The Silent Man (17 page)

“How’s Zaineb?” After Helmut, Bernard had gone back to traditional Muslim names for his kids. Zaineb was the older of Bernard’s two daughters. Nasiji had only met her once. She was petite, with fine dark hair and a throaty laugh like a bus engine, a laugh that seemed to indicate she found the world impossibly funny. In another life Nasiji would have married her.

“She’s fine.”

“Is she around this evening?”

“Visiting a cousin.”

“Away again.” Bernard wanted Zaineb to have nothing to do with him, Nasiji thought. Though he couldn’t blame the man. “Maybe one day I’ll get to see her again.”

“Of course.”

“You Turks are such liars.”

“No worse than you Iraqis.”

They emerged from the tunnel on the south side of the river, to the port zone, block-long docks crosscut by canals, as much water as land. On the wharves, shipping containers were stacked in five-high piles. Cranes towered hundreds of feet overhead. Giant container ships, among the largest structures ever built, rested silently in the canals, gleaming under high-intensity spotlights. The biggest ships were a quarter-mile and could carry 200,000 tons of cargo—the equivalent of 100,000 cars.

“It’s like a race of giants has taken over,” Nasiji said. “And then left again.” Indeed, aside from an occasional security guard, the wharves were empty.

“The boats have gotten bigger and bigger,” Bernard said. “After a while you don’t think about it.” They passed over a bridge, to the southern half of the port. Here the canals were narrower, the ships and cranes slightly smaller. Bernard turned right and drove beside a high wall until he reached a guardhouse. The guardhouse’s window opened and a fiftyish man with long hair leaned out.

“Yes?” Bernard lowered his window and the guard nodded. “Oh, hello, Bernard. Good evening.”

“Georg.”

The gate swung open.

“He knows you,” Nasiji said.

“He should. I’ve owned this warehouse for fifteen years.”

Bernard turned down a dead-end road that led to a locked fence. Behind it was a brick warehouse and a parking lot littered with a half-dozen containers. High on the building, a red-lettered sign proclaimed: “Tukham GmBH, Bernard Kygeli, Prop.” Bernard unlocked the fence and parked outside the warehouse. He keyed in an alarm code and stepped inside. Nasiji followed.

“No one’s watching it?”

“My men would wonder if I asked them to guard a shipment of cabinets, Sayyid. Don’t worry. It’s fine.” Indeed the long padlock on the end of the container was still locked. Bernard picked up a crowbar and broke it off with a flick of his wrist.

 

 

 

TEN MINUTES LATER ,
they’d dragged out crates 301 and 303. Nasiji popped them open, opened the tool cabinets inside, and . . . there they were.

“May I touch?” Bernard said. He reached down—

“NO!”
Nasiji screamed.

Bernard jumped back. “What?” He scuttled backward, away from the warheads, a hand raised protectively.

Nasiji laughed. “Sorry, Bernard. I couldn’t resist. It’s perfectly safe. Touch them, kick them, run them over. Doesn’t matter. They can’t go off.”

Bernard closed his eyes and ran a limp hand over his forehead. “Damn you, Sayyid. My heart . . . my doctor says—” Bernard leaned against a crate and waited for the spasm to pass. “So, the ship goes in two days. You’re sure you want to do it this way? It seems overly complicated. Why don’t you let me send them?”

“I told you, I tried that once myself, a dummy run from Russia, said it was motorcycle parts, and the Americans opened the box.”

“That was Russia. I can send them from Hamburg directly to New York or Baltimore. You see how easy it was from Istanbul.”

“I don’t want to take a chance at customs. I want to use your boat. This way, Yusuf and I watch over them directly, then our friends drive them in from Canada.”

“I don’t agree, but it’s your choice. Now let me show you what I have for you.”

In the back left corner of the warehouse, empty crates and pallets were neatly stacked before a metal cage, its gate protected by a heavy combination lock. Bernard pushed aside the pallets, opened the lock. The men stepped inside the cage, which held two dusty wooden crates, one square, the other long and narrow, both covered with Chinese characters. Bernard grabbed a crowbar and popped the top of the longer crate, revealing two steel tubes packed tightly inside. They were identical, each about six feet long, painted dark green. Their back ends flared out like rocket nozzles, and small sights were attached to their tops, just above their breeches. They were Russian-designed SPG-9 Spear recoilless rifles. Like the AK-47, another brilliant Russian weapon, they were easy to use, built for deserts and jungles, low-tech but effective. The Red Army had first put the SPG-9 in service in 1962, and it had been killing people ever since.

