“Modern as North Korea.”
Abdullah ignored the objection. “Also, the bomb makes us squirm and protects them from you. And the Jews, too.”
“Until Pakistan gives you a bomb of your own.”
“Maybe they’re not so sure the Pakistanis will give us a bomb,” Abdullah said.
“What about you, Your Majesty? Are you sure?”
“It doesn’t matter, because we haven’t made the request.”
“I see all the reasons they might want a bomb. It doesn’t mean they’ve achieved one.”
“If they have, they need to be stopped. And if they haven’t, maybe they need to be stopped from trying.”
“You want the United States to invade Iran on rigged evidence, Your Majesty.”
“What is rigged? What does it mean?”
“People on the left and the right in America, they already don’t believe what the government says. After what happened in Iraq, this would be a catastrophe. Maybe even cause a constitutional crisis.”
“I don’t believe it. Because you’re an absolute monarch. You buy off anyone who criticizes you, and destroy the ones who won’t stay bought. Your biggest threats come from your nephews, not your citizens. You can’t imagine millions of people filling the streets to challenge you.
But Wells said only, “Believe me, Your Majesty. It’s possible.”
“There are still eight days left. Maybe Iran will see the light and you won’t have to invade.”
“So you won’t help?”
Abdullah leaned forward, staring at Wells like a pitcher who needed just one more batter for his no-hitter. He might not have too many fastballs left, but Wells was about to see one.
“I won’t help? Have I not helped already? I let you come here, speak to Nawwaf as you wished. Last month in Bangkok you asked for aid and we granted it immediately. And I promise that no one will tell the FBI and CIA that you were the actual target of this bombing. Unless you would rather that your name be part of our reports.”
“No.” Wells didn’t know what the agency would do if it heard about his freelancing, but the response certainly wouldn’t be you go girl!
“Those courtesies will continue. I gave you my word and it holds. Even though I fear what you find may not help my country. Do you understand me, Mr. Wells?”
“Thank you.”
“Then what more would you like?”
“That you might speak to the President.”
“What shall I say?” Abdullah smiled gently, as much as telling Wells that he was making a fool of himself.
“That he should wait. That there’s too much we don’t know.”
“So you want me to pass along a theory I don’t believe, act against my country’s interests.”
“A war on false pretenses.”
—
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” The shriek came from behind the glass, astonishingly loud. Wells spun in surprise—and found himself staring at a huge blue parrot. “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” God is great.
“Glad you think so,” Wells said.
“Allahu akbar?” A questioning tone this time, and then the parrot flew off.
“You know, this is my favorite room in the whole palace. These birds.”
“I thought you were more of a falconer, Your Majesty.”
“In my old age, these amuse me. They remind me of my aides, the foolish ones who repeat whatever I say. I bring them here sometimes, but they never see the joke.”
“That why I’m here?”
“You and I, we can speak honestly. So I tell you now. Even if I spoke to the President as you asked, it would make no difference. Do you know why?”
Wells shook his head.
“Because he listens to three or four people about this now. His NSA, maybe the Secretary of Defense, maybe the Vice President and chief of staff, if he trusts them. And even them, he hardly hears. In his mind, he’s reached the point where it’s his decision and his alone. This is what it means to command an army.”
“And you think he’s made his decision?”
“You’ll need strong evidence to change his mind. Very strong.”
Abdullah pushed himself up. “Will you stay for lunch with me?”
Wells looked at his watch. Almost noon. “I can’t.” He decided against asking Abdullah for a private jet to Russia. The King would have agreed, but Wells didn’t know what Buvchenko would make of his arriving that way.
“All right, then.” Abdullah took Wells’s hands in his own. The king’s hands were worn with age, dry and creased. “Barak’allah fik.” May God bless you.
His tone was final, the meaning clear enough. Good-bye, not just now but forever.
9
SEVEN DAYS . . .
BETHESDA, MARYLAND
Gentlemen?” the waiter at the Hyatt Regency said.
“Coffee, scrambled eggs, rye toast, hash browns. And a side of bacon.” Shafer felt like a bad Jew when he ordered bacon. A bad Jew who was going to die of a heart attack. But the guy at the next table had a plateful, and it smelled delicious.
“Egg-white omelet with asparagus, and please ask the kitchen to cook it dry,” Ian Duffy said.
“Yes, sir.”
Bad enough that Duffy’s gray suit had a rubbed metallic sheen that screamed Armani. Real men don’t eat egg whites. Shafer wanted to despise the guy. But he couldn’t.
—
Duffy had been chief of station in Hong Kong during Glenn Mason’s tour there. Duffy had quit the agency two years before and come back to the United States. Now he consulted for multinational companies with investments in China. His company was called Global Asian Partners, or Asian Global Partners, or I Partner Asia Globally, or some such. Shafer had done his best to forget.
The clandestine side wasn’t that big. Shafer must have met Duffy at least a couple times over the years. But when he looked Duffy up on LinkedIn, he had no recollection of the man. On-screen, Duffy wore a getting-it-done smile. His profile openly mentioned the CIA. He didn’t specifically say he’d been Hong Kong station chief, but he came close: 200X–201X: Senior Management, Overseas Post, East Asia. Shafer was astonished at first, then less so. Of course Duffy’s prospective clients would want to know what he’d been doing all those years after the University of Michigan. The CIA was a lot more impressive than the State Department.
