A half-hour later, Wells checked into the Novotel, lay down on his bed, fell asleep before he could even get his clothes off. He woke dry-mouthed and tense, certain he’d heard someone scratching at his door. He flipped off the bed, moved noiselessly to the door, pulled it open. The hallway outside was empty. Wells brushed his teeth, undressed, went back to bed, closed his eyes, and resolved to dream of Exley. But if he did he couldn’t remember.
The next morning Wells opened his second suitcase, a big, green, hard-sided Samsonite plastic case, the kind that hadn’t been in style for at least thirty years and that inevitably banged its owner’s shins and left them black and blue. Wells flipped it open, tossed out the clothes and shoes inside. At the base of the case were four almost invisible indentations, the tops of flathead screws that had been machined into place. With his Swiss Army knife, Wells unscrewed them. Underneath was a compartment eight inches long, four inches wide, four inches deep. It held Wells’s Lebanese passport and five hundred bills of 500 euros each—250,000 euros in all, tamped into two packets, each no larger than a narrow paperback book. Wells silently thanked the European Central Bank for deciding to put the 500-euro bill — sometimes called the “bin Laden,” because it was so rarely seen — into circulation, though he couldn’t imagine what the bureaucrats at the bank had been thinking. Who but gamblers, drug smugglers, and spies needed a bill worth almost $1,000?
Besides the money and the passport, the concealed compartment held a few other necessities that Wells had requested from the agency’s Division of Science and Technology. Unfortunately, they didn’t include a gun, which would have been too dangerous to try to smuggle in without a diplomatic bag. Wells took the Lebanese passport and twenty of the bills—10,000 euros in all — and tucked them in his pocket. He left everything else, replaced the panel, and repacked the suitcase.
A few minutes later, Samsonite in hand, he headed for the Mendeleevskaya metro station beside the Novotel. The station, like most of those in the Moscow subway, had been designed to double as an air-raid shelter. Its platform was several hundred feet underground, reached by an escalator whose base couldn’t be seen from its top. Wells found the long ride down oddly calming. The Freudians and the Buddhists would love these tunnels. One endless line of Muscovites silently descending into the earth, another rising from it, death and resurrection played out endlessly in miniature.
Wells took the gray line to Borovitskaya and switched to the red. At Park Kultury, he moved to the circle line, riding it six stops before crossing the platform and reversing direction. Basic countersurveillance. The subway cars were Soviet-era, made of blue corrugated steel with big windows, and they emerged from the tunnels with a pressurized whoosh as if they were powered by air and not electricity. They came every two minutes or so, making the switches very easy. After an hour of riding the trains, with four different transfers, Wells was sure that he hadn’t been followed. Not that there was any reason for him to expect surveillance. He was on an American passport, after all, and Americans visited Moscow even in December. Finally, he switched to the gray line and rode south another seven stops to Yuzhnaya.
When he emerged from the train, he was far from the glitter of Moscow’s city center. Brownish snow covered the streets, and the apartment buildings were mostly cheap concrete left over from the Soviet era. The wind picked up and cut through his jacket and jeans. He looked at the little city map he’d brought and made his way to the Petersburg, a little one-star hotel almost in the shadow of the MKAD, the ring road that surrounded Moscow.
The hotel’s lobby was hardly warmer than the street, and the front desk was empty. Wells rang twice on a little bell before a woman in her mid-thirties wandered out. She had dark skin and a mustache and wore a puffy blue jacket against the cold.
“Yes?” she said.
“You have rooms?” Wells said.
“Of course,” she said.
She didn’t ask for his passport, but he handed it over anyway. The Lebanese this time. The room was 1,200 rubles a night, about $50, one-eighth the price of the Novotel. For that, Wells got a soft double bed and a plastic shower that ran a trickle of lukewarm water. No key-cards here. The door had a big brass lock that an experienced thief, or even a savvy twelve-year-old, could force in seconds.
