Twelve Days (19 page)

It’s here. Why can’t your idiot dog find it?

Because it’s not here!

It’s here.

They tried to talk to Wells, but he pointed at his ears and they seemed to believe him. They patted him down, like the dog wouldn’t have sniffed the stuff on him. Then they tore up the room. Pulled open the drawers, flipped over the bed, cut his bag open, and found his second passport. The discovery made them happy, but not for long.

After a half hour, two cops pulled Wells up, hustled him into the empty room across the hall, threw him on the bed. They were big men, with pale skin and dull blue eyes. They looked at him like they were waiting for an order to work him over. Wells took limited comfort in the fact that it hadn’t come. The police weren’t one hundred percent sure about him.

The man with the glasses walked in. Up close his suit was cheap and his shoes scuffed. He looked like a Depression-era traveling salesman. No way was he FSB. Wells’s fears had been right. Salome and Buvchenko must have used a local trafficker to tip the police—
American drug trafficker in 306, bring a dog, all the
proof you need is in his room.
They found the perfect way to put Wells in a hole without having to call in chits in Moscow.

He tapped his ear. “You can hear now.”

“Yes.” Barely. Static still filled Wells’s ears. The cop sounded like an FM station disappearing behind a hill.

“Which one?” The Russian held up his passports.

Wells pointed at the one with his real name.

“John Wells. You smuggle drugs?”

“I don’t know who told you that, but he’s wrong.”

“You smuggle drugs.” Not a question this time. “Heroin.”

“No.”

“You know the penalty we have in Russia for drug smuggling?”

“I came here to meet Mikhail Buvchenko. You know who I mean?”

“Of course I know him. He lives in the country. Nothing to do with this.”

“I went to his mansion last night to talk to him. Not about drugs. I said something he didn’t like. I guess today he got mad, called you.”

“He didn’t call me.” The guy flipped through Wells’s second passport, the one in the name of Roger Bishop. “This is yours also.”

“Yes.”

Wells wondered if the cop would ask why he had two passports, but he was stuck on the drug angle. “Last month you go to Guatemala. Panama. Thailand. Turkey.”

“Looking for someone.”

“For cocaine. Heroin. Now you come here, spread your poison.”

“Sir. May I ask you your name?”

The man pulled his wallet, flipped it open to show his police identification. “Boris Nemkov.”

Despite the hole he was in, Wells couldn’t help but remember a line from the second season of
The Wire
:
Why always Boris?

“You’re a detective.”

“I am head of narcotics police for Volgograd oblast.”

A drug cop. An honest one, too, if Wells could trust the cheap suit.

“Don’t you think it’s odd I have two working U.S. passports?”

“Plenty of smugglers have extra passports.”

“The dog in my room, it found nothing.”

“So far.”

“There’s nothing to find.”

“Maybe you see us coming, you hide it. In the cart of the maids. The
trash. I promise, we find it. Then—” Nemkov sliced his hand across his neck and walked out of the room.

Five minutes later, he was back. Scowling. “The longer it takes, the madder I become.”

“I swear on my son’s life. No drugs.”

“All this tells me is that your son means nothing to you.”

Wells felt his temper rise. “I landed in Volgograd yesterday, I came to this hotel, Buvchenko’s men picked me up. I stayed overnight, they dropped me back here. Then you came. Where would I have found these drugs?”

“Don’t talk to me about Buvchenko.” Boris went to the door. He pulled it open, stopped, looked at Wells. “The next time I come back, I have it. Then we take you in. But first I give my men ten minutes alone with you, punishment for wasting my time.” Boris murmured in Russian. The cops laughed. “Tell me now.”

“Nothing to tell.”

Boris shook his head with what seemed to be genuine disappointment and walked out.

Wells thought of Salome, how very wrong he had been about her. Had he tried to convince himself she saw him as anything but an obstacle to her plans? Was he so lonely? So desperate for connection? Maybe she respected him vaguely for his courage, the way the Germans and Russians who had once fought here had respected each other. But even so, they had killed each other without pity or remorse.

An hour passed. Another lost hour, another hour closer to war.

Finally, the door swung open. Nemkov stalked in, tugged a cheap wheeled suitcase, hard-sided gray plastic. Wells stared at it, wondering if it was filled with heroin. He didn’t know if Nemkov was crazy enough to plant evidence on an American he’d never met. Maybe. Any Russian policeman who didn’t take bribes had to be crazy.

