The Faithful Spy (21 page)

When he was sure he was ready, he opened the second door and stepped inside.

HE HAD SPENT
most of the last two years just setting up the lab. The equipment was expensive, and installing it without attracting attention was difficult, especially since he had to work alone. But this summer, just in time for the arrival of
Y. pestis,
he had finally gotten the space into order.

He had divided the basement into two working areas. Most of the room was open, its floor and walls covered with double layers of clear, heavy plastic sheeting to keep out dirt and grime. Lab benches lined the walls, stacked with his precious equipment: a 1,000-power microscope, a gas spectrometer, fermenters to grow bacteria in solution. A freezer and refrigerator. Mouse cages and autoclaves and Bunsen burners and trays of slides and pipettes. In one corner he had installed a sealed safety cabinet connected through a filter into the house’s air vents. He kept goggles, gloves, gowns, and a portable respirator in a cabinet by the door, next to a small shower. Fluorescent lights overhead gave the room a bright institutional shine.

The space was essentially a crude equivalent of a Biosafety Level 2 lab, like the one at McGill and every university in the world. BSL-2 labs handle germs and viruses that are moderately dangerous and infectious, pathogens that might give their victims a bad fever but are unlikely to kill anyone. Ironically, plague can sometimes be handled in BSL-2 labs, because
Y. pestis
is not a hardy germ. It grows slowly and is easily destroyed by sunlight, rain, even wind. Only in the human body does plague turn monstrous.

But Tarik needed more than a BSL-2 lab for his experiments. He wasn’t just growing plague and anthrax; he wanted to aerosolize them, turn them into airborne particles that could be easily inhaled. For that he should have been working in a Biosafety Level 3 lab or, even better, a secure BSL-4 lab like the one at the Centers for Disease Control.

The standards for BSL-4 labs run hundreds of pages. They must have their own air supply, double air locks that cannot be opened simultaneously, and filters to scrub the air they exhaust. Scientists must never wear their lab clothes outside the lab. They must always shower before leaving, and the shower water itself must be chemically treated. Germs can be moved only after being put inside a double set of unbreakable containers. And for really tricky projects, scientists must work in a “suit area,” a special room where they wear a full body suit with its own oxygen supply, so they will never accidentally breathe the air around them.

Tarik understood the standards. He had seen photographs of victims of smallpox and plague, faces twisted in agony, bodies bloated in death. He respected the power of the vials in his refrigerator. And he would have preferred to run his experiments at the CDC.

But that institution might have frowned on his work. So Tarik built his own suit area. He sealed a five-foot corner of the basement in floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas, then covered the Plexiglas with thick plastic sheeting, creating a plastic bubble whose air could not circulate into the rest of the room except through an intake and exhaust system protected by HEPA filters.

Inside the bubble Tarik needed his own sealed air supply. Because Canada, like other industrialized countries, restricts the sale of full-body positive pressure suits, Tarik couldn’t order one. Instead he used a respirator and oxygen tanks like those worn by scuba divers. To avoid contaminating the open part of the basement, he installed a Plexiglas passage off the door to the bubble, creating a crude airlock. He always changed into and out of his respirator in the airlock. Inside the bubble he had installed a stand-alone safety cabinet that held a mouse cage and a nebulizer, a machine that blew air through liquids to produce aerosol sprays. On the bubble’s plastic floor he had placed a half-size refrigerator and a cage big enough for a cat or a small dog. He hadn’t used the cage yet, but he expected to change that soon.

The space wasn’t ideal. Tarik could work inside it for only short stretches, until his tanks ran out of oxygen. And his respirator wasn’t as reliable as a genuine BSL-4 pressure suit. Still, the bubble had worked so far. He hadn’t gotten sick, and neither had the mice in the open half of the basement, a crude but effective way to measure exposure. Too bad he couldn’t show his professors—they’d be impressed.

TARIK FLICKED ON
the overhead lights and checked to be sure the benches and beakers and agar dishes were exactly as he had left them. Down here the street and the world seemed far away. Only the faint rustling of his mice intruded on the silence. He counted them, making sure none had gone missing.

He stripped naked and folded his clothes on a chair. Normally he worked first with less dangerous germs before entering the bubble. But tonight he wanted to be close to his “specials,”
Y. pestis
and
Bacillus anthracis—
anthrax. He opened the first door of the bubble—the door to the airlock—and stepped inside. He pulled on the shirt, underwear, and sweatpants that he used in the bubble, then slipped a white smock over his clothes. He pulled the door shut and smoothed over the plastic sheeting on the door, sealing off the bubble from the rest of the basement. He picked up his respirator, hooked up his oxygen tank, and pulled the mask over his face. He breathed deeply, making sure the oxygen was flowing smoothly, then cut back on the flow to preserve the tank. Then a cap, booties, and gloves.

