The Faithful Spy (28 page)

“You must be Jack,” the man said in clean, soft English with just a hint of a Saudi accent. “I’m Thomas.”

The names were right. Khadri might not be here, but this was his man. “Good to meet you,” Wells said. “How was the weather in Detroit?” A simple question, just to confirm what he already knew.

“Cloudy last night but clear this morning.”

Wells extended his hand, and they shook.

THEY WERE SILENT
until Wells swung onto 285, heading east, back toward his apartment. The man who called himself Thomas leaned forward to peek at the right side mirror, checking for tails. “Can you drive faster, in the left lane?” Thomas said. Wells did.

A few minutes later Thomas told him to move right and slow down. Then to speed up. Wells followed every instruction.

“Where do you live?” Thomas said as they reached the intersection of 285 and I-20.

“Doraville. Northeastern Atlanta. About fifteen miles. Should be there in twenty minutes.”

“Where exactly?”

“The address?”

“Yes.”

Wells told him.

“We’re not going to your apartment. Get off here and go west on Interstate 20.”

“Toward downtown.”

“Yes.” Thomas said nothing more. And Wells knew his wait wasn’t over yet.

WELLS PULLED INTO
the parking lot at a beat-up Denny’s in southwest Atlanta. He’d been driving for hours, making endless loops on the highways that scissored the city. Now they were back practically where they had started, a couple of miles from the edge of Hartsfield. Planes flew low overhead, on their approach to the airport. Wells fought down his rising impatience, telling himself that a few more hours wouldn’t matter.

Wells parked, and Thomas led him to the end of the lot, where a man stood beside a green Chevy Lumina. He was shorter than Thomas and dressed casually, jeans and a Falcons T-shirt.

“This is Sami,” Thomas said. He hugged Sami and murmured something into his ear.

“Sami.” Wells put out his hand. Sami let it hang in the air until Wells finally pulled it back.

“Give him your keys.” Thomas didn’t smile.

Without a word Wells flicked his keys to Sami, who caught them neatly and turned for Wells’s pickup. Thomas got into the Lumina, indicating with a wave that Wells should follow.

Wells stayed cool as he watched his Ford disappear from the parking lot. These men were taking all this trouble for a reason. Khadri was putting him through one last test before finally lowering the drawbridge and letting him into the castle. Or so he hoped.

Again they drove aimlessly. The Chevy’s little digital clock passed five
P.M.,
and the traffic began to thicken. But Thomas showed no impatience. Wells figured he was giving Sami time to search the apartment. Fine. Let them play this game. No matter how hard they looked they couldn’t go deep enough to break his cover.

Finally Thomas’s cell phone trilled. He picked up.
“Nam.”
He hung up and slipped the phone into his pocket.

“It’s clean,” Wells said.

“What is?”

“My apartment. Except for the guns. And those are for us.”

For the first time Thomas smiled. “That’s what Sami said.”

THEY ROLLED PAST
Turner Field and the golden dome of the Georgia capitol, until Thomas turned right onto Fourteenth Street, into the center of a neighborhood called Midtown, a jumble of tall office towers and low-rise apartment buildings. Thomas found a garage and circled up the ramps, nodding to himself as the floors emptied. Finally he parked on the top floor, in the middle of a sea of empty asphalt.

“Out.”

“Thomas,” Wells said. “Are we friends?” He was speaking Arabic now, enjoying the smooth feel of the words. Aside from prayers, he hadn’t spoken the language since Pakistan.

“I think so,” Thomas said, also in Arabic. “We’re making sure.”

“Then will you tell me your real name?”

“Qais.”

“Qais. Don’t you think I know there’s a gun under the seat? Don’t you think I could take it if I wanted?” Wells smiled tightly at Qais. I’m a professional too, he didn’t say. Give me a little respect.

Qais showed no surprise. “You could try.”

Wells couldn’t help liking the guy’s style. Neither of them said anything else. Wells slid out, and sure enough, Qais locked the doors and reached under the driver’s seat, pulling out a little .22. He tucked the gun under his shirt and got out.

