had been so hard. Maybe he just didn’t want to know what he would see if he looked back.
He was looking ahead now, getting ready for whatever was coming next. Besides the pistols, he had picked up an assault rifle at the show, a Chinese-made knockoff of an AK-47. But that gun stayed in his apartment, since he had illegally modified it from semiautomatic to full auto.
For close-in work he had bought an old 12-gauge shotgun, worn but mechanically perfect, and sawed the barrels down so far that the shotgun was now only a couple of inches longer than the Glock. He had to leave the 12 -gauge at home too. Sawed-off shotguns were illegal too. And for good reason. Beyond ten feet they were worthless, but up close they were as lethal as a rocket-propelled grenade. With luck they could take out two or three men with one pull of the trigger.
Getting silencers had proved more complicated. The dealers at the Chamblee show didn’t like talking about them, and Wells didn’t want to push too hard and wind up buying one from an ATF agent. But with the help of a manual he’d bought at the show, he’d built one in his apartment. He had no illusions about how long it would last, and it wasn’t great for accuracy. But it did quiet down the Makarov a little.
In any case, he didn’t plan to use the silencer unless he had no choice. He preferred knives when silence was a necessity. He had bought a couple of those too, along with holsters, smoke grenades, and pepper spray, all legal in Georgia. From a store in Macon that advertised itself as “Specializing in Home Defense” he had picked up four police-style walkie-talkies, the hands-free kind that clipped to the shoulder. As well as a bulletproof vest, a flak jacket, and a gas mask in case he had to play defense. A trip to an army-navy surplus store had rewarded him with a green camo uniform, and for night work a black ski mask, black sweatpants, a black hood, and black leather gloves.
At a hospital supply store near Atlanta General, he had put together an emergency medicine kit: Ace bandages, Betadine, clotting agent, gauze dressings, latex gloves, scalpels, splints, sterile solution, surgical scissors, syringes. Even Cipro, Demerol, and Vicodin, ordered from an Internet pharmacy in Costa Rica. His Delta training had included advanced battlefield medicine, and during the fighting in Chechnya Wells had set bones and treated shrapnel wounds. He had bought a couple of books on emergency medicine to refresh himself.
He was getting ready, all right. He only wished he knew what for.
Wells looked at the Makarov in his hand, feeling the metal stubble of its grip. The Makarov was smaller and lighter than the Glock and sometimes got lost in his palm. Still, Wells liked having a pistol he could slip into his waistband. He pulled back the Makarov’s slide, chambering a round, and sighted the target, imagining Khadri’s face at its center.
The first shot pulled right about three inches. The Makarov just wasn’t as smooth as the Glock. Wells sighted again. This time he was straight but high. Wells exhaled and stood utterly still, visualizing the bullet’s path, seeing it plow into Khadri’s cheek, just under the eye, blood trickling out, Khadri crumpling as quickly as gravity could pull him down. He squeezed the trigger. Bull’s-eye.
He practiced for another half hour, then unloaded the pistols and slipped them into their carrying cases. On his way out, he bought oil and a chamois cloth. He didn’t think they needed to be cleaned, but he wanted to break them down anyway, just to be sure.
“Good shooting today?” This from the owner, a tall, bearded guy named Randall.
“Just getting back into it.”
Randall smiled. “Look like a pro to me.”
BACK AT HIS apartment Wells broke apart the pistols and wiped them down. He whetted his knives until their blades seemed ready to bleed. Finally he made himself stop. Khadri — or his men — were due to arrive tomorrow at Hartsfield, and Wells couldn’t ever remember feeling so anxious before a mission. He didn’t care if he died, but he could not fail.
He had kept to himself since his ill-fated night out with Nicole, the bartender from the Rusty Nail. He had even quit working as a day laborer to get ready for Khadri. Money wasn’t a problem; even after buying the guns and the gear, he had a couple of thousand dollars left from his stash. As far as he knew, Nicole had never called the cops; he had swung by the Kermex lot to check if anyone was looking for him, but nobody was. He wondered sometimes if Nicole had gotten back together with her ex-boyfriend. If they had, Wells figured he deserved the credit.
