The Faithful Spy (20 page)

“No, I’m helping you. Get closer to the table,” she said. “Concentrate. Watch the angle.” She laughed again. “I hate it when guys pull that shit, grab me at the table. That’s why I always lose the first game, to see if they will.”

“Kiss me,” Wells said.

“Make this shot and I will.”

He missed, badly. “I never should have had that fifth beer.”

“That’s no way to be a Terminator,” she said.

“I’m not the Terminator,” Wells said. “I’m the good guy. Trying to stop him. What was his name?”

She picked up her cue and sighted her shot. “Too bad. I always had a thing for Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

“Really?”

“Yeah…well, I was talking to Britney—my best girlfriend—a couple years back, about men, you know? Their equipment.”

“Their penises,” Wells said. “Just say it.”

“Yes, Professor.”

“And?”

She flushed. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

“As long as it’s not about how you lost your virginity,” Wells said.

“What?”

“Inside joke. Between me and myself.”

“Right. Whatever. Anyway, Britney and I decided there’s really no way to know how…large a man is. Except for one thing.” She shot and missed. “This is distracting.”

“You brought it up,” Wells said. He was surprised to find that his disquiet had faded and he was enjoying himself. Maybe she’d done this a hundred times, flirted in a bar with the promise of more to come. He hadn’t. “Let me guess—height?”

“You wish. No.”

“Really? How about big feet, big hands—” Wells held up his palm and she did the same. They touched palms. Her fingers reached barely to his first knuckle.

She giggled. “I’d like to think that’s a good sign, but nope.”

“Then what?”

“Okay. Well, look, it’s not like I’ve got a ton of experience—”

“Coulda fooled me.”

She folded her arms.

“Kidding,” Wells said. “What was the tell?”

“German blood.”

“What?”

“German ancestry. German men are very…well-equipped.”

“Really?”

“Would I make that up?”

“How much German blood? Do you have to be all German?”

“It’s not like I did a survey, Jesse.” She laughed.

Wells wished he could tell her his real name. “So that’s why you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

“Well, no. I always thought he was hilarious. I mean, you could tell he was in on the joke in those movies. But the German thing added to the intrigue.”

“You know he’s Austrian.”

“Like there’s a difference. Your shot.”

Wells picked up his cue and leaned over the table.

“Why don’t you miss so I can run the table and we can get out of here?”

He did.

THEY WALKED UP
the stairs to her apartment, stopping every other step to kiss, Wells running his hands over her hips, pushing up her T-shirt, touching her soft stomach. Outside her door she stepped away from him.

“You can’t stay over. You really can’t.”

He kissed her neck.

“Five, ten minutes. That’s all. And promise me you won’t be upset. It’s kind of a pigsty, at least by girl standards.” She unlocked the door and Wells followed her inside. Clothes were strewn across the couch, glasses piled in the sink.

Wells leafed through a textbook sitting on a coffee table
—Introduction to Nursing I.
“You didn’t say you’re studying nursing.”

“Sit. You’re making me nervous poking around.”

Wells sat. “You want a drink?” she said.

“No thanks.” She clicked on the radio. A syrupy ballad filled the apartment. “Hey, Terminator. This is Ruben Studdard.”

“Where do you go to school?”

She put two glasses of water on the table and sat beside him. “You got ten minutes. You want to quiz me or kiss me?” He kissed her, put his hands on her face while hers traced his body. He tasted the smoke in her mouth and felt a faint guilt that she wasn’t Exley. But mainly a desire so fierce that it seemed the room had shrunk around them until she was all he could see or feel. He pushed her back on the couch and slid his hands under her shirt—

Rap-Rap-RAP! Three sharp knocks at the door. She pulled away from him.

“Who’s that?”

“Shit,” she said.

RAP! RAP! The knocks came louder.

“I know you’re in there. Slut,” a slurred voice said from outside. “Open the door.”

“My ex-boyfriend,” she said.

“What’s his name, Heinrich?”

“Not funny. We broke up in July. He didn’t take it well.” RAP! RAP! “He’s come by a couple of times. It’s just—nobody’s ever been over before.”

Wells could feel his erection fade, his desire curdling into anger. “Fuck him,” he said. “I’ll get rid of him.”

