UNLIKE THE REST of the mansion, the drawing room was sleek and modern. In its center was the most striking sculpture that Wells had ever seen. If sculpture was the right word for it. It was a transparent plastic box, five feet high, eight feet long, four feet wide, with weapons inside—an RPG and an AK-47, encircled by a ring of grenades—held fast in a clear plastic goo, perfectly preserved, every detail visible. Wells rapped his fist on the plastic box. The launcher and the rifle didn’t move.
“You’ve heard of Damien Hirst?” Kowalski said. He sat on a black couch whose sleekness seemed inappropriate for his big body. The tall shooter whom Kowalski had called the Dragon sat beside him. They made a ridiculous pair, Abbott and Costello.
Wells hadn’t heard of Damien Hirst. He kept his eyes on the weapons, sealed for eternity inside the box. He feared that if he looked at Kowalski, he would lose control. In the holster below his left armpit the Glock itched, begging to be drawn.
“He’s British. An artist. In 1991, he put the carcass of a tiger shark in a box like this,” Kowalski said. “A whole shark! It made him famous. It was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. A good title, don’t you think? Since then, it’s been cows and sheep and lots of other dead animals in boxes. Now he’s very rich.”
Wells said nothing, and after a few seconds, Kowalski continued. “A few years ago, I was in London at an opening of his and asked him if he might do something for me. He came up with this. A play on the original. A bit derivative, but I like it. Reminds me where my money comes from. I imagine you don’t think much of it. A waste of a good AK, you probably think.”
“Why not just put a dead African in?” Wells said. “Eliminate the middleman.”
Kowalski laughed, a short barking chuckle. “So you do have a sense of humor. I wasn’t sure. All those men you’ve bumped into over the years, you think they saw a tiger shark when you turned out the lights on them? The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”
Nadia was still by the door. “Get out of here,” Wells said to her. She smiled at him, a smile that despite everything sent a surge of desire through Wells, and backed out and closed the door. When Wells glanced back at the couch, the Dragon had drawn his pistol.
“Very chivalrous,” Kowalski said. “You must like her. Something else we have in common.”
“The name,” Wells said.
“The name for a truce.”
“The name and an introduction.”
Kowalski raised his hands. “I’m to vouch for you? No. No, no, no. I give you the name, you do what you like with it. Have your friends from Langley trap him. Or the Germans. Cameras in the walls. Satellites. All your toys. You think you’re going to infiltrate, fool this man? I heard from Ivan Markov about your introductions.”
“Name’s no good without it,” Wells said, with a patience he didn’t feel. He left the sculpture behind and walked to the window. The snow was still coming down. The glass offered him a reflection of Kowalski and the Dragon on the couch. The Dragon was tracking him with the snubnose, his body twisted sideways so he would have a clear shot if Wells spun. But if Wells kept moving along the window, the Dragon’s firing angle would be partially blocked by Kowalski’s bulk.
“Tell him you don’t want to be involved, but you know somebody who can get the stuff,” Wells said.
“And who will you be this time? You speak Polish? Russian?”
Wells watched the window.
“You think your Arabic’s going to come in handy for this?” There was a sneer in Kowalski’s voice, the same sneer Wells had heard a few months before in a mansion in the Hamptons, before Wells had shut him up with a stun gun to the throat and started the mad cycle that had landed him in this room. “You think he believes an Arab can help him? If an Arab could get this stuff, he wouldn’t be coming to me.”
“You’re awful brave with that bodyguard next to you,” Wells said. “Those boys in Moscow were brave, too.” He turned to face Kowalski and the Dragon, keeping his hands loose by his sides. A shoulder holster wasn’t an easy draw and the Dragon was surely quick, but Wells would take his chances. “Tell him whatever you like. I’m a friend you know from way back when. Doesn’t matter. If he needs the stuff as much as you say, he’ll bite.”
Kowalski sighed, and Wells saw that for all his talk he didn’t want to push their battle any further. “And then we’re even?”
