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.
Exley felt a murderous rage replace her shame. In all her years at the CIA she had never been so angry. She knew that personalizing these battles didn’t help win them, but she couldn’t stop herself. This man Khadri was toying with them and killing Americans for sport. He had to be destroyed. “Whatever it takes,” she said to herself under her breath.
Shafer heard her. “Yes,” he said.
KHADRI WAS BRUSHING his teeth in his motel room in Kingston when he heard the first television bulletin.
“This is Scott Yorne with breaking news from Channel 2, your capital area news leader. The Albany Police Department is evacuating parts of western Albany following an explosion in a storage center on Central Avenue. Authorities are advising everyone else in the region to stay inside for at least two hours. So far, police have been tight-lipped about the nature of the explosion, but they promise us more information as soon as possible…”
So Farouk had told the Americans about the bomb, Khadri thought. Otherwise they wouldn’t be evacuating the city. They had been watching the locker and knew what it held. Or thought they did, anyway. They would be surprised when they got inside. Khadri smiled briefly as he looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His precautions had been wise.
But his smile faded as he thought about Farouk’s treachery. He had to assume that Farouk had told the Americans everything. At least one cell in Pakistan was blown. And probably all the nuclear techs that Farouk had recruited. Khadri had carefully compartmentalized his operations. He might be able to cut off the blown cells in time to save his other operatives in Pakistan. But he couldn’t escape the fact that Farouk’s capture was a major setback.
Pressure constricted Khadri’s chest. He reminded himself that he had no real reason to worry. The bomb had surely killed that fool DiFerri. Still, he wanted to get as far from Albany as possible.
He trotted into the motel bedroom and began tossing clothes into his suitcase. Then he stopped. In control, he thought. Always in control. He emptied the suitcase onto the bed and began repacking, folding his clothes neatly.
WITHIN AN HOUR, NEST scientists wearing radiological protective suits were inside locker D-2471, trying not to gag as they picked their way around the pieces of Tony DiFerri scattered around the room.
What they found puzzled them. Or, more accurately, what they didn’t find. Instead of the radioactive furnace they had expected, their detectors picked up only low levels of alpha rays and practically no gamma rays. No plutonium-239. No highly enriched uranium. No cesium-137 or cobalt-57. Instead the NEST team detected traces of plutonium-238, an isotope of plutonium that was practically safe enough to eat, as well as a few grams of low-enriched uranium. Those had apparently accounted for the traces of radiation they had found when they first scanned the locker. Nor did the area show any signs of biological or chemical contamination. No anthrax, no smallpox, no sarin, no VX.
This dirty bomb looked clean after all.
AT LANGLEY THE mood became slightly less grim when the news came in. After a consultation with the White House, Duto and Kijiuri decided to call off the evacuation and blame the local police for overreacting. With the promise of $35 million in extra federal aid, the Albany mayor and police chief agreed to take the heat. The explosion would be classified as conventional, which was close enough if not quite true, and Capitol Area Self Storage would remain the property of the federal government for the indefinite future. In twenty-four hours the national media would forget the bomb, and in a week it would be down to a paragraph even in the local papers. People blew themselves up all the time in America. In other words, nobody in the world except Tony DiFerri would have to know just how badly the agency and the Feebs had screwed up. That was the good news.
“The bad news,” Shafer said to Exley, “is that we’re back where we started. Nuclear material in the United States, and we have no idea where it is.”
It was nearly two A.M., and they were back in her office. They had spent the last few hours on frantic conference calls that reached from the White House to Albany to Langley to Nellis A.F.B. and even Diego Garcia. The calls had been full of bureaucratic ass covering, but along the way the principals had found a few minutes to discuss what had happened in Albany, and what it might mean. They were now sorting through three possibilities, none entirely satisfactory.