“I can handle it.”

“Open the door!”

She walked to the door. Wells followed, positioning himself behind the door where the guy couldn’t see him. She shook her head and pointed toward the bedroom, but he put his finger to his lips and didn’t move. She opened the door a notch. “Craig.”

“Nicole—”

“Go home. Please.”

“You can’t cheat on me.” He sounded pathetic to Wells, a whiny little man.

“Craig, we broke up two months ago.”

“I know you got a guy in there.” The door was shoved open a notch.

“I don’t.”

“I saw you from the parking lot.”

Nicole stumbled backward as Craig pushed her.

Wells didn’t try to control the fury rising in his chest. He had seen enough. Enough of men treating women like chattel. Enough foolish machismo for a lifetime. He pulled open the door and turned toward Craig. The guy wasn’t so little after all, maybe 210, his face flushed, waves of whiskey rolling off him.

“I knew it.” Somehow Craig managed to look triumphant as he said this, as if Wells’s presence justified his own.

“Go home,” Wells said softly, knowing Craig wouldn’t. “I don’t fight drunks.”

“Fuck off.” Craig swung, a looping roundhouse that Wells easily dodged.

“Please don’t make me hit you,” Wells said. “Go home.” The guy swung again. Again Wells slipped the punch. A red fog clouded his eyes. He could almost smell Craig’s blood. Too much loneliness. Too much desire, unrequited.

“I asked you nicely,” Wells said, pleading for himself as much as Craig.

“Nicely.” Craig’s lips curled into a sneer. “You go out with faggots now, Nicole?” Craig swung again, another drunk wild punch.

Wells caught Craig’s arm and counterpunched, hitting him in the stomach, a vicious right that bent Craig in half. Then a quick left jab to the face. Then another right to the stomach, Craig’s hands dropping as he wheezed for breath.

“Jesse—” Nicole said. “Let me call the cops.”

Wells hit Craig again, an uppercut this time, stepping forward and getting all his weight behind the punch. Craig’s mouth snapped shut and he fell backward onto the second-floor walkway. Wells followed him outside and waited. Sure enough, Craig grabbed the railing of the walkway and tried to stand. Wells kicked him in the ribs. Craig rolled onto his side and moaned, clutching his ribs, spitting blood and teeth, as Wells considered where to hit him next.

Nicole jumped Wells from behind, screaming. “Stop it stop it you crazy psycho stop it!”

“Nicole—”

“You’re gonna kill him!” She let go of Wells and knelt over Craig.

Wells stepped back. Nicole looked up at him. “You psycho. Leave us alone.” She pointed down the stairs. “Go. Don’t ever come back to the Nail. I’ll call the cops.”

He raised his hands and backed slowly down the stairs.

WELLS DIDN’T SEE
another car as he drove home down the Buford Highway. He felt as empty as the road unspooling under his tires. He couldn’t understand what he’d just done. First off, he would be in serious trouble if Nicole or Craig called the cops. He should never have taken her to the pool place. Some of the guys at that place knew him from the parking lot. Fuck. So much for being the gray man.

They weren’t going to call the cops. Craig wouldn’t want to admit how badly he’d gotten his butt kicked. Nicole would want them both to disappear. The cops weren’t the real problem.
He
was the real problem. It wasn’t the violence that had freaked Nicole out. Not just the violence, anyway. She had surely seen fights at the Nail. But his coldness, his efficiency, had terrified her. These people, these civilians, they didn’t understand. And he would be wasting his time if he tried to explain. He had to remember this wasn’t a war. This was America.

HE PULLED OVER
and reached for his cellphone, a prepaid model he had bought in Tennessee. He would ditch it and buy a new one tomorrow.

“Hello?” Exley’s sleepy voice said.

“Jennifer?”

“Who is this?” Recognition filled her voice. “John?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God. Where are you?”

“I need to see you.”

“We can do that.”

“We? Who’s we?”

“I meant—just you and me. That’s all.”

“Forget it.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“I’m not in trouble. But tell me something. How will I know if I’ve gone too far?”

“You’ll know, John.” Her voice had a confidence he hadn’t expected. “I trust you.”

