How was he going to bring the sarin inside Langley? Though the chemical was incredibly toxic, it wasn’t a biological weapon like anthrax that was lethal in quantities so minuscule they could barely be seen. He had done some basic calculations and realized he would need to bring in at least ten liters of DF, the liquid precursor to sarin, to have a realistic chance to send lethal quantities through the seventh floor’s ventilation system. Plus an equal amount of isopropyl alcohol.
He’d also have to figure out how to tamper with the vents without being caught. The agency was well aware of the risk of a chemical or biological weapons attack, and its engineers closely watched its heating and air-conditioning systems.
But Wayne couldn’t even overcome the first hurdle of sneaking the liquid inside. Three days before, he had tried the same test at the main lobby gate in late afternoon, hoping the crush of employees leaving for the day might distract the guards. It hadn’t. They stopped him there, too, though that time they just sent him back to his car.
Worse, the guards were supposed to log unusual incidents at their stations. He doubted his test three days before had reached that level. Today’s run-in probably would. And that little troll Shafer was surely looking for incident reports with his name. Bringing in a couple bottles of Gatorade was hardly suspicious, but to get written up for it more than once would be notable.
He needed a new plan. At this point it didn’t matter if the Islamic State brought him a thousand liters of sarin. The only CIA officer he could poison was himself.
—
WAYNE CALLED the imam, scheduled another meet, this one at a Lowe’s in Fairfax, a few miles outside the Beltway. He was pushing his luck by meeting again so soon, but he had to take the chance.
Again Wayne made the meeting part of a normal Saturday run for groceries, dry cleaning, an oil change. The usual suburban nonsense that distracted his fellow Americans from the horrors they fueled. No. They didn’t need distraction. They didn’t think about their sins. Just went about their merry business.
By the time he reached Lowe’s, he was sure he didn’t have anyone on him. The imam was out back, nosing around the garden supplies area like he couldn’t decide if he wanted Kentucky bluegrass or genetically modified fescue. He was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, nothing to attract attention, and nobody was within thirty feet of him.
“My lawn’s getting raggedy,” Wayne said. “Any advice?”
The imam didn’t smile. “I thought you were the expert. Now I’m wondering.”
Wayne picked up a bag of ryegrass. “Thirty bucks for ten pounds? Seems expensive.”
“Didn’t you say we should meet as little as possible, habibi?”
“It couldn’t be avoided. First. There’s a chance that a man named Ellis Shafer may contact you. He probably won’t, but he might.” Wayne had debated whether to mention Shafer. He didn’t want to set the imam off unnecessarily, but Shafer hadn’t stopped poking around. By now, Shafer probably was aware of Wayne’s contacts with the imam, and Wayne couldn’t rule out that Shafer would try to push the imam himself.
“What do I tell him? If he does?”
“He may know I’ve approached you. Just stick to our old cover story.”
“Who is this man Shafer anyway?”
Another reason Wayne hadn’t wanted to mention Shafer. “Nobody. He doesn’t have any real authority, he doesn’t know anything, he just asks questions.” And talks to the President.
“Why me?”
“He decided to look at prominent Muslims who have contact with senior folks, even if we’ve properly reported them.” A safe lie.
“The truth. Do I need to worry?”
“He’s fishing, that’s all.”
“Fine. What else?”
“The stuff we talked about. I don’t see how I can get it inside. Without that, it’s useless.”
“Maybe I should invite your friends for a prayer session. Please, leave your gas masks at home.”
Wayne looked at the stacked bags of fertilizer beside the grass seeds. Maybe a truck bomb? No, exactly the wrong idea. Sarin worked far better in a confined space, why he’d wanted to get it inside.
“To be honest, I’m not sure we can get it to the United States,” the imam said. “Europe, yes. But not America. So unless you want me to give a sermon at the Vatican, invite all your friends—”
A sermon at the Vatican. That fast, Wayne saw the outlines of a plan. The operation would be tricky and complicated, but he could use the agency’s own security protocols against it. And if it worked, the carnage wouldn’t be hidden in some conference room in Langley. The whole world would see it live—
Wayne turned the idea over in his mind. Yes. It was possible.
