but the guy had been retired for a while, and anonymity was his best defense.
“The house has a fence and a gate,” Sami said. “I took pictures last week.” He spread them across the table. The fence had a brick base topped with low ornamental spikes. Behind it, up a hill, a big Georgian house sat back about one hundred feet. A driveway separated the house from the guest cottage. Sami pointed to the fence.
“But only about six feet high, and no barbed wire.”
“Not in Buckhead,” Wells said. “The neighbors wouldn’t approve. How big’s the property?”
“A hundred and twenty meters long, sixty meters wide.” Four hundred feet by two hundred feet, Wells mentally translated. About two acres.
“Big enough to give us a little privacy,” Wells said. “What about dogs?”
“I think one. I’ve heard it a couple of times.”
Wells shook his head. Dogs were a real problem, the biggest one yet. Dogs meant noise. “He married? Any family?”
“He’s divorced,” Qais said. “About a year after he retired. His wife lives in Houston.”
“Only one wife?” Wells joked.
Qais smiled. “Only one.”
Good. Fewer chances for mistakes. “And Khadri wants this tonight? It has to be tonight?”
Qais nodded. “He said you would understand.”
Wells could only nod. “I do.”
He pointed at the map. “I know this part of town from my landscaping work. The place looks more private than it is. Mount Vernon, that’s a big road, a lot of traffic — we can cut across a couple of lawns and leave that way if we have to. Get back here in time to get a good night’s sleep and get Qais back to Detroit.”
FOR TWO HOURS, they talked through the mission. Wells would have liked more time to plan and a lot more information. Floor plans of West’s house, including the room where he slept. The number of police cars and private security patrols that covered the neighborhood, and their usual routes. Whether West had a gun, and if so where he kept it. Instead they didn’t even know whether the house had an alarm, or whether it was keyed to the fence.
They would need to move fast, making up with speed what they lacked in intel and firepower. They had to get out before the police arrived to pin them down. Wells figured they had five minutes at most from the moment they got to the house, even if the place didn’t have an alarm. They should plan on being done in three. Escape was basically impossible once the opposition arrived in force. Especially in unfriendly territory, which Buckhead was.
“If we hear a siren, we go,” Wells said. “Immediately.”
Slowly, he guided Qais and Sami to his plan, letting them work out the details so they wouldn’t realize how much of the idea was his.
“Enough,” Qais said finally. “I feel like I’m back at your FBI. You know everything will turn to shit anyway once we get inside. These things always do.”
“Sure,” Wells said. “But we have to pretend it won’t.” Despite himself, Wells liked these guys. And when they woke up tomorrow on a flight to Guantanamo, they would have only themselves to blame.
SAMI HAD BROUGHT clothes for himself and Qais, black pullovers and black pants like the ones that Wells had bought at the army surplus store.
“We look like a mime troupe,” Wells joked when they had dressed.
“Mime troupe?” Sami said.
“The guys who wear all black and — forget it.”
Sami had brought his own guns too, 45s with silencers as well as an H&K machine pistol, a short-barrel automatic rifle with a thirty-two-shot clip. The H&K was inaccurate and showy but a nasty weapon nonetheless. Jihadis couldn’t resist machine pistols, Wells remembered; they had seen too many action movies. The.45s were the real prize; they fired subsonic rounds, and with the silencers screwed on they were as quiet as a gun could be.
Wells didn’t ask where Sami had gotten the guns. They looked brand-new, and for a moment he wondered whether the agency might be behind this, testing his loyalty with this crazy plot. Maybe Vinny Duto would be waiting for him at the house instead of West.
But Khadri had sent Qais and Sami to him, and if Khadri was an agency mole the United States would have captured bin Laden and destroyed Qaeda a long time ago. No. The guns were real and they were loaded and West was alone in that house. He would die tonight unless Wells could save him.
THEY WOULD TAKE both the Ranger and the Lumina, which Qais promised couldn’t be traced if they had to ditch it. Sami had wiped it down to erase fingerprints. They would leave the pistols and ski masks in the Lumina’s trunk in case they were stopped, though Wells figured the cops might find an excuse to search the car in any event. Three men, two Arab, cruising around Buckhead after midnight, dressed like a SWAT team…. No, they had better drive carefully.
“Do me a favor,” Wells said to Sami. “No speeding.”
They prayed once more, asking Allah for his blessing, for the chance to bring the wrath of Islam upon the infidel general. Wells hoped that Allah paid no more attention than He had to the prayers that Wells had offered beside his parents’ grave.
Just before one A.M. they rolled out, Wells and Qais in the pickup, Sami following behind in the Lumina. Despite the danger — or because of it — Wells’s hands were steady on the steering wheel, his breathing slow and easy. How he had gotten to this place no longer mattered.
THEY MADE THEIR way west on 285, the wide highway mostly empty aside from the eighteen-wheelers burning through the night. Then southwest on Mount Vernon and southeast on Powers Ferry and southwest again on Mount Paran. The traffic got lighter with each turn they made, until finally they were alone. They made one slow winding loop around the block that surrounded the general’s house, looking for security patrols or houses with too many lights on, listening for dogs barking or husbands yelling. But the good citizens of Buckhead were all asleep, or pretending to be.
Wells looked at his watch. One thirty-three. They wouldn’t have a better chance.
“Now,” he said to Qais.
“Now.”
Wells held his left hand out the window, the sign that they were on, and parked his pickup in front of a half- built brick mansion around the corner from West’s house. Sami popped the Lumina’s trunk. They reached for the guns and the masks. Wells took his Glock and a silenced.45 for Sami; Qais grabbed the other.45 and the H&K. They slid into the Chevy. Sami rolled around the corner and stopped in front of West’s house.
SAMI PUT THE car in park but left the engine running. They pulled on their masks and gloves. Wells tucked the Glock into a holster on his hip. Sami slung the H&K across his chest like the villain in a Steven Seagal movie. “Five minutes maximum,” Wells said. “And if we hear sirens we’re out.”
“We know,” Qais said.
Wells looked again at his watch: 1:34:58…1:34:59…1:35:00.
They were out of the car. They closed the doors silently and ran for the fence.
Wells was the first to reach it. He pulled himself up and over in one fluid motion, then jumped down, landing easily. If the fence had an alarm, it was silent, a lucky break. The neighbors would sleep a few seconds longer. Qais followed quickly, but Sami was temporarily stopped when his H&K got tangled in the crown of the fence, something that never happened in the movies.
The lawn was as lush and green and perfectly cut as a football field before the season’s first kickoff. Wells