“Because I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

“Do what?”

He was silent.

“Why don’t you come in so we can talk about it?”

“You’ll never let me out again.”

“John—”

He hung up.

THE NEXT MORNING
he went to the Doraville library to check his gmail account. And, for the first time, he found a message in his inbox, from [email protected]. “Hartsfield. 11:45 a.m. 9/19. DL561. Confirm at this address.” Wells hit the reply key as quickly as he could. He felt a strange gratitude to Khadri. At least now he had something to wait for. And somewhere to channel his rage.

8

Montreal, Quebec

THE HOUSE LOOKED
like any other, a little two-story wood-frame, its gray paint peeling at the corners after too many years without a touch-up. It sat on a quiet street off Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the center of Montreal’s Muslim community, separated from its neighbors by a few feet of close-cut grass.

A close observer might have noticed that the gray house was less crowded than those around it. No kids. Just one man and one woman, both light-skinned Arabs. But being childless was no crime. The observer might have wondered why the house’s blinds were always down, even on summer nights perfect for leaving the windows open to catch the breeze off the Saint Lawrence River. But then the blinds stayed closed in lots of houses in the neighborhood. Muslim women prized privacy.

A
very
close observer might have wondered if the people in the house were running an unlicensed business. Every so often the man dragged cardboard boxes from his minivan to his front door. He usually made these deliveries just after sunrise, when the street was deserted. But, like being childless, starting the day early was perfectly legal.

Anyway, what an observer might have noticed was irrelevant, conjecture only. For no one was watching the house. Tarik Dourant could work unmolested.

LIKE MANY OF
the Arabs in Montreal, Tarik had come from France. He’d grown up just north of Paris, in Saint-Denis, one of a dozen run-down suburbs where the French government warehouses the Muslim immigrants it does not want and cannot send home.

Even by the bleak standards of Saint-Denis, Tarik had a wretched childhood. His mother, Khalida, was a nurse from Algeria, his father, Charles, a French plumber whose lust for Khalida ended the day he impregnated her. When Khalida refused to have an abortion, Charles tried to beat her into a miscarriage. He failed, but the thrashing left Khalida nearly blind. She quit her job, and for the rest of her life she and Tarik subsisted on disability payments. Over the years, she grew dependent on painkillers, first to sleep, then just to get by. She died when Tarik was seventeen of a morphine overdose, officially ruled accidental. Meanwhile, the French legal system treated Charles with unsurprising leniency. He was out of prison in two years.

The neighborhood kids cut Tarik no slack for his mother’s miserable fate. Quite the contrary. Though he had never met his father, they scorned him as French. He was not helped by the fact that he was small and preferred reading to playing soccer. The nurse and the plumber had produced a brilliant child, his aptitude for science obvious from kindergarten. The French educational bureaucracy took note. As a teenager Tarik attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, among the top high schools in France, where he excelled in physics and biology. But the better Tarik’s grades, the deeper his misery. The rich white students at Louis-le-Grand didn’t bother to hide their disdain for the poor Arab in their midst. Meanwhile, the kids in Saint-Denis scorned him as a sellout, calling him “the brain” and “the little prince” and ripping up his homework. His lowest moment came on his fourteenth birthday. No one, not even his mother, bothered to remember.

A week later, Tarik found himself signing up for an Arabic class at a Muslim community center a few blocks from his apartment. To his surprise, everyone at the center encouraged him. Within a few months he was attending a local mosque every morning. Then another mosque, this one more radical. And he found that everywhere he went the believers accepted his prayers. For the first time in his life he belonged.

By the time Khalida died, Tarik had devoted his body and soul to Islam. He hated his father and France and the West for what they had done to his mother, and his mother for what she had done to him. He wanted more than anything to travel to Afghanistan and join the jihad. But the imams wouldn’t let him go. He should keep studying, they said.

They had enough fighters. They needed scientists.

TARIK DID AS
they asked. He took an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from the University of Paris, then left France for Canada. Now he was working toward a Ph.D. in microbiology from McGill, in downtown Montreal. His advisers considered him diligent, though privately they acknowledged that his second year had been less promising than his first. It happened. Not everyone could make the jump to a graduate-level program. And…perhaps Tarik’s professors in France had inflated his potential, since Arabs were badly underrepresented in the sciences.

