The Faithful Spy (18 page)

Another click. Nothing happened. Farouk sank to his knees and realized he was still alive.

J.C. STARED
stupidly at the guy, then at his pistol, which didn’t seem to be working anymore. Out of ammo. Must be. All the adrenaline in his body evaporated at once. Instead of reloading he dropped his pistol and leaned forward until his face was only inches from the other man’s, the fat man quivering, mouthing words that J.C. couldn’t hear or understand, flecks of his spit flying onto J.C.’s uniform. J.C. wanted to tell the guy something, but he couldn’t remember what.

They stayed that way until Captain Jackson pulled J.C. back.

BODY ARMOR MIGHT
not have saved Lt. Col. Fahd, but it had sure saved J. C. Ramirez. His Kevlar had stopped two rounds. For his busted-out eardrums, J.C. got an early ticket home, though he desperately wanted to stay with his buddies. For killing six insurgents and attacking in the face of close-range enemy fire, he wound up with the Distinguished Service Cross, a military award second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.

As far as Jackson was concerned, J.C. deserved the big one. The kid was the best soldier he’d ever seen. But Takahashi, the battalion commander, said that some senior officers wanted to keep the raid quiet. A Medal of Honor would attract attention. Jackson wasn’t surprised, considering how quickly the guys from Task Force 121 had shown up after he radioed in that his company had captured a man carrying a Geiger counter and a Pakistani passport. They had stuffed the guy into one of their Humvees and told Jackson to take the guerrillas’ bodies and cars back to Camp Graphite for inspection. Like he was their damn errand boy.

“We’ll make sure you get credit for this,” said one of them, a Special Forces officer who called himself a colonel though his uniform had no badges at all. Like credit was all Jackson should care about, and Fahd and Voss didn’t matter at all. Jackson hated losing one of his own. Two, depending on how you thought about it.

But when he crashed out on his cot the morning after the raid, the sun already up and the heat rising, Jackson had to admit that he was proud of his company. All these TF 121 guys running around and it was the Mad Dogs who scored. He would make sure his men understood what they had done, even if they weren’t allowed to talk about it. Missions like this were the reason they had shipped off to this hellhole. They had disrupted al Qaeda, taken the fight to the terrorists instead of the other way around.

Jackson folded his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Amped up as he was, he knew he needed to sleep. He was supposed to brief a couple of one-stars on the raid tomorrow. Not bad for a twenty-nine-year-old captain. I just hope intel knows what to do with this guy we caught, Jackson thought, as he finally drifted to sleep. And I hope it’s not too late.

7

Atlanta, Georgia

BROWN-SKINNED MEN
with cheap mesh caps and hungry eyes stood in clusters in the giant parking lot. Though the sun had risen only an hour before, already the air was hot and sticky, and the men moved slowly, conserving their energy for the long day ahead. But their apparent lethargy was deceiving. When a pickup truck turned into the lot, the men swarmed it in seconds.

A red-faced man in a short-sleeved shirt leaned out of the truck, pushing back the crowd. “Chill, wetbacks.” The men grumbled but gave ground. The man in the truck held up four fingers. “Four guys. All day,” he said. “Eighty bucks each. Anybody speak English?”

John Wells shouldered through the crowd. “I do.”

“You,” the man said. “Up front.” He pointed to three other laborers. “You. You. You. In back.”

As the other men trudged away, Wells hustled into the pickup, a red Chevy crew cab with commercial plates and a white-painted slogan:
LEE’S LANDSCAPING: BEAUTIFYING ATLANTA SINCE
1965
.
“What’s your name?” the guy said.

“Jesse.”

“I’m Dale. You speak Spanish?”

“Little bit,” Wells said.
“Poquito.”

“Keep these guys in line, you get an extra twenty.”

“Sí, señor.”

Dale laughed. “
Sí, señor?
That’s funny.”

The truck nosed out of the lot and onto the Buford Highway, Route 13, a crowded six-lane road that ran from Atlanta to the northeastern suburbs of Chamblee and Doraville. Wells hadn’t known what to expect from Atlanta when he’d arrived in April. Outside of his brief stint in the army, he had never spent time in the South. He had vague visions of Scarlett O’Hara and Martin Luther King. Atlanta had surprised him. The city was bigger than he expected, blending into suburbs that sprawled over the low Georgia hills for miles in every direction. And it was not just black and white, as he had pictured, but filled with Hispanics and Asians and even a few Arabs.

Especially here, the Buford Highway, a mélange of strip malls with signs in Vietnamese and Japanese and languages Wells had never seen. Taquerias and Korean saunas and the First Intercontinental Bank—“Tu Banco Local”—sat beside a Comfort Inn and Waffle House, relics of a more familiar America. A mile north was the Buford Farmers Market, which despite its bucolic name catered to Central American immigrants, selling oxtails and bulls’ testicles wrapped in plastic for $2.99 a pound.

