The Faithful Spy (7 page)

What al-Nerzi didn’t know, what investigators discovered only after the 747 landed and they found the bomb in the plane’s hold, was that the turbulence over New Jersey had smashed the second phone, preventing it from receiving the call to detonate the C-4. Only the sudden violence of a late-March squall had saved UA 919 from destruction.

“WE’RE ON OUR
final descent into Washington Dulles International Airport. Flight attendants please be seated for landing,” Captain Hamilton said. In 35A, Angela Smart craned her neck as the jet passed through three thousand feet, two thousand. They broke through a heavy layer of clouds, and she could see thick woods, roads heavy with traffic, the brown waters of the Potomac. The ride was mostly smooth now. One thousand feet. Five hundred.

Touchdown. The jet bounced once on the runway, then landed for real. A giant cheer erupted across the cabin, whoops and applause. The captain threw on the brakes, and the big Boeing came smoothly to a stop. The cheering continued for a full minute before finally slowing down.

“We’re glad to have you home,” the captain said, and the applause exploded again.

SHAFER’S PHONE RANG.
He listened for a moment, then hung up.

“They’re down,” he said to Exley. “But something happened on the approach. They want to scrub the hold, talk to some people.”

An hour later, with the 747 still on the tarmac at Dulles, an FBI agent found the red canvas bag, and the truth of what had almost happened to UA 919 finally became clear.

Finding the would-be bombers wasn’t hard. Inexplicably, al-Nerzi didn’t even try to get rid of his phone. And the timing of Fahd’s stunt appeared strangely coincidental, as did the fact that both men had bought their tickets the same day, through the same travel agent. Exley had little doubt that both men would end up in federal prison, or Guantánamo. But somehow she didn’t feel any better. Only an incredible stroke of luck had saved the lives of 307 people today.

IT WAS NEARLY
midnight when Exley and Shafer shuffled through the agency’s deserted underground parking garage, their heads low. Five cups of coffee had not hidden her exhaustion, just covered it with a layer of jitters.

“It was too close this afternoon,” she said.

“We need better intel,” Shafer said. “Turbulence isn’t a reliable fail-safe.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Where’s John Wells when you need him? The great Jalal.”

After his cryptic note in 2001, Wells had gone silent. The agency had all but forgotten that he existed, but at particularly stressful moments Shafer liked to invoke Wells’s name. He joked of Wells as a magic bullet, a talisman who would reappear when needed to rescue the agency single-handedly. The joke had a bitter edge. Shafer and Exley both knew that the agency desperately needed someone like Wells, someone who could provide reliable information from inside al Qaeda.

“I still think he’s alive,” Exley said as they approached her Caravan.

“Prove it.”

“Prove he isn’t.”

“I’ll bet you a hundred bucks we never hear from him again.”

“I’ll take it,” she said. She squeezed her alarm key and the Dodge gave her a friendly blink.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

Tomorrow. Sunday. Another chance to disappoint her kids. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Great.”

He touched her arm as she slid into the van. “Think more’s coming, Jen?”

“This was a one-off. Otherwise at least one more plane would have gotten hit today. But—”

“But?”

“I think they’re trying to distract us,” she said. “Something is coming. Big. They’re waking up.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Shafer said. “Nerzi didn’t even have to be on the plane. He could have made that call from anywhere. He wanted to be there. He wanted to die.”

“I wish we understood them better.”

“I don’t know how anyone can understand that.” He started to close her door, then stopped. “You know what, Jennifer? Take tomorrow off. Hang out with your kids. We’re going to have plenty to do.”

She didn’t argue, just slipped her key into the ignition as he shut the door.

JANET AND LORI
were out tonight, Exley saw as she nosed the Caravan down Thirteenth Street to her apartment building. When she and Randy separated, she’d moved into D.C. proper, doubling the length of her commute and subjecting herself to Washington’s insanely high taxes. But she’d wanted to put some distance between them, and she didn’t regret the choice. She had bought an apartment just off Logan Circle, a once-iffy neighborhood that had gentrified, thanks to Washington’s hot housing market. Still, on Saturday nights a couple of prostitutes sometimes cruised Thirteenth, looking for behind-the-times johns who had missed the news about the area’s renaissance. She’d gotten to know them—or at least their names—while buying gas at the BP Amoco down the block from her building. She gave them a wave and got a halfhearted nod from Janet in return.

