The Silent Man jw-3

by Alex Berenson

  “But how will you—”

  “We drove in.”

  “Grigory, you know that’s not allowed—”

  “So write me up. But meanwhile open the damn door, so we can put them away and be done.”

  Arkady hung up. A few seconds later, the big steel door creaked open. Grigory and Tajid hefted two crates onto a forklift beside the door. Grigory drove into the cool depths of the warehouse, Tajid walking slowly behind him. Dropping the crates off took twenty minutes. When they were done, they loaded two more crates and repeated the procedure.

  Fourth test. The third set of crates had come from the truck that had been nearest the Volga. Grigory waited until the cameras mounted on the rafters of the shed were facing away from him. The cameras made long, slow loops around the warehouse. For Grigory, who knew the pattern, they were easy to avoid.

  Quickly, Grigory popped the trunk of the Volga and pulled out a pair of steel toolboxes, two feet by two feet by three feet, each half-filled with hard rubber balls the size of large marbles.

  Toolboxes in hand, Grigory strode over to the crates and again keyed in the codes to unlock them. He reached into the first crate and grabbed for the cylinder. He had never actually touched a warhead before. To save weight and space, the damn thing didn’t have handles, and Grigory wasn’t sure how to lift it. He wedged his fingers underneath and began to pull. The warhead slipped back, nearly breaking his hands, and he fired curses at his cousin.

  “Come on, you oaf. Help.”

  On the second try they lifted the cylinder and transferred it into the toolbox, arranging the rubber balls so that it wouldn’t roll around. Quickly, they repeated the operation with the second crate.

  Grigory snuck a look at the cameras on the ceiling. Still safe. He and Tajid slipped the toolboxes into the trunk, one over each wheel well. The lightbulb inside the trunk was dead, and the trunk was dirty with old newspapers and bottles of antifreeze and a spare tire and wrenches and a jack. Grigory covered the toolboxes with blankets and slammed down the lid. A thorough search would spot the boxes, but a flashlight quickly shined over the trunk wouldn’t. So he hoped. He closed the Volga lid and looked around. The cameras were still pointing away.

  Fourth test passed.

  WITH THE WARHEADS in his trunk, Grigory’s self-confidence began to flag. Until now he’d been playing a game, outsmarting Arkady and Boris Hiterov and Major Akilev, which wasn’t hard, since none of them knew they were playing at all. Bringing the Volga in was a technical infraction, nothing more.

  Now, though, he’d crossed the border into something else. What if he’d been caught in some elaborate setup? What if the FSB had recruited Tajid to betray him? What if a force of agents waited outside the fence at this moment—

  “Cousin,” Tajid said sharply, knocking Grigory from his reverie. “Let’s be done.”

  So they went back into the warehouse, first with the two empty crates and then the final two. Grigory heart pounded in his chest. He was grateful for the cold air.

  Then they were done. Grigory called Arkady, who answered on the second ring. This time he’d been awake, awaiting the call, Grigory figured. A bad sign.

  “We’re done. Thank God. I think my balls have frozen.”

  “Fine, then.” Arkady sounded annoyed. Grigory hung up and stepped away as the steel door slid closed. The shed was empty, the forklift beside the door. The place looked exactly as they had found it.

  Grigory and Tajid slid into the Volga. Grigory hoped no one would notice that the car was sitting lower now. “Do you really believe we’ll get out of here, cousin?”

  “Inshallah. It’s God’s will.”

  “If you say so.” Grigory turned the key and the Volga started immediately.

  BUT WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the guard hut, the fence was still closed.

  “Damn Boris.” Grigory honked. The rear door of the hut opened and Hiterov stepped out, holding a flashlight. Its beam caught Grigory in the eyes. Grigory felt his bowels tighten.

  Grigory rolled down his window. “What’s this, Boris?”

  “I have to check the car. Arkady’s orders.”

  Fifth test. This one unexpected. Grigory felt as he did playing chess when an opponent found a weakness and counterattacked, leaving him naked. Grigory opened the door, stepped out of the car. “Come on, Tajid. Into the cold while he finds the bombs we’ve stolen.” He hoped he had the right tone of sarcasm in his voice.

