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 fiancee 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?
