What she was really saying was that she felt the same. That they were the same. But they weren’t. She was a fanatic. She saw the world in abstraction. Us. Them. White. Black. Who would close her eyes to reality if it didn’t agree with her mind’s vision. Wells was the opposite. He lied to the world, yes, but alone he drank truth until it filled his belly and choked his throat.
“Everything I read says Iran doesn’t even want the bomb anymore,” Wells said. “They’re giving it up. All this for nothing.”
“If you believe that, I don’t know how you’ve survived so long.”
“If I could get to my gun, I’d show you.”
She laughed.
In the distance a siren whistled, ooh-ooh, ooh-OOH. Then another. Wells wanted to believe the sirens were a coincidence. He knew better.
No wonder she wasn’t in a hurry.
—
Salome murmured something to the bodyguard. He didn’t answer. She spoke again, a tone that brooked no argument, and this time he tucked his pistol away.
“You think the Iranians are nice people? You know they shot down that plane.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s true. You should help us, John. These men, they’re your enemy, too. Look how they made the United States bleed in Iraq. How they treat their own people.”
The sirens rang louder. Wells saw two police cars swinging into the parking lot. A black SUV followed. Now more sirens in the distance, a beat that needed remixing.
Salome pushed herself off the bed. Two quick steps to the window. She tipped her nose to the glass like a cat that had spotted a particularly tasty bird.
“Your welcoming party. A Muslim convert comes to Russia to meet an arms dealer? FSB will love that. So fortunate for the motherland that Buvchenko did his duty, told them you were here. Or maybe you tell them you’re American, ex-CIA? Even better. They’ll hold you a month, more, before all this gets sorted. So, good. You stay here, your son is safe.”
She had him. Running was impossible. He had nowhere to go. He would have to give himself up, talk the FSB into letting him call home. Duto still had Kremlin contacts. Once the Russians knew who he was, maybe they’d figure a one-way ticket to the border was the easiest way to deal with him.
Maybe.
The guard muttered.
“My friend asks you to step into the bathtub while we take our leave.”
Wells shook his head. The guard pointed the pistol at Wells’s feet.
“A Russian jail with a hole in your foot. No fun.”
Wells knew she was serious. He went to the tub, his muddy shoes staining the white plastic. At least she hadn’t made him turn on the water. This woman had outplayed him twice now.
“Good luck.” She smiled, the real smile, the one that warmed her face. She stepped into the bathroom, raised her right hand to his face, ran her fingers along his chin. Then touched her flat palm to his chest. The warmth of her skin stunned him. “Allah will protect you, I’m sure.”
The words lifted the spell. Wells didn’t like the glancing reference to his religion. Or the intimacy she’d presumed. He pulled her hand from his chest. “Touch my son, I’ll kill you.”
“Of course you will.”
Then she was gone.
—
The room door closed. Wells waited a few seconds before going to the window. The police didn’t seem to be in any rush. They stood in the parking lot, rubbing their hands against the cold. Wells counted nine in all, plus a German shepherd, sniffing the air as one of the uniformed officers stroked its head.
The shepherd bugged Wells. He wasn’t sure why, and then he was. The dog answered a question he hadn’t thought to ask. Salome knew how dangerous he was. She didn’t have to risk seeing him in this little room. She could have met him at Buvchenko’s mansion, where he could be controlled more easily. Why here?
Cops brought dogs to find explosives.
Or drugs.
Wells pulled open the drawers of the cheap wooden dresser. Empty, empty, empty. The nightstand, too. He flattened his cheek to the carpet, peered beneath the bed. There. A bundle the size of a brick, wedged against the bed’s center support. He snaked his arm under, tugged it out. It was brown, plastic-wrapped. Heroin. A kilo or more.
No wonder Salome hadn’t bothered to shoot him. Wells didn’t work for the agency. He couldn’t claim diplomatic immunity. He’d spend the rest of his life in a Russian prison. Another name for hell on earth.
Wells wished they’d left him something less dangerous. Like a grenade.