Carefully, he outlined it for the imam.
“Can we get to him?” the imam said when he was finished. “He must have protection.”
“Not as much as you think. Nothing like our people. I’ll find out where he lives, pass it to you.” Though Wayne would have to be careful. Pushing too hard would set off alarms. “Then you just need men who don’t mind dying—”
“Martyrs aren’t a problem. Especially over there.”
“After that, the second part flows naturally.”
“You’re sure you’ll know where it’ll be.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“If you’re wrong?”
Wayne shrugged. “The first part is worth doing anyway.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Not easy. But possible.”
“Insh’allah.”
“Yeah, Insh’allah.”
12
NANGALAM, AFGHANISTAN
WELLS WAS about to make a mistake.
He couldn’t help himself.
It was past midnight in Nangalam, a tiny eastern Afghanistan town where the Pech River flowed out of the mountains into a valley green with alfalfa. During the early years of the Afghan war, this district had been hotly contested. The United States had put a base called Camp Blessing a half mile away, complete with an artillery battalion to launch giant 155-millimeter shells into the mountains—a rarity in an age of drones and smart bombs.
But even with all its combat power, the United States never truly controlled the area. The tribes here were ornery even by Afghan standards. Not only could they not be bought, they couldn’t even be rented. As far as they were concerned, only the flags changed with each new invader. They happily took the radios and blankets the United States offered them. Then they let the Taliban rain mortars on Blessing. In 2008, Talib fighters nearly overran a small American base a few miles north of Nangalam. Only massive air support had stopped them.
After 2010, the United States moved its soldiers out and focused on controlling Kandahar and south-central Afghanistan. The choice made sense. As the heartland and spiritual center of the Taliban, the south was more important strategically. It was also friendlier tactically. Desert bases didn’t need helicopter resupply, and air support was easier on flat ground.
The mountain tribes and Talibs saw the withdrawal as a victory. Ever since, the jihadis in the area had moved back and forth to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier at will. They faced occasional Special Forces raids, but the Afghan National Army didn’t even try to contest them.
So Nangalam was a perfect place for Wells to become Samir Khalili. As long as the Taliban didn’t find him first.
—
AFTER GETTING his gear in Kabul, Wells convinced Dilshod the taxi driver to give him a ride to Jalalabad. More precisely, an extra two thousand dollars from Wells convinced Dilshod.
The drive turned out to be nearly as dangerous as Wells’s night at the Winter Inn. The highway to Jalalabad was among the deadliest in the world. Just east of Kabul, the road cut through a narrow ravine, stark, beautiful, and lethal. The Kabul River bubbled hundreds of feet be
low. Crumbly cliffs soared a thousand feet above. The slopes spat rocks down in bad weather and good.
But the real danger came from the other drivers on the road, which carried the grand name of the Afghan National Highway. In reality, it was one lane in each direction without even a yellow centerline. Thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in Western aid, it was paved nearly for its entire length. But the asphalt was as much curse as blessing. Wells remembered Afghans as aggressive drivers, but they had reached a new pitch of insanity in the last few years. Maybe they’d been at war for so long that they no longer cared about life at all. They passed on blind curves. They passed trucks into oncoming trucks.
The fruit of this testosterone tree lay along the river below, wrecks that would never be cleared. At the worst curves, scrawny kids stood on the side of the road, yelling, Go! or Stop! seemingly at random, their hands cupped, begging a coin or two in payment for their advice.
Halfway through the gorge, the road briefly straightened, and Wells watched as an SUV passed a pickup that was itself trying to get by a sedan, the three vehicles side by side by side, all honking as wildly as geese in November.
