The Faithful Spy (26 page)

“I think this stuff from Farouk proves that Wells told us the truth.”

At the mention of Wells’s name Shafer wrinkled his nose like he’d stepped in a broken sewer. “John Wells?” Shafer said. “Mr. Invisible? The biggest mistake of my career?”

“He’s the first one who told us about Khadri. Farouk confimed it. And Farouk confirmed meeting Wells in Peshawar last spring.”

Shafer shook his head. “Great. So where’s he been since he ran away five months ago?”

“He didn’t run away. He escaped.” Because you let him, she didn’t say.

“Escaped, ran away, whatever. He’s gone. I fear the great Vincent Duto may be right about Mr. Invisible. I don’t think al Qaeda trusts John Wells any more than we do.”

“Do you ever think about him?” She couldn’t help herself now. “What it must be like for him. They don’t trust him. We sure don’t trust him.”

“He knew what he was getting into when he signed up.”

“He couldn’t have expected to be undercover this long. Nobody could. I mean, he’s got to be the loneliest guy in the world.” She remembered what Wells had said when he’d called that night:
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

The disgusted expression on Shafer’s face brought her back to reality. “I couldn’t care less how lonely John Wells is, Jennifer. I want some actionable intelligence from him. As in, intelligence upon which we can act.”

“What if he’s just waiting? Biding his time?”

Shafer sucked in his lip. He leaned into her desk and lowered his voice. “Jennifer, are you trying to tell me something?”

She shook her head. He looked around the office. “Do you want to have this conversation somewhere else?”

“No.” She was sorry she had brought Wells up.

“Then let’s move on to a happier topic,” Shafer said. “Why did Khadri tell Farouk where the bomb was hidden?”

“Why wouldn’t he? Farouk knows more about nukes than the rest of al Qaeda put together. He’ll probably get brought over to put it together.”

“But it’s already together, right?” Shafer said. “It’s sitting in that locker waiting to get picked up.”

Exley felt very dumb. “So al Qaeda—”

“Has at least one other person who knows how to play with plutonium.”

“Then why’d Khadri tell Farouk where it is? That’s a terrible operational breach.”

“Maybe Farouk isn’t the only one who knows,” he said, thinking out loud. “Maybe Khadri wants to be sure the bomb won’t rot in the locker if we catch him.”

“He can encrypt that info a hundred ways. Telling other people is the least secure system of all. It’s not logical.”

“Whoever built that bomb is logical as hell.”

“Interesting choice of words.”

“You want to joke around, fine. I have things to do.” Shafer began to walk out.

“Ellis, relax. I’m sorry.”

He stopped. “I just hate things that don’t make sense,” he said. “And this doesn’t. This guy Khadri is playing with us.”

“There’s something else,” Exley said. “The bomb’s too small.”

“It’s all they have.”

“All the plutonium, maybe. C-4’s easy to find. Why not build something bigger? This thing will kill fewer people than a truck bomb.”

“Maybe it’s for an assassination,” Shafer said. “Put it in the Waldorf during a fund-raiser for POTUS.” For reasons Exley had never understood, everyone in Washington insisted on using the term POTUS—which stood for “President of the United States”—instead of just calling him the president.

“If it’s a target like that, why bother with a dirty bomb? Use a stand-alone package of C-4 and be done with it. Dead is dead, right?”

Shafer frowned and tugged at his hair. Exley wished he wouldn’t. One day he was going to pull off a chunk of scalp.

Finally he nodded. “Dead is dead. Right. No need for plutonium in a bomb this small. So what’s he doing?”

“Maybe he made a mistake.”

Shafer shook his head violently. “He’s too smart to make mistakes,” Shafer said. “I think he doesn’t like anyone to know what he’s doing. Not even his own guys.”

“He’s a control freak.”

“Keeps his secrets as tight as he can. He knows his guys are vulnerable, that we can catch anybody the way we caught Farouk.”

“Then why’d he tell Farouk?”

“I asked you first, Jennifer.”

And Shafer walked out, leaving her with another unanswerable question.

CIGARETTE IN HAND,
Tony DiFerri walked into the front office of Capitol Area Self Storage, an unprepossessing room with yellow walls, black plastic chairs, and a vending machine that offered bags of stale Doritos. Major Rick Harris, a trim black man, sat behind the counter, doing his best to look bored as he played solitaire on the old Dell PC where Joey O’Donnell had kept the center’s records.

