Then Kowalski had reached out and touched them and Wells had proven what she’d always known, that he couldn’t be housebroken no matter how hard she tried. She’d begged him to wait, and even so he’d bared his fangs and counterattacked as instinctively as a pit bull tossed into a ring. Maybe Wells was so confident in his own ability to get through the worst situations that he didn’t see the danger he faced. Or maybe he simply didn’t care whether he lived or died.
But she did. If not for herself, then for her kids. When she saw them at GW Hospital the day after the shooting, she couldn’t stop crying. Twice in two years, they’d stood beside her hospital bed and held her hand and told her they loved her and everything would be all right. As if they were responsible for her and not the other way around. Whether God or fate or sheer luck had kept her alive, she didn’t know. But she couldn’t take more chances. She couldn’t imagine not seeing her kids again. That day, she’d promised herself she would quit.
But quitting meant giving up Wells forever, and she couldn’t imagine that either. To take her mind off the impossible choice, she’d pressed her rehab as hard as she could. If her nurses asked her to walk, she went until her legs and her spine burned and she had to lie down to recover. If they asked for fifty leg lifts, she gave them a hundred. They’d told her more than once that she wasn’t helping herself by pushing so hard. But the pain distracted her from thinking about Wells.
This morning, Shafer had called and asked her to come in. He’d made the request as casually as if he were asking her if she wanted an extra ticket to a Nationals game. Even so she’d hesitated. But then her curiosity took over; she wondered how being back would feel. As she and her bodyguards rolled by the truck-bomb barriers that guarded the main entrance to Langley, she was overcome with a strange nostalgia, as though she were visiting her old college campus for the first time a year after graduating. She loved this place and understood these people and wanted to be one of them and yet she didn’t feel connected to them.
Now, in Shafer’s office, Exley felt different, more engaged. Shafer was her rock at the agency. He’d hardly changed in all the years she’d known him. He was rumpled, energetic, a bad dresser and messy eater, but most of all brilliant, sometimes too brilliant. For years, she’d wondered if Shafer deliberately played up his eccentricities to add to his mystique as an absentminded genius. Today, for example, a big coffee stain covered his right shirt cuff. Could he really have done that accidentally?
Shafer had never fit in with the agency’s buttoned-up bureaucracy. He’d been on the verge of being marginalized before Exley and Wells saved New York. Now he and Duto had reached an accommodation. Duto let him and Wells and Exley run their own shop. In return, Shafer did his best to control Wells. So far, the deal had worked for both sides, though Exley didn’t believe it would last. Shafer didn’t trust Duto, and the feeling was mutual.
“You need my brain,” Exley said now. “Don’t you know I’m done?”
“Just desk work. I’ll bet after six weeks at home, you’re ready for some excitement. Take your mind off things. So—” and before she could object, Ellis filled her in on the missing uranium, and then on the way that Kowalski had connected Wells with Bernard Kygeli.
“John and Kowalski are buddies now?” Exley said when Shafer finished.
“Strange world,” Shafer said. “But Bernard’s a dead end. The BND, the Hamburg police, nobody has anything on him. He pays his taxes, keeps his Mercedes polished. He probably buys Girl Scout cookies, if they have Girl Scouts in Germany—”
“I get it,” Exley said. “Did they talk to the harbormaster?”
“The port authorities don’t know much about him. He’s been there a long time but he’s small-time and it’s a giant port and he’s never been in trouble, so. ”
“What about customs records?”
“Nothing unusual. Cabinets and rugs from Turkey. Also he sent some silverware two months ago from Poland to South Africa. The Poles checked and the factory confirms the sale.”
“He ship to the United States?”
“Not so far as we can tell.”
Exley could hardly believe how easily she was slipping back into this routine. But a few minutes of thinking out loud didn’t obligate her to come back forever. Anyway, Shafer was right. No one had ever gotten shot at a desk at Langley. “What about the general?” she said. “This Nigerian that Bernard bought the AKs for? Any chance he’s in on it?”