Outside, another SUV rolled up. Two plainclothes officers drifted toward the front entrance. Wells grabbed his backpack, checked the peephole to be sure that Salome wasn’t still in the hall, stepped out. The hotel was a simple rectangle with a single internal north–south hallway. The guest elevators occupied the north end, three doors from Wells’s room. Wells ran the other way, south.
The hallway ended at a gray-painted door with a push bar. A red sign warned “Emergency Exit! ALARM!” in Russian and English. Wells didn’t think so. The hotel wouldn’t want sirens screeching every time a guest took the fire stairs. Anyway, he had no choice. Just ditching the brick down a trash chute wouldn’t be good enough. The cops would scrub the hotel when they didn’t find the heroin in his room. He had to make it disappear permanently.
Wells pushed the bar. No alarm. He scrambled up the stairs two at a time, quads burning, heart pounding. Past the fifth floor, the sixth. To the fire door to the roof. Atop the stairs, he found a fire door wedged open with a VCR tape. Old-school.
Outside, a mess of crumpled cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles. Wells ran for the rusty metal flues that rose side by side from the center of the roof, pumping inky black smoke into the gray sky. The smokestacks extended about six feet off the roof and had old-style mushroom caps mounted loosely atop the flues to keep rain and snow from pouring inside.
Wells carried a butterfly knife in his backpack. As he reached the flues he pulled it out, flipped it open. He had never been quite so conscious of time passing, of the seconds escaping with every motion. How long before the cops downstairs moved? Two minutes? Three? How much time had he used already?
The smoke was greasy and lukewarm after its trip up the flue. Wells reached under the cap, sliced at the bag. A river of brown poison poured down the steel pipe into the furnace below. Where it belonged. When the bag was empty, Wells tossed it down the chute, dropped in the knife, too. He ran for the door, leapt down the stairs. His hands were black now, slick with oil sludge. He didn’t want to leave a trail. He balled them up, didn’t touch the railing. He took the stairs in twos and threes, half running, half falling.
At the third floor, he stopped. If the cops had already reached the hallway, he would have no choice but to go downstairs and surrender in the parking lot. But the corridor was quiet. He ran for his room. The electronic lock on its door beeped green. No doubt the cops had made the clerk downstairs disable it. They were on their way up. He’d beaten them by seconds.
In his bathroom, Wells washed his hands to clean off the grease and whatever heroin residue might be stuck on them. As he finished, he heard footsteps, Russian voices mumbling. The door creaked open. Something skittered across the carpet. Wells saw it in the bathroom doorway. A green sphere. A grenade, and then another.
Wells almost laughed. He’d asked for a grenade. The Russians had seen fit to give him two. He spun, went to his knees, clapped his hands over his ears, and squeezed his eyes closed. If the grenade was a standard frag, he was dead, but if it was a flash-bang, a concussion—
The explosion seemed to come from inside his head. He was nowhere, and then in the hills north of Missoula, caught in a massive thunderstorm. He ran for cover as the skies exploded again—
No. Not Montana. Russia. Wells opened his eyes, found himself back in a shadowy version of the
bathroom. Spiderwebs shrouded his eyes. A whistling scream filled his ears. He reached for the toilet and hung his mouth open, trying to vomit, failing. Only a thin trickle of spittle hung from his mouth. He knew the police had to have followed the grenades into the room, but the idea of turning his head to see them was impossible. He stared at the stained white bowl until men pulled him up, jerked his arms behind his back, cuffed them tight.
They shoved him in the chair in the corner. With his hearing gone, he watched the search play out like a silent movie, a comedy starring one smart dog and a bunch of dumb cops. The shepherd walked through the room, didn’t alert. His handler took him out, brought him back in, tried again. When he still didn’t alert, the handler got into a heated argument with the guy who seemed to be in charge, a tall thin man who wore a suit and thick black plastic glasses that would have passed for hip in Brooklyn. Wells didn’t need to hear them to know what they were saying:
It’s here. Why can’t your idiot dog find it?
