The Faithful Spy

by Alex Berenson

  The burger came fast. He chewed slowly, making each bite last, and listened to a forty-something woman two stools over joke with an old man in a Minnesota Timberwolves cap. “Fishing’s almost better than skydiving,” she said. “And that’s a hell of a lot better than sex, ’specially when you’re my age.” She laughed, and Wells found himself smiling. She caught him looking and raised her eyebrows. She had streaked blond hair and a wide pretty smile. She slid over and held out her hand. “Evelyn.”

  “John.”

  “Do you sing, John?”

  “No, ma’am,” Wells said, a touch of country slipping into his voice.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t sing, handsome.”

  “My voice is terrible.”

  She patted his hand and turned to the bartender. “Come on, punch up ‘You Are So Beautiful.’”

  He had no intention of singing for this woman. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. Instead Evelyn belted out the song, her voice sliding across the notes like a car on an icy road. What she lacked in skill she made up in spectacle, shaking her hips as she leaned toward him, ending with the microphone cradled in both hands. “You—are—so—beautiful—to—me…” The half dozen barflies in the place cheered when she was done, and Wells felt a broad grin crease his face, his first real smile in far too long. She bowed to him and walked back to his stool.

  “You were great,” he said.

  “You’re up next.”

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe later, then,” she said, waving the subject aside. “What brings you to Salmon?”

  “Passing through,” Wells said. “On my way to Missoula.”

  “Where you from?”

  This was what he’d feared. Maybe she was just being friendly, or maybe she was bored and looking for fun on a Tuesday night. He shouldn’t feel so skittish. It would be easy enough to lie, and maybe even go home with this woman. But he didn’t want to lie. Not the night before he saw his family.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Hey, I don’t bite.” She winked and put her hand on his arm. “And I like sex better than skydiving any day.” Wells felt himself flush and stir simultaneously. He had forgotten how shameless American women could be.

  “I have to get up real early tomorrow.”

  “Whatever.” She turned away. Wells took a last bite of his burger and drove the three blocks to the Stagecoach. In the motel’s parking lot he very nearly turned back to the bar. He could not forget the feeling of Evelyn’s hand on his arm. His skin seemed to burn where she’d touched him. He turned off the engine and trudged up to his room. He had waited a long time for a woman, and he supposed he could wait longer. But not forever.

  THE PHONE RANG precisely at six A.M., knocking him out of a dreamless sleep. He showered, then quickly dressed and prayed, bowing his head to the floor and reciting the first verse of the Koran. “Bismallah rahmani rahim al hamdulillah rabbi lalamin…” Outside the sun rose and the stars disappeared as the sky turned from black to blue.

  Wells had the highway to himself as he headed north toward Lost Trail Pass, the border of Idaho and Montana. Lewis and Clark had followed this route on their way to the Pacific, and the mountains had hardly changed since. At the top of the pass, Wells got out of the Dodge and stood in the quiet air, looking down at the Montana hills ahead. They seemed softer and rounder than those behind.

  He reached Hamilton an hour later. The town was bigger than he remembered, and new supermarkets and fast-food restaurants—a Taco Bell, a Pizza Hut—stretched along 93. He turned left on Ravalli Street. There it was. 420 South Fourth. The big gray house on the corner of Ravalli and Fourth.

  Except the house wasn’t gray anymore. It was blue. And there was a tricycle in the front yard.

  He walked to the door. “Ma?” he shouted. No one answered. He rang the bell.

  “May I help you?” A man’s voice.

  “It’s John.”

  “John who?”

  Wells wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere. He wouldn’t have minded if the earth itself had opened and swallowed him whole.

  “John Wells. I’m looking for my mother.”

