, below the diaphragm. Wells guessed he’d hit Buvchenko’s liver or kidney but missed the big arteries, the wounds devastating but probably survivable if he got to the hospital quickly enough.

  “Yebat menya,” Buvchenko whispered, his eyes flat and empty as ever. And in English, “You shot me.” Like he still couldn’t believe it.

  Wells looked at his hand, hanging limply off his arm like a flag on a windless day. It felt even worse than it looked. The pain made him gag. He heard steps at the back of the garage now, Gideon shouting in Hebrew.

  The other two Russians lay in the corner. The smaller one was crumpled, unmoving. Wells had caught him with a shot under the armpit, through the heart. Better to be lucky than good. The big one was dead, too. He’d bled out while Wells was busy with Buvchenko. Orli was awake. She turned her head slowly, like her brain didn’t believe what her eyes were telling her. A shiner was rising from her right eye. Her panties lay beside her like a flag of surrender.

  As Wells ran to her, she covered herself, one hand over her sex and the other across her breasts like she thought he was going to hurt her. Duct tape covered her mouth. He pulled it off as gently as he could.

  “I guess I should say thank you,” Orli said.

  “You should put your clothes on.”

  She lifted her hands, exposing herself completely. Wells turned away.

  “No, look at me. It’s my body, not theirs, and I want you to see.”

  His face must have betrayed his confusion.

  “You earned it. Your arm, man.” He turned to her, and she stood, raised her arms, pirouetted. Wells couldn’t take his eyes from her.

  “Something else you should know,” she said when she was finished. “About what they were doing.”

  Finally, shots from the back of the building, glass breaking. Gideon, one minute late. And in the distance, the first sirens. “Tell me later.” Time to go. But first, Buvchenko. Wells turned to him.

  “Prisoner now, treat me nice.” Buvchenko’s skin was sallow now, his breathing labored. Still, he smirked. “Go to the hospital together.”

  The laws of war made surrender an absolute right. But as he crossed the room, Wells thought of that winter day outside Volgograd when Buvchenko had shot a horse in front of him, cut down the animal to prove he could.

  Buvchenko never blinked, but as Wells raised the pistol and put the tip beside his temple, he opened his mouth. “Ny—” Wells squeezed the trigger and blew off Buvchenko’s head. Nothing pithy, no last words. The Russian’s body slammed down. Wells forced his left arm against his chest and turned for the front door. He didn’t like leaving Orli, she was obviously in shock, but he didn’t have a choice. The sirens were louder every second.

  —

  OUTSIDE, a welcome surprise, the Toyota waiting, engine running, facing east. Wells slipped inside. “Go.”

  “Gideon?”

  “Go.” Too bad. One minute late. Wells owed him nothing.

  They rolled off. “What happened to your hand?”

  “Just drive.”

  “I think there’s a hospital in Aberdeen.”

  We’re going to Mong Kok.” Going to the consulate again would be pushing his luck. He’d meet Wright and Shafer at Wright’s safe house. Wright might know a friendly doctor. At the least, he could bring the consulate’s Marine medic. Wells just needed his wrist to be stable enough to survive a helicopter ride over the Pearl River Delta.

  He had a date in Macao.

  28

  The medic, a skinny black guy named Beach, deftly palpated Wells’s wrist. “I want you to know, this is at the edge of what I do. Hospital’d be better.”

  Wells shook his head.

  “You say so.” Beach unrolled a quick-set bandage and gently wrapped Wells’s wrist and hand. “That’ll stabilize it,” he said, when he was done. “But you need a real doctor in the morning. Clean out the bone fragments. Put in a pin so that it heals quicker, nothing slips around.”

  “That bad?”

  “See how blue your fingers are? Something in there is blocking nerves, blood vessels. I can’t fix that. You don’t get to someone who can in the next twenty-four hours, you might lose those piggies.”

  All that work to rehab his foot, and now this. Wells laughed.

  “You think I’m joking?”

  “I’m like one of those highways that as soon as the crews get done paving, they have to start all over again at the other side, they never really fix it.”

  “Whatever. I shouldn’t give you this, I’ve seen twenty-year-old privates with more sense, but you’re gonna need it.” Beach dug into his kit, came up with a morphine ampule.

