“Then can I ask you something? You like it here?”
“Every month I send my family seven hundred dollars. They building a house in Escuintla, where I’m from,” Eduardo said. “When it’s done, I go home.”
“You don’t want to stay?”
“You really want to know?”
“I asked.”
Eduardo looked at Wells, considering.
“Then I tell you, man. I know all about America before I come. So big, so rich. And also you have demo-cra-cy and free-dom—” English might not be Eduardo’s first language, but he understood irony just fine, Wells thought.
Eduardo coughed and spat at the traffic. “You act like this is the only place in the world. And everybody should be sad they don’t live here. So I’m glad I came, man. Now I seen America for myself. I won’t miss it. This place, for me, it’s a job. That’s all.”
* * *
DARKNESS HAD FALLEN when Wells finally reached his apartment. Tired as he was, he remembered to check the sliver of tape he’d fastened to the top of the doorsill and the thin black thread at the base; both were intact. He’d escaped his pursuers for another day. If anyone was bothering to pursue him.
His living room looked even duller than usual. A dingy futon and a wooden coffee table marred with cigarette burns. A particleboard bookcase and a television-DVD combo with a few discs, mainly westerns like Shane. A motivational poster of an eagle flying above a generic mountain landscape. Except for the DVDs and a few books, the apartment looked as tired as it had when Wells first rented it. No pictures, no trinkets. No clothes on the floor, no dishes in the sink. Nothing that marked the place as being inhabited by a human being instead of a robot. Well, one thing: a few weeks earlier Wells had bought a fish tank and a couple of angelfish.
“Hello, Lucy,” he said to the tank. “Hello, Ricky.” He had never particularly liked fish, but he was glad to have something alive in his apartment. Half alive, anyway — the fish had been swimming slower and slower the last few days.
He knelt on his prayer rug and unenthusiastically flipped his Koran to the first sura. “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” he murmured in Arabic. “Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful—”
Wells broke off and set the Koran down. He tried to pray every morning and night, but he couldn’t hide from himself the truth that his faith had deflated like a leaky tire since the morning when he’d knelt hopelessly before his parents’ graves. He still believed — or desperately wanted to believe, anyway — in God and charity and brotherhood. But he had told Duto the truth when he’d said Islam had been a way of life as much as a religion for him. Being Muslim meant praying five times a day, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the mosque every Friday, not necessarily believing that Mohammed had risen to heaven on a white horse. Now he prayed alone, and without the comforts of the umma, the brotherhood, the Koran seemed increasingly foreign.
In a way the distance made him glad. He knew that when the moment came to stop Khadri, he wouldn’t have any doubts. Still, he wished he could believe in something. No country, no religion, no family. He had tried to write his son, but what could he say to the boy? “Dear Evan, you don’t know me, but I’m your real father, not that nice lawyer who’s taken care of you all these years…” “Dear Evan, I know I disappeared from your life when you were two…” “Dearest Evan, it’s Dad. I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing or even the alias I’m living under, but here’s $50. Buy yourself a video game and think of me when you play it.” After a half dozen pathetic efforts, he’d given up.
He wouldn’t have guessed he’d be lonelier in the United States than in the North-West Frontier. He supposed he believed in Exley. Jenny. He dreamed of her every couple of weeks. Sometimes he was back in the Jeep with her. Sometimes he was with her on the night she lost her virginity. Always he woke with an erection swollen against his boxers. He didn’t have a picture of her, but he could almost see her blue eyes and translucent white skin. The hitch in her walk. He was sure he could pick her out of a crowd from a hundred yards away. And he was sure she felt the same about him.
Though what did he really know about her? She might even have made up that story, faked feelings for him on orders from somebody higher up. The agency had used sex as a weapon before. Wells shook his head. If that story was fake, she belonged in Hollywood, not Langley. He had to trust his instincts, or he would wind up seeing FBI agents around every corner. No, Exley wanted him as much as he wanted her. They would see each other again. For now he had to do his job, and that job was to be ready for the moment when Qaeda finally came to him.