But the McGill professors were wrong. Tarik was every bit as smart as his scores had indicated. Unfortunately, he couldn’t devote his full attention to their labs. In the basement of the anonymous gray house, he had his own project.

PLAGUE.

To nonscientists, the word conjures up visions of the end of days, illness and death beyond measure. But for biologists, the word has a more specific meaning:
Yersinia pestis,
the scientific name for the germ that causes the disease called plague, or sometimes the Black Death. During the Middle Ages plague was the most feared of diseases, more terrifying even than smallpox. In the mid-1300s, tens of millions of Europeans, a third of the continent’s population, died after being bitten by plague-infested fleas.

“The condition of the people was pitiable to behold,” one Italian wrote, recalling the devastation. “Many died in the open street, others in their houses, their deaths known only by the stench of their rotting bodies.” Another epidemic began in China in the 1890s and ran for a generation, killing twelve million people.

Since then plague has largely disappeared in Europe and the United States, thanks to better sanitation and aggressive efforts to exterminate rats and fleas. But the
Y. pestis
germ remains widespread in the wild, infecting thousands of people every year. Exotic viruses like Ebola get most of the media’s attention, but plague has killed far more people.

In humans,
Y. pestis
causes several types of infections. The best known is bubonic plague. It begins with chills and shaking, followed by a fever spike that can top 105 degrees. The swollen lymph nodes—also called buboes—explode to the size of baseballs as the immune system tries desperately to clear
Y. pestis
from the body. A profound fatigue takes over, so severe that many victims find themselves beyond caring whether they live or die. In the final stages of disease, the explosion of
Y. pestis
in the bloodstream causes septic shock. The blood hemorrhages under the skin, and the arms and legs take on a deep blue-black tint, the signature symptom of the Black Death.

YET THE BLACK
Death isn’t the most dangerous form of plague. Bubonic plague can’t be transmitted from person to person, and some victims recover without treatment. No, the real terror is the Red Death, pneumonic plague, the disease that results when
Y. pestis
infects the lungs. In that warm, moist environment, the germ replicates with furious speed.

An infected person first notices a fever, headache, a slight cough—the nuisances of daily life. But in a few hours
Y. pestis
takes over. The headache turns from annoyance to agony. The cough becomes a spiraling pneumonia. A vise of pain constricts the chest as bacteria fill the lungs and the heart struggles to pump blood. The victim spits up phlegm, watery and loose at first, then thick with clotted blood.

Within forty-eight hours, people infected with the Red Death have less than a 50 percent chance of survival even if they are put on a respirator and given intravenous antibiotics. Left untreated, they will die within days of shock or respiratory failure, choking to death as their lungs fill with blood. Living through pneumonic plague without treatment is about as likely as winning the lottery.

Worse, infected people spit up clouds of
Y. pestis
bacteria each time they cough, so the disease jumps easily from person to person. And while modern antibiotics can stop plague if it is detected quickly, no vaccine for the germ exists. In fact,
Y. pestis
is in some ways its own worst enemy. Like Ebola, pneumonic plague kills its victims so fast that it can’t spread far under normal circumstances, limiting the danger of outbreaks in the wild.

But that condition doesn’t apply if plague is released deliberately as a terror weapon. Scattering
Y. pestis
in the air over a major city could produce hundreds of thousands of infections at once, overwhelming hospitals and causing a worldwide panic. The World Health Organization has estimated that a release of
Y. pestis
in a metropolitan area of five million, the size of Washington, could cause 150,000 cases of pneumonic plague and kill 36,000 people. The WHO didn’t venture to guess what the plague might do in a larger city, like New York.

TARIK DOURANT HAD
a half dozen vials of
Yersinia pestis
stored in his basement.

He hadn’t needed to attack the Centers for Disease Control headquarters to get them, or to sneak into Vector, the giant germ factory in Siberia where the Soviet Union hid its biological-weapons research during the Cold War. Tarik hadn’t even needed to leave the house. He had just needed to be home when a FedEx delivery truck rolled up, so he could sign for a package from the Muhimbili Medical Center in Dar es Salaam.

