Twelve Days (21 page)

“Hallo?” The voice was thirty-five years rougher than Shafer remembered, but the accent was unmistakable.

“Joost.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Ellis Shafer. We knew each other back in Kinshasa.”

“I never lived in Kinshasa.”

Shafer wondered if he had the wrong man. But no. Old spy habits died hard. “Come on, Joost. Remember that party you threw, Christmas,
you brought in the witch to cast spells on us? Betty Nye, she hid in the closet. Orson had to drag her out.” Orson Nye had been Shafer’s first chief of station.

Joost laughed. “Okay, then. I remember. Where is Orson these days?”

“Nursing home in Virginia. Alzheimer’s.”

“That is unfortunate.”

Shafer had forgotten how Afrikaners talked, these oddly flat statements. “Sure is. I need to see you, Joost.”

“Where are you?”

“I can be in Henderson tonight.”

“Ellis—”

“It’s not about back then, Joost. I’m hoping you can help me find something.”

Joost went silent. Shafer had only pay-phone static for company. He wondered if he’d pushed too hard, lost the old man.

“I’ve left all that behind.”

“I swear. Nothing to be worried about.”

“Then I look forward to seeing you tonight.”

—

Henderson was on the outskirts of Vegas, four hundred miles down I-15 from Provo. Shafer decided to stick to the Regal instead of flying out of Salt Lake, a way to avoid using credit cards and the TSA.

Still, as the mile markers rolled by and the Buick’s gauges rose toward red, Shafer wished he’d splurged for the
second-
cheapest car on the lot. The ninety-point checklist at Great Deals Used Cars didn’t seem to include the engine. Shafer turned the Regal’s heat to high to relieve the radiator and kept the speedometer steady at fifty-three. Anything beat blowing the engine in the Utah desert.

The six-hour trip took eight hours. But finally Shafer knocked on the door of Joost’s house in Henderson. A tidy ranch in a tidy subdivision, as far from the chaos of Kinshasa as Shafer could imagine. The Regal
had cooled after sunset. Shafer believed it might even survive the return trip north.

The door swung wide open. Joost looked surprisingly like the man Shafer had known a generation before. Gray hair and age spots notwithstanding, he held himself ramrod-straight, ready to head upriver into the heart of darkness.

“Joost. You look good.”

“So do you.” To Shafer’s surprise, Joost opened his arms and wrapped him up. “Come, come.”

Joost’s living room was covered with pictures of Joost and a stout Hispanic woman maybe twenty years younger. She definitely hadn’t been his wife in Kinshasa. Shafer vaguely remembered that woman as tall and blond. “Is that—”

“Janneke died in 2005. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Linda was her nurse. She thinks I was a mining engineer over there.”

Now Shafer understood why Joost had been wary of his call. “She’s out tonight?”

“She plays poker with the tourists once a week. You’d be surprised how much she wins. Sit, please. If you’d like a drink—” On the coffee table Joost had set out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a bowl of ice. “I don’t drink much these days, but I thought tonight. Just a taste.”

“Please.”

Joost poured them two shallow drinks. “Cheers.”

“It’s good to see you, Joost.”

And it was. Not because Joost had been a good intelligence officer, or even a good man. He’d had a long-running affair with a secretary at the Dutch embassy, if Shafer remembered right. But Joost had kept his promises, a rare trait in their business. In any case, seeing him offered a more intimate version of a college reunion, a reminder that everyone was headed the same way.

“You’re still working, Ellis?”

“For now.”

“Can you believe Zaire is even worse now than it was back then?”

“We didn’t exactly leave them a winning hand.”

“Always this excuse. They’ve been independent fifty years now. Time to take responsibility for themselves. I remember you saying something like that to one of the big men. You were never afraid to say what you thought. Though you must have known after a few months that you were wasting your breath.”

Story of my life.

“Worst that could happen, they send me back to Langley, I stop getting malaria.”

“You remember the time when Mobutu’s secretary called you in, that crazy one who drove the pink Rolls-Royce—”

For an hour, they talked about nothing but the past.

“So,” Shafer said finally. “There was something I wanted to ask you about.”

