The Faithful Spy (15 page)

He slowed down. “Is it wrong for me to imagine how you must have looked back then?”

“I looked
good.
I mean, I can say it now that I’m old and decrepit: I was hot. And I was wearing this thigh-high skirt and these boots…. My mother had a lot on her mind or she never would have let me out of the house.”

“You’re not old, Jenny.”

“Too kind. So, anyway, I catch the BART to Oakland, ’cause I’m not even legal to drive, remember. And I start walking around this kind of crummy neighborhood, because this is before every square foot in the Bay Area is worth a million dollars, and I’m starting to get nervous, and then I find it. And it’s loud, amped up, a big party in a big run-down house. There were some Berkeley students, but there were grad students too, and some guys from the neighborhood who’d come by and even some bikers, because that’s what Oakland was then. If you were having a party you’d better invite the locals. The girls were a little younger, but they were all in college at least. And I grab myself a beer and take a couple bong hits from this bong that must have been about four feet long. And I start looking for Mr. Right.”

“Jenny—”

“Too late. Let me finish.” She knew she had to tell him everything. To provoke him, to arouse him, she wasn’t even sure. “And I see a blond guy, surfer type, tall, cute. Not rough. Maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. I start heading toward him, but before I can get to him, this guy in a black T-shirt grabs my arm. He’s got a couple tattoos on his arms. And he’s holding me pretty close. He asks me if I want a beer or maybe something harder, and he’s practically sticking his tongue down my throat while he says it. But I shake him off and head for the surfer.

“And Blondie’s interested, and it only takes about half an hour before I get him to a bedroom upstairs, and we’re making out, and he’s good and hard, and I say something dumb, like ‘Put it in me, stud.’ He looks at me and says, ‘What did you say?’ Then he looks again, and says, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ and he’s out the door like that, moving even faster when I say, ‘But I
want
you to fuck me. I don’t wanna be a virgin anymore.’”

“So you didn’t lose it that night after all.”

“Let a girl finish, John. So I go back downstairs, and I find Mr. Tattoo. And I say, ‘How about that drink?’ And ten minutes later he’s fucking me on this pool table in the basement, with a towel under me because that was his main concern about my virginity, that I not bleed all over the felt, ’cause he knew the guys who rented the house. He probably only went about five minutes, but it seemed like a
long
time. I was lucky I was still a little wet from the surfer, or it really would have hurt.”

“Jenny—”

“And the kicker is, when he’s done, and I’ve bled all over that towel, he tosses his condom next to me, pulls up his pants, turns around, and leaves without a word.”

WELLS PULLED THE
Jeep to the side of the road. A light rain had just begun, misting the windshield, putting halos on the streetlights. Cars cruised by slowly, driven by men and women who worked in malls or hospitals or offices downtown and lived decent quiet lives. People he would never know.

Why, Jenny, he almost said aloud. Why would you? But he held back. She’d done it because she wanted to, and told him because she wanted to, and who was he to judge? His career choice didn’t exactly give him a lot of moral authority. “So were you glad you did it?” he finally said.

She moved closer to him in her seat, and he knew he’d asked the right question. “Yeah. Even though I never did anything like that again. It’s like dropping acid. A little goes a long way. But the truth is, I was giving something to the guy, even if he thought he was taking it from me. I did it how I wanted to. Maybe it sounds crazy, but it’s how I felt. And I never talked to him again. Never even knew his name. Though I’m pretty sure I spotted him years later in Berkeley, when I was back from college. Luckily I was in my car, and I just kept driving. So there’s your story, John, and I hope it keeps you warm wherever you’re going.” She laughed her low smoky laugh.

HE LOOKED AT
her, looked away, then back again. “Can I ask you something?” he finally said, his voice so low she could hardly hear him.

“No more stories.”

“You didn’t show up that night, the night before I went away, did you?”

“No, and I knew you wouldn’t either. We keep blowing our chances. Now unless you want to spend some more time with Vinny Duto, you better go.”

“Jenny. Jennifer—” And she knew what he would ask before the words left his mouth. Maybe before the thought had formed in his mind.

“Yes. I do.”

“Do what?”

“I trust you, John. Of course. Why do you think I just told you what I just told you?” He seemed to want to say something more, but he didn’t. He leaned toward her and for a moment she thought he would kiss her. She stayed still, not moving toward him or away, mesmerized, wanting and angry and afraid at once. But wanting more than anything. And then he kissed her, across the miles and the years. A chaste kiss, lip to lip, that turned warm and open-mouthed and sweet until finally she summoned the will to break it off.