“Put your hands on the hood and spread your legs,” he said to Wells, back in English now. He frisked Wells efficiently. “Good.”

“Were you a cop in a past life?”

“Something like that. Let’s go. Somebody’s waiting. You’ll be glad to see him.”

THE SUN HAD
slipped behind the office towers to their west by the time they left the garage. Qais moved easily now, comfortable that they weren’t being tailed. In a few minutes they reached Piedmont Park, a one-hundred-acre expanse of grass and trees around an artificial lake. On the hilly lawn at the park’s edge, shirtless college students tossed a Frisbee around in the twilight. Joggers in sports bras made their way along a path at the bottom of the hill. Beyond them a man sat alone on a bench, quietly reading
The New York Times.

Khadri.

He stood as Wells and Qais walked toward him, folding the paper under his arm. He was one hundred yards away now, fifty, twenty-five, ten. And then he was close enough to touch. Kill him now, Wells told himself. Drop him and break his neck. Or take the gun from Qais and shoot them both.

Instead Wells merely smiled and held out his hand, as Khadri had at their initial meeting. Wells thought he could probably take Qais, but he couldn’t be certain of getting them both. Khadri might have a gun too. Again he remembered those hunts growing up. He would have only one shot at Khadri. He had to be sure.

To Wells’s surprise Khadri ignored his outstretched hand and hugged him instead, gripping him close, running his hands down Wells’s back in a quick frisk.

He let go of Wells and stepped back. “Jalal.” No one had called Wells that name since Peshawar.
“Salaam alaikum.”

“Alaikum salaam.”

“You look different.”

“I, ah—I grew out my hair. To blend in, you know.”

Khadri looked at Wells’s shirt. “Did you go to the jazz festival?”

His perfect English accent grated on Wells’s ears. “For a couple of hours. They have it in this park, over there.” He pointed west.

“You like jazz?”

Wells shrugged. “Sure. It was fun. It was something to do.”

“While you waited?”

“While I waited.”

“And Qais? No problems at the airport?”

Qais merely shook his head. He had retreated a couple of steps, but his hand was on his hip, casually, a few inches from his pistol.

“Shall we stroll, Jalal? Such a nice evening.”

They walked slowly along the jogging path, Qais a few steps behind, out of earshot.

“It’s pretty, this place,” Khadri said. “I read it was designed by the sons of the man who built Central Park in New York. But Central Park is much bigger.”

Wells wished he knew if Khadri was probing for something or just thinking out loud.

“You passed through New York on your way here, Jalal.”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“New York? I thought it was one big target,” Wells said truthfully. He wanted to grab Khadri’s neck and squeeze until the man’s face turned gray and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Didn’t you think it was exciting? Times Square?”

“Sure. It was exciting.”

“But not your kind of place.”

“I grew up in Montana, Omar. I had mountains to myself.”

“How about this?”

“It’s pretty, like you said.” Khadri was just talking, Wells realized. Chatting about America. Even he must need a break sometimes.

“It’s strange that some places are so—pretty—and others so awful, isn’t it, Jalal? Your people, they live so easily.”

“Too easily,” Wells said. “They ought to notice the world’s misery. So much ignorance is evil. And they’re not my people.”

“You always say the right thing, Jalal. Just right. You always sound like one of us.”

This was the moment, Wells knew. If he couldn’t convince Khadri now he never would. “Because I am. I don’t know what else to say. Whatever you ask, I’ll do.”

Khadri stopped walking and turned toward Wells. “I want to trust you, Jalal. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come here. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“You can be incredibly valuable to me, to us. We have big jobs ahead. And I have so few good men—” Khadri broke off. He had problems he didn’t want to reveal, Wells thought.

“In any case,” Khadri went on. “You are unique. You fit in here”—Khadri waved his hand at the city around them—“in a way that I never will, Qais never will. It is a great gift.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never given us reason to doubt you. In Chechnya, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan.”

“I’ve always tried to do what’s necessary.”

