Wells’s first shot ripped through his chest, knocked him back toward the window. Khadri felt no pain, just enormous anger. He wouldn’t let the kafirs take this from him. He reached down for the detonator that was so very close. But Wells kept coming, firing, and as he kicked open the door of the bus and jumped inside Khadri knew he had failed.
Wells leaned over Khadri, his hot feverish filthy breath in Khadri’s face, and Khadri knew. Wells was the angel of death. He tried to stay angry, but the black wind came for him and he closed his eyes. A dribble of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. A final agonal breath rattled his chest. He died.
WELLS FELT THE shot even before he heard it. The muscles in his back seemed to explode. He twisted and fell forward. Onto Khadri. The cops. Doing their jobs. Getting the bad guy. So they thought. No. He had to live. He had come too far to die. He’d done his job too. All those years in the wilderness. He tried to lift his hands, but the effort overwhelmed him.
Wells could feel his blood, his hot dirty blood, pumping slowly down his back. As he closed his eyes and the world went black his last thought was Exley.
EPILOGUE
EXLEY WOKE. HER left knee burned as if a shark had bitten off half her leg. But when she opened her eyes she saw her foot in the air. A sling held her leg in place. A hospital bed. Two women stood beside her, one wearing a white doctor’s coat, the other a nurse’s uniform. Surgical masks hid their mouths.
As consciousness found her, the pain in her leg turned to agony. The electrical fire inside her burned endlessly, every nerve in her knee sending an individual message of grief to her brain. “Hurts,” she choked.
Beyond her leg, the rest of her body ached terribly. And though she’d just woken she felt enormous fatigue, as if she’d been running for days on end. Exley clenched her fists against the pain and the nurse ran a hand down her arm, carefully avoiding the intravenous line plugged into her elbow.
The doctor stepped forward. “You were shot,” she said. “Do you remember?”
Now Exley did. “In the hall.”
“Would you like some ice?”
Exley nodded. Even talking was an enormous effort; her mouth seemed to lack any moisture. With her gloved hand, the nurse slipped a chip of ice into Exley’s mouth. Exley sucked on it, a cold piece of paradise. She began to remember more, her hours in the van, Wells shouting her name—
“What happened?” Panic rose in her, under the pain. Wells. Where was he? Her last memory of him, leaning over her in the dirty yellow hallway.
“Can you tell me your name?” the doctor said.
“Jen. Exley.”
The doctor nodded. “I’m Dr. Thompson. Julie. I have some good news for you, Ms. Exley. Your children are here.”
“Where’s here?” She licked her lips, dry again.
“The infectious disease unit at Bellevue. New York. You’ve been here about sixteen hours. But we want to be sure you’re not contagious before we bring David and Jessica in.”
At the doctor’s second mention of her children Exley felt a strange sorrow overtake her. They shouldn’t see her like this. She had come so close to dying, giving them up. She had been absent from them for too long. The drugs and the pain and the shame melded in her mind and she felt hot tears running down her cheeks. The doctor — Exley had forgotten her name already — pulled off her glove and put a cool hand on Exley’s forehead.
“There’s no reason to worry,” she said. “You were infected with some nasty stuff, but it looks like we caught it in time. You can probably see them tomorrow.”
Exley thought again of Wells. “Where’s John?”
The doctor glanced at the nurse. “Also here. He’s very sick.”
Very sick. Exley closed her eyes.
“I know you’re in a lot of pain,” the doctor said. “We need to be careful about how much medication we give you, but if it hurts too much, tell us. When you feel better there are a lot of people who want to talk to you. To thank you. In the meantime try to sleep. Please.”
THE NEXT DAY passed in a haze, Exley slipping in and out of consciousness as the nurses adjusted her medication. The doctors briefly brought in her kids and her mother, and Exley’s joy at seeing them overcame her shame. Still, she was glad when they left. She saw in their faces that they were shocked by the way she looked. The effort of trying to smile for them exhausted her. She passed out almost as soon as the door closed behind them.
When she woke again Shafer was crouched beside her bed. “Ellis,” she croaked. For the first time she felt a trace of energy returning, although her knee burned as if it were being torn apart from the inside out.
“Jennifer.” For once he seemed at a loss for words. He wrung his hands together and hopped around the room on his spindly legs.
“What happened out there?” she said. “They won’t tell me.”
“It was close, but you did it, Jennifer,” he said. “You and Wells.”
“What did they mean when they said I might be contagious?”
“I’m probably not supposed to be the one to tell you this, but Wells infected you with plague.”
Plague. Exley’s body ached at the word. Shafer rubbed her shoulder. “It’s okay. We think we’ve tracked down everyone who was exposed, here and in Canada.”
Canada? Exley decided not to ask.
“I need to see him, Ellis.”
“He’s in bad shape,” Shafer said. “He was exposed a lot longer than you, and he was shot in the back.”