Tanzania had scores of plague cases every year, and its government worked hard to prevent outbreaks. Doctors who discovered a potential case were required to take blood samples to be tested at Muhimbili’s infectious disease lab, the most sophisticated in East Africa. There the samples came under the care of a quiet Pakistani technician who had moved to Tanzania to get a job at Muhimbili—on the orders of the man who called himself Omar Khadri. Khadri figured that a Pakistani Muslim would have an easier time getting hired in Tanzania than at the Centers for Disease Control. He was right.

Thus the plague had found its way to Tarik, who at the tender age of twenty-three was the most sophisticated scientist ever to work for al Qaeda.
Inshallah.
God’s will. And so Tarik could not give his full attention to his studies at McGill.

THE GRAY HOUSE
was silent as Tarik unlocked the front door and stepped inside. “Fatima?” he called out. “Fatima?”

No answer. She should have been home by now, cooking dinner. Acid rose in his stomach. His wife had been late twice in the last week. Her respect for him seemed to be vanishing by the day.

Tarik had met Fatima in Paris during the spring of his final year at the university. She was the oldest daughter of an imam in Brussels, a petite eighteen-year-old whose
hijab—
the head scarf worn by pious Muslim girls—framed her big brown eyes. Tarik was smitten instantly. He was ecstatic when he found she felt the same about him, despite his pockmarked skin and thick glasses. They married four months later, just before he moved to Canada. She followed the next year. For a few months she seemed like the perfect wife, loving and supportive. She didn’t question the long hours he worked at McGill or spent in the basement. But then she began complaining that Tarik wouldn’t let her work. She was bored staying home all day, she said. In the spring, she had found a job as a secretary for a law firm downtown. He had tried to forbid her from taking it, but she’d just laughed.

“Then divorce me,” she’d said. She knew he would never do that. She was the only woman he had ever been with. He was sometimes frightened by how much he wanted her. But her job had increased the distance between them. She hardly listened to him anymore. He couldn’t understand this other side to her. She seemed to have forgotten her place since she’d come to Canada. But maybe she had never cared for him at all. Maybe she had seen him as just a chance to escape her father.

A month before, he had hit her for the first time, on a night when he tried to make love to her and she turned away. He had raised his fist, not intending to touch her. Then she smiled. She was mocking him, he thought. Mocking him for his weakness, for his skinny arms and caved-in chest, just like the kids in Saint-Denis had done. He might be weak, but he was still a man. She needed to remember that. He swung his fist into her belly. She cried out, just once, and he wanted to comfort her and tell her he was sorry. But he held his tongue.

When he reached for her later that night, she gave herself to him without complaint. In fact she never mentioned what he had done. For a few days Tarik thought she had learned her lesson. But in the last couple of weeks she’d turned secretive. He’d overheard her whispering on the phone in the kitchen. When she saw him listening she hung up and pretended she hadn’t been talking at all. He raised his fist at her again, but she just shook her head, and he dropped his hand and turned away in humiliation.

TARIK TRIED TO
put Fatima out of his mind. He would talk to her when she came home. In the meantime he had to work. He unlocked the door to the basement, revealing a narrow enclosed staircase that led to another locked door. Tarik knew the twin locks might look suspicious, but he couldn’t take the chance of allowing anyone down here. Besides the plague, he had anthrax and tularemia in his refrigerators downstairs, all classified by the CDC as grade A pathogens, all delivered from Muhimbili.

To preserve his privacy, Tarik kept his distance from the other McGill graduate students, accepting their invitations to socialize only when his absence would be conspicuous. He told classmates that his wife was a devout Muslim who didn’t go out, and he told Fatima that the other students were prejudiced and never invited him. He couldn’t stop her from meeting the neighbors, but he discouraged her from bringing anyone to the house, one reason she insisted on working. Maybe that had been a mistake; maybe he should have let her have more friends.

Tarik put his key in the padlock at the base of the stairs. He needed to stop thinking about Fatima. Now. If he allowed himself to be distracted down here he might make a mistake, and if he made a mistake he could easily die. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and cleared Fatima from his mind.