“You sure?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I’ll Google it . . . Penn State athletics . . . It’s all football . . . Soccer . . . No Arab or Turkish-sounding names, nobody from Turkey or Germany or anywhere in the Middle East.”
“Try the J.V.”
A few seconds later, Shafer came back. “No, John. You still want me to call the FBI? They’ve got a few other things to do.”
“What about women?” Gaffan said.
Wells clapped a hand to his forehead. “Of course.”
“Of course what?” Shafer said.
“Check the women’s roster.”
Shafer clicked away. “Wouldn’t you know? Aymet Helsi. From Blankenese, Germany. Says here she’s a goalie. You want to bet your buddy Bernard knows her family? Maybe he’s helping with her tuition?”
“You have an address?”
“As soon as I hang up, I’ll get the FBI to get a warrant, get her address from the registrar. Meantime let’s see if she’s got a, yes, she’s listed. The last twenty-year-old with a landline.”
“Address.”
“Ten Vairo Boulevard, unit 239-04 . . . Looks like it’s part of a big apartment complex called Vairo Village. You want me to stay on the line, give you directions?”
“We’ve got a GPS.”
“I’ll call the army. But you’re going to get there first, no matter what. I don’t suppose I can convince you to wait.”
Wells was silent.
“John, do me a favor and don’t get killed. She’ll never forgive you. Or me.” Click.
FOLLOWING THE GPS’S chirped orders, Gaffan turned right onto the Mount Nittany Expressway, Route 322, the east-west highway that ran along the northern edge of town. At Waddle Road, less than a mile from the apartment, Gaffan pulled off. Wells tapped his shoulder. “Pull over.” Wells hopped out, told the trooper what had happened.
“I gotta call the State College cops,” the trooper said.
“Sit tight for five minutes. We’ll go in first, no sirens.”
“But what about evacuating—”
“There’s no evacuating from this,” Wells said. “Let us go in first.”
AT 4:25, THE NEWS CRAWL on CNN began to promise a major announcement from the White House at 5 p.m. Then the crawl reported that the FBI would hold a briefing following the White House announcement. Nasiji didn’t need to see more.
“We’re going,” he said to Yusuf and Thalia. “Now.”
WELLS AND GAFFAN rolled down Oakwood Avenue. The GPS informed them that Vairo Boulevard was ahead on their right. They reached a stop sign, turned right onto Vairo. The apartment complex was across the road, dozens of brown-and-white buildings around a long cul-de-sac.
Gaffan started to swing in. “No,” Wells said. “Next one.”
He pointed to the sign in front: “Phase 1—Units 1-100.” Wells lowered the window of the Expedition and cradled his M-4. His mouth was dry, his fingers gnarled. If his hunch was wrong, he might be about to shoot an innocent college student. And if it was right . . .
They reached the next block: “Phase 2—Units 201-300.” Gaffan swung in. They rolled slowly down the street, which was really just a big parking lot for the complex. The buildings were identical, each two stories, white and brown, laid out roughly in a rectangle that extended several hundred feet around the parking lot. They were moving up the longer side of the rectangle, north from Vairo Boulevard, as the parking lot divided into four rows.
“We know what kind of car we’re looking for?”
“Something big,” Wells said.
And Wells saw it. A black Suburban at the far end of the complex, moving south away from them, toward the exit. He touched Gaffan’s shoulder.
“Let’s see what building they came out of.”
They swung right, down the northern edge of the complex, the top of the rectangle, as the Suburban rolled away. Number 239 lay at the northeastern flank of the complex, where Wells had first seen the Suburban. Gaffan slowed down. “We going in?”
“No.”
NASIJI LAY ON THE FLOOR of the Suburban, the uranium pit tucked between his legs. On the ride down from Addison, the position had left him vaguely carsick, but it allowed him to load and fire the Spear in seconds. Inshallah. How silly to worry about a bit of stomach pain when he was about to give his body to a nuclear fireball. He wasn’t afraid . . . Or perhaps he was. Anyone would be. But he had chosen this course, and unlike that coward Bashir, he would see it through. His father, his mother, they hadn’t asked to die either. He and Yusuf and even Thalia would join Mohammed Atta and the other martyrs who had given themselves to liberate Islam.
Nasiji clutched the pit tight and closed his eyes. They stopped, waiting for traffic to clear so they could join the traffic on Vairo Boulevard. Soon they would be on the highway, just another anonymous black SUV traveling through the Pennsylvania night, burning the gasoline that the Americans had invaded Iraq to steal. In half an hour, he would hear what the president had to say and then he would decide where to take their precious cargo.
