The Faithful Spy

THE NEXT MORNING he went to the Doraville library to check his gmail account. And, for the first time, he found a message in his inbox, from [email protected]. “Hartsfield. 11:45 a.m. 9/19. DL561. Confirm at this address.” Wells hit the reply key as quickly as he could. He felt a strange gratitude to Khadri. At least now he had something to wait for. And somewhere to channel his rage.

8

Montreal, Quebec

THE HOUSE LOOKED like any other, a little two-story wood-frame, its gray paint peeling at the corners after too many years without a touch-up. It sat on a quiet street off Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the center of Montreal’s Muslim community, separated from its neighbors by a few feet of close-cut grass.

A close observer might have noticed that the gray house was less crowded than those around it. No kids. Just one man and one woman, both light-skinned Arabs. But being childless was no crime. The observer might have wondered why the house’s blinds were always down, even on summer nights perfect for leaving the windows open to catch the breeze off the Saint Lawrence River. But then the blinds stayed closed in lots of houses in the neighborhood. Muslim women prized privacy.

A very close observer might have wondered if the people in the house were running an unlicensed business. Every so often the man dragged cardboard boxes from his minivan to his front door. He usually made these deliveries just after sunrise, when the street was deserted. But, like being childless, starting the day early was perfectly legal.

Anyway, what an observer might have noticed was irrelevant, conjecture only. For no one was watching the house. Tarik Dourant could work unmolested.

LIKE MANY OF the Arabs in Montreal, Tarik had come from France. He’d grown up just north of Paris, in Saint-Denis, one of a dozen run-down suburbs where the French government warehouses the Muslim immigrants it does not want and cannot send home.

Even by the bleak standards of Saint-Denis, Tarik had a wretched childhood. His mother, Khalida, was a nurse from Algeria, his father, Charles, a French plumber whose lust for Khalida ended the day he impregnated her. When Khalida refused to have an abortion, Charles tried to beat her into a miscarriage. He failed, but the thrashing left Khalida nearly blind. She quit her job, and for the rest of her life she and Tarik subsisted on disability payments. Over the years, she grew dependent on painkillers, first to sleep, then just to get by. She died when Tarik was seventeen of a morphine overdose, officially ruled accidental. Meanwhile, the French legal system treated Charles with unsurprising leniency. He was out of prison in two years.

The neighborhood kids cut Tarik no slack for his mother’s miserable fate. Quite the contrary. Though he had never met his father, they scorned him as French. He was not helped by the fact that he was small and preferred reading to playing soccer. The nurse and the plumber had produced a brilliant child, his aptitude for science obvious from kindergarten. The French educational bureaucracy took note. As a teenager Tarik attended the Lycee Louis- le-Grand, among the top high schools in France, where he excelled in physics and biology. But the better Tarik’s grades, the deeper his misery. The rich white students at Louis-le-Grand didn’t bother to hide their disdain for the poor Arab in their midst. Meanwhile, the kids in Saint-Denis scorned him as a sellout, calling him “the brain” and “the little prince” and ripping up his homework. His lowest moment came on his fourteenth birthday. No one, not even his mother, bothered to remember.

A week later, Tarik found himself signing up for an Arabic class at a Muslim community center a few blocks from his apartment. To his surprise, everyone at the center encouraged him. Within a few months he was attending a local mosque every morning. Then another mosque, this one more radical. And he found that everywhere he went the believers accepted his prayers. For the first time in his life he belonged.

By the time Khalida died, Tarik had devoted his body and soul to Islam. He hated his father and France and the West for what they had done to his mother, and his mother for what she had done to him. He wanted more than anything to travel to Afghanistan and join the jihad. But the imams wouldn’t let him go. He should keep studying, they said.

They had enough fighters. They needed scientists.

TARIK DID AS they asked. He took an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from the University of Paris, then left France for Canada. Now he was working toward a Ph.D. in microbiology from McGill, in downtown Montreal. His advisers considered him diligent, though privately they acknowledged that his second year had been less promising than his first. It happened. Not everyone could make the jump to a graduate-level program. And… perhaps Tarik’s professors in France had inflated his potential, since Arabs were badly underrepresented in the sciences.

But the McGill professors were wrong. Tarik was every bit as smart as his scores had indicated. Unfortunately, he couldn’t devote his full attention to their labs. In the basement of the anonymous gray house, he had his own project.

PLAGUE.

To nonscientists, the word conjures up visions of the end of days, illness and death beyond measure. But for biologists, the word has a more specific meaning: Yersinia pestis, the scientific name for the germ that causes the disease called plague, or sometimes the Black Death. During the Middle Ages plague was the most feared of diseases, more terrifying even than smallpox. In the mid-1300s, tens of millions of Europeans, a third of the continent’s population, died after being bitten by plague-infested fleas.

“The condition of the people was pitiable to behold,” one Italian wrote, recalling the devastation. “Many died in the open street, others in their houses, their deaths known only by the stench of their rotting bodies.” Another epidemic began in China in the 1890s and ran for a generation, killing twelve million people.

Since then plague has largely disappeared in Europe and the United States, thanks to better sanitation and aggressive efforts to exterminate rats and fleas. But the Y. pestis germ remains widespread in the wild, infecting thousands of people every year. Exotic viruses like Ebola get most of the media’s attention, but plague has killed far more people.

In humans, Y. pestis causes several types of infections. The best known is bubonic plague. It begins with chills and shaking, followed by a fever spike that can top 105 degrees. The swollen lymph nodes — also called buboes — explode to the size of baseballs as the immune system tries desperately to clear Y. pestis from the body. A profound fatigue takes over, so severe that many victims find themselves beyond caring whether they live or die. In the final stages of disease, the explosion of Y. pestis in the bloodstream causes septic shock. The blood hemorrhages under the skin, and the arms and legs take on a deep blue-black tint, the signature symptom of the Black Death.

YET THE BLACK Death isn’t the most dangerous form of plague. Bubonic plague can’t be transmitted from person to person, and some victims recover without treatment. No, the real terror is the Red Death, pneumonic plague, the disease that results when Y. pestis infects the lungs. In that warm, moist environment, the germ replicates with furious speed.

An infected person first notices a fever, headache, a slight cough — the nuisances of daily life. But in a few hours Y. pestis takes over. The headache turns from annoyance to agony. The cough becomes a spiraling pneumonia. A vise of pain constricts the chest as bacteria fill the lungs and the heart struggles to pump blood. The victim spits up phlegm, watery and loose at first, then thick with clotted blood.

Within forty-eight hours, people infected with the Red Death have less than a 50 percent chance of survival even if they are put on a respirator and given intravenous antibiotics. Left untreated, they will die within days of shock or respiratory failure, choking to death as their lungs fill with blood. Living through pneumonic plague without treatment is about as likely as winning the lottery.

Worse, infected people spit up clouds of Y. pestis bacteria each time they cough, so the disease jumps easily from person to person. And while modern antibiotics can stop plague if it is detected