“Yes,” Nasiji said. “See, they have duplicates of everything. Two circuit boards, two altimeters, four batteries—and probably just one needed to set off the primary.”
The batteries were the size of cigarette packs, sealed in plastic and attached to the inside of the steel casing. They fed two pairs of red and black wires that snaked through a steel shield into the heart of the cylinder, the bottom half where the primary was placed. “They want to be sure it will work even if part of the arming mechanism fails. Probably they expect ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent reliability.”
“Not one hundred?”
“Remember, they have thousands of these warheads. They can still blow up the world if a few don’t work.”
“Yes, well. I’ll bet they wish they had this one back.”
Nasiji yawned. “Let’s get a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.”
THAT NIGHT BASHIR DREAMED of sawing through the metal inch by inch. When he woke up, his fingers were inside his wife. Even before he was fully conscious, he’d slipped up her nightgown and spread her legs apart and pushed himself inside her. She was asleep when he started, but she woke up fast. The thought of the bomb drove him and he didn’t last long, but he didn’t mind and neither did she. She covered her mouth with her palm so Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t hear her moans. When he was done, he fell back to sleep and didn’t wake until Nasiji knocked on the bedroom door at nine a.m.
A half-hour later, he and Nasiji and Yusuf were in the stable, examining the naked guts of the warhead, trying to decide their next step. Nasiji favored cutting the battery wires before they sawed any further into the guts of the bomb. Bashir thought they might be better off leaving the wires alone.
“Didn’t you say we didn’t have to touch the primary at all?” he asked Nasiji.
“That was before we had a look. Now I see that the secondary won’t come out easily and I’d rather be sure the detonators are asleep.”
“If there’s any kind of trap, it’s going to blow when we take out the batteries.”
Nasiji shook his head, and Bashir saw that he wasn’t going to win this argument. “It must have a positive action,” Nasiji said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s possible to design the plastic so that it will go off unless there’s a constant flow of power from the batteries. In other words, if the power is cut, the plastic explodes. A negative action. But then what if the batteries go dead? Much too dangerous. So it must have a positive action. Goes off only if the batteries fire. And that means the safest course is to cut the power—”
Nasiji was the engineer, and Nasiji had stolen the bombs. This decision was his. So Bashir reached into the toolbox at his feet and handed Nasiji a pair of wire cutters. Then he picked up a second pair, feeling their smooth plastic handles in his hand.
“Both pairs of wires, the same time.”
“On three.” They stood next to each other and slipped the cutters’ blades around the wires. “One. Two. Three.”
The wire was brittle after being dosed with liquid nitrogen the night before. Bashir squeezed the handles together, feeling the tension—and then the plastic outer casing of the wires shattered into a hundred tiny pieces, and he tore smoothly through the copper underneath. Beside him Nasiji cut through his own wire. They waited for the bomb to sputter. Or for an explosion they would never see. But the seconds ticked by, and then a minute and then another, and the bomb sat inert.
“It’s done,” Nasiji said, not triumphantly, just a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that they’d passed another way station on a very long race.
They put aside the clippers and Bashir picked up the saw and they got back to work sawing around the cylinder, trying to remove the entire top half and expose the shell of U-235 that formed the rim of the secondary. Hard work, and slow, but steady and, with the batteries removed, safe enough. Bashir was already calculating how many days they would need before they could remove the secondary and get at the U-235. One? Two? Three at most. Then they’d have the raw material to start building their own bomb.
20
Give me the bad news,” Duto said as soon as Shafer walked into his office.
“How do you know it’s bad? Maybe it’s good.” Shafer wandered to Duto’s bookcase, plucked out An Army at Dawn, the Rick Atkinson book about the North African campaign in World War II, flipped through it aimlessly.
“It’s never good, these chats of ours,” Duto said. “And you called me, so it’s worse than usual. Stop wasting time.”
“You may be right.” For the next five minutes, Shafer told Duto where Wells was and what had happened with Kowalski. Duto didn’t say a word, the only sign of his anger a faint flush in his cheeks. Years before, when Duto had run the Directorate of Operations, now the National Clandestine Service, he’d been a screamer and sometimes even a thrower. Pens, briefing books, on one infamous occasion a laptop loaded with encrypted files. The techs had needed two weeks to recover everything. But since his promotion to director, Duto kept his anger bottled up. Shafer figured some management consultant had told him that controlled rage was more effective than fist-pounding. It was true, too.
“All right, again, from the top,” Duto said, when Shafer was done.
“Why?”
“I need to hear this twice.”
