“What do you do for them, if you don’t mind my asking?” Shafer had to tread lightly here. If he pushed too hard, Duffy would surely report this conversation back to 88 Gamma. This guy Ellis Shafer was asking about Aaron.
“They want to be sure they can collect on the credit they extend. Which, if someone is too connected in Beijing, gets tricky.”
“Makes sense.”
“So that’s it? You came here to tell me that Glenn Mason was dead?”
“Not really.” Shafer wondered if he could pull this pivot. Distract Duffy from his interest in Duberman, and at the same time find out if North Korea could possibly have supplied the Istanbul uranium. The odds were hugely against Pyongyang being involved, but the question was still worth asking.
Shafer slathered butter over his toast, took a bite, buying a few seconds, thinking through the story he was about to tell. “The reason I got onto Mason at all, I’ve been looking into the North Korean nuclear program. We got this weird report that an FBI agent who’d been stationed in Hong Kong defected to North Korea and he lives in Pyongyang now.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither did I. The report came from a North Korean defector talking to the South Koreans. They sent it to the Bureau and they said it was ridiculous. Got filed under C for crazy. But like I said, I was looking at defectors’ reports about North Korea, and I realized that the guy might have said FBI when he meant CIA. So I looked for case officers from Hong Kong station who left in the last few years. That’s how I found Mason. Now I’m wondering if there’s any chance he might have faked his death and defected to North Korea.”
Shafer worried now that the story sounded a little too real, that Duffy might get interested enough to ask questions of his old friends back at Langley.
“So he fakes his death in Thailand and then goes to Pyongyang?” Duffy said.
“I know it seems like a long shot. The defector said this American was working with the North Koreans to look for buyers for nukes and raw uranium. That they’d tried to approach Saudi Arabia and gotten laughed off.”
Duffy shook his head emphatically. “Makes no sense. On either side. North Korea doesn’t have any nuclear weapons to spare, and if they were trying to sell them, why would they need some burned-out CIA op to help? And Mason, he struck me as desperate, not stupid. He would know that North Korea’s pure roach motel. He would last in Pyongyang until somebody high up got nervous. Then they’d shoot him. If he was lucky. More likely they’d find some even more unpleasant way to get rid of him. You heard about the air force general they fed to a bear?”
“Nice. So the North Koreans aren’t trying to sell their nukes?”
“That was really Seoul’s AOR.” Area of responsibility. “But I never heard anything serious.”
“Fair enough.”
“So. What are people saying inside? Are we really going to war with Iran over this?”
Shafer thought of the way Duberman had blocked them at every turn, even as the President’s deadline crept ever closer.
“It’s not looking good.”
10
The Yuzhniy Hotel was the best in Volgograd. The faintest praise imaginable. The restaurant beside its bland lobby doubled as a cabaret, complete with techno music, pulsing blue lights, and a smoke machine. Near the front, a single flabby stripper twisted halfheartedly around a pole. A late-afternoon special for bored businessmen.
At the counter, the receptionist made a copy of Wells’s passport, handed it back with a key.
“You are in room three-zero-six. We have free breakfast from six a.m. to nine.”
“In there?” Wells nodded at the restaurant, where the stripper was now jiggling on a low platform. “Sounds delicious.”
“Yes. If I can help you with anything, please tell me.” Her voice bordered on robotic. Wells sensed that if he presented himself at the desk again in five minutes, she would repeat herself word for word as if they’d never met. He was sorry for mocking her about the restaurant. Russian provinces weren’t the poorest places on earth, but they might have been the saddest.
He bypassed the hotel’s elevator to walk up the concrete staircase. Halfway between the first and second floors, he smelled cigarette smoke and stopped. Two male voices overhead, quiet, Russian. Wells was sure the men were here for him. He trudged up. He hoped they wouldn’t feel the need to work him over before taking him to see their boss. But then Russians liked a bit of drama, even when it didn’t serve their interests.
As their Ukrainian adventure proved. The protesters who’d started the trouble by begging Russia for help had obviously been agents provocateurs paid by the FSB. The entire episode was as badly acted as an elementary school play. Yet Vladimir Putin hadn’t let the West’s disdain stop them. And by the time he finished, he owned much of eastern Ukraine.
At the third-floor landing, Wells found two twenty-something men dressed in the mandatory uniform of Russian gangsters, black leather jackets and dark blue jeans. Though, weirdly, under their coats they wore thick white wool sweaters that could have come from L.L. Bean. Where the sweaters ended, ornate blue tattoos flared up their necks. Their faces were pouty, their fists meaty. The taller of the two wore an expensive version of brass knuckles, thick gold rings on nine fingers. Wells presumed he would have preferred ten, but he didn’t have the option. His left pinky was missing. Wells’s sudden appearance puzzled him for a moment. Then he dropped his cigarette and pulled his pistol, a snubnose, tiny in his hand. He didn’t look puzzled anymore. “You are Wells.”
“If you say so. You?”
“Why you take stairs?”
“Why not?”
Apparently, the right answer. The guy tucked away his pistol. “Hands—” He nodded toward the ceiling.
He stood back while his partner gave Wells an efficient frisk.
“You come with us.”
“Mind if I take a shower first?”
“You come with us.”
Volgograd was best known for being the place where Russia turned the tide of World War II. A five-month battle in late 1942 and early 1943 reduced the city, then known as Stalingrad, to rubble. In November, with the German Sixth Army near victory, more than a million Soviet soldiers counterattacked. Two months later, as the Soviets encircled the Germans, Hitler ordered his generals not to surrender or retreat. The Sixth Army would fight to the last man, he said. It very nearly did. By some estimates, the Battle of Stalingrad was the deadliest single engagement in the history of war. Nearly a million German soldiers died, along with hundreds of thousands of Russians. Germany alone lost nearly as many soldiers that winter as the United States had in all the wars it had ever fought — combined.
Stalin wasted no time rebuilding the city that bore his name. But after he died, Khrushchev renamed it Volgograd, part of the effort to end the cult of personality around Uncle Joe. By any name, the city remained a backwater. It subsisted on agriculture and heavy industry, with none of the glamour of St. Petersburg or the wealth of Moscow. The arms dealer Wells was about to meet might be the richest man in the entire province.
Outside the hotel, a BMW 7 Series waited. Wells’s escorts pushed him into the front passenger seat. They didn’t even bother to take his phone, more proof they didn’t think he represented much of a threat. Dusk was fading into night, and the Yuzhniy’s red neon sign glowed against the blue-black sky.
Volgograd’s streets were wide and quiet. The BMW quickly left the city behind and sped northwest along a provincial highway. Low apartment buildings and chunky concrete houses gave way to empty fields. Wells’s escorts seemed content to ride in silence, and he didn’t argue.