The Silent Man (46 page)

Sirens began to scream up the driveway. In minutes, cops and FBI agents would be overrunning the place. Maybe he should have gone back to Andrews after all.

Wells’s phone buzzed. Shafer. “They’re not here,” he said.

“I heard. You decided to stay, enjoy the scenery?”

“Give me some good news.”

“There isn’t any. If we haven’t found them by five, the president will announce that the State of the Union has been canceled and release their names and photographs publicly. It’s going to leak by then anyway. Already there’s stuff on the Internet, rumors. Nobody’s put it together yet, but they will.”

Wells looked at his watch: 2:15.

“We know what they’re driving?”

“The only car registered to Bashir is that Ford. If I had to guess, I’d say they bought something else and didn’t retag it. It’s got to be something big, though. A van or SUV.”

“There’s only about fifty million of those.”

“I told you no good news. What, they didn’t leave a map with a big
X
marking safe house?”

“You think they have another safe house?”

“Maybe not a true safe house, but these guys are too smart just to be driving around, especially if the car’s not registered. They’ve got someplace to crash.”

Wells thought of the coffee mug in Bernard Kygeli’s office. “How about Penn State? From there, it’s interstate to New York and D.C.”

“We’re looking, but we can’t find anybody connected to Kygeli.”

“All right. If anything happens, call me.”

“If anything happens, you may hear it all the way up there.”
Click.

“Who was that?” Gaffan said.

“My boss.”

“What now?”

The keys to Bashir’s Expedition were in a candy dish on the kitchen table. Wells picked them up. “We’re going to Happy Valley.”

Gaffan shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Happy Valley, Pennsylvania. Penn State.”

A New York State trooper escorted them in a Suburban, calling ahead so that the Pennsylvania troopers knew they were coming. They rolled down 15, and at the state border were handed off to a Pennsylvania trooper in an unmarked Mustang. The highway was narrow and the Expedition was wide, but somehow Gaffan kept the speedometer pinned at 105 most of the way down. They’d get to Penn State by four, give or take, Wells thought. Then what? He had no idea.

 

 

 

THE PLACE WAS
sparsely furnished and small, two rooms and a galley kitchen. Cheap, simple college housing. Nasiji let them in with the key that Bernard had given him. They parked the Suburban in the parking lot directly outside, no need to be fancy. They’d taken out the two back rows of seats. The gadget was in the back, facing backward, the tamper close to the back gate. On the way down, Yusuf had driven, with Thalia next to him. Nasiji lay in the back, next to the Spear, hidden by the tinted windows, the uranium round between his legs.

No one could track them here, and all they needed to do was wait. The woman who lived here had no idea what they were planning, of course. Nasiji hoped she wouldn’t show up until they arrived. She would only complicate things.

In the apartment, Nasiji watched CNN with the sound off, waiting for the screen crawl that might tell him that they’d been found, that the State of the Union had been canceled or a farm in upstate New York had been raided. But the afternoon rolled by quietly and he began to think that they’d gotten away. They would leave just before sunset and head southeast to Harrisburg. There they would decide whether to turn south toward Washington—if the State of the Union was still happening—or east toward Philadelphia and New York. Once they were on the road, they ought to be unstoppable. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could connect them with the Suburban, and the police lights would help.

The mission hadn’t gone according to plan, he had to admit. They’d lost the second bomb. The Americans had found the
Juno.
And then, last night, Bashir’s unforgivable treachery.

Even so, they were close. By the end of this night, the American government might no longer exist.
If.
If they could get into Washington, get close to the Capitol. If the bomb didn’t fizzle. If Allah smiled on them. Nasiji lowered himself to the floor and began to pray.

 

 

 

TEN MILES OUTSIDE STATE COLLEGE,
a billboard for Penn State football towered over Route 220.
Go Nittany Lions.
And then Wells remembered. The coffee mug in Bernard’s office hadn’t been for Penn State. It had been for Penn State
soccer.

He called Shafer.

“Ellis. Have the FBI call Penn State, get the soccer team roster. That’s the connection.”