Dilshod drove coolly, but he couldn’t escape the madness. On the last blind curve before the highway escaped the gorge, an oncoming pickup forced the taxi so far over that it popped onto the highway’s low stone curb. The jolt threw Wells against his belt. Through his streaked window, he glimpsed the football field drop to the right. The river surged below, foamy and white. Wells thought they would go over. But Dilshod braked and downshifted and spun the steering wheel all at once, hands and feet moving in tandem like he was coming out of Turn 4 at Daytona.
The taxi popped back to safety as the Hilux edged by. Dilshod turned to Wells and grinned.
An hour later, at a gas station at the edge of Jalalabad, Dilshod pulled over. “Here, yes?”
The guy had done enough. Wells didn’t want him to press his luck further. Anyway, if Wells couldn’t find the bus station on his own, he ought to give himself to the Talibs right now. He slid twenty one-hundred-dollar bills to Dilshod. “Go home, forget me.” Wells almost added Kiss your kids, but the sentiment wasn’t very Afghan.
“You think I need you to tell me?”
“Don’t suppose you know any hotels I can trust in the mountains.”
“Those people”—Dilshod shook his head with a city dweller’s disdain for the hicks upstate—“they keep goats in their beds. Not only to stay warm. You see?”
Wells smiled.
“Too many Taliban up there. Whatever it is you’re doing, Mr. American, I hope Allah is with you.”
Allah and an AK . . . “Drive safe, Dilshod.”
—
IF UNGUARDED American civilians were unlikely sights in Kabul, they were as rare as unicorns everywhere else in Pashtun territory. Wells planned to use that fact to his benefit. No one was looking for Americans. Thus, no one would wonder if he was American. He would speak Arabic first, Pashtun only if necessary. Big-bearded Arabs were known to be trigger-happy. He didn’t expect questions.
Even so, the Winter Inn might haunt him. The clerk would remember Mitch Kelly’s name even without a copy of the passport. The jihadis might have someone inside the airport who could run the name and find Kelly’s passport picture, complete with Wells’s photo. By then, Wells needed to be laying low in the hills, waiting for the men in the black helicopters to come get him. Even paranoids have enemies. He was aiming for Asadabad, a town of fifty thousand, northeast of here, close to the Pakistani border.
Under a clear blue sky, Jalalabad was bustling. Wells followed a muddy road crowded with minibuses and trucks and 100 cc motorbikes, two-wheeled lawn mowers. Russian tanks, American jets, and Talib suicide bombers had all left scars here. But the Afghans were still doing what they loved best, gossiping and trading. If we would just leave them alone for twenty years . . .
No one ever did. For a country that had no oil, no ports, no gold or diamonds, no real strategic relevance, Afghanistan attracted more than its share of attention. The great powers almost seemed to want to send their armies into this unforgiving land just to prove they could.
—
JALALABAD’S BUS STATION was misnamed, a gravel lot where brightly painted vans and minibuses parked in haphazard rows, their drivers shouting destinations and fares. The passengers were mainly families with five or six children and sometimes chickens, sheep, and goats. They tied duffel bags and suitcases onto the roofs, stuffed themselves and their livestock in. Wells found the next ride to Asadabad, an orange Kia minibus, and handed over a one-hundred-afghani note—about a dollar-fifty.
“By yourself?” the driver said in Pashtun.
Wells nodded. The driver handed him a five-afghani coin in change, waved him on board without looking twice. Wells felt himself shedding his American skin.
The Kia pulled out an hour later, a twelve-seater with eighteen passengers on board. Fortunately, no animals. The Asadabad road was less crowded than the Jalalabad highway, and though the minibus’s brakes squeaked, the driver avoided near-death experiences. The kids around Wells chattered nonstop. He thought of Emmie and the luck she’d had to be American. It was early morning in New Hampshire now. She’d be sleeping in her bed, her mother one room away, her belly full. She was healthy and happy and lovely in her innocence, not yet aware the world could be anything other than peaceful.
He missed her.
