keeping His thoughts about Wells — and everything else — to Himself.
AFTER HIS PRAYERS, Wells showered, brushed his teeth, opened the FedEx box that the concierge had given him. He found a black leather carrying bag with a shoulder strap. Anne would have called it a man purse. The thought made Wells smile. The bag held what looked like the leftovers from an estate sale: a flash drive, a Zippo lighter, two garage door openers, two strips of white plastic, two handkerchiefs, a flat gray rock, high-resolution satellite photos of David Miller’s house in Dubai, and a credit card — size Sony camera. Only the camera and the photos were what they appeared to be. Everything else came from the basement labs at Langley, the Directorate of Science and Technology.
When Wells trained at the Farm, these toys hadn’t existed. He needed to give them a dry run. He looked through the online Dubai real estate listings until he found a target. Then he called the Avis office in the Grosvenor’s lobby and rented a Toyota. Nothing fancy. Nothing memorable.
He drove east through the Dubai night, away from skyscrapers on the coast, toward the industrial neighborhoods near the airport. The roads stayed fantastically wide, eight- and ten-lane boulevards, but the traffic steadily lightened. Wells saw a sign for “Dubai Oasis Super East” and turned right onto a long, curving boulevard. Suddenly he entered a ghost city.
Beginning in 2008, developers abandoned housing projects all over Dubai, especially in the unsexy neighborhoods far from the gulf. These developments were the tinsel side of flash, paid for with 100 percent borrowed money. Now the banks had stopped lending, and these half-built houses literally could not be given away. Finishing them would cost more than any buyer would pay. They sat empty, waiting for cheap money to start flowing again, or the desert to retake them.
The boulevard narrowed and then turned left into a cul-de-sac. Eight lanes into none. Urban design at its worst. One finished house and three shells were scattered around the teardrop. Halfway down the block, a single street lamp leaned drunkenly over the asphalt. The winds had tilted it, or the summer heat had buckled its base. Or both. To the east, helicopters fluttered around the Burj Khalifa. But the cul-de-sac occupied another universe, postapocalyptic in its desolation. Wells half expected to see a sentient robot scuttling by.
He parked outside the wire fence protecting the lone finished house. “No Trespassing/Alarmed Response,” signs warned in Arabic and English. Wells pulled himself over and trotted for the house. The front door had two locks, a dead bolt up high and a standard knob below. Inside, a red light blinked on an alarm box.
Wells turned the door handle. Locked. As he’d hoped.
He flipped open the Zippo lighter Shafer had sent him. Where the metal cage around the wick should have been, the lighter had a notch that looked like a USB port. Wells slipped the head of the flash drive into the port. Then he pulled off the plastic casing at the back of the drive, revealing two narrow metal picks with oddly shaped tips. When Wells plugged the flash drive into the Zippo, a light on the side of the drive blinked green.
Wells lined up the tips of the picks with the deadbolt’s keyhole. He pushed a tiny button next to the light, and the picks slid into the keyhole. Metal scraped on metal inside the lock. Then the flash drive made a quarter turn sideways, and the deadbolt slid back with a solid thwack.
Wells repeated the procedure with the bottom lock. He reached for the handle and the door opened smoothly. Wells stepped inside, let his eyes adjust. The rooms were empty. The house was hot and stale and stank of varnish and something sharp, maybe mold. The windows and doors hadn’t been opened in years, but grit and sand covered the floors.
Ten seconds after Wells walked in, the alarm beeped frantically, as if it were guarding a nuclear weapon, not an empty house. Wells pulled out the device that looked like a garage door opener, a black plastic box with a single black button. He peeled a plastic sheet on the box’s back, revealing a sticky adhesive, and pressed it on the wall next to the alarm system. He pushed the button on the front.
Shafer had promised him that the device would beat any standard household alarm. Something about a short-range electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to disrupt circuits. The pulse caused the software inside the alarm to run very slowly. An alarm that normally sounded thirty seconds after a break-in would instead need an hour or more to go off.
