The Faithful Spy

fiftieth street. Forty-ninth. Forty-eighth. Khadri kept both hands on the wheel and tried to contain his adrenaline as the Yellow headed south. The traffic was so heavy that the people on the sidewalks were walking as fast as he was driving, but that didn’t matter now. Nothing could stop him. His hands were shaking, but not from fear. He should have been scared, he knew, but instead he felt only excitement. The world would long remember this day. t h e t r a f f i c c a m e to a stop on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Three black Lincoln Town Cars, a UPS delivery van, a Range Rover, a battered Volkswagen Jetta, and a little school bus — what the kids in Montana called a short bus. The bus was empty except for the driver, but it was riding low on its wheels, like it was carrying a heavy load.

Wells looked at it and knew. Khadri. The ironist. Of course. And no one would look twice at a school bus.

The Yellow was second at the light, on the west side of Seventh Avenue, behind a Lincoln. Maybe sixty feet away. Three seconds if he ran. Ten if he walked. Wells tucked the cap down on his head and began to walk east, toward Seventh Avenue. Khadri was half right, he thought; they were meeting again, but not in paradise. In Times Square.

“Hey, buddy,” the cop said. Wells kept walking, crossing behind the police cruiser and through the taxis that were moving slowly across Forty-seventh.

Forty feet. He coughed, a vicious rib-shaking eruption he didn’t try to cover. If he didn’t get to the bus, the people around him would have bigger problems than plague.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.” The cop wasn’t yelling, not yet. Wells reached the north side of Forty-seventh and turned right, cutting between clots of men in suits who were scurrying west toward the Morgan Stanley headquarters. Thirty feet. Not close enough, not yet. Khadri would surely have the detonator in his lap. Wells slipped a hand into his waist and grabbed his gun, holding it under his jacket.

He peeked back and saw that the cops were getting out of their cruiser. He began to trot toward the bus.

Twenty feet. “Stop!” he heard the cops yell, but an enormous honk from a UPS truck drowned them out. He could see Khadri now behind the driver’s seat of the otherwise empty bus, sitting straight up, head held high, as if he could already see paradise. Ten feet.

a f e w s e c o n d s, Khadri told himself. This light would turn green, he would drive two blocks, and in the heart of the square, at Forty-fifth Street. he would be complete. A few seconds. Two blocks. The detonator was still at his feet. He wasn’t allowing himself to touch it, so he wouldn’t have the temptation to blow it too early. He wanted this to be perfect.

And then he saw the man in the Red Sox cap, running toward the bus, a gun in his hands.

Khadri screamed, pure animal rage. He reached for the detonator—

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?”