“And you’re sure we got them.”
“Unless they had a teleporter.”
In the past, these missions had knotted the President’s stomach. He didn’t love playing judge and jury. He wanted to believe the best about his enemies, that they might disagree with America’s intentions but that they shared the same morals and values.
Not tonight. Green had briefed him on Ayoub’s background, how he’d killed the IDF soldiers in 2006. No surprise the man was happy to do Tehran’s foul bidding, destroy a jet filled with innocent people from a dozen different countries. The world was better off without him.
“Good. Please congratulate the team on my behalf. All the way down.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
His steward took the phone and vanished.
“Everything okay?” his wife said. Dinner was supposed to be a bubble for her, too.
“Sorry about that.”
“No calls at dinner, Daddy,” his daughter said.
“You’re right.”
The President looked around the table at his family and, not for the first time, considered how lucky he was.
More than lucky. Blessed.
16
FOUR DAYS…
Israel and Jordan had signed a peace treaty in 1994, making Jordan the second Arab state to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But the end of war didn’t make the countries the best of friends. Israel still closed its borders to millions of Palestinian refugees that Jordan desperately wanted to send back to Israel. And Israel knew that Jordan’s rulers had agreed to peace for practical reasons rather than any love for the concept of a Jewish state.
The Wadi Araba border station between the Jordanian resort town of Aqaba and its Israeli counterpart Eilat reflected that wariness. Hundreds of tourists crossed each day, many on their way from Eilat to Petra, the ancient rock city in the Jordanian desert that had provided the spectacular backdrop for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But neither side allowed vehicles registered in the opposite country on its roads. To cross, tourists had to trudge across hundreds of meters of empty blacktop hemmed in by high fences as bored soldiers watched. The scene was half Checkpoint Charlie, half baggage claim. The stations themselves were blocky concrete buildings, ugly and utilitarian, though the Jordanian side included a souvenir shop for any traveler who had somehow escaped Petra with a few dinars.
Now Wells walked past the hookahs inside the shop’s dusty windows and handed his passport to the final border guard. After his troubles in Russia, part of him expected another hassle. But the guard merely nodded and handed back his passport. Wells stepped past a white-lettered blue sign that read “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Good Bye,” the broken English oddly pleasant, and entered the no-man’s-land.
He had the walk west to himself. The checkpoint had just opened.Everyone else was heading the other direction, looking forward to a day among the ruins. Wells felt a little like Petra himself, battered and eroded but still standing.
The day before, in Lubyanka, a splash of cold water had woken him. He opened his eyes to find his interrogator smirking, a bucket in her hand. “Wake up, pretty. It’s nearly two.”
So she’d let him sleep. A kindness Wells hadn’t expected, and the reason he felt halfway human. Though he realized he was famished. He hadn’t eaten properly since the dinner at Buvchenko’s mansion the night before last. Too bad he wouldn’t have a chance at those pelmeni again.
She threw him his jeans and shirt and boxers and stood in the doorway as he pulled on his clothes. Let her look. Let her do whatever she wanted, as long as she let him go.
“So many scars,” she said.
Mostly on his back, where the surgeons had saved him after Omar Khadri shot him. He hadn’t thought of Khadri in a long time. The living left the dead behind. For a while.
“Want to touch them?”
“Broken bones, too. I see where they’ve healed. Though they never fully heal, do they?”
Her fortune-cookie psychoanalysis irritated him. “I assume you’re not getting me dressed to leave me in here.”
“Domodedovo.”
Again. “Didn’t think that word could sound so good.”
On the ride to the airport she told him that Duto had backed his story, and the FSB had decided keeping him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. “I told him you’d missed somehow your flight yesterday,” she said, the misplaced word making her sound more Russian than she had the night before. “That you’d taken sick and we brought you to the hospital, but you felt much better now. He asked you to buy a ticket to Amman. There’s a flight this afternoon, a nonstop.”
Amman. Jordan. Why? But Wells didn’t bother to ask. Duto would never have told this woman. Wells wondered if the United States and Iran had moved closer to war in the last day and a half, or if, perhaps, Duto or Shafer had made progress. By the time he reached Amman, the sun would be down. Another day wasted. Three lost in Russia. Before that, two in Saudi Arabia. By the morning, they would be less than one hundred hours from the President’s deadline—
Wells stopped himself. Obsessing over the ticking clock wouldn’t help. Besides, maybe Shafer had found the uranium already. Wells could imagine Shafer’s glee. Yeah, I just Googled “HEU where to buy” and there it was.
Domodedovo was déjà vu all over again, the same business travelers and rich kids, the same blue-uniformed paramilitaries giving Wells the stink-eye. Wells bought a ticket on Royal Jordanian and his interrogator led him to a VIP line at the exit station. After a ten-second conversation and a flashed badge, the border guard nodded and stamped Wells’s passport.
They sat in silence at the gate until boarding began.
“Before you go, want to tell me the truth? Why you were here?”
“Looking for a pony.”
“Stand.”
He did. She reached between his legs, wrapped her fingers around his crotch, squeezed. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to hurt or arouse him. Maybe both. “You’re still in my country. Be polite.”
“Bad touching.” Wells peeled off her hand.
“You know, some of us wanted to kill you. Dump you in the forest like those Poles.” The Katyn Wood massacre. In 1940, on Stalin’s orders, the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, had executed thousands of defenseless Polish prisoners of war.
“No man, no problem,” Wells said. One of Stalin’s most famous sayings: Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.
“I told them, no, a little girl like you, not even worth the bullet.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Wells turned away.
She reached for his shoulder, twisted him toward her, hissed in his ear.
“Don’t come back to Russia, Mr. Wells.”
In Amman, he called Duto from a fresh prepaid mobile.
“Fun trip?”
Wells didn’t curse much, but he was sorely tempted. “The best.”
“I don’t suppose I get any thanks for bailing you out.”
Now he did curse, potently and in Arabic.
“Don’t know what that means, but I’m guessing Miss you sweetheart. Sounds like you didn’t suffer any permanent damage.”
Wells didn’t see any reason to answer.
“Get anything?” Duto said after a few seconds.
“Bumped into my buddy from Istanbul. We had a nice chat. She’s sweet as ever.”
“How about a photo?”
“Maybe.” Wells wondered if Nemkov, the narcotics colonel, had sent the surveillance shots of Salome from the hotel. He’d check as soon as he could find a semi-safe Internet connection. A photo would get them Salome’s real name and new paths to chase.