The Faithful Spy

t h e o f f i c i a l s n ow ba l l 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 Fortyseventh 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.