defibrillator. Too late, Wells was sure. They’d gone in hard and slow and given Bernard plenty of time to take the coward’s way out. Or the hero’s. Depending on who was telling the story. Either way Bernard wouldn’t be much help.
Three minutes of explanations later, Wells found himself outside the hotel’s front door, pleading with the BND agent in charge to let him inside.
“You want to see the room? But the man inside is dead. He killed himself, yes?”
“No doubt. Maybe he left me something.”
“We will find it.”
“I’d like to look for myself.” You guys blew this top to bottom, so please don’t make me beg, Wells didn’t say.
But the agent seemed to understand. “As you wish. Jergen will accompany you.”
THE STERN CATERED to British chavs who piled into cheap charter flights for weekend vacations in Hamburg: all the pilsner they could swallow and a stop at the brothels on Herbertstrasse. Good times. The third- floor carpet had once been blue. Now it was closer to black and covered with cigarette burns. The plaster in the hallway was laced with fist-sized holes where guests had traded punches with each other and maybe a few unlucky hookers. A dozen BND agents stood outside the room, murmuring to one another, knocking around what had happened, what had gone wrong, the stories they would tell their bosses and the internal investigators who would second-guess every decision they had and hadn’t made. They fell silent as Wells passed.
And in Room 317, Bernard Kygeli, the top of his head split like an overcooked egg. He lay on his back on the queen-sized bed, his blood soaking through the cheap wool blanket. The medics weren’t even pretending to work on him. Bernard hadn’t taken any chances when the BND came through the door. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and swallowed eternity. His brains were splattered on the grimy yellow wall behind the bed.
Wells knew he ought to feel a touch of pity for Bernard, or at least disgust at the ugly way he’d died. But he could muster only annoyance, the annoyance of a district manager whose top salesman had just quit. Bernard should have stuck around a little bit longer, instead of bailing this way, leaving him shorthanded with the end of the quarter coming up. Not a team player.
From the neck down, Bernard was undamaged, oddly dapper in a blue suit with a pale pink shirt and dark red tie, his black leather dress shoes hanging limply off the bed. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered window, carrying in the rising blare of European sirens — Ooh
“Anyone search him yet?”
Jergen consulted with the other cops. “No.”
Wells grabbed latex gloves from one of the medics, strapped them on, sifted through Bernard’s pockets, hoping for a cell phone, a flash drive, an engraved pen, a business card, a hotel receipt, any clue at all. In Bernard’s inside suit pocket, he found six keys — house, office, and warehouse, most likely. In the right front pants pocket, a wallet, smooth black leather. Wells flipped through it. A gold Amex card, seven 50-euro notes, a creased headshot of two young women, pretty, both wearing headscarves. His daughters, presumably.
And in the left pocket, a thickly folded piece of lined notebook paper. Wells unfolded it and found a scrawl in Arabic, shakily written in thin blue pen—
“What is it?” Jergen said.
“A suicide note. From the Quran.” The ninth Surah, if Wells remembered right. He tucked the paper and Bernard’s wallet and the keys where he’d found them. He pulled open the squeaking closet doors, looked inside the particleboard dresser, stuck his head in the bathroom, ducked his head under the bed. He found nothing but two roaches in the tub and a couple of dusty condom wrappers, surely pre-dating Bernard’s arrival.
“He say anything when you came in?” Wells said to the agent in charge. “
The cop shook his head. “Just the pistol in his mouth, and—”
“Yeah.”
When Wells and Jergen returned to the front entrance, they found a tall man in a gray suit. He extended a hand to Wells.
“Mr. Wells,” he said. “I’m Gerhard Tobertal. Assistant director of the BND for Hamburg—”
“Yeah, you’re the one who lost him.” Wells leaned forward, put his face close to Tobertal’s, staring into the German’s blue eyes. “Get your men out of here. All of them.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t you see anything?” Wells knew that his rage was counterproductive, but he couldn’t help himself. First Shafer and now this. “You blew the surveillance and the takedown, too, and now you want CNN here, talking about how a terrorist killed himself on the Reeperbahn? So all Bernard’s friends know he’s dead.”
“Mr. Wells—”
“Make it go away. Pull your guys and make it a no-name junkie overdose. And when you hit his house, do it fast and quiet in the middle of the night. If you know how. Maybe we’re lucky and the compartmentalization saves us, and his buddies don’t find out for a few extra hours.”
“I don’t appreciate being talked to this way—”
“Then do your job.” Wells turned away. If he hurried, he could still make his flight.
31
This time Wells had no problem at immigration. The opposite, in fact. A Homeland Security officer waited for him when the flight arrived at Newark. “Mr. Wells,” she said as he walked out of the companionway, the first passenger off. “This way.”
She led him along the glassed-in second floor that overlooked the C Concourse, a long walkway, no exits, that connected international arrivals with the Newark customs hall. She was young and strong and Wells had to jog to keep up. He felt heavy and slow. He’d lost a night’s sleep — it was nearly 10 p.m. in Newark, 4 a.m. in Germany — and even the frigid jetway air hadn’t shocked him awake. Maybe he was getting old.
When Wells had come home after his decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wealth of the United States had overwhelmed him. Not just the size of the stores, aisle upon aisle of products for every conceivable desire, but the buildings themselves, high-ceilinged and fitted tightly together. Even the lights, banks of bright fluorescents where Afghans would make do with a single sixty-watt bulb. Americans might complain about the price of electricity but they sure weren’t afraid to use it. For his first few months back, Wells found himself wondering whether he had landed in a fifty-state Potemkin village, if the malls and office parks and highways he saw were nothing more than stage sets. So much abundance couldn’t be real.
Fortunately or not, the feeling faded. Now, after two years of motorcycles and perfect teeth and flat-screen televisions and grocery stores filled with fresh fruit, Wells was again used to, if not exactly comfortable with, his country’s riches.
Tonight, though, he felt a different dislocation, a kind of real-time nostalgia for the people on the concourse below him. The family clumped together slurping sodas outside the Subway, two tiny kids dressed identically in puffy red jackets and jeans and white sneakers, not a fashion statement, just a sale at Wal-Mart. The sales rep in a demure gray suit-and-skirt set, leaning against a wall, checking her BlackBerry, then pumping her fist in quiet triumph, deal closed and bonus won. The middle-aged man with the darkest skin Wells had ever seen, stepping up to gate C-89 to hug an equally dark woman wearing a bright orange and green dress under her winter coat.
No matter where it blew, the bomb would destroy this place. The buildings would be rebuilt. Maybe, eventually, the economy would recover. But the
