He shot Qais once with the.45 in the back of the head. A quiet pop. Another man dead. Then Wells did something he hated. He turned Qais over and aimed the.45 at his face. He stepped back so the blood wouldn’t spatter his legs and pulled the trigger until he had blown Qais’s nose and mouth and eyes into a bloody pulp. An unrecognizable pulp. Wells assumed that the surveillance footage at Hartsfield would show him with Qais, and that the police would check those tapes as soon as they could. But Qais wasn’t carrying any identification, and with what Wells had just done the tapes wouldn’t be much use.
WELLS JOGGED THROUGH the house to the kitchen, in the back. The sirens came louder now. He opened the kitchen door and sprinted through the garden behind the house. He pulled himself over the fence, landing on gravel in the unfinished backyard of the half-built mansion.
He whipped off his ski mask and ran around the unfinished house and down the driveway to the street where he had parked his pickup. The houses on this side were still dark. A lucky break.
He slid inside the Ranger, pulled his Red Sox cap over his head, and drove off. As he turned onto Mount Vernon he could see a police cruiser speeding toward him, flashers blazing, sirens screaming. The officer inside looked hard at him as they passed but didn’t slow down. And Wells drove free into the night.
BACK AT HIS apartment he sat at the kitchen table, trying to control the faint shaking of his left hand. The adrenaline was gone now and he just felt tired. Beyond tired. Exhausted deep into his bones.
In April he had told Walter the interrogator that he didn’t remember how many men he had killed. He had lied. He remembered every one. Now he had two more to add to his list. He thought of that first buck he had shot so many years before. No, he didn’t hate killing. But he was sick of it, sick of being good at it. Sick of knowing that he would have to do it again. He had been around too much death for too long.
Wells forced the thought of death out of his head and balled his hand into a fist. When he opened it again, the shaking was gone. He couldn’t blame himself for tonight. Khadri had put him in an impossible spot. He had played his cards as best he could. He couldn’t have known that West would be with the guard. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he murmured to the empty kitchen, and felt a faint ugly smile cross his face.
He considered calling Exley, turning himself in, trying to explain what had happened. But that was impossible. Things had gone too far tonight. He’d been involved in the killing of a three-star. No way to sweep this under the rug. Even if the agency believed him, it would have no choice but to lock him up. Or just make him disappear. No, he could never redeem himself unless he brought in Khadri, dead or alive. Nothing less would save him from the agency. Nothing less would save him from himself. All this killing had to take him somewhere.
Get the bad guy, save the country, get the girl. Simple, really. “Yeah, I’m right on track,” he said aloud to the empty room.
* * *
THE GOOD NEWS was that the cops and the FBI would have a hard time figuring out what had happened tonight, Wells thought. Plus they would keep the details of the killings out of the media. No sense in ruining West’s reputation.
So Khadri would know only that Qais and Sami had died alongside West and the bodyguard. Khadri wouldn’t trust Wells more than he had before tonight, but he wouldn’t trust Wells any less either. Wells figured he would hear from Khadri soon or not at all. And his next mission, if there was a next mission, wouldn’t be a test run. In the park earlier today Khadri had looked like he was running short on time.
Wells knew just how Khadri felt.
13
THE CAT WAS in pitiful shape.
When Tarik picked her up from the animal shelter a week before, she had been runty but healthy, an energetic tabby whose fur was a mottled blend of black, brown, and white. Unlike most strays, she showed no fear of humans. She swiped playfully at him on the drive home. Even when he locked her in the cage in the bubble in the basement, she didn’t fight.
“You’ll really like her,” the woman at the SPCA had told him. “She’s a great choice.”
AND THE WOMAN was right, though not for the reasons she would have liked. Three days after being exposed to an aerosolized mist of Y. pestis, the cat lay on her back, mewling quietly. Tarik could hardly bear to look at her. Her fur was matted and greasy with the blood she had vomited. Pus caked her green eyes. Open sores covered her stomach. She could hardly turn her head when he entered the bubble and approached her cage.