The first was that Dmitri the Russian physicist had duped Farouk Khan, selling him the wrong plutonium isotope, atomic junk instead of the treasure he’d been promised. The White House had seized on this theory. After all, the president officially viewed al Qaeda as weakened and on the defensive, hardly worthy of attention compared to Iran and other troublemakers. The fact that the group had supposedly smuggled a dirty bomb onto American soil didn’t square with this view, and so the White House was looking for evidence to discredit the bomb.
Maybe the optimists at 1600 Pennsylvania were right, Exley thought. The only problem with their theory was that Farouk was a trained physicist who had explained to Saul exactly how he had tested the material he had bought.
A second possibility was that Farouk had simply lied to Saul about the amount of radioactive material he had bought from Dmitri, hoping — as detainees sometimes did — to make himself seem more important than he was. The White House liked this theory too. In any case, it could be checked relatively easily. Farouk had already been thrown back into the hole. If he had lied they would know soon enough. Exley didn’t even want to imagine what Saul did to people who tried to deceive him.
Then there was the third theory, the one the White House didn’t like. The theory that Farouk hadn’t lied to Saul about where the bomb was hidden. Not intentionally, anyway. The theory that someone else had lied to Farouk. Someone — call him Omar Khadri — had gone to the trouble to build a fake dirty bomb, maybe more than one. And why would Khadri do that? Both to hide the location of the real bomb and as a counterintel trap, so he could know whether the United States had compromised his operatives.
If the third theory was right, Farouk would have nothing more to tell them, no matter what Saul did. Which meant the trail to the bomb was dead. Worst of all, because the JTTF had tipped its hand by beginning the evacuation after the explosion, Khadri now knew that they had been watching the storage center.
Which meant that he knew that Farouk had been flipped, and that the United States government was aware that al Qaeda had a dirty bomb on American soil. Which made him more likely to blow it quickly.
No, the third theory wasn’t comforting at all.
Shafer and Exley both believed it completely.
11
WELLS RAISED THE Glock and lined up his target.
With the pistol steady he squeezed the trigger. The Glock spoke to him the only way it knew, a short sharp bark. The slide popped back, ejecting a shell, and the weapon kicked in his hands as if it were angry he had fired. Wells controlled the recoil and squeezed the trigger again. And again. And again. And again, lower this time.
Finally he put the pistol down and looked downrange. Four holes punctured the center of the target, less than an inch from the bull’s-eye. The fifth hole was six inches below, and slightly right. Not bad for fifty feet.
Since getting Khadri’s message, Wells had practiced his shooting at American Classic Marksman, a little firing range in a strip mall in Norcross, a few miles from his apartment. He had forgotten how much h
e enjoyed having a pistol in his hands. He didn’t think of the men he had killed; instead he remembered the hunting trips he had taken each fall with his dad, Herbert.
Once a year they had hiked into the Montana mountains, seeking deer and elk. Wells could almost smell the rich, dark coffee that they brewed each morning, hear the bacon bubbling in their frying pan. He hadn’t eaten bacon since he’d converted. Even now he missed the taste. He and his father walked deep into the mountains, looking for a stand where they could wait in silence for the perfect shot. And the shot had to be perfect, since Herbert allowed Wells to target only one buck each season; if he missed he went home empty-handed. No sense in making the hunt too easy, Dad said.
In their third season, Wells finally bagged a whitetail. He could still remember how his pulse had quickened when he saw his shot ring true. The deer had reared back, then listed to the right and fallen. A clean kill. Before Wells had pulled the trigger he had wondered whether killing the buck would bother him. But since that moment he had never been afraid to shoot. He couldn’t pretend he hated killing. Animals killed and animals died; that was the natural order.
WELLS PUT ASIDE the Glock and picked up the Makarov that he had bought at a gun show in Chamblee two weeks before. The pistol was identical to the one he had left behind in the hut on the day he’d first met Khadri. As he held it, unexpected memories from the North-West Frontier filled him: the thick stench of raw sewage on summer days; a tiny girl in a full black burqa holding her father’s hand as he led her through the market in Akora Khatak; the not-quite-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that he had found one night outside the mosque, and the shock of the whiskey’s pungent aroma when he uncapped the bottle and poured it away.
