The Faithful Spy

wells raised the Glock and lined up his target. With the pistol steady he squeezed the trigger. The Glock spoke to him the only way it knew, a short sharp bark. The slide popped back, ejecting a shell, and the weapon kicked in his hands as if it were angry he had fired. Wells controlled the recoil and squeezed the trigger again. And again. And again. And again, lower this time. Finally he put the pistol down and looked downrange. Four holes punctured the center of the target, less than an inch from the bull’seye. The fifth hole was six inches below, and slightly right. Not bad for fifty feet.

Since getting Khadri’s message, Wells had practiced his shooting at American Classic Marksman, a little firing range in a strip mall in Norcross, a few miles from his apartment. He had forgotten how much he enjoyed having a pistol in his hands. He didn’t think of the men he had killed; instead he remembered the hunting trips he had taken each fall with his dad, Herbert.

Once a year they had hiked into the Montana mountains, seeking deer and elk. Wells could almost smell the rich, dark coffee that they brewed each morning, hear the bacon bubbling in their frying pan. He hadn’t eaten bacon since he’d converted. Even now he missed the taste. He and his father walked deep into the mountains, looking for a stand where they could wait in silence for the perfect shot. And the shot had to be perfect, since Herbert allowed Wells to target only one buck each season; if he missed he went home empty-handed. No sense in making the hunt too easy, Dad said. In their third season, Wells finally bagged a whitetail. He could still remember how his pulse had quickened when he saw his shot ring true. The deer had reared back, then listed to the right and fallen. A clean kill. Before Wells had pulled the trigger he had wondered whether killing the buck would bother him. But since that moment he had never been afraid to shoot. He couldn’t pretend he hated killing. Animals killed and animals died; that was the natural order.

wells put aside the Glock and picked up the Makarov that he had bought at a gun show in Chamblee two weeks before. The pistol was identical to the one he had left behind in the hut on the day he’d first met Khadri. As he held it, unexpected memories from the North-West Frontier filled him: the thick stench of raw sewage on summer days; a tiny girl in a full black burqa holding her father’s hand as he led her through the market in Akora Khatak; the notquite-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that he had found one night outside the mosque, and the shock of the whiskey’s pungent aroma when he uncapped the bottle and poured it away. He almost couldn’t believe that he’d left Pakistan just six months ago. Usually he didn’t think much about the place or Sheikh Gul or Naji and the other jihadis he’d known there. They seemed to belong to another life. Maybe it was the way he had left, disappearing so quickly. Or maybe forgetting the frontier was easy because living there had been so hard. Maybe he just didn’t want to know what he would see if he looked back.

He was looking ahead now, getting ready for whatever was coming next. Besides the pistols, he had picked up an assault rifle at the show, a Chinese-made knockoff of an AK-47. But that gun stayed in his apartment, since he had illegally modified it from semiautomatic to full auto.

For close-in work he had bought an old 12-gauge shotgun, worn but mechanically perfect, and sawed the barrels down so far that the shotgun was now only a couple of inches longer than the Glock. He had to leave the 12-gauge at home too. Sawed-off shotguns were illegal too. And for good reason. Beyond ten feet they were worthless, but up close they were as lethal as a rocket-propelled grenade. With luck they could take out two or three men with one pull of the trigger.

Getting silencers had proved more complicated. The dealers at the Chamblee show didn’t like talking about them, and Wells didn’t want to push too hard and wind up buying one from an ATF agent. But with the help of a manual he’d bought at the show, he’d built one in his apartment. He had no illusions about how long it would last, and it wasn’t great for accuracy. But it did quiet down the Makarov a little.

In any case, he didn’t plan to use the silencer unless he had no choice. He preferred knives when silence was a necessity. He had bought a couple of those too, along with holsters, smoke grenades, and pepper spray, all legal in Georgia. From a store in Macon that advertised itself as “Specializing in Home Defense” he had picked up four police-style walkie-talkies, the hands-free kind that clipped to the shoulder. As well as a bulletproof vest, a flak jacket, and a gas mask in case he had to play defense. A trip to an army-navy surplus store had rewarded him with a green camo uniform, and for night work a black ski mask, black sweatpants, a black hood, and black leather gloves.