“You have a nice nap?”
Wells tilted back his head, rubbed his eyes. “We close?”
“We’re not far, Sleeping Beauty.”
“You must want me to start praying again.”
“Dear Jesus, no.” Duto’s idea of a joke. “Any ideas how we’re going to play this? Since I left the satellite shots at home.”
“Look for the weak spot, then come in hard. Guns drawn. Don’t waste time. Shoot first. Try not to kill anyone we shouldn’t. The usual.” Wells supposed the last two words were his idea of a joke.
“Sounds good.”
Ten minutes later, the GPS told them that they had arrived. A fence marked by lightning-bolt pictographs ran along the road, ending at the property’s main gate, eight feet of wrought iron set between brick posts. Witwans Manor, a bronze plaque announced.
“Classy,” Duto said. The house itself stood on a low hill a couple hundred feet from the gate. Wells expected it would be mostly dark. Instead, the entire first floor was lit like Witwans was having a cocktail party. Between the Audi’s high beams and the light coming out of the house, they could see up the driveway and the lawn around it. Empty, no guards visible.
Salome’s bodyguard could have set up in a sniper’s nest on the second floor of the mansion to pick off Wells as soon as he jumped the gate. But Wells didn’t see a way around the risk. Shorting out the fence so he could climb it would take longer and be even more conspicuous. Anyway, he had a sinking feeling that they had arrived too late, that Salome’s bodyguard had already left with Witwans.
“I’ll go over the gate, pop it for you from the inside,” Wells said.
“You think he’s gone, don’t you?”
Wells reached into the back seat for a Glock, jammed it into his waistband. He stepped out of the car and scaled the gate, ignoring the iron tines prodding his hands and feet. The gate’s motor was on the inside of the right brick post. Wells turned it on and the gate churned open. Easy enough.
A dog’s howl erased his satisfaction. Not one dog. Two, three, a pack. They tore down the driveway at him, three German shepherds and two Great Danes, their jaws wide open, galloping like they were thoroughbreds and Wells the finish line. Wells reached for his pistol and then realized that shooting them wasn’t an option. Even if he could take out two or three, the survivors would shred him.
He ran for the corner where the gate met the brick post and scrabbled up the iron, a clumsy game of parkour. The pack leader, a giant gray Great Dane, arrived just as Wells pulled himself onto the post. The dog’s jowls snapped shut an inch beneath Wells’s feet. Wells stood atop the post as the pack growled and howled and snapped and jumped for him, lemme at ya, come on down and fight fair, you can’t stay up there forever. Now Wells could shoot them all. But he didn’t like shooting dogs. Anyway, killing them wouldn’t gain him any points with Witwans or whoever was inside the house.
Duto edged the Audi forward and cracked his window. “Now what?”
“I’m gonna jump on the roof and you drive to the house.”
“John—”
Wells jumped. His bad ankle nearly gave and he had a moment imagining himself on the ground with the dogs at him, but he steadied. Beneath him, the Audi rolled through the gate and up the driveway. The dogs followed the car, howling all the way, outriders from hell.
—
The mansion’s wide front door swung open. An African man stepped onto the porch, pointing a shotgun at the Audi. From a window on the floor above, a second black man covered them with a pistol. Salome’s bodyguard and Witwans were nowhere in sight.
Wells raised his hands.
“You have a gun?” the man on the porch said. He looked at least seventy, his skin wrinkled and his hair short and gray, but he held the shotgun steady.
“Yes.”
“Throw it down.”
“We’re looking for Rand.”
“Throw it down.”
Wells plucked out the Glock by its butt and spun it softly to the right, onto the grass at the edge of the driveway. The man whistled sharply and shouted in Afrikaans. The dogs snapped their jaws shut and looked up at him. One by one, they backed away from the car. The man whistled again and they trotted through the front door. The gray Great Dane went last, unwillingly, eyeing Wells as he disappeared into the house.
“Get down,” the man said. “This side.” He nodded the shotgun to his right, the direction opposite where Wells had thrown the pistol. Smart. Wells jumped down.
The man stepped off the porch, keeping about fifteen feet from Wells. The man on the second floor shouted down in an African language Wells had never heard. The first man didn’t answer. He seemed to be enjoying his control of this situation. Wells tried to imagine how he must feel, a servant who suddenly had absolute power over these white men who had bizarrely come to the house where he worked. Yet he seemed polite, almost friendly.
“Your name?”
“John.”
“I’m Martin. What is it you want?”
“We’re looking for Rand.”
“He’s not here.”
“The man with the scars took him?”
Martin hesitated, obviously wondering how Wells knew, then nodded. “Amos, yes. Around six p.m.”
“Don’t suppose he told you where?”
“No.”
Wells grunted, just once. Like he’d taken a shot to the stomach. He and Duto had come so close. They’d missed Witwans by three hours, no more. But three hours or three months made no difference. Witwans could be anywhere, and they had no way of finding him. In the wind, the cops said.
“This man comes, now you. What is it you want with him?” Martin appeared sincerely interested.
“To stop a war.”
“Rand? He can’t get out of bed without a drink.” The man upstairs laughed.
