“John Wells?”
“Who?” Witwans’s face registered genuine surprise.
“And there’s no way anyone could know what you’d done?”
“No. I told Natalie when she bought the stuff. We produced fifteen-point-three kilos, I brought the Israelis fourteen, stored the difference here. One HEU ingot, thirteen hundred grams in all. It was in a safe downstairs. I destroyed the records. Back then, everything was paper. No computers. There were three sets of files, two with us, one at the Defense Ministry. I took them all, burned them. No way for anyone on either side to know.” Witwans rubbed his hands together, gone like this.
“No one asked questions about you destroying the files.”
Nobody wanted anything to do with them. They were afraid the blacks would take revenge on all of us in the secret services.”
“You’re sure there were only three copies.”
“I suppose it’s possible the Defense Ministry made another set, they’re in an archive somewhere. But I don’t think so. And all the years the blacks have been in power, no one’s ever asked me about the program. Until Natalie. You see?”
“Sure.”
Though Frankel saw only that Witwans was lucky. If Frankel had been in charge instead of Salome, he would have put a round in the man and sent him and his story to the grave.
“She seems to have put what I sold her to good use.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t say another word about that. Not even dream about it.”
“Of course. Now what? You go back to Natalie, tell her everything is fine.”
“Oh no, Rand. I’ve come all this way. I’m staying.”
“No need — I promise—”
Frankel shook his head and Witwans trailed off.
“That’s fine, then.” Trying to play the country squire. “I have plenty of room.”
“What about weapons? Beyond your shotgun.” Because he’d flown commercial, Frankel had needed to leave his pistol in Istanbul.
“Of course. A whole cabinet, pistols, rifles. Out here you can’t be too careful.”
For the first time since he’d arrived in South Africa, Frankel felt a smile crease his lips.
18
Hey Adina!
The subject line was strangely cheery. But the sender’s name was what froze her.
John Wells.
Some part of Salome had known this moment was coming. Even wanted it, maybe. She clicked the email open.
She had come to Bucharest the night before, from Istanbul, after Buvchenko told her that the FSB had let Wells go. The Romanian capital was unpleasant at the best of times. In winter, when the sidewalks and buildings and sky blended into the same pallid gray, the city induced despair and an overwhelming desire to flee to Brazil.
But Bucharest also had some of the best hackers around. So Salome had a safe house here, occupied by a young man named Igor. He wore cheap leather jackets and heavy cologne that didn’t hide his disinterest in showering. Online, where he spent most of his life, he called himself IbalL.
“Didn’t expect to see you again,” he said over his shoulder as she walked in. She didn’t need to wonder how he knew who she was. No one else came here. In her experience, hackers were either compulsively neat or crazily messy. Igor was the latter. Like he’d moved his consciousness onto the Internet already and no longer cared about the space his body occupied. Empty Red Bull cans and pizza boxes covered the scuffed wood floor. Dozens of partly disassembled laptops filled the couch and the coffee table. Generations of PlayStations, Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis occupied the kitchen. Amazingly enough, the place was bug-free. Igor had sprayed it a few months before with an insecticide banned everywhere in the world except Romania and Africa.
“I missed you,” Salome said.
“I think one day you come to kill me.”
“Never.”
“No. You send your boyfriend.” What Igor called Frankel.
Good call. She stood behind him, but he didn’t look up. He was simultaneously playing online poker, Gchatting with four different people, and on the third and highest-resolution screen watching truly foul pornography.
“Is that a dog?”
“Be glad it’s not a horse.”
“Off, Igor.” He hated when she used his real name. “And get out.”
“I’m in a tournament—”
“A tournament—”
“Poker.” He pointed at the first monitor. “See, a horse.” Indeed, a stallion was now being led onto the third screen. “Always a horse sooner or later.”
Salome kept a pistol and silencer in a safe in the apartment’s bedroom. She was tempted to blow out the monitors and the boy-man sitting at them. Maybe the fanatics were right. Maybe the modern world was so mired in sin that God needed to wipe it away, start anew. “Igor—”
“Fine.” He flicked off the screens. She knew he didn’t want to make her too angry. He liked her, or at least liked the jobs she offered, more interesting than credit-card scams. He dragged himself up. He spent so much time on his rear and so little on his feet that he sometimes seemed unacquainted with gravity, his bones brittle as needles.
“Not far. I may need you.”
He nodded.
“If I want to get online—”
“They’re all clean. Safe to use, I mean. I wouldn’t touch the one in the bathroom.”
“Lovely. Phones?”
He walked into the kitchen, came back with three. “These.”
She opened the windows as he left. The Bucharest air wasn’t great, but at least it didn’t coat her mouth like the inside of a paint can.
Thirty hours before, she had left Volgograd assuming she was done with Wells. But even before Buvchenko’s private jet landed at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, she’d learned she was wrong. She and Buvchenko went to their backup plan, convincing the FSB to pick Wells up. She’d much preferred the local police. Buvchenko had told her the plan couldn’t fail. When they find the heroin—he drew a hand across his throat.
What about a bribe?
Buvchenko shook his head. This colonel, he’s the only clean police officer in all of Russia.
But somehow Wells had gotten out, and they were stuck with the FSB, which acted solely in its own interest. She wasn’t sure how the FSB would view Wells. But she imagined it would keep him at least a couple days while it sorted him out.
And from what she saw when she landed in Istanbul, Wells was very short on time. Though the city was fifteen hundred kilometers from the Iranian border, the Turkish police and army were gearing up for war. Soldiers stood at the terminal doors, their faces hard and ready. Five-ton army trucks were lined up along the runway fence and outside the airport’s main gate. Plainclothes police officers looked over every vehicle coming in and out.
The security made sense. Turkey was run by conservative Sunni Muslims who supported the rebels in Syria and didn’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. The Turkish government was letting the United States use its mountainous eastern border with Iran as a base for the invasion. It had every reason to fear that Tehran would respond with terrorist attacks.
Salome’s safe house was in the city’s wealthy Nisantasi District. By the time she and Frankel reached it, the winter sun had slid behind the luxury apartment buildings that dominated the area’s narrow streets. At this hour, shoppers and commuters should have filled the sidewalks. Instead, they were nearly empty. A neighborhood full of Western luxury brands was a ripe target for a Hezbollah bomb.