Twelve Days

by Alex Berenson

  “Yes,” Evan said.

  “No,” Heather said.

  “Go inside, Mom.”

  “Don’t do this. It’s not fair.” She looked at Shafer with wide pleading eyes. He understood. She had lost Wells to this shadow war. She feared Evan would be next.

  “Fair’s got nothing to do with it,” Evan said.

  The kid was eighteen. Old enough to enlist, if he wanted. He had the right to know.

  Heather turned away, walked into the house. So Shafer told Evan the story. It took an hour. He didn’t mention Duberman by name, but he gave up everything else. Evan looked at him in disbelief when he finished.

  “This mysterious billionaire might kill us to get at John?”

  “Your father’s lots of things. Not crazy. Neither am I. It’s all true. And we would both feel better if you stayed here until we figure out where the uranium came from.”

  “Or we, the country, I mean, invade Iran,” Evan said. “This guy won’t care after that, right?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So John’s running to every country that ever had this stuff, and they’re all blowing him off. And in another week, we’ll attack and it’ll be moot.”

  Something about what Evan had said bugged Shafer. And it wasn’t the dig, either.

  “Say that again.”

  “I said, John’ll be in Libya, chasing some guy who worked at some reactor in 1983”—as if the year was the dawn of recorded history—“and meanwhile the President will come on television to tell us all about Operation Irani Freedom or whatever. And Richie Rich will buy himself a new spaceship because he’s so excited his plot worked.”

  —

  Some reactor in 1983. That fast, Shafer saw what he’d missed. He was a fool. It had taken an eighteen-year-old kid to spot the hole.

  A country running an active nuclear weapons project would track its HEU to the milligram. It wouldn’t sell the stuff at any price. But what about a country that had stockpiled a chunk of weapons-grade uranium and then ended its program? The material instantly would be a liability. It would be locked in a vault and after a few years forgotten. Waiting for someone—for Salome—to find it and pry it out for the right price.

  A long shot, sure. But no longer than the possibilities that had taken Wells to Russia and Duto to Israel. Plus Shafer had an edge. Of all the countries that had walked away from enrichment programs over the years, South Africa had gotten the furthest. It was the natural place to start. Shafer’s first agency posting had been in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire—the country now known as Congo. This was the late seventies. Kinshasa was rife with officers for the South African Bureau of State Security—infamously known as B.O.S.S. All over Africa, the CIA worked hand-in-glove, white-hand-in-white-glove, with South Africa. It saw the white-run government in Pretoria as a buffer against the Communist-supported African National Congress.

  In Kinshasa, Shafer had worked with a dozen South African intelligence officers. They were for the most part unapologetically racist, especially after a few drinks. The blacks can’t be trusted to manage their own affairs, one told Shafer. You don’t let the animals run the zoo. Yet when they weren’t talking politics, they were pleasant enough. And Shafer, cynical to his core, nonetheless believed that some forms of government were worse than others. Communism would make Africa even poorer and more miserable. Eventually, sooner than they expected, white South Africans would have no choice but to give the vote to the black majority. Meantime, he would work with them when the need arose.

  So Shafer told himself. Though he wondered if he was just making excuses.

  The white regime took longer to fall than he expected. But it did. And in the mid-nineties a couple of the guys he’d known in Congo emigrated to the United States. Shafer couldn’t remember where they’d wound up, but he could find out easily enough. Lucky for him, they all had these weird Afrikaner names. He wouldn’t need fancy databases to track them. He was guessing the United States had only one Joost Claassen.

  —

  A poke in the ribs from Evan brought him back to Provo.

  “I gotta go. Promise you’ll stay.” If Evan sat tight, so would Heather. “Even if you think it’s BS.”

  “For that story, I’ll give you a week. On two conditions. One for you, one for my dad. First. Whatever happens, promise when it’s over you’ll give me the after-action report.” The kid raised his eyebrows, at once acknowledging and mocking the lingo.

  “Done. What’s the other?”

  “You tell John, I want him to come out here, come skiing with me. If I’m stuck in Utah, I might as well get to Alta. Pow-pow.”

  “What about basketball?”

  “I’m already out of the rotation.”

  “All right, I’ll tell him. Though I bet he hasn’t skied in at least twenty years.”

  Evan grinned, and Shafer saw he’d chosen the sport for exactly that reason. An easy way to show his superiority over the old man. Shafer turned for the gate. “Tell your mother I had to run.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Evan said.

  Shafer found a copy shop that had workstations with Internet access. In forty-six seconds, he found Joost and Linda Claassen, in Henderson, Nevada. He bought himself a phone card, hoping Joost hadn’t moved. Or gone unlisted. Or died.

  “Hallo?” The voice was thirty-five years rougher than Shafer remembered, but the accent was unmistakable.

  “Joost.”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Ellis Shafer. We knew each other back in Kinshasa.”

  “I never lived in Kinshasa.”

  Shafer wondered if he had the wrong man. But no. Old spy habits died hard. “Come on, Joost. Remember that party you threw, Christmas, you brought in the witch to cast spells on us? Betty Nye, she hid in the closet. Orson had to drag her out.” Orson Nye had been Shafer’s first chief of station.

