The Faithful Spy (9 page)

But Wells had already turned away.

TEARS ROLLED SILENTLY
down his face as he drove south on 93 to the Lone Pine Cemetery in Darby. Wells couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, or even when he’d wanted to, but he was crying now. He hadn’t allowed himself to think that his ma might have…passed on. Died. Gone to the Great Prairie in the Sky. Ha. Good one, John.

She couldn’t have died. He’d gone to the end of the world and he hadn’t died. All she had to do was play bridge with her friends and tend the flowers outside her big old house. She couldn’t have died. But she had, and the proof was in the granite gravestone that stared up at Wells near the back of the cemetery. Mona Kesey Wells, 1938–2004. Loving wife, cherished mother, honored teacher. A cross engraved in the stone. His father lay beside her, Herbert Gerald Wells, 1930–1999. Wells knelt before them and closed his eyes, hoping to feel their presence, to feel anything at all. He murmured the eighty-second sura of the Koran, an invocation of Judgment Day:

When the sky is torn

When the stars are scattered

When the seas poured forth

And the tombs burst open

Then a soul will know what it has given and what left behind…

But all he heard was the traffic rolling by on 93 and the graveyard’s American flag flapping in the morning breeze. Wells knew he ought not to blame God for the loneliness he felt, but he couldn’t help himself. God, Allah—whatever His name, He was gone at this moment when Wells needed Him most.

Wells walked to the cemetery’s edge. No fence marked its border. The graves simply stopped a few feet before the ground sloped down to a set of railroad tracks. He looked east into the sun until his eyes burned. He could almost see his faith coming loose, pouring out and floating away in the wind. In the distance a locomotive whistle sounded. Wells waited, but no train came. He walked back to his car. He had never felt so empty.

HE DROVE INTO
Missoula slowly, trying to escape the feeling that he ought to give up this foolish journey and head for Washington. Missoula had grown even faster than Hamilton. Subdivisions crawled up the hills where Wells and his family had ridden horses. His ma had loved to ride. His ma. Again he felt tears coming, but this time he choked them back. He had sacrificed those years for a reason. No one in Qaeda would have trusted him if he had come back to the United States on his own. His mother had never questioned his decision to become a soldier. Now he needed to control his emotions and do what he needed to do. He didn’t know how else to honor her.

He edged his way into town. At least he knew Heather wasn’t dead—he had called her from New York. He’d hung up when she answered, feeling slightly dirty.

He parked outside Heather’s house, a nice white two-story. As he looked at the place he felt sure he wouldn’t be welcome. He walked slowly to the front door and rang the bell. A little boy opened the door. “Is your mom here?” Wells asked.

“Mom!” The boy ran off.

He heard Heather’s small feet padding toward the door.

“Yes?” She slipped the chain and opened the door. She was as beautiful as he remembered, a country girl with honey-blond hair and deep brown eyes, tiny and perfect. He towered over her, and he had loved to pick her up and carry her to their bed. They had been wild together. But there had always been part of him that she couldn’t reach, and they had drifted apart after he joined the agency. When he said he was going underground and couldn’t promise when he’d be back, she gave him an ultimatum: the job or me. The job or Evan, who at the time had just turned two. She told him she wouldn’t wait. And she didn’t. He couldn’t blame her.

When she saw him her eyes opened wide and a low sound—half-sigh, half-grunt—came from her throat. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it.

He reached out for her. She hesitated, then gave him half a hug, holding her hips back so they wouldn’t touch him.

“John,” she said.

“Can I come in?”

She motioned him in. The living room was nicely furnished, Wells saw. A handful of children’s books lay on the coffee table. Nineteenth-century drawings of men in robes and wigs hung on the walls. A life that had no intersection with his own. He bit his cheek and tried to think of something to say.

“What’s with them?” He pointed to the drawings. Then, feeling as though he’d already stumbled, he tried to make the question less hostile. “They’re neat, is all I mean.”

“Howard’s a lawyer.”

“Howard?”