Because it’s not here!
It’s here.
They tried to talk to Wells, but he pointed at his ears and they seemed to believe him. They patted him down, like the dog wouldn’t have sniffed the stuff on him. Then they tore up the room. Pulled open the drawers, flipped over the bed, cut his bag open, and found his second passport. The discovery made them happy, but not for long.
After a half hour, two cops pulled Wells up, hustled him into the empty room across the hall, threw him on the bed. They were big men, with pale skin and dull blue eyes. They looked at him like they were waiting for an order to work him over. Wells took limited comfort in the fact that it hadn’t come. The police weren’t one hundred percent sure about him.
The man with the glasses walked in. Up close his suit was cheap and his shoes scuffed. He looked like a Depression-era traveling salesman. No way was he FSB. Wells’s fears had been right. Salome and Buvchenko must have used a local trafficker to tip the police—American drug trafficker in 306, bring a dog, all the proof you need is in his room. They found the perfect way to put Wells in a hole without having to call in chits in Moscow.
He tapped his ear. “You can hear now.”
“Yes.” Barely. Static still filled Wells’s ears. The cop sounded like an FM station disappearing behind a hill.
“Which one?” The Russian held up his passports.
Wells pointed at the one with his real name.
“John Wells. You smuggle drugs?”
“I don’t know who told you that, but he’s wrong.”
“You smuggle drugs.” Not a question this time. “Heroin.”
“No.”
“You know the penalty we have in Russia for drug smuggling?”
“I came here to meet Mikhail Buvchenko. You know who I mean?”
“Of course I know him. He lives in the country. Nothing to do with this.”
“I went to his mansion last night to talk to him. Not about drugs. I said something he didn’t like. I guess today he got mad, called you.”
“He didn’t call me.” The guy flipped through Wells’s second passport, the one in the name of Roger Bishop. “This is yours also.”
“Yes.”
Wells wondered if the cop would ask why he had two passports, but he was stuck on the drug angle. “Last month you go to Guatemala. Panama. Thailand. Turkey.”
“Looking for someone.”
“For cocaine. Heroin. Now you come here, spread your poison.”
“Sir. May I ask you your name?”
The man pulled his wallet, flipped it open to show his police identification. “Boris Nemkov.”
Despite the hole he was in, Wells couldn’t help but remember a line from the second season of The Wire: Why always Boris?
“You’re a detective.”
“I am head of narcotics police for Volgograd oblast.”
A drug cop. An honest one, too, if Wells could trust the cheap suit.
“Don’t you think it’s odd I have two working U.S. passports?”
“Plenty of smugglers have extra passports.”
“The dog in my room, it found nothing.”
“So far.”
“There’s nothing to find.”
“Maybe you see us coming, you hide it. In the cart of the maids. The trash. I promise, we find it. Then—” Nemkov sliced his hand across his neck and walked out of the room.
Five minutes later, he was back. Scowling. “The longer it takes, the madder I become.”
“I swear on my son’s life. No drugs.”
“All this tells me is that your son means nothing to you.”
Wells felt his temper rise. “I landed in Volgograd yesterday, I came to this hotel, Buvchenko’s men picked me up. I stayed overnight, they dropped me back here. Then you came. Where would I have found these drugs?”
“Don’t talk to me about Buvchenko.” Boris went to the door. He pulled it open, stopped, looked at Wells. “The next time I come back, I have it. Then we take you in. But first I give my men ten minutes alone with you, punishment for wasting my time.” Boris murmured in Russian. The cops laughed. “Tell me now.”
“Nothing to tell.”
Boris shook his head with what seemed to be genuine disappointment and walked out.
Wells thought of Salome, how very wrong he had been about her. Had he tried to convince himself she saw him as anything but an obstacle to her plans? Was he so lonely? So desperate for connection? Maybe she respected him vaguely for his courage, the way the Germans and Russians who had once fought here had respected each other. But even so, they had killed each other without pity or remorse.
An hour passed. Another lost hour, another hour closer to war.