  Joost laughed. “Okay, then. I remember. Where is Orson these days?”

  “Nursing home in Virginia. Alzheimer’s.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  Shafer had forgotten how Afrikaners talked, these oddly flat statements. “Sure is. I need to see you, Joost.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I can be in Henderson tonight.”

  “Ellis—”

  “It’s not about back then, Joost. I’m hoping you can help me find something.”

  Joost went silent. Shafer had only pay-phone static for company. He wondered if he’d pushed too hard, lost the old man.

  “I’ve left all that behind.”

  “I swear. Nothing to be worried about.”

  “Then I look forward to seeing you tonight.”

  —

  Henderson was on the outskirts of Vegas, four hundred miles down I-15 from Provo. Shafer decided to stick to the Regal instead of flying out of Salt Lake, a way to avoid using credit cards and the TSA.

  Still, as the mile markers rolled by and the Buick’s gauges rose toward red, Shafer wished he’d splurged for the second-cheapest car on the lot. The ninety-point checklist at Great Deals Used Cars didn’t seem to include the engine. Shafer turned the Regal’s heat to high to relieve the radiator and kept the speedometer steady at fifty-three. Anything beat blowing the engine in the Utah desert.

  The six-hour trip took eight hours. But finally Shafer knocked on the door of Joost’s house in Henderson. A tidy ranch in a tidy subdivision, as far from the chaos of Kinshasa as Shafer could imagine. The Regal had cooled after sunset. Shafer believed it might even survive the return trip north.

  The door swung wide open. Joost looked surprisingly like the man Shafer had known a generation before. Gray hair and age spots notwithstanding, he held himself ramrod-straight, ready to head upriver into the heart of darkness.

  “Joost. You look good.”

  “So do y
ou.” To Shafer’s surprise, Joost opened his arms and wrapped him up. “Come, come.”

  Joost’s living room was covered with pictures of Joost and a stout Hispanic woman maybe twenty years younger. She definitely hadn’t been his wife in Kinshasa. Shafer vaguely remembered that woman as tall and blond. “Is that—”

  “Janneke died in 2005. Cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Linda was her nurse. She thinks I was a mining engineer over there.”

  Now Shafer understood why Joost had been wary of his call. “She’s out tonight?”

  “She plays poker with the tourists once a week. You’d be surprised how much she wins. Sit, please. If you’d like a drink—” On the coffee table Joost had set out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a bowl of ice. “I don’t drink much these days, but I thought tonight. Just a taste.”

  “Please.”

  Joost poured them two shallow drinks. “Cheers.”

  “It’s good to see you, Joost.”

  And it was. Not because Joost had been a good intelligence officer, or even a good man. He’d had a long-running affair with a secretary at the Dutch embassy, if Shafer remembered right. But Joost had kept his promises, a rare trait in their business. In any case, seeing him offered a more intimate version of a college reunion, a reminder that everyone was headed the same way.

  “You’re still working, Ellis?”

  “For now.”

  “Can you believe Zaire is even worse now than it was back then?”

  “We didn’t exactly leave them a winning hand.”

  “Always this excuse. They’ve been independent fifty years now. Time to take responsibility for themselves. I remember you saying something like that to one of the big men. You were never afraid to say what you thought. Though you must have known after a few months that you were wasting your breath.”

  Story of my life.

  “Worst that could happen, they send me back to Langley, I stop getting malaria.”

  “You remember the time when Mobutu’s secretary called you in, that crazy one who drove the pink Rolls-Royce—”

  For an hour, they talked about nothing but the past.

  “So,” Shafer said finally. “There was something I wanted to ask you about.”

  Joost tapped his wrist. “Now we come to the point.”

  “We can talk all night.”

  “Please, Ellis. You didn’t come all this way to reminisce about Mobutu.”

  Shafer poured them both fresh splashes of whiskey.

  “Were you ever involved with the nuclear stuff?”

  “Our program? So, so, so.” All one word: sososo. “No.”

  “Joost, I promise, I’m not here officially. I’m not fishing to get you in trouble.”

  “You see the life I live, Ellis. I don’t want reporters at the door.”

  Shafer waited.

  Joost sipped his drink and seemed to decide he had to give Shafer something. “Look, South Africa isn’t like the States. Inside the apparatus, we all knew each other.”

  “After ’77, it wasn’t any great secret,” Shafer said, hoping to encourage him.

  In 1977, South Africa had been close to conducting an underground nuclear test when the United States discovered its preparations.

  “One of the scientists, a little man named Alfred, he’s dead now, we grew up together in the Transvaal. When I came back from Zaire, he told me bits and pieces.”

  “You were working with Israel.”

  “Yes. The Jews didn’t care about the sanctions. People hated them even more than us. We had money and uranium ore. They had the scientists. We traded.”

  “And the enrichment project succeeded.”

  “These stories you see now that we had six nuclear weapons, that’s an exaggeration. Cubs trying to be lions, we say. But we did make enough for one.”

  “This was in the eighties.”

  “Yes. I can’t remember exactly which year.”

  “And what happened to it? That highly enriched uranium.”

