The Silent Man

You’ve lost your way, Khadri told him. You’ve lost the faith and you’ll pay. Khadri’s teeth were fangs and he—

Wells tired of the dream. He knew he was dreaming and decided to wake and did. Instead of sleeping, he examined imperfections in the concrete, looking for patterns in the meaningless whorls.

“Waiting for me to pass a baggie?” Wells said to the guard about six hours on. “May take a while.”

“Someone’ll be here soon enough.” The guard clanked the panel shut.

Two hours more passed before the door finally opened. Wells popped up. Shafer and two guards stood outside. Wells shrank into a corner. “Noo!” he yelled. The guards took a half-step back.

“Send me to Guantanamo,” Wells said. “But don’t leave me with him.”

“John, enough,” Shafer said.

“This guy’s into crazy stuff. I’m serious. Cattle prods, nipple clamps—”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m leaving you here.”

“Fine,” Wells said sulkily.

“This is John Wells,” Shafer said to the guards as Wells slid into his shoes. “Bet you didn’t think he’d be such a jackass.”

NEITHER OF THEM SPOKE until they reached the New Jersey Turnpike and Shafer said, “Duto wanted to teach you a lesson, leave you in the Hotel JFK for a couple of days. I told him it wouldn’t be much of a lesson.”

Wells didn’t respond. Shafer was right, of course. Shafer knew that ten years in the Northwest Frontier had taught him patience.

“You stepped in it this time, John.”

“Ellis, watch the road.” Shafer was driving a black agency Suburban, and, illegally, flashing the red lights mounted in the grille as he cut through traffic. “As far as I can see, the agency still owes me a couple of favors.”

“I’m not talking about the agency.”

“Please, no Exley advice, Ellis. Stick to Duto. Does he know where I was?”

“Of course he knows.” Shafer sounded irritated at the question. “And he knows about Markov.”

“What about the Russians? Have they fingered me?”

“Strangely enough, no. At least they haven’t said anything to us.”

“Markov’s staying quiet.”

An eighteen-wheeler blasted them with its airhorn as Shafer cut in front of it.

“You’re the worst driver I’ve ever seen. And that includes the jihadis.”

Shafer slowed down, turned his head, stared at Wells. “I hope this little trip of yours was worth it.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know.” Shafer flicked on the radio, WCBS 880, the all-news station in New York, and they listened to the world’s hum. Two dead soldiers in Iraq, a big oil find off the coast of Brazil, some starlet arrested again, the Giants getting ready for the NFC finals. Last and least, a triple murder in the South Bronx, drug-related, the police said. No news on Wells’s own triple murder in Moscow, but why would there be? Every minute, people everywhere died too soon. Three dead in Moscow, two in Bangkok, four in Johannesburg, one in Newark, an endless tide of mayhem, far too much for a single radio station to track. The police would always be in business.

“Not much happening,” Wells said aloud.

“Maybe there is.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll let Duto tell you.”

WHEN THEY REACHED the Beltway, Wells thought Shafer would swing east, toward 295, the feeder road that led to central Washington and Exley. Instead he turned west, the highway to Langley. It was near midnight and the road was nearly empty and they made good time. In barely fifteen minutes they’d crossed the long flat bridge that spanned the Potomac and turned onto the Georgetown Pike.

“Now?” Wells said.

“Duto wants to see you.”

“When did he start working so hard? When did you turn into his errand boy?” Wells wanted to see Exley, not Vinny Duto.

“Let’s get it over with.”

Just past midnight, they walked into Duto’s office, a square room with a heavy wooden desk and views over the Langley campus. The windows were bulletproof glass, tinted, and three layers thick for security. The furniture was generic chief executive, a mahogany desk and heavy brown leather chairs. Wells wondered whether Duto had chosen the decor in a deliberate effort to connect with the agency’s WASPy history, the Ivy League mystique that had permeated the place during the 1950s, when half the CIA seemed to have gone to Yale. Duto had actually attended the University of Minnesota, where he’d graduated in three years with a history degree. Oddly enough, Wells was the only Ivy Leaguer in the room. Shafer had gone to MIT.

An oversized wooden bookcase across from Duto’s desk was filled with military histories, beginning with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and stretching through the millennia. The titles of the newest books, about the Iraq war, didn’t inspire confidence: Fiasco, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Generation Kill. The books were slightly out-of-order, as if Duto had actually read them. Wells wondered. He’d never thought of Duto as intellectually curious.

“John.” Duto was reading a black-bordered file and didn’t rise from behind his desk, didn’t extend a hand.

Wells sat. “Commandante Duto.” Duto didn’t smile. He scribbled a note on a yellow legal pad and flipped the file closed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Duto said. “You’re thinking, you can drag me in here at midnight, yell at me, make me sit through this, but you can’t touch me. After what I’ve done, I’m untouchable. But you’re wrong. It’ll be ugly as hell, but I can get rid of you.” Duto’s tone was steady.

“Vinny—” Shafer said.

“This is between me and him, and if you don’t like it, the door’s behind you,” Duto said to Shafer, without breaking eye contact with Wells. “Understand this, John. If what happened in Moscow comes out, you’ll have to go. We’ll protect you, we’ll tell everybody you had PTSD and snapped. Maybe it’s even true. We’ll make sure you never get charged with anything. And it’ll be a real tragedy, losing John Wells, the hero of Times Square. But that’ll be that. Can’t have a guy who just murdered three Russians on the U.S. government payroll.”

“I guess we’re skipping the small talk,” Wells said.

“And if you’ve thought it through at all, which I’ll bet you haven’t, since thinking ahead isn’t your strong suit, you’re probably figuring that worst case, even if we fire you, you’ll get by. Because you’ve always gotten by. But ask yourself, John, if you didn’t have this, what would you do? Be a mercenary? Be a stuntman, maybe?”

“Stuntman,” Wells said. The idea was oddly appealing.

“How about a mercenary? You see yourself protecting some billionaire in Mexico City?”

“Maybe I’ll move back to Montana and fish.”

“You may think you want to stop, but you’re way past that now.”

The intimacy of Duto’s tone irritated Wells. “When did we get to be such good friends, Vinny?”

“Guys like you, there’s only one way out. Two ways, but they’re the same. You get too old, or you die.”

“Isn’t that true for everybody?”

“You don’t even see what we do for you. We’re the reason you can look in the mirror and say, I did it all for the good guys. Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May not be much, but it’s something. Without it, you’re just a stone-cold killer.”

“If you’re my moral compass, I’m in worse shape than I thought.”

“Then leave right now, go to Moscow or Beijing or wherever. Plenty of people would be glad to hire a man with your talents.” Duto waited. “No, John? I didn’t think so.”

“You made your point,” Shafer said. “No need to rub his face in it.”