“See if you still want to hug me after I give you the news.”
“Soon enough. Meantime. Notice anything different?”
Now she did. On her last visit, the room’s couches had been white leather over steel frames, a vaguely Nordic look. The frames were the same, but the leather was now red. The change had probably cost fifty thousand dollars.
“You redecorated.”
“Tinker Bell.” Duberman’s impolite name for his five-hundred-dollar-an-hour decorator. Every so often he said something like that, reminding her he was from a different generation. “He didn’t ask. I should have fired him, but I feel a certain loyalty since he set me up with Orli.”
Salome refrained from pointing out that putting a billionaire with a supermodel didn’t exactly qualify as groundbreaking in the matchmaking department. For whatever reason, Duberman felt talkative today, not ready for business.
“You have to live it to understand, being this rich makes you the center of your own little solar system. Somebody buys my furniture, somebody drives. It’s not just that somebody else gardens. Somebody else hires the gardeners. All I do is breathe and write checks. Though somebody else signs them, mostly.”
“I’m having a hard time sympathizing.”
“I feel sometimes like I’m not living my own life. This thing we’ve done, it’s the only thing in the world that’s really mine.”
“And your kids.”
“They’re Orli’s, really. They love me, but if I vanished tomorrow she’d have a thousand men at her door. She’d pick a good one and it’d be like I was never there.” Duberman looked vaguely embarrassed, as though he’d said more than he meant. She had never seen that expression on him before, and she didn’t like it. Embarrassment didn’t suit him.
“So you’re telling me you decided to start a war because firing your decorator would have been too difficult.”
“Exactly.” He grinned. “Anyway. You didn’t come halfway around the world because you have good news.”
His library was a square room with books on every side, an old-school gentlemen’s club. He flipped a light switch to expose a keypad. He tapped in a code. A section of books on the back wall slid into the floor, revealing a safe room.
“Does it connect to the Bat Cave, too?”
He led her in, closed the door. The room was a cube, ten feet on each side. Two narrow twin beds were pushed against the walls and a three-foot-high gray safe occupied the center. The place looked like an unfinished art installation, a parody of itself: The Safe Room, a/k/a The Billionaire’s Mind.
She patted the safe. “Let me guess. Five hundred thousand euros and a pistol.”
“Why don’t you tell me the problem.” A statement, not a question. Now he was the one who was annoyed. So she explained how Wells had escaped, killed Mason and the others, fled Turkey.
“Now? Where is he?”
“Back in the U.S. I had a lawyer hire detectives to watch for him at airports all across the East Coast. Didn’t say who he was, just that we were looking for him. One picked him up coming through Boston.”
“So we have eyes on him?”
“No. Too dangerous. I let him go. I’d rather have guys on Ellis Shafer. That’s his main contact inside the agency. Even so, it’s tricky. These private detectives, the good ones won’t touch anything that crosses wires with the CIA. It’s one thing to look for a guy at an airport, but once they know Shafer works for the agency, only the low-rent ones will go near it.”
“So Wells is loose.”
A few minutes ago she’d thought they were friends. Now his voice was quiet. Icy. She wished he would shout at her. Anything but this. She waited.
“We’re close on this,” he said finally. “Especially after what those animals did in Mumbai—”
His words brought Salome back to the reports from India. She had focused so closely on Wells that she hadn’t thought much about the downing of the jet. But Duberman was right. The war drums were beating.
“They must want a war,” Duberman said.
“Want it or think it’s inevitable.” Most Iranian Muslims were part of the Shia branch of Islam. And the drive to martyrdom had been part of Shia culture from the very founding of the sect. The first Shia had believed Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, was his true heir. Other Muslims, calling themselves Sunnis, opposed Ali. At a battle near the Iraqi city of Karbala, the Sunnis killed Ali and slaughtered his men. They had dominated Islam ever since. Today, ninety percent of Muslims were Sunni.
But the Shia remained faithful to Ali. In fact, the name Shia meant “followers of Ali.” Each year, hundreds of thousands of Shia made pilgrimages to Karbala to commemorate that first battle. Recently, Sunni terrorists had made a habit of attacking the pilgrims. No matter. They kept coming.
When Salome heard analysts say that Iran would never use a nuclear weapon against Tel Aviv because it knew that the Israelis would respond with a hundred bombs of their own, she thought of those pilgrims shuffling along, unarmed, unprotected, awaiting their fates.
She pushed the pilgrims out of her mind. “So have you talked to Donna?” The National Security Advisor.
“Not since the uranium turned up. It’s better if I don’t get involved right now. They know I want them to attack. I can’t seem like I’m celebrating. At this point, if I do call, it’ll be directly to POTUS. And it’ll be one time only. Best to keep that card tucked away in case of emergency. The question is, does your friend Wells know enough to make a case? And will anyone listen?”
“He and Shafer weren’t getting anywhere with the agency. That’s why Wells came to Istanbul by himself. Everything he did, he did on his own. As far as the CIA is concerned, Glenn Mason’s been dead for years.”
“You think Wells knows about me?”
Salome hesitated.
“Tell me the truth.”
“I’m trying to think it through, Aaron. He found Mason, so he and Shafer must know about the money Mason lost in Macao. Whether they jumped to you, I don’t know.”
“Let’s assume they have. What about anything Wells might have seen in Istanbul. License plates? IDs? The factory?”
“We’re safe on the factory. Paid for from an account that doesn’t come anywhere near us. Wells did steal a laptop when he broke out, but all our computers have software on them that erases the hard drive if the wrong password is used or someone tries to copy it. Wipes it clean.”
“You’re confident in that.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“So what do you think we should do? About Wells.”
The ultimate question. The reason she had flown more than ten thousand kilometers to see Duberman.
“I think he’s too much of a risk. We have to neutralize him.”
“You mean kill him.”
“We already took him captive, and that blew up.”
“He have a family?”
“A son and an ex-wife. But they’re gone. Probably Wells has the FBI looking after them. Anyway, going after families usually causes more problems than it solves. The same with Duto and Shafer. A senator, a CIA officer, they’re untouchable. But Wells, he takes chances. He’ll come at us. We catch him—”
“Last time you caught him, he killed five of your guys. What makes you think you’ll have better luck this time?”
“We’ll be ready.” She knew the answer sounded lame.
“As far as you know, Wells doesn’t have anything more than he did last week.”