WELLS CROSSED OVER the Willis Avenue Bridge into Manhattan as the sun rose in his rearview mirror. Time to call in the cavalry. He grabbed his cell and punched in 911. As he did the phone beeped. Low battery.
“Nine one one emergency.”
“There’s been a shooting on One Forty-sixth Street in the Bronx.”
He could hear the dispatcher clicking on her keyboard. “Yes, sir. Emergency units are on the scene.”
“Make sure they have biohazard gear. The apartment’s contaminated with plague.”
“Plague?”
“Yes.”
“Sir, are you certain—”
“Yes.” Wells hung up.
He didn’t know how to reach Shafer or Duto, but he hadn’t forgotten the number for the Langley crisis desk, which was always staffed. He punched it in. After a single ring a man picked up.
“Station.” An odd tradition that had lasted almost since the agency’s creation.
“This is John Wells.”
“And how may I help you, Mr. Wells?”
“I need to talk to Vinny Duto.” Again his phone beeped.
“There’s no one here by that name,” the man said smoothly. “Are you sure you have the right number?”
Wells punched the steering wheel in frustration. Of course the guy wouldn’t just put him through. He had probably never heard Wells’s name before. And Wells no longer had the emergency codes that agents used to prove their identities to the desk.
He coughed viciously and spat a fat glob of phlegm onto the Ranger’s passenger seat. It was still gray, at least. If he started coughing blood even the Cipro couldn’t save him.
“Hello? Hello?” The man had hung up. Wells called back.
“Station.”
“Please. Get Duto for me. Or Ellis Shafer.”
The man hesitated. Duto’s name was public record, but Shafer’s wasn’t. “Tell me your name again?”
“John Wells. I’m an agent. My EPI is Red Sox.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wells. I have no way of checking your EPI. Whatever that is. If you have something else to tell me, please do it.”
“Look, I don’t have the codes anymore, but please believe me.”
“Mr. Wells, someone will have to call you back. Can you be reached at this number?”
“No. The battery’s going.”
“Mr. Wells—”
“Tell them to put out a BOLO”—be on the lookout—“for the Yellow.”
“The yellow what?”
“It’s a dirty bomb,” Wells said. He felt clouded and weak. The Cipro and the plague were at war inside him, and the plague was holding its own. At least. “I know I’m not making much sense, but that’s all I have for you. The Yellow. Also there’s a man in Montreal named Tarik who’s infected with pneumonic plague, a scientist—”
“Thank you, Mr. Wells. Someone will call you back.”
Click. Wells looked down to see that his phone had gone dead. Even if the guy sent the message up the line, the agency couldn’t reach him. For a little while he was on his own.
ON HIS WAY home Khadri stopped for steak and eggs at an all-night diner on Webster Avenue. He found himself ravenous. He could hardly wait for his men to begin their travels this morning. Nothing could stop the plan now.
He had just pulled into Ghazi’s garage when he heard the first bulletin on his radio. “And we have some breaking news for you from 1010 WINS. There’s been a shooting at an apartment building on One hundred and Forty-sixth Street in the South Bronx. Police have cordoned off the block, and neighbors say at least two men have been removed on stretchers. Stay tuned. We’ll update this important story as soon as we have more details.”
Khadri shook his head, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until his head fogged and he had to stop. “No,” he said quietly. “No.” He sat back in the Lincoln and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. How could he have been so foolish? What had the American done in that apartment?
He had to assume the worst, that Wells had killed his men and called the police. After so many years, Wells had fooled him, undone all his work. The plague would never leave that apartment now. Khadri cursed himself for his arrogance. And John Wells, that lying infidel. Allah would surely send Wells to the hottest fires of hell, and Khadri would deserve to join him there for losing this opportunity.
It wasn’t just the plague, he thought. The Yellow was registered in Ghazi’s name. The police could trace it easily once they identified Ghazi. He would need to blow the bomb this morning, before the police made the connection. He looked at the Lincoln’s digital clock: 6:29. Until now Khadri hadn’t planned to die in the attack; he had intended to leave the Yellow in a garage near the target and be in Mexico by the time the bomb blew. But he couldn’t take that chance now. He would have to blow the bomb himself.
