The Faithful Spy

“Listen to me for a minute. Stop what you’re doing. Put down that liberal newspaper. Think for yourself for once. You don’t start evacuating people because some two-bit loser blows himself to bits in a storage locker. That doesn’t make sense—”

Wells turned the volume down. Lavelle was wrong about a lot of things — Wells believed that the moon landing had happened — but the guy was right about Albany. What had happened there made no sense. Wells figured the agency or the FBI had been watching the locker for a biological or chemical weapon. But Wells couldn’t understand why they had let anyone into the locker at all. Khadri could probably fill in the missing pieces, but Wells didn’t plan to ask.

Lavelle was still yelling as Wells flicked back down the dial. No point in having to explain to Khadri why he was listening to WATK, whose hosts hated Muslims even more than they disliked the Feds. at h a rt s f i e l d w e l l s left the knife inside the truck; it could cause him trouble at a security checkpoint. He hadn’t been inside an airport since the spring, and he didn’t like being in this one. There were probably more cops and federal agents here than anywhere else in Georgia. His old friends at Langley could easily have sent a BOLO — be on the lookout — alert for him to the Transportation Security Administration. In case they had, he had done his best to change his looks. He didn’t put much stock in elaborate disguises, which usually attracted attention rather than deflected it. But he had grown out his hair since the spring, and today he was wearing a Red Sox cap and wirerim glasses with clear lenses. As long as he didn’t do anything dumb, he ought to be fine. The TSA officers were overwhelmed and mainly worried about keeping the lines moving. To protect himself further, he had told Khadri that he would wait in Hartsfield’s main concourse instead of the terminal, which would have required him to go through a checkpoint. After a few minutes of pacing the halls, he settled down with a Journal-Constitution and tried to read about the Braves’ latest win — six in a row — but he couldn’t focus. Eventually he gave up and let his mind roam. It settled on Exley. At this hour she was probably in her office. He had never seen where she worked, but he could picture it. She would try hard to keep her desk neat, but it would still be messy, thick with unclassified reports and maps and transcripts. In her safe she would have photocopies of classified documents — she wouldn’t get the originals. She would have pictures of her kids and maybe some drawings they had made for her. He hoped so.

She wasn’t married anymore. If she had a boyfriend, a lover, she might have a picture of him. But Wells was sure it would be discreet. She wasn’t the type to bring her life into the office. Did she bring the office home? Nearly everyone at the agency was married. He couldn’t picture her having some awful workplace affair, the kind that the secretaries know will happen even before it starts and the bosses figure out in a week. The kind that inevitably ends with the husband back at home with wife and kids. Exley was smarter than that. Had to be. But Wells knew better than anyone that loneliness in large doses could twist people so badly that eventually even they couldn’t recognize themselves.

So did she have a lover? A boyfriend? After the way she’d opened up to him in the Jeep he couldn’t imagine she was seriously involved with another man. Nobody lived with her, anyway. When he had called her that morning a month ago, she had picked up. And she hadn’t sounded surprised. As if she had been waiting for his call. As if she had been thinking about him as much as he’d been thinking about her. He closed his eyes and imagined her, alone in her bed, sleeping nude beneath a thin cotton sheet, her windows open to the humid Washington night and a fan spinning slowly overhead. The vision made him shiver, and for a moment he could almost touch her.

Wells opened his eyes and looked at his watch. Eleven-forty. In five minutes Khadri would arrive on Delta flight 561 from Detroit. the flight came in on time. But Khadri wasn’t on it. The man who stepped off the escalator was younger, early thirties, tall, clean-shaven, wearing slacks and a loose-fitting polo shirt. He couldn’t do anything about his olive skin and wiry black hair, but otherwise he blended nicely with the crowd of midday business travelers. Right down to his laptop. A professional. He glanced around, saw the Atlanta Jazz Festival T-shirt that Wells had promised to wear in his e-mail — a simple, foolproof way to make contact in public — and walked straight over. “You must be Jack,” the man said in clean, soft English with just a hint of a Saudi accent. “I’m Thomas.”

The names were right. Khadri might not be here, but this was his man. “Good to meet you,” Wells said. “How was the weather in Detroit?” A simple question, just to confirm what he already knew.