With that thought he put Exley aside and for the hundredth time tried to guess why Khadri had sent him to Atlanta. The Centers for Disease Control was a few miles south of his apartment, with freezers full of smallpox and Ebola. But the CDC campus was a fortress, with motion sensors, armed guards, and biometric locks. Khadri was fooling himself if he imagined they could get inside. And Khadri didn’t strike Wells as dumb. A sadistic fuck, for sure. The L.A. bombings proved that. But not dumb.
Then what did Khadri want here? Centennial Park, home of the 1996 Olympics? Nobody cared about the 1996 Olympics. The regional Federal Reserve Bank? Ditto. The Coca-Cola building? Sure, the Coca-Cola building. Coke stood for American imperialism. Or maybe Khadri had big plans for Fort Benning, a hundred miles south of here. In truth, Wells had no idea what Khadri was planning, or if Khadri would ever contact him again. Every couple of days he went to the Doraville library to check his gmail account, and every couple of days he found it empty.
Wells rolled his neck, an old habit. Sulking in here with his dying fish wasn’t doing him any good. He headed for the door. “Sorry, Lucy,” he said, looking at the tank. “Sorry, Ricky. But at least you’ve still got each other.”
The fish said nothing.
WELLS’S FORD RANGER had seen better days; its air conditioning hardly worked, and someone had torn out the glove compartment. But the truck was utterly anonymous, a little white pickup like one hundred thousand others in Georgia. Even if he got pulled over he should be okay; the name on his insurance and registration, Jesse Hamilton, matched the name on his driver’s license. He also had an old Honda CB500 motorcycle, bought three months earlier in Tennessee. He had paid cash and never reregistered the bike, so it couldn’t possibly be connected to him. Just in case.
Wells steered the pickup off the Buford Highway and into the narrow parking lot of the Rusty Nail, a restaurant with a front door guarded by a six-foot-long black revolver that was actually a barbecue roaster. The Nail was famous for its barbecue, and day and night the revolver’s barrel vented a thin stream of blue smoke. Inside the place looked oddly like a ski lodge, an octagonal wooden building with a bar at the center and booths around the outside. The Braves game played on televisions mounted in the corners, and the smell of cigarettes and barbecue hung heavy in the air. On another evening the stale smoke might have chased Wells away, but tonight it felt just right.
Wells posted himself at the bar beside a trivia-game console whose screen blinked brightly. The place was mostly empty, just a few regulars at the bar watching the ninth inning with an alcoholic gleam in their eyes, and some kids from Emory looking for a cheap place to drink. Wells had been to the Nail once before, on a night like this, when the silence of his apartment became too much. He would have liked to eat here more, have dinner and watch a game once a week, but regulars got noticed.
“Whenever you can, be the gray man,” Knoxville Bill Daley, the agency’s top countersurveillance instructor, had told him during training at the Farm. “Right now people see you when you walk into a room. Be the man no one remembers.”
Ever since, Wells had done his best to slow down and keep his mouth shut. Of course he hadn’t been the gray man in Afghanistan, where by his very existence he stood out. But even there staying quiet helped. Sometimes Wells wondered if he had taken Bill’s advice too far, submerged hi
s personality so far inside himself that he no longer knew who he was. Not that the answer necessarily mattered.
Living in the North-West Frontier, he had wanted to come home. But now that he was back he had no idea what he would do, what he would be, once this mission ended. If it ended. The war on terror showed no signs of losing steam. He would never need another job. He could play the gray man forever.
Knoxville Bill’s comment had been the most important piece of training Wells got. Outside the Farm, he had never touched a dead drop or shucked a team of enemy agents. He regretted not having been a spy during the Cold War. Back then the game had possessed a certain formal elegance. The agency and KGB had existed almost outside their governments, playing three-dimensional chess on a board only they could see. Neither side really expected the other to blow up the world, and proxy soldiers in Africa and Central America fought the nastiest battles. A few unlucky Soviet moles got executed, but not the spooks themselves. The biggest penalty for failure was expulsion, maybe a nasty Select Intelligence Committee hearing.
