months earlier in Tennessee. He had paid cash and never reregistered the bike, so it couldn’t possibly be connected to him. Just in case.
Wells steered the pickup off the Buford Highway and into the narrow parking lot of the Rusty Nail, a restaurant with a front door guarded by a six-foot-long black revolver that was actually a barbecue roaster. The Nail was famous for its barbecue, and day and night the revolver’s barrel vented a thin stream of blue smoke. Inside the place looked oddly like a ski lodge, an octagonal wooden building with a bar at the center and booths around the outside. The Braves game played on televisions mounted in the corners, and the smell of cigarettes and barbecue hung heavy in the air. On another evening the stale smoke might have chased Wells away, but tonight it felt just right.
Wells posted himself at the bar beside a trivia-game console whose screen blinked brightly. The place was mostly empty, just a few regulars at the bar watching the ninth inning with an alcoholic gleam in their eyes, and some kids from Emory looking for a cheap place to drink. Wells had been to the Nail once before, on a night like this, when the silence of his apartment became too much. He would have liked to eat here more, have dinner and watch a game once a week, but regulars got noticed.
“Whenever you can, be the gray man,” Knoxville Bill Daley, the agency’s top countersurveillance instructor, had told him during training at the Farm. “Right now people see you when you walk into a room. Be the man no one remembers.”
Ever since, Wells had done his best to slow down and keep his mouth shut. Of course he hadn’t been the gray man in Afghanistan, where by his very existence he stood out. But even there staying quiet helped. Sometimes Wells wondered if he had taken Bill’s advice too far, submerged his personality so far inside himself that he no longer knew who he was. Not that the answer necessarily mattered.
Living in the North-West Frontier, he had wanted to come home. But now that he was back he had no idea what he would do, what he would be, once this mission ended. If it ended. The war on terror showed no signs of losing steam. He would never need another job. He could play the gray man forever.
Knoxville Bill’s comment had been the most important piece of training Wells got. Outside the Farm, he had never touched a dead drop or shucked a team of enemy agents. He regretted not having been a spy during the Cold War. Back then the game had possessed a certain formal elegance. The agency and KGB had existed almost outside their governments, playing three-dimensional chess on a board only they could see. Neither side really expected the other to blow up the world, and proxy soldiers in Africa and Central America fought the nastiest battles. A few unlucky Soviet moles got executed, but not the spooks themselves. The biggest penalty for failure was expulsion, maybe a nasty Select Intelligence Committee hearing.
No more. Get caught by the wrong guys today and you wound up dead, a video of your beheading on the Internet for the world to see. And the bad guys really would blow up the world if they could. Invisible ink and pinhole cameras were cute tricks for an easier time.
THE BARTENDER SLID over to him, a lanky woman with a stud in her nose, friendly blue eyes, and a long- sleeved Braves T-shirt. “What can I get you?”
She leaned in toward him, and Wells almost fell off his stool. After almost a decade of celibacy, just being this close to a woman set him off. Especially this woman. She looked…well, she looked like a younger version of Exley. Taller. A little trashier. No wonder he had come back to the Rusty Nail.
She smiled. He did his best to smile back. “Burger and fries, medium-rare.”
Her smile turned into a smirk. “Medium-rare may be a little tough for our ‘chef’”—she made quotation marks with her fingers so he couldn’t miss the fact she was teasing him—“I’d pick one or the other. I’m not sure what language he speaks, but it isn’t English.”
“Medium, then,” Wells said.
“Good choice.”
“And a Coke.”
“Coke?”
“No, a beer,” Wells said, surprising himself. A guilty pleasure ran through his veins. He hadn’t tasted a beer in a very long time. He figured this was how addicts felt when they were about to take the day’s first hit.
She gave him a tiny shrug, indicating that his sobriety was no concern of hers. “What kind?”
“Budweiser. Draft,” Wells said. “Bring it with the burger.”
“Sure. What’s your name?”
“Jesse.”
“I’m Nicole,” she said.
Before he could stop himself Wells had stuck out his hand. She looked at it for a moment, then took it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.
“Hi.” She walked back to the kitchen, and Wells watched every step, feeling his cheeks redden. Pleased to meet you? A handshake? She was a bartender, not an insurance agent. But he hadn’t known what to say. He just wanted her to come back, so he could look at her some more.
WELLS SLID A dollar into the game machine and played Entertainment Trivia, amusing himself with his lack of knowledge. “The highest-grossing movie of all time is A)
Nicole slid his beer and burger across the bar and rested an easy hand on his shoulder. “You really didn’t know it was
“Uh-uh.” Wells sipped his beer and tried not to say anything stupid. The Budweiser was cold, acrid, slightly bitter on his tongue. Perfect. It tasted like home.
“That movie was so great.”
“Never saw it.”
“Really? What were you, living in a hole?”
“Something like that.”
“Let me see your arms.” She took his hands in hers and rolled his arms back and forth. “No tats. You weren’t in prison.”
“Nope,” Wells said. “Do I seem like I was in prison?”
“Sort of,” she said. “And like you haven’t had a beer in a very long time.”
“You’re right about that part.”
She tapped the trivia game. “Play. It’s gonna eat your dollar.”
Wells punched up the next question: “This one-hit wonder was the first winner of the television show
“Who are these people?” Wells said.
“Jessica Simpson. Blond, big tits — ring any bells?” She tapped the screen B and was rewarded with 900 points. “Maybe Ruben’s more your liking? Country boy from Birmingham.”
“Like Garth Brooks?”
“Sure, only Ruben’s fat and black and sings ballads. Come on, you never heard of any of them? You’re messing with me.”
“I stopped caring about music about the time that Kurt Cobain died.”
He hadn’t exactly stopped caring, he thought. But rock didn’t get a lot of play in the places where he’d been. Wells couldn’t claim sophisticated musical tastes; in high school he had adored Springsteen and Zeppelin as well as slightly cooler stuff like Prince. Then in college he’d gotten into grunge and alternative, like everybody else. In Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier he had missed music more than he’d expected he would, though he had burned a few dozen songs into his head before he left and could still conjure them on occasion.
“Where have you been?” Nicole said. “The moon?”
“Worse. Canada.”
“Maybe I been stuck in Georgia my whole life, but I know they have TVs in Canada.” She gave him a long look, then shook her head. “Canada it is then.”