“Doubt it. Those look like real deals. Then when Bernard was looking for beryllium, he went to Kowalski since he had the connection already.”
“And we can’t figure out where he’s getting his money?”
“He makes a decent living legitimately through the business. We could go in, turn his house upside down—”
“But then he’ll know we’re looking and—”
“He’ll tip the guys who are making the bomb. Exactly. We can’t take a chance on spooking him. Same reason we haven’t talked to any of his workers or gone at that law firm in New York yet. We could try to talk to them quietly, pull the national security card, but if they call him we’re in trouble.”
“What law firm in New York?”
“I didn’t mention this?” Shafer explained how Wells had gone to Bernard’s house and found the bill from Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein.
“Have we checked his ships?”
“He doesn’t own ships. At least they’re not in his corporate record or registered in Germany or anywhere else we can find. We looked. And the harbormaster didn’t mention them.”
“Come on, Ellis. He has a decent-sized ex-im business, he makes regular runs, he must own a boat or two. They’re not in his name, that’s all. Some shell company in the Caymans or Gibraltar is holding them, with a lawyer as the corporate nominee.”
“And you think that law firm in New York is the connection?”
“I don’t know,” Exley said. “But we ought to pull the suits they’ve filed, see what turns up.”
“I missed you,” Shafer said.
BESIDES NEW YORK, Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein had offices in Baltimore and Miami. The firm specialized in representing ship and aircraft owners against insurance companies and boatyards. Most of the suits were straightforward, and Exley didn’t see any connections to Hamburg. Certainly none to Bassim Kygeli. By the end of the afternoon, her back was aching so badly that she’d been reduced to lying on Shafer’s floor. “All right, Ellis,” she said. “I’m not sure I can stand, but it’s time for me to go.”
“Give it a few more minutes. Don’t you like reading about all these rich guys whining because they ordered a helicopter pad for their yacht and got an extra Jacuzzi or vice versa?”
Another half-hour crawled by. And then Shafer stood and clapped his hands. “Check this out. Two years ago, our friends at Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe filed suit against AIG. On behalf of a company called YRL Ltd.”
“AIG, the world’s biggest insurance company?”
“The one and only,” Shafer said. “YRL looks to be a shell. Based in the Caymans. But the suit was filed in New York because that’s where AIG is headquartered. YRL wants AIG to pay a four-million-dollar insurance claim for a freighter called the Greton, registered out of Liberia. About two years ago, the Greton burned up off the Nigerian coast.”
“Anybody die?”
“Doesn’t look that way. Anyway, AIG won’t pay. It says the Greton didn’t have a decent fire-suppression system or an adequately trained crew. Basically that it was an accident waiting to happen.”
“So who won?”
“The lawyers. Two years gone, a dozen claims and counterclaims already and they’ve barely started discovery. By the time they’re done, they’re going to spend more on the suit than the boat was ever worth. But—” Shafer stepped out from behind his desk and stood beside Exley and jabbed at the filing he was reading. “Lookee here.”
“Lookee here?”
Shafer tossed the filing to Exley. “Page eight.”
On page eight, a description of the Greton: “used primarily to bring cargo from Turkey to ports in Western Africa. Frequently chartered by Tukham, Ltd., an import-export company based in Hamburg.” Tukham, Ltd. was Bernard Kygeli’s company.
“You are one smart girl,” Shafer said. “And I say that in the most sexist way possible.”
“Guess we should find out who owns YRL.”
“And what other boats YRL owns.”
Exley checked her watch: 6:30. “The corporate registry in the Caymans is closed for the night. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.”
“We? That mean you’re coming in tomorrow?”
Exley didn’t bother to answer.
THE INCORPORATION PAPERS that YRL Ltd. had filed with the Cayman Secretary of State’s Office were only two pages long. But they told Exley and Shafer everything. YRL’s president was one Bassim Kygeli, of Hamburg, Germany.
