Free The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson Page B

over the city’s lights. Wells hadn’t seen a functioning electrical grid in a long time. The tribal elders in his village had owned two diesel generators, loud stinking beasts that dribbled out enough power for bulbs and a few televisions. But nothing like the sea of yellow-orange lights that glowed below Wells’s window, the blinking red beacons that capped the radio towers on Hong Kong Island, the white shine of the skyscrapers. I’ve forgotten that humans can build as easily as destroy, Wells thought.
    The jet landed, and around him passengers stood and grabbed their bags. He could not move, owned by an emotion he could not name, not fear or hope but a sense that time had unfrozen and he had aged a decade in an instant. He knew he should be happy. He was free. Only he wasn’t. He had only moved to a new battlefield, one with even higher stakes. Weariness overwhelmed him, and he sat motionless until the cabin emptied and a flight attendant tapped his shoulder.
    “Are you all right, sir?”
    “Fine.” He shouldn’t call attention to himself. He took his bag and walked off.
    Glossy billboards for Hyatt and Gucci and IBM and Cathay Pacific and a dozen other companies filled the air-conditioned arrival hall. Every woman in the ads was more beautiful than the next, and they all displayed enough skin to merit a whipping or worse in the North-West Frontier. Wells pulled his eyes from the billboards and looked around the hall’s polished floors. Women were all around him, Chinese and white and Indian and Filipina. They walked alone, no male escorts, with faces and arms and legs uncovered. Some even wore makeup. A beautiful Japanese teenager, her hair dyed a shocking red, hurried past him, and Wells swiveled his head to watch her. As he did he felt an unexpected irritation. Couldn’t these women be a bit more modest? They didn’t need to wear burqas, but they didn’t have to wear miniskirts either.
    On a bench in the arrival hall outside a Starbucks, he puzzled over his reaction. After a decade of celibacy he should be thrilled at the feast of skin before his eyes. Nothing about the Taliban had troubled him more than the way they treated women. He supposed he had internalized the fundamentalist credos more deeply than he had realized. Or maybe he just needed to get laid. Sex had been nearly impossible in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the villagers weren’t interested in marrying their daughters to Qaeda’s guerrillas, much less an American. And sex outside marriage wasn’t worth the risk; the Talibs and Pashtuns were endlessly inventive in their punishments for prostitution and adultery. Wells had seen a man buried alive, and a half dozen others hanged. He had kept his libido locked down. He couldn’t even remember what a woman smelled like.
    He would have to change that. Muslims were supposed to save sex for marriage, but Wells knew he couldn’t be chaste forever. He had decided that he would not pay for sex or look for a one-night stand, but if he found the right woman, someone he cared about, he would not wait for a wedding.
    He looked at a tall blonde strutting by and hoped he would find the right woman soon.

    HE SPENT THE next week at an anonymous hotel in Kowloon. To pass the time he walked Hong Kong’s teeming streets each morning, then spent afternoons at the city’s Central Library, a massive stone and glass building across from Victoria Park. He paged through newspapers and magazines to catch up on his lost years. Monica Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich. The Internet bubble. The euro. Britney Spears. The 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount. The years before September 11 were as calm as a Montana lake on a hot summer day.
    Then the attack. In the yellowing newspapers from 2001 the shock was still palpable. Wells learned about the flyers that the families of the missing had plastered across New York, paper memorials more eloquent than any monument. And about Rudy Giuliani’s answer, that first day,