Enough, Tarik thought. He sank a syringe into a vial of sodium pentobarbital solution and carefully measured out two milliliters of the liquid. He grabbed the cat’s back left leg and looked for a vein on her stomach. Under normal circumstances, she would have fought. Instead she waved her paws feebly in the air and closed her eyes. Tarik found a vein and jabbed the needle into it. The cat went limp a few seconds later.
“Poor cat,” Tarik said. “I’m sorry.”
He did not enjoy making animals suffer, especially cats. He would have preferred to experiment on a dog, but dogs were naturally immune to plague. So he had no choice. And despite his sorrow at the cat’s awful death, he could not deny the pride he felt at the speed of his progress with the plague. He had stopped all his work on his other germs, even anthrax, to concentrate on Yersinia pestis.
Tarik would have liked to credit hard work for his success. But the truth was that the bacteria he had received from Tanzania appeared to be an especially virulent strain of plague. The germs grew quickly in brain-heart infusion broth and stayed alive for hours after he strained them into a weak solution of soy agar that flowed easily through his nebulizer. The bacteria were also more temperature-resistant than Tarik had expected.
Without a column chromatograph and a polymerase chain reaction assay he couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that this Y. pestis strain included both the pPCP1 and pMT1 plasmids. Those were strands of DNA that produced enzymes that interfered with the immune system and the blood’s ability to clot. A week before, seeing how quickly his mice and rats were dying, Tarik had started taking doxycycline, an antibiotic known to work against plague. As far as he knew, he had not been exposed, but he wanted to be doubly careful.
Looking at the cat’s bloody carcass, he was glad he was taking the medicine. He carefully plucked her body from the cage and slipped it into a large glass jar of hydrochloric acid, where it would dissolve. He would go by the shelter for another cat tomorrow. Though maybe he’d be better off at a pet store. They’d have fewer questions. He had been surprised when the woman at the shelter had asked him what name he had picked out for the cat.
“I’m not sure yet,” he’d finally stammered.
Yes, a pet store was the way to go, Tarik thought. But if his success continued, he would soon be done with cats. His next subjects would be monkeys, whose respiratory systems had more in common with humans’. Unfortunately, monkeys weren’t easy to come by; biological supply companies would sell them only to licensed research centers, and very few people bred them for sale as pets. He had seen Internet ads from breeders in the United States, but he wasn’t sure he could get across the border by himself, much less with a monkey in tow. And he strongly suspected that customs agents — maybe even the police — would pay his house a visit if he tried to order one online.
Still, even without the monkeys Tarik believed he now had enough skill with the nebulizer to infect people in an unventilated room — if he could figure out a way to release the mist without anyone noticing. Of course, that didn’t mean he could cause a widespread outbreak. He had months to go before he could figure out how to stockpile enough Y. pestis for a big attack. And he worried that it would take months or years to overcome the technical problems associated with large-scale spraying. Creating an aerosol mist in a lab with a few milliliters of solution was far easier than spraying hundreds of liters of liquid from a crop duster or the back of a truck.
But he couldn’t deny his progress. He had been spending six, eight, somet
imes ten hours a day down here, sleeping only in short snatches as his excitement grew. He knew he should pace himself — he was surprised by how tired and disheveled he appeared when he saw himself in the bathroom mirror — but the plague filled his mind. The plague and Fatima.
As he thought of her his excitement faded. Fatima had grown even more distant from him in the last month, coming home late from work, hardly smiling when he tried to talk to her, pushing off his fumbling advances in their bed. The week before, he’d emerged from his work in the basement and again found her whispering on the phone in the kitchen.
“What do you care?” she’d said. “You’re down there all the time anyway.”
At that he had hit her, just a couple of times.
“Please, Tarik,” she’d said. “What’s happening to you?”
You and your wicked ways are what’s happening, Tarik mentally answered her. He wished he could talk to someone about her, but Khadri was the only person he trusted enough to ask, and Khadri’s advice was always the same: focus on your work. “It’s your problem,” Khadri had said the last time they spoke. “Deal with it.”