He was praying five times a day again too, examining the Koran with the intensity he had shown during his years on the frontier. In truth, his faith was weak. But he couldn’t let Khadri see any cracks in his fervor. He wanted to be sure he had recovered the daily rhythm of the religion by the time his fellow jihadis arrived.
Mainly he worked through possible scenarios: What if Khadri’s carrying a vial of smallpox? What if he says Qaeda has a nuclear weapon but won’t say where? What if he comes with a dozen other men? Do I kill him on the spot? Try to play along with him so he’ll open up? Turn him over to the agency? Wells wished he could talk things through with Exley. But he knew that calling her would only get her in trouble. When he had more information for her he’d reach out. He needed to be ready, because the show was about to start. Khadri’s style seemed to be to wait, then move fast. He struck Wells as a man who would share information only at the last moment. When they’d met in Peshawar Khadri hadn’t even hinted at the Los Angeles bombings. But at some point he would have to explain his plans, and then Wells would have a chance to stop him.
WELLS DIDN’T EXPECT to sleep that night. But he did, a dreamless sleep, and when his alarm buzzed he came alert immediately, just as he had on those crisp fall mornings in Montana, hunting beside his father. He brewed himself a pot of coffee and bowed his head before Allah. Then he strapped the stiletto to his leg and headed for Hartsfield, the giant airport on Atlanta’s southwest edge.
The morning traffic on 285 was even worse than he’d expected, but he had given himself plenty of time. He clicked on the pickup’s radio. Lately he had amused himself by listening to WATK, a crackly right-wing station far up the AM dial whose morning host, Bob Lavelle, was fond of conspiracy theories. For the last week Lavelle had talked about nothing but the explosion in Albany, the one that everyone else had already forgotten.
“Then why’d they evacuate the city?” Lavelle said. “I’m telling you, there’s a lot we don’t know about this.” Lavelle’s voice rose. “Listen to me for a minute. Stop what you’re doing. Put down that liberal newspaper. Think for yourself for once. You don’t start evacuating people because some two-bit loser blows himself to bits in a storage locker. That doesn’t make sense—”
Wells turned the volume down. Lavelle was wrong about a lot of things — Wells believed that the moon landing had happened — but the guy was right about Albany. What had happened there made no sense. Wells figured the agency or the FBI had been watching the locker for a biological or chemical weapon. But Wells couldn’t understand why they had let anyone into the locker at all. Khadri could probably fill in the missing pieces, but Wells didn’t plan to ask.
Lavelle was still yelling as Wells flicked back down the dial. No point in having to explain to Khadri why he was listening to WATK, whose hosts hated Muslims even more than they disliked the Feds.
AT HARTSFIELD WELLS left the knife inside the truck; it could cause him trouble at a security checkpoint. He hadn’t been inside an airport since the spring, and he didn’t like being in this one. There were probably more cops and federal agents here than anywhere else in Georgia. His old friends at Langley could easily have sent a BOLO — be on the lookout — alert for him to the Transportation Security Administration.
In case they had, he had done his best to change his looks. He didn’t put much stock in elaborate disguises, which usually attracted attention rather than deflected it. But he had grown out his hair since the spring, and today he was wearing a Red Sox cap and wire-rim glasses with clear lenses. As long as he didn’t do anything dumb, he ought to be fine. The TSA officers were overwhelmed and mainly worried about keeping the lines moving. To protect himself further, he had told Khadri that he would wait in Hartsfield’s main concourse instead of the terminal, which would have required him to go through a checkpoint. After a few minutes of pacing the halls, he settled down with a
Eventually he gave up and let his mind roam. It settled on Exley. At this hour she was probably in her office. He had never seen where she worked, but he could picture it. She would try hard to keep her desk neat, but it would still be messy, thick with unclassified reports and maps and transcripts. In her safe she would have
