of electrical tape. He made sure to leave Kowalski’s nostrils open so he wouldn’t suffocate. Then Wells clapped a hand over Kowalski’s nostrils and squeezed them shut. He counted aloud to ten, nice and slow, before letting go.
“Don’t forget to breathe.” And with that, Wells ran.
IT WAS 3:29. Exley was sitting in the minivan. “Got your helmet?”
Exley grabbed her motorcycle helmet from the van and they ran for the bike. Three minutes later, they were at the corner of Newton Lane and Main Street, the Honda purring smoothly beneath them. A police car turned past, its emergency lights flashing, but no siren and not speeding. The chief had kept his word, even given Wells a couple of extra minutes.
Route 27 was empty and quiet, and once he’d picked through the traffic lights of the Hamptons and reached the highway, Wells wound down the throttle of the CB1000 and watched the speedometer creep up and the highway unspool before him. Exley wrapped her arms around him and gripped him tight, from fear or joy or both, and he was as happy as he knew how to be.
Only when he saw the red-and-blue lights of a police cruiser ahead in the distance did he slow. An hour later, they were on the outskirts of Queens, the traffic on the Long Island Expressway just starting to pick up with the morning’s earliest commuters. Wells pulled the Honda off the highway and they found the Paris Hotel, not particularly clean but happy to take cash.
ROOM 223 OF THE PARIS had a faded gray carpet and a soft moist smell.
“Nice,” Exley said. She poked at the rabbit ears atop the television. “I haven’t seen these in a while.”
“We’ll always have Paris,” Wells said.
“We did it. Am I allowed to say it was fun, John? Because it was.”
“Sure it was.”
Exley settled onto the mattress, ignoring the spring poking at her butt. “I can’t believe we’re already back in New York City.”
“Told you the moto comes in handy sometimes.”
“You have to slow down, John. Didn’t you feel me hitting you?”
“Thought you wanted me to go faster.”
Exley couldn’t believe they were fighting about this, after what they’d just pulled off, but they were. “Such a child. If you’re gonna get us killed, do it for a halfway decent reason. You don’t have to prove to me you have a big dick.”
“Well, that’s comforting.” Wells lay next to Exley, his face almost touching hers. The bed sank under him. “Think this is one mattress or a bunch stitched together?”
Exley had to laugh. Wells could be impossible, and more than once lately she’d thought that he planned to push his luck until he wound up in a wooden box. But she couldn’t pretend she didn’t love him. “So what did he say? Kowalski?”
“Not much.” Wells recounted the conversation. “But there was one thing. He said he was getting paid out of a bank in Macao. Which doesn’t really make sense. Of course, the money could have been coming into that bank from anywhere.”
“Think he was telling the truth?”
Wells propped himself up on an elbow and stroked Exley’s hair. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t know who I was, but he knew no matter what, I couldn’t use it in court. He wanted me out of there and he didn’t know how much I knew. Honesty was his best bet.”
“He’s going to come after you. Us. In a way, he was flaunting what he’d done.”
“If he’s smart, he’ll let it go, be happy I didn’t shoot him. He can’t track us anyway. And if he does figure out it was us…”
Exley understood. They were untouchable. Or so Wells thought.
“Why did you tape him up that way at the end, John? He was angry already.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She waited, but Wells was silent, his breathing steady, and she knew he wouldn’t say anything more. “Roll over,” she said.
He turned his big body and Exley snuggled up and ran her hands around him. She pushed up his shirt and touched the raised red scar high on his back. He sighed softly, happily, and reached back for her. She closed her eyes and kissed his back.
“So who do you think was paying for those guys?” he said.
She lifted her mouth from his skin. “Don’t know. And that’s real money. A hundred and twenty million.”
“But think on it. We spend a couple billion bucks a month in Afghanistan. For a fraction of that, somebody’s making it a lot harder for us. Not a bad investment.”
“Syria. Libya.”
“Iran?”
“Maybe.”
Wells sat up and leaned against the bed’s battered headboard. Exley traced her hand over his chest, the muscles solid as iron.
“You close on the mole?” he said.
“We’d be closer if I hadn’t come up here. But we’ll get him soon. Shubai gave us enough. In a way it doesn’t matter, though. He’s already done the damage. We don’t have one Chinese agent we can trust.”
“Not a good time for it either,” Wells said.
“No. Any day now, China and Iran are about to announce something big. They aren’t even denying it. There’s all this trouble in Taiwan. And Shubai says there’s a power struggle in Beijing. Says the hard-liners want to prove how tough they are, that we have to stand up to them, that showing any weakness will just make them push us harder.” Exley closed her eyes and felt weariness overtake her.
“You think Beijing might have been supporting the Talibs through Kowalski?”
“I wondered too when you said Macao. But why risk a war with us?”
“None of it makes sense,” Wells said. “The Chinese make this deal with Iran. They betray the Drafter. It’s like they want a fight.”
“Yes and no. They’re coming at us sideways. They’re hoping we overreact.”
“But that’s not what Shubai says, right? He says they want us to back down so that the whole world will see how much more powerful they’re getting.”
“What would you do, John? If you were running the show? Push back hard on the Chinese or let things simmer?”
He considered. “I don’t know. We can’t let them push us around, and it sounds like this guy Shubai knows what he’s talking about. But there’s something we can’t see. Hate to go to war by accident.”
Wells didn’t bother to ask what she thought. Without another word, he rolled onto her, his size surprising her, as it always did. He enveloped her, his mouth on hers, wet open-mouthed kisses. He never asked permission, she thought. He never needed to. His big hands gripped her waist, then one was unbuttoning her jeans, the other pulling them off her hips. And as quickly as that, she forgot she was tired.
24
LARRY YOUNG, THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY, felt the buzz in the press-room as he strode to the podium. These afternoon briefings were usually inside baseball, watched by a few thousand political junkies. Not today. Today Young would be live from Los Angeles to Boston, Tokyo to Moscow. The Chinese and the Iranians had certainly gotten the world’s attention that morning.
Young waited for the cameras to stop clicking before he read the statement, approved forty-five minutes