Finally he opened the inside door of the airlock and stepped into his bubble.

In here he could have been underwater, or on the moon. Only his breathing broke the perfect silence. He slid noiselessly to the safety cabinet. A week earlier he had grown
Y. pestis
for the first time, placing the bacteria in petri dishes of blood agar at 28 degrees Celsius, about 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Two days later, white colonies of bacteria speckled the red agar, their edges pebbly and uneven. They looked like tiny fried eggs, the telltale shape of
Y. pestis.
They were ugly, Tarik admitted to himself, small and ugly. But anyone who didn’t respect them would be surprised. And he controlled their power. The thought gave him great pleasure.

AFTER GROWING THE
plague, Tarik injected it into six mice. Only one survived more than two days. Now it, too, lay on its side in the safety cabinet. Tarik put the mouse’s carcass in a glass container, then filled the container with hydrochloric acid to destroy the remains. At McGill he would have autopsied the animal to see how exactly it had died, but in here that wasn’t important. He simply wanted to prove to himself that he could grow a good, virulent strain of
Y. pestis.
And he had done just that.

But Tarik knew he had taken only a small step toward his ultimate goal. Infecting people with pneumonic plague was much harder than sticking a needle in a mouse. He needed to figure out a way to spray the germ in a fine mist that could be inhaled and caught in the lungs. He would have to test different solutions, different plague concentrations, chemicals that might allow the mist to disperse more easily without killing the bacteria inside it.

That challenge had perplexed scientists in labs much more sophisticated than this basement. Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic Japanese cult, had spent millions of dollars in the 1990s trying to develop biological weapons, and had even sprayed Tokyo with botulism and anthrax. But Aum had never managed to infect anyone. Its only successful attack had come with nerve gas, which was far easier to make than biological weapons.

Furthermore, military scientists weren’t exactly publishing reports about their experiments with plague. Tarik would have to make his own mistakes. He wished he could talk to someone about the technical difficulties. But his only confidant was Omar Khadri. Khadri was a typical nonscientist. He seemed to think that unleashing an epidemic should be as easy as growing germs in a beaker and then tossing them on subway tracks. He had been bitterly disappointed when Tarik had explained otherwise.

“You received my present?” Khadri had asked in their last conversation, a few days after the plague arrived. Tarik was at a pay phone at a gas station in Longueuil, on the other side of the Saint Lawrence River, miles from his house.

“Yes. Thank you, Uncle.” They always spoke French and never used names or specifics.

“So how long will it be?”

“I can’t say, Uncle.”

“Your best guess then. A month? A few months?”

“For the purpose you require, a few months at the earliest.”

“You know I’m anxious to see your work.”

Tarik shifted anxiously from foot to foot. He hated to disappoint Khadri. “I beg your forgiveness. But this job cannot be rushed.”

“Will you need more money?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“The same as January.” That was $200,000. Tarik had spent carefully, but the equipment he needed was unavoidably expensive.

“The same?” Khadri laughed, but the sound had an edge. “You think your uncle is so rich?”

Tarik said nothing.

“I’ll make the arrangements,” Khadri finally said. “And how is your wife?”

“Uncle, I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t let her become a distraction, my nephew.”

How easy for you to say, Tarik thought. “Will you visit soon? I’d like to see you.”

“I wish I could,” Khadri said. “But I’m very busy these days. You’re sure you don’t have any competitors?”

“I’ve been very careful.”

“Well. Nephew. In this I am in your hands.” Khadri sighed, as if he found that admission particularly painful. “Keep up your work. You know the whole family has great hopes for you. We’ll speak again soon.”

“I won’t disappoint you, Uncle.”

Click.

TARIK WISHED KHADRI
could see the basement now. He was certain his “uncle” would be impressed. Two days before, Tarik had moved colonies of
Y. pestis
from the agar dishes into beakers of brain-heart infusion broth. Now Tarik saw that the transfer had been successful. The broth inside the vials remained clear, but white rings of bacteria lined their glass walls—the sure sign of a plague colony. Unlike most germs,
Y. pestis
did not disperse readily in solution, preferring to remain clumped.

