The Wolves Read Online Free PDF

edge.
    “Hong Kong.”
    “You think the Chinese love your casinos so much they’ll protect you?”
    “The President will be too embarrassed to tell them. Maybe I can wait it out. Best case, he doesn’t do anything for the rest of his term, he’s too busy hoping not to be impeached. When he’s done, the next guy doesn’t know anything about it.”
    “What about this man Wells?”
    A good question. “I don’t know. He might come after me, too, or he might decide it’s enough, he stopped the invasion, let the President deal with me.”
    She tilted his face toward hers. He didn’t think she’d ever looked at him so carefully before.
    “One last look before you leave?”
    “You know why I chose you, Aaron?” She smiled. Her teeth were not quite perfect, with a tiny space between the top two in front. Somehow models were allowed to have gapped teeth, the only imperfection the arbiters of beauty permitted.
    His face must have betrayed his surprise.
    “Don’t tell me you thought
you
chose
me
?”
    But, yes, he had. Even with the age difference. “I thought my offer was compelling.” He raised his hands to the mansion around them.
    “You weren’t my first billionaire.”
    Something else he hadn’t known.
    “I looked at you, how hard you worked, the engine never stopped—”
    “You knew I would be too busy to bother you much.”
    “I thought, this guy’s the same now as he was when he was twenty, didn’t have a penny. He just wants to win.”
    “And that was appealing?”
    “You can’t imagine how
lazy
rock stars are. Half the reason they wind up as junkies is that heroin is the world’s best excuse to do nothing. So you went after me, you swept me up, maybe it was a little bit cheesy, over-the-top, the million-dollar ring—”
    “Four—”
    “Like you couldn’t even imagine I’d say no. How you’ve lived your whole life. Now, finally, you went too far.” She cocked her head, looked at him critically. “Tell me again why you did this? Aside from proving that you could?”
    He pointed to the Tel Aviv skyline through their window, the apartment buildings glowing along the beach. “It all looks solid. But a nuclear bomb—” He snapped his fingers. “It’s gone. And the problem is no one believes it can happen until it does. It seems like madness. But mad things happen.”
    She twined her fingers in his. “You really think you can get out of this?”
    “It’s possible.”
    “Then I’m coming with you.”
    “Orli—”
    “No one thinks I had anything to do with it, right? If everyone knows I’m innocent, who’s going to touch me?”
    “The longer you stay, the more my guilt becomes yours.”
    “But not right away.”
    “No. The Americans will assume you don’t know. And even if they start to suspect you, they would probably warn you first.”
    “Then I’m not going to worry about that. Promise me, from now on we’re partners.”
    “Yes. Partners.”
    —
    F ORTY - SIX HOURS LATER , they were on Duberman’s personal Boeing 787 Dreamliner, bound for Hong Kong. The mansion on Victoria Peak was fully furnished. Even so, they were carrying dozens of trunks of clothes and jewelry, along with their personal chef and Orli’s trainer. The travails of the super-rich.
    As they flew, Duberman wondered whether the United States would pluck them out of the sky, force them to land in an American ally like Tajikistan, and from there bring him back to American soil for trial. But the hours and the countries passed and then they were in Chinese airspace and he knew they were safe. Their arrival at the VIP terminal in Hong Kong was a strange anticlimax. They cleared immigration without a hitch, convoyed up to the mansion on the Peak, and unpacked. In other words, told the people who worked for them to unpack.
    The days turned into weeks. They settled into a routine of sorts. Orli worked. She even left Hong Kong sometimes for photo shoots. Duberman encouraged her. He didn’t want her to feel