  The door opened a notch to reveal Ken Fredrick, who’d been two years ahead of Wells in high school. Penny Kenny, the nastier kids called him, because his family was always flat broke. He and Wells had been something like friends. Kenny was football manager during Wells’s first two years on the team, and he had taken a lot of abuse, especially on the long bus rides to away games. The worst moment came one Friday night near the end of Wells’s first season. Three linemen opened the emergency exit and held Kenny out, his face a few inches above the asphalt of Interstate 90 as the bus hurtled along. Wells could still remember Kenny screaming, maybe the first time he’d heard real panic. After that, Wells invited Kenny to sit with him. Even in ninth grade Wells had been starting middle linebacker and running back, so Kenny got picked on less after that.

  “John Wells? Bonecrusher?” Wells hadn’t heard that name in a long time. He had gotten the name because of the way he hit, jaw-dropping tackles that popped off helmets and left guys flat on the field. Running backs and wide receivers hated coming over the middle on him. Wells wasn’t especially big, but he was fast and he knew the secret, the one that coaches couldn’t teach: Don’t slow down. Most defenders pulled up—just a bit—before they made a tackle. They got nervous. It was only natural. Wells never slowed down.

  “Man, it’s good to see you,” Kenny said. “Been a long time.” Penny Kenny opened the door and offered up his hand.

  “What are you doing here?” Wells unwilling to admit the truth to himself even now.

  “I live here, John,” Kenny said. “My wife and I bought the place from your mom years ago. I’m a vice president, at the Ravalli County Bank. People call me Ken now.” The pride in his voice was unmistakable.

  “Where’s my ma?”

  Kenny swallowed hard. “You didn’t know? She passed on, John. Breast cancer.”

  Wells found himself staring at Kenny’s perfect teeth, which had been twisted and uneven when they were kids. You could be in a Crest ad, Wells thought. No Afghan dentists for you. And what are you doing in my house?

  Wells wanted to live up to his nickname. His fist clenched as he looked at Kenny and Kenny’s white teeth. But none of this was Kenny’s fault. Kenny was a nice kid.

  “She’s at Lone Pine,” Kenny said. “With your dad.”

  “I know where my family’s buried, Kenny. Ken.”

  “I’m sorry, John,” Kenny said. “I don’t know what else to say. Can I invite you in? Get you some coffee?”

  But Wells had already turned away.

  TEARS ROLLED SILENTLY down his face as he drove south on 93 to the Lone Pine Cemetery in Darby. Wells couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, or even when he’d wanted to, but he was crying now. He hadn’t allowed himself to think that his ma might have…passed on. Died. Gone to the Great Prairie in the Sky. Ha. Good one, John.

  She couldn’t have died. He’d gone to the end of the world and he hadn’t died. All she had to do was play bridge with her friends and tend the flowers outside her big old house. She couldn’t have died. But she had, and the proof was in the granite gravestone that stared up at Wells near the back of the cemetery. Mona Kesey Wells, 1938–2004. Loving wife, cherished mother, honored teacher. A cross engraved in the stone. His father lay beside her, Herbert Gerald Wells, 1930–1999. Wells knelt before them and closed his eyes, hoping to feel their presence, to feel anything at all. He murmured the eighty-second sura of the Koran, an invocation of Judgment Day:

  When the sky is torn

  When the stars are scattered

  When the seas poured forth

  And the tombs burst open

  Then a soul will know what it has given and what left behind…

  But all he heard was the traffic rolling by on 93 and the graveyard’s American flag flapping in the morning breeze. Wells knew he ought not to blame God for th
e loneliness he felt, but he couldn’t help himself. God, Allah—whatever His name, He was gone at this moment when Wells needed Him most.

  Wells walked to the cemetery’s edge. No fence marked its border. The graves simply stopped a few feet before the ground sloped down to a set of railroad tracks. He looked east into the sun until his eyes burned. He could almost see his faith coming loose, pouring out and floating away in the wind. In the distance a locomotive whistle sounded. Wells waited, but no train came. He walked back to his car. He had never felt so empty.

