The Faithful Spy

Wells tucked his Red Sox cap low on his forehead, slipped Ghazi’s gun into his waistband, and covered it with his shirt. He stepped out of the truck, blinking in the cloudy morning light. He leaned against the truck, unsure where to go. He had heard the shootings in apartment 3C reported on the radio, but so far there were no signs of a dragnet by the police, no roadblocks or sirens screaming. Obviously Exley was still unconscious, and no one had linked his call to Langley with the bloodbath in the apartment. The agency and the NYPD would make the connection soon, he knew. Probably in the next couple of hours. But a couple of hours might not be soon enough.

He wondered if he should find the nearest police station, explain who he was, ask them to put out a bulletin for Khadri. But the cops wouldn’t issue an alert right away, not on the word of a disheveled man off the street who said he was a CIA agent and had a story about plague and a dirty bomb. His showing up in person might even slow the process of getting an alert out. Especially since the cops would mostly be interested in him as the apartment shooter. No. When the police put out a public alert for him or Khadri he would turn himself in and get the antibiotics he needed. Until then he would stay on the streets and try to find the Yellow, whatever it was.

But where to go? The United Nations and the New York Stock Exchange were too well guarded. The Empire State Building? Citi-group Center? The Time Warner Center? Grand Central? Then Wells remembered what Khadri had told him when they’d met in Atlanta, in Piedmont Park. “Didn’t you think it was exciting? Times Square?” Times Square was the only place Khadri had ever mentioned by name. It was the best- known address in the world. And it would be far easier to reach than the others. It was Ground One.

Of course, he could be wrong. Khadri might hate the Empire State Building for reasons Wells didn’t know. And Wells couldn’t even be sure he would recognize the Yellow when he saw it. But he was out of options. He could go to Times Square. Or turn himself in.

“Times Square,” Wells said aloud. Four blocks east. He turned and walked into the rising sun.

THE COPS ON 146th Street didn’t need long to see that the massacre in apartment 3C was more than a drug deal gone bad. The NYPD immediately dispatched antiterrorist units to scour the building. The department also notified the FBI’s New York City watch center, looking for any information the Feds might have on the apartment or the men inside. The FBI reported that none of the men showed up on its main terrorism watch list, but that didn’t necessarily prove anything. The detectives badly wanted to question the woman who’d been found in the hallway. Unfortunately, she was in surgery. Meanwhile, the man they’d found chained to the radiator refused to talk.

Wells’s warning about plague was passed to the police tactical command center at One Police Plaza in Manhattan. The officers on the scene were warned, and a police biohazard unit was dispatched to the building to test for contamination, standard practice whenever a plausible bioterror warning was received. Still, the officers in the apartment didn’t panic; bioterror hoaxes were all too common in New York.

The NYPD biohazard unit was one of only six civilian units in the United States equipped with an experimental polymerase chain reaction assay capable of detecting plague. The test took roughly an hour.

At 7:26, its results came back positive.

THE OFFICIAL SNOWBALL immediately began rolling. Apartment 3C was declared a possible bioterror site. The building was placed under quarantine, no one allowed to enter or leave. The doctors operating on the woman from the hallway were warned. Blood samples were taken from her and the nameless man who’d been captured in 3C. The police flashed a bulletin to the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the White House. And Joe Swygert, the Langley duty officer, realized that he had better find Vinny Duto and tell him that a man named John Wells had called.

In minutes, the JTTF pieced together what was about to happen on the streets of New York. At 7:41 an all- points bulletin went out to every New York City police officer and FBI agent on duty in the city, telling them that intelligence indicated an imminent terrorist attack, probably with a radiological — a.k.a. dirty — bomb. The bomb’s exact delivery method remained unknown, but cabs, Ryder trucks, and Yellow freight trucks were to be considered especially dangerous. The bomber was also unknown, though he was believed to use the alias Omar Khadri.

A separate bulletin was issued for John Wells, a white American male, six-two, approximately two hundred pounds, dark eyes and hair, as a material witness in a six-person homicide in the Bronx earlier that day. At Langley, the agency scrambled to find a picture of Wells to give to police and television stations. The bulletin advised officers to consider Wells armed and dangerous, and warned that he might be infected with Yersinia pestis, or plague bacteria.

The president immediately ordered onto high alert the army’s biowar defense center and the secret army teams that had the job of responding to a nuclear or radiological attack on U.S. soil. The White House press office called the networks, asking them to make time at eight-thirty A.M. for an announcement of critical national importance.

There were just three problems with all this activity.

No one had a picture of Khadri.

No one knew what the Yellow was.

And they were all too late anyway.

AT 7:43, KHADRI swung the Yellow from Central Park South onto Seventh Avenue. The traffic was hardly moving, but even the worst New York gridlock couldn’t keep him from his target, he thought. He looked out through his vehicle’s high square windshield at the kafirs elbowing one another on the sidewalks, rushing to their offices so they could fatten their pockets.

If they only knew the fate that awaited them, the fire and ash, the deadly smoke. Then they wouldn’t be so worried about getting rich. But it was too late for them. He looked back at the trunk, then at the detonator, hidden at his feet, where it couldn’t be seen. These people would have to hope for mercy from Allah, he thought. They would get none from him.

The light at Fifty-eighth Street turned green. Khadri eased down on the gas. The Yellow rolled ahead.

WELLS LEANED AGAINST the western edge of the TKTS booth, in a traffic island on the northern edge of Times Square, on Forty-seventh Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway. In the afternoons the booth sold discount Broadway tickets to tourists, but in the morning it was closed, the only empty space in the maelstrom that stretched from Forty-seventh to Forty-second. Instead of fighting the crowds, Wells had decided to conserve his strength and wait at the booth, where he could cover the vehicles heading south into the square on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

He knew he wouldn’t be out here much longer anyway, and not just because of the plague. In the last five minutes police sirens had been screaming to the east, the north, the south, all over. As Wells watched, two cops pulled their pistols and ordered the driver out of a cab double-parked by the Morgan Stanley headquarters on the corner of Forty-seventh and Broadway. The word was out. He would soon be irrelevant. But not just yet. Wells shivered and turned his attention to Seventh Avenue.

He knew, somehow, that Khadri was very close. The Yellow. It had to be some kind of vehicle, Wells thought. A cab made sense, but it was too obvious. Khadri had been so pleased when he’d said those words in the apartment. Not a cab. And not a truck. A truck was too big, too hard to hide. The Yellow was something else, something that was big enough to hold a good-sized bomb without attracting attention. But what?

A police car turned onto Forty-seventh Street and stopped in front of him. The officers inside looked curiously at him. The driver rolled down his window.

“You okay, buddy? You look a little sick.”

“Fine,” Wells said. He tried not to cough.

FIFTIETH STREET… Forty-ninth…Forty-eighth…

Khadri kept both hands on the wheel and tried to contain his adrenaline as the Yellow headed south. The traffic was so heavy that the people on the sidewalks were walking as fast as he was driving, but that didn’t matter now. Nothing could stop him. His hands were shaking, but not from fear. He should have been scared, he knew, but instead he felt only excitement. The world would long remember this day.

THE TRAFFIC CAME to a stop on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Three black