THE SUBURBAN STOPPED at the intersection of the parking lot and Vairo Boulevard, stuck behind a car that was waiting to make a left turn.
“Ram them,” Wells said. “Hard.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Gaffan stamped the gas pedal and the Expedition surged, its big engine roaring—
CRASH. The Expedition’s massive grille buckled the rear of the Suburban, shattering the back windows. The collision threw Wells forward but his seat belt caught and airbags popped from all over, front and side. He didn’t even drop his M-4. He juddered back into his seat and even before the steam started to rise from the Expedition’s crumpled radiator, he’d unbuckled his seat belt. For a moment, he couldn’t open his door, but he put his shoulder to it and popped it out. Through the Suburban’s broken windows, Wells saw a man in the back of the truck, crawling toward what looked like a big rocket-propelled grenade tube, a Spear, maybe. A strange ball was attached to the muzzle of the Spear.
“Stop!” Wells yelled in Arabic. He stepped out of the Ford and dropped the safety on the M-4, wondering if he really was about to start shooting, without warning, at three people in an SUV he’d never seen before. The man in the Suburban didn’t look back. He inched forward and stretched out his right arm for the barrel of the Spear.
THE COLLISION TOSSED Nasiji backward, throwing him into the Suburban’s rear doors. Shards of glass covered him and he dropped the pit. No. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine how, but they’d been tracked. Only one choice left. This stupid place wasn’t Washington or New York, but it would have to do. He reached around and found the pit and inched forward. Outside the car, a man yelled “Stop” in Arabic, and Nasiji remembered the American soldiers in Iraq, always giving orders. He pushed himself forward. If he could just load the pit.
THE SUBURBAN LURCHED FORWARD, metal tearing metal, pulling apart the grille of the Expedition. In a moment, it would be free. Wells stepped forward and propelled himself onto the hood of the Expedition and began to shoot, first at the man in the back, tearing him open, three in the chest and then two in the head to be sure, and switched to full auto and tore up the driver and passenger seats until blood and brains splattered the front windshield and the Suburban was still.
AND THEN WELLS leaned back against the hood of the Ford and looked at what he’d done. A hand squeezed his shoulder and a voice, Gaffan’s, said his name. But Wells only shook his head and sat in the cold, shivering, as the police arrived in ones and twos and then by the dozens, and Vairo Village turned into a mad clanking, flashing carnival, with him the main attraction, its mute and beating heart.
EPILOGUE
The bomb would have worked.
So the engineers at Los Alamos calculated after oh-so-carefully taking it apart and simulating its explosion on their supercomputers. They calculated an 87 percent chance of a Hiroshima-sized 10- to 15-kiloton explosion, a 4 percent chance of
a 2- to 10-kiloton explosion, and a 9 percent chance of a fizzle.
To avoid panicking the public, the results of the simulation were never released. The White House and FBI publicly said only that the weapon found in the back of the Suburban was an “improvised radiological device,” never calling it a nuclear weapon. Wells’s role in finding the bomb was also kept secret. Reporters were told only that he and Gaffan were “U.S. government employees,” a statement that was true enough as far as it went.
Meanwhile, the video that Nasiji had made caused a stir across the Internet when it was aired on Islamic Web sites. The United States and Russia quickly issued a joint statement calling the video “a total fabrication intended to stir hatred between us.” A few conspiracy theorists insisted that the bombs and Grigory’s identification both looked real, but they were ignored.
Privately, of course, the White House blamed the Kremlin for the near catastrophe, and for once the Russians didn’t try to defend themselves. The director of Rosatom was quietly relieved of his duties and given a new job overseeing nuclear waste cleanup in Siberia.
Finding the source of the financing for the plot proved more complicated. After several false starts, analysts at the CIA and Treasury linked a bank account that Nasiji had used to a twenty-thousand-barrel oil shipment from the Yanbu terminal in Saudi Arabia. But despite extraordinary pressure from the White House, the Saudi government insisted that it could not determine who had authorized the shipment. A few weeks later, Ahmed Faisal, a minor Saudi prince, burned to death when his Land Rover exploded in a fiery crash on the desert road connecting Riyadh and Jedda. The accident surprised Faisal’s friends, who’d always known him to be a careful driver.
