Around 6 a.m., Wells jerked out of a haze of not-quite-sleep to see a three-foot chunk of steel pipe bouncing at them from the bed of an overloaded pickup. Duto pulled the wheel hard left, and the Audi, down on its shocks, missed the pipe by six inches.
“I’d hate to disappoint Duberman by dying in a car accident,” Wells said.
“Didn’t you learn at the Farm that they’re among the top risks case officers face?”
Indeed. Wells had joined the service in the halcyon days before 9-11, when drunk driving, paper cuts, and herpes were the major health threats in the clandestine service. A few minutes later, as they came through a bump of a town called Matjiesfontein, the sky went from black to blue, wisps of dawn creeping from the east. The light revealed an arid, scrubby land, low hills flecked with scattered shrubs and bushes.
“I thought the Cape was supposed to be beautiful,” Duto said.
“This the Karoo,” Jacob said.
“Did you sneeze?”
“Something else. Witwans off the N1.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
Wells reached back for the phone. Sure enough, the Mercedes had turned south off the highway about twenty kilometers east of central Cape Town. The giant slum called Khayelitsha lay a few kilometers south, as did the Cape Town airport. Wells feared Frankel might be taking Witwans to the airport, but he had chosen a strange route in that case, along surface streets rather than the R300 ring road, which ran directly to the airport.
After their all-night chase, the Mercedes held a lead of about two hundred kilometers, two and a half hours, give or take. Seeing the airport on the map reminded Wells that their jet was still in Johannesburg. They needed it in Cape Town.
The pilot answered on the first ring. “This is Kirk.”
“Hope you and your first mate got a decent night’s sleep, because you have a long day ahead.”
“Tell me we’re going home.”
“We’re going home.” Inshallah. “Can you meet us in Cape Town this morning?”
“Done. I’ll check the charts, but I think we can be there in two and a half hours, three at most. Quick turn?”
“With any luck. Back to Dulles. You can file the flight plan now. Three passengers.” Wells hoped he wasn’t jinxing himself. But better to do this now, with time, than as they were racing to the airport.
“Who’s the third?”
“Rand Witwans. South African national. Shouldn’t raise any flags.”
“As long as you have his passport number.”
“I do.” Not just the number. The passport itself. Witwans had left it in the bedroom safe at his mansion. His not-so-faithful servant Martin knew the combination.
On the ground, the Audi raced southwest. On Jacob’s phone, the Mercedes turned right, left, right again. It stopped, then doubled back a few seconds later. Wells guessed Frankel was trying to find a safe house he’d never seen before. The Merc made another right and moved slowly south, into an area the map marked as Bellville Lot 3. There it stopped.
The squarish road grid and setting near highways and airport suggested a middle-class suburb. Wells imagined houses set on narrow lots, plenty of residents around to hear a gunfight and call the police. Worse, he and Duto would reach the neighborhood around 9 a.m. Some straggling commuters would still be heading out, along with parents taking their toddlers to day care. All potential victims of stray bullets.
But the location came with positives, too. The executive terminal at Cape Town International was barely ten kilometers down the M10, which the map indicated was a big surface road. Even in traffic, they ought to be able to reach it in under fifteen minutes. Better still, the police had no obvious choke points for roadblocks. Wells and Duto were looking at the human equivalent of smash-and-grab. Go in fast, take Witwans, stuff him in the Audi, dump him on the plane while the police were still making sense of what had happened.
They had a second edge. Martin had told them the night before that Frankel was the only guard watching Witwans. Of course, he might have reinforcements at the safe house, but then why hadn’t they come to Bloemfontein and helped at the mansion? Duberman didn’t have casinos in South Africa, so Wells doubted he had a local guard force. More likely that Salome had sent Frankel down by himself. Then, after the Saudis released her, she must have called him and told him to move Witwans from his mansion to this safe house a thousand kilometers away. The likely reason was that she had figured out that Wells was on his way to South Africa and wanted to hide Witwans from him. Her plan would have worked if not for the GPS tracker on the car, something she couldn’t possibly have expected.
But if Frankel was alone at the mansion, he would have had to make the entire thousand-kilometer drive himself. Witwans had been too drunk to walk, much less drive, the night before, according to Jacob. Frankel would be exhausted. No matter how good they were, exhausted soldiers made mistakes.
With that thought, Wells leaned back in his seat and made himself rest.
Ten minutes after Wells closed his eyes, the G650 carrying Salome went wheels-down at Cape Town International, the first landing of the new day. She’d flown in the darkness over Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, seeing none of them. The flight was smooth, and she’d slept the whole way.
She couldn’t remember her dreams. But she woke with a clear-eyed, cold anger at Wells. Duberman had thrown him a lifeline in Tel Aviv, and he had not just rejected it but sneered at it. She hadn’t understood until then how small-minded Wells was. He couldn’t grasp the strategic catastrophe that would come if Iran built a nuclear weapon. Worse, he lacked the imagination to realize the elegance of the story she and Duberman had told. He was stuck on the fact that they’d lied about the uranium. Of course they had. Human beings lied every day in every conceivable way. Iran had lied about its nuclear program for twenty years.
How had she ever considered Wells her match? He was a more skilled version of the men around her on this plane. A bruiser with a great survival instinct. Nothing more. She would shed no tears when she killed him.
At last, as their jet rolled to a stop, she saw the full significance of the name she’d given herself. The Bible told the tale of Salome, who danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist as her reward. But two millennia had passed. The new Salome didn’t need a man to do her dirty work. She would kill Wells — John the American, John the Troublemaker, John the Muslim—herself.
First, though, she needed to run out the clock. South Africa was seven hours ahead of Washington, where it was now 11:30 p.m. In a half hour, the final day of the President’s deadline would officially begin at the White House. She turned on her phone, found CNN.com reporting that in a speech from the Oval Office three hours before, the President had repeated his deadline. “Iran’s efforts to terrorize the United States by killing innocent civilians and disrupting travel and commerce around the world will fail,” he said. “Our resolve is unshaken. Iran must agree to open its nuclear facilities by midnight tomorrow, or face the consequences.”
The New York Times wrote that the United States planned its first air raids “minutes or hours” after the cutoff passed. A ground invasion would follow “within days,” though of course no one would say exactly when. Military analysts were split over the wisdom of the President’s willingness to invade with a small and lightly armored force, instead of the massive armies it had mustered in Iraq. Whole new way of fighting. If it works, it’ll give the United States options all over the world, one retired three-star said. But if it doesn’t, we’ll lose more thousands of men. In a week.