John Wells, a strong-silent type in his late thirties, is a CIA operative, and the only American to ever infiltrate al-Qaeda. Blessed with Arab looks from his Lebanese grandmother, he’s been under deep cover with the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other terrorists for the past few years, carrying out the jihad in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Unfortunately, though, he didn’t know anything about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States until they happened. Now, his CIA superiors (those few who know of him in the first place) wonder if he withheld information. Perhaps he has gone over to Osama’s side. This is further complicated by the fact that Wells really has converted to Islam.
His story opens in the mountains of Afghanistan. Wells wipes out his squad of loyal men, leading them into an ambush with American Special Forces. He shoots the one or two survivors in the back. Then he reports in to a startled Green Beret major.
After pouring out all the intelligence he’s been gathering for months, Wells must return undercover. He asks the major to shoot him through the arm to make things look less suspicious. The major claims that he can shoot off a possum’s unmentionable body part at 100 paces. He then complies with Wells’s request.
Wells returns to al-Qaeda only to get summoned to a secret meeting with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama’s main deputy. Al-Zawahiri orders Wells to return to the U.S. and blend in as an American while waiting for further instruction from Khadri, a master terrorist also present at the meeting. Khadri will direct terrorists hidden throughout the U.S. and Canada in the next big attack on American soil.
Of course nobody shares the details with Wells whom they have never completely trusted.
Wells arrives in the U.S. Unfortunately, he has the bad judgment to take two weeks to contact the CIA. He uses the time to visit his hometown and relax. But in the meantime Khadri initiates a horrific series of truck bombings in Los Angeles. Once he hears about the bombings, Wells shows up at CIA headquarters where they unsurprisingly clap him into a cell.
However, Wells intuits that the Los Angeles bombings are just a distraction from the main event. That will be a bio-weapon such as anthrax or smallpox. Or perhaps a dirty-bomb: conventional explosives packed with enough radioactive material to contaminate an entire city. He has no choice but to escape from the CIA, and stop the evil single-handedly.
The Faithful Spy is a hard read if you still have nightmares about 9/11. It’s also not much fun if you’re squeamish about bio-warfare. You should probably skip over the sequences in Montreal where a terrorist creep tests his bio-weapon creations upon animals.
In terms of character development, more could have been done to divide Wells’s soul. He has his loyalty to America, but does he not have any feeling for his men with whom he fought for years in Afghanistan? What about his conversion to Islam? His faith as a Muslim pops up in the beginning merely to heighten the CIA’s distrust of him then drops conveniently away. Real faith isn’t so easily discarded.
Otherwise, the action is competently done, and involves a timely topic. (If the subject intrigues you, try Christopher Dickey’s 1998 novel Innocent Blood about an all-American boy who really is a Muslim terrorist.) The Faithful Spy is the 2007 Edgar Award winner for best first mystery novel, and you can find it on Amazon through this link: The Faithful Spy: A Novel