“You sure?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I’ll Google it . . . Penn State athletics . . . It’s all football . . . Soccer . . . No Arab or Turkish-sounding names, nobody from Turkey or Germany or anywhere in the Middle East.”

“Try the J.V.”

A few seconds later, Shafer came back. “No, John. You still want me to call the FBI? They’ve got a few other things to do.”

“What about women?” Gaffan said.

Wells clapped a hand to his forehead. “Of course.”

“Of course what?” Shafer said.

“Check the women’s roster.”

Shafer clicked away. “Wouldn’t you know? Aymet Helsi. From Blankenese, Germany. Says here she’s a goalie. You want to bet your buddy Bernard knows her family? Maybe he’s helping with her tuition?”

“You have an address?”

“As soon as I hang up, I’ll get the FBI to get a warrant, get her address from the registrar. Meantime let’s see if she’s got a, yes, she’s listed. The last twenty-year-old with a landline.”

“Address.”

“Ten Vairo Boulevard, unit 239-04 . . . Looks like it’s part of a big apartment complex called Vairo Village. You want me to stay on the line, give you directions?”

“We’ve got a GPS.”

“I’ll call the army. But you’re going to get there first, no matter what. I don’t suppose I can convince you to wait.”

Wells was silent.

“John, do me a favor and don’t get killed. She’ll never forgive you. Or me.”
Click.

 

 

 

FOLLOWING THE GPS’S
chirped orders, Gaffan turned right onto the Mount Nittany Expressway, Route 322, the east-west highway that ran along the northern edge of town. At Waddle Road, less than a mile from the apartment, Gaffan pulled off. Wells tapped his shoulder. “Pull over.” Wells hopped out, told the trooper what had happened.

“I gotta call the State College cops,” the trooper said.

“Sit tight for five minutes. We’ll go in first, no sirens.”

“But what about evacuating—”

“There’s no evacuating from this,” Wells said. “Let us go in first.”

 

 

 

AT 4:25, THE NEWS CRAWL
on CNN began to promise a major announcement from the White House at 5 p.m. Then the crawl reported that the FBI would hold a briefing following the White House announcement. Nasiji didn’t need to see more.

“We’re going,” he said to Yusuf and Thalia. “Now.”

 

 

 

WELLS AND GAFFAN
rolled down Oakwood Avenue. The GPS informed them that Vairo Boulevard was ahead on their right. They reached a stop sign, turned right onto Vairo. The apartment complex was across the road, dozens of brown-and-white buildings around a long cul-de-sac.

Gaffan started to swing in. “No,” Wells said. “Next one.”

He pointed to the sign in front: “Phase 1—Units 1-100.” Wells lowered the window of the Expedition and cradled his M-4. His mouth was dry, his fingers gnarled. If his hunch was wrong, he might be about to shoot an innocent college student. And if it was right . . .

They reached the next block: “Phase 2—Units 201-300.” Gaffan swung in. They rolled slowly down the street, which was really just a big parking lot for the complex. The buildings were identical, each two stories, white and brown, laid out roughly in a rectangle that extended several hundred feet around the parking lot. They were moving up the longer side of the rectangle, north from Vairo Boulevard, as the parking lot divided into four rows.

“We know what kind of car we’re looking for?”

“Something big,” Wells said.

And Wells saw it. A black Suburban at the far end of the complex, moving south away from them, toward the exit. He touched Gaffan’s shoulder.

“Let’s see what building they came out of.”

They swung right, down the northern edge of the complex, the top of the rectangle, as the Suburban rolled away. Number 239 lay at the northeastern flank of the complex, where Wells had first seen the Suburban. Gaffan slowed down. “We going in?”

“No.”

 

 

 

NASIJI LAY ON THE FLOOR
of the Suburban, the uranium pit tucked between his legs. On the ride down from Addison, the position had left him vaguely carsick, but it allowed him to load and fire the Spear in seconds.
Inshallah.
How silly to worry about a bit of stomach pain when he was about to give his body to a nuclear fireball. He wasn’t afraid . . . Or perhaps he was. Anyone would be. But he had chosen this course, and unlike that coward Bashir, he would see it through. His father, his mother, they hadn’t asked to die either. He and Yusuf and even Thalia would join Mohammed Atta and the other martyrs who had given themselves to liberate Islam.