  “You think I want to be out here?” Hiterov whined. Nonetheless he leaned into the car, shined the flashlight over the front seats, then into the back. “Now the trunk.”

  Grigory unlocked the trunk. Hiterov poked the beam of his light inside.

  “What a mess. Don’t you ever clean this thing?”

  “Only on nights I’m screwing your wife in the backseat.”

  With his free hand, Hiterov poked ineffectually at the papers and antifreeze bottles. Grigory imagined how he would explain the warheads to the police and the FSB. An experiment, a test of the plant’s security. Maybe he’d tell the truth, try to trade his life for Yusuf’s, though he’d still wind up in a Siberian jail until he died.

  Finally, Hiterov stood up. He hadn’t found them. He hadn’t noticed the toolboxes, hadn’t even moved the blankets.

  “Inspection over. Tell Arkady I did as he asked.”

  “Tell him yourself.” Grigory and Tajid slipped back into the Volga as Hiterov disappeared into the hut. The gate opened and Grigory put the Volga into gear and rolled out.

  Fifth test passed. Game over. Checkmate.

  The rest was simple. They checked in at headquarters and handed over the paperwork. Arkady complained about the way Grigory had broken the rules, and Grigory apologized dutifully. Four a.m. came, the end of Grigory’s shift. “See you, Tajid,” he said to his cousin, whose shift didn’t end for another hour. “Have a good weekend, Arkady.”

  “You and your mother, too.”

  Grigory walked out of headquarters and into the frigid night. The lights of the buildings around him glowed brightly, but nothing moved. In the distance, somewhere outside the gates of the plant, a truck rumbled. He walked toward the Volga. It wasn’t too late. He could still turn around, confess to Arkady, explain the theft as a crazy practical joke.

  Too late, not too late, too late. Forget it. He’d won. Now he wanted his reward, whatever it was. He settled himself inside the Volga, slipped key into ignition.

  “Inshallah,” he said. The foolishness that contented his cousin. God willing. What a strange thing to say. As if God had anything to do with this game they were playing. He pursed his lips, said it again. “Inshallah.” He drove off, toward the plant’s main gate, two stolen nuclear warheads in his trunk.

  4

  ZURICH

  Cottage cheese.

  Cottage cheese and melon. Cottage cheese and low-fat granola. Cottage cheese and an egg-white omelette. In the last three months, Pierre Kowalski had eaten cottage cheese all the ways it could be eaten. Now he was eating it again, spooning the rubbery white junk into his mouth. He choked it down with a glass of Evian, trying to pretend it had any taste at all.

  “This is no way to live,” he grumbled in French across the table at Nadia Zorinova, his girlfriend, a twenty-two-year-old whose pert nose and ice-blue eyes were currently gracing the cover of Spanish Vogue.

  “Now you know how we models feel.” Nadia smirked at him with her million-dollar lips. “Soon you’ll be ready to walk the runway.”

  Nadia. This mansion on Lake Zurich, another in Monte Carlo. A yacht complete with its own helicopter pad. A billion dollars spread in banks around the world. The ear of defense ministers and presidents from Buenos Aires to Bangkok. Kowalski had everything he wanted. Everything but this. cottage cheese.

  Kowalski never wanted to see cottage cheese again, not unless it was sitting next to a steak. A thick filet mignon, medium rare, in a pepper-corn sauce, accompanied by a bottle of burgundy. He picked up his plate, Wedgwood bone china, and
spun it across the room like a $600 Frisbee. It crashed into the fireplace and exploded in a thousand shards, scattering cottage cheese and grapes across the floor.

  Nadia’s smirk widened. “Pierre, you mustn’t keep destroying the china.”

  “It’s replaceable.” Like you, Kowalski mentally added. Though Nadia had her charms. A few weeks earlier, she’d just missed being cast as an underwear model for Calvin Klein.

  “Would you like something else?”

  “Do you plan to cook it for me?”

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE, Kowalski had brought his personal physician, Dr. Émile Breton, to his mansion for a physical. The appointment was not entirely routine. For weeks, he’d found himself unable to. perform, despite Nadia’s most tender ministrations. He’d never suffered that problem before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Years before, his endowment had earned him the nickname “Cinquante,” French for “fifty,” a reference not to the American rapper but to the.50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms ever made.