She parked the Caravan in the building’s underground garage and trudged to the elevator. Her legs ached from the hours she’d sat at her desk. She wanted nothing more than a glass of red wine, maybe two, before bed. In fact, that wasn’t entirely true. She wanted lots of things more than a glass of wine. A backrub, maybe. A boyfriend. A job that didn’t leave her constantly exhausted and on edge. But the first two weren’t immediately available, and she knew that she would have an awful time leaving the agency no matter how miserable she got. She was fighting for the United States. She couldn’t picture herself working for some private risk-management company, even for double the pay and half the hours. Maybe a couple more years of this would burn her out so badly she’d have to leave, but not yet.

No backrub, no boyfriend, no new job. A glass of Shiraz would be it instead.

Inside her apartment, a tidy one-bedroom in the corner of the building’s third floor, Exley flicked on the Ella Fitzgerald in her CD player, opened a bottle of wine, and stretched out on her couch. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror across the room. God, she looked tired. She could remember being beautiful. She had the pictures to prove it. But age wasn’t fair to women, unless they were actresses or trophy wives with fantastic amounts of money for their upkeep. She still had a good figure, and her eyes could light up a room, but only Botox would erase her crow’s-feet and the lines on her neck, and she couldn’t see herself getting plastic surgery. She wondered if most men would care or even notice. Probably not. But the wondering was the problem. The wondering dammed your confidence. That and the endless pictures of twenty-something models in every magazine.

She finished her wine and poured herself another glass. The irony was that Randy’s fiancée was dumpy, to be blunt, even if she was a couple of years younger. And she knew he was still attracted to her. No, he had just gotten tired of her putting the agency first. She couldn’t blame him. But the job didn’t allow for compromises. And how could it, when the bad guys could hit anytime?

Like this afternoon. If they’d only followed her advice—

“Oh shit,” she said aloud to the empty room.

Shafer had known, of course. For once he’d been too tactful to say anything. No wonder he’d given her Sunday off. He knew she would get it eventually. If they’d only followed her advice this afternoon, 307 people would have died. Because if they’d landed UA 919 in Boston or Hartford, before the turbulence over New Jersey, the cellphone in the hold would have worked, and the plane would have gone down.

“God,” Exley said. She gulped down the wine and poured herself another glass. She sank down into the couch and closed her eyes. Of course she couldn’t have known. No one could have. Even so. She had almost killed 307 people.

What a perfect way to end the evening, Exley thought. She drank the last of the wine and headed for her medicine cabinet to look for an Ambien. She had an old prescription, from the worst of the divorce.

She would need a pill to sleep tonight.

3

LEARNING HOW TO
be an American again came harder than Wells had expected.

His first shock came even before his flight landed in Hong Kong, as the Pakistan Airlines A-310 circled over the city’s lights. Wells hadn’t seen a functioning electrical grid in a long time. The tribal elders in his village had owned two diesel generators, loud stinking beasts that dribbled out enough power for bulbs and a few televisions. But nothing like the sea of yellow-orange lights that glowed below Wells’s window, the blinking red beacons that capped the radio towers on Hong Kong Island, the white shine of the skyscrapers. I’ve forgotten that humans can build as easily as destroy, Wells thought.

The jet landed, and around him passengers stood and grabbed their bags. He could not move, owned by an emotion he could not name, not fear or hope but a sense that time had unfrozen and he had aged a decade in an instant. He knew he should be happy. He was free. Only he wasn’t. He had only moved to a new battlefield, one with even higher stakes. Weariness overwhelmed him, and he sat motionless until the cabin emptied and a flight attendant tapped his shoulder.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Fine.” He shouldn’t call attention to himself. He took his bag and walked off.

Glossy billboards for Hyatt and Gucci and IBM and Cathay Pacific and a dozen other companies filled the air-conditioned arrival hall. Every woman in the ads was more beautiful than the next, and they all displayed enough skin to merit a whipping or worse in the North-West Frontier. Wells pulled his eyes from the billboards and looked around the hall’s polished floors. Women were all around him, Chinese and white and Indian and Filipina. They walked alone, no male escorts, with faces and arms and legs uncovered. Some even wore makeup. A beautiful Japanese teenager, her hair dyed a shocking red, hurried past him, and Wells swiveled his head to watch her. As he did he felt an unexpected irritation. Couldn’t these women be a bit more modest? They didn’t need to wear burqas, but they didn’t have to wear miniskirts either.

On a bench in the arrival hall outside a Starbucks, he puzzled over his reaction. After a decade of celibacy he should be thrilled at the feast of skin before his eyes. Nothing about the Taliban had troubled him more than the way they treated women. He supposed he had internalized the fundamentalist credos more deeply than he had realized. Or maybe he just needed to get laid. Sex had been nearly impossible in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the villagers weren’t interested in marrying their daughters to Qaeda’s guerrillas, much less an American. And sex outside marriage wasn’t worth the risk; the Talibs and Pashtuns were endlessly inventive in their punishments for prostitution and adultery. Wells had seen a man buried alive, and a half dozen others hanged. He had kept his libido locked down. He couldn’t even remember what a woman smelled like.