“Go,” she said.

“Look. You know that park in Kenilworth, the Aquatic Gardens?” he said. The Gardens was a small national park on the east bank of the Anacostia River, near the projects where Wells had stolen the Jeep.

“In East Cap?”

“If I need you, I’ll leave you a message with the word ‘swimmingly.’ That’s where I’ll be.”

“What if I need you?”

He didn’t say anything. She ran her hand down his cheek. He raised his chin as if receiving a benediction.

“Take care, John.”

He was silent. Finally, he laughed, a rueful sound. “Be seeing you.”

She got out. He hesitated, then drove off. She watched the Cherokee go, watched until she couldn’t see it anymore, and then kept watching. As if she could bring him back simply by staying still. She wanted more than anything to be in that Jeep.

Be seeing you, John.

Please.

PART TWO

THE
BELIEVERS

6

Baghdad, Iraq

ON THE BATTALION
radio, A Company used the call sign “Mad Dog.” As in “Mad Dog 6 to Bushmaster 6, moving out, over.” The other companies in the 2-7 Cav battalion, the armored unit that covered northwest Baghdad, had found call signs to match their letters. B Company went by “Bushmaster.” C had settled on “Commando” after briefly trying “Crusader.”

But no one in A Company could think of a kick-ass word that started with A, except for “Anarchist,” which—like “Crusader”—sent the wrong message. For a while A Company had called itself the Angry Dogs, but that sounded stupid. Then Angry Mad Dogs, which was worse. Eventually Jimmy Jackson, the captain of A Company, gave up on alliteration and said Mad Dog would be the company’s handle. Good thing too, Specialist J. C. Ramirez thought. Hearing “Angry Mad Dog 6 to Angry Mad Dog 2” over the radio was driving him nuts.

Up in the gunner’s sling of Captain Jackson’s Humvee, J.C. mopped the sweat off his face. He used to think Texas was hot, but these Iraqi summers were something else. The sun had almost set, but it was still one hundred degrees. His body armor didn’t help. He drank a gallon of water a day and never had to piss, because he sweated every drop out. And though he stuffed himself with chow, he’d lost twenty pounds in nine months. The Baghdad diet. His uniform hung loose on his five-ten frame.

“They don’t feed you?” his mama had asked him when he came home to El Paso in July for his two-week leave. “They starving you to save money, is that it?” He told her the chow was fine, but she didn’t believe him. She was ready to write the president before he calmed her down. He understood. The food gave her something to focus on, something small that kept her mind off the real stuff. Or maybe she was just being a Mexican mama, looking for any excuse to stuff him with enchiladas.

Either way he’d be back with her and his girl again soon. A couple more months, and then he would never have to see this place again…until his next rotation. This was his first time over here, but lots of the guys in the 2-7 were already on their second trip. Like most soldiers, J.C. figured this war would go on awhile, no matter what the politicians said.

Almost seven-thirty. They’d been waiting to roll for an hour. J.C. was getting bored. Typical false alarm. They planned four raids for every one that happened. “How much you wanna bet it’s off?” he yelled down to Corporal Mike Voss, the Humvee’s driver. Voss just shook his head.

Then J.C. saw Captain Jackson walking toward the Humvee, Jackson’s quick clipped stride telling J.C. that they would be going out tonight after all.

THE HUMVEE ROLLED
to the two-inch-thick steel gates that served as Camp Graphite’s front door. J.C. tugged his armor down tight over his shoulders and pulled his pistol from his leg holster. He had cleaned it a day before, but he double-checked the slide, as he always did before leaving the base. The metal slipped back smoothly. Good. He chambered a round and slipped the pistol back onto his leg. Not that he expected to need the 9mm. It was a popgun compared to the .50-cal on the Humvee’s roof, much less the machine cannons on the Bradleys or the 120mm main guns on the tanks. If somebody got through all that he was in deep shit, pistol or no. But extra firepower never hurt.

