Mormons creeped Shafer out.
A ridiculous prejudice. Yet he couldn’t shake it. The long underwear. The polygamy. The promise that believers might receive their own planets after death. Most of all, the unfailing perky friendliness. He didn’t trust anyone who smiled so easily.
But here he was in Provo, the spiritual heart of Mormonism. He’d flown to Denver on United in the morning, supposedly heading for San Diego. At Denver International, he’d shucked his connecting flight, bought a fresh ticket on Southwest to Oakland via Salt Lake. Simple countersurveillance. He’d walked the United flight three times, scanning faces. He didn’t see any of them on the Southwest flight.
In Salt Lake, he rented a car, drove to the wide boulevards south of downtown, found a long-term lot. He locked his phones in the glove compartment, taking only a burner he’d never used. He walked east and south until he found Great Deals Used Cars on State. He carried eight thousand dollars in cash, crisp hundred-dollar bills he’d pulled from his basement safe the night before.
The showroom was nicer than he’d hoped. A salesman in jeans and cowboy boots beelined for him. “Afternoon. I’m Rick. What can I do you for today?”
“Put the preposition in the right place.”
Rick’s smile faded, then came back stronger. “Sir?”
“Your cheapest car.”
“We can do that. Naturally.” Rick laid a friendly hand on Shafer’s shoulder. “But maybe I can show you something nicer first, credit problems are no problem at Great Deals—”
Shafer was in no mood for cute. He twitched his shoulder like he was having a seizure until Rick pulled his hand away. “Cash. You want the quickest sale of your life, or not?”
Rick cleared his throat. “In that case. I think you’re looking at a 2000 Regal. A Buick.” Rick nodded over his shoulder at a fenced-in corner filled with junkers. “Hundred sixty thousand miles. Sticker’s nineteen hundred, totally fair, but maybe I can knock fifty bucks off for a cash sale—”
“It’ll get me to Provo?”
“Heck, it’ll get you all the way to New York City”—those last three words spoken as if New York were Mars—“if that’s where you want to go. All our cars go through a ninety-point checklist, we call ’em Great Deals certified—”
“Done.” Shafer pulled out his wallet. “If you can get me out the door in ten minutes.”
“No problem, sir, no problem at all—”
“And shut up while you’re doing it.”
Nine minutes later, Shafer had himself a new used car, legally registered and insured. The Regal was the saddest vehicle he’d ever driven. Someone had sprayed its pleather seats with mint air freshener in a futile effort to hide the smell of ten thousand cigarettes. Its steering wheel clicked ominously when Shafer switched lanes. Its brakes worked like a radio call-in show, with a seven-second delay.
No matter. Shafer had made himself as untraceable as any American could. Even if Salome’s crew tracked the credit card he’d used for the rental, the trail would dead-end in Salt Lake. The Regal was too old and cheap to have a GPS. He’d ditched his phones. He could head to the safe house, where Evan and Heather were hiding, with a clear conscience.
This visit counted as a rear-guard action at best. Not that Wells and Duto were making much progress. Shafer had stopped at Duto’s house predawn, on his way to Dulles. Duto stood in the doorway in black silk pajamas, reading glasses dangling from a lanyard. He didn’t invite Shafer in.
“Told her I was gonna rape her,” he said before Shafer could ask about Donna Green.
Shafer thought he’d misheard. “You threatened to tape her?”
“Rape. R-A-P-E. Rape.” Emphatically. Like he was trying to win a prison spelling bee.
“The National Security Advisor? Of the United States? Of America? All these years learning to hide what a psychopath you are, you choose this moment to blow it?”
“She said I was making a play. I told her I’d be back with the truth, and when I was done with her she wouldn’t sit down for a month.”
“More like buggery, then.”
Duto folded his arms over his chest and smirked. He reminded Shafer of an old-school Hollywood mogul, the kind who made every starlet spend time on his couch. “That better or worse? I’m telling you, there was no convincing her. She knows about the Midnight House, how I got to Whitby.”
Now Shafer understood. Green had waved the red flag, told Duto that she’d taken the agency from him. And Duto had charged, just as she’d expected.
“Nothing’s changed,” Duto said.
“Sounds like a productive meeting.”
“More than you think. Donna told me we got the guys who took out the jet. Delta grabbed ’em in Mumbai last night. They’re Hezbollah.”
“So we’re going to come back at them?”
“Yes. She wouldn’t say how.”
Another step toward war.
“And Wells busted out, too.” The text had come in a few minutes before, Wells reporting that Volgograd was headed for Moscow and then Frankfurt. “I think he’s in rough shape.”
“He’s a big boy.” Duto’s standard answer when Shafer worried about Wells. Like Wells was a horse who could be worked forever without consequence. “Call him when you work it out with Evan. That’ll cheer him up.” Duto edged the front door toward Shafer’s foot. “Anything else? I gotta take a piss.”
“Me, John, you against the world, you still need me to know you’re in charge.”
As an answer, Duto shut the door.
Now Shafer parked the Regal outside a gray two-story house in the snow-dusted foothills on Provo’s east side. A wooden stockade fence hid the building’s first floor. The blinds were pulled tight on the second. A bubble camera watched the locked front gate. Shafer buzzed.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice.
“Heather? It’s Ellis.”
“I need to see your identification, sir.”
Not Heather. An FBI agent. Shafer held his license to the camera. A fresh westerly wind blew from the desert, dragging lacy clouds across the blue Utah sky. Shafer listened to the weekday sounds floating up from the streets below, school buses idling, kids yelling. Footsteps crossed the yard, and the gate opened to reveal an olive-skinned woman, late twenties.
“I’m Special Agent Rosatto. Hands against the fence.” She frisked him thoroughly. “Come with me.”
In the living room, Evan and Heather, Wells’s ex-wife, played Scrabble on a beige couch. They grunted insincere greetings. They’d wanted Wells.
Heather was in her early forties now, still pretty, but with the hollowed-out face of a compulsive exerciser. Shafer had met her long before, when Evan was a toddler and Wells was on his way to Afghanistan to infiltrate al-Qaeda. She and Wells had fallen in love in high school, married young, had a baby. Then she’d left. Like Exley. And now Anne. They’d all seen that the field was Wells’s true mistress.
As for Evan, Shafer didn’t need a DNA test to know that he was John’s son. He was tall and rangy like his father, the same strong nose and thick brown hair. But his cheeks were unlined, his eyes soft. I used to care… but I take a pill for that now, his T-shirt explained. Shafer didn’t know if Evan was weaker than John or just younger. Not even nineteen. Not one but two generations behind Shafer. Shafer knew he’d been that young once. He had pictures to prove it. But his memories of those years were lighter than dreams.
“We need a few minutes outside,” he said to Rosatto.
“If she’s okay with it.”
Heather nodded.
“Just please stay in the yard.”
So they stood around an empty sandbox, Heather and Evan on one side, Shafer on the other. Heather took a half step back, letting her son do the speaking.