Twelve Days

by Alex Berenson

  —

  With just one good leg Wells couldn’t handle the Remington’s recoil. It knocked him back and down and the shotgun came out of his hands. He looked up at the doorway to the kitchen and saw Frankel running toward him, raising his pistol, and Wells scrabbled for his own pistol, but he couldn’t find it, he had tucked it in his waist, but the fall must have knocked it out—

  And the shots came from the house, one-two-three—

  But it was Frankel whose mouth opened in surprise, Frankel whose body arched forward and windmilled down—

  Duto.

  Wells forced himself to his feet, hobbled toward the corner of the house. The pain was intense, but if he kept the weight on the heel he could move. Salome was dead, a baseball-size hole in the center of her chest, her eyes open in death. Another second and she would have had him. Wells had never killed a woman before. Funny. And funny that he couldn’t think of a better word, a more powerful word for his feelings. But it wasn’t just his weapons that were low on ammunition. Wells was as exhausted as he had ever been. He supposed he ought to close her eyes, but he couldn’t imagine touching her. He left her on her back staring at nothing as Duto appeared in the back door, his mouth open wide. Grinning.

  “Thank you? Huh? Maestro?”

  Wells wanted to shoot him right there, this man who had just saved his life. Six weeks before, Duto had asked Wells to meet a man in Guatemala City. All this madness had started then. Wells hadn’t wanted to go, but he’d owed Duto a favor, and he’d hated the idea of being in Duto’s debt.

  So what did he owe Duto now?

  A second siren joined the first. The question would have to wait. “Thank you.”

  “The pleasure’s mine. What happened to your leg?”

  “Tell you later.”

  —

  They found Witwans on the living room couch, staring at the television. His face was flushed, his cheeks swollen, his eyes wide and watery.

  “You know why we’re here, Rand?”

  His head bobbed yes over his slumped shoulders. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.” Thinking about himself to the end. Nothing about anyone else in the house. Hard to believe that this pathetic specimen was their only chance to stop a war. But they didn’t need him to be a hero. They just needed him to tell the truth about what he’d done to the President. Looking at him, Wells knew he would.

  Rand Witwans didn’t have the strength to lie.

  “Lucky man,” Duto said to Wells. “Going to the White House.”

  Without waiting for Witwans to answer, they pulled him off the couch to begin his trip.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE HOUR . . .

  Donna Green trudged down the West Wing corridor that led to the Oval Office. The first fighters were about to take off from Incirlik. She ought to be running. But every step came harder than the one before.

  What she wanted, more than anything, was to turn the other way. Walk to the Farragut West Metro stop, three blocks away at 17th and I. Step to the edge of the platform. She might have to wait a few minutes. But soon enough a train would come. And before it reached her, she would step off.

  She wasn’t a suicidal type. She’d never even considered the act before. But anything at all, even nothing, had to be better than the conversation she was about to have. She remembered the stupid threat Duto had made in the parking lot, Bend you over so hard you won’t sit for a month, and how tonight on the tarmac at Dulles, Duto hadn’t bothered to hide his smile as Witwans choked out the truth.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t move, not forward or back.

  Elizabeth Hoyt, the President’s chief speechwriter, strode past, nearly knocking her down. “Sorry, Donna.”

  “How’s the speech?” Might want to start a rewrite.

  “Not bad. Our brave troops. Protecting the homeland. Et cetera. I gotta—”

  “Go, go.”

  Our brave troops. Tens of thousands of men and women were about to risk their lives for a lie she should have uncovered. Cowardice now would only compound her failure.

  Too soon and too late, she came to the outer office.

  “I need to see him.”

  “Liz just went in—he’s working on his speech—”

  “Now.”

  —

  “Tell me you’re joking,” the President said three minutes later.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Fuck you, Donna. Fuck you.”

  He had never spoken that way to her before.

  “You’re sure?”

  She squeezed her hands tight, made herself stay steady. “He’s a mess, Witwans, an alcoholic, but not a liar. He showed me the bank transfers. We can trace that money. And I talked to Rudin—the Mossad guy—and he confirms that Witwans is the one who delivered the stuff to Israel.”

  What she didn’t say, what she couldn’t make herself say, was: And it makes sense. It answers a lot of questions that we should have asked but didn’t, because we were so sure that the uranium was from a government.

  The President spewed a stream of curses, picked up the five-page speech on his desk, tore it in half. He tore the halves in half again, balled up a piece as if to throw it across the room. Then put it down.

  “Okay. Tantrum over. I’m asking for real, any way we go ahead?”

  She didn’t want him to rip her again, but the question had only one answer.

  “No, sir. Even forgetting about morality, Duto destroys us.”