  So Kowalski’s troubles left him puzzled. Perhaps his advancing age? Whatever the problem, he expected that Breton would take care of it with a prescription for Viagra or some similar elixir. The doctor had other ideas. He weighed Kowalski, drew blood, insisted that Kowalski come to his office for a treadmill stress test. And then he returned to Kowalski’s mansion to deliver the bad news in person.

  “Pierre. You must change your diet, begin to exercise. You’ve gained ten kilos”—twenty-two pounds—“in two years.”

  “You’ve been saying the same thing for as long as I’ve known you.” Kowalski smirked. “Would you like lunch, Doctor? It’s quail today, in a sauce of figs.”

  “This isn’t a joke. Your cholesterol, your weight, your glucose. Disastrous, all of it.”

  “Aren’t there those balloons?”

  “Angioplasty. Yes, you may need that as well. But unless you take your diet more seriously, it’s only postponing the inevitable. Your arteries are nearly blocked. Why do you think you’re having such trouble with that delightful girl out there?”

  Kowalski’s smile faded. “Now I see I have your attention,” the doctor said.

  “What about the pills?”

  “If you don’t lose at least twenty-five kilos”—almost sixty pounds—“Viagra will be useless.”

  “You’re beginning to depress me.”

  “Forty kilos would be even better. Tell your chef to throw away the quail, cook some vegetables.”

  “Forty kilos? That’s nearly one-third of my weight.” Kowalski weighed 130 kilos — almost 290 pounds.

  “I know.” He handed Kowalski a card: H. W. Rossi, spécialiste de diète. “If you’re serious about remaining alive, call him. I’ve seen him work miracles with men like you.”

  INDEED, under the watchful eyes of Rossi, who seemed to survive solely on vegetables and an occasional piece of broiled trout, Kowalski had lost thirteen kilos in three months. Over the last few weeks, his libido had even started to return. Even so, the diet wore on him. Kowalski had always been a master at presenting a smooth face to the world. Now, though, he found himself irritable, prone to silly tricks like flinging plates across the room.

  Yes, the diet was bothering him. The diet. And the knowledge that John Wells was still alive.

  Kowalski was the world’s largest private arms dealer, a conduit for weapons from Russia, France, and the United States to armies all over the developing world. His father, Frederick, had gotten into the business in the late 1950s, recognizing that the newly liberated nations of Africa would need weapons and that Europe had millions of guns left over from World War II, moldering in warehouses.

  The business took off in 1975, when Frederick brokered a deal between France and a young Iraqi dictator named Saddam Hussein. By then, Kowalski was at Oxford, studying political science. A few months before Kowalski graduated, Frederick asked when he would join the firm.

  “Never,” Kowalski said.

  Frederick looked at his son with the cool dark eyes that were a family trait.

  Kowalski felt the need to explain, though he didn’t want to offend his father by questioning the morality of the business. “I want to make my own success.”

  Frederick raised his hand. “Pierre. C’est bon. When you change your mind, you’ll find an open door.”

  It will never happen, Kowalski thought. “Thank you, Papa,” he said aloud.

  But his father was right. After five years of working in Paris for Lazard Frères, the investment bank, Kowalski had grown supremely bored. These pompous executives in their hand-tailored suits thought they ruled the world. But the men who really ruled, the generals who held whole nations in their grip, didn’t pay lawyers to squabble at each other. When they saw something they wanted, they took it. If they made a mistake, they didn’t get a fat severance package and a new job a few months later. They paid with their lives.

  And those men — they came to his father for help. All over Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Frederick Kowalski was treated like royalty. Pierre was disgusted, too, with the hypocrisy he saw every day in business. These companies, with their trade associations and their codes of ethics, as if they cared about anything but their profits. At least the Africans didn’t hide their greed. On his fifth anniversary, just as his boss at Lazard told him he was on track to become a partner, Pierre handed in his resignation.

  Two days later, he was back in Zurich. When he appeared at his father’s office on Bahnhofstrasse, Frederick smiled.