Joost tapped his wrist. “Now we come to the point.”

“We can talk all night.”

“Please, Ellis. You didn’t come all this way to reminisce about Mobutu.”

Shafer poured them both fresh splashes of whiskey.

“Were you ever involved with the nuclear stuff?”

“Our program? So, so, so.” All one word:
sososo.
“No.”

“Joost, I promise, I’m not here officially. I’m not fishing to get you in trouble.”

“You see the life I live, Ellis. I don’t want reporters at the door.”

Shafer waited.

Joost sipped his drink and seemed to decide he had to give Shafer something. “Look, South Africa isn’t like the States. Inside the apparatus, we all knew each other.”

“After ’77, it wasn’t any great secret,” Shafer said, hoping to encourage him.

In 1977, South Africa had been close to conducting an underground nuclear test when the United States discovered its preparations.

“One of the scientists, a little man named Alfred, he’s dead now, we grew up together in the Transvaal. When I came back from Zaire, he told me bits and pieces.”

“You were working with Israel.”

“Yes. The Jews didn’t care about the sanctions. People hated them even more than us. We had money and uranium ore. They had the scientists. We traded.”

“And the enrichment project succeeded.”

“These stories you see now that we had six nuclear weapons, that’s an exaggeration. Cubs trying to be lions, we say. But we did make enough for one.”

“This was in the eighties.”

“Yes. I can’t remember exactly which year.”

“And what happened to it? That highly enriched uranium.”

Joost poured himself another whiskey, a big one this time, and offered the bottle to Shafer, who covered his glass.

“I don’t suppose all these questions have anything to do with what you found in Istanbul.”

“You know I can’t answer that.” Shafer already regretted telling the story to Evan.

“For what it’s worth, the stuff we produced was very pure. Just like the uranium you found over there.”

“You’re sure.”

“It was a point of pride.”

“So the stuff is still in a vault in Pretoria?” Shafer couldn’t believe finding it would be this easy. Wells and Duto had gone all over the world, and Shafer was about to get the answer.

“Of course not. We wouldn’t have left it for the ANC. It’s not even in Africa anymore.”

Shafer’s elation vanished. “So where?”

“Where do you think? We sent it to the Jews as a present. Why not? At least they’d helped us.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

Another brick wall. If the South Africans had given up the uranium twenty years before, the Israelis had no doubt long since blended it into a nuclear warhead now pointing at Iran.

Still, he’d come too far not to finish his questions.

“How much HEU was it, anyway?”

“A bit more than fifteen kilos.”

Shafer hadn’t expected such a precise answer. “That’s oddly specific.”

“Because fifteen was always the amount we needed to reach for a bomb. The scientists celebrated for a week when they reached it, my friend told me. But then the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry had a big fight and de Klerk halted the program.”

“Because you knew what was coming.”

“What could we do with it? Blow up Soweto?” The giant slum southwest of Johannesburg. “The joke was that it would look better after.”

“So the program stopped at fifteen kilos. One bomb.”

“Fifteen-point-three sticks with me, for some reason. But it’s all gone now. Ask your friends in Tel Aviv.”

“Did Israel pay for it? How did you arrange the transfer?”

Joost splashed more Johnnie Walker into his glass. He seemed to have forgotten his promise of “just a taste.
”
“Now you’ve dug too deep for me. You need someone closer to the program. But none of them came to the States.”

“The planes go both ways. If I wanted to chase this, who would I ask?”

“A lot of the scientists, they’re gone now. But the bugger who ran the program at the end is still around. Real jackal, that one.”

Joost drained the last of his whiskey. It seemed to hit him all at once.
He closed his eyes, flicked his tongue across his lips. “Were we ever friends, Ellis?”

Shafer flashed back to a long night at the British embassy, Joost drunkenly wrapping an arm around the ambassador’s wife, whispering in her ear until Janneke peeled him away.

All these years later, he was still a sloppy drunk.

“Sure we were.” The truth could wait. Forever.

“How come you never looked me up until now?”

“I wanted to leave you in peace. But this is too important. So? This jackal who ran the program?”