The bus passed two police stations on the way to Asadabad. The first was abandoned, windows shot out, bricks crumbling. The second was filled with white pickup trucks that looked to Wells like they belonged to the Taliban, not the Afghan cops. Afghanistan’s official black, red, and green flag was nowhere in sight. Neither the driver nor anyone else in the minibus commented. Talib control was a fact of life here, not worth mentioning.
Just outside Asadabad, two Hilux pickups formed a makeshift checkpoint. A white flag emblazoned with the shahada, the Muslim creed, flew overhead. A bearded jihadi stepped into the road and waved the bus over. The driver sighed, pulled to the side, turned off the engine.
A Talib with a pistol on his hip walked close. “How many?”
“Four men, three women, eleven children.”
“Fifteen for the men, ten for the women, five for the children.” The math was apparently beyond the Talib. After a few seconds, the driver made the mistake of speaking.
“One forty-five.”
“Two hundred, yes.” The Talib grinned.
The driver pulled two one-hundred-afghani notes from his pocket, handed them over.
“Did you see anything worth telling?”
“No, Commander.”
“No Americans, no ANA?”
“No, Commander. I swear on Allah’s name.”
“All right. Go on.”
As the driver turned on the engine, the Talib spied Wells. He chopped his hand in front of the windshield, yelled, “Stop!” He muttered under his breath, and two men stepped up and put their AKs on the van.
Wells realized he should have stuck himself in the middle of the bus along with the kids. He would hardly have been seen.
So the moment of truth had come sooner than he expected. He wasn’t worried that these Talibs were looking for the man who’d burned the Winter Inn. Even in Kabul they couldn’t know about Mitch Kelly yet, much less have a picture. But if he couldn’t pass as Arab, this ride would turn messy very fast.
Samir Khalili. No one else.
The commander pointed to Wells, crooked his finger—Get out. The United States had decimated al-Qaeda and killed bin Laden. But Arab jihadis still looked down on the locals. Wells didn’t plan to be too deferential. He strolled to the side of the road.
“What’s your name?” The man’s Arabic was rough but understandable. He had thick black hair, heavily oiled.
“Samir, Commander. Samir Khalili. And yo
urs?”
“Where from?”
“Lebanon. Many years ago.” Wells wanted to avoid mentioning Canada, though he knew he was taking a chance. If they searched his bag, they’d find the passport.
The commander looked around, playing to his men. “Is there sea here?” The jihadis shook their heads. “This doesn’t look like Lebanon to me.”
“I’m on my way to the Swat.” The Swat Valley was in Pakistan, home to a few hardy al-Qaeda refugees who after all these years were practically locals.
“Why?”
Wells didn’t answer. The commander looked at the men beside him and suddenly Wells had two AKs pointed at him. He hesitated long enough to make sure the commander knew he was choosing to answer. “I have a message.”
“For me.”
“Your Arabic isn’t bad, Commander. Did you learn from men like me?”
The Talib smiled at a joke Wells hadn’t told. “Not too many like you left here. They’ve gone home. Or died. Some fell in love with poppies. Is that you? Don’t you know my men will shoot you right here if I say so and throw your body there”—he nodded at the road just as a truck rolled past, belching diesel smoke—“for the trucks to squash?”
“You’re right, there aren’t many of us left, but I was in Afghanistan with the sheikh before the Americans came. And, truly, I believe that Allah will give us our revenge, if we keep our faith and don’t give up. If I have a message for someone, he hears it, no one else.”
The Talib nodded, and Wells knew that he’d scored. “Did you really know bin Laden?”
Strange to think bin Laden’s name still carried weight. But, then, September 11 remained the most successful terrorist attack. “I didn’t know him, but I saw him. He was a lion. When he spoke, we thought anything was possible.”
The commander pulled a camera from his pocket, stood next to Wells, snapped his picture, a two-man selfie. “Go on, then. Peace be with you.”
The Prisoner Page 19