Fine. I’ll deal with it, Tarik thought. I’ll deal with it tonight.
THE OXYGEN GAUGES on Tarik’s regulator dipped toward empty. He headed back into the airlock and stripped, then hung up his respirator and wiped down the tanks with bleach. When the tanks were clean he dragged them outside of the bubble into the open area of the basement. There he hooked them up to an oxygen pump to refill them.
He showered and dressed slowly, savoring the rush of power that came from handling Y. pestis. He didn’t want to leave the basement. This place belonged only to him, and no one could take that away.
Finally he headed upstairs. A strange trembling rose in him as he walked up the steps to face his wife. Fatima needed to support him, support his work, not disrespect him by coming home late. She had given herself to him as a good Muslim woman, a daughter of the Prophet, and she would keep her word to him and to Allah. He almost didn’t care at this moment if she loved him, as long as she respected him.
He felt a mix of anger and relief when he opened the top door of the stairs and found her sitting at the kitchen table, writing on a yellow legal pad. His lovely wife. Still, his temper rose as he saw that she was wearing a skirt that showed her legs. When had she bought that? She looked like a kafir. He had warned her about dressing immodestly when she took her job at the law firm and stopped wearing robes. But she’d dismissed his complaints, telling him she needed to fit in at work. No more, Tarik thought. From now on she would do as he said.
“Hello, my sweet,” he said, and walked over to kiss her. She turned her lips from his, offering her cheek instead. “How was work?”
She didn’t respond.
“My sweet, we’ve talked about this many times before. Why are you so late? You must call—”
“Tarik—”
“Fatima.” The anger on her face stopped him for a moment, but he decided to press ahead. “Listen to me—”
“Tarik!” she yelled. “I’m through listening! Now you listen!”
Her voice echoed in the tiny kitchen, and he found himself shocked into silence. She had never raised her voice to him before.
She pushed back from the table and stepped out of her chair. He noticed a small black suitcase at her feet, a cheap softsided bag he had never seen before. He tried not to think about what it might mean. He realized he had lied to himself. He didn’t just want her respect. He wanted her to love him again, to smile the way she had when they had first met.
She took a deep breath, composing herself. The kitchen was eerily silent, and Tarik felt as if he had suddenly been given superhuman powers of sight and sound. He heard the slow drip of water from the leaky kitchen faucet, and saw the faint dark fuzz on the peaches that she always kept in a bowl on the counter, the grain of the cheap dishrag in the sink. He looked up and found that the light from the overhead bulb burned his eyes.
When Fatima spoke again, her voice was quiet and firm.
“Tarik. I can’t live with you—”
His thoughts contracted to a single word: No. “My sweet. Of course you can live with me.”
She laughed bitterly. “Don’t you see you’ve proven my point? I say I can’t live with you and you don’t even let me finish my sentence—”
“Don’t you love me, Fatima?”
A pained expression crossed her face. “Do you know why I married you, Tarik? I thought you were a scientist. That you would understand a modern marriage. But you’re as bad as the rest of them. Worse.”
“This is no way to speak.” He tried to keep his voice steady.
“Tarik.” Her voice broke. “Do you think I want to do this? Since spring I’ve tried to talk to you a dozen times, a hundred times, but you don’t listen.”
“I want to talk—”
“You say you want to talk, but you don’t. You disappear into that hole”—she pointed accusingly at the locked basement door—“and don’t come back for hours. Days. You don’t tell me what you’re doing. You never let me bring anyone over. I feel like a prisoner in this house.”
“You’re not a prisoner—”
“And you’re changing, Tarik. You don’t sleep—”
“I sleep—”
“You don’t. You’re not the same man you were even a month ago. I don’t know what you’re doing down there”—again she looked at the basement door, and Tarik felt his stomach clench—“but you’ve turned into someone who scares me. You beat me last week, Tarik. I never would have imagined that.”
