His mood swung between grim and weirdly jaunty as he made his way back to his office. Whatever Carcetti had planned would not be pleasant. On the other hand, now that Joyner had seen him they wouldn’t be able to make him vanish.
He was not at all surprised to find Carcetti and Bunshaft waiting at his desk. As a lieutenant three decades earlier, Carcetti had been a heavyweight on the All-Marine boxing team. His gut had thickened notably since then, but his legs and shoulders were still solid. He looked like a bouncer at a biker bar.
“Mr. Shafer—” Bunshaft said.
“Jess. Max. Call me Ellis. As far as I’m concerned, it’s first names for us.”
“Where were you?” Carcetti said.
Shafer smirked.
“Believe it’s known in the trade as dropping the kids off at the pool.”
“We’ve been here fifteen minutes.”
“I’m an old man.” Shafer tapped his belly. “Things get stuck—” Shafer grinned, not even hiding what he was doing, riffing like a drunk comedian at the late show on Friday night. Carcetti had followed his boss Hebley up the Marine Corps ladder. He’d retired with three stars on his collar and the nickname Mad Max, a commander who shouted and intimidated subordinates into submission. Shafer had learned over the years that playing the fool worked surprisingly well against that personality type. He hoped to drive Carcetti into useless and counterproductive rage, as he had Duto a dozen times.
“Least you can’t say I’m full of—”
“Enough.” Carcetti’s voice was level, but his eyes bulged like a blocked artery.
Now Shafer needed to shift gears, remind Carcetti that he wasn’t a fool after all. “You think this is still the Corps, General? You have me confused with a terminal lance?” A Marine who ended his enlistment as a lance corporal, the lowest possible rank after four years. “You think you say jump and I say how high, sir?”
Carcetti grabbed Shafer’s arm. “I think you’re coming with us.”
Carcetti and Bunshaft had detained Shafer briefly a month before. Back then, they’d locked him in a cell disguised as an executive suite, a room meant to preserve the illusion of dignity. Not today. Today Carcetti led him through a tunnel that connected the New Headquarters Building with its older cousin, the Original Headquarters Building. Down a grimy fire staircase that dead-ended on a subbasement that Shafer had never seen before in all his years at Langley. Through a maze of corridors lined with aging air handlers. Carcetti seemed to know the layout by heart. Finally, they reached a room whose concrete floor and grease stains suggested that it had once housed a furnace. Now it was stagnant and empty but for a steel table and three chairs, two on one side, the third on the other.
Carcetti shoved Shafer into the third chair. “Where’s John Wells?”
Good. He’d asked a question Shafer couldn’t answer. “Dunno.”
“We suspect him of aiding the Iranian government. And we suspect you of aiding him.”
Shafer felt the ground shift. The accusation was desperate, proof of the pressure Carcetti and Hebley felt. But if they could convince the President to sign a finding that Wells was aiding a foreign government, the agency would be authorized to snatch Wells without warning. The finding wouldn’t specifically call for Wells to be killed, but once black-ops teams were involved, anything could happen. If Wells pulled a gun, and he probably would, they’d shoot him in the street. A tragic accident.
And Shafer had no way to warn Wells.
“You can’t seriously believe that.”
“He’s a Muslim convert.”
“You know there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia, right?”
“I know that about twenty-four hours ago the FSB released him from Lubyanka following a call from Iran’s Foreign Minister to the Russian Interior Minister.”
“Two things that have nothing to do with each other.”
“I know he got on a plane from Moscow to Amman. And I know he hasn’t been seen since. You tell us where he is, we can pick him up safely. Nobody wants him to get hurt.”
“Why don’t you check the files, find out what Wells has done for this agency, this country, before you accuse him of treason?”
“Like those Deltas he killed in Afghanistan, you mean? Or when he was five minutes late in Mecca?”
Shafer didn’t think he was naïve. But he had never imagined anyone spinning Wells’s record that way.
“Max—”
“Look, maybe he’s got the best of intentions here, but he’s acting as a foreign agent whether he means to or not.” Carcetti nodded like a salesman trying to close a deal. “Do everyone a favor. You don’t want to tell me where he is, I get it. Just tell him, go to an embassy. Somewhere safe for him and our guys, so nobody makes a mistake.”
“Somewhere safe.” The line a parody of good-cop reasonableness. In reality, the offer was poison. Wells would never agree to come in, and Shafer’s phone call would give the agency and NSA a chance to pinpoint him.
Shafer closed his eyes, like the pressure was getting to him. Let Carcetti believe he’d won. He needed time to think through his next move, get Carcetti back inside the lines so that Wells wasn’t at risk.
Carcetti’s hand squeezed his wrist. “You know I’m right.”
Shafer looked at Carcetti and Bunshaft. Their posture was telling. Carcetti sat forward, eager. Bunshaft was back, arms folded. Nervous. Shafer ticked his head at Bunshaft.
“Jess. You’re sweating.” The furnace room’s harsh overheads highlighted the sheen of perspiration-occupying territory ceded by Bunshaft’s receding hairline. “You on board with this? Bringing me someplace with no cameras. No warrant, nobody watching. Your boss doesn’t like the law much.”
“Exigent circumstances,” Carcetti said. “National security exception.”
“He’s got to do it this way, because even Taylor wouldn’t come near this.” Cliff Taylor, the agency’s new deputy legal counsel, handpicked by Hebley. Bunshaft glanced at Carcetti. Cleared his throat like he’d forgotten how to talk.
“Worry less about us, more about yourself,” Carcetti said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten. Duto’s a senator. He’s protected. Not you. All those leaks to Wells and he doesn’t have a security clearance—”
“We’ve gone from treason to leaking in two minutes. Next you’ll accuse me of parking in a handicapped spot.”
“This kind of leaking is treason. And, your age, twenty years in jail is a life sentence. Bright side, your wife’s old, too. No worries about her leaving you.”
Carcetti went silent and Shafer found that he, too, had nothing to say. They were both breathing hard. Like the bell had rung and they’d gone back to their corners to sit on their stools, get ready for the next round, the arena empty, only Bunshaft watching, a silent, unreliable referee.
Shafer realized he’d forgotten the most important question of all. He opened his palms and dropped his head like he was ready to surrender. Rope-a-dope.
“All right, General. I’d like to ask something. Tell me the truth, I’ll call Wells.”
“Why would I trust you?”
“Because I don’t want him to get shot.”
An answer Carcetti would believe. He nodded. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“You really think Iran produced that HEU?”
Carcetti hesitated for half a second. “Yes. I mean, that’s what our experts concluded—”
“Translation, you have no idea. And the worst part is you don’t care. Like the Gulf of Tonkin or WMD.” The excuses that Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, respectively, had offered for Vietnam and Iraq. “You’ve decided that invading Iran is the right war. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.”