him.
“It’s not surprising, given the severity of the initial injury. We have it controlled now, but we had to give her more blood.”
“Can I see her?” Wells was alone now. The nurses had moved Randy, David, and Jessica to a separate waiting area.
“Certainly not tonight. Tonight she rests. Possibly tomorrow.”
WELLS LEFT A FEW MINUTES LATER, sitting in the back of an ambulance, the only sure way to get through the media cordon. He emerged at his house to find three Suburbans parked in front. Two men sat inside each of the SUVs, peering out. Two more men were on the porch, all wearing Kevlar flak jackets. Agency guards. Michaels had told Wells to expect them. Wells supposed he understood the logic. But he hated the idea of having the house he shared with Exley turned into a fortified garrison.
The guard nearest the front door raised a hand as Wells inserted his key into the lock. “Mr. Wells. Leon Allam,” he said. He raised his identification.
“Good to meet you,” Wells said.
“Mind if we come in with you? Just to be sure everything’s cool.” Allam had a soldier’s tight haircut, and his Kevlar looked ridiculous over his suit and tie. Wells tried not to dislike the guy. He was just doing his job.
“I’m sure it’s fine.” Wells turned the key in the lock. “I’ll holler if I need you.”
“Yes, sir. But I’d be a lot more comfortable if I could come in.”
Wells felt his temper rise. “You asking or ordering?”
“I’m asking.”
“In that case, you can come in. As long as you and your men agree to trade in those flak jackets for bulletproof vests that’ll fit under your suits. No need to scare the neighbors.”
Allam paused. “All right, sir. If Mr. Michaels agrees.”
“And stop saying ‘sir.’ I can’t stand it. I’m John.”
Wells turned the lock in the door and Allam grabbed his arm.
“I’d like to go in first, secure the entry.”
“Secure the entry. By all means.” Wells restrained himself from pointing out that anyone inside the house would be well aware by now that they were coming in. He stepped out of the way and Allam pushed open the door and jumped inside.
“Secure!” he yelled a few seconds later.
“Where do they get you guys?” Wells murmured to himself.
A few minutes later, with Allam downstairs, Wells stepped into the shower and hit himself with a blast of frigid water. He wanted to hurt himself, run in the dark until his knees burned and his feet blistered, but the shower would have to do for now. He needed to catch up on the investigation. He dressed, packed a kit bag. He would sleep at Langley until Exley came home. He couldn’t bear to spend his nights in this empty house, with her gone and the guards outside.
He refused Allam’s offer of a ride in an armored Suburban and instead took his little Impreza out from the garage. But Allam insisted that the Suburbans ride shotgun front and back, their emergency lights flashing as the convoy rolled out.
And as they flew toward Langley with the Suburbans running their sirens at eighty miles an hour, Wells realized that even if Exley recovered completely, and for the sake of his sanity he had to believe she would, their lives wouldn’t be normal for a very long time. This attack had destroyed whatever privacy they had left. They’d live in a bubble for the foreseeable future.
Another reason to make Kowalski pay.
AT LANGLEY, Shafer briefed Wells that the CIA and FBI had set up a joint task force, eighty agents, with the promise of more to come if they were needed. Following the card key, the investigators had tracked the Russians to the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington. The Marriott staff reported that the men had checked in six days before, to rooms 402, 403, and 404. They’d used a single credit card, a MasterCard from Bank Zachodni in Warsaw. They’d kept to themselves, saying they were visiting Washington on business and expected to stay about a week, possibly longer. They’d parked only the Pathfinder, not the motorcycles, which they’d apparently stashed elsewhere. They’d asked for quiet rooms. When they’d checked in, the clerk had gotten a plate number for the Pathfinder from them, which caused a brief whirr of excitement at the agency, but when the agency ran the number, it was fake. In all, no one at the Marriott found anything odd about them. They weren’t American, but so what? People from every nation in the world had business in Washington.
While the hotel staff was questioned, rooms 402, 403, and 404 were searched to their foundations, every piece of furniture removed and disassembled. So far, the investigators hadn’t found much. In 402, a Russian copy of
But no passports, real or fake. No cash. No computers. No cell phones. No Pathfinder in the Marriott’s parking lot. The assassins had apparently planned to ditch their motorcycles, pull off their masks, take a cab or the Metro to the Pathfinder, and disappear. With their faces hidden and the motorcycles bought under fake names, their tracks would be lost.
Wells had rendered that plan inoperative. The task force now had faces and fingerprints from the corpses. Investigators were checking the prints against the FBI national criminal database, as well as the prints that foreign visitors to the United States were required to provide when they entered the country. The criminal database hadn’t matched any hits. The immigration records had, for two of the men. They’d entered the United States three weeks earlier, on a nonstop Delta flight from Warsaw to Atlanta. They had valid Polish passports with valid U.S. tourist visas, issued a few weeks before in Warsaw. They were brothers, and their names were Jerzy and Jozef Godinski, according to the record.
Already, Langley had asked the Polish government, which unlike the Kremlin was a good friend of the United States, to help it track down the men — if they existed at all. Everyone at Langley figured that both the names and the passports would be fake. As for the third man, the passenger on the Ducati, his fingerprints didn’t match any on file. Which meant he’d come in on a foreign diplomatic passport. Or illegally over the Mexican border. Or by car from Canada, where fingerprint checks were not yet routine. Put another way, the investigators had no idea how he’d gotten in. Not yet, anyway.
“So that’s what we know,” Shafer said when he was done.
“Have we called the Russians yet?”
“No proof they were Russian yet. The credit card’s the best lead so far. Until we find the Pathfinder.”
“You think they stowed everything in it?”
“They had to keep their passports and cells somewhere. Unless they had a safe house. And if they had a safe house, why stay at a hotel?”
THE MAINTENANCE STAFF found a cot and brought it to Wells’s office on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. But when Wells closed his eyes, he couldn’t sleep. He swore he could smell her, her lemony perfume. Near midnight, Shafer walked in. “Come on. Get dressed.”
“Did they find something?”
“I’m taking you home. To Casa Shafer. We’ll have a beer, watch TV, pretend today never happened.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Get dressed. I promise, you’ll have lots of time for whatever bloody revenge fantasy you’re cooking up.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