Wells stowed the suitcase in the tiny closet and headed out. He would sleep at the Novotel, but he wanted to keep his options open. At an outdoor market, he bought a two-pound tub of cheap, oily peanut butter and a loaf of Russian black bread. Then he found Ultra Spa. He intended to stay as fat and dark as possible.
THE NEXT MORNING, Wells made his way to the building that was home to Markov’s company. The offices were in the middle of the Arbat district, the center of old Moscow, a half-mile west of the Kremlin, in a refurbished apartment building two blocks down from the Canadian embassy. Two security cameras watched the front entrance. Four more monitored the edges of the building. A big man stood just outside the entrance doors, which were made of heavy dark glass like a cheap ashtray and blocked any view of the lobby. A gate to the south side protected a parking lot that held a half-dozen Mercedes and BMW sedans and a Hummer H1.
Wells didn’t break stride. Besides the Aeroflot incident, he’d drawn some tough looks on the subway. Chechen terrorists had repeatedly attacked Moscow since 2000, and Arabs were not loved here, not unless they came from Saudi Arabia and wanted to discuss how to keep the price of oil high.
Wells had arrived in Moscow with only a vague plan to get to Markov. He’d figured on finding the bars and clubs where junior FSB officers hung out, reach out to private security firms whose investigators might know Markov, grease the skids with some of the money in his briefcase. But now that he was here, the odds against that plan seemed impossibly long. As an Arab, even a Christian Arab, he was immediately distrusted. He’d need months to overcome that suspicion. If Shafer couldn’t help, Wells would be reduced to trying to break into Markov’s house or assassinate him on the street.
He e-mailed Shafer, explaining. A day later, Shafer replied with a name, phone number, and two sentences.
With a day to burn before the meeting, Wells wandered through central Moscow, the boulevards and narrow streets around the Kremlin. The city was loud and busy and shockingly rich. The GUM mall, which stood across Red Square from Lenin’s tomb, was filled with Hermes and Dior and Cartier and dozens of other snotty stores. The fact that $4,000 purses were being sold a hundred yards from the mummified founder of Communist Russia struck Wells as deeply ironic. But the Muscovites in the mall didn’t seem to care. They wandered happily, shopping bags heavy in their hands. Wells considered buying Exley some official Russian Olympic gear from the 2014 winter games in Sochi — he was supposed to be a tourist, after all — but changed his mind when he saw the price tag on the hat he was fingering: 2,200 rubles, almost $100. For a baseball cap. Wells checked the math three times in his head, figuring he’d made a mistake. Who was buying these trifles? And why? Russia was supposed to be poor, a broken third- world country. Oil had turned its fortunes in a hurry.
THE MALL THAT ROSETTE had chosen for their meet was outside the downtown core, near the end of the green metro line. The place wasn’t in the same league as the GUM, but it was still plenty prosperous, with an IMAX movie theater and an array of stores that would have been familiar at any suburban mall in the United States. Though no Starbucks. For some reason, Moscow didn’t have any. Wells was meeting Rosette at the local equivalent, a place called the Coffee Bean. Wells ordered two black coffees, found a seat against a wall where he could watch the door, and waited.
And waited. Rosette showed up forty-five minutes late. Wells didn’t recognize him at first. He was in his early sixties, wearing a finely cut blue suit, his hair a distinguished silver. The beret he’d promised poked from his overcoat pocket. Wells wouldn’t have guessed he was French, but he didn’t look Russian either. German, maybe, or Swedish. Rosette took his time ordering and finally wandered over to Wells’s table. Up close, he wasn’t so impressive; he had a fleshy face and a drinker’s nose, the skin cut with thin red stripes like a contour map.
“Come,” he said to Wells in English.
They walked through the mall, a conspicuous pair. Rosette was nearly as tall as Wells, and better dressed than any other man in the mall. Wealthy Russian women dressed absurdly well — hence the luxury stores at the GUM — but the men tended to favor tracksuits and jeans.
“So why did you bring me up here?”
