Two weeks later, when the last victim died at Cedars-Sinai and reports of the missing stopped coming, the death toll from the Los Angeles bombings reached 336: 132 at the synagogue, 204 in Hollywood. It was the worst attack since September 11, and no one was surprised when al Qaeda took responsibility.
EXLEY WOKE ON the first ring. She hadn’t been fully asleep anyway. The boundary between sleep and consciousness, once easy for her to cross, these days seemed bounded by barbed wire and broken glass. She grabbed for the phone and heard Shafer’s voice. “Jennifer. Get in here.” Her clock radio glowed 1:15 A.M. in the dark. “There’s been a bombing. In L.A.”
Her mind spun.
“It’s bad. Two bombs.” Click.
On her way to Langley she flicked on the radio to hear the mayor of Los Angeles declaring that an emergency curfew would begin in an hour. “Only police, fire, and hospital vehicles are permitted in the emergency zone. All others are subject to arrest. The emergency zone is bounded by the Santa Monica Freeway to the south…”
She turned off her radio and looked at the dark silent highway around her and tried to comprehend why someone would blow up kids out for fun on a Friday night. But she couldn’t. She understood intellectually, of course: she knew all about asymmetric warfare, the relationship between terrorists and failed states, the financial and religious motivations of suicide bombers. But in the end those words were as meaningless as wrapping paper for an empty box. Nothing justified these bombs. She couldn’t help but feel that these killers were barbarians, something less than human.
Which, she was sure, was exactly how they felt about Americans.
AT LANGLEY, NO one needed to say the obvious: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement had failed terribly. Again. Hundreds of Americans had died, and so far clues were scarce. The bombers wouldn’t be talking; they had been so completely obliterated that the FBI would never find enough tissue for DNA samples. For the moment, anyway, they had no leads.
But they did have a suspect, as Exley realized when she arrived at her office and found one of Duto’s assistants waiting to demand that she give him Wells’s file from her safe. “For Vinny,” the assistant said. She said nothing, just unlocked her safe and handed over the file.
She was looking at the first flash reports when Shafer appeared. “What’s your gut?”
She didn’t need to ask what he meant. “It wasn’t him.”
“Explain.”
“One, he was just in Montana. This thing didn’t get put together in a day.”
“Two?”
“Two, if it was his, why would he risk blowing it by visiting his ex?”
“Three?”
“Three, even if he’s flipped, he would never attack soft targets.”
“He’s violent.”
“Not against civilians. He wouldn’t consider that fair.”
“Four?”
“I don’t have a four.”
Shafer held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “Duto’s this close to having Tick flash a bulletin for him.” A bulletin to police and the FBI about Wells.
“On what evidence?” Exley said.
“On the evidence that he’s scared shitless his own guy just killed three hundred people and he wants to get in front of it. If Wells did this, getting fired is the least of it. You and I could go to jail. On general principles.”
“Come on, let’s talk to Vinny.”
As she stood, her phone rang.
“Yes?”
“Jennifer Exley?” a man asked. She knew his voice immediately.
“Where are you?”
“Here. Washington.”
She couldn’t help herself. “Thank God, John.”
“I think I need to come in.”
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
5
“IT WAS A mistake,” Wells said again. “I made a mistake.”
Exley, Shafer, and Duto sat across from him at a conference table in a small windowless room that wasn’t quite standard-issue office space. No clocks, for one. Then there were the cameras in each corner that had deliberately been left visible, and the acoustic padding covering the walls. In theory, the padding was meant to defeat any efforts to listen in on conversations in the room. In reality, it and the cameras were signals, Wells knew: This is a serious room and you’re in serious trouble. A man in a suit sat against the far wall. He hadn’t introduced himself, but Wells figured him for a lawyer. He didn’t have to guess about the no-neck plainclothes security officer who stood by the door, his hand resting on the Glock on his hip.
No one had even pretended to be friendly. The gate guards had searched him head to toe before they’d let him in. He’d been searched again before he’d been allowed to see Exley and Shafer, who had met him with handshakes, not hugs, like he was back from a three-day sales trip to Detroit. Wells couldn’t say he was surprised.
“John,” Shafer had said. “We’re gonna have some questions for you.” Wells had picked up a flicker of something more in Exley’s eyes when she’d first seen him, but the look had disappeared fast. If she was glad to see him, she was hiding it.
After leaving the YMCA, he had bought a Greyhound ticket from Missoula to Washington, one last chance to be alone before the world started to turn again. He planned to call the agency when he reached D.C. He had met Zawahiri in Peshawar two weeks before. Two weeks of freedom seemed fair after all his years at the edge of the world.
On the bus Wells felt heavy and tranquil, as if his blood had been replaced with something cooler, his veins filled with embalming fluid. He thumbed through his Koran and cataloged what he had lost during his time away. His mother. His ex-wife. His son, though not forever, he hoped. But he still had the chance to protect his country from men who believed that Allah had given them a license to destroy it.
NOW HE WAS furious with himself. The world had been turning all along, and he hadn’t noticed. Three hours after the Greyhound pulled into Washington’s rundown bus station he heard the bulletins about Los Angeles. He knew immediately he should have checked in as soon as he’d reached Hong Kong. The attack would make the agency’s doubts about him boil over.
He promised himself he would stay calm, whatever they said to him. He had to convince them to trust him, or they would never give him another chance. So he sketched out his years in the North-West Frontier, walked them through the weeks since he’d left Islamabad: where he’d stayed, how he’d traveled, the name he’d used to clear immigration at Kennedy. He told them about his meeting in Peshawar with Zawahiri and Khadri and Farouk, how they had sent him to America without a specific mission.
“It wasn’t Los Angeles,” Duto said.
“No.”
“You didn’t know anything about Los Angeles.”
“Of course not.”
In the most even tone he could muster, he apologized. For entering the country without telling them. For not