“Khadri shot him?”
“No. The police.” A strange half smile crossed Shafer’s face. “Things got messy at the end, but it worked out all right. Our boy’s a hero and you must be too. The president’s coming up here next week. Meanwhile Duto’s taking all the credit, and I’m letting him.”
Duto’s name provoked a flare of anger in Exley, but the emotion faded as quickly as it came. She was just too tired. Shafer seemed to read her mind. “Don’t waste your energy, Jennifer. If it’s not him it’ll be someone else.”
“He’s going to make it. Right, Ellis?” In her haze she imagined trading her leg so Wells would live. Or both legs. Sure. Who needed legs anyway?
“I’m not going to lie. They’re saying fifty-fifty. But that’s better than yesterday.”
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING she felt stronger, and she asked that they take her to his bed. They told her no, but she insisted. So they rolled her in her bed to a room watched by four New York City police officers wearing blue dress uniforms and white gloves. An honor guard.
Wells lay on his side, an intravenous drip in his arm, oxygen tubes in his nose, a catheter poking out from the sheets by his waist. He was pale and gaunt and his breath came slowly, but the steady beeping of the pulse monitor and oximeter above his head reassured Exley.
“I know he doesn’t look great, but he’s doing much better,” Dr. Thompson said. “He’s been trying to say something, mumbling. We think he could regain consciousness today.”
In the bed Wells twitched and sighed.
“Can you bring me closer?” Exley said.
WELLS STOOD OUTSIDE a gleaming white skyscraper, the biggest he had ever seen. Its marble walls seemed to have no end. He wanted badly to get in though he didn’t know why. Something was impelling him, something he couldn’t fight. He was too tired to fight anyway. He looked for an entrance but the building had no doors or windows, only a single push-button entrance bell. He pressed the bell. It began to beep and a man in a blue blazer and a surgical mask materialized in front of him.
Please, Wells said without speaking. Yet he knew the man would understand.
The man pointed at Wells’s belt, where a dozen pistols hung. Makarovs, 45s, Glocks, even a couple of old revolvers. As Wells watched, the pistols morphed into each other. They were alive, he realized. He’d never seen living guns before. Yet the sight didn’t surprise him.
Take them off, the man thought-said.
I can’t, Wells replied. He looked do
wn. A vast pit lay beneath him, filled with men and cranes and earthmovers building a neon city. You don’t know what it’s like down there.
Take them off, the man said again. Behind him the marble skyscraper lost its shine and began to fade. Wells desperately reached for the man in the blazer, but the man raised a finger, a single finger, and pain flooded Wells, radiating from his back into his shoulders and then across his body.
Wells looked up. The skyscraper was almost gone. He knew he would never get in if he kept his guns. He tried to pull them off but couldn’t: they were bound to him like leeches.
The building disappeared. The man shook his head and waved his hand angrily. And Wells fell.
HE LANDED ON his back on hard, rocky ground. The neon city had vanished, and the sky above was black. Wells closed his eyes and saw stars, but dimly, like fireflies. He was looking at his own brain through a thick gauze curtain. Again he felt a surge of pain in his back. He looked at the stars. They were dim, too dim. They weren’t the stars he remembered from Afghanistan.
Afghanistan.
And once he understood that word everything came back, everything, all of it, all at once, as bright and wicked as a fever dream, only real; he could remember everything, and the pain from the hole in his back scorched through the morphine or fetanyl or whatever it was that they were giving him and—
— he opened his eyes. And there she was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without my brother David, who helped conceive the idea of a CIA agent inside al Qaeda and think through ways to tell this story. He too is a writer, but when I asked him if I could take a shot at this book, he told me to go ahead. For that encouragement, and for the ideas he offered each step of the way, I cannot thank him enough.
Thanks also to:
Ellen and Harvey, my parents
Mark Tavani, an editor who edits
Heather Schroder, who somehow convinced Random House to sign a contract on three chapters and an outline, giving me the confidence (and legal responsibility) to finish, and Matthew Snyder, who performed a similar trick with the movie rights
Jonathan Karp, who bought in early
Pilar Queen, Deirdre Silver, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Jennifer Vanderbes, who offered wise and gentle criticism on the first draft
Dorian and Eric Nerenberg, who showed me the Buford Highway
Douglas Ollivant, Kelly Pippin, and other soldiers and officers too numerous to mention, who shared their stories (and their chow halls) in Baghdad and Najaf
Zaineb Obeidi and all the translators and drivers at the Baghdad bureau of the Times
And, finally, all the war reporters and photographers who risk their lives every day. I worked with them for only a few months, but my respect for them grows daily.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEX BERENSON is a reporter for The New York Times who has covered topics ranging from the occupation of Iraq to the flooding of New Orleans. He graduated from Yale University in 1994 with degrees in history and economics. This is his first novel. He lives in New York City.
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