Shafer did. By the time he was done, Duto’s face had turned a ripe pink, the color of a medium-rare steak. “You’re telling me that Wells already screwed us with the Russians. And then he gets a call from Pierre Kowalski and he dances over to Zurich to see him?”
“I believe he flew. Swiss Air.”
“And you signed off on this?”
“It’s John, okay. You see me telling him what to do?”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“And further that the real reason all this happened with Kowalski, the reason Wells and Exley got hit last month, wasn’t because we screwed up Kowalski’s play in Afghanistan last year. It goes back to Wells taping his head in the Hamptons?”
“Duct-taping, yes.”
“Which you and John and Jennifer, the three of you, didn’t see fit to mention until now. And now Kowalski, to get Wells off his back, gave up a name. A Turkish refugee in Germany—”
“Not a refugee, a legal immigrant, a business owner—”
“Don’t give a damn if he’s the president of the Elks Club, Ellis.” Duto picking up momentum now. “He’s trying to build a nuke—”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“We know he wants beryllium. Desperate for it. And instead of coming straight to me on this, you tell Wells to meet the guy, Bernard, Bassim, whatever he’s called, on his own?”
“Again, Wells told me.”
“And Wells is pretending to be a mercenary? From Rhodesia?”
“Correct.”
Duto clenched and unclenched his fists three times, like a basketball coach signaling a play in from the sidelines. “You’re two little kids, kindergartners painting the walls with crayons. You can’t help yourselves. You just push me until I have no choice.” Shafer wondered whether he was going to see an old-time explosion. But Duto breathed deep, ran a hand over his face, controlled himself. “What do we know about the Turkish guy? Bernard?”
“He’s not in the Black Book”—the CIA’s database of 4,500 known or suspected terrorists—“nor the Gray Book”—a broader list, 37,000 names in all, friends, relatives, and associates of the people in the Black Book. “He’s not in the TSC database”—yet another list, this one managed by the FBI Terrorist Screening Center, mainly for the use of local law enforcement agencies.
“Any criminal record at all?”
“Can’t be sure because we don’t have fingerprints, but his name isn’t in the NCIC database”—a list of fifty million names, almost everyone who had ever been arrested, convicted, jailed, or paroled in the United States. “Interpol doesn’t have anything either.”
�
��The NSA?”
“Still checking.”
“Germans have any files on him? BND, local police?”
“I haven’t asked. Wanted to come to you first.”
“Nice of you. How about his business?”
“I’ve only started to look in public records, but it seems legit. He shows up in the Dun and Bradstreet corporate records for Germany, he’s listed in the Hamburg phone book, he’s in the Hamburg port database. Even got a Web site. Brings in rugs and machinery from Turkey, exports used cars and clothes to Africa.”
“Does he send anything to the United States?”
“Doesn’t look that way, but I’m checking.”
“You’re going to have a lot of other people helping you check, Ellis.”
“So be it,” Shafer said. “Long as they don’t get in my way.”
At that, Duto’s fists opened and closed, three times, another play called in. “Back to Wells. He’s meeting this guy when?”
“A couple hours from now. Six p.m. in Hamburg, noon here.”
“With no backup.”
“None whatsoever.”
“And no way of knowing that Kowalski didn’t triple him up, give his real name to this guy? No way of knowing that besides losing a nuke, we might wind up with a videotape of John Wells, our precious national hero, getting his head chopped off while bin Laden watches?”
“You sure you wouldn’t mind? You gave us that pretty speech about how we’re all on the same team, but your passion seems to have cooled.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t, but the White House would.”
“Kowalski’s on very thin ice and it’s not in his interest to play that kind of game.”
Duto drummed his fingers against his big oak desk, horses on the backstretch, coming around the far turn, lots of race left. Shafer wasn’t good at keeping his mouth shut, hated these silences, but this time he resolved to outlast Duto.
“You know the stakes here,” Duto said finally. “Why don’t you act like it?”
Because I trust Wells a lot more than I trust you, Shafer didn’t say. He’d already pissed Duto off plenty. “Worst case, he doesn’t get anything, we go in, pick up this guy Bernard, we’re right back where we started.”
“Worst case, Wells spooks him, sends him flying, and we miss our chance at his friends. Whoever they are. Wherever they are.”
“Vinny, he’s been in tight before and it’s always worked out. The BND’s more likely to spook this guy than Wells is. I say we give Wells a couple days before we tell the Germans.”
“Are you kidding me?” Duto said. He smiled, a big fake grin. “You are. You’re kidding me. Ellis Shafer, you joker you. I know you and John and Jenny, you have this us-against-the-world thing going, the three musketeers, all of it—”
“But—”
“No. You listen now. Last month, one muskeeter almost got killed and now the other one’s trigger-happy like a twelve-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto—”
“Grand Theft Auto?” Shafer smiled, trying to lighten the mood.