  “Then let’s solve that problem first.” The President reached for his phone. “I need Belk.” The Secretary of Defense. “Roger. Call it off.” A pause. “No. I am not. Call it off. We are not invading Iran—

  “Ask me again if I’m joking, I’ll fire you. Nothing’s happened we can’t undo, right?” He listened.

  “Then keep it that way. I promise I’ll tell you why later, but for now just land the drones, unscramble the jets, whatever you do when you change your mind about a war. Now now now. Am I clear, Roger?”

  He slammed down the phone without waiting for an answer, reached into his desk for the Zippo and the pack of Marlboro Lights she knew were inside. He lit up, offered her the pack. She shook her head.

  “You just destroyed my presidency, Donna. My reputation for the next hundred years. You should at least join me in a cancer stick.”

  They smoked in silence, the President puffing viciously.

  “That was the easy part,” he said. “The hard part is, how do we explain?”

  “The truth—”

  “They will impeach me, Donna. It’s not just that we got suckered. It’s who did it. What did Duto say he wanted, Donna?”

  “Nothing specific. He said he knew you would do the right thing.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “He say he was going public?”

  “He said it would depend. I didn’t push. I was mainly worried about getting back here.”

  The President stubbed out his cigarette, lit another.

  “He goes public, there’s nothing we can do. Let’s assume he’s keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he thinks I can help him get—” He wagged the cigarette around the room. “Seems to me my only play is to make it look like I blinked at the last minute. Lost faith in the lightfoot strategy.”

  “So we pack up the Marines and the Rangers and the Airborne?”

  “Soon. For now. We leave them all, but announce a new deadline, a nice long one, six months. Everyone will know what that means. Congress will pummel me, the media. Say I got scared. But it’s better than the truth. In a day or two, we start to leak concerns about the evidence. And in a week, you go to Tehran and you lick their boots and tell them we don’t want a war—”

  “What about the planes?”

  “We started this, Donna. Two weeks ago. We bombed their capital wit
h no warning, and I don’t care if it was just the airport. You tell them we view the planes as a stand-alone act of terror and we will investigate that way. You make sure they understand that means we aren’t invading them. In a month or so, I fire Hebley and all his boys, they don’t resign, I fire them. We buy time, we pull back, and in a couple more months this becomes the war that wasn’t.”

  The consequences would be devastating. The Iranians would be equal parts furious and triumphant. They wouldn’t understand why the United States had picked a fight with them. But they would know that they’d won. They’d believe they had carte blanche all over the Middle East.

  “What if we tell the truth, the real truth, the whole story, blame Duberman?”

  The President shook his head.

  “No. First of all we don’t even have it yet. Second, at best I look like a dupe instead of a co-conspirator. Get impeached anyway. Third, it means admitting our intel on Iran is so terrible that we fell for this. And last, you want me to blame a Jewish billionaire for trying to start a war. The world already doesn’t like Jews much. This takes it to Elders of Zion territory.” The President paused. “I promise. Duberman will pay. The highest penalty. But not now. When the time is right.”

  If there was a better answer, she couldn’t see it.

  His phone rang.

  He picked it up, listened briefly. “Thank you, Roger. I’m sure you must have questions. We’ll talk later.” He hung up, pointed at the door. Like she was a secretary. “Go get Liz. Quickest speech ever written.”

  At the door, she stopped. “Who are we telling about this? The truth, I mean?”

  “Only Hebley and Carcetti for now. By the way, Donna. I’ll need a resignation letter from you.”

  We all fell for it. Not just me. And ten days ago, when I tried to warn you, you shooed me off.

  Not fair.

  But not fair hardly mattered at this moment. “What about my trip to Tehran?”

  “Postdate it three months. Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

  He smiled his liar’s smile. She’d seen him use it on other people in this room. Never her. Didn’t he know that she knew? If he did, he didn’t care.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Thanks, Donna.”

  —

  Wells and Duto sat in the library of Duto’s house in Arlington, watching CNN on mute. It was past midnight now and the countdown clock was counting up. They’d have to fix that somehow.

  Wells didn’t even know why he had come here. Probably because he had nowhere else to be. Shafer was in jail until the morning, and Wells didn’t exactly have a lot of friends in Washington. Or anywhere else. For a moment, he’d considered calling Exley—hey, babe, remember me?—but reason had prevailed.

  Duto’s house was brick and big. New and built to look old. Full of dark wood and brown leather. A single silver-framed photo of him with two late-twenty-something men who shared his heavy features sat on a bookcase beside the television. The picture looked to have been taken at a wedding. All three men wore tuxedos. Duto offered a politician’s grin. The younger men were hardly smiling.

