He and the imam had agreed that if they needed to talk face-to-face in an emergency meeting, they would arrange to bump into each other in one of the many shopping centers nearby. Wayne powered up a fresh burner, texted the imam, S 1105 SA 119. The message hardly deserved to be called code—location, time, day. The S stood for Springfield Town Center, a Virginia mall just outside the Beltway. It was miles from Langley and Wayne’s house, far enough that he wouldn’t see anyone he knew, close enough that his presence would raise no questions if he did.
The last three numbers were the only unusual part: 119 was the equivalent of 911 in many Asian countries. Wayne’s way of saying the meeting was a priority. His phone buzzed back five minutes later with a single number: 1. Yes.
—
ON SATURDAY, Wayne spent an hour shopping, buying sneakers for himself, bras for his wife. Acting naturally was the best countersurveillance tactic. The mall wasn’t crowded. He had plenty of space to watch for watchers. The agency couldn’t risk using its own counterintelligence officers to track him. He might recognize them. It would have to rely on the FBI, and despite its efforts to diversify, the Bureau remained heavy on middle-aged white guys who spent too much time at the gym. They’d stand out at Victoria’s Secret.
No one raised Wayne’s suspicions. At this hour, his fellow shoppers were mostly stealth exercisers. Moms pushed strollers. Retirees power walked. At exactly 11:05, Wayne passed the Starbucks near the mall’s east entrance. The imam stepped out.
“My friend. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Salaam alaikum,” Wayne said.
“Alaikum as-salaam.”
“What brings you here?”
“My wife has dispatched me to Macy’s to buy towels.”
“Macy’s? Me, too. I’ll walk with you.”
They strolled the mall’s wide corridors.
“What was so very urgent?” the imam murmured, not quite keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.
Wayne felt the slightest chill. This man is not your friend. But this man was his only friend. Thus, he had no friends at all.
His own choice. “First, find out if you can pass a message to Hani.”
“The one in Bulgaria? Did you let him out?”
“No—”
“Then how can we send him a message? You’d have a better chance yourself.”
“Just try.”
“What’s the message?”
“First find out if you can pass it.”
“All right. What else?”
“A defector tells us your friends are making nerve agents. Probably sarin.”
“So.”
“I need it.”
The imam stopped, reminding Wayne that he wasn’t a pro, no matter how much he pretended to be.
“Keep walking, please. Two buddies on our way to Macy’s.”
The imam walked. “What for?”
Wayne felt the bags in his hands, all this stuff that he didn’t need, that no one needed. Lace bras and hundred-dollar Nikes, useless excess from sea to shining sea. “When the people I work with are choking to death, you think they’ll remember all the junk they bought? When their bowels give, you think they’ll care if they’re wearing Fruit of the Loom or Jockey?”
“Insh’allah,” the imam muttered.
“That’s right, my man. Insh’allah all night long.” For the first time in months, years, a decade, since Jane, Wayne felt free. As though a seed he’d carried had finally found sunlight.
“This stuff, if we have it, how much do you want?”
“All there is.”
“A number, please. If you’re serious.”
The imam’s tone suggested that Wayne should put the crazy back in the basement. “Ten liters. If you have that much.”
“If we don’t?”
“Tell me how much you have, how quickly you’re making it, the potency.”
The imam didn’t answer. Wayne read his mind: Is he playing me? Was he working for the agency all along?
“Everything I’ve given you and you don’t trust me.”
“And if this sarin exists at all, what will you do with it?”
“Just see if you have it, please.”
They’d reached Macy’s. Wayne gave the imam a piece of paper, an email address he’d created that morning. “When you know, write me here.”
The imam nodded. “Until we meet again.”
“Until we meet again.”
—
WAYNE FORCED HIMSELF not to check the email more than once a day. Still, the waiting nearly snapped him, especially since he knew each hour brought Wells closer to Hani. He had come up with one move that might stop Wells even before he reached Afghanistan. He decided to try it, mainly because he was sure no one could connect it to him.
But Wells would probably beat it. Then he’d be on his way. Wayne imagined a History Channel–style red line tracking Wells’s progress as he landed in Kabul and made his way east. Wayne wanted to hope the Taliban would catch Wells. But Wells had lived among the jihadis for years. He was a survivor.
He was coming.
Wayne coped with the pressure by imagining the sarin, what he’d do with it.
A week passed before he found a message from the imam: You were correct. I am told to tell you we have almost 5L of the substance.
Still waiting to hear about the other.
Five liters was more than he expected. Enough to kill hundreds of people. He and his friends had to move it from Syria to the United States, and then into Langley, without being caught. A non-trivial obstacle, as the analysts said. But beatable, Wayne hoped. They’d beat it.
Then he would have his fun.
9
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
THE WAR in Afghanistan was over. But charter flights loaded with contractors still landed at Bagram Air Base. American soldiers and airmen still launched air strikes against the Taliban to prop up the corrupt Afghan government. Deltas and SEALs still died in ambushes and helicopter crashes, the casualties barely noticed back home.
The war in Afghanistan was over.
But it wasn’t.
