“Yeah. He tried to tell me he was too sick to meet.”
“Sick?”
“He has lung cancer. Been keeping it quiet. Told him I’d come to Tel Aviv. I’m not expecting much. I fly out tonight. Twenty-two-hour round-trip for a ten-minute meeting.” Duberman’s wealth and his importance in Israel meant that the Mossad must have watched him over the years.
“Too bad you don’t have lung cancer, too,” Wells said. “You could make him meet you halfway.”
“What about you, Ellis?” Duto said. “You going to look for the leak?”
The final thread. Duberman’s team seemed to have a source inside Langley. Wells, Shafer, and Duto weren’t sure whether the leaker knew the truth about the plot or had simply been fooled into giving up bits of information that Duberman could use. In any case, they saw the leaker as an opportunity as well as a threat. He was another potential avenue to Duberman. But they risked alerting Duberman to what they knew if they went after him.
“At this point, no. Ice is too thin. I’m just going to go into my office, keep my head down for a couple days. May try to talk to Ian Duffy. Mason’s station chief in Hong Kong. He’s back in D.C. now. Lobbying. Maybe he knows something about how Mason connected with Duberman.”
The move was a long shot at best, but all they had right now were long shots.
“So we go our separate ways,” Duto said. “John, in terms of”—Duto made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger—“I know you’ve had difficulties getting hooked up.” Without access to a diplomatic pouch, Wells had trouble getting weapons across borders. “Some places, I still have friends. Russia, for example.”
Wells wasn’t entirely sure why Duto was working so hard. Getting involved with this mess carried serious risk. Duto wouldn’t bother unless he smelled a bigger payoff.
Then Wells realized. “You think this is your ticket, don’t you?”
Duto must have expected the Senate seat would be his last stop. He had won his race as a conservative Democrat, a breed that rarely survived presidential primaries. But now he had a chance at the biggest prize of all. If he could prove that the President’s largest donor was trying to lure the United States into war, he could demand whatever he wanted from the White House. A promotion to Secretary of State or Defense. Done. The President’s endorsement in the next election? Absolutely.
Duto had used Wells and Shafer before. But never for stakes this high. And Wells had never seen the con so early in the game.
“La, la, la,” Wells said. Arabic. No, no, no.
Duto nodded. “Nam.” Yes. “Unless you prefer the alternative.”
He tapped his wrist. “Come on, you can ride with me to Dulles.”
“I’ll get there myself.” Wells couldn’t bear sharing a car with this man.
“As you wish.” Duto walked out.
Wells and Shafer sat side by side on the edge of the bed.
“We can’t,” Wells said.
“Can’t what?”
“He’s not fit.” Wells wasn’t one hundred percent sure about much, but he was sure that Duto shouldn’t be President. Part of him wanted to flip on the television and watch ESPN for the next eleven days. Let Duto solve this, if he could.
“You want another war, John? Me neither. Take a minute so you don’t run into him in the elevator. Then go. You have a plane to catch.”
Wells had nothing left to say. He went.
2
ELEVEN DAYS…
The woman who called herself Salome had spent three hours running countersurveillance, MTR to taxi to Star Ferry and back to MTR, the Hong Kong subway. She reached the pickup spot, an alley behind a run-down Kowloon hotel, just as the gray Sprinter van arrived. She pulled open its cargo doors and stepped inside.
She was certain that she hadn’t been followed. Wells had no way of knowing where she was. But she was furious with herself for what had happened in Istanbul four days before. She couldn’t afford another mistake.
Now she squatted inside the van’s cargo compartment, holding a cheap white nylon bag. Gleaming white urinals and dull plastic pipe surrounded her. Anyone who happened to check the van’s license plate would find it was owned by HKMCA Plumbing PLC. The corporation was real enough, one of forty-five hundred subsidiaries of Duberman’s casino company. Thus the Sprinter had every reason to make its way through the tunnel that connected Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and fight through the island’s congested avenues until it reached the narrow roads that led up the side of Victoria Peak. Its destination was Duberman’s $200 million mansion. The house was one of just a handful of private homes on the upper slopes of the Peak, the eighteen-hundred-foot mountain that provided a lush green backdrop to Hong Kong’s skyscrapers.
After fifty minutes, the van stopped. Through the wire mesh that split the cargo compartment from the front seats, Salome heard the driver lower his window and mumble in Chinese. A buzzer sounded. The van turned, rolled forward, stopped again. “Here,” the driver said. Salome pushed aside a sink and hopped out the back.
She found herself in the center of a five-car garage, its concrete floor spotless. Around her: a yellow Lamborghini Aventador, a red Ferrari 288 GTO, a white Rolls-Royce Phantom, and an orange Porsche Carrera GT, a twin of the car that had killed the actor Paul Walker. All spit-shined each week so that they gleamed under the halogen lights that hung from the ceiling.
The cars were flawless, worth millions of dollars. They were protected by a fire-suppression system that could fill the garage with a nontoxic foam in twenty-five seconds. Yet as vehicles they were basically useless. Duberman drove them once a year at most. They didn’t even have gasoline in their tanks. Gas was flammable and corrosive, and its impurities might leach out and damage their fuel lines since they were run so infrequently. They might as well have been gold bricks with rubber tires.
Still, they served a purpose. Duberman brought in his biggest 88 Gamma bettors to see them, along with his other collections in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Lose $2 million, you can sit in them. $5 million, start their engines. $10 million, maybe I’ll let you drive one. The whales coveted these invitations, though Salome couldn’t imagine why. For the money they gambled away, they could have bought the cars themselves.
Duberman himself traveled in a four-ton gray Bentley sedan outfitted with armor plates and inch-thick windows that would stop anything up to a .50-caliber round. The security at his mansion was similarly over-the-top. The property was hidden from the street by a reinforced concrete wall ten feet high and three feet thick, built to survive a five-ton truck bomb. A mantrap ringed the inside of the wall. Five feet wide and fifteen deep, the trap was hidden under the narrow green lawn that Duberman’s engineers had carved out of the mountain.
Duberman’s security hadn’t always been so oppressive. He’d added a lot of it since his wedding two years before. Salome supposed the additional protection made sense. His wife, Orli, was a celebrity in her own right, a Victoria’s Secret supermodel. And they had two infant children, obvious kidnap targets. But Salome wondered sometimes if Duberman had added the extra security to make himself feel better about the risk he’d taken funding their operation. Though he surely knew that all the mantraps in the world wouldn’t stop a Delta team.
The van pulled out. Salome was briefly alone with the cars. Then the house door opened to reveal Gideon Etra, Duberman’s personal bodyguard.