“I didn’t beat you—”
She pulled up her shirtsleeve, exposing black-and-blue welts the size of credit cards on her left arm, above the elbow. “What would you call this?”
Shame and rage rose in him. “I didn’t mean—” But even as he said the words he could feel his fist clench.
She picked up her suitcase. “I’m leaving, Tarik. It will be better for us both.”
Now the shame was gone. A pure white rage filled him. He remembered finding his mother dead in her bed in their apartment in Saint-Denis. The yellow paint peeled from the walls, and Khalida’s eyes yellow too, the needle still in her arm. He had hated his mother so much at that moment. But this was worse.
“You can’t leave,” he said. “Where will you go?”
“You think I don’t have friends?”
“What kind of friends?” he said. “I won’t let you. You belong to me.”
At his words an ugly sneer formed on her lips. “You think I don’t have a boyfriend? My poor little Tarik—”
Had she really said that? He slapped her hard, across the face.
“No more, Tarik—”
He slapped her again. She stumbled backward and banged against the kitchen counter. But she just shook her head and stood up straight, her brown eyes fierce. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, but as she reared back she seemed twice his size.
“Yes, a boyfriend,” she said. “A kafir boyfriend. A real lover, not like you—”
And Tarik knew he would never have her back. He raised his hand to slap her again, but she put up her own hand. “Don’t—”
He spat instead, a white glob landing on her cheek.
“Bitch. Worthless whore. The infidels have filled your head with rot. I won’t divorce you.”
The spittle trickled slowly down her cheek. She raised her hand and wiped away his venom. Her eyes never left his.
“Then I’ll tell the police what you’re doing down there.” She pointed again to the basement. “Don’t you think they’d like to know?”
“You said you didn’t know.”
“Of course I know. Am I a fool? Maybe I’ll tell them anyway.”
THEN THE KNIFE was out of the drawer and in his hand. A big butcher knife with a black plastic handle. A fevered god spoke in his head and he obeyed. Fatima began to scream even before he landed the first blow, slashing across her stomach so the blood sprayed out
through her clean white shirt.
She turned to run but he stabbed her in the back and she fell and he was on her. He cut at her again and again, plunging the knife into her tiny body, stabbing into her back and neck, cutting through skin and fat and bone until she stopped screaming and her blood covered him. She was dead in less than a minute.
THE BUZZ IN his ears faded to silence. A bird chirped in the night outside, behind the blinds that he always kept drawn. He stood and looked at his wife.
“Allah forgive me,” he said quietly. Had he really just killed her? He couldn’t believe it, and yet there she was, unmoving, her legs splayed, her blood pooling thick as paint on the kitchen’s white linoleum floor.
He dropped the knife. Already his rage was fading. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her. Didn’t she know he loved her? She shouldn’t have pushed him, shouldn’t have done this to him. She was to blame.
He knelt beside her and stroked her hair. “I’m sorry, Fatima,” he said.
What would he do? Had the neighbors heard her scream? What about the people in her office? Her boyfriend? All of them must know that she had planned to leave. Soon enough the police would come. Tarik could stall them for a few days, tell them that she had left Montreal to see friends. But the boyfriend, whoever he was, wouldn’t let this go. Eventually the police would come back with a warrant. And the basement would be the first place they would look.
Dear God. What had he done? His plans, his work. About to be lost. Because of this whore. Pity filled him, pity for her and for himself. He had nothing left now, nothing but a few days to work, not nearly enough time to take his revenge on this world.
But he couldn’t give up. Not yet, anyway. Maybe he could salvage his plans, get his germs someplace far from the gray house, someplace the police wouldn’t find them. At least find a way to make use of the Y. pestis he had grown.
He turned on the faucet as hot as the water would go and washed his hands and face until his tan skin lost its reddish tint. He knew he would be bloody again soon enough. He would have to take Fatima’s body downstairs and wipe the kitchen floor. But for this moment he wanted to be clean.
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