“Just make sure you give the thing a couple of feet when it’s on.”
“Why?”
“Just make sure.”
So Wells pressed the button and stepped away. The response was immediate and gratifying. The alarm no longer warned of the end of the world. Now it sounded like a heart monitor, with long pauses and dignified single beeps. Incredible. Wells walked through the empty rooms for a few minutes. The house was nearly finished. The bathrooms even had sinks, though when Wells turned the taps he heard only a faint hiss.
He took one final look and walked out, grabbing the alarm disruptor. The device did have one flaw. It stopped working once it was removed. An operative who used it had to pull it and run, or leave it and prove that he wasn’t an ordinary thief. But the advantage the device offered was worth the trouble. The next time he came home, Wells wanted to meet the engineers who’d built it — and the lock picker.
A HALF HOUR LATER, he was driving through the neighborhood where Miller lived. He didn’t plan to hit Miller’s house this night, but he wanted to case it. The technology was new, but the fundamentals of surveillance hadn’t changed.
“Always see the target before you make your move,” Guy Raviv, Wells’s favorite teacher, had told Wells and the other eager beavers in his training class at the Farm. Raviv was dead now, and the class a lifetime away. “If you’re not sure about something, go back again. Once. No more. You don’t want them wondering who you are before you get there. And never spend more than fifteen minutes inside, whether it’s a home or an office. Five is preferable. Ten is trouble. Fifteen is the limit. People turn around, double-check that they haven’t left the air- conditioning on. Janitors change their schedules, work the floor you’re on instead of the one below you. Time is not your friend on these missions. Never. So do what you came to do, whatever that may be, and get out quick.”
Easier said than done, then and now.
Miller lived in an area called Al Barsha South, closer to the gulf than Wells’s last stop. “Welcome to ABS,” a billboard proclaimed in English. “A great place to live. An even better investment.” But Al Barsha hadn’t escaped the bust. Its streets were named after European landmarks, Hyde Park Street and Trevi Fountain Drive, names that sounded even sillier in Arabic. Most houses were dark. On one lot, a blue tarp flapped over a Caterpillar earthmover, its treads sinking into the earth. A fence and “No Trespassing” signs blocked off an unfinished playground, complete with a slide that didn’t reach the ground, a half-remembered dream. East of the playground, the only evidence of life came from the distant headlights along the outer Dubai ring road.
Miller lived in Al Barsha’s wealthier western end, which had been built first and avoided the crash. Here, eight-foot walls protected concrete mansions. Miller’s house stood two stories tall and nearly filled its lot. The satellite photos from Shafer revealed that it had a small oval pool in its backyard, a bright blue tear. In Dubai, as in Beverly Hills, pools were closer to a necessity than a luxury. Wells rolled by slowly, peering through the bars of the front gate. In their last conversation, Shafer had told him that Miller had a girlfriend, or possibly a second wife, in Dubai.
“You don’t know?” Wells said.
“There’s some evidence in the records for both. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Point is, figure probably somebody’s home. The electric records show use consistent with an occupied house the last few months, even when Miller’s in Chicago.”
As usual, Shafer was right. As he passed the front gate, Wells heard the rumble of a garage door rising. He tapped the brakes, stopped long enough to glimpse the icy headlights of a luxury sedan inside the garage. Before the gate could swing open, Wells rolled on. At the end of the street, he turned left, onto the eight-lane avenue that connected Al Barsha South with the main Dubai highway. If the car was leaving the neighborhood, it would come this way.
Wells pulled over, put on his hazard lights. He popped the hood and got out and pretended to fiddle with the battery. Ninety seconds later, a Lexus rolled by, nearly blinding Wells with its xenon headlights. A man drove, with a woman in the back. The lights stopped Wells from seeing her clearly. But she was Arab. She wore a long-sleeved gown and a loosely tied head scarf that let her hair flow freely, the uniform of the cultured gulf elite outside Saudi Arabia. The wife/girlfriend. She was having dinner with friends. Getting her nails done. Shopping. The malls in Dubai