“You leave these here?” Nasiji said. “In the open?”

Bernard had grown a touch tired of having Nasiji second-guess him. “You think my men touch that lock if I don’t say so, Sayyid? Now lift with me.” They grabbed the barrel and heaved it up.

“Not too bad.”

“No. This is the new SPG, a bit shorter and lighter, about forty kilos”—ninety pounds. “I suppose I sound like a salesman. But you already have two heavy crates, so I wanted to keep it as light as possible.”

Bernard broke open the second crate, revealing a dozen steel canisters, each painted black, just over two feet long, but narrow, like stretched-out soup cans or oversized bullets. “The rounds. New design from the Polish, the highest velocity available. Near five hundred meters a second.”

 

 

 

NASIJI PICKED UP
a round. The canister was light, no more than six kilograms. He passed it from hand to hand. Standard theory said that the pieces of the uranium pit needed to come together at three hundred meters a second or more to lessen the risk of preimplosion. The problem was that every extra gram of weight that he added to the round would reduce its acceleration and slow its top speed. He’d have to be very careful to keep the pit, and the reflector around it, as light as possible.

“What about the beryllium?” Nasiji said.

Bernard shook his head. “Much harder than getting these. Almost as hard as getting those nasties out there, believe it or not. Only one reason anyone would want that quantity of beryllium and everyone knows it. There are only two people I trust enough even to mention it to, and they both said no. I can’t push. It won’t help anyone if my name shows up on a list of people looking to get dual-use material. Anyway, isn’t it just insurance?”

“Probably. Until I get inside the bombs and do the math, I won’t know for sure.”

“Then I’ll keep trying. Meanwhile, let’s get back to my house so you can sleep. You’ll thank me when you’re on the North Atlantic.”

W
ells stood under the glowing ultraviolet rays, trying not to feel silly as the minutes ticked by. Outside, night had fallen and the temperature was just above zero. But inside Ultra Spa, the sun never set.

Wells was the only man in the place and had drawn a suspicious look from the cashier when he arrived. But she took his rubles and led him down a dingy tile hall, past saunas and a tiny lap pool, to a room where a half-dozen stand-up tanning booths crackled with an electrical hum. Wells stripped down to his boxer briefs, earning an appreciative look from the cashier despite the slight gut he’d put on. She put a hand on his arm as she chose a booth and punched in his time, fifteen minutes. She gave him a pair of goggles and in he went.

He wondered if any spy manual anywhere mentioned tanning salons. Doubtful. But he had no choice. He needed to keep his skin as dark as possible, no easy task in Moscow at the end of December. He intended to approach Markov as Jalal Sawaya, leader of a radical Lebanese Christian independence group, the Flowers of Lebanon. Jalal wanted to hire Markov’s men to blow up the headquarters of the Syrian intelligence service in Damascus, revenge for Syrian-backed car bombings in Beirut. He had 250,000 euros—almost $400,000—in his suitcase to prove he was serious.

So went Wells’s cover story, anyway. In his saner moments, he knew it was thin. Worse than thin. Gaunt. The Flowers of Lebanon did exist, but they hadn’t been heard from in years. The Syrians had dismembered them very efficiently. Jalal Sawaya was a figment of Wells’s imagination, though the name was common enough in Lebanon. Further, even if Markov did believe that Jalal was real, he would surely wonder why Jalal had approached him and not a terrorist group closer to home.

But Markov didn’t have to be planning to accept Jalal’s offer, or even to believe the story. As long as Markov agreed to meet with Jalal, even if it was only to steal the money he carried, Wells would have his chance.

 

 

 

EVEN BEFORE HE ARRIVED
on Russian soil, Wells got a hint that his beard and olive skin wouldn’t be an asset in Moscow. Though he was in first class, and booked under the name Glenn Kramon with his new American passport, the Aeroflot attendants were slow to serve him. He’d wondered if he was imagining their attitude, until an attendant called him to the front galley ninety minutes into the flight. “Mr. Kramon, the captain wishes to speak with you.”

The captain was a tall man with close-cut hair and a wide Slavic face. “You are Mr. Kramon?”