“That’s not mine.”

“It is.”

Wells shook his head. Nemkov dropped the suitcase at Wells’s feet. He stood over Wells, tugged at Wells’s left ear like an angry nineteenth-century schoolmaster.

“We found it.”

Wells tried to shake his head, but Nemkov held him fast. Wells couldn’t help feeling the ear-tugging was childish for both sides. Like the detective had decided he was unworthy of a proper beating.

Nemkov said something in Russian. One of the cops went to his knees. Snapped open the clasps and opened the suitcase.

Revealing an empty compartment. Wells looked down at the molded plastic, wondering what he could be missing.

“Where is it?”

It’s nowhere and everywhere. It went to the dick
.
H. E. Roin, born Helmand Province, Afghanistan, died Volgograd, Russia. Poppies to ashes and dust to dust.
Wells’s concussion talking. “Where is what?”

Nemkov pulled harder, twisting Wells sideways. Wells feared the detective might take his ear off. “This whole hotel. My men, they want me to make the evidence. You understand what I mean?”

“Plant it.”

“Prison for you forever. But I don’t do that.”

Nemkov stepped away from Wells, reached behind his back, for a 9-millimeter. First Buvchenko, then Salome’s guard, now this cop. For the third time in eighteen hours, Wells stared at a pistol’s unblinking eye.
Maybe it’s time to think
about your life choices, son.
But Nemkov had to be bluffing. A man who wouldn’t plant evidence wouldn’t shoot a handcuffed prisoner.

Unless his fury ran away with him.

Nemkov stepped around the bed, knelt behind Wells. Wells felt the pistol kiss his neck, the tip of the barrel oddly warm.

“Last time. Where is it?”

This interrogation had gone as far it could. Nemkov would pull the trigger. Or he wouldn’t. For the first time in all his years, Wells
understood the words
death wish.
He was well and truly tired of being so close, of feeling the Reaper creep past, smirking and winking at him. Tired, too, of all the killing he’d done over the years to survive.
Do it, then. Let me rest.

But as quickly as the words came to him, he pushed them away, forced the shameful weakness from his mind. And of course Nemkov didn’t kill him. He grabbed Wells’s cuffed arms and pulled him off the bed.

“This suitcase, it’s yours. I give it to you to replace the bag they cut. You see it’s empty, no trick. I give you back your money.” Nemkov held up the passports. “Even these.”

“Thank you.”

“Now it’s time for you to go. In one hour, there’s a plane to Domodedovo.” The largest of the three airports that served Moscow. “What you do after that is up to you, but I advise you, leave Russia as soon as possible.”

An excellent idea.

—

Nemkov drove Wells to the airport himself, in silence. As they stopped at the terminal, Wells tried to open his door, found it locked. Nemkov reached over, squeezed his wrist.

“Tell me the truth, why you were here?”

“I swear it wasn’t drugs.”

“But the
truth
.” Nemkov shook his head.

Somewhere in his concussion-scrambled mind, Wells wondered if Nemkov wanted to help. And why not ask? “Detective—”

“Colonel.”

“Colonel. I’m sorry. The hotel has surveillance cameras, yes?”

“Of course.”

“If your men can find a shot of a man and a woman leaving together a few minutes before you arrived—”

“A few?”

“Five or less. Send me that picture, I promise I’ll tell you the whole story when it’s over. Whatever happens.”

“You
promise
?”

“And what I did with the drugs they tried to plant on me. You know, the ones you and your dog and the whole 23rd Precinct couldn’t find.” The concussion talking for sure. For a moment, Wells feared he had said too much, that Nemkov would drive him back to the hotel and start the beating anew. Nemkov seemed to be trying to decide, too. But finally he nodded.

“And if I find them, what? You want me to arrest them? Use the police for your work?”

“They’re probably already gone from Russia. I just want you to email me the picture.” Wells gave one of his new email addresses. Having an image of her to show other people might make the trip worthwhile.

“If I decide to help you, it’s not for pay, you understand. It’s for—” Nemkov opened his door and spat onto the pavement.