The locals called Chamblee “Chambodia,” but that term hardly captured its variety. The Buford Highway was post-American America, the United States at its ugly, tacky best, accepting—if not quite welcoming—immigrants of every color, Wells thought. More practically, it was a good place to hide. Anybody who wanted to work could make a living here, and the landlords didn’t fuss over renting to people whose papers weren’t quite in order. They welcomed anyone who paid on time and kept quiet, like Wells.

So for four months he had lived in a furnished one-bedroom apartment just off the highway. Every morning he took his place among the Guatemalans and Nicaraguans waiting for work at the parking lot. At first they had suspected him of being an immigration agent or a cop and refused to talk to him, but lately they had loosened up a bit. They still didn’t really like him; he got picked for more than his share of jobs because he was white and spoke English.

But Wells figured he knew how to be an outsider. Another fake name, another new identity, another endless wait for orders. He sometimes wondered what guys like Dale the landscaper would do if he told them who he really was. Laugh, probably—“That’s funny”—and tell him to get back to work.

THEY HEADED WEST
on I-285, the ring road that surrounds Atlanta, leaving the grit of Doraville behind as they passed the giant Perimeter Mall, a shopping center the size of a small city. Even now Wells couldn’t get used to the casual wealth of America, the gleaming opulence of cars and office buildings. At exit 24, Sandy Springs, they turned off 285, and a few minutes later Dale swung onto a culde-sac with four newly built homes that grandly proclaimed itself
HIDDEN HILLTOP LANE: A PRIVATE DRIVE.
A truck full of saplings awaited them, along with a teenager wearing a Jeff Gordon cap.

“Kyle,” Dale said to the kid.

“Wassup, Dale.” They exchanged a complex, fluid handshake.

“Got you some Mexicans,” Dale said. “This here’s John. He speaks Spanish—he’ll tell ’em what to do.”

Wells’s heart thumped. How could Dale possibly know his real name?

“Jesse,” Wells said.

“Whatever,” Dale said. “Long as you can dig a hole.”

Wells could only shake his head. This cracker had just given him his biggest scare in months.

Dale pointed at the trees in the truck. “Kyle’ll show you where to put them,” he said. “Make sure you get the roots in deep.”

THEY STOPPED FOR
lunch around noon, hiding from the sun by the side of the house. The Guatemalans unwrapped homemade tamales and bottles of warm beer; Wells pulled out a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, his secret vice. He munched on a greasy, salty drumstick and rolled his tired shoulders, trying to stay loose. He had sweated through his shirt, but he didn’t mind the work. Months of digging and hammering had given him back the muscles that had disappeared in the North-West Frontier.

Wells tilted the bucket of chicken toward the Guatemalans. “You want?”

One of the men reached toward the bucket, then stopped.

“It’s okay,” Wells said. “Really.”

The guy took a drumstick.
“Gracias.”

“Quien es tu nombre?”

“Eduardo. Tú?”

“Jesse.”

“You work every day.”

“Sí,”
Wells said.

“But you white.”

“Looks that way,” Wells said. The beginnings of a smile formed on Eduardo’s face, then disappeared.

“And you no
inmigración.
”

“No.”

Eduardo looked puzzled as he tried to understand why a
norteamericano
would be stuck working with them. Wells had had this conversation, or something similar, a dozen times. It always stopped here. These men respected privacy and, anyway, most of them didn’t know enough English to push further. Sure enough, Eduardo finished off the last of his chicken in silence.

“Gracias,”
he said again, and turned back to the other Guatemalans.

Wells leaned against the wall and looked at the houses around him, broad and tall, with three- and four-car garages attached. Each one probably had fifteen rooms. For one family. Amazing, he thought. Someone would be glad to live here, or ought to be.

THEY FINISHED UP
around five o’clock, with the clouds thickening, promising a heavy summer downpour. “Anybody want a cigarette?” Kyle asked. He walked over to his truck—and suddenly hopped in and pulled away. “Later, bitches,” he said. Just like that he was gone. The Guatemalans chased the truck but gave up as it disappeared down Mount Vernon.

“Maricón,”
Eduardo yelled uselessly down the road. “Fucking
puta.
”

This had happened to Wells once before. Most contractors kept their word, because they were honest or because they knew that word would get out if they didn’t. But some were real pricks. Wells wanted to put a rock through a window of one of these fancy houses. But Dale might show up at the Kermex lot with the cops, and nobody could risk that. Least of all Wells. He tossed the box of fried chicken on the lawn—maybe the smell would attract raccoons.

