The shepherd bugged Wells. He wasn’t sure why, and then he was. The dog answered a question he hadn’t thought to ask. Salome knew how dangerous he was. She didn’t have to risk seeing him in this little room. She could have met him at Buvchenko’s mansion, where he could be controlled more easily. Why here?
Cops brought dogs to find explosives.
Or drugs.
Wells pulled open the drawers of the cheap wooden dresser. Empty, empty, empty. The nightstand, too. He flattened his cheek to the carpet, peered beneath the bed. There. A bundle the size of a brick, wedged against the bed’s center support. He snaked his arm under, tugged it out. It was brown, plastic-wrapped. Heroin. A kilo or more.
No wonder Salome hadn’t bothered to shoot him. Wells didn’t work for the agency. He couldn’t claim diplomatic immunity. He’d spend the rest of his life in a Russian prison. Another name for hell on earth.
Wells wished they’d left him something less dangerous. Like a grenade.
Outside, another SUV rolled up. Two plainclothes officers drifted toward the front entrance. Wells grabbed his backpack, checked the peephole to be sure that Salome wasn’t still in the hall, stepped out. The hotel was a simple rectangle with a single internal north — south hallway. The guest elevators occupied the north end, three doors from Wells’s room. Wells ran the other way, south.
The hallway ended at a gray-painted door with a push bar. A red sign warned “Emergency Exit! ALARM!” in Russian and English. Wells didn’t think so. The hotel wouldn’t want sirens screeching every time a guest took the fire stairs. Anyway, he had no choice. Just ditching the brick down a trash chute wouldn’t be good enough. The cops would scrub the hotel when they didn’t find the heroin in his room. He had to make it disappear permanently.
Wells pushed the bar. No alarm. He scrambled up the stairs two at a time, quads burning, heart pounding. Past the fifth floor, the sixth. To the fire door to the roof. Atop the stairs, he found a fire door wedged open with a VCR tape. Old-school.
Outside, a mess of crumpled cigarette butts and empty vodka bottles. Wells ran for the rusty metal flues that rose side by side from the center of the roof, pumping inky black smoke into the gray sky. The smokestacks extended about six feet off the roof and had old-style mushroom caps mounted loosely atop the flues to keep rain and snow from pouring inside.
Wells carried a butterfly knife in his backpack. As he reached the flues he pulled it out, flipped it open. He had never been quite so conscious of time passing, of the seconds escaping with every motion. How long before the cops downstairs moved? Two minutes? Three? How much time had he used already?
The smoke was greasy and lukewarm after its trip up the flue. Wells reached under the cap, sliced at the bag. A river of brown poison poured down the steel pipe into the furnace below. Where it belonged. When the bag was empty, Wells tossed it down the chute, dropped in the knife, too. He ran for the door, leapt down the stairs. His hands were black now, slick with oil sludge. He didn’t want to leave a trail. He balled them up, didn’t touch the railing. He took the stairs in twos and threes, half running, half falling.
At the third floor, he stopped. If the cops had already reached the hallway, he would have no choice but to go downstairs and surrender in the parking lot. But the corridor was quiet. He ran for his room. The electronic lock on its door beeped green. No doubt the cops had made the clerk downstairs disable it. They were on their way up. He’d beaten them by seconds.
In his bathroom, Wells washed his hands to clean off the grease and whatever heroin residue might be stuck on them. As he finished, he heard footsteps, Russian voices mumbling. The door creaked open. Something skittered across the carpet. Wells saw it in the bathroom doorway. A green sphere. A grenade, and then another.
Wells almost laughed. He’d asked for a grenade. The Russians had seen fit to give him two. He spun, went to his knees, clapped his hands over his ears, and squeezed his eyes closed. If the grenade was a standard frag, he was dead, but if it was a flash-bang, a concussion—
The explosion seemed to come from inside his head. He was nowhere, and then in the hills north of Missoula, caught in a massive thunderstorm. He ran for cover as the skies exploded again—
No. Not Montana. Russia. Wells opened his eyes, found himself back in a shadowy version of the bathroom. Spiderwebs shrouded his eyes. A whistling scream filled his ears. He reached for the toilet and hung his mouth open, trying to vomit, failing. Only a thin trickle of spittle hung from his mouth. He knew the police had to have followed the grenades into the room, but the idea of turning his head to see them was impossible. He stared at the stained white bowl until men pulled him up, jerked his arms behind his back, cuffed them tight.
They shoved him in the chair in the corner. With his hearing gone, he watched the search play out like a silent movie, a comedy starring one smart dog and a bunch of dumb cops. The shepherd walked through the room, didn’t alert. His handler took him out, brought him back in, tried again. When he still didn’t alert, the handler got into a heated argument with the guy who seemed to be in charge, a tall thin man who wore a suit and thick black plastic glasses that would have passed for hip in Brooklyn. Wells didn’t need to hear them to know what they were saying:
It’s here. Why can’t your idiot dog find it?
Because it’s not here!
It’s here.
They tried to talk to Wells, but he pointed at his ears and they seemed to believe him. They patted him down, like the dog wouldn’t have sniffed the stuff on him. Then they tore up the room. Pulled open the drawers, flipped over the bed, cut his bag open, and found his second passport. The discovery made them happy, but not for long.
After a half hour, two cops pulled Wells up, hustled him into the empty room across the hall, threw him on the bed. They were big men, with pale skin and dull blue eyes. They looked at him like they were waiting for an order to work him over. Wells took limited comfort in the fact that it hadn’t come. The police weren’t one hundred percent sure about him.
The man with the glasses walked in. Up close his suit was cheap and his shoes scuffed. He looked like a Depression-era traveling salesman. No way was he FSB. Wells’s fears had been right. Salome and Buvchenko must have used a local trafficker to tip the police—American drug trafficker in 306, bring a dog, all the proof you need is in his room. They found the perfect way to put Wells in a hole without having to call in chits in Moscow.
He tapped his ear. “You can hear now.”
“Yes.” Barely. Static still filled Wells’s ears. The cop sounded like an FM station disappearing behind a hill.
“Which one?” The Russian held up his passports.
Wells pointed at the one with his real name.
“John Wells. You smuggle drugs?”
“I don’t know who told you that, but he’s wrong.”
“You smuggle drugs.” Not a question this time. “Heroin.”
“No.”
“You know the penalty we have in Russia for drug smuggling?”
“I came here to meet Mikhail Buvchenko. You know who I mean?”
“Of course I know him. He lives in the country. Nothing to do with this.”
“I went to his mansion last night to talk to him. Not about drugs. I said something he didn’t like. I guess today he got mad, called you.”
“He didn’t call me.” The guy flipped through Wells’s second passport, the one in the name of Roger Bishop. “This is yours also.”
“Yes.”
Wells wondered if the cop would ask why he had two passports, but he was stuck on the drug angle. “Last month you go to Guatemala. Panama. Thailand. Turkey.”