“Yes,” Wells said.

“You are Egyptian?”

“American. Want to see my passport?”

“You are Muslim?”

“I’m a Unitarian,” Wells said. For some reason, Unitarian was the first denomination to pop into his head. He hoped the captain wouldn’t ask him any doctrinal questions. Did Unitarians believe in faith or works?

“What is Unitarian?”

“Christian. What is this, Twenty Questions? Don’t you have a plane to fly?” Wells knew he should keep his mouth shut, but his temper was rising.

“Your passport, please?” Wells handed it over. The captain flipped through the pages and finally nodded. “Thank you. Please go back to your seat,” he said, as if Wells had demanded to speak to him, not the other way around. For the rest of the flight, the attendants ignored Wells entirely.

 

 

 

AT SHEREMETYEVO-2 IMMIGRATION,
the cool reception continued. “Passport?” the agent said in English. He was a trim man with hostile brown eyes and a mustache that curled over his upper lip. Wells handed over Kramon’s passport and the entry/exit card that all visitors to Russia were required to fill out.

“Visiting Russia for vacation? Now?”

“I got a good fare.”

“What hotel?”

“The Novotel. Found it on Expedia. I can show you the reservation.” Wells began to sort through his computer bag.

“Forget it.” The guard flipped through his passport, scanned his visa, and typed into his terminal. He tore off half of the entry card and handed the other half back to Wells. “Entry card. Don’t lose.”

“Thanks.”

But the guard had already turned his attention to the woman in line behind him.

A half-hour later, Wells checked into the Novotel, lay down on his bed, fell asleep before he could even get his clothes off. He woke dry-mouthed and tense, certain he’d heard someone scratching at his door. He flipped off the bed, moved noiselessly to the door, pulled it open. The hallway outside was empty. Wells brushed his teeth, undressed, went back to bed, closed his eyes, and resolved to dream of Exley. But if he did he couldn’t remember.

The next morning Wells opened his second suitcase, a big, green, hard-sided Samsonite plastic case, the kind that hadn’t been in style for at least thirty years and that inevitably banged its owner’s shins and left them black and blue. Wells flipped it open, tossed out the clothes and shoes inside. At the base of the case were four almost invisible indentations, the tops of flathead screws that had been machined into place. With his Swiss Army knife, Wells unscrewed them. Underneath was a compartment eight inches long, four inches wide, four inches deep. It held Wells’s Lebanese passport and five hundred bills of 500 euros each—250,000 euros in all, tamped into two packets, each no larger than a narrow paperback book. Wells silently thanked the European Central Bank for deciding to put the 500-euro bill—sometimes called the “bin Laden,” because it was so rarely seen—into circulation, though he couldn’t imagine what the bureaucrats at the bank had been thinking. Who but gamblers, drug smugglers, and spies needed a bill worth almost $1,000?

Besides the money and the passport, the concealed compartment held a few other necessities that Wells had requested from the agency’s Division of Science and Technology. Unfortunately, they didn’t include a gun, which would have been too dangerous to try to smuggle in without a diplomatic bag. Wells took the Lebanese passport and twenty of the bills—10,000 euros in all—and tucked them in his pocket. He left everything else, replaced the panel, and repacked the suitcase.

A few minutes later, Samsonite in hand, he headed for the Mendeleevskaya metro station beside the Novotel. The station, like most of those in the Moscow subway, had been designed to double as an air-raid shelter. Its platform was several hundred feet underground, reached by an escalator whose base couldn’t be seen from its top. Wells found the long ride down oddly calming. The Freudians and the Buddhists would love these tunnels. One endless line of Muscovites silently descending into the earth, another rising from it, death and resurrection played out endlessly in miniature.

Wells took the gray line to Borovitskaya and switched to the red. At Park Kultury, he moved to the circle line, riding it six stops before crossing the platform and reversing direction. Basic countersurveillance. The subway cars were Soviet-era, made of blue corrugated steel with big windows, and they emerged from the tunnels with a pressurized whoosh as if they were powered by air and not electricity. They came every two minutes or so, making the switches very easy. After an hour of riding the trains, with four different transfers, Wells was sure that he hadn’t been followed. Not that there was any reason for him to expect surveillance. He was on an American passport, after all, and Americans visited Moscow even in December. Finally, he switched to the gray line and rode south another seven stops to Yuzhnaya.