Wells had come back more than once since the years he’d spent in the Kush as part of al-Qaeda. He’d traveled semi-officially, arriving on military jets, sleeping on bases until he ventured outside the wire. Not now. For this op, he would come as a civilian. JFK to Dubai to Karachi, a bus to Islamabad, one final flight to Kabul. From there, he would find his way into the mountains on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Along the way, he’d become Samir Khalili, a veteran al-Qaeda courier whose luck at avoiding capture was about to run out.
Wells and Shafer had not yet figured out exactly when or where the Special Ops team would grab him. Wells needed to find the right village. It had to have a hotel big enough for him to blend in, small enough that the team that picked him up could do so quickly. Wells wanted to minimize the chance that American soldiers would die in a mission whose only real purpose was to establish Samir Khalili’s identity. But providing Wells’s exact location to the capture team too far ahead in advance would raise questions. Couriers didn’t stay long in one place unless they had no choice.
—
THE FIRST LEG of Wells’s trip was easy. Emirates to Dubai, on a fresh passport from the agency in the easy-to-forget name of Mitch Kelly. Wells sat in coach, reading his Quran, recalling the comfort the words had given him in the mountains so many years before: He is God the Creator, the Maker, the Shaper. To Him belong the Names Most Beautiful. All that is in the heavens and the earth magnifies Him. He is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise. The Allah depicted in the Quran had more in common with the Jewish God of the Old Testament than the Christian Father of the New. Like Yahweh, Allah demanded constant homage to His greatness and lashed out against His doubters: Shall We then treat the people of Faith like the people of
Sin? What is the matter with you?
Wells knew he’d never truly convince himself that God existed—or that He didn’t. Some mysteries didn’t answer to human understanding. Maybe all of creation existed inside the shell of a hydrogen atom. Maybe, as the old joke went, it was turtles all the way down. Yet the Quran’s fierceness resonated with him. A punishing master for a punishing universe. A God who combined infinite power with an all-too-human need to prove His might. Wells wondered sometimes why he couldn’t accept the forgiveness that the God of Jesus and Mary offered. The failure was his, he supposed. He couldn’t imagine a better world.
The connection from Dubai to Karachi offered Wells the first glimpse of the world that had once been his home. Westerners mostly avoided Pakistan. Wells clocked only two other white faces on the plane, both in business class, of course. He was in coach, which was filled with construction workers coming back from projects in the Emirates. They wore their cleanest long-sleeved shirts and jeans, happy to be returning home. Wells’s seatmate eyed him critically, but when Wells opened his Quran and began to read in Arabic, the man’s frown disappeared. “Muslim?”
“Nam.”
“Salaam alaikum.”
“Alaikum as-salaam.”
“From France?”
“America.”
The man smiled broadly. Wells had almost forgotten that the United States could generate this reaction, along with the reverse. “Do you know Alcatraz?”
“The prison?”
The man cocked his head as though Wells were a fool even to raise the question: What other Alcatraz is there? “The Rock. I want to see it. But impossible now. Visas.” He had brown eyes, and a tiny scar in the very center of his chin. “I am Faisal.”
“Mitch. You like Dubai?”
Faisal shook his head. “The Arabs, they treat us worse than animals.” A common complaint among non-Arab Muslims.
Pakistanis were a talky bunch, but even by those standards, Faisal was exceptional. He spent the rest of the two-hour flight in a near-nonstop monologue, pouring out facts in broken English about Alcatraz and the American penal system. He was a savant of sorts. You know the Eastern State Penitentiary? In Philadelphia? It opened in eighteen hundreds. Now a museum, you can visit . . . An odd coincidence, considering the mission. Wells wondered if Faisal knew anything about Bulgarian prisons, decided not to ask.
By the time they touched down in Karachi, Faisal had invited Wells for dinner. Wells was reminded of Islam’s power to cross nationalities, the strength of the brotherhood that had first attracted him to the faith.
Too bad he would never have the chance to take Faisal up.
—
THE IMMIGRATION AGENT in Karachi looked Wells over with distaste. Wells wondered if the man figured him and his big beard and American passport for a private military contractor. “Purpose of trip?”
“Business.”
“Traveling outside Karachi?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any weapons?”
Good question. Once he reached Afghanistan, Wells would need a pistol and, ideally, an assault rifle, too, to establish his cover and for protection. He’d also need an expired Canadian passport in Samir Khalili’s name and other bits of what the agency called pocket litter. Those were the photos, fake identity cards, maps, and trinkets that Khalili would have accumulated over the years in the Kush.
The agency had designers and forgers who specialized in these documents. Before Wells left, they’d made what he needed. The tricky part was bringing it to Kabul. Wells could have carried it, but since he was flying on a civilian passport, he faced the risk of a bag search. Under these circumstances, he would normally have another CIA officer bring the stuff in a diplomatic pouch and deliver it once he’d arrived. But—aside from the necessary step of having the Kabul chief of station brief the Deltas and Special Operations Group on Samir Khalili—Wells and Shafer wanted to keep the case officers in Afghanistan in the dark.