At that thought, Khadri’s stomach fluttered. He pushed his fear aside. He had promised paradise to his jihadis; now he too would discover whether Allah awaited. And with that thought Khadri stepped out of the Town Car.
AT LANGLEY WELLS’S message was passed to Joe Swygert, the overnight head of the duty desk. The warning troubled Swygert; the caller knew the agency’s procedures, but none of the current codes. And the information he had offered didn’t make sense, Swygert thought. The daily hot sheet that listed the top current threats had never mentioned a Yellow attack.
He looked over the message again and sighed. The duty desk got calls like this a couple of times a year from nut jobs who somehow found its number. He punched up the agency’s Level III classified directory, looking for a John Wells. He couldn’t find the name, but he knew that absence didn’t necessarily mean anything. The directories didn’t stop at Level III.
Swygert looked at his watch: 6:32. In three years, he had woken Duto only twice: once when Farouk disclosed the dirty bomb to Saul and once when an agent died in a suspicious car crash in Beijing after meeting a high-level mole in the Chinese government. Swygert didn’t plan to call Duto or Shafer unless something else crossed the wires.
KHADRI WEAVED HIS way south through the Bronx on the Major Deegan. Already the traffic was picking up, box trucks loaded with vegetables to stock deli shelves, McDonald’s tractor-trailers with giant Big Macs painted on their sides. Khadri drove slowly. He planned to reach his target by eight. He would have liked to wait longer, make sure the buildings in midtown were full, but he couldn’t afford to delay. His arrogance had already cost him too much. Better to hit early than be caught and miss his chance entirely.
AT 7:03, WELLS parked his Ranger in a taxi-only zone on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan, just off Eleventh Avenue. He ignored the cabs honking at him as he washed his hands and face with the last of a gallon of water he had bought the night before. He felt sick and weak, and his coughs were coming more quickly now. Soon he would need intravenous antibiotics more powerful than the Cipro if he were to have any chance to survive.
“This showcase can be yours,” he muttered to himself. He wondered if he would ever see Evan again. Probably not. But then a lot of fathers and mothers wouldn’t see their children after today if he couldn’t find Khadri. “Watch him, Lord,” Wells murmured. “Whatever happens today, please watch him.” He didn’t care whether he was praying to the Muslim God or the Christian anymore, and he supposed God didn’t care either.
Wells tucked his Red Sox cap low on his forehead, slipped Ghazi’s gun into his waistband, and covered it with his shirt. He stepped out of the truck, blinking in the cloudy morning light. He leaned against the truck, unsure where to go. He had heard the shootings in apartment 3C reported on the radio, but so far there were no signs of a dragnet by the police, no roadblocks or sirens screaming. Obviously Exley was still unconscious, and no one had linked his call to Langley with the bloodbath in the apartment. The agency and the NYPD would make the connection soon, he knew. Probably in the next couple of hours. But a couple of hours might not be soon enough.
He wondered if he should find the n
earest police station, explain who he was, ask them to put out a bulletin for Khadri. But the cops wouldn’t issue an alert right away, not on the word of a disheveled man off the street who said he was a CIA agent and had a story about plague and a dirty bomb. His showing up in person might even slow the process of getting an alert out. Especially since the cops would mostly be interested in him as the apartment shooter. No. When the police put out a public alert for him or Khadri he would turn himself in and get the antibiotics he needed. Until then he would stay on the streets and try to find the Yellow, whatever it was.
But where to go? The United Nations and the New York Stock Exchange were too well guarded. The Empire State Building? Citi-group Center? The Time Warner Center? Grand Central? Then Wells remembered what Khadri had told him when they’d met in Atlanta, in Piedmont Park. “Didn’t you think it was exciting? Times Square?” Times Square was the only place Khadri had ever mentioned by name. It was the best-known address in the world. And it would be far easier to reach than the others. It was Ground One.