  As badly as he wanted the relief, Wells shook his head. “You have Advil? Tylenol? I gotta stay sharp.”

  Beach gave Wells four of each. “In my professional opinion, they won’t do jack.”

  “A little suffering is good for the soul.” Wells dry-swallowed the pills.

  “Then yours is gonna be in great shape tonight.”

  —

  WELLS TOLD Wright and Shafer everything, everything except the way Orli had spun for him at the end.

  “Give us a sec?” Shafer said when Wells had finished. Not the response he’d expected. Shafer and Wright left, closed the apartment’s door. Wells heard them murmuring in the hallway. A couple minutes passed, long enough to annoy him. It was almost midnight. He’d have to hurry to be in Macao in time to catch Duberman and Cheung together. Wells was about to go outside after them when Shafer walked back in. Alone. He stood close to the door, like he was afraid Wells would take off.

  “Any chance Gideon got away?” Shafer said. “Media hasn’t mentioned anything about anyone being arrested.”

  “I don’t see how. He’s not our problem, anyway.”

  “Unless he gives you up.”

  “Not his style.”

  “What about Orli?”

  He couldn’t help himself, her name brought him back to the garage, not only how she’d looked but what she’d said, I want you to see. A diamond’s beauty, a diamond’s hardness. “No. They push her, she’ll say she was in shock, she can’t remember.”

  “And you don’t know what she wanted to tell you at the end?”

  Wells shook his head. “About that helicopter, Ellis.”

  “I think we should focus on getting you out of here. Charter to Japan or if HKIA’s no good, a ship to the Philippines.”

  “Without Gideon or Orli, no way the cops make me. Not in time to matter, anyway. We were on the highway by the time we saw anyone coming. And that Toyota isn’t even ours.”

  “FSB’s going to be looking, too.”

  “I’m not suggesting I buy a place here. I’ll be gone tomorrow morning at the latest. They won’t come back that fast.” Wells didn’t understand Shafer’s sudden caution. He stood from Wright’s ugly yellow couch. “Let me put on a shirt that isn’t covered in Russian blood and get out of here.”

  Shafer raised his hand like a traffic cop. A flicker in his eyes Wells couldn’t read.

  “This coming from the White House, Ellis? President change his mind again?”

  “I just want to be sure we’re thinking it through.”

  “Do
ne thinking. You won’t give me the helicopter, I’ll take a ferry.” Though Wells would much rather fly. A ship wouldn’t arrive in time. And a copter would set him on the roof of Duberman’s new casino, save him from the pesky immigration officers at the Macao Ferry Terminal. Even if an air traffic controller noticed it landing at the casino rather than the terminal, the Chinese air force would hardly scramble. Macao’s airspace was low priority, chasing down a gambler who wanted to skip immigration even lower.

  “Duberman’s not going anywhere, John. It’s all over but the shouting. You’ve done enough for one night. Give somebody else a chance.”

  Inside the cast, Wells’s wrist throbbed. Suddenly he understood. “This is about Buvchenko.” Wells stepped toward the door, stared at Shafer until the smaller man blinked, looked away. “If anyone in the world had that coming—”

  “It’s not about who he is. It’s about who we are. And it’s not just what you did. It’s the way you’re talking about it.”

  “Get that from a Hallmark card?”

  “Murder with special circumstances.” A phrase prosecutors used when they intended to seek the death penalty for heinous crimes.

  “That what I am to you?”

  “You need to get some sleep.”

  “Go back to Langley. You don’t belong out here.”

  Shafer shook his head: Maybe you don’t, either. Not anymore.

  “This conversation’s done, Ellis. Give me a ride or I find one myself.”

  Shafer folded his arms across his chest and looked up at Wells, and Wells wondered what he would do if Shafer didn’t move.

  Finally, Shafer ducked his head in surrender. “Okay, John. One condition.”

  Wells waited.

  “Whatever happens over there, tonight’s done, you rest.”

  29

  MACAO

  The helicopter pilot was Wells’s age, a bald-headed white guy who wore brown fingerless leather driving gloves. He’s good, Wright had said, his last words before Wells walked out of the apartment. Just don’t ask his name. Wright seemed less bothered than Shafer by the way Wells had executed Buvchenko. Maybe Wright understood better.