“Did a woman come here a few months ago? In her thirties, brown hair, pretty. Big nose. Maybe take something from the house?”
Martin’s eyes widened. “Natalie, yes.”
Wells tented his hands together in supplication. “I promise you, if you have any idea where he went—please.”
“Tell me more about why you want him.”
“He sold that woman uranium—stuff for a nuclear bomb. She’s pretending it’s from Iran. And that’s why America wants to attack Iran tomorrow.”
“This is true?”
“I swear on my family.”
“You catch him, then what?”
“We take him back to the States, to the people who need to know the truth.” A more than slightly oversimplified answer. Wells hoped it was right.
“They put him in jail?”
“I don’t know.”
“Drunk greedful fool. You know he thinks we like him.”
“So help us find him.”
“I tell you I don’t know.”
Wells bowed his head. Maybe Martin would let them look through the house for clues. Though Wells couldn’t imagine that Frankel had left anything useful.
Then Martin grinned, nodded to the man on the second floor. “But Jacob, my nephew, he does.”
—
Inside, Jacob explained. Every couple of weeks, Witwans drove his Mercedes to bars around Bloemfontein and drank himself to blackout. The bartenders took his keys and called him taxis home. Their motive was not so much altruism as the cut of the fare they received. The next day, Jacob had to find the Merc. To simplify the process, he installed a GPS tracker.
This evening, when Frankel told Witwans that they would have to leave, Witwans had set only one condition, that they take the Mercedes. After a minute of arguing, Frankel agreed.
“Does Rand know about the tracker?” Duto said.
“Not sure. He loves the car. So maybe it was a fortune—”
“Coincidence—” Martin
said.
“Or maybe he wants us to find him. No matter.” Jacob pulled out his phone, a big-screen Samsung. “Here he is.” A white dot pinged on a bright orange highway.
“That’s the N1?”
“Yes. He’s in the Northern Cape now. Almost three hundred kilometers from here. Going good, maybe one hundred kilos.”
“Can we have the phone?” Wells said.
“No no no.” Jacob tucked it away.
“Name your price.”
“No price.”
Not now. They couldn’t afford more delays. Wells couldn’t imagine hurting these people, but he would for the phone. “Please.”
“This is too good. I’m coming.” Jacob grinned. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
27
ONE DAY . . .
BELLVILLE, SOUTH AFRICA
Wells expected to stay at the wheel until they caught the Mercedes. But just after midnight, the Audi demanded gas. At the station, Wells went inside for a pit stop of his own. He came out with coffee and water and found Duto in the driver’s seat.
“Move.”
Duto grabbed the coffee instead. “You’re not the only control freak in this car. Besides, big day tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep.”
So Wells took his place in the passenger seat. Their new friend Jacob sprawled across the back, cradling the phone that was his ticket to the party. He was a big man, and spherical, round eyes in a round head atop a round body, fat, but strong, too. Wells wasn’t sure how they would make him stay in the car when they caught Frankel and Witwans. He looked to be having too good a time.
Wells dozed fitfully as Duto raced down the N1. He hoped they might reel the Mercedes in over the night, but the road didn’t give them much chance. It was not a divided highway but a single strip of asphalt, often with only one lane in each direction. A county road, with an interstate’s traffic, even in the small hours of the night. Twice oncoming trucks forced them onto the shoulder.
Every few minutes, Jacob let them know that the Mercedes was still moving, still ahead of them. But Wells couldn’t shake a creeping fear that Frankel had shucked them somehow. Maybe he knew about the tracker. Maybe he’d passed the car to another driver and taken Witwans the opposite direction, toward Johannesburg. Paranoia, yes, but Salome and Duberman had more than matched him this last month. Why wouldn’t they have one more trick?
—
Around 6 a.m., Wells jerked out of a haze of not-quite-sleep to see a three-foot chunk of steel pipe bouncing at them from the bed of an overloaded pickup. Duto pulled the wheel hard left, and the Audi, down on its shocks, missed the pipe by six inches.
“I’d hate to disappoint Duberman by dying in a car accident,” Wells said.
“Didn’t you learn at the Farm that they’re among the top risks case officers face?”
Indeed. Wells had joined the service in the halcyon days before 9-11, when drunk driving, paper cuts, and herpes were the major health threats in the clandestine service. A few minutes later, as they came through a bump of a town called Matjiesfontein, the sky went from black to blue, wisps of dawn creeping from the east. The light revealed an arid, scrubby land, low hills flecked with scattered shrubs and bushes.
“I thought the Cape was supposed to be beautiful,” Duto said.
“This the Karoo,” Jacob said.
“Did you sneeze?”
“Something else. Witwans off the N1.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
Wells reached back for the phone. Sure enough, the Mercedes had turned south off the highway about twenty kilometers east of central Cape Town. The giant slum called Khayelitsha lay a few kilometers south, as did the Cape Town airport. Wells feared Frankel might be taking Witwans to the airport, but he had chosen a strange route in that case, along surface streets rather than the R300 ring road, which ran directly to the airport.
After their all-night chase, the Mercedes held a lead of about two hundred kilometers, two and a half hours, give or take. Seeing the airport on the map reminded Wells that their jet was still in Johannesburg. They needed it in Cape Town.