Shafer found the solution: a British MI6 operative would deliver everything to Wells once he came to Kabul, bypassing the CIA. Duto could ask the head of MI6 directly. The move even had a certain symmetry. The prior president had used the British against Wells on his last mission.
So Wells had nothing to worry about in his bag. “No, no weapons.”
The agent consulted his screen.
“I need to check your luggage.” The agent wasn’t asking. A second officer had already come to the counter, his right hand touching the pistol on his hip.
The men led Wells to a windowless concrete room, empty except for a portable X-ray machine and a plastic table. They locked Wells inside, returned ten minutes later with his black Samsonite, a stock bag, no hidden compartments.
“Yours?”
“Yes.” Wells wondered if they’d planted a gun or drugs inside it. The delay would have given them time. He watched as they ran the Samsonite through the X-ray machine and emptied it so they could tug at every seam for hidden compartments. Wells was glad he’d come in clean. Even the agency’s best trick suitcases wouldn’t have survived this inspection.
After fifteen minutes, the men grew frustrated. The good news was that they hadn’t planted anything or they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to find it. But they had obviously expected to find something.
“This bag, it has a hidden compartment? Maybe we cut it open.”
“Whatever you like.”
The search hadn’t been random, Wells realized. Someone at Langley had found the name Wells would be using on his new passport, then made an anonymous phone call telling the Pakistani government to watch for Mitch Kelly. Shafer and Wells hadn’t told the seventh floor about their plan to use the British. The mole might have assumed Wells would carry his own litter, or even a weapon. If the Pakistanis found it and arrested Wells, he’d be stuck in prison for months. If he asked the agency to help, word would spread to every case officer in Central Asia. His mission would be derailed before he ever reached Bulgaria.
Best of all, from the mole’s point of view, the move carried no risk. Wells and Shafer had no good way to chase down the tip, or even prove anyone had made one.
Wells had to give the mole credit. He wondered how far the Pakistani officers would press the issue, if they would hold him without evidence. But after another five minutes of prodding at the suitcase, the agents let him go.
Nice try, Mr. X. I’m still coming.
—
BECAUSE PAKISTAN AIRLINES was less than reliable—it had recently suspended service after three of its workers died in a riot for higher pay—decent intercity bus lines connected the country’s major cities. Yet his nine-hundred-mile ride to Islamabad lasted more than a day on pockmarked highways. By the time he stepped off the bus, Wells felt as though the world’s worst masseuse had worked him over.
He found a drab hotel by the station, took a lukewarm shower to wash the stink off his body. The cracked mirror displayed an exhausted, dull-eyed man. Good. The Islamabad–Kabul flight had plenty of Western aid workers and bodyguards. Wells didn’t want them to mistake him for one of them. He preferred they see him as one of the confused adventurers who showed up in Kabul a couple of times a month. They called themselves freelance journalists or directors of charities they’d invented themselves. Usually Afghanistan wasn’t their first stop. They’d survived Myanmar or Egypt and thought they were ready for the big leagues.
The smart ones saw the dangers and hung around Kabul’s handful of expat cafés for a few days before going back to Dubai. The lucky ones ran out of cash before they could bump into supposedly friendly locals who could lure them from the capital’s relative safety. The really lucky ones went straight north and wound up in Tajikistan, where they blog-bragged about their adventures in the Graveyard of Empires. The unlucky ones . . . disappeared. They were kidnapped and held for insane ransoms. Or simply murdered, t
heir torn bodies dumped at the edge of the capital, a wordless warning to every other Westerner in Afghanistan: Get out. You don’t belong.
The professional foreigners didn’t like these guys. Not just because their kidnappings caused trouble. Their Lonely Planet wandering called into question the seriousness of the diplomats and journalists. To you, Kabul’s a hardship post, the center of American foreign policy in Central Asia, a chance to win a Pulitzer. To me, it’s a passport stamp and a place to buy a cheap rug. The pros would have liked to ban them, but the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan had its own rules.
So Wells wanted his fellow passengers to see him as an amateur. And ignore him.
—
INDEED, on the flight the next morning, no one said a word. Wells had booked a window seat on the right side of the plane so he could look at the green hills to the north. Past them, the great mountains of the Kush, their peaks covered in untracked snow, so massive that even from a hundred miles away they erupted into the sky. The sight filled Wells with a nostalgia, real and false at once. Despite the deprivation he’d endured in those mountains, he’d felt a sense of purpose that he’d never entirely recaptured. Stop al-Qaeda before it could attack the United States again. What could be simpler or more important? Ever since, the threats had grown muddier, the missions more complicated. We were soldiers once . . . and young . . .
The 737 left the mountains behind and descended into Hamid Karzai International Airport. It had been called Kabul International until 2014, when the Afghan parliament renamed it after the former president, probably to commemorate all the money he’d skimmed during reconstruction. The jet came in in a standard approach, no tactical landing needed. So the airport was safe, for now.
At Immigration, Wells offered himself up as Mitch Kelly for what he expected would be the second-to-last time. The officer flipped to the visa page. “Purpose of visit.”
“Tourism. Panjshir Valley.” North of Kabul, a mostly Tajik province.
The Prisoner Page 15