The Silent Man (28 page)

Wells had been ready, more than ready, to make Kowalski pay for Exley and all those nameless Africans who had died from the bullets that Kowalski sold. Even at the price of losing Exley. And maybe one day Exley would have forgiven him, understood that he’d needed to kill Kowalski to make sense of all the rest of the killing he’d done. Or maybe not. But though Wells always would have hated himself for driving her away, he never would have been sorry for killing Kowalski.

Or maybe . . . he would have found a way to change his mind. Maybe he would have realized that vengeance wasn’t his to take. And then he could have told Exley:
I’m not going after him. Maybe it’s too late, but I want you to know. I’m sorry.

Instead Wells would lose both ways. Snake eyes. Kowalski would live. And yet Wells wouldn’t be able to tell Exley that he’d found peace in his heart and walked away from the fight. Kowalski was simply buying his way out, plea-bargaining for his own survival.

As Wells had known all day. Now he was wasting time, and Kowalski was right. These terrorists, whoever they were, they wouldn’t wait once the bomb was done. Wells flicked off the television and picked up the phone.

 

 

 

A HALF-HOUR LATER,
the hotel’s Bentley brought him through snow-covered streets to the gates of Kowalski’s mansion. Wells stepped out and watched as the big black sedan, a brick on wheels, silently rolled away. Then he pushed the bell and the wrought-iron gates swung open and he walked up the gravel driveway toward the house, three stories high and wide and made of solid red brick. It looked like it belonged in Boston and not Zurich.

The front door was opened by a uniformed housekeeper. She curtseyed and stepped aside, revealing the most beautiful woman Wells had ever seen, tall and slim and high-breasted and wearing a black crepe dress that seemed molded to her body.

“Nadia,” she said, extending a hand.

“John.” Wells stood in the door, trying to brush off his long blue overcoat, feeling clumsy as a sixth-grader on his first date. He’d expected to be met by Tarasov, or the shooter whom Kowalski called the Dragon. Not this creature, whose eyes were as blue as Exley’s.

“Please, come in. Let Fredrika take it.”

The housekeeper helped him out of the coat and gloves and disappeared. Nadia cocked her head and looked at Wells, a butterfly smile flitting over her face, as if he’d whispered a joke that she hadn’t quite heard. “Are you cold? Would you like a drink?”

Wells shook his head.

“Follow me, please.”

The mansion was even more opulent than Wells had expected, its walls lined with Impressionist art. Wells caught a glimpse of what looked like a Renoir as they passed the dining room, and a Degas pastel in a dim alcove.

In front of him, Nadia’s hips swung sideways and her red heels clacked on the oak floors beneath them. Her dress whispered as she walked. It was modest, knee-length, but Wells imagined Nadia’s thighs underneath, could almost see them. He hadn’t felt so attracted to a woman other than Exley in years, but this woman exuded sex as naturally as a lake spouted fog at dawn. He forced himself to look away. He was being cruel to Exley, and stupid besides. He was here for a deal, not to steal Kowalski’s concubine.

Nadia knocked on a closed wooden door.

“Come,” Kowalski said softly.

A flare of anger burned away Wells’s lust. Now that he was on the verge of making peace, he hated Kowalski more than ever. He had planned to come to this meeting unarmed, but just as he walked out of his hotel room he’d grabbed his Glock and tucked it in a shoulder holster. He was glad to have it. Though he knew he ought not to be. He was here for a name, nothing more.

 

 

 

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 the 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.