  HE DROVE INTO Missoula slowly, trying to escape the feeling that he ought to give up this foolish journey and head for Washington. Missoula had grown even faster than Hamilton. Subdivisions crawled up the hills where Wells and his family had ridden horses. His ma had loved to ride. His ma. Again he felt tears coming, but this time he choked them back. He had sacrificed those years for a reason. No one in Qaeda would have trusted him if he had come back to the United States on his own. His mother had never questioned his decision to become a soldier. Now he needed to control his emotions and do what he needed to do. He didn’t know how else to honor her.

  He edged his way into town. At least he knew Heather wasn’t dead—he had called her from New York. He’d hung up when she answered, feeling slightly dirty.

  He parked outside Heather’s house, a nice white two-story. As he looked at the place he felt sure he wouldn’t be welcome. He walked slowly to the front door and rang the bell. A little boy opened the door. “Is your mom here?” Wells asked.

  “Mom!” The boy ran off.

  He heard Heather’s small feet padding toward the door.

  “Yes?” She slipped the chain and opened the door. She was as beautiful as he remembered, a country girl with honey-blond hair and deep brown eyes, tiny and perfect. He towered over her, and he had loved to pick her up and carry her to their bed. They had been wild together. But there had always been part of him that she couldn’t reach, and they had drifted apart after he joined the agency. When he said he was going underground and couldn’t promise when he’d be back, she gave him an ultimatum: the job or me. The job or Evan, who at the time had just turned two. She told him she wouldn’t wait. And she didn’t. He couldn’t blame her.

  When she saw him her eyes opened wide and a low sound—half-sigh, half-grunt—came from her throat. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it.

  He reached out for her. She hesitated, then gave him half a hug, holding her hips back so they wouldn’t touch him.

  “John,” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  She motioned him in. The living room was nicely furnished, Wells saw. A handful of children’s books lay on the coffee table. Nineteenth-century drawings of men in robes and wigs hung on the walls. A life that had no intersection with his own. He bit his cheek and tried to think of something to say.

  “What’s with them?” He pointed to the drawings. Then, feeling as though he’d already stumbled, he tried to make the question less hostile. “They’re neat, is all I mean.”

  “Howard’s a lawyer.”

  “Howard?”

  “My husband.” She pointed to a picture: Heather, a handsome paunchy man who must be Howard, Evan, and two young children, a boy and a girl. “That’s George, and Victoria. Howard has a thing for English royalty.”

  “Do you?”

  She shook her head. It wasn’t an answer to his question. “I figured you must be dead when you didn’t come to Mona’s funeral.”

  “No such luck.”

  “She missed you, John. She thought you’d come back.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “They didn’t tell you on super-spy radio or something? Give you the bat signal so you could come home?”

  Wells tried not to think of his mother in her hospital bed, waiting and dying. Then just dying.

  “I’m sorry, John. I didn’t mean that. You always were a mama’s boy, that’s all. I figured if you were anywhere on the planet you’d be back.”

  “I never thought of myself as a mama’s boy.” But he couldn’t deny that some of his fondest memories growing up were of Mona baking in their kitchen, while Herbert worked at the hospital or read in his study. Wells smiled. “Maybe I was. So this is your life?”

  A look he couldn’t read crossed her face. “This is my life. Married. Three kids. Boring.”

  “Heather—”

  “Whatever you’re gonna say, just don’t.”

  “Can I see Evan?”

  “He’s at Little League practice at the YMCA.”

  “He plays baseball?”

  “Third base. He doesn’t even know who you are, John.”

  Wells felt as though she’d slapped him. “Tell you what. Stay here a year, be his dad, you can see him. Heck, you can teach him all that spy stuff.”

  “Heather—”

  “Six months?” Pause. “A month? Is your son worth a month to you, John?”

  Wells was silent. She was right. He couldn’t begin to tell his son what he’d done, where he’d been. And what if the boy accepted him and then he disappeared again? What then?

  Heather’s face softened as she saw him nod.

  “What do you tell him?”

  “That you’re a soldier. That you’re fighting a war that we have to win. The truth.”