Tarik poured the broth into a glass mixing dish, carefully scraping the colonies of
Y. pestis
off the walls of the beakers. Using a wire, he gently mixed the colonies until the bacteria were scattered through the broth. Now he would test aerosolizing the bacteria. He connected a simple rubber hose to a small electric pump. He dropped the free end of the hose into the dish and turned on the pump. A moment later bubbles began gurgling out of the broth, as if it were a primordial stew about to boil over.

This was the most basic way to aerosolize bacteria, Tarik knew. But he wanted to see whether
Y. pestis
could survive being moved between the beakers and the dish, and whether this basic aerosol could cause infection. In the scientific vernacular, this was a proof-of-concept experiment. And so Tarik had put six more mice in a cage beside the mixing dish. They crawled calmly around their metal pen, oblivious to their fate.

Tarik worked for another half hour inside the bubble, transferring plague colonies between agar dishes and beakers of broth. He had more experiments planned, and he would need much more
Y. pestis.
He took careful notes, recording the temperature and humidity in the cage, the number of bubbles rising from the dish every second. Simple stuff, to be sure. But most laypeople didn’t understand that a thousand hours of tedium in the lab paved the way for every breakthrough. One step at a time, and he would get where he needed to be.

9

THE DOORMAN TIPPED
his cap as Exley walked into the Jefferson Hotel, her low heels clacking on the lobby’s marble floor, the hotel’s air conditioning a relief from the muggy summer night.

“Good evening, Ms. Exley.”

“How are you, Rafael?”

“Never better, ma’am.”

She turned right, into the lounge, a quiet red-walled room whose dark wood tables seemed as if they should be crowded with politicians and lobbyists. Instead the space was mostly empty. The Jefferson had never matched the glamour of the Hay-Adams, and with the arrival of the Ritz-Carlton and other five-star hotels it had fallen permanently into second-tier status, a dowager whose rooms filled after the rest sold out.

But Exley liked the hotel’s faded elegance, the bouquet of flowers in the lobby, the way the doormen knew her. Plus, the Jefferson was on Fifteenth Street, a short walk from her apartment. After a couple of drinks she could wobble home. Tonight she’d stopped in for a special treat, a meeting of the S.L. Club, five professional women who saw each other for drinks every few weeks. One was a reporter for the
Post,
another a lawyer at Williams & Connolly. They were all divorced or never married, all middle-aged or older. Exley hated to define herself as middle-aged. Ugh. But she was, by any reasonable standard. Soon enough she’d be closing in on menopause. Okay, maybe not that soon, but still.

The S.L. Club had no bylaws, no fees, and no real purpose, aside from giving its five members a chance to vent about work and family and sneak a couple of cigarettes that their kids didn’t need to see. Exley had met Lynette, its informal leader, at an interminable Fourth of July party three years before.

The five of them were friends, but not a part of one another’s lives. So they could be honest with each other about their sputtering parents and complicated children. About ex-husbands who had remarried and decided that they wouldn’t pay for private school for their kids anymore. About minor triumphs at work and home, bureaucratic victories or honors their kids had won. In fact, that was probably the best thing about the club. Women weren’t supposed to brag, and Exley liked having the chance to celebrate a little when things went right. She looked forward to these gatherings, even—especially—when work became overwhelming, as it had been for months. But tonight she was distracted.

THEY WERE IN
the corner, as usual, and she was late, as usual. She took the last seat, a glass of wine already poured for her. “To the Sophisticated Ladies,” they all said, glasses raised.

“The Sophisticated Ladies.” Clink.

A somewhat bitter joke. The initials stood for Self-Loathing as well. Did they really hate themselves? Probably not. But Exley could always hear a little voice deep in her head, and she guessed the other four women could too: Your kids don’t even think of you as their real mom anymore. You’re going to be alone the rest of your life. Worst of all, words she knew the others didn’t hear: There’s a pattern in the intercepts. Something is coming, and you’re too dumb to see it.

She needed to stop this second guessing before she shook herself apart. There wasn’t any pattern. She couldn’t analyze information that didn’t exist. That damn voice. Men didn’t hear that voice. Men expected success even when they failed; women awaited failure even after they had succeeded.

Lynette, a slim black woman who was a producer at NBC, caught her eye. “You okay, baby? You look stressed.”

“Just fine.” Exley tried to smile.

“We find Osama yet?” They all knew Exley worked at the agency, though not what she did.

“You’re asking the wrong woman,” Exley said. “I’m just a secretary.”