He almost couldn’t believe that he’d left Pakistan just six months ago. Usually he didn’t think much about the place or Sheikh Gul or Naji and the other jihadis he’d known there. They seemed to belong to another life. Maybe it was the way he had left, disappearing so quickly. Or maybe forgetting the frontier was easy because living there had been so hard. Maybe he just didn’t want to know what he would see if he looked back.
He was looking ahead now, getting ready for whatever was coming next. Besides the pistols, he had picked up an assault rifle at the show, a Chinese-made knockoff of an AK-47. But that gun stayed in his apartment, since he had illegally modified it from semiautomatic to full auto.
For close-in work he had bought an old 12-gauge shotgun, worn but mechanically perfect, and sawed the barrels down so far that the shotgun was now only a couple of inches longer than the Glock. He had to leave the 12-gauge at home too. Sawed-off shotguns were illegal too. And for good reason. Beyond ten feet they were worthless, but up close they were as lethal as a rocket-propelled grenade. With luck they could take out two or three men with one pull of the trigger.
Getting silencers had proved more complicated. The dealers at the Chamblee show didn’t like talking about them, and Wells didn’t want to push too hard and wind up buying one from an ATF agent. But with the help of a manual he’d bought at the show, he’d built one in his apartment. He had no illusions about how long it would last, and it wasn’t great for accuracy. But it did quiet down the Makarov a little.
In any case, he didn’t plan to use the silencer unless he had no choice. He preferred knives when silence was a necessity. He had bought a couple of those too, along with holsters, smoke grenades, and pepper spray, all legal in Georgia. From a store in Macon that advertised itself as “Specializing in Home Defense” he had picked up four police-style walkie-talkies, the hands-free kind that clipped to the shoulder. As well as a bulletproof vest, a flak jacket, and a gas mask in case he had to play defense. A trip to an army-navy surplus store had rewarded him with a green camo uniform, and for night work a black ski mask, black sweatpants, a black hood, and black leather gloves.
At a hospital supply store near Atlanta General, he had put together an emergency medicine kit: Ace bandages, Betadine, clotting agent, gauze dressings, latex gloves, scalpels, splints, sterile solution, surgical scissors, syringes. Even Cipro, Demerol, and Vicodin, ordered from an Internet pharmacy in Costa Rica. His Delta training had included advanced battlefield medicine, and during the fighting in Chechnya Wells had set bones and treated shrapnel wounds. He had bought a couple of books on emergency medicine to refresh himself.
He was getting ready, all right. He only wished he knew what for.
Wells looked at the Makarov in his hand, feeling the metal stubble of its grip. The Makarov was smaller and lighter than the Glock and sometimes got lost in his palm. Still, Wells liked having a pistol he could slip into his waistband. He pulled back the Makarov’s slide, chambering a round, and sighted the target, imagining Khadri’s face at its center.
The first shot pulled right about three inches. The Makarov just wasn’t as smooth as the Glock. Wells sighted again. This time he was straight but high. Wells exhaled and stood utterly still, visualizing the bullet’s path, seeing it plow into Khadri’s cheek, just under the eye, blood trickling out, Khadri crumpling as quickly as gravity could pull him down. He squeezed the trigger. Bull’s-eye.
He practiced for another half hour, then unloaded the pistols and slipped them into their carrying cases. On his way out, he bought oil and a chamois cloth. He didn’t think they needed to be cleaned, but he wanted to break them down anyway, just to be sure.
“Good shooting today?” This from the owner, a tall, bearded guy named Randall.
“Just getting back into it.”
Randall smiled. “Look like a pro to me.”
