“Not like that.”
“What then?”
“Roman’s the weakest of the three of them, I have that right?”
“Stupidest for sure. Spends most of his time on his PSP and he’s not even good at that.”
Stupid didn’t necessarily mean weak. Still, Wells figured Roman was his best bet. That night, as Roman walked back to his bunk from the showers, Wells stepped out from between two trailers, tapped him on the shoulder.
“Walk with me, Kevin.”
Roman’s eyes darted like tadpoles in a muddy pond. “Sir?”
“Walk with me. Now.” Roman’s shoulders slumped and he fell in beside Wells, who led him to the same maintenance lot where Rodriguez and Young had faced off. The maintenance guys were gone for the night. Wells walked Roman to a narrow aisle between a Stryker and a blast wall.
“You know who I am, Kevin?”
“The guy who talked to us last week. John Wells.”
“That’s right. Know why I’m here?”
“No, sir.”
Wells hit Roman, low and hard in the solar plexus, pivoting into it, getting all of his two hundred and ten pounds behind the punch. Roman’s stomach was a little bit soft and Wells connected solidly, more solidly than he’d intended. If he’d been holding a knife, he would have buried it to the hilt. As it was, he felt the contact up his arm and into his shoulder. Roman doubled over on his fist like a folding chair. Wells pulled his arm back and Roman put his hands on his knees and gasped.
Wells gave him a few seconds and then put his right hand under Roman’s shoulder and tugged him up and stepped close. Roman was still struggling for breath. His eyes jumped wildly before settling on Wells. “Tonight. You’re going to call CID, tell them about you and Rodriguez and Weston.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t. And don’t tell me you can’t.”
“They’ll kill me. I swear they will.”
Wells put a hand under Roman’s chin and squeezed his throat. “Tyler and Nick won’t kill you. But I will. Here or back in the States. Like I killed Francesca. I’ll do you just like that.”
Francesca’s name did the trick. Wells had figured as much. Francesca was a Delta. A sniper. The baddest of the bad. And Wells had nearly taken his head off his neck. Roman pushed out his lips, though actual speech seemed beyond him.
“You don’t have to tell them what Tyler did to Ricky Fowler”—Wells figured the murder would come out quickly once the Army opened the investigation—“but you need to tell them about the drugs. CID’s got that twenty- four-hour hotline. You call it tonight, tell them you want to come in tomorrow to Kandahar. Tell them you had an attack of conscience. You know what that is, Roman?”
Roman shook his head.
“Didn’t think so. Now you tell me what you’re going to do.”
“I’ll call them tonight.”
Wells stepped back and hit Roman again in the stomach. Not as hard this time. Wells didn’t want to kill him. Even so, Roman doubled over and coughed, quick faint breaths, an old dog panting after a game of fetch. Wells flexed his knees to get low and hit him once more, a rising right that connected with the tip of Roman’s jaw, bone on bone. Wells grunted with the impact. A sweet pain filled his hand. Roman’s eyes rolled back. His head snapped up. Then gravity took over and he crashed to the hard-packed dirt. Wells watched for a couple seconds to be sure Roman was still breathing, hadn’t swallowed his tongue. Then Wells walked away, shaking out his hand. Truly he hadn’t felt so good in months.
AS SOON AS Wells passed Peter Lautner’s name to Shafer, a team of techs at Langley began checking every e-mail in their servers, every phone call, every trip, every expense report. They hoped to find evidence of a connection between Lautner and Francesca or Alders, or even better between Lautner and Amadullah. At first, they came up empty. In the two-plus years since his wife’s death, Lautner had been very careful, unusually careful, to keep his official CIA account free of anything personal.
But within twenty-four hours, even before Wells went to FOB Jackson, the techs scored a hit. Stored on the agency’s computers at Langley was an e-mail four years before to Lautner from Daniel.L.Francesca@us.army.mil. A few days later, Lautner had written Francesca back. He’d sent the e-mail not to Francesca’s military account but to another address, DLORFHK@gmail.com. It didn’t take much imagination to realize the account probably belonged to Francesca. With the NSA’s help, the CIA cracked the Gmail address and found three suspicious messages. Two were nothing more than short strings of numbers, possibly phone numbers, though they didn’t match any numbers in the NSA’s worldwide database. The third was yet another Gmail account, with the password attached. Shafer checked it, found it empty. Probably Francesca and Lautner had used it to send messages to each other. One man wrote a message, saved it as a draft e-mail. Once the other read it, he deleted the draft. That way, the message was never permanently stored anywhere, and never left a trail for the NSA to trace.
Shafer and Wells believed that Lautner and Francesca had met face-to-face or used burner phones for all their important conversations. In truth, Francesca’s last words were the only real proof that Wells had of Lautner’s involvement. Wells thought he understood now why Gabe Yergin, the station’s operations officer, had acted so oddly during that first interview at the Ariana Hotel. Yergin had suspected Lautner, but he’d had no real evidence. So he’d done everything possible to raise Wells’s hackles without openly voicing his suspicions.
Lautner himself had added to the confusion. Because he’d been so overtly hostile, Wells had imagined he couldn’t have anything to hide. In fact, Lautner had outplayed Wells. He’d guessed how Wells would read his anger and then used that knowledge to his advantage. He was very tricky and very good and he had left only the faintest footprints on this operation. As far as Wells could see, Francesca, Daood Maktani, and maybe Amadullah Thuwani were the only three men who could connect him directly to the trafficking. The first two were dead, and now that he’d left his compound in Balochistan, Thuwani was impossible to find. Anyway, he would have less than no interest in helping the CIA.
And so, two days after he shot Francesca, Wells found himself standing on the roof of the German embassy, waiting for Shafer to call. He’d flown to Kabul from FOB Jackson the night before and decided that the Germans would probably be better hosts than his friends at the Ariana. Duto and the agency’s congressional paymasters were scheduled to fly to Kabul in hours. Wells still didn’t know how Duto planned to deal with Lautner, or whether he’d be involved.
His sat phone trilled.
“And
“Believe so. I’m on the roof. Looking at beautiful Kabul. Snowcapped mountains to the west, helicopters to the north, Taliban all around.”
“Sounds romantic.”
“What am I doing here, Ellis?”
“I’ve never seen Duto this way. Like he’s paralyzed, doesn’t want to believe it’s Lautner. He wants to talk to you, go over it again.”
“Sure.”
“Sit tight for fifteen minutes.”
An hour later, the phone rang again. No preamble.
“We don’t have enough. No prosecutor would charge him. A few weird e-mails and hearsay from a dead sniper? And what exactly will you say on the cross, when the defense asks how you happened to hear Francesca’s last words?”
“You sound tired, Vinny.”
“Tell me you’re sure about this. How can you know Francesca was telling the truth?”
“If we could find the money. Lautner must have it somewhere.”
“Forget the money. This was never about money.”