“I know you run that place.”

“If I ran it, things would be different.” The joke was almost automatic, but Lynette smiled anyway, and after a moment Exley did too.

“That is the truth.” Lynette raised her glass.

THE AGENCY AND
the Joint Terrorism Task Force had worked nonstop in the months since the Los Angeles bombings. But the investigators still hadn’t identified the bombers, much less figured out how they had accumulated three tons of ammonium nitrate without anyone noticing. Either they had gotten the stuff through customs or they had built a stash bit by bit while living in America for years. Exley couldn’t decide which prospect was worse. And she worried that the attacks had been designed as a diversion. Even the United States government didn’t have infinite resources. The FBI had put some of its best agents on the bombing case, pulling them from other open investigations. Exley understood the instinct; the families of the dead wanted answers and arrests at any cost. She just hoped that the cost wouldn’t include another attack.

She and Shafer were looking ahead. They had spent the spring and summer poring over the databases the JTTF used to track the movements and communications of every known al Qaeda member, searching for patterns the first-line analysts had missed. So far they hadn’t found much. Over the years the intelligence community had accumulated evidence that al Qaeda had at least one sleeper network somewhere inside the United States. Network X, some people at the agency called it. Two or three cells, between six and twenty agents in all. Put in place before September 11. Al Qaeda’s secret weapon. Waiting for orders to launch a big attack, presumably chemical or biological or radiological. Or nuclear, God forbid. And last month the NSA had picked up an e-mail that indicated that al Qaeda had somehow gotten nuclear material into the United States. But the message was unconfirmed, and no one knew how—or even if—it tied into Network X.

Not that Exley would mention any of this to the Sophisticated Ladies. Much less the early-morning phone call she had gotten two weeks before. She poured herself another glass of wine and decided to try to relax. “Girls,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

Gretchen, a petite gray-haired woman, leaned in. “So…”

“So?”

“Don’t play dumb with us, Jennifer. How was your date?”

Exley didn’t feel like having this conversation again. “Isn’t it amazing?”

“What?” Gretchen said.

“The five of us, we’re all attractive. All financially stable, all reasonably sane.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lynette said, getting a laugh.

“No, really. And we’re lucky to get, what—two dates a month? Not two each. Two for all five of us.”

“Hey,” said Ann, the lawyer. “I got propositioned just last week at this conference in Atlanta. I mean, he was married, but he did take off his ring before he asked. I thought that was sweet.”

This time the laughter had an edge. The Sophisticated Ladies got plenty of propositions from married men at bars—or, worse, at work. They got invitations to cocktail parties from guys who had never married and were probably closet cases. What they didn’t get were real dates from divorced men their own age. Unless they didn’t want more kids, those guys inevitably wound up with women at least a decade younger.

“Stop stalling,” Gretchen said to Exley. “How was it?”

Normally Exley submitted to these interrogations without much resistance, though privately she wished they would spend less time talking about men. Nothing ever changed, so what was the point? But tonight she had no appetite for Gretchen’s questions. She wanted to sit and drink her wine.

“Must have been good,” Ann said. “You look tired.”

“Leave her alone,” Lynette said. “Least let the lady finish her wine.”

EXLEY HAD MENTALLY
replayed the call from Wells a hundred times. She had traced the number—an exchange in Nashville, a cellphone, which meant it could have been made from anywhere. She could easily call a friend at the FBI to find out where. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to take that step.

Nor had she told anyone at the agency, even Shafer, about the call. She feared she would lose control if she did. They would tap her phone, monitor her apartment. After all, Wells was a fugitive. Duto had a couple of his goons searching for Wells in the United States without telling the FBI—even though the agency’s charter specifically prohibited it from operating on American soil. Duto had somehow convinced his general counsel that the CIA could search for Wells under an exception to its charter that allowed limited investigations of internal security breaches.

Exley assumed that the search for Wells was small and basically for show, so that Duto would have his ass covered in case something happened to Wells. She didn’t think Duto seriously considered Wells a threat. In fact, he might be glad to have Wells on the loose. This way Duto would still get credit on the off chance that Wells stopped an attack, while being able to blame Shafer if Wells screwed up or turned up dead. But she couldn’t be sure, since Duto refused to give her or Shafer any details about the search—though he had told her that she needed to tell him if Wells contacted her.

“I want to know
personally,
” he had said. “You understand, Jennifer?”