“My husband.” She pointed to a picture: Heather, a handsome paunchy man who must be Howard, Evan, and two young children, a boy and a girl. “That’s George, and Victoria. Howard has a thing for English royalty.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. It wasn’t an answer to his question. “I figured you must be dead when you didn’t come to Mona’s funeral.”

“No such luck.”

“She missed you, John. She thought you’d come back.”

“I didn’t know.”

“They didn’t tell you on super-spy radio or something? Give you the bat signal so you could come home?”

Wells tried not to think of his mother in her hospital bed, waiting and dying. Then just dying.

“I’m sorry, John. I didn’t mean that. You always were a mama’s boy, that’s all. I figured if you were anywhere on the planet you’d be back.”

“I never thought of myself as a mama’s boy.” But he couldn’t deny that some of his fondest memories growing up were of Mona baking in their kitchen, while Herbert worked at the hospital or read in his study. Wells smiled. “Maybe I was. So this is your life?”

A look he couldn’t read crossed her face. “This is my life. Married. Three kids. Boring.”

“Heather—”

“Whatever you’re gonna say, just don’t.”

“Can I see Evan?”

“He’s at Little League practice at the YMCA.”

“He plays baseball?”

“Third base. He doesn’t even know who you are, John.”

Wells felt as though she’d slapped him. “Tell you what. Stay here a year, be his dad, you can see him. Heck, you can teach him all that spy stuff.”

“Heather—”

“Six months?” Pause. “A month? Is your son worth a month to you, John?”

Wells was silent. She was right. He couldn’t begin to tell his son what he’d done, where he’d been. And what if the boy accepted him and then he disappeared again? What then?

Heather’s face softened as she saw him nod.

“What do you tell him?”

“That you’re a soldier. That you’re fighting a war that we have to win. The truth.”

She smiled as she said the last two words, and he wondered if she still loved him. Not that it mattered. “Do you remember—” she started to say. She broke off as the phone rang, an electric trill that went six rings and then stopped.

“No answering machine?” he said.

“Voice mail.”

Huh. Voice mail had been much less popular when he’d left. A meaningless glimmer of a thought, but for a moment it pulled his mind from this miserable day. “What were you going to ask me?” he said.

But her smile had disappeared, and he knew she wouldn’t say. The phone had pulled her back to her life now, and she had no place for him in it.

“You should go, John.”

He looked around the room, trying to imprint it in his mind so he would have something of her to remember. Suddenly she cocked her head, a tic he knew well. “Why’d you come home?”

“What?”

“You’re still working for the agency.” It wasn’t a question. He wondered if she’d been asked, or told, to call in if she saw him. “So why are you here? Why now?”

“You know I can’t say.”

“Do they know that you’re here? In America?”

“Of course.”

But he had never been able to lie to her, and he could see she knew he was lying now. Her face showed her uncertainty. He wished he could explain, tell her how he had ended up here without a person in the world he could trust. Instead he walked to the door. As he stepped through, he felt his hand on her arm. He turned, and she hugged him, for real this time. He closed his eyes and hugged her even harder.

Then she let him go.

WELLS SAT IN
his rented Dodge and tried to burn his son’s picture into his mind. Finally he slipped the car into gear and rolled off, driving slowly toward the YMCA. But when he reached the fields he didn’t recognize Evan.

HEATHER WATCHED HIM
leave. When the Dodge had disappeared, she pulled a business card from her wallet and picked up her phone to make a call that would push the United States closer to the deadliest terrorist attack in history. She punched in the numbers. The phone rang twice.

“Is this Jennifer Exley?” Heather said. She paused. “Jennifer? It’s Heather Murray…. Yes. John Wells’s ex-wife.”

4

AT TWO A.M.,
weary travelers filled the arrivals hall at Miami International Airport. Omar Khadri was pleased to see that he fit in easily; everyone was his shade or darker. He joined a long line for non-U.S. citizens, carrying a black leather briefcase that held a copy of
Don Quixote
in Spanish to match his passport.

