A knock at the door startled him. Khadri looked at his briefcase, where he kept his gun. Were the
“Room service.”
Right. His breakfast. He opened the door, still half-expecting to see FBI agents lined up, guns drawn. But the only person outside was a waiter with a tray. “Just leave it, please.”
“Yessir.”
Khadri looked down at his food: hot coffee, scrambled eggs with the steam still rising, a glass of fresh orange juice. Normally he would have been ravenous. But this morning he had lost his appetite. In just the last month, he had lost three of the ten sleeper agents that al Qaeda had in the United States. Including Qais, his best operative.
Khadri had explained to Qais that he’d designed the mission in Atlanta to test Wells’s loyalties. He had warned Qais to be careful, to kill Wells immediately if he felt at all threatened. So Khadri couldn’t understand what had happened. Wells had e-mailed him afterward, explaining that the mission had gone wrong because West wasn’t sleeping where they’d expected. He was outside the main house, having sex with his bodyguard. The bodyguard had shot Qais and Sami before Wells killed him and West, Wells said.
The story was so bizarre that Khadri almost believed it. Almost. He wished he knew if he could trust Wells. He had debated that question endlessly with himself, and he still wasn’t sure. But he believed that the answer was yes. More important, he didn’t have much choice, especially after what had happened in Montreal.
Yet another disaster, Khadri thought. Allah had not blessed him this month. Crazy Tarik Dourant. Khadri understood why Tarik had snapped. His wife had deserved what she’d gotten. But why couldn’t Tarik just have waited? Khadri would gladly have taken care of Fatima and her
Wells was his best choice. Khadri’s other sleepers might have problems at the border, but Wells could cross easily. And Khadri thought he had found a foolproof plan, one that would work even if Wells was an American agent. A plan that would turn everything around and shock the world.
As soon as possible Khadri needed to get authorization from Ayman al-Zawahiri for the new operation. Zawahiri wouldn’t be pleased with the change. Al Qaeda prepared its attacks years in advance. An operation as important as this wasn’t supposed to be revised on a few days’ notice, and the new plan would cost al Qaeda all its American sleepers at once. But Zawahiri would understand. Better their men should die gloriously than be arrested one by one. Better to strike while they still had the strength to land a heavy blow. This attack might not be as elegant as his original plan, but it would kill just as many people.
Khadri leaned forward to pray. He couldn’t delude himself. The noose was tightening. He would probably never see Mecca, his greatest dream. He would never be married or have a family. He would probably die in this alien land, surrounded by infidels. Yet he found himself more afraid of failure than death.
In this, at least, he and Wells were alike.
AS SOON AS the phone rang Wells knew. Khadri was the only person who had this number. He pulled the handset out of his pocket, took a breath, and accepted the call.
“Jalal.”
“Check your gmail account.” Click.
“As you like, Omar,” Wells said to the dead line.
Finally, Wells thought. Finally Khadri had decided to use him. He felt certain this was the real mission, the one he had awaited for so long. And even if Khadri was sending him down another false path, Wells knew now that they would meet again. This time he would destroy Khadri. Even if he had to tear out the man’s throat with his bare hands.
Wells could see now that Khadri was Qaeda’s linchpin, even more important to the group’s plans than Zawahiri or bin Laden himself. Khadri and Khadri alone controlled Qaeda’s networks in the United States. Without him Qaeda’s ability to attack America would be set back at least five years. Maybe more. Not forever, but enough time for Major Glen Holmes and Wells’s old friends in the Special Forces to root out the last of the jihadis in the North-West Frontier. To catch Zawahiri and bin Laden himself. To defeat Qaeda. Khadri was the key.
15
AT THE DORAVILLE Public Library, Wells logged on to his gmail account. The orders were simple enough. Drive — Khadri specified that Wells had to drive — to Montreal. Pick up a package at a hotel. Drive back. Khadri had included a phone number for the contact he would meet in Montreal. The meeting was barely twenty-four hours away. He would need to move fast.
Back home Wells packed an overnight bag with the essentials: His field medicine kit. His flashlight. His black leather gloves. His knife, strapped to his leg. The.45 he had taken from Sami. He wrapped the pistol and silencer in plastic and packed them in a separate bag. He would have to hide them before he reached the border, but for this trip he wanted a gun. He left his other weapons in the apartment. He had gotten rid of his Glock the week before, tossing it into a deserted stretch of the Chattahoochee River fifty miles north of Atlanta. The gun had splashed into the black water and disappeared without a trace. Wells wished he could forget Qais and Sami as easily.
Wells slipped his Koran into the bag as well. After everything that had happened, everything he had done, he wasn’t sure what he believed. Still, the book was like an old friend he hadn’t seen in a while. Maybe they didn’t have much to talk about anymore. But they had understood each other once, and that counted for something.
He looked around the apartment one last time as he headed out. Lucy had died, but Ricky was still alive, swimming listlessly. Wells decided to give the fish a last meal. Somehow he didn’t expect to see the place again. No great loss. It had served its purpose.
On his way out, Wells knocked on the door of his next-door neighbor, Wendell Hury, the old man whose television blared game shows through the walls of Wells’s apartment every day. They weren’t exactly friends, but Wendell was the only person in all of Atlanta who might notice that he’d gone. Wells felt oddly compelled to say good-bye. But though Wells could hear Wendell’s television through the door, the old man didn’t answer his knock. Wells waited a few seconds, then turned away.
WELLS ROLLED DOWN his windows as he passed through the suburbs and into the lush green woods of northeast Georgia. The September air was warm and humid, with thick clouds in the air promising a late-afternoon shower. Wells could feel sweat running down the small of his back. He flicked on the radio and skimmed between stations, not really sure what he was hoping to hear. Then he caught the fiddles of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” a great hokey country song from the Charlie Daniels Band that Wells hadn’t heard at least since high school.
The song brought a grin to Wells’s face, his first real smile in weeks. He stomped on the gas for a moment, feeling the Ranger’s little engine rev and the pickup jump forward, then pulled his foot away and reminded himself not to speed. Even after the highway narrowed to two lanes outside the Atlanta suburbs, traffic was heavy and state troopers a constant presence. But the oversized signs and the road’s smooth macadam soothed him. Through South Carolina he hummed “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” wondering what his comrades in the North-West Frontier would think of the song. Not much, probably. For the first time since he had come back to the United States he felt truly American.
