The Faithful Spy

“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 nearest 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? Citigroup 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.