An hour later, he was still waiting. Meanwhile, the lines for Americans moved smoothly. Khadri seethed. You show us your contempt even before we arrive, he thought. Maybe if he shouted his delight at reaching the United States, Allah’s gift to the universe, he would be jumped to the front of the line. Finally he reached an agent. She looked briefly at his passport, then at him.

“Are you here for business or pleasure, Mr. Navarro?”

“Business,” Khadri said. Definitely business.

“Where will you be staying?”

“Miami.” With a side trip to Los Angeles.

“How long?”

“Two weeks.”

She handed him his passport. “I just need a fingerprint and photo and you’ll be on your way.”

“Excuse me?” Khadri said.

“Your fingerprint and photo. It’s standard procedure.”

Khadri did not want his prints and picture on file with the United States government. As far as he knew, no intelligence service had ever taken his photograph. He was as close to anonymous as anyone could be: medium height, medium weight, straight black hair, relatively light skin for a Pakistani, and an uncanny ability to mimic accents, a great gift in his line of work. He could pass for Egyptian, Iranian, Filipino, maybe even Italian. Even so, giving up a fingerprint would lock him into using this passport every time he came to America. He much preferred being able to change names.

“Sir? That a problem for you?”

“It’s a rule?” Khadri wished he weren’t so tired. Fatigue muddied his thinking, and he felt an unexpected fear, not for himself, but for this week’s operation.

“Same for everyone, sir.” A hint of a smirk crossed the agent’s face. If you don’t like it, tough, she didn’t quite say. You can always go home.

Khadri fought down his irritation as he looked at her black face. He did not like black people, especially black Americans. This woman was a trained monkey, a combination of American arrogance and African savagery. But Khadri decided to be polite; he didn’t want the trained monkey looking too hard at his passport. “I’ll be glad to,” he said.

The procedure took only a few seconds. He put his index finger on a digital reader and looked into a small digital camera. A few seconds later the agent’s computer beeped and she waved him on.

“Welcome to the United States.”

“Good to be here,” Khadri said.

ON HIS FLIGHT
to LAX the next morning, Khadri silently raged at himself. He should have been familiar with the new fingerprinting rules, which had been publicly announced. He couldn’t make mistakes like that. In their paranoia, Americans seemed to think that al Qaeda was an all-powerful killing machine. But Khadri knew the group’s weaknesses all too well.

True, al Qaeda was in no danger of going broke. Sheikh bin Laden had squirreled away tens of millions of dollars around the world during the 1990s, and new cash still flowed in quietly. But money alone was not enough. Al Qaeda’s biggest problem was finding good operatives. Plenty of men wanted to die for the cause. But only a handful had gotten inside the United States before America clamped down on immigration from Muslim countries. Even fewer could be trusted for difficult missions. One bad decision, a moment of panic, could destroy a plan years in the making.

A flight attendant rolled her cart up. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Coffee. Two sugars and milk.” Naturally, Khadri did not drink or use drugs, but—like many devout Muslims—he had a sweet tooth and a serious coffee habit.

He sipped his coffee and wondered how history would judge him. He fully expected that one day the world would know his name, his real name. Biographers and historians would examine his life. But if they were looking for a traumatic event, something they could “blame” for clues to his “crimes,” they would be disappointed, he thought.

He had grown up in Birmingham, England, the oldest child and the only boy among six children. His father, Jalil, was an engineer who had emigrated from Pakistan, a sour man with a quick temper. His mother, Zaineb, had trained briefly to become a nurse’s aide but never worked. Jalil and Zaineb were deeply religious, and strict. Khadri had felt the lash of his father’s belt more than once as a child, and he had learned quickly not to disagree. He was a mostly solitary child; his father didn’t allow him to spend time outside school with unbelievers, and Jalil’s definition of “unbeliever” included most Muslims. So Khadri had escaped into his math and science textbooks, and the Koran. At the school library, where his father couldn’t see, he turned to philosophy, trying to understand power, looking for clues in Nietzsche and Machiavelli and Hobbes. Infidels all, but they showed him how strong men forced their will on the weak. One day he would prove his strength to the world, and his father.