“What about him?”

“His name, Joost. What’s his
name?”

FIVE DAYS . . .

MOSCOW

A
ll anyone needed to know about the new Russia was that Lubyanka was still open.

Sure, the Soviet Union had crumbled a generation before, and Russia was now theoretically a democracy. Sure
,
the
very name Lubyanka sent a shiver through Russians of a certain age. The building was synonymous with the bad old days, secret trials and one-way trips to Siberia. No one knew how many prisoners had been tortured to death in its basement cells. For generations, it had served as the headquarters of the Committee on State Security, the
Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti.

The KGB.

The KGB had vanished with the USSR, replaced by the more polite-sounding Federal Security Service, known in English as the FSB. Yet the FSB was in no hurry to leave Lubyanka. Moving was such a headache. Lubyanka was a beautiful building, conveniently located just a few blocks from the Kremlin.

Besides, many senior FSB officers had a more positive perspective on the KGB than the average Russian. After all, they were KGB veterans themselves. As was Vladimir Putin. He wasn’t about to punish his old
buddies. Putin and his oligarchs had more to lose from a revolution than Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet
apparatchiks
ever had.

So, by any name, the secret police stayed in business. And inside Lubyanka’s walls, the cruelties continued.

—

The FSB held Wells at Domodedovo through the evening. The airport cell was big enough for a dozen men, but besides Wells, its only occupant was a baby-faced Southeast Asian. Wells tried English and Arabic on the guy, but he only shook his head and pointed to his belly. Wells guessed he was a drug mule. His skin was waxy and soft, like he was melting from the inside out.

Wells had endured more unpleasant cells. This one was warm, quiet, and windowless, a tonic for his concussion. The fog in his mind lifted and the black spots in his vision disappeared. He was left to consider the wreckage of this mission. Had Custer felt this way when he rode over the hill at Little Bighorn? Wells had traveled all over the world and earned only a broken finger and a shaken brain for his troubles.

He hadn’t always won before, but he had never felt so outclassed.

He tried to tilt his anger to Salome and Duberman. But after a few minutes, the revenge fantasy lost its appeal. He changed his tack, closed his eyes, found his favorite Quranic verses. He didn’t believe for a minute that Muhammad had received messages straight from Allah. Yet he sometimes sensed divine inspiration in the text. Not just in the obvious places, the rhythms and melodies of famous Surahs like
The Overturning,
with its bizarrely poetic promise of the apocalypse:

When the sun is overturned

When the stars fall away

When the mountains are moved

When the ten-month pregnant camels are abandoned

When the beasts of the wild are herded together

When the seas are boiled over

When the souls are coupled . . .

But contradictions and digressions filled the Quran’s lesser chapters, verses that sounded sweet in Arabic but could barely be translated into any other language. Only a truly confident God would allow such malarkey in His revealed word.
I command you
to believe no matter what I say . . .

Wells slept. He must have, for the jangle of metal against metal stirred him. He opened his eyes to see a man in a windbreaker at the bars. Behind him, a digital clock read
00:23.
He waved Wells over, cuffed his hands behind his back through the bars, slid the cell door open.

“Bye,” the Asian kid said.

“Good luck.” Though Wells wasn’t even sure what
luck
would mean for the guy. He might be better off having the package break inside him, a brief euphoria before he tumbled into the void.

“Bye-bye-bye.” Like a toddler who knew only one word.

Wells’s captor tugged his shoulder. Wells looked at him. “You’re FSB, yes?”

“
Da
.”

“How ’bout you tell me what’s going on?”

“Lubyanka.”

The word even
sounded
cold. For a moment, Wells considered trying to make a break. But the idea was beyond foolish. He didn’t speak Russian, didn’t have money or a car waiting. He wouldn’t clear the airport before they shot him down. He would get out of this mess with his wits, or not at all.
And Duto and Shafer think I’m just the muscle.

They brought him to the center of the city in style, a big Mercedes. The ride took twenty minutes, the Merc’s blue light clearing a path better than any siren. Even as Wells was still getting his bearings, they reached a plaza dominated by a single massive building on its northeastern side.