  She smiled as she said the last two words, and he wondered if she still loved him. Not that it mattered. “Do you remember—” she started to say. She broke off as the phone rang, an electric trill that went six rings and then stopped.

  “No answering machine?” he said.

  “Voice mail.”

  Huh. Voice mail had been much less popular when he’d left. A meaningless glimmer of a thought, but for a moment it pulled his mind from this miserable day. “What were you going to ask me?” he said.

  But her smile had disappeared, and he knew she wouldn’t say. The phone had pulled her back to her life now, and she had no place for him in it.

  “You should go, John.”

  He looked around the room, trying to imprint it in his mind so he would have something of her to remember. Suddenly she cocked her head, a tic he knew well. “Why’d you come home?”

  “What?”

  “You’re still working for the agency.” It wasn’t a question. He wondered if she’d been asked, or told, to call in if she saw him. “So why are you here? Why now?”

  “You know I can’t say.”

  “Do they know that you’re here? In America?”

  “Of course.”

  But he had never been able to lie to her, and he could see she knew he was lying now. Her face showed her uncertainty. He wished he could explain, tell her how he had ended up here without a person in the world he could trust. Instead he walked to the door. As he stepped through, he felt his hand on her arm. He turned, and she hugged him, for real this time. He closed his eyes and hugged her even harder.

  Then she let him go.

  WELLS SAT IN his rented Dodge and tried to burn his son’s picture into his mind. Finally he slipped the car into gear and rolled off, driving slowly toward the YMCA. But when he reached the fields he didn’t recognize Evan.

  HEATHER WATCHED HIM leave. When the Dodge had disappeared, she pulled a business card from her wallet and picked up her phone to make a call that would push the United States closer to the deadliest terrorist attack in history. She punched in the numbers. The phone rang twice.

  “Is this Jennifer Exley?” Heather said. She paused. “Jennifer? It’s Heather Murray…. Yes. John Wells’s ex-wife.”

  4

  AT TWO A.M., weary travelers filled the arrivals hall at Miami International Airport. Omar Khadri was pleased to see that he fit in easily; everyone was his shade or darker. He joined a long line for non-U.S. citizens, carrying a black leather briefcase that held a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish to match his passport.

  An hour later, he was still waiting. Meanwhile, the lines for Americans moved smoothly. Khadri seethed
. You show us your contempt even before we arrive, he thought. Maybe if he shouted his delight at reaching the United States, Allah’s gift to the universe, he would be jumped to the front of the line. Finally he reached an agent. She looked briefly at his passport, then at him.

  “Are you here for business or pleasure, Mr. Navarro?”

  “Business,” Khadri said. Definitely business.

  “Where will you be staying?”

  “Miami.” With a side trip to Los Angeles.

  “How long?”

  “Two weeks.”

  She handed him his passport. “I just need a fingerprint and photo and you’ll be on your way.”

  “Excuse me?” Khadri said.

  “Your fingerprint and photo. It’s standard procedure.”

  Khadri did not want his prints and picture on file with the United States government. As far as he knew, no intelligence service had ever taken his photograph. He was as close to anonymous as anyone could be: medium height, medium weight, straight black hair, relatively light skin for a Pakistani, and an uncanny ability to mimic accents, a great gift in his line of work. He could pass for Egyptian, Iranian, Filipino, maybe even Italian. Even so, giving up a fingerprint would lock him into using this passport every time he came to America. He much preferred being able to change names.

  “Sir? That a problem for you?”

  “It’s a rule?” Khadri wished he weren’t so tired. Fatigue muddied his thinking, and he felt an unexpected fear, not for himself, but for this week’s operation.

  “Same for everyone, sir.” A hint of a smirk crossed the agent’s face. If you don’t like it, tough, she didn’t quite say. You can always go home.

  Khadri fought down his irritation as he looked at her black face. He did not like black people, especially black Americans. This woman was a trained monkey, a combination of American arrogance and African savagery. But Khadri decided to be polite; he didn’t want the trained monkey looking too hard at his passport. “I’ll be glad to,” he said.