Of course, he could be wrong. Khadri might hate the Empire State Building for reasons Wells didn’t know. And Wells couldn’t even be sure he would recognize the Yellow when he saw it. But he was out of options. He could go to Times Square. Or turn himself in.
“Times Square,” Wells said aloud. Four blocks east. He turned and walked into the rising sun.
THE COPS ON 146th Street didn’t need long to see that the massacre in apartment 3C was more than a drug deal gone bad. The NYPD immediately dispatched antiterrorist units to scour the building. The department also notified the FBI’s New York City watch center, looking for any information the Feds might have on the apartment or the men inside. The FBI reported that none of the men showed up on its main terrorism watch list, but that didn’t necessarily prove anything. The detectives badly wanted to question the woman who’d been found in the hallway. Unfortunately, she was in surgery. Meanwhile, the man they’d found chained to the radiator refused to talk.
Wells’s warning about plague was passed to the police tactical command center at One Police Plaza in Manhattan. The officers on the scene were warned, and a police biohazard unit was dispatched to the building to test for contamination, standard practice whenever a plausible bioterror warning was received. Still, the officers in the apartment didn’t panic; bioterror hoaxes were all too common in New York.
The NYPD biohazard unit was one of only six civilian units in the United States equipped with an experimental polymerase chain reaction assay capable of detecting plague. The test took roughly an hour.
At 7:26, its results came back positive.
THE OFFICIAL SNOWBALL immediately began rolling. Apartment 3C was declared a possible bioterror site. The building was placed under quarantine, no one allowed to enter or leave. The doctors operating on the woman from the hallway were warned. Blood samples were taken from her and the nameless man who’d been captured in 3C. The police flashed a bulletin to the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the White House. And Joe Swygert, the Langley duty officer, realized that he had better find Vinny Duto and tell him that a man named John Wells had called.
In minutes, the JTTF pieced together what was about to happen on the streets of New York. At 7:41 an all-points bulletin went out to every New York City police officer and FBI agent on duty in the city, telling them that intelligence indicated an imminent terrorist attack, probably with a radiological — a.k.a. dirty — bomb. The bomb’s exact delivery method remained unknown, but cabs, Ryder trucks, and Yellow freight trucks were to be considered especially dangerous. The bomber was also unknown, though he was believed to use the alias Omar Khadri.
A separate bulletin was issued for John Wells, a white American male, six-two, approximately two hundred pounds, dark eyes and hair, as a material witness in a six-person homicide in the Bronx earlier that day. At Langley, the agency scrambled to find a picture of Wells to give to police and television stations. The bulletin advised officers to consider Wells armed and dangerous, and warned that he might be infected with Yersinia pestis, or plague bacteria.
The president immediately ordered onto high alert the army’s biowar defense center and the secret army teams that had the job of responding to a nuclear or radiological attack on U.S. soil. The White House press office called the networks, asking them to make time at eight-thirty A.M. for an announcement of critical national importance.
There were just three problems with all this activity.
No one had a picture of Khadri.
No one knew what the Yellow was.
And they were all too late anyway.
AT 7:43, KHADRI swung the Yellow from Central Park South onto Seventh Avenue. The traffic was hardly moving, but even the worst New York gridlock couldn’t keep him from his target, he thought. He looked out through his vehicle’s high square windshield at the kafirs elbowing one another on the sidewalks, rushing to their offices so they could fatten their pockets.
If they only knew the fate that awaited them, the fire and ash, the deadly smoke. Then they wouldn’t be so worried about getting rich. But it was too late for them. He looked back at the trunk, then at the detonator, hidden at his feet, where it couldn’t be seen. These people would have to hope for mercy from Allah, he thought. They would get none from him.
The light at Fifty-eighth Street turned green. Khadri eased down on the gas. The Yellow rolled ahead.
