The Silent Man (26 page)

In the years since their first meeting, Bashir had met Nasiji several more times in Montreal. But Bashir was under no illusions about who was in charge of the operation. Its ultimate success or failure would fall on Nasiji. It was Nasiji who had decided to bring the bombs in through Canada, where Bashir and his wife would pick them up, ferry them to Nova Scotia, and truck them over the United States border. In a big SUV filled with ski equipment and suitcases, the bombs wouldn’t stand out. Bashir had wondered about the scheme, which seemed to him too complicated by half, but Nasiji was the boss.

Now they’d suffered disaster, no way around it. Nasiji had always told Bashir they’d have two bombs to work with. Two into one, he called the plan. And though Bashir wasn’t a nuclear physicist, he understood that being short of material made their task immensely more complicated.

Well, at least they’d gotten the one bomb across the border. After the pickup, Bashir and Thalia had driven across Newfoundland through the night and caught a ferry to Sydney, Nova Scotia, a roiling two-hundred-mile trip. From Sydney they drove to Montreal. They told the border guards on the New York State Thruway that the skiing on Mont Tremblant had been great but promised that next time they’d try Lake Placid. Then they were through.

Meanwhile, Nasiji and Yusuf had taken the easy way in. After resting for a night in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, they’d hopped a Continental flight that conveniently enough went nonstop to Newark. From there they would rent a car and drive to the farm. And the real work of making the bomb would begin.

Z
urich was calm and rich and Wells disliked it immediately, for no good reason. Maybe because Kowalski lived here. Maybe that was enough. Wells hadn’t taken any great precautions for this trip. He’d even checked into the hotel under his own name. He had his Glock and the agency knew he was here, all the protection he needed. He couldn’t imagine Kowalski had invited him just to take another shot at him.

Wells was staying at the Baur au Lac, a five-star hotel downtown. The place stank of endless wealth, fortunes that would last until the sun exploded and its flames swallowed the world. Perversely, Wells had taken a suite, handing over his agency credit card, imagining an auditor at Langley choking on his coffee as he saw the $3,000-a-night room.

As soon as the bellhop left him in the room, he reached for the phone. Kowalski answered on the first ring. “Hallo?”

“I’m at the Baur au Lac.” Come and get me, Wells thought.

“Mr. Wells. Shall we meet in the bar in the lobby, tonight at six?”

“I’ll be there.” Wells hung up.

 

 

 

THE BAR WAS REALLY
a sitting room, a fifty-foot square with dark wood walls and a faded gold carpet. Men in dark suits and white shirts sat at tables sipping beers, reading
Die Zeit
or the
Financial Times
. In one corner a fifty-something blonde in an electric-blue blouse, diamonds glittering on her wrist and neck and ears, sat on a couch between two younger men, talking equally to them both. They leaned forward as if they’d never heard anything so interesting. Her investment advisers, perhaps. Or nephews hoping for a loan.

Kowalski sat in the opposite corner, slumped on a sofa behind a low coffee table. He was wearing a rumpled blue suit, cream shirt, no tie. He seemed smaller than when Wells had seen him last, though hardly svelte. Two men flanked him, one about Wells’s size, the other tall and thin and ugly. They stood as Wells walked near, and Wells recognized the big one, Anatoly Tarasov, Kowalski’s head of security. He was shorter than Wells but thicker in the shoulders. He had the cauliflower ears and flattened nose of a boxer. Wells figured he could go twelve rounds with Tarasov, but he wasn’t sure he’d get the decision. The other man stood to the side and didn’t bother with eye contact, focusing instead on Wells’s hands. His own hands were slipped under his jacket. He was the dangerous one. He was the shooter.

As Wells reached the table, Kowalski grunted and stood and extended a hand. Wells let it dangle in the air until Kowalski pulled it back and lowered himself down to the couch.

“Mr. Wells. I hope you don’t mind my bringing friends. This is Anatoly, and the gentleman in the corner is called the Dragon.” Kowalski raised his glass. “Would you like a drink? I’m having Riesling, very dry. Very nice.”

Wells saw no reason to speak.

