committed to the cause, but Khadri worried about him. He had come to al Qaeda out of loneliness, a man almost broken by the cruelties of the West.
Khadri didn’t trust that type of recruit any more than he trusted the fanatics who begged to blow themselves up. They were mirror images. The fanatics were irrational, though strong. Men like Tarik were weak and prone to panic. A strong man would not have let his wife insist on taking a job surrounded by
Khadri dumped two packets of sugar into the coffee to hide its bitterness. A month earlier Farouk Khan had disappeared in Baghdad after an American raid, and since then he hadn’t responded to Khadri’s messages. Khadri feared the worst. If the Americans had captured Farouk alive, they might have learned of the packages that al Qaeda had brought to the United States. Khadri needed to know if Farouk had betrayed that secret.
So Khadri had come to Albany to conduct an experiment of sorts. Now he needed a helper. An unwitting helper. Someone who wanted money. Someone who would follow orders without asking questions. Someone expendable. The bus station, in the shadow of the highway that stretched down the eastern edge of this ugly city, had seemed a natural place to look. But Khadri hadn’t found anyone suitable. He would never trust a woman for this job, and the men loitering here were old and ragged. He needed someone younger. Maybe a black. They would do anything for money, and Albany was filled with them.
HE LEFT THE station and walked through Albany’s decaying downtown. There. A black man sat on the stoop of a vacant office building, a blue baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, a bottle half-hidden in a bag between his legs. A hostile look settled into the man’s eyes as Khadri walked toward him. “Hello,” Khadri said.
A glare was the only response. Evidently this black had some irritations of his own.
“I’m sorry to bother you. Sir.”
“Can I help you with something?” The man’s words were polite, but his tone wasn’t.
“This may seem strange, but I have a favor to ask.”
The man sneered. “A favor.” The black drew out the word to show his disbelief. The insolence of these people. Khadri reminded himself to stay calm.
“I will pay.” A flicker of interest crossed the black’s face. Khadri wasn’t surprised. “I need a package picked up.”
The interest disappeared, replaced with anger. “You got nothing better to do than hassle me?” The black stood up, towering over Khadri. “You know I just got out and now you wanna send me back—”
The black thought he was with the authorities, Khadri realized. “I’m not a constable — a police officer,” he said. “Please, listen for a moment.”
“Don’t care who you are,” the man said. “Just get out of my face.”
Khadri decided to comply. As he walked away, he heard the words muttered at his back: “Fuckin’ raghead.”
How he hated this country.
KHADRI FELT DEFEATED as he sat in his motel room in Kingston that night. He had not expected so much trouble finding help. But he had been scorned three times. These people weren’t fools. They could see he didn’t belong.
He would have to solve this problem by tomorrow. He didn’t want to become known in Albany as the Arab stranger who needed a favor, which was why he had chosen to stay fifty miles from the city in this rundown motel. Of course he could bring his own man to get the package, but doing that would mean risking an operative and compromising the security of an entire cell. He had so few reliable men in the United States. And now he viewed this as a personal challenge. He should be able to dupe an American into doing his bidding.
Khadri sighed and flicked on the room’s battered television. His mood improved when a rerun of
The show ended, and Khadri looked at his watch. Time for his evening prayer. He checked his compass, spread his rug toward Mecca, and prayed silently, touching his head to the ground, genuflecting before Allah. When he finished the ritual he felt calm and clearheaded, ready for a night’s sleep and the next day’s work. Then an idea filled his mind, surely placed there by the Almighty. Or perhaps — Khadri couldn’t help but smile — by Mr. Donald Trump.
These Americans, they knew he didn’t fit in. So he wouldn’t try.
EARLY THE NEXT afternoon, after some research and a stop at a Kinko’s, Khadri returned to the streets of Albany, slowly driving through the battered neighborhood north of downtown. In a rundown parking lot, a chunky man sat on a battered gray Ford Focus, the obligatory paper bag in his hand. His T-shirt was rolled up to expose his heavy white biceps. Good. Khadri was tired of blacks anyway. He didn’t like them, and the feeling seemed to be mutual.
Khadri, dressed today in a dress shirt and khakis, parked next to the Focus and stepped out of his car. “Hello, my friend.” This time he didn’t hide his English accent.
The man looked at him suspiciously.
“May I ask your name?”
“Tony.”
“And your last name?”
“DiFerri.”
“Tony DiFerri, very pleased to meet you.”
Khadri stuck out his hand, and after a moment the man shook it.
“I’m Bokar,” Khadri said. “How would you like to be on television?”
“Say what?”
“I’m a talent spotter. I work for a new reality television show that’s searching for contestants.”
Tony looked at Khadri as if he had announced he was an alien. “Why me?”
“It’s a British show. We want a mix of contestants. Not the usual Hollywood types.
“You serious?”
“Utterly, sir. Utterly.” Khadri rolled the word out with the plummiest Hyde Park accent he could muster. He was beginning to enjoy himself. Now the tricky part. “But we need to prequalify you.”
The man’s face went blank. “Prequalify?”
“Make sure you’re capable, that you have a realistic chance of winning.”
“Sure.”
“There are five tasks you must complete. The good news is you’ll be paid for each, as well as fifty dollars merely to participate. The bad news is that if you fail even once, we’ll be forced to reject you. Are you interested?”
Tony was more than interested, Khadri could see. He nearly snatched the pen from Khadri’s hands to sign the ten-page contract filled with legal boilerplate that Khadri had printed out that morning.
The instructions took only a few minutes. DiFerri listened carefully, even borrowing Khadri’s pen to scratch a quick note to himself. Then he took the key to locker D-2471 from Khadri, coaxed his Focus to life, and drove off. His destination was a converted warehouse on Central Avenue that was home to Capitol Area Self Storage.
OPERATION EARNEST BADGER had begun a week before, after Farouk Khan sobbed out the last of his secrets to his questioners in Diego Garcia. Looking over the transcripts of the interrogation, Exley almost couldn’t believe how much information Farouk had given up: details of bank accounts and e-mail addresses; the location of an al Qaeda safehouse in Islamabad; the names of three al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani nuke program. Farouk had turned out to be the biggest catch for the United States in years.
Most stunning of all, Farouk revealed that he had bought one kilo — about two pounds — of plutonium-239 and another kilo of highly enriched uranium from a Russian physicist, Dmitri Georgoff. The agency and Joint