The pilot answered on the first ring. “This is Kirk.”
“Hope you and your first mate got a decent night’s sleep, because you have a long day ahead.”
“Tell me we’re going home.”
“We’re going home.” Inshallah. “Can you meet us in Cape Town this morning?”
“Done. I’ll check the charts, but I think we can be there in two and a half hours, three at most. Quick turn?”
“With any luck. Back to Dulles. You can file the flight plan now. Three passengers.” Wells hoped he wasn’t jinxing himself. But better to do this now, with time, than as they were racing to the airport.
“Who’s the third?”
“Rand Witwans. South African national. Shouldn’t raise any flags.”
“As long as you have his passport number.”
“I do.” Not just the number. The passport itself. Witwans had left it in the bedroom safe at his mansion. His not-so-faithful servant Martin knew the combination.
—
On the ground, the Audi raced southwest. On Jacob’s phone, the Mercedes turned right, left, right again. It stopped, then doubled back a few seconds later. Wells guessed Frankel was trying to find a safe house he’d never seen before. The Merc made another right and moved slowly south, into an area the map marked as Bellville Lot 3. There it stopped.
The squarish road grid and setting near highways and airport suggested a middle-class suburb. Wells imagined houses set on narrow lots, plenty of residents around to hear a gunfight and call the police. Worse, he and Duto would reach the neighborhood around 9 a.m. Some straggling commuters would still be heading out, along with parents taking their toddlers to day care. All potential victims of stray bullets.
But the location came with positives, too. The executive terminal at Cape Town International was barely ten kilometers down the M10, which the map indicated was a big surface road. Even in traffic, they ought to be able to reach it in under fifteen minutes. Better still, the police had no obvious choke points for roadblocks. Wells and Duto were looking at the human equivalent of smash-and-grab. Go in fast, take Witwans, stuff him in the Audi, dump him on the plane while the police were still making sense of what had happened.
They had a second edge. Martin had told them the night before that Frankel was the only guard watching Witwans. Of course, he might have reinforcements at the safe house, but then why hadn’t they come to Bloemfontein and helped at the mansion? Duberman didn’t have casinos in South Africa, so Wells doubted he had a local guard force. More likely that Salome had sent Frankel down by himself. Then, after the Saudis released her, she must have called him and told him to move Witwans from his mansion to this safe house a thousand kilometers away. The likely reason was that she had figured out that Wells was on his way to South Africa and wanted to hide Witwans from him. Her plan would have worked if not for the GPS tracker on the car, something she couldn’t possibly have expected.
But if Frankel was alone at the mansion, he would have had to make the entire thousand-kilometer drive himself. Witwans had been too drunk to walk, much less drive, the night before, according to Jacob. Frankel would be exhausted. No matter how good they were, exhausted soldiers made mistakes.
With that thought, Wells leaned back in his seat and made himself rest.
—
Ten minutes after Wells closed his eyes, the G650 carrying Salome went wheels-down at Cape Town International, the first landing of the new day. She’d flown in the darkness over Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, seeing none of them. The flight was smooth, and she’d slept the whole way.
She couldn’t remember her dreams. But she woke with a clear-eyed, cold anger at Wells. Duberman had thrown him a lifeline in Tel Aviv,
and he had not just rejected it but sneered at it. She hadn’t understood until then how small-minded Wells was. He couldn’t grasp the strategic catastrophe that would come if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Worse, he lacked the imagination to realize the elegance of the story she and Duberman had told. He was stuck on the fact that they’d lied about the uranium. Of course they had. Human beings lied every day in every conceivable way. Iran had lied about its nuclear program for twenty years.
How had she ever considered Wells her match? He was a more skilled version of the men around her on this plane. A bruiser with a great survival instinct. Nothing more. She would shed no tears when she killed him.
At last, as their jet rolled to a stop, she saw the full significance of the name she’d given herself. The Bible told the tale of Salome, who danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist as her reward. But two millennia had passed. The new Salome didn’t need a man to do her dirty work. She would kill Wells—John the American, John the Troublemaker, John the Muslim—herself.
First, though, she needed to run out the clock. South Africa was seven hours ahead of Washington, where it was now 11:30 p.m. In a half hour, the final day of the President’s deadline would officially begin at the White House. She turned on her phone, found CNN.com reporting that in a speech from the Oval Office three hours before, the President had repeated his deadline. “Iran’s efforts to terrorize the United States by killing innocent civilians and disrupting travel and commerce around the world will fail,” he said. “Our resolve is unshaken. Iran must agree to open its nuclear facilities by midnight tomorrow, or face the consequences.”
The New York Times wrote that the United States planned its first air raids “minutes or hours” after the cutoff passed. A ground invasion would follow “within days,” though of course no one would say exactly when. Military analysts were split over the wisdom of the President’s willingness to invade with a small and lightly armored force, instead of the massive armies it had mustered in Iraq. Whole new way of fighting. If it works, it’ll give the United States options all over the world, one retired three-star said. But if it doesn’t, we’ll lose more thousands of men. In a week.
Twelve Days Page 36