“Sir, there’s no smoking in here,” Harris said. His sister had died of lung cancer and one of his kids had asthma.

“Sure,” DiFerri mumbled, grinding out the half-finished Marlboro Light under his heel.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” DiFerri said. “I’m looking for locker D-2471.”

Harris nearly fell off his chair. This wasn’t the guy he’d expected. Somehow he kept his face straight. “Sure. That’s the second floor, off the main hallway toward the back. I can show you.”

“I can find it myself.”

“No problem. Lemme see your key.”

Sure enough, DiFerri held up the key. D-2471. Harris pushed the green button, unlocking the steel grate that separated the office from the storage area. A few seconds later DiFerri was inside. Harris waited until he was out of sight, then clicked on the tiny microphone wired to his chest.

“Code Blue active,” he said. “Repeat, Code Blue.
This is not a drill.
Bogey a white male, medium height, white T-shirt, overweight, approximately forty years old.”

Almost involuntarily, the major found himself looking at the box under the counter that hid his radiological protective suit.

DIFERRI LUMBERED UP
the stairs, wheezing as he pushed open the door to the second floor. He didn’t have much wind. Or much time. His new friend Bokar had told him he needed to figure out what was inside the bag and report back by four-thirty
P.M.

“I just check it and tell you what’s inside?” DiFerri had asked.

“Precisely.”

“It’s not drugs or nothing illegal.”

“No. Nothing illegal.”

“That don’t sound too hard. And then—”

“I shall give you another fifty dollars and explain your next task.”

DiFerri didn’t totally understand this game, but he figured if he didn’t like what he saw in the bag he would just quit. Even if the whole thing was some joke, he’d already gotten fifty bucks. These Hollywood guys had plenty of cash, for sure. Besides, nothing this interesting had happened to him since the first time he got laid, and that was a long time ago. So after he caught his breath DiFerri started moving again, walking down the halls of the storage center, looking for D-2471.

EXLEY’S PHONE RANG.
“Get over to the sports bar,” Shafer said. “Something’s up in Albany.”

Encrypted satellite links gave the agency a real-time view of the storage center, ending up in an auditorium-sized room with three hundred flat-panel televisions, each capable of showing a different satellite feed. Officially, the room was known as the JTTF Secure Communications Presentation Center. But when Duto caught one of the center’s technicians watching his beloved Miami Dolphins in a corner on a sleepy Sunday night, Shafer started calling the place the sports bar. The name stuck.

The sports bar was a ten-minute walk from Exley’s office. Or a five-minute run. She ran.

DIFERRI MADE A
couple of wrong turns before he found D-2471, near the northeast corner of the storage center’s second floor. He paused in front of the locker, then slipped his key in, wondering what he’d see. Maybe there’d be a camera crew. Maybe the bag would be filled with money, crisp hundreds in packets like in the movies. Or maybe his key wouldn’t work at all.

But the door opened easily, and when DiFerri turned on the overhead light he saw nothing but the oversized canvas bag that Bokar had told him to expect. He took a tentative step into the room and closed the door. It shut behind him solidly, and he wondered if he had locked himself in. But when he checked the handle the door swung open smoothly, and the corridor outside looked just as it had a few seconds before. DiFerri closed the door again, wondering why he felt creeped out. He’d watched
Fear Factor
plenty of times. Those stunts were weird. This was just a bag in a locker.

On his way to the locker DiFerri had seen a half dozen signs warning against smoking, but he didn’t see one in here. Screw that guy at the front desk. He tapped a cigarette into his palm and lit up.

ONLY ABOUT A
handful of civilians had been inside the storage center when the man with the key came in. They were not evacuated; Duto and Kijiuri had specified that the center should operate normally unless someone tried to remove the bag. Nor did the commandos approach D-2471. But everyone in the center was being shadowed. If the bomb detonated, the commandos would evacuate the civilians from the building, by force if necessary, and take them to a temporary decontamination center NEST had set up a mile away. There they would be checked for radiation exposure.

The computer simulations that NEST had run suggested a 70 percent probability that no civilian would be exposed to harmful levels of radioactivity, as long as everyone escaped the building within three minutes of an explosion. Of course, those odds left a 30 percent chance of harmful exposure, but that couldn’t be helped.