No more. Get caught by the wrong guys today and you wound up dead, a video of your beheading on the Internet for the world to see. And the bad guys really would blow up the world if they could. Invisible ink and pinhole cameras were cute tricks for an easier time.
* * *
THE BARTENDER SLID over to him, a lanky woman with a stud in her nose, friendly blue eyes, and a long-sleeved Braves T-shirt. “What can I get you?”
She leaned in toward him, and Wells almost fell off his stool. After almost a decade of celibacy, just being this close to a woman set him off. Especially this woman. She looked…well, she looked like a younger version of Exley. Taller. A little trashier. No wonder he had come back to the Rusty Nail.
She smiled. He did his best to smile back. “Burger and fries, medium-rare.”
Her smile turned into a smirk. “Medium-rare may be a little tough for our ‘chef’”—she made quotation marks with her fingers so he couldn’t miss the fact she was teasing him—“I’d pick one or the other. I’m not sure what language he speaks, but it isn’t English.”
“Medium, then,” Wells said.
“Good choice.”
“And a Coke.”
“Coke?”
“No, a beer,” Wells said, surprising himself. A guilty pleasure ran through his veins. He hadn’t tasted a beer in a very long time. He figured this was how addicts felt when they were about to take the day’s first hit.
She gave him a tiny shrug, indicating that his sobriety was no concern of hers. “What kind?”
“Budweiser. Draft,” Wells said. “Bring it with the burger.”
“Sure. What’s your name?”
“Jesse.”
“I’m Nicole,” she said.
Before he could stop himself Wells had stuck out his hand. She looked at it for a moment, then took it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.
“Hi.” She walked back to the kitchen, and Wells watched every step, feeling his cheeks redden. Pleased to meet you? A handshake? She was a bartender, not an insurance agent. But he hadn’t known what to say. He just wanted her to come back, so he could look at her some more.
* * *
WELLS SLID A dollar into the game machine and played Entertainment Trivia, amusing himself with his lack of knowledge. “The highest-grossing movie of all time is A) Star Wars B) Titanic C) Shrek D) Spider-Man.” Wells picked Star Wars; he had hardly heard of the other three. The answer turned out to be Titanic.
Nicole slid his beer and burger across the bar and rested an easy hand on his shoulder. “You really didn’t know it was Titanic?”
“Uh-uh.” Wells sipped his beer and tried not to say anything stupid. The Budweiser was cold, acrid, slightly bitter on his tongue. Perfect. It tasted like home.
“That movie was so great.”
“Never saw it.”
“Really? What were you, living in a hole?”
“Something like that.”
“Let me see your arms.” She took his hands in hers and rolled his arms back and forth. “No tats. You weren’t in prison.”
“Nope,” Wells said. “Do I seem like I was in prison?”
“Sort of,” she said. “And like you haven’t had a beer in a very long time.”
“You’re right about that part.”
She tapped the trivia game. “Play. It’s gonna eat your dollar.”
Wells punched up the next question: “This one-hit wonder was the first winner of the television show American Idol: A) Jessica Simpson B) Kelly Clarkson C) Ruben Studdard D) Justin Timber-lake.”
“Who are these people?” Wells said.
“Jessica Simpson. Blond, big tits — ring any bells?” She tapped the screen B and was rewarded with 900 points. “Maybe Ruben’s more your liking? Country boy from Birmingham.”
“Like Garth Brooks?”
“Sure, only Ruben’s fat and black and sings ballads. Come on, you never heard of any of them? You’re messing with me.”
“I stopped caring about music about the time that Kurt Cobain died.”
He hadn’t exactly stopped caring, he thought. But rock didn’t get a lot of play in the places where he’d been. Wells couldn’t claim sophisticated musical tastes; in high school he had adored Springsteen and Zeppelin as well as slightly cooler stuff like Prince. Then in college he’d gotten into grunge and alternative, like everybody else. In Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier he had missed music more than he’d expected he would, though he had burned a few dozen songs into his head before he left and could still conjure them on occasion.