They crossed through the gates, and at his feet J.C. heard the barking chorus of “Who Let the Dogs Out” for the hundredth time:

Who let the dogs out
Woof woof woof woof

Naturally the Mad Dogs used the song as their slogan; they played it every time they left base. J.C. tried to remember when the song had come out. Was he in eighth grade? Ninth? Probably ninth. A smile creased the corners of his mouth. That dumb song was good luck. None of the Mad Dogs had died here. The other companies in the 2-7 hadn’t been so fortunate. A car bomb had blown up one of Bushmaster’s Humvees, and a sniper had shot Lieutenant Poley of Commando and gotten away clean. Freaking sniper. Maybe the Mad Dogs would have a chance at him tonight.

The Humvee swung through the chicane of concrete barriers that protected the front gate, then accelerated down a wide avenue west of Baghdad’s tattered zoo. J.C. concentrated his attention on the zoo’s deserted grounds, a natural hiding place for a guy with a rocket-propelled grenade. He had learned the hard way that ambushes could come anytime, anywhere.

J.C. was a gunner. His buddies said he had the worst job in the army: sitting in a harness in a hole in the roof of the Humvee, handling a machine gun that swung 360 degrees. On hot days—which meant every day—he baked in the sun. When they rode the highways he ate dust and diesel fuel and came back to base spitting black clods of phlegm. And gunners had the highest pucker factor around. As in the pucker your asshole makes when you’re squeezing back your fear. The tanks and Bradleys had thick steel armor. Even the Humvees had steel plates and heavy bulletproof glass. J.C. just had his helmet and flak jacket, which wouldn’t do much good against an RPG.

But he liked the job. He didn’t want to be stuck inside a tank. Up here he could spot ambushes and bombs. He had so much to watch for, and yet he couldn’t get trigger-happy. A C Company gunner had shot a kid carrying a toy gun, a mistake J.C. had promised himself he’d never make. He knew how to make a crowd back off without firing a shot, and how to tell the heavy thump of a mortar from the deadly hiss of a RPG. Even the officers had figured out he was the best gunner in the company, maybe the whole battalion. So he always rode with Captain Jackson.

The Humvee turned left on Santa Fe, a main east-west avenue in central Baghdad. The Iraqis didn’t call the road Santa Fe, of course. They had their own haji name for it, Mohammed Avenue or something. J.C. wasn’t entirely sure. None of the soldiers spoke Arabic, so for the sake of convenience the battalion had renamed the roads after American cities.

Now, squinting into the setting sun as the convoy headed west, J.C. wished he had learned more about Iraq. He had picked up a few Arabic words from Salim, Captain Jackson’s interpreter, a teenager the Mad Dogs called Harry because he wore little round glasses like Harry Potter. Salim had taught him that
abu
meant father and
umm
mother. He could count to ten:
wahid, ithnien, thalatha…
Salim had even told him that
haji—
the word J.C. and every other soldier used to describe anything local—wasn’t just some random word. It meant someone who had taken a hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, a big deal for these guys.

Even so, J.C. felt like he was on the moon most of the time. He didn’t understand this place. Why did the men wear those long robes that looked like dresses? Why did they hold hands? And what was up with the women? He’d been inside Iraqi houses with Captain Jackson, and it was like the women didn’t even exist. Once they had served tea, but usually they hid in the back of the house. Not that J.C. had tried to find them. Command Sergeant Major Holder, the senior enlisted man in the battalion, had made that clear. Don’t look at the women, don’t talk to the women, and never—ever—touch the women.

The Iraqis were hospitable enough, anyhow. Even the ones who barely had furniture made sure to offer up tea and Cokes to Captain Jackson when he visited. But you couldn’t trust them much. J.C. had seen the captain lose his temper after one long meeting with a local sheikh. “Just be honest with me. Tell me the truth,” Jackson had said. The sheikh had flat-out laughed when he heard Salim translate. “The truth?” he said. “I save the truth for Allah.”

THE HUMVEE HALTED
as the cars ahead jammed around a traffic circle. Everyone wanted to be home by dark, when kidnappers and guerrillas ruled the streets, sharks cruising in black BMW sedans with smoked-glass windows. J.C. cursed as he looked up the road at an old Mercedes truck belching diesel smoke. He hated getting stopped in traffic. Anybody could take a pop at them. And he hated dusk, when the shadows offered cover but there was still too much light for his night-vision goggles.

Around him the call to evening prayer echoed through the streets, an eerie amplified chant that J.C. knew he would always be able to hear, no matter how far behind he left this place. The sound of Baghdad.