As the years passed, his hatred of Britain and the West grew fiercer. Unlike some al Qaeda soldiers, he could not point to a specific incident that had turned him against the
kafirs
and onto the path of righteousness. Sure, like everyone in England with tea-colored skin, he’d been called a raghead by yobs on the street. But he’d never been seriously threatened, or even spat on. No, he had simply grown sick of the moral corruption around him, drug taking and homosexuality and pleasure seeking at all costs. And the
kafirs
did not merely insist on polluting themselves. They wanted to force their ways on the rest of the world, while piously pretending to spread freedom.

Yet Khadri’s religious fervor had limits. Yes, he believed in Allah, believed that Mohammed was the last and truest prophet. He prayed five times a day. He never polluted his body with alcohol or drugs. He hoped to see paradise when he died. But when his companions sang tales of black-eyed virgins who would pleasure them for eternity, Khadri turned away to hide his embarrassment. Paradise wasn’t an amusement park, and only fools were eager for their own deaths. Khadri did not try to build his faith by promising himself rapture. Jihad was an obligation, not a game. Paradise might await in the next world, but Islam needed to triumph here and now. As always, Mohammed had set a fine example, Khadri thought. He had been a commander, not just a prophet. His armies had swept Arabia, and though he was a wise and just ruler, in battle his ferocity knew no bounds. He had aimed for conquest, and had viewed martyrdom as a tool to that end, not an end in itself.

Khadri made good use of the fanatics. Any man willing to die could be a dangerous warrior. But he did not fully trust them. They were irrational, and rational men like him were needed to win this war. America, Britain, and the rest of the West might be rotten, but they were still fierce enemies, none fiercer than the United States. Thousands of American agents dreamed of sending him and his men to Guantánamo or the execution chamber. They had tools and weapons that he could hardly imagine. So he needed to be perfect. Because he and al Qaeda spoke for a billion Muslims. For every Iraqi killed by an American soldier, every Palestinian torn apart by an Israeli missile. We speak for Islam, he thought. And on September 11 we spoke loud and clear. The attack that day had been genius. Using the enemy’s own weapons to destroy its biggest buildings. He did not mind that the targets were civilian office towers, the missiles passenger planes. Only by bringing the war to American soil could al Qaeda succeed. One day armies of Muslim soldiers would fight the crusuaders everywhere, as they already did in Iraq. Meanwhile, al Qaeda would fight with the weapons at hand, and if they happened to be jets like this one, so much the better.

Khadri had only one regret about September 11. He had wanted to target the Capitol and the White House, not the Pentagon, but the sheikh had insisted on attacking the American military directly. Unfortunately, the Pentagon was too big to be seriously damaged, even by an airplane. Destroying the Capitol would have killed hundreds of congressmen and senators. The American government would have fallen into chaos.

Nonetheless, the attacks had been a strategic triumph. In their wake America had sent its Christian crusaders into two Muslim countries. The whole world could see the battle between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the place of peace and the place of war. But September 11 was slipping from the world’s memory. Al Qaeda needed to remind the
kafirs
of its power. Khadri wanted to hit this fat rich country in the face a dozen times, until blood flowed out of her eyes and nose and mouth. Then he would hit her a hundred times more, until she pulled back her armies and begged for peace. He would show the Americans just as much mercy as they had offered the Japanese they vaporized in Hiroshima, the Vietnamese they burned up in the jungles. No more. No less.

We must win, Khadri thought. And we will. For Allah is with us. He drank the last of his coffee. He felt refreshed, invigorated. The thought of attacking America always excited him.

EXLEY SAT AT
her desk, sifting through Wells’s file, looking for something new and knowing it wasn’t there. She rolled her head, trying to relax the tension that had been building in her since Heather Murray called the day before. The call had sent a jolt through the CIA or, more accurately, through the handful of officials to whom the name John Wells meant something. Vinny Duto, the chief of the Directorate of Operations, had immediately dispatched a couple of internal security officers to interview Heather and Kenny, but they hadn’t gotten much from either one.