Disobeying direct orders from Vinny Duto was a bad idea. But Exley didn’t care. She was certain Wells hadn’t flipped. She wanted to protect him as best she could, save him from being warehoused in a cell somewhere. If he found anything important, he would reach out.

Meanwhile, she wished she knew where he was now, what he was doing, what he thought of the agency’s games. What did he think of the United States, after his years away? And what about her? Did he think of her the way she thought of him? He was a constant presence in her mind, and his call had made her believe that he felt the same, but she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he had reached out to her only because he had no one else. Yet when she’d hung up the phone she’d realized that the call hadn’t surprised her at all; subconsciously, she had expected it.

Her overwhelming desire for Wells confused her. She was basically logical, and yet somehow she had fallen for a man she had seen for all of two weeks in the last ten years, a man who had probably lost his mind somewhere in the hills of Afghanistan. But he hadn’t seemed crazy in the Jeep; his brown eyes had seemed entirely calm. In any case, he wasn’t like anyone else she had ever known.

In her more cynical moments she wondered if she wasn’t lost in an escape fantasy. A strong silent man to take her away. If he happens to be a renegade agent even better. She wished she could tell the Sophisticated Ladies about the situation. They would appreciate the irony. She had always prided herself on keeping her feelings out of the office. Women so easily got tagged as weepers who couldn’t be trusted under pressure. Even during her divorce only Shafer had known how badly she was hurting. Now she had thrown away her rules for a man she would probably never see again. If the stakes weren’t so high, she would have laughed at herself.

For the moment she had decided to think of the call as a dream. That way she didn’t have to report it.

A tap from Gretchen shook her out of her reverie. “Come on, Jennifer. Share.”

Fine. She would tell them about her date. “There’s nothing to share. His name’s Charles Li, a cardiologist at Georgetown. Divorced. We went out last week.”

“Where?”

“Olives.”

“Very nice.”

And so very predictable, Exley thought. Olives was an overpriced restaurant on Sixteenth and K with a big-name chef and a fancy wine list. She had to guess that Wells would never take her to Olives.

“So…how it’d go?”

“It went fine. I learned a lot about stents. And Lipitor. You all should have your cholesterol checked. Did you know that heart disease kills more women than any other illness, including breast cancer?”

Lynette shook her head. “That bad, huh?”

“Let’s just say I didn’t get to talk much.”

“You know you have to let them talk about themselves on the first date,” Gretchen said. “Has he called?”

“Oh yeah.” Called, sent flowers, called some more. Dr. Li was persistent. Persistent enough that she had considered giving him another chance, despite his potbelly and comb-over. At least the good doctor was making an effort.

“Well that counts for something—” Gretchen said as Exley’s cellphone rang. She flipped it open.

“Pack a bag for warm weather and get in here.” It was Shafer. Click.

SHE WAS GLAD
for the excuse to go. She quickly said her goodbyes and arrived at Langley an hour later to find Shafer sitting on her desk, a suitcase at his feet.

“What took you so long?”

“Ellis. I set a land speed record getting here.”

“I have a special treat. Come on.” He grabbed his suitcase and strutted out of her office, leaving her to follow. Evidently she wasn’t the only one losing her mind.

At the best of times Shafer was an uncertain driver. Tonight he veered from lane to lane, speeding and tailgating, as they headed south, then east on the Beltway, toward Andrews Air Force Base.

“Where are we going, Ellis?”

“You’re an analyst. Analyze the situation.”

She felt herself flush with irritation. Shafer must be nervous. He wasn’t usually so juvenile.

“Ellis. This isn’t a fucking class trip.”

“Temper temper.”

“Fine,” she said. “Looks like we’re headed to Andrews. And you told me to pack for warm weather. I’ll say Gitmo.”

“Guantánamo?” Shafer laughed. “Come on, reporters tour that base. You think we keep anybody important there?”

“Then where?”

“A long way away.”

“Kuwait? Oman?”

“A place that doesn’t exist.”

“Diego Garcia,” she said.

“Well done.”

Diego Garcia was a U.S. naval base on a British island in the Indian Ocean, one thousand miles from the southern tip of India, even farther from Africa. The base wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t exactly well publicized either. The Pentagon always denied holding al Qaeda members there, mainly to soothe British sensibilities. The Pentagon lied, Exley knew; Diego was home to several al Qaeda operatives.

“May I ask why?” she said. “Or do I have to play Twenty Questions again?”

“A month ago we caught somebody in Baghdad. A Pakistani nuclear scientist.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”