The Faithful Spy

“Ellis—” Wells stopped himself. He wanted to ask Shafer about Exley, where she stood, but he would have that conversation with her directly.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks,” Wells said.

Shafer looked at his watch. “The poly’s in an hour.”

“Am I a prisoner, Ellis?”

“That’s for the lawyers to decide. Let’s say you’re a guest.”

“Like the Hotel California?”

“You’re showing your age, John.” Shafer opened the door.

“It’s not locked?”

“Not for me,” Shafer said. And walked out, closing the door behind him. wells hadn’t taken a polygraph since his agency training, and he was surprised when he realized that a flat-panel computer monitor on the examiner’s desk had replaced the paper-and-needles box. Otherwise the room hadn’t changed: beige walls, a thickly padded chair, and an obvious one-way mirror on the far wall.

“Sit,” said the examiner, a tough-looking guy, early fifties, with the thick forearms and unfriendly squint of a marine gunnery sergeant. He strapped a blood-pressure cuff around Wells’s arm, tightened rubber tubes around his chest, and attached electrodes to his fingers. “Pull up your pant leg.”

Wells hesitated, then rolled up his jeans. The examiner knelt next to Wells’s left leg. He pushed down Wells’s sock and pulled a straight razor from his pocket. “Hold still.” He shaved a patch of Wells’s calf and pasted another electrode to the spot. He stepped back to consult his monitor.

“What’s your name?” His tone was harsh, as if Wells were a prisoner.

Wells controlled his temper, visualizing the top of Lost Trail Pass, the Montana mountains.

“Easy, killer,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“You can call me Walter. What’s your name?”

“Walter what?”

“What’s your name?”

Wells knew he couldn’t win this fight. He could either pull off the electrodes and walk out — and be back where he started — or answer Walter’s questions. “John Wells.”

“Where were you born?”

“Hamilton, Montana.”

“When?”

“July 6, 1969.”

“Any siblings?”

“No.”

Walter slowly worked his way through Wells’s life: the name of his first-grade teacher, the make and model of his first car. Sometimes he moved quickly, sometimes slowly, sipping from a water bottle as he mulled or pretended to mull his next question. The air in the room grew heavy and stale and Wells wondered if the airconditioning had been turned off to make him uncomfortable. But he stayed patient, knowing Walter wanted to irritate him, distract him, so that the real questions would come almost as a relief. Finally they began.

“When did you first go to Afghanistan?”

“In 1996.”

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t think I’d forget.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean for the agency.”

“You mean when Osama called me after I graduated college, said he had a job for me. That time? Come on, Walter.”

Walter said nothing.

“I never went to Afghanistan before 1996,” Wells said slowly. “I never went to Afghanistan except on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Flew into Islamabad, found a ride over the border. The usual route.”

“What was your cover?”

“NOC.” Nonofficial cover, the CIA’s term for an agent who had no open connection to the U.S. government, as opposed to one supposedly working for the State Department or another federal agency. “Very nonofficial. I was a backpacker, a small-time dopehead.”

“Were you nervous?”

Wells laughed. “I was too dumb to be nervous.”

“Someone in Kabul knew you were coming.”

“Didn’t we just go through this?”

“You were in contact with al Qaeda even before your first mission.”

“I never even heard of Osama bin Laden until that first trip.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Walter. He walked Wells through the details of his first trip to Kabul and Kandahar. Wells answered mechanically, in his mind seeing Afghanistan. The thick sweet smell of a goat roasting over a spit, the moaning of an exhausted horse being whipped to death because it could no longer pull a cart. The Afghans, so hospitable and so cruel.

The snap of Walter’s fingers pulled Wells out of his reverie. “Pay attention.”

“Can I have some water?” Wells didn’t want to ask, but he was badly thirsty. Walter pulled a bottle out of his bag, and Wells gulped from it. For the first time he felt their kinship. They were both pros, just doing their jobs. Of course, Walter wanted him to feel that way.

“what were you doing in Kabul that first time?”

“Trying to recruit. Unsuccessfully.”

“What went wrong?”

“Where should I start? I hardly spoke Pashto. Under U.S. law I wasn’t supposed to recruit anybody dirty. Remember that stroke of genius, Walter? I was frigging twenty-seven years old and I was gonna turn these guys who’d been lying to each other for a thousand years?”

“You failed to recruit a single agent.”

“I didn’t even try. I would have blown my cover, gotten myself killed.”

Walter walked toward Wells.

“When did they tell you about 9/11?”

Switching abruptly from a comfortable line of questioning was an old trick, but effective. Wells’s pulse quickened. “I found out afterward like everyone else.”

“Why didn’t you warn the agency beforehand?”