He would have to change that. Muslims were supposed to save sex for marriage, but Wells knew he couldn’t be chaste forever. He had decided that he would not pay for sex or look for a one-night stand, but if he found the right woman, someone he cared about, he would not wait for a wedding.

He looked at a tall blonde strutting by and hoped he would find the right woman soon.

HE SPENT THE
next week at an anonymous hotel in Kowloon. To pass the time he walked Hong Kong’s teeming streets each morning, then spent afternoons at the city’s Central Library, a massive stone and glass building across from Victoria Park. He paged through newspapers and magazines to catch up on his lost years. Monica Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich. The Internet bubble. The euro. Britney Spears. The 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount. The years before September 11 were as calm as a Montana lake on a hot summer day.

Then the attack. In the yellowing newspapers from 2001 the shock was still palpable. Wells learned about the flyers that the families of the missing had plastered across New York, paper memorials more eloquent than any monument. And about Rudy Giuliani’s answer, that first day, when a reporter asked how many people had died: “More than we can bear.”

What about next time? Wells wondered. What will we have to bear then?

Meanwhile the United States had struck back, stomping into Afghanistan and Iraq, hoping to put its enemies on the defensive. America’s soldiers had punished the forces of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But Wells worried that the United States had stirred a generation of rage among a billion Muslims. Every time an American soldier stepped into a mosque, a jihadi was born. And now the United States seemed trapped in Iraq. Weighing the possibilities gave him a headache. Finally he returned to the safety of the sports pages, reveling as his Red Sox overcame the Yankees and won the World Series. Theo Epstein was a genius.

At night he drank Cokes in the bar of the Peninsula Hotel, looking across Victoria Harbor at the lights of Hong Kong, eavesdropping on expats chattering on their cellphones. Everyone talked all the time, a hypercharged English Wells could barely follow.

“It better happen this week or it’s not going to happen at all—”

“Yeah, Bali this weekend, back here and then San Francisco—”

“These new Intel chips are unbelievable—”

He felt as though he was the only one in the entire city not having sex or making money. Or at least talking about it. For these people globalization was a promise, not a threat. They knew how to surf the world, and they didn’t get paid to notice the folks drowning in the undertow.

Nonetheless Hong Kong did him good. The city’s energy flowed into him, and he felt his own blood beginning to move. He found a dentist to fix his ruined molar. She frowned as she looked inside his mouth. “They don’t have toothbrushes in America?” He showered three times a day to make up for the weeks that had passed between baths in the North-West Frontier, and watched races at the Sha Tin track. He didn’t gamble, but he enjoyed the pageantry of the place, the billionaires walking beside women half their age, the sleek thoroughbreds nearly prancing as they approached the gate. And the roar of the crowd as the horses neared the finish.

One morning he found himself outside the American consulate on Garden Road and felt a pang of guilt. He should already have contacted the agency officials inside. But he couldn’t bring himself to give up his freedom so soon. As soon as he presented himself to the agency he would have a new set of minders. There would be weeks of debriefings, endless questions: Where have you been all these years? Why didn’t you contact us? What exactly have you been doing?

Underlying them all would be a deeper doubt: Why should we trust you anyway?

No. He wasn’t ready. He would report in when he got back to America. Nothing would happen before then anyway. He walked on, leaving the consulate behind.

HIS PASSAGE TO
Frankfurt and then New York went smoothly. He felt none of the elation he expected when his Lufthansa 747 touched down at Kennedy, only the knowledge that he couldn’t escape his duty much longer.

The immigration officer hardly glanced at his passport, and he spent his first morning in Manhattan wandering as he had in Hong Kong. But he couldn’t help but see the city through Khadri’s eyes, as one big target: the tunnels, the bridges, the New York Stock Exchange, the Broadway theaters, the subways, the United Nations.

And Times Square, of course. When he’d last seen it, the square—really a bowtie-shaped intersection where Broadway meets Seventh Avenue—had been seedy and rundown. Now it matched its claim to be the world’s crossroads. At Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, he watched tourists and locals crawl over one another like ants at a messy picnic. Oversized neon advertisements glowed from the new office towers. News crawled endlessly on digital tickers, the world reduced to dueling strips of orange and green. Drivers leaned on their horns and street vendors tried to outshout them, hawking Statue of Liberty keychains and drawings of Tupac. A huge Toys ‘R’ Us store occupied the corner where he stood, proof that the place had become an all-ages attraction. Wells remembered what somebody—he didn’t know who—had supposedly once said about Times Square: “It must be beautiful if you can’t read.” Business got done here too. The headquarters of Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Viacom were within two hundred yards. Plus, you could drive a truck right through it. If the World Trade Center was Ground Zero, Times Square was Ground One.