WELLS LEANED AGAINST the western edge of the TKTS booth, in a traffic island on the northern edge of Times Square, on Forty-seventh Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway. In the afternoons the booth sold discount Broadway tickets to tourists, but in the morning it was closed, the only empty space in the maelstrom that stretched from Forty-seventh to Forty-second. Instead of fighting the crowds, Wells had decided to conserve his strength and wait at the booth, where he could cover the vehicles heading south into the square on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.
He knew he wouldn’t be out here much longer anyway, and not just because of the plague. In the last five minutes police sirens had been screaming to the east, the north, the south, all over. As Wells watched, two cops pulled their pistols and ordered the driver out of a cab double-parked by the Morgan Stanley headquarters on the corner of Forty-seventh and Broadway. The word was out. He would soon be irrelevant. But not just yet. Wells shivered and turned his attention to Seventh Avenue.
He knew, somehow, that Khadri was very close. The Yellow. It had to be some kind of vehicle, Wells thought. A cab made sense, but it was too obvious. Khadri had been so pleased when he’d said those words in the apartment. Not a cab. And not a truck. A truck was too big, too hard to hide. The Yellow was something else, something that was big enough to hold a good-sized bomb without attracting attention. But what?
A police car turned onto Forty-seventh Street and stopped in front of him. The officers inside looked curiously at him. The driver rolled down his window.
“You okay, buddy? You look a little sick.”
“Fine,” Wells said. He tried not to cough.
FIFTIETH STREET… Forty-ninth…Forty-eighth…
Khadri kept both hands on the wheel and tried to contain his adrenaline as the Yellow headed south. The traffic was so heavy that the people on the sidewalks were walking as fast as he was driving, but that didn’t matter now. Nothing could stop him. His hands were shaking, but not from fear. He should have been scared, he knew, but instead he felt only excitement. The world would long remember this day.
THE TRAFFIC CAME to a stop on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Three black Lincoln Town Cars, a UPS delivery van, a Range Rover, a battered Volkswagen Jetta, and a little school bus — what the kids in Montana called a short bus. The bus was empty except for the driver, but it was riding low on its wheels, like it was carrying a heavy load.
Wells looked at it and knew. Khadri. The ironist. Of course. And no one would look twice at a school bus.
The Yellow was second at the light, on the we
st side of Seventh Avenue, behind a Lincoln. Maybe sixty feet away. Three seconds if he ran. Ten if he walked. Wells tucked the cap down on his head and began to walk east, toward Seventh Avenue. Khadri was half right, he thought; they were meeting again, but not in paradise. In Times Square.
“Hey, buddy,” the cop said. Wells kept walking, crossing behind the police cruiser and through the taxis that were moving slowly across Forty-seventh.
Forty feet. He coughed, a vicious rib-shaking eruption he didn’t try to cover. If he didn’t get to the bus, the people around him would have bigger problems than plague.
“Hey. I’m talking to you.” The cop wasn’t yelling, not yet.
Wells reached the north side of Forty-seventh and turned right, cutting between clots of men in suits who were scurrying west toward the Morgan Stanley headquarters. Thirty feet. Not close enough, not yet. Khadri would surely have the detonator in his lap. Wells slipped a hand into his waist and grabbed his gun, holding it under his jacket.
He peeked back and saw that the cops were getting out of their cruiser. He began to trot toward the bus.
Twenty feet. “Stop!” he heard the cops yell, but an enormous honk from a UPS truck drowned them out. He could see Khadri now behind the driver’s seat of the otherwise empty bus, sitting straight up, head held high, as if he could already see paradise.
Ten feet.
A FEW SECONDS, Khadri told himself. This light would turn green, he would drive two blocks, and in the heart of the square, at Forty-fifth Street…he would be complete. A few seconds. Two blocks. The detonator was still at his feet. He wasn’t allowing himself to touch it, so he wouldn’t have the temptation to blow it too early. He wanted this to be perfect.
And then he saw the man in the Red Sox cap, running toward the bus, a gun in his hands.
Khadri screamed, pure animal rage. He reached for the detonator—
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