  “Come to join me?”

  Pierre nodded, feeling slightly abashed. Until now he hadn’t considered the possibility that he might have waited too long, that his father might be angry at him, might even reject him.

  “What took so long?” Frederick said.

  The business became Kowalski père et fils a few years later, and Kowalski took over when Frederick suffered a stroke in 1999. Besides his daughter, Anna, a regular in the pages of the fashion magazines, Kowalski fils had two sons from his first and only marriage. So far, neither had shown interest in becoming part of the trade. But Kowalski expected they’d change their minds soon enough.

  Like his father, he ran the business on a few simple principles. He never promised customers weapons he couldn’t deliver. He never stored his merchandise on Swiss soil. He always made sure he was paid up front. He never worked twice with anyone who tried to burn him.

  And he never made threats he didn’t intend to keep.

  Several months before, John Wells had attacked Kowalski at a rented mansion in East Hampton, New York. Wells had. Kowalski didn’t even like to remember what Wells had done. Handcuffed him, shocked him with a stun gun, covered his head with duct tape. He was lucky he hadn’t suffocated. Wells had worn a mask, but Kowalski had learned his identity a few weeks later. Now he wanted revenge, the revenge that he had promised the masked man in his bedroom that night. On Wells, and Exley, too, who’d helped Wells.

  “You must know you’re making a terrible mistake,” Kowalski had said at the time. “Whoever you are. Even if you think you’re safe. I’ll break the rules for you.” Now Kowalski meant to keep his promise. Wells would pay for what he’d done.

  A HAND TOUCHED his shoulder, snapping him out of that summer night. Nadia stood beside him. “Pierre, are you all right? Your face was so. black.”

  He kissed her cheek. “Too much cottage cheese.”

  A light knock on the door. Anatoly Tarasov, Kowalski’s head of security, a former Russian Spetsnaz officer, entered. A walking tornado, capable of extraordinary violence.

  “Have you finished?” Kowalski said to Nadia.

  “Yes.” Her lunch had consisted of two pieces of melon and a boiled egg, and yet she seemed satisfied. He couldn’t imagine how.

  “Then wait for me in the drawing room. Today we’ll go for a shop.”

  She kissed him and glided out. Tarasov waited until she was gone, then closed the door and sat beside him. “You like her.”

 
; “She’s sweet,” Kowalski said. “Sweeter than most of them.”

  “Or a better actress.”

  “Perhaps. Have you news on our friend?”

  “You won’t wish to hear it. The CIA has two teams, two men each, watching the house where he and the woman live.”

  “Around the clock?”

  “Around the clock. One team in front, one in back. There’s a third in plainclothes that comes and goes.”

  “What about their vehicles?” Putting a bomb underneath a car was the easiest way to assassinate someone.

  “Garaged. They travel to work in separate cars most days. The woman drives a Dodge minivan, and Wells a Subaru. Sometimes he rides a motorcycle, but not in the winter. Two of the guards follow in a chase car.”

  “Are their cars armored?”

  “It doesn’t seem so. At Langley, they’re untouchable, naturally. They also have a private office in a place called Tyson’s Corner. But they spend most of their time at the agency now. And the private building has its own security. One of the CIA guards has a post outside the door and the other watches the cars. There’s a third guard in their office.”

  “Could we reach them there?”

  “They never open the door when there’s anyone else on the floor, and there are cameras on the corridor.”

  “How about the elevator?”

  “Such a confined space isn’t ideal. If Wells gets a hand up—”

  “I understand.” They would have only one chance at Wells and Exley. Kowalski didn’t want to waste it.

  “Also, the guards at the house have noticed our scout.”

  Kowalski’s stomach began to ache. “They’ve blown it already? Markov said these were his best men.”

  Ivan Markov was recently retired from the FSB. Kowalski had given Markov $2 million up front to kill Wells and Exley, with the promise of another $3 million for a successful job.

  “Nothing’s blown, Pierre. Our man was asked an idle question by the agents outside the house. He gave an idle answer. Nothing more. We shouldn’t underestimate the CIA. Perhaps they cannot catch bin Laden, but they are perfectly capable of watching a house in Washington.”