NONE OF THIS MATTERED to Wells, though he did vaguely wonder what would happen to Bernard Kygeli’s family. For three days, he stayed at Langley, where he was interviewed by the investigators who were working to pull the weeds of the rest of Nasiji’s network. There was no word from Exley, and all along he had only one question: Where is she? Finally, Wells lost patience and told them that they’d gotten all he knew and that if they had specific questions they knew where to find him. He showered and shaved and drove off campus in a standard-issue agency Pontiac G6. He insisted on no protection, no chase cars or spotters, and they seemed to agree; as far as he could tell he was alone.
When he got to their house, the usual tinted-glass Suburban was parked in front. But the windows were dark and her minivan was gone. Wells let himself in, knowing before he did that the house would be empty.
“Jenny?” he said. “You there?”
Upstairs the bed was neatly made, an envelope tucked under his pillow. In her neat script, nine words:
“I love you. I miss you already. Be safe.”
Wells sat on the bed and turned the note over and over in his fingers as if hoping to make the words disappear, vanish like a shaken Etch A Sketch drawing. But they didn’t, and after a while he tucked the note in his pocket and looked in her closet. Her suitcases were gone and so were most of her clothes. He couldn’t stay in this room anymore. He walked downstairs and turned toward the kitchen, then to the front door, wanting to be out of the house.
He knocked on the SUV’s windows.
“Where is she?”
The guard shook his head apologetically.
Wells leaned into the truck. “I need to talk to her.”
“She requested that we not tell you, sir.” The guard looked embarrassed, Wells thought, embarrassed to be seeing the famous John Wells this way, like a lovesick high school senior dumped the night before the prom.
“Is she with her kids?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Wells turned away before he could humiliate himself further. He slipped into the Pontiac and screamed off with no good idea where he was headed. A half-hour later he found himself at Dulles looking at a departure board full of choices, none he wanted to take. Should he go to Zurich, see Kowalski? And then what? Thank the man for saving the world? Shoot him and break the last promise he’d made? Try to forget Exley in Nadia’s cool blue eyes?
Or Missoula to see Heather and Evan, his ex-wife and son? This time insist on meeting his boy, whatever Heather said?
Or somewhere else?
No. Montana or Switzerland it was. Neither made sense. But all he really wanted was a place to go, a place that wasn’t here. He pulled a quarter from his pocket, picked heads and tails. Heads, Zurich. Tails, Missoula.
All around him the hall bustled, arrivals and departures, purposeful motion. Wells flicked the quarter high into the air and watched it spin, watched it catch the lights overhead as it rose and rose and finally topped out and fell. He should have reached out to catch it but instead watched it land at his feet and spin neatly around until it plopped over. Heads? Tails? He leaned down and looked at the quarter as if it could give him an answer that mattered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the end of The Ghost War, I encouraged readers to e-mail me at [email protected] with comments, suggestions, and complaints. I had no idea I would get so many responses. More than five hundred of you wrote, and I learned some things that I should have known already—I can promise I will never again use the phrase “knots per hour”—as well as some things that I don’t think anyone who wasn’t a C-130 pilot could have known.
Best of all were the notes from soldiers, both active-duty and veteran, some of whom said they identified very much with Wells, for better and worse. Wells isn’t real, and yet his emotions are: his sense of duty, his loneliness, his anger at injustice in all its forms, his strength, his patience, his ability to keep his emotions under wraps for as long as necessary. He is a soldier as much as a spy, and I hope I have rendered him honorably.
I tried to reply to every e-mail, and I’m sorry if I missed anyone. Please keep the notes coming, and I will try to continue to respond individually to each one, though if the volume of e-mail continues to grow exponentially I may not be able to keep up. Let me know also if you’d like to see improvements to my Web site—I’m considering a forum for people to discuss the books and other spy novels, but if it won’t be used I won’t bother. (Few sights are sadder than a message board with three entries.)
Now, on to the actual acknowledgments (which haven’t changed much since The Ghost War, a sign of either stability or ossification).
Ellen and Harvey, my parents and closest readers.
David, my brother and best bud.
Neil Nyren, whose suggestions are always on point—and the rest of the folks at Putnam and Berkley, who somehow made The Faithful Spy a number-one bestseller in paperback.
Heather Schroder, who makes the deals that keep John Wells alive, and Matthew Snyder, who is still working to get Wells his close-up.
Tim Race, Larry Ingrassia, and the rest of the fine folks at The New York Times, who are far more patient than I have any right to expect.
And: Jonathan Karp, Douglas Ollivant, Deirdre Silver, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Mark Tavani, all of whom have helped nurture John Wells along the way. Thanks to all of you.
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