Finally, the door swung open. Nemkov stalked in, tugged a cheap wheeled suitcase, hard-sided gray plastic. Wells stared at it, wondering if it was filled with heroin. He didn’t know if Nemkov was crazy enough to plant evidence on an American he’d never met. Maybe. Any Russian policeman who didn’t take bribes had to be crazy.
“That’s not mine.”
“It is.”
Wells shook his head. Nemkov dropped the suitcase at Wells’s feet. He stood over Wells, tugged at Wells’s left ear like an angry nineteenth-century schoolmaster.
“We found it.”
Wells tried to shake his head, but Nemkov held him fast. Wells couldn’t help feeling the ear-tugging was childish for both sides. Like the detective had decided he was unworthy of a proper beating.
Nemkov said something in Russian. One of the cops went to his knees. Snapped open the clasps and opened the suitcase.
Revealing an empty compartment. Wells looked down at the molded plastic, wondering what he could be missing.
“Where is it?”
It’s nowhere and everywhere. It went to the dick. H. E. Roin, born Helmand Province, Afghanistan, died Volgograd, Russia. Poppies to ashes and dust to dust. Wells’s concussion talking. “Where is what?”
Nemkov pulled harder, twisting Wells sideways. Wells feared the detective might take his ear off. “This whole hotel. My men, they want me to make the evidence. You understand what I mean?”
“Plant it.”
“Prison for you forever. But I don’t do that.”
Nemkov stepped away from Wells, reached behind his back, for a 9-millimeter. First Buvchenko, then Salome’s guard, now this cop. For the third time in eighteen hours, Wells stared at a pistol’s unblinking eye. Maybe it’s time to think about your life choices, son. But Nemkov had to be bluffing. A man who wouldn’t plant evidence wouldn’t shoot a handcuffed prisoner.
Unless his fury ran away with him.
Nemkov stepped around the bed, knelt behind Wells. Wells felt the pistol kiss his neck, the tip of the barrel oddly warm.
“Last time. Where is it?”
This interrogation had gone
as far it could. Nemkov would pull the trigger. Or he wouldn’t. For the first time in all his years, Wells understood the words death wish. He was well and truly tired of being so close, of feeling the Reaper creep past, smirking and winking at him. Tired, too, of all the killing he’d done over the years to survive. Do it, then. Let me rest.
But as quickly as the words came to him, he pushed them away, forced the shameful weakness from his mind. And of course Nemkov didn’t kill him. He grabbed Wells’s cuffed arms and pulled him off the bed.
“This suitcase, it’s yours. I give it to you to replace the bag they cut. You see it’s empty, no trick. I give you back your money.” Nemkov held up the passports. “Even these.”
“Thank you.”
“Now it’s time for you to go. In one hour, there’s a plane to Domodedovo.” The largest of the three airports that served Moscow. “What you do after that is up to you, but I advise you, leave Russia as soon as possible.”
An excellent idea.
—
Nemkov drove Wells to the airport himself, in silence. As they stopped at the terminal, Wells tried to open his door, found it locked. Nemkov reached over, squeezed his wrist.
“Tell me the truth, why you were here?”
“I swear it wasn’t drugs.”
“But the truth.” Nemkov shook his head.
Somewhere in his concussion-scrambled mind, Wells wondered if Nemkov wanted to help. And why not ask? “Detective—”
“Colonel.”
“Colonel. I’m sorry. The hotel has surveillance cameras, yes?”
“Of course.”
“If your men can find a shot of a man and a woman leaving together a few minutes before you arrived—”
“A few?”
“Five or less. Send me that picture, I promise I’ll tell you the whole story when it’s over. Whatever happens.”
“You promise?”
“And what I did with the drugs they tried to plant on me. You know, the ones you and your dog and the whole 23rd Precinct couldn’t find.” The concussion talking for sure. For a moment, Wells feared he had said too much, that Nemkov would drive him back to the hotel and start the beating anew. Nemkov seemed to be trying to decide, too. But finally he nodded.
Twelve Days Page 18