For a couple of days after Wells flew to Switzerland and Duto to Tel Aviv, Shafer didn’t try to contact Duffy. Shafer justified his hesitation by telling himself that the CIA was waiting for him to make a mistake. Like the White House, the agency had gone all in on the theory that Iran was the source of the Istanbul uranium. The DCI’s chief of staff and axman, Max Carcetti, had warned Shafer against trying to prove otherwise. Shafer would embarrass himself and the agency at a crucial moment, Carcetti said. And Carcetti had leverage, in the form of tapes of Shafer passing classified information to Wells and Duto—who no longer had CIA clearances.
The tapes gave Carcetti and Scott Hebley, the DCI, all the evidence they needed to fire Shafer. If they wanted to play hardball, they could even ask the Department of Justice to prosecute Shafer as a leaker. Shafer probably wouldn’t go to prison. Duto was a senator and the former DCI, and Wells had worked for the agency for more than a decade. Even so, fighting a federal indictment would take years and cost Shafer his life savings. Shafer figured the only reason Hebley and Carcetti hadn’t gotten rid of him already was that they wanted him in the office, where they could watch him easily. Best to tread lightly, especially since Duffy probably didn’t have anything useful anyway.
—
But the morning before, not long after the agency received reports of a terrorist attack in Riyadh, Shafer saw a message in his in-box from [email protected]. The body text was a cut-and-paste for counterfeit Viagra. The point of the
message was contained in the sender’s address: Wells wanted Shafer to call him on his second burner phone in forty-five minutes.
For a moment, Shafer found himself oddly sympathetic to the jihadis he’d spent fifteen years chasing. Did he and Wells think they would beat the all-seeing NSA with these simple tricks? Inshallah, my man. Forty-three minutes later, he stood outside his car in the parking lot of the Tysons Corner Galleria as Wells recounted his conversation with General Nawwaf.
North Korea?
I don’t believe it either, Wells said. But since it’s all I got, I figured I’d mention it. Anyone you can ask?
I’ll think about it.
What about this bombing? We just got the reports. Were you—
I don’t want to talk about it. If I thought it was relevant, I would have mentioned it.
I’m sorry, John.
The show never ends. And I’m starting to think I know all the lyrics by heart.
Get some sleep. If you can.
Keep an eye on Evan and Heather, okay?
Of course. You’ll feel better in the morning.
Shafer wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince Wells, or himself. Either way, he was talking to dead air. Wells was gone. And Shafer was furious with himself for his cowardice. Wells risked his life in the field every day, and Shafer was sitting on his hands because he was afraid to irritate the seventh floor? He left the burner in his glove compartment, found a cab to take him to the Clarendon Metro, the orange line. He didn’t think Carcetti and Hebley would bother with a live tail. But they might have stuck a GPS tracker on his car.
From Clarendon he headed east to Rosslyn. South to Crystal City on the blue line. Northeast to L’Enfant Plaza on the yellow. To the street, a brisk walk from the entrance at 9th and D to the one at 7th and Maryland, then back underground. Again the blue line. The run took nearly an hour and was probably unnecessary, a blur of silver trains puffing in and out under waffle-shaped concrete ceilings. But Shafer wanted to work his countersurveillance muscles. Feel like a real case officer again. He got off at Benning Road. The massive growth in the government and the lobbyists who sucked its teats had made Washington wealthier than it had ever been. Neighborhoods around Capitol Hill and all over Northwest had been prettied past recognition. But the gentrification boom hadn’t touched the low-slung housing projects that speckled the hills east of the Anacostia River. Here, crack vials still littered the sidewalks, and convenience-store clerks cowered behind bulletproof glass.
Shafer trudged along East Capitol until he saw the neon lights of a check-cashing outlet glowing in the dusk. In a world of cheap prepaid mobile handsets, check cashers were among the last places that could be counted on for old-fashioned pay phones. Of the four phones outside Ready-Chek!-Go, one had no handset. Another had inexplicably been mummified with electrical tape. Burns and scratches that couldn’t even be called graffiti covered the last two. As Shafer tried to pick the one less likely to give him hepatitis, two women in miniskirts sidled toward him. They were either prostitutes or doing their best to freeze to death. He expected an approach, but apparently he was too old for them to bother. The one on the left said something under her breath to the other, and they both giggled and kept walking. An entirely inappropriate flush of self-pity seized him. When even the whores ignore you, you might as well be dead.
He shoved quarters into the phone and dialed. “Global Pan-Asia Partners,” a woman said, her voice crackling through the broken plastic.
“Ian Duffy, please.” Shafer was shouting, trying to keep the mouthpiece away from his lips.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Ellis Shafer.”
“And will he know what this is in reference to, Mr. Shafer?”
“Tell him it’s Farm business.”
Three full minutes passed. Shafer started to lose feeling in his fingers. He was nearly ready to hang up.
“This is an unexpected pleasure. The famous Ellis Shafer. How may I help you?”