“Lubyanka,” the FSB agent said again.

“I get the tour? Excellent. Didn’t think that was part of the package.”

The guy patted Wells’s cheek, the touch more menacing than any punch.

The Mercedes stopped at a manned gate on the building’s north side, away from the square. As they waited for the guard to examine the driver’s identification, Wells found himself
wanting
to be inside. He was tired of the uncertainty of this twilight struggle. If they planned to torture him because they believed he was a spy, or a troublemaker, or just because they could, so be it. Give him a battle to fight.

His wish came true. The gate came up. The Merc rolled down a long curved ramp and stopped before a steel door where two men waited, pale guys with meaty hands and crumpled noses. A heavyweight welcoming committee. They yanked Wells out, shoved him inside, down a long staircase that ended in a narrow corridor lit with dim red bulbs, like a predigital photo lab. Wells figured he had to be fifty feet below street level. With no natural light or sound to anchor him, he would quickly lose any sense of time. They could destroy his sleep cycle in a day or two just by playing with the lights.

A woman stood at the end of the corridor. For a moment, Wells thought he was looking at Salome. But when the guards brought him closer, he realized his mistake. This woman had the same narrow hips, the same confident stance. But she was older, with a pinched nose, a wattled neck. She pulled open the door behind her.

“Ready for a shower?” she said in English.

The guards dragged him through the doorway into a white-tiled room about fifteen feet square, lit with standard white bulbs. A dozen showerheads were mounted from the ceiling. A camera and speaker hung in each corner.

The lead guard turned, gave him a right-left-right combination to the stomach. Wells doubled over, stared at the narrow tiles at his feet. He caught his breath, tried to straighten. But the second guard grabbed
his cuffed hands, pulled them up and back, driving Wells’s head down toward the floor. Over the years, his shoulders had been dislocated more times than he could remember. They loosened in their sockets. The pain arced like a firework about to burst. But just before they popped out, the cuffs came off. His hands were free. Wells needed a moment to realize that the guard had unlocked him.

Wells didn’t question why. Instinct took over. He straightened up, trying to spin around, get in a quick right hook. Before he even got his arm all the way up, the first guard kicked out his legs, sending him sprawling. The fall didn’t hurt much, but it was humiliating. As he pushed himself up to go after them, they walked out of the room, locked the door. Perfect choreography. Wells wondered how many times they had pulled this routine.

“Remove your clothes,” a man said, a voice so empty it might have been computer-generated.

“I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“Five seconds.”

“Let me call my embassy. Please.
Spasibo.”
The pose of confused tourist was a weak play, but he didn’t see other options.

The room went dark. And then water drummed his head, soaked his clothes. It was frigid at first. Wells moved to a corner, but the room had been designed so that the showerheads covered it. The water warmed to lukewarm. Then comfortable. Wells didn’t need an engineering degree to figure that in a couple of minutes it would be scalding.

He pulled off his shirt, stepped out of his jeans. A psychological ploy to make him follow their orders without violence, show him that they were in complete control. And a good one. He doubted they would boil him to death in here if he refused to comply. But he couldn’t take the chance.

As he finished undressing, the water again went frigid. He closed his eyes, saw Afghanistan. For months on end he had bathed only in the bone-chilling streams that flowed down the sides of the Kush. The memory relaxed him, and maybe his captors saw that the cold wasn’t bothering him, because the water stopped quickly and the lights came up.

Wells forced himself to remember that the FSB had no reason to keep him for long. Moscow was two hours ahead of Frankfurt, eight ahead of the East Coast. At this moment, Duto and Shafer thought they were doing Wells a favor by letting him get a good night’s sleep in Germany. But when they realized he hadn’t reached Frankfurt, they would call Moscow. Duto still had FSB connections. Wells would spend no more than a day here. Two at most.

He hoped.

—

The two big guys stepped into the shower. With his hands free, Wells considered taking a pop. But clothes—and shoes—offered a huge advantage in close quarters combat. A boot strike would break his unprotected feet. Other body parts were even more vulnerable.

He let them cuff him.