AT THE SPORTS
bar Exley found a dozen agency officials watching the monitors. Inside the locker a perplexed-looking white man puffed on a cigarette and nudged the canvas bag with his foot.

“This guy?” she said to Shafer. The guy looked like a mechanic, maybe an out-of-work trucker. Anything but a terrorist.

“You know as much as I do.”

“What about the NSA?” The National Security Agency had recognition software that could match facial photographs with a database of suspected al Qaeda members.

“Nothing there. He’s probably just a Dixie cup,” Shafer said. “Hired in case we’re watching.”

“Charming term,” Exley said. “Dixie cup” was agency jargon for someone disposable, someone who could be arrested or killed without consequence. “I don’t get it,” she said. “If they went to so much trouble to bring the stuff in, why are they treating it like this?”

On-screen, the guy in D-2471 poked at the bag, then squatted beside it.

“We’re so screwed,” Shafer said.

She knew exactly what he was thinking. The agency and the FBI were in an impossible position. The guy in the locker probably had no idea what he was playing with. Then again, he had the key. He might be a genuine al Qaeda operative, a true believer who happened to look like a trucker. Until they arrested him, they wouldn’t know. They couldn’t move too quickly or they might blow the operation. But if they moved too slowly, they risked letting the guy blow himself up, especially if he was a dupe.

Exley felt the way she had when she was seventeen and trying to learn to drive a stick. Lay off the gas, drop the clutch, slip the transmission into gear. Easy.

Only she couldn’t do it. She had burned out the clutch on her brother’s old Willys Jeep. Boy, had that day been awful. Worse because her brother was so locked up fighting his own demons that he hardly paid attention when she told him what she’d done.

She brought her attention back to the screen. The guy was still playing with the bag. “So…we let him open it?” she said to Shafer.

“If you’ve got a better idea now would be a good time to share.”

She didn’t.

DIFERRI STUBBED OUT
his cigarette on the locker’s concrete floor. Time to get to work. He cautiously opened the big canvas bag, pulling down its black plastic zipper to reveal the smooth metal top of the aluminum trunk inside.

He tried to lift the trunk out of the bag. It was heavier than he had expected. His grip slipped. He grunted and let go, and the trunk thudded against the floor and banged into his knee.

“Dammit,” he yelped. The complaint echoed in the locker, and again he considered leaving, telling Bokar that he couldn’t open the trunk. No. He’d always wanted to be on TV, and he wasn’t going to blow this chance.

He tried again, turning the trunk on its side. He found a digital lock with a numeric pad instead of a keyhole. Just as Bokar had promised. The lock’s red LCD flashed the time: 15:47:05…15:47:06…. Shit. He had less than an hour to get downtown. As Bokar had told him to do, he tapped the pound key on the pad three times. The clock disappeared, replaced by a blinking row of dashes. DiFerri pulled his battered wallet out of his pocket and found the piece of paper with the code that Bokar had given him. 4308512112-9447563-01072884.

DiFerri carefully punched the numbers into the pad. By the time he finished he was sweating, and not from the heat in the airless room. He hoped he had gotten the code right. He punched the pound key three times, as he’d been told. The code disappeared, replaced now by a timer.

10…9…8…7…

Holy shit.6…5…4…3…2…1…

He lumbered to his feet and tried to back away.

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE
watching in Langley, Exley could see exactly what was happening inside D-2471. The cameras were good enough to catch the terror on the guy’s face as he stepped backward. Then the bomb blew. The explosion echoed inside the communications center, and the monitors went black.

The room was silent. Exley could not stop replaying the panicked look she had just seen. He was no terrorist, that guy. He didn’t belong in that locker. She had just watched an innocent man die. For the first time in history, a radioactive weapon had exploded on American soil. And she and everyone in this room had allowed it. Their mistakes had no end. Shafer’s joke about the Dixie cup seemed unimaginably callous now.

Then the ringing of a phone, and another and another, broke the silence. The communications center began humming like a casino on New Year’s Eve, technicians shouting to the commandos inside the center. The mission wasn’t over. The Delta units and the Albany police had to evacuate everyone within a quarter mile while NEST’s scientists determined how much radiation the dirty bomb had released. Plus, they would have to figure out who the guy in the locker had been and track his movements and accomplices as far back as they could. Though Exley had little doubt that the trail—if they could trace it at all—would eventually lead back to one Omar Khadri.