Wells nodded.
“In that case. His name’s Bernard Kygeli.” Kowalski plucked a cell phone from his pocket. For the next ten minutes, Wells watched in silence as he spoke rapid-fire German, Wells catching a word here and there, mostly place names—Hamburg, Zimbabwe. “Gut,” Kowalski finally said. “Gut. Bitte.” He hung up, slid his phone shut.
“Went goot?” Wells said.
“Your name is Roland. You’re an old friend of mine, a Rhodesian I’ve known a long time. I came to you because you have friends in Warsaw and the Poles have a big beryllium plant. You’re not sure, but you think maybe you can get the stuff for him. At a big price. He said not to worry, money wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Any hint of how close they are?”
“No. And I didn’t ask.”
“The meeting,” Wells said.
“He said no, but I told him you required it. This isn’t guns or grenades and you need to see him face to face. Finally, he said okay. Tomorrow in Hamburg at six p.m. The plaza outside the Rathaus, the old city hall.”
“Anything else I need to know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then we’re done.”
“You’re not staying for dinner? Nadia will be disappointed.” Kowalski pushed himself off the couch and pursed his lips into a rictus grin and extended a meaty hand toward him. Before Wells could stop himself, he’d extended his own hand and they shook. Kowalski’s palm was cool and dry and they stood together for a long moment, gripping and grinning for invisible, or maybe real, cameras. Finally, Wells pulled his arm away.
“Save the world, won’t you, Mr. Wells?” Kowalski grinned at him. “And don’t forget to save me, too.”
We’re not the same, Wells wanted to say. Not even close. You can tell me we are, tell me this is all a big cosmic joke, but you’re wrong. But he was through arguing. He’d gotten the name. He reached for his phone to have the hotel send the Bentley for him, then changed his mind. He would walk along the lake instead, let the snow cover him, cool him off. In this house, his emotions ran too hot.
AT THE DOOR, Nadia was waiting with his coat. She slipped it over his shoulders and rested an easy hand on his back and Wells felt a shock of desire rope down his spine into his groin.
“Good luck,” she said out of the side of her mouth.
“Whatever he’s paying you, I hope it’s worth it. Hope you’re socking every franc under the mattress.” Wells knew he ought to keep his mouth shut—she must make a gibbering idiot of every man who walked into this house—but he couldn’t stop himself.
She put her hand to his face and tilted his head and kissed his cheek. “Good luck,” she repeated. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
Wells walked out.
BACK IN HIS SUITE, Wells found his Kyocera satellite phone, a big black handset with a finger-sized antenna poking from the top, and punched in an eighteen-digit number and listened to silence for thirty seconds. In the 1990s, Motorola had spent billions of dollars to build a satellite network called Iridium, able to carry calls from any point in the world, including both poles.
But Iridium had been a bust. The calls cost several dollars a minute, and standard cell networks worked well enough for most business travelers. In 1999, Iridium had gone into bankruptcy. But the satellites had never been shut off. Though the network was still theoretically open to anyone, it was mainly used now by the Pentagon and CIA. The number that Wells had called was known as a sniffer. Software on the other end of the line looked for abnormalities in the connection that might indicate the phone or th
e connection had been tampered with. Bottom line, a silent line meant a clean phone. Or so the engineers at Langley had told Wells, and he wasn’t going to contradict them.
Of course, a clean phone was useless if the room was bugged, so Wells wandered back downstairs and into the silent streets of Zurich. It was not even ten p.m., but the city was as quiet as a castle with the moat up, the burghers and bankers home counting the day’s profits. Wells walked down the Bahnhofstrasse along the locked stores and called Shafer, filled him in.
Five minutes later: “Okay, spell the name for me.”
“B-A-S-S-I-M. K-Y-G-E-L-I. But goes by Bernard. Runs an ex-im business in Hamburg called Tukham.”
“Turkham? Like Turkey-Hamburg?”