—

As soon as the cop had pulled away, Wells emptied his new suitcase and ran his hands over the plastic, feeling for compartments where Nemkov might have hidden drugs or weapons. But he didn’t expect to find anything, and he didn’t. The suitcase was what it seemed, a cheap Samsonite knockoff, its walls too thin for any secret panels.

After security, he found an Internet kiosk, booked himself a business-class seat on a 5:40 p.m. Lufthansa flight, Domodedovo to Frankfurt. Then he emailed Shafer and Duto:
B no help. LH 1447. Talk from Germany.
He
needed Shafer to know where to look for him in case he vanished again. Salome would hear soon enough that Wells had beaten her trap. When she did, she would have Buvchenko call his friends at the FSB. How fast the FSB sounded an alarm for Wells would depend on the story Buvchenko told. But Wells would be at risk until the moment that Lufthansa plane left Russian airspace.

The Transaero flight to Moscow was mostly empty. He settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, imagined how he would relax when this mission was done. Hiking the Grand Canyon. Buying a big new motorcycle and ramrodding it across the Montana plains at a buck-ten. Seeing Evan suit up for the Aztecs, a pleasure he’d never had.

Daydreaming had its dangers. In Afghanistan, Wells had seen that men who relied too much on fantasy for comfort rarely lasted long. But after the madness of the last day, he needed a few minutes of relief. Better yet, a good night’s sleep. When he landed in Frankfurt, he would take a cab to the most efficient, boring hotel in the city. He would pull the shades and close his eyes. And he would wake ready for war.

—

As the Transaero 737 touched down on the Domodedovo tarmac, a concussive fog crept back into his brain. Wells blamed the change in air pressure. Black spots flitted across his eyes as he trudged through the massive steel-and-glass terminal that connected Domodedovo’s domestic and international wings. A suicide bomber in the international arrivals hall had killed thirty-four people here in 2011. Now explosives-sniffing dogs and teams of commandos in spiffy blue-and-black camouflage paced the check-in counters.

At this hour, the airport was heavy on business travelers, well-dressed Europeans who looked relieved to be leaving. A high school ski team waited to check in for an Alitalia flight to Milan, the children of Moscow’s elite, girls wearing diamond bracelets flirting with boys in Prada jackets. Wells watched the world through Saran wrap. His muzzy head accounted for only part of the disconnect. He couldn’t help remembering the way Salome had touched him. Then walked away to leave him to his fate. He didn’t know what she’d been trying to tell him, or why that moment seemed so much more real than this one.

He forced himself to move, find the Lufthansa counters. No surprise, they were quieter and more organized than the rest of the terminal. He
printed out his boarding pass and joined the line for border control. Fifteen minutes later, an unsmiling woman waved him forward to her kiosk, where she took his passport with the practiced boredom displayed by immigration agents everywhere.

She flipped through it. “Mr. Wells.”

“That’s me.” He’d had to use his real passport for this trip, since Buvchenko arranged the visa.

“This is not a conversation, yes? If I have a question, I ask.”
Stupid Americans always think they need to talk.

“Right. I mean, was that a question? Did I need to answer?” Wells laying it on too thick now. She put a finger to her lips, ran the passport through her scanner.

The moment of truth. If Buvchenko had reached the FSB, she’d ask him to wait a moment, then pull him out of line.
A few questions in our office, nothing to worry about—

“You’ve traveled a lot lately, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am. Work.”

“And for this trip you stayed in Russia only two days. Why?”

“I met a business associate in Volgograd. The meeting’s done—”

“Fine. I see.” She typed away on her keyboard. “There’s a problem.”

Here it comes.

“A business associate, you said?”

“Yes.”

“But you came on a tourist visa.”

Wells didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d liked
business associate
,
thought it sounded slick. Professional. “I’m sorry about that. My associate arranged the visa. Short notice.”

She pecked away on her computer. “I’m noting this in our files. Do you plan to come back to Russia?”

“Of course, yes—”

“Then make sure you have the proper visa. Next time the penalty is serious.” She shoved his passport back to him.

“I’m so sorry—”

She waved him on. “Next.”

—

He had half an hour before the flight boarded. He sucked down four Tylenols, a Coke, a liter of water, trying to ratchet his brain back into gear. As the minutes ticked down, he sat two gates from his own and watched for any sign that the FSB was looking for him, uniformed or plainclothes police, hushed conversations between the Lufthansa agents.