Wells could feel a timer counting down somewhere. He headed into the subway and looked for a train to Queens. Eight hours later he was on a Greyhound bus headed for Charleston with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket. He’d stashed the other fifteen thousand in a safe-deposit box in Manhattan, just in case.

TWO DAYS LATER,
Wells walked through the Minneapolis airport with a brand-new South Carolina driver’s license in his pocket, thanks to that state’s liberal rules for issuing licenses. He was headed for Boise, and from there through the Idaho backcountry to Missoula. He had two stops to make, three people to see: his mom, son, and ex-wife. His last errand before he reported in.

He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. He wanted to surprise his ma, show up in Hamilton and sit in her kitchen while she brewed a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs. He would kiss her cheek and tell her he was sorry he’d been gone so long. She’d forgive him as soon as she saw him. Mothers were like that. At least his was. As for Evan and Heather…he’d have to see.

He had two hours to kill before his flight to Boise, so he found a TGI Friday’s and sat at the bar to watch the NCAA men’s basketball final, Duke versus Texas. After a few minutes, the man at the next stool turned to look at him. Early forties, a faint tan, close-cropped hair, a thin gold chain around one wrist. “Duke or Texas?”

“Duke,” Wells said. He wasn’t keen to talk, but the guy looked harmless enough.

“Me too. Where you headed?”

Wells shrugged and looked up at the television. The guy didn’t take the hint.

“Me, I’m going to Tampa. I hate Northwest. I flew a hundred and twenty thousand miles last year. They didn’t even upgrade me out of Tampa. I couldn’t believe it. They
owe
me an upgrade.”

“Yeah,” Wells grunted. The guy must be a salesman. Not that he planned to ask.

“You married?” the guy said. “I’m married. Five kids.”

“Congratulations.”

“Hey, you don’t mind shooting the shit, do ya?”

Wells found himself unable to tell the guy to get lost. He seemed kind of sad, and Wells hadn’t had a casual conversation with another American in a long time. Call it field research.

The guy downed half his beer in a single gulp. “I better switch to shots. Lemme buy you a beer. Name’s Rich, by the way.”

“I don’t drink,” Wells said.

Rich looked at the bartender. “Double shot of Cuervo for me and a beer for my friend—”

“I told you I don’t drink.”

“Sorry, man. Just being friendly. A Coke then.” Rich nodded to the bartender. “You know, I never minded flying before 9/11. Since then I get hammered every time. Even still.”

Wells wondered again if he should leave. He didn’t feel like talking about September 11. He thought about it plenty on his own. But he supposed airports were a natural place for the topic.

“I think to myself, what would I do if somebody pulled out a box cutter?” Rich said. “Tell you what, I’d go down fighting. Be a hero, like those guys on flight 93.”

“Hero?” Wells couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice.

The bartender set a generous helping of Cuervo in front of Rich. “You don’t think those guys were heroes?” Rich looked insulted.

Wells didn’t know much about what had happened on flight 93, but he knew this: trying to save your own skin didn’t make you a hero. Everybody wants to live. You were a hero when you risked your life to save someone else. Usually. Sometimes you were just stupid. He had seen men throw their lives away just to prove they were tough.

Still, some famous battles were remembered for the courage of one side against overwhelming odds. Take Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the Confederates swarming Cemetery Hill against the Union Army. The attack had been a disaster, but the Rebs would always be known for their bravery. Were they heroes or fools? Did the fact that they were fighting for slavery change the answer?

But Wells didn’t feel like debating heroism with Rich the salesman. “Sure. They were heroes.”

Rich raised his shot to Wells. “
Salud.
Let’s roll. You know what’s weird?”

I’ll bet I’m about to find out, Wells thought. Rich tipped the Cuervo down his throat and pounded the glass against the bar. “My marriage is so messed up.”

Wells tried to look sympathetic.

“My wife, Barbara, she caught me screwing the maid. Consuelo. She’s so pissed. Barbara, that is. Consuelo doesn’t care much.”

Wells racked his brain for an appropriate response. He failed to find it. America seemed to have gotten a lot chattier in his absence. He vaguely remembered television talk shows like
Jerry Springer.
Now the whole country seemed to be auditioning for one of those reality programs. What kind of person told a total stranger that his wife had walked in on him with the maid?