“Okay. You’re in charge, John. You’re the President. What do you do?”
“I go public.”
“And when there’s riots in Pakistan? And the nukes go missing?”
“We have to do something. We can’t let the ISI get away with murder.”
“What if we could do something? What if you could do something?”
TOO LATE, WELLS UNDERSTOOD that Duto had been leading him down this path all along. The floor seemed to twist under his feet. Was this what Duto thought he’d become?
He put a hand on Shafer’s skinny shoulder. “Did you know about this? ”
“Can’t swear to God, because I’m an atheist, but no.”
“I’m going to forget you ever asked me this,” Wells said to Duto.
Duto sipped his champagne. “You said it yourself. The ISI, they’re getting away with murder. And Tafiq is at the heart of it.”
“It doesn’t even make sense. We have a deal with him. Why would you want to get rid of him now?”
“We’d rather have someone we can trust running the ISI.”
“And killing the guy in charge is the way to get there? No. I’m not an assassin, Vinny. I came here to quit. My stuff’s packed. I’m getting out of this swamp.”
Wells wasn’t sure whether Duto was testing him or this offer was genuine. He no longer cared. More than anything, he wanted out of this office, out of this whole sick business.
“No problem. You’d have to quit. You couldn’t be connected with us at all, not for this.”
“Good-bye, Vinny.” Wells looked at Shafer. “If you had any guts, you’d come, too.”
Wells turned away, walked out of Duto’s office, slammed the big wooden door behind him.
But he couldn’t get away fast enough to escape the director’s last words. “Don’t kid yourself. You’ll be back.”
And the Lord said to Moses, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will assign it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my family for their thoughtful criticism; to Neil, Ivan, Leslie, Tom, and everyone else at Putnam and Random House UK for all their hard work making these books real; to Heather and Matthew for their advice; to Larry and the Times for keeping me around, and to Deirdre for catching the mistakes even the copy editors miss. Most important, thanks to Jackie, my lovely wife, partner, and friend.
And, finally, thanks to every reader who came this far. John Wells wouldn’t exist without you. As always, e-mail me with comments, suggestions, or criticism at alexberensonauthor@gmail.com. With the volume of e-mail I’m now getting, I can’t promise to respond to every note, but I pledge to read them all.