Within the hour, they’d checked ship registries worldwide for boats registered to YRL. They found one more: the Juno, also registered in Liberia. YRL had bought it two years before, presumably as a replacement for the ill-fated Greton. It had been built in Korea in 1987 and displaced 22,000 tons, a pipsqueak compared to the newest and largest container ships. But more than big enough to carry a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Exley couldn’t find pictures of the Juno online, but AIG would have some and a quick call from Langley would shake them loose.
“If the Greton is out of commission, that’s got to be the one,” Shafer said.
“Assuming that Bernard shipped the stuff on his own boat.”
“What’s the point of owning a boat if you can’t use it for something like this?” Shafer said. “Anyway, it’s the first place to look.”
Exley checked the Hamburg port records. “Shows up only twice in Hamburg in the last two years. Once last summer. And on December 31. Happy New Year. It left Hamburg with a load of used car parts. No mention of Tukham or Kygeli. It’s supposedly being managed by a company called Socine Expo.” Exley looked up Socine on the D&B corporate database. “Socine’s offices are at the same building as Tukham, 29 Josefstrasse.”
“Wouldn’t you know,” Shafer said. “No wonder the German port records don’t connect Bernard and the Juno. Where’s it headed? I’ll bet New York.”
“Close,” Exley said. “Dock records say Lagos, Nigeria.”
“Then it should have gotten there already.”
“Think the Nigerians have their port records online?” With a few keystrokes, Exley sniffed out the records. “Amazing but true. They do. Arrivals and departures in Lagos. In English. I’m not surprised about the Germans, but the Nigerians?”
“Nothing about the Internet surprises me anymore.”
“Well, this won’t surprise you either,” Exley said. “There’s no record of the Juno.”
“Which means it’s either in port here or somewhere in the Atlantic. We’d best tell Duto, get the navy looking for it. How hard can it be to find a two-hundred-foot-long boat? The Atlantic’s only a couple of million square miles.”
“You going to tell John about this?”
“Not yet. At this point, the less he knows, the better off he is. He seems to be handling Bernard decently so far.”
“How is he, Ellis?”
“Oh, no. I’m not playing matchmaker. You want to know, you ask him yourself.”
26
Even waiting for the Juno in Newfoundland, Bashir had never been this cold. A front had blown in from Canada and encased the entire Northeast in frigid polar air. He and Nasiji and Yusuf needed heavy gloves and thick jackets for the half-minute walk between the Repard house and the stable.
But inside, the stable was as hot as Iraq in July. The gas-fired furnace at its center roared as Bashir melted steel in a thick-walled tungsten carbide pot. The steel glowed as red as the devil’s own soup. Bashir stood four feet from the furnace, but even so the flames scorched his hands.
“Are we close?” Nasiji said.
“A few minutes. No wonder hell is supposed to be hot. Imagine spending eternity in those flames.”
“We won’t be the ones in them.”
Bashir wished he could be so sure. As they moved close to finishing the bomb, his doubts were growing. Two nights before, with Thalia asleep, he’d crept to his laptop and read about nuclear explosions, looked at photographs of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The violence these bombs unleashed was unimaginable, though it didn’t have to be imagined. It had already happened.
Most civilians assumed that the lethality of a nuclear bomb resulted from the radiation it produced, the gamma rays and neutrons that caused leukemia and other cancers. But radiation, though terrifying, was not the deadliest part of the blast. Even a small bomb — like the ones dropped on Japan, like the one they were making — created a fireball hundreds of feet around, with a temperature of seven thousand degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the sun. The fireball could burn the skin of people standing two miles away. The most horrifying pictures from Hiroshima came from the triage tents where the burn victims had gathered to die, their skin torn off, their clothes melted to their bodies.
At the same time, the explosion produced a massive shock wave that traveled at almost a thousand miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound. In other words, the blast hit before its victims could hear it coming. The wave was far stronger than the biggest tornado or hurricane, leveling buildings and tearing people to shreds. For the first half-mile from the epicenter of the blast, no human being or animal, no matter how well protected, could survive.