Shafer didn’t know why Duffy was so chummy. Maybe they had met after all. “I’d love to tell you over a drink tonight,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.
“Tonight’s no good. Breakfast? Tomorrow?” Duffy’s voice combined his Michigan childhood and the decades he’d spent in former British colonies. The flat nasal tones of the Midwest and the elongated consonants of Hyde Park. He sounded like an aristocrat with a cold.
“Tomorrow would be great.”
“Eight a.m.? The Hyatt in Bethesda?”
“Looking forward to it.” Though Shafer wasn’t. He’d have to set his alarm at 5:30 for another Metro run.
“See you then.”
—
The sky was dark when he left his house the next morning. But not so dark that he didn’t notice the unmarked white van that picked him up when he turned onto Washington Boulevard. Then again, he would have had to be blind to miss it. It was a dented Ford Econoline with tinted windows and no commercial insignia, which only heightened its obviousness. Shafer looked for a front license plate to memorize, but the van didn’t have one. The omission wasn’t necessarily illegal. Several nearby states, including North Carolina and West Virginia, didn’t require front plates.
The van seemed to Shafer less a tail than a signal. We’re watching. We know where you live. The agency had already sent that message loud and clear. Which left Duberman.
He called home. “Sweetie. Can you do me a favor and look outside?”
She walked to the window. They’d been together forty years. Shafer believed he’d know his wife by her footsteps alone.
“I’m looking.”
“See anything out of place? Unmarked vans, anything like that?”
“Everything looks okay. What’s going on, Ellis?” He’d learned in Africa a generation ago that she didn’t scare easy. She didn’t sound scared now. Not for herself, anyway.
“I’ll tell you when I get home. As much as I can.”
As a rule, she didn’t ask him about work, but in this case she deserved to know.
“If I see anything, I’ll call you.”
“And the police. And the neighbors.” Shafer thought of the pistol he kept in the basement, but the suggestion would only make her laugh.
“That bad?”
“Better safe than sorry. Love you.”
“Likely story.”
He drove on, eyeing the van in his mirror, trying to push down his fury, keep his mind clear. They wanted to come at him, fine. But not his wife. Real spy agencies didn’t play these games. They were too easy, and too easy to escalate. Shafer decided to let them tail him for now. He’d find out at the Metro station if they were serious about following him.
The East Falls Church lot was already almost half full when he arrived. D.C.’s rush hour started early. Shafer drove slowly through the lot, waiting for the van to follow. But it stopped outside the entrance, as if the men inside weren’t sure what to do. After a few seconds, it rumbled off. Shafer suspected its disappearance meant that the driver didn’t want him to see its rear license plate and run a trace. More proof they were private investigators. FBI or CIA operatives wouldn’t have cared. Shafer wondered if he ought to follow them, but they had a decent lead and he wasn’t in the mood for a high-speed chase through suburban Virginia. Anyway, they’d be back.
—
The morning’s countersurveillance run on the Metro gave Shafer plenty of time to consider why Duberman and the woman who worked for him had sent the van. The move seemed unnecessarily provocative. They knew the agency and White House had bought their scheme. But for whatever reason, they still felt the need to pressure Shafer. Maybe he and Wells were closer than they imagined.
Shafer walked out of the red line Bethesda Metro stop at 7:45. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been followed. It was always possible that the agency or the FBI was run
ning a twenty-agent team on him, but those were basically impossible to spot, and Shafer didn’t know why they would bother.
Duffy arrived at eight, exactly on time. Shafer didn’t recognize him, didn’t think they had ever spoken, but Duffy was as cordial as he’d been the day before. Duffy was a common agency type, tall and lanky, with blue eyes that seemed friendly at first and then less so. The CIA contained a surprising number of Midwesterners and Mormons. Shafer didn’t know why. Maybe they saw espionage as a way to channel their murderous ids into the noble task of protecting the homeland. They unsettled Shafer. He knew he was being unfair, but he had no trouble imagining them setting railroad schedules for trains to Auschwitz in 1944.
“You live close by?” Shafer said, as the waiter walked away.
“Chevy Chase. We were lucky enough to buy a house twenty years ago and sublet it all these years I was in Asia.”
“And business is good?”
“Fantastic.”
Shafer was sure Duffy would have given that answer even if he was on the verge of bankruptcy. “You don’t mind my asking, who do you work for?”
“Everyone from pharmaceutical companies trying to keep counterfeit Chinese drugs out of the supply chain to movie studios dealing with DVD knockoffs. Software, auto parts, it doesn’t matter, if the Chinese can copy it, they will. Hedge funds hire us to help with investments gone wrong. Ask us to figure out if hiring some minister’s son will cause more problems than it’s worth. Western companies are only just realizing now how complex doing business in China is. Only problem is that I wind up spending half my time on planes to Hong Kong.”
“And I guess they’re willing to pay.”
“I’m not afraid to tell you, Ellis. I charge a thousand-fifty an hour. And flying counts, too. Just to put me on a plane to HK costs twenty grand. But then, if you have seven hundred million dollars sunk into some truck plant there, twenty grand doesn’t sound so bad.”
Twelve Days Page 14
