dozens.
“Suicide’s the tough part,” Wells said. “Once you decide to cross that bridge, why not take as many friends along as you can?” Wells almost laughed but didn’t. “Would they use it? Like you said, you already know the answer.”
SO WELLS had it backward. The meeting with Duto turned out to be relatively painless. But talking with Exley was impossible. When they left Langley that night, Wells figured Shafer would take him home. Instead, Shafer turned toward his house.
“Appreciate the offer, Ellis, but I’d rather sleep with Jenny.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“If you won’t take me, I’ll get a cab.”
“Give it time, John. She begged you not to go, not to leave her, and you went anyway.” Shafer paused. “I know what you want to do, run home, tell her you love her, everything’s going to be all right. But trust me, whatever you say will seem meaningless to her right now. What she wants is for you to prove that you can listen to her.”
“I do—”
“Then
“But—” Wells snapped his mouth shut. He couldn’t argue with Shafer’s logic. “How long?”
“I think it’ll be easier once she’s out of rehab,” Shafer said. “I’ll talk to her in a day or two. Believe me. This is better.”
So Wells slept in Shafer’s basement for a night before moving to an anonymous safe house in Vienna, Virginia. Like all safe houses, the place was entirely without personality, white walls and cheap wooden chairs and generic Manet posters in black frames, the real-estate equivalent of purgatory. Shafer asked if he wanted guards, but Wells refused. He’d had enough security for a while, enough guys with guns around.
The house did have two handy pieces of equipment in its basement, a treadmill and a Nautilus machine. Wells worked out for three hours a day, aiming to lose the fifteen pounds he’d put on for the Russia trip, hoping to rid his body of any vestige of that failed mission. Every day for a week, he asked Shafer if Exley was ready to see him. Every day for a week, Shafer said no. Every night, Wells sat by the phone, willing himself not to call her. Four times, he dialed all but the last digit of her cell before hanging up, feeling as lonely and foolish as a lovesick geek aching for the prom queen.
At night, alone in the house, he wondered if Exley would join the rest of the friends and family he’d left behind. Heather, his ex-wife, remarried now. Evan, his son, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He found himself Googling them, hoping to find scraps of their lives on the Internet, wondering if he should go back to Montana, try to see his boy. But he’d tried visiting Heather and Evan once before and the trip had ended badly. For now, anyway, Exley was all he had. If he even had her anymore.
Meanwhile, the search for the Farzadovs went on, without success. The agency and its European cousins were working on the assumption that the Farzadovs would eventually have to surface to sell the HEU. But so far the Farzadovs had stayed out of sight. And the Kremlin was still refusing to disclose exactly what it knew about the theft.
SO ON HIS NINTH NIGHT BACK, Wells found himself alone in a booth at the Denny’s on 66. Wondering when Exley would see him again and what they’d say to each other. Wondering what he would have to give up in himself to get her back, whether he wanted to change and if he was even capable.
After an hour of drinking coffee, Wells had no answers, but at least he could feel his hands again. The teenagers had gone, leaving just him and Diane. Wells reached for his wallet, figuring he’d leave a couple of twenties under his cup and disappear, head back home. To the safe house. Then his cell phone buzzed. A restricted number. Maybe Exley was calling, reaching out. Maybe she missed him as much as he missed her. He answered—
“Hello? Have I reached John Wells?” Not Exley. A man. Some kind of European accent. Wells had heard the voice before but he couldn’t place it. And then he could. The bedroom in the Hamptons, a man warning him,
“Yes.”
“This is Pierre Kowalski.”
Wells closed his eyes and stroked a hand across his forehead and waited.
“I have something to discuss with you. Can you come to Zurich?”
PART THREE
15
The Repard family had owned the house for more than a century. Then, on a rainy March morning, just outside Elmira on Route 17, Jesse Repard took a turn too fast and flipped his Ford Explorer into a ravine. He was thrown through the driver’s-side window and died instantly. His wife, Agnes, fractured her spine at the C-2 vertebra and was paralyzed from the neck down. In the back, their two-year-old son, Damon, was untouched, not even a cut.
The Repard house was impossible to navigate in a wheelchair and too expensive for Agnes to maintain. She had no choice but to sell it and the thirty-seven acres of land around it, quick. But upstate New York’s economy was worse than lousy, and the property was too small to be farmed efficiently but too big for most families. For three months, the place sat on the market without attracting even a low-ball bid. Agnes’s agent told her she needed to chop her asking price fifteen percent, maybe more.
Then a young couple came to see the property. He was in charge, Agnes saw that right off. He was a surgeon from Mercy Hospital, down the road in Corning. She walked a step behind him and didn’t say much. But immediately they seemed to take to the place. They liked its thick stone walls, the heavy stand of oak trees that screened the front of the property. They especially liked the big stable behind the house.
The Repards hadn’t owned horses in decades, and the stable had been crumbling when Agnes and Jesse married. A year before the accident, Jesse had started to restore it. He’d torn out the stalls and reshingled the roof, turning the stable into a giant shed, fifty feet long by eighty feet wide with dirt floors and wooden walls. Agnes had handled the exterior, painting the walls fire-engine red.
“Chose the colors myself,” Agnes told the surgeon from Corning. “I figured we’d have lots of kids and one day we’d have horses for them. They’d grow up here and one of them would take over the house from us, keep it in the family.” She knew she shouldn’t talk so much but she couldn’t help herself, as if by telling him her plans she’d bring them back to life.
“Interesting,” he said.
But he didn’t seem interested, much less interested than he’d been when he pulled a tape measure from his pocket and wrote the stable’s dimensions on a memo pad. Or later, when he stood on the porch of the house and scanned the grass and the trees and the hills with binoculars.
“You can see,” Agnes said. “I mean you can’t see anything, you can see that. It’s nice and quiet. Private.” She was nervous now. She needed a good price for the place, enough money for Damon to have a decent childhood. Damn you, Jesse, for your speeding and not wearing your seat belt. For leaving me, and for leaving me like this. She hoped she wouldn’t start crying, the more so since she couldn’t even wipe away the tears herself.
“Yes,” he said. “I like privacy. Americans have a saying, the home is the castle, and I agree with that.”
He was a handsome man, tall and slightly heavy, with a soft lilting accent. He was from the Middle East, she wasn’t sure where and she didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to take the chance of offending him. His name was