“And yet. I don’t understand you, Jalal. I have talked about you with the sheikh himself. And after we sent you here, I asked the men who knew you on the frontier about you. For all those years you studied and prayed and trained. You were never impatient—”

“I was impatient,” Wells said.

“If you were you never let anyone see it. You never complained. You never took a drink or a smoke or had a woman. The perfect soldier. But I see that discipline and it frightens me. I wonder, how do I know whether you are fighting for us—or them?”

Wells gripped Khadri’s arm, pulling the smaller man toward him. Qais strode toward them, but Khadri waved him off.

“Omar. I’m not the perfect soldier. The men who died in Los Angeles, who sacrifice themselves in Iraq every day. The martyrs. They are. All I’ve done is wait. I only want the chance to serve. And if I must I’ll wait forever—”

Wells stopped. He had made his point. No need to go further. He let Khadri go, but Khadri did not step away. Instead he leaned toward Wells, looking up into Wells’s face. Finally he nodded. “You want the chance to serve? Then you will have it.”

Wells bowed his head. The drawbridge had dropped. He was in. All the years, all the waiting, they’d finally paid off. Was this how it felt to rise from the dead? “Thank you, Omar.”

Khadri tapped his chest. “I must go. Qais will explain the mission. He speaks for me.”

“Thank you,” Wells said again.
“Allahu akbar.”
God is great.

“Allahu akbar.”

Khadri walked away, up the hill. He crossed out of the park and disappeared.

“He looks like he knows exactly where he’s going,” Wells said quietly to Qais.

“He always does.”

AT THE GARAGE
Sami waited in Wells’s pickup.

“Salaam alaikum,”
Sami said.

“Alaikum salaam.”

“So you’re with us.”

“Inshallah.”

Sami smiled and tossed Wells back his keys.

WELLS DROVE THE
Ranger, Qais in the passenger seat. Sami followed in the Lumina.

“Where’s your hotel?”

“No hotel. We’re staying at your apartment.”

“The neighbors will wonder.”

“We aren’t staying long.”

Wells waited for something more, but Qais didn’t explain further.

“Who trained you, Qais?”

“The Saudi Mukhabarat. And I spent six months at Quantico with your FBI.”

“No wonder.”

“Thank you.”

“So…” Wells said in Arabic. “You and Sami didn’t come to Atlanta just to see me, did you?”

Qais laughed. “No. Nor just to waste gasoline.”

“Then would you like to tell me the mission? Or should I guess?”

“You won’t guess.” Qais was much more relaxed now that Khadri had given Wells his okay.

“The CDC? Centers for Disease Control?”

“No.”

“CNN Center? The Coke building?”

“No. Anyway, Omar likes Coca-Cola. It’s all he drinks.”

“Me too,” Wells said. “The Georgia Dome? Turner Field?”

“I don’t even know what those places are,” Qais said. “Look, it’s only you and me and Sami. And this isn’t a martyrdom mission. Omar needs us alive.”

“Then…it must be something simple. An assassination.”

“Very good. Who?”

Wells had no idea. The mayor of Atlanta? A CDC scientist? One of the senators from Georgia? Nobodies. And anybody really important would have a ton of security.

“You’re right, Qais. I can’t guess.”

“You’ve heard of Howard West? The general?”

Howard West had run the army’s black ops and counterterrorism units during the 1990s. Wells had met him once, at a memorial service for a Delta officer who’d died. West had spoken briefly, then disappeared into a helicopter to do whatever it was that three-stars did.

He had retired a few months after that—Wells couldn’t remember exactly when. Now he worked as a “consultant.” That meant he collected six-figure checks from companies that peddled spy gear. In return, he connected them with his old friends at the Pentagon. He kept a low profile. Wells hadn’t even known he lived in Atlanta.

Attacking him was a brilliant way for Qaeda to declare its equality with the United States. You hunt our leaders? We’ll hunt yours. And since he was retired, West would have much less security than an active general. But killing West wasn’t the big job that Khadri had planned, Wells thought. “Omar needs us alive,” Qais had said. The assassination was a diversion. The drawbridge was only halfway down. Khadri was offering Wells a bargain: Kill West, or die trying, and I’ll trust you. Kill West and you’re in. If not, you’ll never see me again.

