Twelve Days Read Online Free Page A

analysts believed that the President wouldn’t have won without his help.
    “You talk to Evan and Heather?” Shafer said. Wells’s son and ex-wife.
    “Yeah. They agreed to hang out a few more days. Though they aren’t happy about it.” “Hang out” translated into
stay in FBI protective custody.
Before Wells killed him, Mason had threatened Evan and Heather. Wells didn’t know if Mason had been serious, but he couldn’t take the risk.
    “Where are they?”
    “Provo. Heather told me the biggest risk was death by boredom. And Evan says I’m going to get him kicked off the team. He just cracked the rotation and now this.” Evan was a shooting guard on San Diego State’s nationally ranked basketball team.
    “We all have problems. You mention you killed five guys three days ago?”
    “We had a nice conversation about it.”
    The room door banged open. Vinny Duto walked in. Strode in.
    The former Director of Central Intelligence, Duto was now a Pennsylvania senator. He’d crash-landed in the Senate after the President pushed him out of the CIA. He was an old-school politician, unpolished and raw with power. No one would call him handsome. He had stubby fingers, a heavy Nixonian face. But his intensity had resonated with Pennsylvania’s flinty voters. He had dominated the debates.
    As DCI, Duto had saved Wells’s life more than once. Now they were working together to stop Duberman. But Wells could barely stand Duto at the best of times. He saw Duto as the worst kind of Washington opportunist. And he knew that Duto pegged him as an adrenaline junkie who took unnecessary risks.
    They were both right.
    Duto offered Wells a thin-lipped smile. “Gentlemen. Hope I haven’t interrupted anything.” Duto liked to irritate Shafer by accusing him of having an old man’s crush on Wells.
    Wells felt the itching in the tips of his fingers that meant he was ready to fight. Three hundred people dead and Duto was cracking jokes. Wells knew exactly what Duto thought of the downed plane. Not a tragedy. A
moment
. One that might help his career if he played it right.
    “Imagine you lost a donor on that plane,” Wells said. “Then you could pretend to care.”
    “Life lessons from you, Johnny? Definition of irony.”
    “Boys. Already?” Shafer clapped his hands like a cheerleader trying todistract a drunken crowd from a blowout. “Same team here. Same team. We have bigger fish to fry,
n’est-ce pas
?”
    Shafer’s horrendous French broke the spell. “Did you just say
n’est-ce pas
?” Duto said.
    “He did,” Wells said.
    “You two ready to be grown-ups?”
    They both nodded.
    “Then let’s move on. Please tell us you have something CNN doesn’t, Vinny.”
    The new CIA director, Scott Hebley, had tried to freeze Duto out. But Duto still had sources in the National Clandestine Service, the former Directorate of Operations.
    “Video analysis says the missiles traveled at least five kilometers from launch, maybe six. Based on distance and speed, the betting is they’re late-model Russian SAMs. Possibly SA-24s. Which only came into service in 2004. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much untraceable. The Russians have sold them all over, including Libya. After Qaddafi went down in 2010, we had a report that both Iran and Hezbollah agents got their hands on a bunch.”
    “And could easily have moved them to India,” Shafer said.
    “The White House will see it that way for sure. At this point, I don’t think we have any way to know whether this is Duberman pushing buttons or the Iranians firing across the bow.”
    “Anything on the ground?”
    “The Indian security services have responded with their usual efficiency,” Duto said.
    Meaning none. In 2008, terrorists had attacked hotels, a synagogue, and the central train station in Mumbai. The police didn’t respond in force for hours, allowing ten attackers to kill 166 people and wound hundreds more. “Good news is that the Bureau”—the FBI—“has a