Exley looked again at the polygraph test and psychiatric interview Wells had taken when he’d joined a decade before. He had smoked pot but nothing harder, he’d said. He drank occasionally. He had never had a sexually transmitted disease. He had never had sex with a man, though he had been involved in a ménage à trois in college. Despite prodding from the examiner, Wells had declined to be more specific. Good choice, Exley thought. Stuff like that got all over Langley in a hurry, confidentiality agreement or no.

More from the poly: Aside from the marijuana and two speeding tickets, Wells had never broken the law. He felt that dissent was an essential American right. He would quit before carrying out an order he believed immoral. He had never seen a psychiatrist. He rarely had nightmares. He believed in God but would not call himself Christian. While playing football at Dartmouth he had broken the leg of the Yale quarterback. He had not felt remorse. The hit was clean and violence was part of the game. About the only time Wells had responded unusually was when he’d been asked whether he loved his wife. Yes, of course, he’d said, but the poly hadn’t agreed.

The agency shrink had hit the obvious points in his evaluation. Wells had a high tolerance for risk. He was self-reflective but not overly emotional. He was very self-confident. He had no pedophilic or psychopathic tendencies, but he appeared capable of extreme violence. In sum, he was an excellent candidate for the Special Operations Group, the agency’s paramilitary arm, its most covert operatives.

None of this was news to Exley. She looked at Wells’s picture and remembered when she’d first seen him. She had come back to Langley after a frustrating posting in Islamabad. She hadn’t recruited anyone important; despite her best efforts, the Pakistani intelligence officers had refused to take her seriously. If she’d whored herself to the generals who’d groped her at embassy parties she might have gotten somewhere, but she’d refused.

After three long years, Exley had decided to come home, get married, have kids. She’d requested and received a transfer to Staff Ops. She always judged herself too harshly. She’d been disappointed with her time in Islamabad, but her bosses said she was a rising star; she’d recruited more agents in Pakistan than anyone since.

Which showed how badly the CIA had ossified since the end of the Cold War, Exley thought. Despite its swashbuckling mystique, the agency had become merely another Washington bureaucracy. Like all bureaucrats, its senior officers found the real action at headquarters, not in the boring grunt work of actual spying. They happily brought Exley home, where she read cables from field officers who somehow missed the fact that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons under their noses.

THEN SHAFER CONVINCED
the Directorate of Operations that the agency needed someone to recruit inside the Taliban. He picked Wells, and Exley understood why the moment she saw him on a trip to the Farm, the agency’s training grounds at Camp Peary in tidewater Virginia. Wells looked swarthy and vaguely Arab. He was tall and strong, maybe six foot two and two hundred and ten pounds, but he didn’t hold himself like a soldier. Instead he had a sleepy-eyed confidence that seemed unshakable. In fact—and even now, a decade later, the memory brought a flush to her cheeks—her first impression when she met him was that he carried himself like a man who was a very good fuck. And knew it. Highly inappropriate, she knew. Totally inappropriate, especially for a professional and a happily married woman. But there it was.

More to the point, Wells spoke Arabic, was learning Pashtun, and had studied the Koran. He eagerly agreed to a recon trip to Kabul and Kandahar. Exley would be his handler, although in truth she had little to do but hope Wells’s performance matched his pedigree.

Wells disappeared to Afghanistan for six months, a month longer than he was supposed to, and returned to Langley without a single agent. Recruiting was impossible, he said. The Taliban wouldn’t accept outsiders. Exley was disappointed, but not surprised. Then Wells talked about bin Laden. The agency was monitoring him as a terrorism financier; Wells insisted he was more. Bin Laden was building training camps in Afghanistan and planned a jihad against the United States and Saudi Arabia, Wells said. But he was short on specifics. He hadn’t seen the camps. His information was hearsay. Exley remembered the moment vividly.