Nasiji clutched the pit tight and closed his eyes. They stopped, waiting for traffic to clear so they could join the traffic on Vairo Boulevard. Soon they would be on the highway, just another anonymous black SUV traveling through the Pennsylvania night, burning the gasoline that the Americans had invaded Iraq to steal. In half an hour, he would hear what the president had to say and then he would decide where to take their precious cargo.

 

 

 

THE SUBURBAN STOPPED
at the intersection of the parking lot and Vairo Boulevard, stuck behind a car that was waiting to make a left turn.

“Ram them,” Wells said. “Hard.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Gaffan stamped the gas pedal and the Expedition surged, its big engine roaring—

 

 

 

CRASH.
The Expedition’s massive grille buckled the rear of the Suburban, shattering the back windows. The collision threw Wells forward but his seat belt caught and airbags popped from all over, front and side. He didn’t even drop his M-4. He juddered back into his seat and even before the steam started to rise from the Expedition’s crumpled radiator, he’d unbuckled his seat belt. For a moment, he couldn’t open his door, but he put his shoulder to it and popped it out. Through the Suburban’s broken windows, Wells saw a man in the back of the truck, crawling toward what looked like a big rocket-propelled grenade tube, a Spear, maybe. A strange ball was attached to the muzzle of the Spear.

“Stop!” Wells yelled in Arabic. He stepped out of the Ford and dropped the safety on the M-4, wondering if he really was about to start shooting, without warning, at three people in an SUV he’d never seen before. The man in the Suburban didn’t look back. He inched forward and stretched out his right arm for the barrel of the Spear.

 

 

 

THE COLLISION TOSSED
Nasiji backward, throwing him into the Suburban’s rear doors. Shards of glass covered him and he dropped the pit. No. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine how, but they’d been tracked. Only one choice left. This stupid place wasn’t Washington or New York, but it would have to do. He reached around and found the pit and inched forward. Outside the car, a man yelled
“Stop”
in Arabic, and Nasiji remembered the American soldiers in Iraq, always giving orders. He pushed himself forward. If he could just load the pit.

 

 

 

THE SUBURBAN LURCHED FORWARD,
metal tearing metal, pulling apart the grille of the Expedition. In a moment, it would be free. Wells stepped forward and propelled himself onto the hood of the Expedition and began to shoot, first at the man in the back, tearing him open, three in the chest and then two in the head to be sure, and switched to full auto and tore up the driver and passenger seats until blood and brains splattered the front windshield and the Suburban was still.

 

 

 

AND THEN WELLS
leaned back against the hood of the Ford and looked at what he’d done. A hand squeezed his shoulder and a voice, Gaffan’s, said his name. But Wells only shook his head and sat in the cold, shivering, as the police arrived in ones and twos and then by the dozens, and Vairo Village turned into a mad clanking, flashing carnival, with him the main attraction, its mute and beating heart.

The bomb would have worked.

So the engineers at Los Alamos calculated after oh-so-carefully taking it apart and simulating its explosion on their supercomputers. They calculated an 87 percent chance of a Hiroshima-sized 10- to 15-kiloton explosion, a 4 percent chance of a 2- to 10-kiloton explosion, and a 9 percent chance of a fizzle.

To avoid panicking the public, the results of the simulation were never released. The White House and FBI publicly said only that the weapon found in the back of the Suburban was an “improvised radiological device,” never calling it a nuclear weapon. Wells’s role in finding the bomb was also kept secret. Reporters were told only that he and Gaffan were “U.S. government employees,” a statement that was true enough as far as it went.

Meanwhile, the video that Nasiji had made caused a stir across the Internet when it was aired on Islamic Web sites. The United States and Russia quickly issued a joint statement calling the video “a total fabrication intended to stir hatred between us.” A few conspiracy theorists insisted that the bombs and Grigory’s identification both looked real, but they were ignored.