They led him to an unmarked room at the other end of the hall. The woman waited inside, sitting behind a big and heavily scarred oak desk that looked strangely out of place in here. A relic dating back to the KGB, maybe even the Cheka. There were no other chairs. Wells had no choice but to stand naked in front of her. Water puddled at his feet. Goose pimples covered his arms and legs. He forced himself to stand straight, make no effort to hide himself. Let her look. Her smirk widened. She barked a command and the guards turned him around as slowly as a pig on a spit.

“Let me go,” Wells said.

“Shut up.” Her English was perfect, her tone as dismissive as a Valley Girl’s. He wondered if she’d spent time in California. “You must know we have a hundred ways to hurt you in this place, no marks. You leave, complain, no one cares. A crazy American telling lies about Russia. What do you think we were doing when we had you at the airport? We checked
with Moscow station, they say you’re not one of them. Not listed. Not NOC.”

The letters stood for non-official cover. Most CIA case officers operated under diplomatic cover. They worked out of embassies and had immunity from arrest and prosecution. Only a few worked without that protection. Even they usually could count on their stations for help when they got in serious trouble. The FSB had its own operatives under non-official cover in the United States, so both sides tried to keep from playing too rough.

“NOC?” Wells said. “What’s that?”

She barked in Russian, and the guard to Wells’s right rabbit-punched him in the kidney. The pain spread up, slow-cooking his viscera and ribs. Wells forced himself to stay steady.

“Next time, I tell him to kick you in those big balls of yours.”

Wells nodded. He wasn’t sure he could speak. These guys did maximum damage with minimum effort.

“You play games with me, this takes until morning. I don’t want that. I want to get home, turn on the television, go to sleep. And you, I see even from the way you took that last punch, you’re a professional. Please, treat me with respect.”

She stared at him with her lumpy black eyes, almost daring him to argue. But she’d made her point. His best bet was to answer her questions as honestly as possible.

“Da.”

“Good.” She fetched the suitcase that Boris had given him from under her desk, pulled his passports. “Which is real?”

“Both real, both USG issued.”

“Is either your real name?”

“Wells.”

She flipped through it. “John Wells. Where were you born?”

“What it says. Hamilton, Montana.”

“But you use the other also. In the name Roger Bishop.”

“Yes.”

“Are these your only passports?”

“The only ones I’ve used recently.”

“Good.”

Wells didn’t know if she was complimenting him for his honesty or herself for having found such a valuable prisoner. She reached into the desk for a pen and a tiny notebook, scratched out a note. “You come to Russia when?”

“Two days ago.”

“Where did you arrive?”

“Here. On my way to Volgograd.”

“Why?”

“To meet Mikhail Buvchenko.”

Another quick note.

“From where?”

“Saudi Arabia via Istanbul.” No reason to lie. She wouldn’t even need to check flight manifests. The passport stamps told the tale.

“Saudi Arabia. You are Muslim?”

“I am.”

“This is very unusual. A white American becomes Muslim.”

He didn’t answer. She made another note. Wells wondered if she’d press him, but instead she said only, “Fine. Volgograd. You met Buvchenko?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Overnight. His men brought me directly from my hotel. We had dinner, and then he asked me to stay at his house.” Wells left out the tale of Peter the horse. “He didn’t give me much choice, so I stayed. Then, yesterday morning, he brought me back to Volgograd.”

“Where the police come to your room.” Showing him she knew everything that had happened, he shouldn’t bother to lie.

“They said I was carrying drugs.”

“Were you?”

“No. I don’t know why they had that idea. They searched the hotel and didn’t find any.”

He wondered if she’d ask about Salome, but she didn’t.

“Then they put you on a plane to Moscow.”

“The lead detective, Boris, he told me I needed to leave Russia. I didn’t argue.”

“You have much misfortune on this trip. People accusing you of drugs for no reason. The FSB comes for you.”

“I’ve had better weeks.”

She stood up, leaned across the desk, eyed him tip to toe. Wells couldn’t help thinking of the witch in the gingerbread house.
Good enough to eat, my dearies.
“So why all this travel? You are businessman? You do oil?”