“No, T-U-K-H-A-M. No R.”
“Any idea why?”
“Maybe he’s not a good speller, Ellis. Focus here.”
“And wants beryllium.”
“So he says. I’m meeting him tomorrow. Six p.m.”
“John.” Shafer was silent, four thousand miles away, and Wells felt him trying to figure out what to say next. Finally he sighed, as if he knew that trying to dissuade Wells from this meeting would be pointless. “All right. What’s your cover?”
Wells explained. “Can you get me papers?”
“To Germany in twenty hours? Sure. Piece of cake. Pick a last name.”
“Albert.”
“Albert? Okay. Roland Albert. Rhodesian mercenary. Better get you a British passport. We’ll hook you up with a courier in Hamburg. Can you do a Rhodesian accent?”
“Shrimp on the barbie, mate?”
“Not Australian, John. Rhodesian.” Shafer started to laugh and stopped. “This isn’t a joke. Not with five kilos of HEU missing. You know I have to tell Duto. He’ll tell the BND, get things started.”
“Give me the first meeting, at least.”
“And your fat friend? Any business left with him?”
“Deal’s a deal,” Wells said. “How’s Jenny?”
“Better every day,” Shafer said. “Sends her love.”
Wells hung up. He was directly across from the central Zurich train station now—the Hauptbahnhof, which, logically enough, marked the northern end of the Bahnhofstrasse—and he turned right and began to walk beside the narrow Limmat River, which flowed gently out of the Zürichsee. He called Exley’s cell phone, a useless exercise. She wasn’t answering him.
But tonight she did.
“Hello?” That voice. Smoky and sweet and husky and knowing. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, she whispered to him until she herself fell asleep and even then he would hear her voice comforting him. He was ashamed of every halfpenny of lust he’d had for Nadia.
“It’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“Zurich.”
“Zurich,” she said. He waited for her to ask him why, but she didn’t. “Is it safe?” she said finally. An old joke of theirs, from the scene in Marathon Man.
“Is it safe?” Wells laughed. “It couldn’t be safer if it tried.”
She was silent for a few seconds. Normally Wells didn’t mind these pauses, but tonight he wanted her to talk, tell him she was past the worst of it, they were past the worst of it.
“How are you, Jenny? How’s your back?”
“Not skiing yet, but give me time.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Another pause.
“So . . . I wanted to tell you. The thing I came here for, I worked it out.”
“I don’t want to talk about that, John.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” The smoke and the sweetness were gone.
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said. “I’m tired, is all. Lots of rehab today. I wish you were here.”
“I can come back.” Wells tried to keep his voice steady.
“Not till you know what you want.”
“All right,” he said. “I love you, Jenny.”
“I love you, too.” And then she was gone.
19
In addition to its side control panel, the warhead had a hinged steel plate on top to allow technicians to access its guts. A tough-looking lock, a steel box the size of a deck of cards, covered half the plate, preventing it from being raised. Nasiji poked at the box with a screwdriver. “We could try to force it,” he said. “But I don’t like the look of it. Let’s cut around it, peel off the casing.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Bashir said. “The biggest danger we face is from the plastic and these traps, not the bomb.”
Nasiji nodded to the wall of gear in the back of the stable. “Ready?”
“Let’s pray,” Yusuf said.
So Bashir grabbed three prayer rugs from the house, and for fifteen minutes the three men prostrated themselves and asked Allah for his support, finishing with Surah 2:201. “Oh Lord! Give us good in this world and good in the hereafter, and defend us from the torment of the Fire.” When they were done, they rolled up the rugs and set them aside and pulled on long rubber boots and gloves and face shields and goggles and heat-resistant coats.
“Before we start,” Bashir said. “I thought, perhaps, we should film all this. One day the world will want to know how we did what we did.”
“We talked about this,” Nasiji said. For the first time, his voice betrayed impatience. “No cameras. No more speeches, no more prayers, no more visits to the bathroom. The nitrogen now. It’s time.”