An ache creased Wells’s back. He felt like a puppet whose strings had been pulled too hard. Khadri had outsmarted him again. But maybe he could find a way out.

“We can get to West,” Wells said to Qais. “It’ll take some planning, though. When does Omar want it done?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight.” As he said the word Wells felt the trap snap shut.

12

WELLS OPENED HIS
apartment door to find that Sami had laid out his arsenal on the kitchen table, the guns and knives an invitation awaiting an answer. Aside from that, the place looked undisturbed, which didn’t surprise Wells. Like Qais, Sami was a professional, a former Jordanian cop.

“Shall we say the
maghreb
?” Wells asked, using the Arabic word for the evening prayer.

“What about your neighbors?” Qais said. Through the walls they heard a television blaring in the next apartment, the jokes and canned laugher running together monotonously.

“Wendell’s almost eighty,” Wells said. “And almost deaf. As long as we’re quiet.”

He laid out a rug, and the three men said their evening prayers. Then they ate. On the way home Wells had stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought premade sandwiches and quart-sized tankards of coffee. He was ravenous, and he figured Qais and Sami must be too. But he felt no pleasure as he chewed his stale turkey hero, just the knowledge that the clock was winding down. He swallowed his last bite and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. He had four hours, six at the most. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see a way clear. He couldn’t kill West. Yet Khadri would never trust him if West lived.

With a week of notice, even a day, he could have warned Exley. Then the agency and the FBI could have set their own trap. They could have snatched up Qais and Sami and let Wells go. They could even have announced that Qais and Sami had been killed in the house, and that West had been shot and wounded. Khadri would have to accept that; he had no way to check.

But Wells couldn’t get a warning to West now. Qais and Sami weren’t going to leave him alone tonight. They knew that the real point of the mission was to test Wells’s loyalty. Of course, he could just kill Qais and Sami now. But then he would lose whatever information they had, and the trail to Khadri would end. Turning them in would be better, but that was no sure bet either. They wouldn’t exactly sit back and smile if he picked up the phone and called 911.

Wells wondered whether he should just let West die, pull the trigger himself if Qais asked. This was a war, and West had been a soldier once. Not just a soldier. A general. He was close to seventy. He had lived a full life. He might even understand.

Wells shook that thought from his mind. He had to make sure West lived tonight. For his own sake as much as the general’s. There were some lines he could not cross. He couldn’t murder the people he had been charged with protecting. He couldn’t play God and sacrifice one of his countrymen in the hopes of saving others. No. He had to save West without blowing the cover he had worked so hard to build.

 
YET HE COULDN’T
see a way out, no matter how hard he tried. Call 911? Can’t. Shoot Qais? Can’t. Kill West? Can’t. Warn West? Can’t. Call Exley? Can’t. Call 911? Can’t…

He pulled his attention back to the kitchen as Sami spread a street map of Buckhead over the table. Technically, the area was part of Atlanta, the northwestern corner of the city. In reality Buckhead was a lush suburb where the city’s corporate gentry lived in oversized houses set back from winding tree-lined streets. Wells had done lots of landscaping work there.

“He’s here.” Sami pointed to a red sticker, a few hundred feet from the intersection of Northside Drive and Mount Vernon Road.

Qais slid a manila folder from his laptop case. “The property records say he bought it for two point one million dollars in 2001,” Qais said. “Three floors, with a guest cottage on the side.”

“Two point one million? The army pays better than I remembered. Do we have pictures of him?”

Qais pulled out pictures of West taken from the Internet. Wells recognized the general, a tall, bald man with thick, rubbery lips and a mass of wrinkles for a forehead. “How do we know he’ll be there tonight? He must be on the road a lot.”

Qais looked at another paper. “He’ll be there. The Georgia Defense Contractors Association is giving him its lifetime achievement award at a dinner tonight. A town called Roswell.”

“That’s north of here.”

