The Faithful Spy

Q: Were you sorry you had broken his leg?

A: It was a clean hit. Violence is part of the game. Q: So you weren’t sorry?

A: Not at all.

What if Wells had been doubled? What if he had decided that violence against the United States was part of the game? Exley shook her head. If Wells had wanted to stay hidden, he wouldn’t have contacted his ex-wife. Still, Exley wished he would report in. Soon. Before something blew up. josh goldsmith didn’t want to be nervous, but he couldn’t help himself. This morning was Thursday. His bar mitzvah was in two days, and even before that he’d have to speak on Friday night. For what felt like the thousandth time he looked at the photocopied section of the Torah he was supposed to read, making sure he had it memorized.

A knock on his door startled him. “Ready for school, sweetie?”

He shook his head, annoyed. “I’m studying, Mom.”

“You’ll miss breakfast.”

“I just need a couple minutes.” His voice broke. God, he was pathetic. Would he ever get through puberty like a normal kid?

“At least put your socks on—”

“Okay, okay.” Like most Reform Jews, the Goldsmiths were not particularly religious. But Josh was a studious child, and he had worked hard for the ritual ceremony of his bar mitzvah. Still, he was nervous, both for the ceremony on Saturday morning and the party afterward. Most of the kids at school had turned down their invitations. Josh tried not to feel too bad about it. His real friends would be there anyway. He looked at the poster of Shawn Green — a Jewish first baseman, once of his beloved Dodgers, now traded to Arizona — taped above his bed.

“Think Blue,” Josh whispered to himself, the Dodgers’ motto, the giant letters visible in the hillside beyond the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. “Think Blue, Blue, Blue.” Think Blue. He reached up a fist and tapped Shawn Green. He knew his reading perfectly. He’d be fine.

t h e s t e e l d ru m s shone dully under the van’s overhead light. Holding a handkerchief over his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow too much dust, Khadri stepped into the van’s cargo compartment. He lifted the rusted top of the drum by the van’s back doors and ran his fingers through the small off-white pellets that filled about threequarters of the drum. The van held a dozen similar drums, about twenty-seven hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate in all. Khadri had already checked out the first bomb, which was even larger and hidden in a panel truck in a shed in Tulare, fifty miles north. Khadri smiled to himself. No one would ever mistake Aziz or Fakhr for brilliant, but building a good ANFO bomb didn’t require brilliance, just patience and steady hands. His men had both. As they had been taught in the camps, Aziz and Fakhr had wired the barrels with dynamite charges that would set off the initial explosion and arranged the nitrate barrels in a shaped charge to maximize the force of the blast. Khadri checked the wires again. Everything was in order. They just needed to pour in fuel oil, stir, and blow. ANFO was a bomber’s dream, Khadri thought. Governments could crack down on antiaircraft missiles and machine guns. But as long as farmers needed fertilizer and truckers had to drive, the ingredients for an ammonium nitrate — fuel oil bomb would be available everywhere. Even better, ANFO wasn’t volatile. After it was mixed, it could be driven hundreds of miles without much risk of accidental detonation. Which was convenient when your targets were inside a major city — say, Los Angeles. And ANFO was shockingly effective. A truckful of the stuff would take out an office building, as Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had proved in Oklahoma City. During the 1970s, the U.S. military had even used it to simulate nuclear explosions. Still, Khadri was not sorry that he had taken the time to examine the bombs for himself, just as he had done his own target reconnaissance the night before. After the problems on the United flight, he intended to see to the success of this operation himself. These bombings would be a crucial diversion from the mega-attack coming next, and he could not allow another mistake. He had planned the attack carefully. The truck and van were untraceable, bought for cash under fake names. Similarly, Fakhr and Aziz had built their cache of ammonium nitrate a hundred pounds at a time, while keeping a low profile. Until two weeks before, they had worked as cabbies and lived in a basement apartment in the Rampart district, a gritty neighborhood north of downtown Los Angeles. They rented month to month, always paid cash, always paid on time. It was their fifth apartment; Khadri insisted they move every year, so the neighbors never got friendly. Not that Rampart was known for its warmth.