He angled the .50-cal down a notch and watched the men on the sidewalks, looking for the glint of metal hidden in a robe. The Humvee jerked forward, then stopped again. “Come on, move,” he yelled down to Voss.

“You want to drive?” Voss yelled back.

“Fuck no.”

“Then shut up.”

As they inched ahead J.C. wondered what had happened to this country. Anybody could see it had been rich once. Their base had been one of Saddam’s palaces, a huge building with an entrance hall three stories high, marble floors, and gold walls. The Baghdad airport looked newer than the one in El Paso. The highway to Falluja, that shithole, was six lanes wide, good as any interstate. Baghdad had twenty-story hotels and big mosques with beautiful blue domes. J.C. had even seen dusty cracked advertisements for Air France and Japan Airlines. People had once wanted to come here; the Iraqis had once had enough money to leave.

No more. Now the place was a disaster, dying a little more every day. On the streets the men walked slow, with slumped shoulders and angry faces. Not just unhappy. Hopeless, like life had been getting worse for so long that they couldn’t even dream it would ever get better. And the resentment in their eyes was impossible to mistake.

In some of the neighborhoods the 2-7 patrolled, the stink of sewage and burning garbage filled the streets. Little boys without shoes begged for candy every time they stopped. After a car bomb a couple months before, the Mad Dogs had wound up at Kindi Hospital in western Baghdad. The place was covered with blood and J.C. had seen flies in an operating room, hovering over a girl whose face was cut to pieces. Even the guys who joked about everything didn’t have much to say that day. Baghdad was poorer than Juárez, poorer than any place in Mexico he’d ever seen. J.C. couldn’t understand. These people had all that oil, and they lived like this.

J.C. knew he was thinking too much. His buddies kept it simple: Bank your checks, stay down, and hope your girl is keeping her legs shut back home. And they were right. His job was keeping himself and his fellow Mad Dogs alive. Let the hajis take care of themselves. But sometimes, playing dominoes after dinner in the palace, J.C. felt the doubt sneak up: How did this place get so messed up? Is it our fault?

IN THE HUMVEE
below, Captain James Jackson Jr. was hoping for a little luck. The tip had come in three days before from the battalion’s best informant, a college student named Saleh who wanted an American visa to join his cousins in Detroit. He hadn’t led Jackson wrong yet. In fact Jackson worried that Saleh was giving the battalion too much; his life expectancy would be measured in hours if his friends realized that he was ratting them out. But Jackson figured that Saleh knew the risks better than anyone.

Anyway, if this raid panned out, Saleh would be one step closer to 8 Mile Road. He had claimed that several “488s”—military slang for high-value targets—planned to meet tonight at a barbershop in Ghazalia, a suburban Baghdad neighborhood that had become a center of the resistance. Saleh didn’t have any names, but he promised they weren’t the usual criminals and street fighters. One was a foreigner nicknamed “the Doctor” who had just arrived in Iraq, he said.

If military intel had confirmed the story, the raid would have been handed off to Task Force 121, the Special Forces/CIA operating group responsible for top-level targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. But “the Doctor” didn’t show up in anyone’s database. So the Special Forces, who couldn’t be bothered going after anybody less important than they were, turned the job down. Which was fine with Jackson. The Mad Dogs had five tanks, six Bradleys, and four armored Humvees, enough firepower to take out a small town. He didn’t expect any problem grabbing a couple of guerrillas. He just hoped it was worth the trouble. Saleh had been right so far, but there was a first time for everything.

JACKSON NEED NOT
have worried. The Doctor’s real name was Farouk Khan, the fat man who had met John Wells in the apartment in Peshawar five months before. Although he had earned his title, Farouk was no M.D. He was a physicist, the third cousin of A. Q. Khan, who had overseen the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Farouk had worked for the program too, until he was fired for attending an Islamabad mosque whose imam preached for the overthrow of Pakistan’s government.

A year later, Farouk found his way to Osama bin Laden’s lair in the North-West Frontier. There the sheikh offered him the exalted title of “director of atomic projects,” and Farouk set about trying to pry a bomb out of Pakistan’s arsenal. Even with his old connections, Farouk found his mission difficult. Pakistan’s generals knew that if al Qaeda blew a Pakistani nuke in New York the United States might respond with its own bomb on their villas in Islamabad. An attack on Delhi would be even more dangerous, inevitably provoking a full-scale nuclear war that would turn India and Pakistan to dust. Farouk had to move cautiously.