Along with the shock wave and the fireball came a blast of radiation. The splitting of the uranium atoms released gamma rays, high-energy particles that ricocheted through the body like tiny bullets, killing cells and damaging DNA. The rays attacked the entire body, but they were especially damaging to soft tissue and marrow. The most heavily dosed victims suffered acute radiation sickness and bled out, hemorrhaging through their skin. Other victims seemed fine for the first few weeks after the explosion. Then their hair fell out, their skin sloughed off as if they were rattlesnakes molting, their stomachs turned into bloody sinkholes. Unable to eat or drink, they starved to death. And even at relatively low doses, the radiation could kill years later by causing leukemia and lymphoma.
Bashir wasn’t afraid of bloody viscera or broken bones, of puncture wounds or charred flesh. He’d been a surgeon for seven years, long enough to see all manner of horrors. An old man whose glasses had melted to his face because he’d tried to save a few dollars fixing his hot water heater himself, instead of hiring a mechanic. A motorcyclist who’d had both legs and his pelvis crushed by an SUV. Worst of all, an eleven-year-old boy who’d fallen off the roof of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue and had the terrible luck to puncture his stomach and chest on a wrought-iron fence. The firefighters and EMTs worried that the kid would bleed out if they pulled him off the spikes, so they cut the fence and brought him to the hospital with the iron still in him. He was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, Bashir remembered, and with the spikes sticking out, the shirt looked like a novelty gift gone wrong. The medics hadn’t wanted to give the boy painkillers for fear of putting him into shock. When he arrived in the operating room, he was too frightened or in too much pain or both to talk. He just nodded when Bashir told him they were going to fix him, but they’d have to hold him down to get him free of the spikes. They’d put a mouth-guard in to protect his teeth and his tongue and started to pull. But the iron in his abdomen was in deeper than they’d imagined, into the muscle behind the stomach, and the kid screamed until his eyes rolled up and he fell unconscious, foam flecked at the corner of his mouth. The boy had lived, but Bashir would never forget the way he screamed. Or that when they finally wormed out the spike, bits of partially digested corn kernels were stuck to its prongs.
In his years as a surgeon, he’d saved a few lives. But this bomb would undo the good he’d done a thousand times over. The deaths would
come by the hundreds of thousands, a poet’s nightmare vision of the apocalypse. Only this inferno existed outside the pages of the Quran or the Bible. This jerry-rigged monster they were building from a few pieces of uranium and steel, it was real. No matter that they were in a hundred-year-old stable instead of a laboratory surrounded by guards and barbed wire. The physics of a nuclear explosion were the same here as in Los Alamos. They didn’t need security guards, or thousands of engineers and scientists, or a billion-dollar budget. If they had enough uranium, and they pushed it together into a critical mass quickly enough, they would get a nuclear explosion. Full stop.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shocked the world so much that for two generations nations had come together to prevent another nuclear blast. They’d built tens of thousands of bombs. But they’d never again used one, not against civilians, not even on enemy armies. Not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Indians or the Pakistanis. Not even the Jews. They’d all kept the genie inside the bottle.
Now Bashir and Nasiji and Yusuf, and a few other men whose names he didn’t even know, were going to break the taboo. Who were they to cast the world’s wisdom aside? They weren’t presidents or kings or prime ministers. They weren’t imams whose names were known by pious Muslims around the world. They weren’t even famous generals. They were a few men who’d gotten their hands on a few precious kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Now they were going to use it. They weren’t going to declare war, or warn anyone what was coming. And though they had only one bomb, Nasiji was hoping to use it to start a much bigger conflict, Bashir knew.
Yet. why should they hold themselves to a higher standard than the United States, which hadn’t warned civilians out of Hiroshima or Nagasaki before it vaporized those cities? And why shouldn’t America pay for its crimes? They’re at war with us. They kill us in ones and twos and sometimes by the hundreds. Shouldn’t we be at war with them? And the struggle long predated the invasion of Iraq. Since the first Crusade, Christians had tried to destroy Islam.
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