So Bashir and Yusuf picked up an insulated container of liquid nitrogen, called a dewar, and carried it to a thick-sided plastic tub that sat next to the warhead. They tipped the dewar over the tub, pouring until the liquid came nearly to the brim. The nitrogen, cooled to seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero, bubbled madly as it evaporated.
“Into the bucket.”
Bashir and Nasiji picked up the warhead and lowered it into the bucket. There was no guarantee, but cooling the cylinder might make an accidental explosion less likely. Bashir felt as though he were in the operating room in Corning, about to make the day’s first cut, the patient prepped and unconscious on the operating table beneath him. It’s really happening, Bashir thought. He wanted to mark the moment, but the set of Nasiji’s jaw discouraged idle chatter.
As the cylinder cooled, the only sound in the stable was the nitrogen’s bubbling. Then Bashir breathed deep and picked up a circular saw, its blades diamond-tipped to cut through concrete. He flicked it on, feeling it vibrate in his gloved hands. As gently as he could, Bashir touched the saw to the top of the cylinder, avoiding the locked panel. The saw screeched and jumped back as it touched the steel. Bashir pushed down harder, hard enough that the blades bit into the steel and began to grind through it. Bashir held the saw in place for a few seconds, then pulled it up as Nasiji stepped forward with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the top of the warhead.
Bashir turned off the saw, put it down, and ran a finger over the hole he poked into the steel. It was barely a quarter-inch deep and two inches long and revealed nothing at all.
“Again,” Nasiji said.
Bashir flicked on the saw and felt it come to life. He lined it up with the groove he’d just cut. He sliced in slowly, controlling the saw through the steel, until it broke through and slipped forward—
Then, without warning, compressed air began to whoosh out of the cylinder, filling Bashir’s nostrils with a strong sour smell—
Bashir pulled back the saw as Nasiji stepped forward and sprayed the casing with a fire extinguisher—
Bashir coughed wildly and twisted sideways, nearly cutting Nasiji in half. Nasiji jumped back as Yusuf reached to unplug the saw—
And then it was over. The compressed air stopped coming. Bashir counted one, two, three, four, five, waiting for the explosion. But nothing happened and Bashir put down the saw and shined a flashlight into the hole and touched the groove with his gloved fingers.
“What was that?” Yusuf said.
Bashir s
hook his head. He was still coughing, but the gas, whatever it was, didn’t seem to be toxic. He leaned against the workbench and tried not to laugh as his fear faded. “I don’t know. Some kind of gas to keep the parts from corroding. It was under pressure inside and once we broke through the sidewall, it burst.”
“Most likely argon or neon, a noble gas, to keep the electronics inside the weapon stable,” Nasiji said. “It’s probably not dangerous, but give it a minute to air. You almost took my head off with that saw, you know.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Bashir said sheepishly.
“It’s a lesson for all of us,” Nasiji said. “Take it a centimeter at a time. We really don’t know what’s inside.”
“The look on your face,” Yusuf said to Bashir. He opened his mouth, an exaggerated gasp of fear.
“Easy to be bold from across the room,” Bashir said.
INCH BY INCH, they opened the warhead. They weren’t trying to preserve the components as a functioning weapon, so they didn’t have to make perfect cuts. Even so, the work was slow and nerve-racking. As they widened the hole and exposed the inside of the shell, they poured liquid nitrogen inside, trying to freeze the bomb’s circuitry.
By late in the day, they’d cut away the arming panel and exposed two flat green boards loaded with primitive electronic circuitry, capacitators and black transistors as big as quarters. They looked like they belonged in an old radio, not a nuclear warhead.
“Not like what they show in the movies,” Bashir said.
“Remember, they probably designed this in the mid-1980s, and they were far behind the United States in computers even then. And besides, for something like this, cutting-edge technology doesn’t matter. Only reliability.”
“It’s all going to get vaporized anyway,” Yusuf said.
The Silent Man Page 22