  “Those your sons?” Wells realized how little he knew about Duto’s family.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  “Long ago. My first posting was Mexico, she didn’t mind that. But then they sent me to Nigeria and she said no. She kept the boys. I didn’t argue.”

  Duto reached for the box of cigars on the table beside him and began the slow clubby ritual of lighting one, examining the band and putting the wrapper to his nose, cutting the cap and sparking a long wooden match, and finally touching flame to the cigar’s tip while spinning and puffing it. Wells suspected Duto had put more thought into lighting the cigar than into his divorce.

  “You good with them?”

  “Nothing like you and Evan.” Duto smirked. He set aside the cigar, went for the whiskey bottle he’d brought out from the kitchen. “High West. All these small batches now.”

  “We ought to send Jacob a case for his help.” The South African had texted them with the news of his narrow escape.

  “Please. Guy had the time of his life,” Duto poured himself a slug. “Try some?”

  Wells didn’t answer.

  “Back to being a good Muslim this month, John.”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to end up like Witwans.” Who was sleeping upstairs. Duto had given him an Ativan.

  “You know what I told Shafer three weeks ago? After Mason kidnapped you in Istanbul. He had some dumb idea about going over and saving you. I said, ‘You think you can do better than the best field guy ever.’ You are, too. Man. Cutting Gideon’s Achilles. Where did you come up with that?”

  Duto sipped his whiskey. Wells waited. A but was coming, he was sure.

  “But you want it both ways. Do it and feel bad about it. Like this boy of yours, trying to build a relationship with him, you can’t see that all he wants is for you to leave him alone.”

  Wells grabbed Duto’s cigar, stuffed it into his whiskey glass. It gave a satisfying hiss as it flamed out. “Save your advice, Vinny.”

  The count-up clock ticked forty-three seconds before Duto spoke again. “My mistake. I overstepped. Anyway, it’s not about him. It’s about you. Some part of you feels you have to apologize for what you do out there.”

  “Conscience, you mean.”

  “We stopped a war today. You want it to be clean, John? It’s impossible. You don’t stop beating yourself up, you’ll crack for real. Or that conscience of yours will kick in at the wrong time. Either way, you get yourself killed.”

  “And you care because?”

  Duto poured himself a new glass of whiskey.

  “You’d be tough to replace.”

  “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men, Vinny.”

  “Not ones who owe me favors.”

  Wells had to laugh.

  “How psychopaths give pep talks.”

  “Then retire, John. That chick cop in New Hampshire will take you back.”

  “And who would run your errands?”

  “Exactly. You are who you are. Accept it.” Duto sipped his glass. “At least admit the world would be a better place without Duberman. And him, he’s not a Saudi royal, doesn’t have a whole country protecting him. It’ll take some doing, but he’s gettable.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that.”

  They sat awhile more.

  “Can I ask you something?” Wells said. “Ever been in love?”

  Duto’s silence told Wells all he needed.

  “If I’m honest with myself, I don’t think so,” Duto said eventually. “I thought I loved Laura for a while, but I look back, it was just that we screwed pretty good and I wanted to get married. Now you’re going to tell me that’s what all this is about for me, power, filling a void, blah blah blah. Let me tell you, John. Maybe. But maybe I want it because I know I’ll use it right. Maybe I love this country, the idea of it.”

  “Maybe you just love the idea of being President.”

  “And what do you love, John?”

  Now Wells had nothing to say. Exley? Anne? He’d left them both easily enough. His son? He would die to protect Evan. But he hadn’t raised the boy, and Evan didn’t even consider Wells his father.

  CNN spared him from having to answer. The words Breaking News: President About to Speak appeared in massive letters. Duto turned up the sound just as the feed switched to the Oval Office, the President at his desk.

  “I know what I am about to say will surprise you—”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of the usual suspects this year, and some new ones. Neil Nyren and Ivan Held are the captain and first officer of the S.S. John Wells (I’ll let them sort out who’s who), overseeing Putnam’s crack publicity, mar
keting, and sales teams. One word: airports. Bob Barnett and Deneen Howell keep ’em all honest. Everyone needs at least one tough outside first reader, and Deirdre Silver is mine. And thanks to Mike Whitty. He couldn’t save Flight 49, but he did make sure its details were right.

  A big group hug for Jackie and Lucy.

  This year the emails and comments came faster than ever, but I—barely—kept my promise to read and respond to all of them. (Including the note from a guy named, wait for it, John Wells. He said he had no problems identifying with my characters. Best reader email ever.) Anyway, keep on writing, and I’ll keep on writing back. If you’d like more frequent updates, follow me at facebook.com/alexberensonauthor or twitter.com/alexberenson.

  That’s all I got. Until next year, anyway . . .

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