  Joost poured himself another whiskey, a big one this time, and offered the bottle to Shafer, who covered his glass.

  “I don’t suppose all these questions have anything to do with what you found in Istanbul.”

  “You know I can’t answer that.” Shafer already regretted telling the story to Evan.

  “For what it’s worth, the stuff we produced was very pure. Just like the uranium you found over there.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “It was a point of pride.”

  “So the stuff is still in a vault in Pretoria?” Shafer couldn’t believe finding it would be this easy. Wells and Duto had gone all over the world, and Shafer was about to get the answer.

  “Of course not. We wouldn’t have left it for the ANC. It’s not even in Africa anymore.”

  Shafer’s elation vanished. “So where?”

  “Where do you think? We sent it to the Jews as a present. Why not? At least they’d helped us.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  Another brick wall. If the South Africans had given up the uranium twenty years before, the Israelis had no doubt long since blended it into a nuclear warhead now pointing at Iran.

  Still, he’d come too far not to finish his questions.

  “How much HEU was it, anyway?”

  “A bit more than fifteen kilos.”

  Shafer hadn’t expected such a precise answer. “That’s oddly specific.”

  “Because fifteen was always the amount we needed to reach for a bomb. The scientists celebrated for a week when they reached it, my friend told me. But then the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry had a big fight and de Klerk halted the program.”

  “Because you knew what was coming.”

  “What could we do with it? Blow up Soweto?” The giant slum southwest of Johannesburg. “The joke was that it would look better after.”

  “So the program stopped at fifteen kilos. One bomb.”

  “Fifteen-point-three sticks with me, for some reason. But it’s all gone now. Ask your friends in Tel Aviv.”

  “Did Israel pay for it? How did you arrange the transfer?”

  Joost splashed more Johnnie Walker into his glass. He seemed to have forgotten his promise of “just a taste.” “Now you’ve dug too deep for me. You need someone closer to the program. But none of them came to the States.”

  “The planes go both ways. If I wanted to chase this, who would I ask?”

  “A lot of the scientists, they’re gone now. But the bugger who ran the program at the end is still around. Real jackal, that one.”

  Joost drained the last of his whiskey. It seemed to hit him all at once. He closed his eyes, flicked his tongue across his lips. “Were we ever friends, Ellis?”

  Shafer flashed back to a long night at the British embassy, Joost drunkenly wrapping an arm around the ambassador’s wife, whispering in her ear until Janneke peeled him away.

  All these years later, he was still a sloppy drunk.

  “Sure we were.” The truth could wait. Forever.

  “How come you never looked me up until now?”

  “I wanted to leave you in peace. But this is too important. So? This jackal who ran the program?”

  “What about him?”

  “His name, Joost. What’s his name?”

  14

  FIVE DAYS . . .

  MOSCOW

  All anyone needed to know about the new Russia was that Lubyanka was still open.

  Sure, the Soviet Union had crumbled a generation before, and Russia was now theoretically a democracy. Sure, the very name Lubyanka sent a shiver through Russians of a certain age. The building was synonymous with the bad old days, secret trials and one-way trips to Siberia. No one knew how m
any prisoners had been tortured to death in its basement cells. For generations, it had served as the headquarters of the Committee on State Security, the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti.

  The KGB.

  The KGB had vanished with the USSR, replaced by the more polite-sounding Federal Security Service, known in English as the FSB. Yet the FSB was in no hurry to leave Lubyanka. Moving was such a headache. Lubyanka was a beautiful building, conveniently located just a few blocks from the Kremlin.

  Besides, many senior FSB officers had a more positive perspective on the KGB than the average Russian. After all, they were KGB veterans themselves. As was Vladimir Putin. He wasn’t about to punish his old buddies. Putin and his oligarchs had more to lose from a revolution than Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet apparatchiks ever had.

  So, by any name, the secret police stayed in business. And inside Lubyanka’s walls, the cruelties continued.

  —

  The FSB held Wells at Domodedovo through the evening. The airport cell was big enough for a dozen men, but besides Wells, its only occupant was a baby-faced Southeast Asian. Wells tried English and Arabic on the guy, but he only shook his head and pointed to his belly. Wells guessed he was a drug mule. His skin was waxy and soft, like he was melting from the inside out.

  Wells had endured more unpleasant cells. This one was warm, quiet, and windowless, a tonic for his concussion. The fog in his mind lifted and the black spots in his vision disappeared. He was left to consider the wreckage of this mission. Had Custer felt this way when he rode over the hill at Little Bighorn? Wells had traveled all over the world and earned only a broken finger and a shaken brain for his troubles.

  He hadn’t always won before, but he had never felt so outclassed.

  He tried to tilt his anger to Salome and Duberman. But after a few minutes, the revenge fantasy lost its appeal. He changed his tack, closed his eyes, found his favorite Quranic verses. He didn’t believe for a minute that Muhammad had received messages straight from Allah. Yet he sometimes sensed divine inspiration in the text. Not just in the obvious places, the rhythms and melodies of famous Surahs like The Overturning, with its bizarrely poetic promise of the apocalypse:

  When the sun is overturned