The Faithful Spy

t h e n s h a f e r c o n v i n c e d the Directorate of Operations that the agency needed someone to recruit inside the Taliban. He picked Wells, and Exley understood why the moment she saw him on a trip to the Farm, the agency’s training grounds at Camp Peary in tidewater Virginia. Wells looked swarthy and vaguely Arab. He was tall and strong, maybe six foot two and two hundred and ten pounds, but he didn’t hold himself like a soldier. Instead he had a sleepy-eyed confidence that seemed unshakable. In fact — and even now, a decade later, the memory brought a flush to her cheeks — her first impression when she met him was that he carried himself like a man who was a very good fuck. And knew it. Highly inappropriate, she knew. Totally inappropriate, especially for a professional and a happily married woman. But there it was. More to the point, Wells spoke Arabic, was learning Pashtun, and had studied the Koran. He eagerly agreed to a recon trip to Kabul and Kandahar. Exley would be his handler, although in truth she had little to do but hope Wells’s performance matched his pedigree. Wells disappeared to Afghanistan for six months, a month longer than he was supposed to, and returned to Langley without a single agent. Recruiting was impossible, he said. The Taliban wouldn’t accept outsiders. Exley was disappointed, but not surprised. Then Wells talked about bin Laden. The agency was monitoring him as a terrorism financier; Wells insisted he was more. Bin Laden was building training camps in Afghanistan and planned a jihad against the United States and Saudi Arabia, Wells said. But he was short on specifics. He hadn’t seen the camps. His information was hearsay. Exley remembered the moment vividly.

“Everybody hates us,” she’d said. “What makes this guy different?”

“I saw him once in Kabul,” Wells said. “There’s something in his eyes. We need to take him seriously.”

“Something in his eyes?” Shafer didn’t hide his sarcasm. “You didn’t even get inside the camps, son. For all you know they’re roasting marshmallows and singing ‘Kumbaya’ in there.”

Wells grunted as if he’d been hit. He’s never failed like this before, Exley thought. Her sympathy was limited. No one was right all the time, and the sooner Wells learned that lesson the better. Welcome to the real world. Wells stood and leaned over the conference table where she sat beside Shafer.

“I’ll go back. I’ll get in.”

“You can’t.”

“Authorize it, sign the waivers. I’ll get in.”

“Okay,” Shafer said. He had wanted Wells to say that all along, Exley realized later.

w e l l s d i d g e t in. He never said how and Exley never asked, since the answer no doubt included violations of agency regs and U.S. law. Langley didn’t know what to do with Wells; most field agents looked for informants at dinner parties. Wells was simply trying to prove himself to al Qaeda, while sending back what he could about the group’s structure and plans. In 1998, after months of silence, Wells reported that al Qaeda planned to attack U.S. interests — most likely an embassy — in East Africa. But he didn’t have specifics, and the agency could not correlate his warning. Without much interest, the CIA dutifully told the State Department about the report, and State dutifully filed it away. Two weeks later, suicide bombers blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died. The agency started taking bin Laden, and Wells, more seriously. Just before the millennium Wells helped disrupt a planned bombing of two hotels in Cairo on New Year’s Eve. The plot was in its final stages; the agency believed it would have succeeded if not for Wells. In his final contact with Exley, Wells said he was going to Chechnya. He had volunteered for the mission to reestablish his bona fides; after the Egyptian plot failed, a Qaeda lieutenant had wondered openly whether he was responsible. I have to prove myself to them every day, he had said; they don’t fully trust me, and I’m not sure they ever will. Exley could not even imagine the pressures he faced. Then silence. Wells’s connection to the agency was strictly oneway; Exley had no way to reach him. Still, after the millennial plot, Langley viewed him as an ace in the hole, the last fail-safe if everything else went wrong. Except on September 11 the ace turned into a joker. Or so Wells’s former fans believed, especially when he vanished after his cryptic note in the fall of 2001. Exley had the distinct impression that Vinny Duto wished that Wells were dead. Dead, he was a hero, an agent who’d made the ultimate sacrifice. Alive, he was a failure at best, a traitor at worst. Of course Duto was too smart to set Wells up as a scapegoat for his failure to prevent 9/11. But Duto would be out for blood if Wells ever turned up.

Now, looking again at Wells’s file, Exley wondered if Duto might be right. She could not understand why Wells had come back to the United States without telling the agency. Without telling her. She thumbed through the poly.