“You know where the word
hotel
comes from?” Kowalski said. “Six, seven hundred years ago, the Middle Ages, trade picked up and merchants began to travel, selling goods. They needed places to stay. Before that travelers had slept in monasteries or castles, but these merchants didn’t know the local priests or barons. They were stuck. So in the bigger towns, the leading bars added hostels—places anyone could stay, with his safety guaranteed.”

“And hostels became hotels.”

“Exactly. Consider this such a place. Don’t be afraid to have a drink. Take my glass if you like.”

“You think I’m afraid?” Wells said. “I didn’t come here for your hospitality. Or history lessons.”

“Besides, your bosses know you’re here, and if I touch you all the bodyguards in the world can’t protect me,” Kowalski said. “A Black Hawk full of Deltas will come to my house and grab me and toss me into the Zürichsee from a thousand meters up.”

“You have a vivid imagination.”

“Maybe a drink later, then. When we know each other better.” Kowalski sipped his wine. “You like Zurich, Mr. Wells? Each year we win the award for the best quality of life. Though for a man of action such as yourself, it must be boring.”

Wells wouldn’t have guessed he could feel anything other than hate for Kowalski. But he did, a profound irritation that sat atop his disgust like barbed wire on an electrified fence. Kowalski reminded Wells of George Tyson, the agency’s head of counterintelligence, another fat man who could never get to the point and who took more than he gave when he finally did.

“And our women are beautiful, of course,” Kowalski said. “The Swiss misses.”

Wells thought of Exley, crying silent tears as she levered herself down the hospital hallway. Kowalski, no one else, was to blame for those tears. And now he was joking about the women of Zurich? Wells’s throat tightened. Instantly, the room was twenty degrees cooler and the conversations around them no longer existed. The universe had shrunk to this corner.

Wells looked at the Dragon, the shooter, and then at Tarasov, calculating geometries. Could he get to his Glock and get two shots off, take out the Dragon first and then Tarasov? Doubtful. He’d need two guns, a cross-draw, Jesse James style. Those only worked in the movies.

The other men seemed to sense that Kowalski had pushed Wells too far. The Dragon reached under his jacket for his own weapon, a little snubnose that he held now beneath his waist, under his clasped hands. Kowalski didn’t move, but his eyes opened slightly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wells. I was impolite. But let’s not disturb the peace of our neighbors.”

Wells leaned back, rested his hands in his lap. Kowalski nodded at the Dragon and the snubnose disappeared.

“Do you have something to tell me? Because now’s the time.” Wells pushed back his chair. “Now or not at all.”

“First, sincerely, I’m sorry about last month. I made a terrible mistake. What you did to me in the Hamptons, it unsettled my equilibrium. I overreacted.”

Wells stood. Kowalski raised a big hand to hold him off.

“I want peace between us. I have something for you.”

For the first time since he’d seen Kowalski, Wells smiled. “This isn’t a bribe, right? Even you aren’t that stupid.”

“A bribe, yes. But not money. Information.”

Wells sat.

 

 

 

FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES,
Kowalski filled Wells in on the call he’d gotten from Andrei Pavlov, the deputy director of Rosatom, and about his suspicion that a nuclear weapon had gone missing. Wells didn’t tell Kowalski about the report that Duto had passed to him, but the details seemed to line up.

“So the Russians are missing material,” Wells said when Kowalski was done. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“All right. Let me start at the beginning. Two years ago, a man comes to me, a Turk who lives in Germany, he wants three thousand AKs, a million rounds.”

“What’s his name?”

“Let’s call him the Turk.”

“Clever,” Wells said. “So you did the deal. You weren’t worried the German police were setting you up? Or someone else?”

“If the German police try to sting me, I know it before the men who are running the operation. Anyway, this wasn’t illegal, what he wanted.”

“Isn’t it unusual for someone to come to you like this, out of the blue?”

“Not so much. People know who I am, they know what I do, if they call me I answer. Or one of my men does.”

“But he comes to you, wants to spend a few hundred thousand on rifles, you don’t ask where they’re going.”

“Of course I do. He told me Nigeria, he knew a general there, they’d done business before, used jeeps. This time, the man wanted AKs for a brigade of police, paramilitaries.”

“And this guy, the Turk, he wasn’t lying about the buyer?”