They walked for miles down Mount Vernon in rain that turned into a full-on thunderstorm. Wells forced himself to stick with Eduardo and the others, though he worried that a cop might pick them up. Sandy Springs was the richest suburb in Atlanta, and its police didn’t look kindly on brown men wandering the streets. For long stretches, the road had no shoulder or sidewalks, and twice they were forced to jump into brush to avoid speeding SUVs.

Finally they reached 285 and waited interminably for a bus. From now on Wells was bringing twenty bucks and his cell phone on these jobs, so he could call a cab if he got ditched. He had been colder and hungrier plenty of times, but he couldn’t remember being quite so furious. He expected more from his country. Beside him the Guatemalans chattered away until finally Wells tapped Eduardo’s shoulder. “You speak English?” Wells said.

Eduardo smiled. “Good as you speak Spanish.”

“Then can I ask you something? You like it here?”

“Every month I send my family seven hundred dollars. They building a house in Escuintla, where I’m from,” Eduardo said. “When it’s done, I go home.”

“You don’t want to stay?”

“You really want to know?”

“I asked.”

Eduardo looked at Wells, considering.

“Then I tell you, man. I know all about America before I come. So big, so rich. And also you have demo-cra-cy and free-dom—” English might not be Eduardo’s first language, but he understood irony just fine, Wells thought.

Eduardo coughed and spat at the traffic. “You act like this is the only place in the world. And everybody should be sad they don’t live here. So I’m glad I came, man. Now I seen America for myself. I won’t miss it. This place, for me, it’s a job. That’s all.”

DARKNESS HAD FALLEN
when Wells finally reached his apartment. Tired as he was, he remembered to check the sliver of tape he’d fastened to the top of the doorsill and the thin black thread at the base; both were intact. He’d escaped his pursuers for another day. If anyone was bothering to pursue him.

His living room looked even duller than usual. A dingy futon and a wooden coffee table marred with cigarette burns. A particleboard bookcase and a television-DVD combo with a few discs, mainly westerns like
Shane.
A motivational poster of an eagle flying above a generic mountain landscape. Except for the DVDs and a few books, the apartment looked as tired as it had when Wells first rented it. No pictures, no trinkets. No clothes on the floor, no dishes in the sink. Nothing that marked the place as being inhabited by a human being instead of a robot. Well, one thing: a few weeks earlier Wells had bought a fish tank and a couple of angelfish.

“Hello, Lucy,” he said to the tank. “Hello, Ricky.” He had never particularly liked fish, but he was glad to have something alive in his apartment. Half alive, anyway—the fish had been swimming slower and slower the last few days.

He knelt on his prayer rug and unenthusiastically flipped his Koran to the first sura. “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” he murmured in Arabic. “Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful—”

Wells broke off and set the Koran down. He tried to pray every morning and night, but he couldn’t hide from himself the truth that his faith had deflated like a leaky tire since the morning when he’d knelt hopelessly before his parents’ graves. He still believed—or desperately wanted to believe, anyway—in God and charity and brotherhood. But he had told Duto the truth when he’d said Islam had been a way of life as much as a religion for him. Being Muslim meant praying five times a day, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the mosque every Friday, not necessarily believing that Mohammed had risen to heaven on a white horse. Now he prayed alone, and without the comforts of the
umma,
the brotherhood, the Koran seemed increasingly foreign.

In a way the distance made him glad. He knew that when the moment came to stop Khadri, he wouldn’t have any doubts. Still, he wished he could believe in
something.
No country, no religion, no family. He had tried to write his son, but what could he say to the boy? “Dear Evan, you don’t know me, but I’m your real father, not that nice lawyer who’s taken care of you all these years…” “Dear Evan, I know I disappeared from your life when you were two…” “Dearest Evan, it’s Dad. I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing or even the alias I’m living under, but here’s $50. Buy yourself a video game and think of me when you play it.” After a half dozen pathetic efforts, he’d given up.

He wouldn’t have guessed he’d be lonelier in the United States than in the North-West Frontier. He supposed he believed in Exley. Jenny. He dreamed of her every couple of weeks. Sometimes he was back in the Jeep with her. Sometimes he was with her on the night she lost her virginity. Always he woke with an erection swollen against his boxers. He didn’t have a picture of her, but he could almost see her blue eyes and translucent white skin. The hitch in her walk. He was sure he could pick her out of a crowd from a hundred yards away. And he was sure she felt the same about him.

Though what did he really know about her? She might even have made up that story, faked feelings for him on orders from somebody higher up. The agency had used sex as a weapon before. Wells shook his head. If that story was fake, she belonged in Hollywood, not Langley. He had to trust his instincts, or he would wind up seeing FBI agents around every corner. No, Exley wanted him as much as he wanted her. They would see each other again. For now he had to do his job, and that job was to be ready for the moment when Qaeda finally came to him.