“And tomorrow afternoon he’s speaking at the City Club downtown. He’ll be home.”

Wells couldn’t disagree. “What about bodyguards?”

“Only one,” Sami said.

“You sure?”

“I’ve been watching him. When he’s out he rides in a Jimsy”—Arab slang for a GMC Suburban. “The driver doubles as his bodyguard and sleeps at the house.”

“More likely in the cottage,” Qais said.

 
THE GLIMMER OF
a plan took shape in Wells’s mind. Maybe he could split Qais and Sami up, after all.

“Yeah,” Wells said. “Probably in the cottage.” He turned back to Sami. “You’re sure West doesn’t have more protection?”

“I’ve only seen one guard ever.”

Khadri really did want them all to survive, Wells thought. He was surprised that West had so little security, but the guy had been retired for a while, and anonymity was his best defense.

“The house has a fence and a gate,” Sami said. “I took pictures last week.” He spread them across the table. The fence had a brick base topped with low ornamental spikes. Behind it, up a hill, a big Georgian house sat back about one hundred feet. A driveway separated the house from the guest cottage. Sami pointed to the fence.

“But only about six feet high, and no barbed wire.”

“Not in Buckhead,” Wells said. “The neighbors wouldn’t approve. How big’s the property?”

“A hundred and twenty meters long, sixty meters wide.” Four hundred feet by two hundred feet, Wells mentally translated. About two acres.

“Big enough to give us a little privacy,” Wells said. “What about dogs?”

“I think one. I’ve heard it a couple of times.”

Wells shook his head. Dogs were a real problem, the biggest one yet. Dogs meant noise. “He married? Any family?”

“He’s divorced,” Qais said. “About a year after he retired. His wife lives in Houston.”

“Only one wife?” Wells joked.

Qais smiled. “Only one.”

Good. Fewer chances for mistakes. “And Khadri wants this tonight? It has to be tonight?”

Qais nodded. “He said you would understand.”

Wells could only nod. “I do.”

He pointed at the map. “I know this part of town from my landscaping work. The place looks more private than it is. Mount Vernon, that’s a big road, a lot of traffic—we can cut across a couple of lawns and leave that way if we have to. Get back here in time to get a good night’s sleep and get Qais back to Detroit.”

 
FOR TWO HOURS,
they talked through the mission. Wells would have liked more time to plan and a lot more information. Floor plans of West’s house, including the room where he slept. The number of police cars and private security patrols that covered the neighborhood, and their usual routes. Whether West had a gun, and if so where he kept it. Instead they didn’t even know whether the house had an alarm, or whether it was keyed to the fence.

They would need to move fast, making up with speed what they lacked in intel and firepower. They had to get out before the police arrived to pin them down. Wells figured they had five minutes at most from the moment they got to the house, even if the place didn’t have an alarm. They should plan on being done in three. Escape was basically impossible once the opposition arrived in force. Especially in unfriendly territory, which Buckhead was.

“If we hear a siren, we go,” Wells said. “Immediately.”

Slowly, he guided Qais and Sami to his plan, letting them work out the details so they wouldn’t realize how much of the idea was his.

“Enough,” Qais said finally. “I feel like I’m back at your FBI. You know everything will turn to shit anyway once we get inside. These things always do.”

“Sure,” Wells said. “But we have to pretend it won’t.” Despite himself, Wells liked these guys. And when they woke up tomorrow on a flight to Guantánamo, they would have only themselves to blame.

 
SAMI HAD BROUGHT
clothes for himself and Qais, black pullovers and black pants like the ones that Wells had bought at the army surplus store.

“We look like a mime troupe,” Wells joked when they had dressed.

“Mime troupe?” Sami said.

“The guys who wear all black and—forget it.”

Sami had brought his own guns too, .45s with silencers as well as an H&K machine pistol, a short-barrel automatic rifle with a thirty-two-shot clip. The H&K was inaccurate and showy but a nasty weapon nonetheless. Jihadis couldn’t resist machine pistols, Wells remembered; they had seen too many action movies. The .45s were the real prize; they fired subsonic rounds, and with the silencers screwed on they were as quiet as a gun could be.