“On a first-time sale like this, I don’t do the deal until I’m sure. So I checked. The story was what the Turk said, Nigeria. It isn’t complicated. You understand how it works?”

Wells shook his head.

“The Turk comes to me with these papers called end-user certificates, a promise by the Nigerian government that the weapons won’t be resold. I check, make sure everything’s in order, I set up the deal. AKs are easy to find, they make them all over the world, China, Russia, Bulgaria, wherever. I buy the AKs for $150, sell them for $220 each, including the transport. Three thousand guns, $70, a nice little profit, $210,000, plus the ammunition. A small deal, but for a few hours work, a few phone calls, not bad.”

“And the Nigerian government can’t do this on its own?”

“Of course it can.” Kowalski’s heavy eyes were half-closed now, as if having to explain all this bored him. “And $220 is a very fair price for a new rifle. But you must understand, the license, the EUC, end-user certificate, it says four thousand AKs, not three thousand.”

“So?”

“So the Turk, or the general, somewhere up the line they’re adding a thousand AKs of their own, old bad guns, maybe cost twenty dollars each, and pocketing the difference. The general finds the Turk, the Turk finds me, everybody makes money. They don’t ask me for a kick-back, even, they just want me to forget the extra thousand rifles. And I’m very good about things like that.”

“No doubt,” Wells said.

“Then, last year, the Turk, he calls me again, another order. Bigger. This time six thousand AKs, a few machine guns, plus a few SPG-nines. Just four.”

“The Spear?” Wells had seen them in Afghanistan. The Spear was a 73-millimeter recoilless rifle, Russian-designed. Basically an oversized bazooka. It was advertised as an antitank gun, but that was an exaggeration. The Spear could take out pickup trucks and medium-armored Humvees, but it wasn’t much use against anything heavier.

“Yes.”

“Did he say why he wanted those?”

“No. Same deal as before. This time the license says eight thousand rifles. Okay. And the Spears, it’s a little strange, they’re under a separate license, but so what, who cares? It’s not like he’s buying a tank.”

“So you sold him the guns.”

“I am an arms dealer, Mr. Wells. I do arms deals. But then, a few months ago—”

“When?”

“Six. Six months. The Turk called me again. This time he wanted beryllium. He was coy about it, very cagey, but he wasn’t joking.”

“Beryllium?”

“A metal. It’s for bombs. Nuclear.”

“Can you use it for anything else?”

“Not so much. Do you understand the physics?” Kowalski explained the rudiments of bomb design, scribbling on a pad he’d brought. After a few minutes, Wells understood, or thought he did.

“So the beryllium reflects the neutrons back at the bomb?”

“Exactly. It goes around the core of the nuclear material and speeds up the chain reaction. But you can’t make a bomb with it. It’s useless without the plutonium or the uranium. And the Turk didn’t seem to have that. His question was more in the nature of a hypothetical. If he needed beryllium, could I get it? I told him probably not, but for the right price, I would look.”

“Were you surprised he came to you? You could have gone right to the Swiss police. Or even the Germans.”

“We did two deals already, they went well, so no. Anyway, everyone knows I don’t go to the authorities. If I can’t make a deal, I don’t make it. But that’s my business, no one else’s. And there’s no law against asking about beryllium.”

What a fine human being you are, Wells didn’t say. “All right. He came to you. Suppose the Turk and his friends could get enough HEU or plutonium for a bomb. Would it be hard to make?”

“I’m not an expert, but I don’t think so.”

“How many men?”

“Fewer than five. Remember, this is very old technology.”

Wells thought of the new Russian estimate of missing material. “If they had the uranium, how long would it take?”

“I don’t know. It depends if they know what they’re doing, how much they have. Two weeks at least, three months at most.”

“
If
they have enough. Whoever they are. It’s all theoretical. All smoke.”

“All smoke,” Kowalski agreed. “But what if it’s not?”

Wells looked around. This bar was the wrong place for the discussion they were having, and not because it was insecure, though it was. The room around them just didn’t match the subject at hand. But then what room would? An underground bunker at Strategic Air Command headquarters, maybe. World maps glowing on wall-sized monitors. Stern-faced men with stars on their shoulderboards watching the beast slouch closer. Not here, not with a fifty-something bottle blonde three couches away.