BACK AT HIS apartment Wells broke apart the pistols and wiped them down. He whetted his knives until their blades seemed ready to bleed. Finally he made himself stop. Khadri — or his men — were due to arrive tomorrow at Hartsfield, and Wells couldn’t ever remember feeling so anxious before a mission. He didn’t care if he died, but he could not fail. He could not fail. He had failed to stop September 11, failed to stop the Los Angeles bombings. Not this time.
He had kept to himself since his ill-fated night out with Nicole, the bartender from the Rusty Nail. He had even quit working as a day laborer to get ready for Khadri. Money wasn’t a problem; even after buying the guns and the gear, he had a couple of thousand dollars left from his stash. As far as he knew, Nicole had never called the cops; he had swung by the Kermex lot to check if anyone was looking for him, but nobody was. He wondered sometimes if Nicole had gotten back together with her ex-boyfriend. If they had, Wells figured he deserved the credit.
He was praying five times a day again too, examining the Koran with the intensity he had shown during his years on the frontier. In truth, his faith was weak. But he couldn’t let Khadri see any cracks in his fervor. He wanted to be sure he had recovered the daily rhythm of the religion by the time his fellow jihadis arrived.
Mainly he worked through possible scenarios: What if Khadri’s carrying a vial of smallpox? What if he says Qaeda has a nuclear weapon but won’t say where? What if he comes with a dozen other men? Do I kill him on the spot? Try to play along with him so he’ll open up? Turn him over to the agency? Wells wished he could talk things through with Exley. But he knew that calling her would only get her in trouble. When he had more information for her he’d reach out. He needed to be ready, because the show was about to start. Khadri’s style seemed to be to wait, then move fast. He struck Wells as a man who would share information only at the last moment. When they’d met in Peshawar Khadri hadn’t even hinted at the Los Angeles bombings. But at some point he would have to explain his plans, and then Wells would have a chance to stop him.
WELLS DIDN’T EXPECT to sleep that night. But he did, a dreamless sleep, and when his alarm buzzed he came alert immediately, just as he had on those crisp fall mornings in Montana, hunting beside his father. He brewed himself a pot of coffee and bowed his head before Allah. Then he strapped the stiletto to his leg and headed for Hartsfield, the giant airport on Atlanta’s southwest edge.
The
morning traffic on 285 was even worse than he’d expected, but he had given himself plenty of time. He clicked on the pickup’s radio. Lately he had amused himself by listening to WATK, a crackly right-wing station far up the AM dial whose morning host, Bob Lavelle, was fond of conspiracy theories. For the last week Lavelle had talked about nothing but the explosion in Albany, the one that everyone else had already forgotten.
“Then why’d they evacuate the city?” Lavelle said. “I’m telling you, there’s a lot we don’t know about this.” Lavelle’s voice rose. “Listen to me for a minute. Stop what you’re doing. Put down that liberal newspaper. Think for yourself for once. You don’t start evacuating people because some two-bit loser blows himself to bits in a storage locker. That doesn’t make sense—”
Wells turned the volume down. Lavelle was wrong about a lot of things — Wells believed that the moon landing had happened — but the guy was right about Albany. What had happened there made no sense. Wells figured the agency or the FBI had been watching the locker for a biological or chemical weapon. But Wells couldn’t understand why they had let anyone into the locker at all. Khadri could probably fill in the missing pieces, but Wells didn’t plan to ask.
Lavelle was still yelling as Wells flicked back down the dial. No point in having to explain to Khadri why he was listening to WATK, whose hosts hated Muslims even more than they disliked the Feds.
AT HARTSFIELD WELLS left the knife inside the truck; it could cause him trouble at a security checkpoint. He hadn’t been inside an airport since the spring, and he didn’t like being in this one. There were probably more cops and federal agents here than anywhere else in Georgia. His old friends at Langley could easily have sent a BOLO — be on the lookout — alert for him to the Transportation Security Administration.
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