Wells didn’t ask where Sami had gotten the guns. They looked brand-new, and for a moment he wondered whether the agency might be behind this, testing his loyalty with this crazy plot. Maybe Vinny Duto would be waiting for him at the house instead of West.

But Khadri had sent Qais and Sami to him, and if Khadri was an agency mole the United States would have captured bin Laden and destroyed Qaeda a long time ago. No. The guns were real and they were loaded and West was alone in that house. He would die tonight unless Wells could save him.

THEY WOULD TAKE
both the Ranger and the Lumina, which Qais promised couldn’t be traced if they had to ditch it. Sami had wiped it down to erase fingerprints. They would leave the pistols and ski masks in the Lumina’s trunk in case they were stopped, though Wells figured the cops might find an excuse to search the car in any event. Three men, two Arab, cruising around Buckhead after midnight, dressed like a SWAT team…. No, they had better drive carefully.

“Do me a favor,” Wells said to Sami. “No speeding.”

“Nam.”

They prayed once more, asking Allah for his blessing, for the chance to bring the wrath of Islam upon the infidel general. Wells hoped that Allah paid no more attention than He had to the prayers that Wells had offered beside his parents’ grave.

Just before one
A.M.
they rolled out, Wells and Qais in the pickup, Sami following behind in the Lumina. Despite the danger—or because of it—Wells’s hands were steady on the steering wheel, his breathing slow and easy. How he had gotten to this place no longer mattered.
He
no longer mattered. Only the mission counted.

 
THEY MADE THEIR
way west on 285, the wide highway mostly empty aside from the eighteen-wheelers burning through the night. Then southwest on Mount Vernon and southeast on Powers Ferry and southwest again on Mount Paran. The traffic got lighter with each turn they made, until finally they were alone. They made one slow winding loop around the block that surrounded the general’s house, looking for security patrols or houses with too many lights on, listening for dogs barking or husbands yelling. But the good citizens of Buckhead were all asleep, or pretending to be.

Wells looked at his watch. One thirty-three. They wouldn’t have a better chance.

“Now,” he said to Qais.

“Now.”

Wells held his left hand out the window, the sign that they were on, and parked his pickup in front of a half-built brick mansion around the corner from West’s house. Sami popped the Lumina’s trunk. They reached for the guns and the masks. Wells took his Glock and a silenced .45 for Sami; Qais grabbed the other .45 and the H&K. They slid into the Chevy. Sami rolled around the corner and stopped in front of West’s house.

 
SAMI PUT THE
car in park but left the engine running. They pulled on their masks and gloves. Wells tucked the Glock into a holster on his hip. Sami slung the H&K across his chest like the villain in a Steven Seagal movie. “Five minutes maximum,” Wells said. “And if we hear sirens we’re out.”

“We know,” Qais said.

“Nam.”

Wells looked again at his watch: 1:34:58…1:34:59…1:35:00.

“Allahu akbar,”
Wells said. “Go.”

They were out of the car. They closed the doors silently and ran for the fence.

Wells was the first to reach it. He pulled himself up and over in one fluid motion, then jumped down, landing easily. If the fence had an alarm, it was silent, a lucky break. The neighbors would sleep a few seconds longer. Qais followed quickly, but Sami was temporarily stopped when his H&K got tangled in the crown of the fence, something that never happened in the movies.

The lawn was as lush and green and perfectly cut as a football field before the season’s first kickoff. Wells looked around for a dog, but the grass was empty. Then he heard the barking. The noise grew louder as Wells ran up the hill toward the big white house.

He reached the front porch and looked at his watch: 1:35:20. He would give himself fifteen seconds to pick the lock on the front door. If he couldn’t, they would have to break a window. But when he grabbed the doorknob it turned smoothly. The door was unlocked. Weird, but he didn’t have time to figure it out. The dog was yammering loudly now, one bark rushing into the next. He sounded like he was at the door. And he sounded like he was big. They would have to take care of him quickly.