The Faithful Spy

He laid out a rug, and the three men said their evening prayers. Then they ate. On the way home Wells had stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought premade sandwiches and quart-sized tankards of coffee. He was ravenous, and he figured Qais and Sami must be too. But he felt no pleasure as he chewed his stale turkey hero, just the knowledge that the clock was winding down. He swallowed his last bite and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. He had four hours, six at the most. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see a way clear. He couldn’t kill West. Yet Khadri would never trust him if West lived. With a week of notice, even a day, he could have warned Exley. Then the agency and the FBI could have set their own trap. They could have snatched up Qais and Sami and let Wells go. They could even have announced that Qais and Sami had been killed in the house, and that West had been shot and wounded. Khadri would have to accept that; he had no way to check. But Wells couldn’t get a warning to West now. Qais and Sami weren’t going to leave him alone tonight. They knew that the real point of the mission was to test Wells’s loyalty. Of course, he could just kill Qais and Sami now. But then he would lose whatever information they had, and the trail to Khadri would end. Turning them in would be better, but that was no sure bet either. They wouldn’t exactly sit back and smile if he picked up the phone and called 911. Wells wondered whether he should just let West die, pull the trigger himself if Qais asked. This was a war, and West had been a soldier once. Not just a soldier. A general. He was close to seventy. He had lived a full life. He might even understand. Wells shook that thought from his mind. He had to make sure West lived tonight. For his own sake as much as the general’s. There were some lines he could not cross. He couldn’t murder the people he had been charged with protecting. He couldn’t play God and sacrifice one of his countrymen in the hopes of saving others. No. He had to save West without blowing the cover he had worked so hard to build. yet he couldn’t see a way out, no matter how hard he tried. Call 911? Can’t. Shoot Qais? Can’t. Kill West? Can’t. Warn West? Can’t. Call Exley? Can’t. Call 911? Can’t. He pulled his attention back to the kitchen as Sami spread a street map of Buckhead over the table. Technically, the area was part of Atlanta, the northwestern corner of the city. In reality Buckhead was a lush suburb where the city’s corporate gentry lived in oversized houses set back from winding tree-lined streets. Wells had done lots of landscaping work there.

“He’s here.” Sami pointed to a red sticker, a few hundred feet from the intersection of Northside Drive and Mount Vernon Road. Qais slid a manila folder from his laptop case. “The property records say he bought it for two point one million dollars in 2001,”

Qais said. “Three floors, with a guest cottage on the side.”

“Two point one million? The army pays better than I remembered. Do we have pictures of him?”

Qais pulled out pictures of West taken from the Internet. Wells recognized the general, a tall, bald man with thick, rubbery lips and a mass of wrinkles for a forehead. “How do we know he’ll be there tonight? He must be on the road a lot.”

Qais looked at another paper. “He’ll be there. The Georgia Defense Contractors Association is giving him its lifetime achievement award at a dinner tonight. A town called Roswell.”

“That’s north of here.”

“And tomorrow afternoon he’s speaking at the City Club downtown. He’ll be home.”

Wells couldn’t disagree. “What about bodyguards?”

“Only one,” Sami said.

“You sure?”

“I’ve been watching him. When he’s out he rides in a Jimsy”—

Arab slang for a GMC Suburban. “The driver doubles as his bodyguard and sleeps at the house.”

“More likely in the cottage,” Qais said.

the glimmer of a plan took shape in Wells’s mind. Maybe he could split Qais and Sami up, after all.

“Yeah,” Wells said. “Probably in the cottage.” He turned back to Sami. “You’re sure West doesn’t have more protection?”

“I’ve only seen one guard ever.”

Khadri really did want them all to survive, Wells thought. He was surprised that West had so little security, but the guy had been retired for a while, and anonymity was his best defense.

“The house has a fence and a gate,” Sami said. “I took pictures last week.” He spread them across the table. The fence had a brick base topped with low ornamental spikes. Behind it, up a hill, a big Georgian house sat back about one hundred feet. A driveway separated the house from the guest cottage. Sami pointed to the fence.

“But only about six feet high, and no barbed wire.”

“Not in Buckhead,” Wells said. “The neighbors wouldn’t approve. How big’s the property?”

“A hundred and twenty meters long, sixty meters wide.” Four hundred feet by two hundred feet, Wells mentally translated. About two acres.

“Big enough to give us a little privacy,” Wells said. “What about dogs?”

“I think one. I’ve heard it a couple of times.”