“Where have you been?” Nicole said. “The moon?”
“Worse. Canada.”
“Maybe I been stuck in Georgia my whole life, but I know they have TVs in Canada.” She gave him a long look, then shook her head. “Canada it is then.”
“Hey, Nicole,” a guy called from the other side of the bar. “Can a man get a drink, or you gonna spend the whole night flirting?”
“What man? Oh, you mean you,” she said.
“You’re not as cute as you think,” the guy said.
“Yes she is,” Wells called out. He was on his second beer and already feeling lightheaded.
“Coming, Freddie.” She leaned into Wells and said, “I’d let him pour it himself but he’d suck down the whole bottle.”
“I heard that—”
“Then you know it’s true,” she said over her shoulder to Freddie. And winked at Wells and walked away. Wells sipped his beer and tried not to stare at her ass. He failed.
FOUR HOURS LATER, Wells turned his Ford into the parking lot of a storefront pool hall down the highway from the Rusty Nail where the illegals watched Mexican soccer and drank two-dollar Buds. He checked his mirror. Sure enough, her Toyota pickup was making the same turn.
He knew that he was making a mistake, that getting involved with this woman — even for one night — would cause complications that he didn’t need. He knew too that Nicole, whatever her charms, was a poor substitute for Exley. But at the moment he didn’t much care. He needed a woman, and the hard truth was that he might never see Exley again. He flicked at his shoulder, envisioning an angel on it disappearing in a puff of smoke.
The guy behind the counter gave them a half-friendly nod when they walked in. Aside from the occasional movie, playing pool was Wells’s only entertainment; he had been here twice before.
“We close in a hour, man.”
“That doesn’t give me much time to kick your butt,” Nicole said. “Let’s go.”
TO HIS SURPRISE, she wasn’t joking. She started cold and lost the first game but won the next two and would have taken a third straight if she hadn’t scratched on the eight ball. “Should have known a bartender could play,” he said, watching her smoothly stroke a ball into a side pocket.
“Hate to get beat by a girl?”
“You haven’t beat me yet. It’s two — two.”
She narrowly missed a double bank shot
and walked around the table to him. Even after a few drinks she moved easily. “You’re funny,” she said. “You pretend you don’t care but you hate to lose.”
Wells shrugged. “That’s true,” he said.
“And you’re always watching. You never stop watching. What are you looking at, Jesse?”
Even after all these years alone Wells knew the right answer to that one. “You.”
She laughed. “That took way too long. You’re like a robot that’s almost human but not quite. The Terminator.”
Wells suddenly felt as though he’d gone to a five-dollar storefront psychic and been told not just that he would die, but exactly when, where, and how. She didn’t know how right she was. To cover his discomfort he laughed awkwardly. “That’s not nice,” he said. He leaned over the table to line up his shot. She slid behind him and put her arms on his. Wells could smell her, whiskey and cigarettes. He turned to kiss her but she pulled her mouth away. For a moment he forgot her entirely and thought of Exley, lying on the table in a dirty basement in Oakland. Then he was back.
“No, I’m helping you. Get closer to the table,” she said. “Concentrate. Watch the angle.” She laughed again. “I hate it when guys pull that shit, grab me at the table. That’s why I always lose the first game, to see if they will.”
“Kiss me,” Wells said.
“Make this shot and I will.”
He missed, badly. “I never should have had that fifth beer.”
“That’s no way to be a Terminator,” she said.
“I’m not the Terminator,” Wells said. “I’m the good guy. Trying to stop him. What was his name?”
She picked up her cue and sighted her shot. “Too bad. I always had a thing for Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
“Really?”
“Yeah…well, I was talking to Britney — my best girlfriend — a couple years back, about men, you know? Their equipment.”
“Their penises,” Wells said. “Just say it.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“And?”
She flushed. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
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