The Faithful Spy

The FBI, which was leading the investigation, had discovered that General West had slept with at least five enlisted men during his career in the army. He had once forced a sergeant to retire after their relationship soured. All five of those men had alibis, but other former lovers were surely lurking. One might have killed West for revenge. Even a busted robbery was possible; the Atlanta cops had found $200,000 in a safe in West’s bedroom. Making the case even trickier, the physical evidence proved that West and the bodyguard hadn’t killed the Arabs. A third shooter had killed them, then escaped. But why? Terrorists didn’t shoot their own. Maybe the third man had hired the other two to help him with a revenge killing, then taken them out so they wouldn’t talk. That was the FBI’s theory, anyway. Exley and Shafer and the others at the agency who knew about Wells had their own suspicions. But at an emergency meeting two days after the shootings, Duto warned them all to keep Wells’s existence secret. “He’s our asset,”

Duto said. “There’s no evidence that he did this. No need to tell the Feebs about him.”

Another lie, Exley thought. Wells was nobody’s asset right now, certainly not the agency’s. But she didn’t argue. If Wells wasn’t involved in the shootings, making his name public would blow his cover. And if he was involved. Exley didn’t want to think about that.

Meanwhile, Duto’s team was still searching for Wells. As far as she knew, they had no leads, although she wasn’t sure Duto would tell her or Shafer if they had. Exley hadn’t helped. She still hadn’t revealed Wells’s early-morning call to her. Too much time had passed, she told herself. Talking about it now would just get her in trouble. But she knew the truth. She didn’t want Wells sitting in an isolation chamber in Diego Garcia. When he was ready he would reach out to them. Reach out to her.

s o t h e f b i never heard about Wells. And that wasn’t the only problem the Atlanta investigators faced. The Pentagon had pushed to classify details of what had happened at the house, claiming that disclosing too much information could compromise national security. The Pentagon’s real motivation — embarrassment about West—

wasn’t hard to figure. But the FBI had decided not to argue. Even the third shooter remained a closely kept secret. The lack of information had created a vacuum that bloggers filled with wild theories, though no one had guessed the real story. Even the craziest conspiracy theorists had limits. The Albany bombing had also frustrated the JTTF. The bomb hadn’t left any recognizable signature. The timer, the trunk, the battery, and the wires were available at any Home Depot. The C-4 was military grade, but military-grade plastic explosive was available for the right price all over South America and eastern Europe. The junk radioactive material in the bomb didn’t match any of the samples the Department of Energy had on file from Russian nuclear labs. The Albany investigators had managed to identify the man who’d died in the explosion. He was Tony DiFerri, an unemployed grifter with a half dozen arrests for burglary and cigarette smuggling, nothing that explained how he had ended up blown to bits inside locker D-2471. The best guess from the Joint Terrorism Task Force was that the man called Omar Khadri had duped him into opening the trunk. Unless they caught Khadri they wouldn’t know how. DiFerri sure couldn’t tell them.

it was 5:14. One minute to go. On-screen, the garbage trucks had pulled over and turned off their engines. Exley sipped her coffee.

“You think it’s real?” she said to Shafer.

“You know as much as I do.” Probably a lie, Exley thought, but she didn’t argue. Shafer was especially irritable this morning. “Let’s assume it’s real. The problem—”

Shafer broke off. On-screen, men in black flak jackets, Kevlar helmets, and plastic face shields jumped out of the garbage trucks. They halted for a moment at the front door of the tenement, then blasted open the lock and ran inside.

the raid went smoothly. At 5:22 a.m. four agents came out of the building holding a dazed-looking man in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his hands and feet manacled. They shoved him into an unmarked van and drove off, trailed by two police cars. Inside the Secure Communications Presentation Center, a small cheer went up.

“Little early to get excited, don’t you think?” Shafer murmured to Exley under his breath. “We don’t even know if it’s the right guy.”

Shafer was probably right, but she didn’t want to hear it. After everything that had gone wrong the last few months, the JTTF needed a break. “Can’t you be happy for five seconds?” she said. “If we’re wrong we’ll cut him loose. He can get a lawyer and sue us. Like everybody else.”

“Assume we’re right. Assume he’s real,” Shafer said. “Somebody set up these cells very carefully—”

“Khadri,” Exley said.

“Sure, Khadri, whoever he is. Somebody. John Wells. Anybody.”