“Sir—”
“You can walk me straight to my plane if you like, but don’t put a finger on me.”
The guard reached for a phone at the X-ray station, but Duberman said something in Hebrew and he stopped.
Five minutes later, they stepped into the G650. The blond-haired pilot poked his head out of the cockpit. “Four passengers? For Cyprus?” Duto had called on the drive over.
“Correct.”
“No weather, no line, we should be airborne in five minutes. On the ground in forty-five.”
As he closed the cockpit door, Wells pulled two pairs of plastic flex-cuffs from the bag that Duto had brought him. “I need you both to put your wrists together in front of you.”
“Are we such a threat to a trained killer?” Duberman said. He let Wells cuff him and settled into his seat, his smirk wider than ever. He’d shaken off the mock execution and pistol-whipping in record time. Wells knew what he was thinking. That he would call his guards when they landed and be back in Israel within hours. That he had this jet’s tail number and could track it. That he would either have Wells arrested right away or, more likely, let him flail until the deadline passed and then put Gideon on him. Most important, that Wells and Duto didn’t have any idea where Salome had gotten the HEU and didn’t have the time to find out.
Duberman was thinking that he’d won.
Wells feared he was right.
Where could they go after Cyprus? Their best bet would probably be to fly to the United States, see if they could shake Shafer loose from CIA custody. Maybe he’d come up with something before the seventh floor grabbed him.
And if they lost? When they lost? Being a senator gave Duto protection, though it wasn’t unlimited. Wells would have to decide whether to take his chances with the Justice Department or go off the grid. Maybe a year or two in the mountains would do him good. Catching steelheads and salmon for supper. Sleeping in a one-room cabin without electricity or a toilet. Chopping wood or going to bed cold. Good old-fashioned basic survival. Maybe this life had made him too hard and too soft at the same time. Or maybe he was deluding himself, pretending life as a fugitive would be anything but exhausting and lonely. He’d fall asleep each night wondering whether the FBI or Duberman would find him first.
A song he’d first heard lying in bed with Anne came to him:
The singer’s voice breathy and quiet. The band was called The Killers, Wells remembered now, the song “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Both about right.
He wasn’t beaten. Not as long as he breathed. Let the world break him. He wouldn’t surrender.
He settled into his seat and waited for Cyprus.
24
The Gulfstream’s engines spooled up.
And Wells felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. An Israeli number. Had the Mossad tracked them already? He sent the call to voice mail.
The phone buzzed again. Same number. Wells knocked on the cockpit door. “Hold tight a minute.” He stepped to the back of the jet. “Yes?”
“The question you asked me.” Rudi’s rasping voice. “About the stuff. The man who brought it, his name was Witwans.”
“Rand Witwans?”
“That’s right. First name R-A-N-D. The amount was fourteen kilos.”
“One-four?” Wells’s heart drummed a mad song in his chest.
“Yes, dummy. Fourteen. Fourteen exactly. Does that help?”
“Maybe.” Yes, yes, yes.
“No more questions. No more favors.”
“Thank you, Rudi.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I’ll see you at my funeral. Unless yours comes first.” Click.
Joost Claassen had told Shafer that South Africa produced 15.3 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Joost remembered the amount because the program had beaten its goal of 15 kilos. But Rand Witwans had brought only 14 kilograms to Israel. He’d held on to those missing 1.3 kilograms all those years. Until Salome found him.
Witwans held the answer, if they could track him down in time. Cyprus was the wrong move, the wrong way. Wells needed at least twelve hours. To fly to South Africa, find Witwans’s house. He’d be alone there, only his servants for company—
No. Wells suddenly realized why Salome’s personal bodyguard hadn’t been at their meeting. She’d sent him to watch Witwans. He needed to put Salome and Duberman someplace they couldn’t immediately call the guard. Wells could think of only one place in the world from which Duberman couldn’t use his billions to free himself immediately. The last card in the deck. His last play.
He reached for his phone.
“Again?” Abdullah said. “And after our conversation last week. Truly?”
“I know I’ve stretched your generosity, King.”
“What you did for my family, I didn’t think I could repay it, not in the time I had left. But maybe I’ve lived longer than I expected. What is it now?”
Wells explained.
“This is one of the richest men in the world, not some maid from Pakistan,” Abdullah said. “You think no one notices?”
“A day, two at the most—”
“An American. A diplomatic nightmare. And what’s our excuse? No, it’s not possible.”
“How about this? Not even a day. Just until the afternoon tomorrow, and then put him on a plane back to Amman.” Amman was less than a hundred kilometers from Jerusalem, close enough that Duberman and Salome could find their way back to Israel without trouble. At the same time, the jet would stay outside Israeli airspace, so Abdullah wouldn’t have to worry that it or its pilots would be detained. “Say it’s a terrible mistake. Blame me.”
“Of course I’ll blame you.”
The King laughed, and Wells knew he would agree. “All right. In return, I want a promise.”
Wells waited for the inevitable.
“This repays our debt. Now and forever.”
“It’s already repaid, King.”
“I know.”
Wells came forward, ignored the others, knocked on the cockpit door.
“Ready to push?” the pilot said.
“Can I come in?”
The cockpit was sleek and black and angular, with four big flat-screen panels side by side under the windshield. It looked like a cross between a BMW dashboard and a video game.
“What can I do for you?”
“Mind if I ask your name?”
“On these sorts of missions, I go by Captain Kirk,” the pilot said.
Fair enough. “We have a new destination. And I’d rather you not call it in until we’re in the air.”
“Where’s that, sir?”
“Riyadh.”
“We can get cleared to land? From Tel Aviv?”
Wells scribbled down the number for Abdullah’s private secretary. “He’ll arrange it. All he needs is the tail number and an ETA.” Wells hesitated. “I don’t suppose you can turn off the transponder.”
Civilian jets carried transponders so that air-traffic control systems could track them and distinguish them from military aircraft. In response to radio signals from ground stations, a transponder emitted a unique call sign that included the location and altitude of the plane carrying it. Public tracking services like flightaware.com now tracked the transponder signals of planes worldwide in real time, which meant that Duberman’s guards could easily follow this flight and would know when it changed course and turned away from Cyprus.