“My nephews, they’re teenagers, what can I say?” Duto smiled, too, but the break in the storm didn’t last. “And you come in here with your smirk and tell me there’s a guy in Hamburg wants beryllium. Then with a straight face you tell me to keep the BND in the dark, let the great John Wells do his thing. Little Boy Two blows up in Potsdamer Platz, vaporizes that fancy new Reichstag of theirs, what do you think the Germans are going to say to that?”
“The bomb’s not in Germany—”
“You don’t know that, Ellis. You don’t know shit. And this is too important for guessing.”
“Here’s what I know,” Shafer said. “These guys don’t care about Berlin. New York, D.C., maybe London, maybe Moscow—that’s it for them. Max damage, max symbolism.”
“Maybe. Even so, this is on German soil and we’re telling the BND.”
“You think they’ll help us on this?” The CIA didn’t have a great reputation in Germany these days, not after the fiascos over renditions and the Iraq war.
“They got the same report on the missing uranium as everybody else. They’ll help.”
“Fine,” Shafer mumbled. He’d lost this fight. Duto had made up his mind. And part of him was relieved. Much as he disliked Duto, this mission was too important to be outside the chain of command. “Vinny, there’s something I’m not seeing here. Why won’t the Russians be straight with us on this?”
“I asked Joe”—Joe Morgau, the head of the agency’s Russia desk—“the same thing. He says four possibilities. In order of likelihood. One, it’s reflex. They lie to us so much they don’t know how to tell the truth anymore. Two, they’re embarrassed, so they’re burying the truth, hoping it doesn’t come back on them.”
“Sounds like something we would do.”
“Three, they don’t know exactly what’s missing and they don’t want to scare us. Four, there’s some bigger power struggle happening in the Kremlin and this is part of it in some way we can’t see.”
“What do you think?”
“I think it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to find the stuff, whatever it is, and we’ve got to assume the Russians aren’t going to help.” Duto paused. “Here’s what I’ll do for you, Ellis. It’s”—Duto looked at his watch—“ten a.m. now. Four p.m. in Germany. I’ll give Wells this one meeting tonight. I’ll call Mieke”—Josef Mieke, the director of the BND—“around six p.m. our time, midnight over there. He won’t get the message until the morning. Then he’ll want to talk to me, make sure it’s real, that we’re not exaggerating. That’ll give you a few hours to get hold of Wells, tell him what’s coming, so he doesn’t do anything dumb and spook the Germans. But this is it. The last time.”
“You’re a prick . . . but I love you anyway.” Shafer stood, aiming to get to the door before Duto could change his mind. Wells would have one night with Bernard before the Germans showed up.
“Don’t make me regret this.”
“I suspect you regret it already.” Shafer grabbed the Atkinson book and left.
21
The Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg was an architectural marvel, two dozen train platforms under an arched steel roof that stretched four hundred feet, the space open, no supporting columns cutting it up. The trains never stopped coming, stubby commuter S-Bahns and sleek long-distance expresses painted with the red-and-white DB logo, bound for Berlin, Munich, Paris. On the platforms, men and women lined up, quick-checked their tickets to be sure they had the right cabins, grabbed their briefcases and suitcases, and stepped up into cars, only to be replaced a few minutes later by new passengers waiting for new trains. Everyone was properly bundled against the cold, long wool coats and scarves and leather gloves, and no one pushed and no one ran. They were German, after all.
Wells watched the endless flow from a self-serve snack shop on a balcony overlooking the platforms; 4:04 turned 4:05 on the big digital clock above him. His contact was five minutes late, maybe the only person in all of Hamburg who was not on schedule. At six p.m., Wells was supposed to meet with Bernard Kygeli, and if he didn’t have the right papers he might as well not show up.
Then he saw the man Shafer had told him to expect: late twenties, shoulder-length dark hair, orange Patagonia jacket. The guy sidled up to Wells’s table and dropped a hotel keycard beside his coffee cup. “Park Hyatt 402,” he murmured to the air. “Four-oh-two,” Wells said quietly, confirming, as the courier turned and left. Wells liked the way the guy had handled the drop, how he hadn’t wasted time being subtle, no need since nobody was watching. Wells pocketed the key and sipped his coffee until the clock hit 4:10, plenty of time for his contact to disappear, then pulled himself up and left the station behind.
A winter wind was flying in off the North Sea and down the Elbe, sending a shiver through the sunless city. But the stores on Mönckebergstrasse were bustling, lit up with white lights and thick with shoppers taking advantage of the sales.
The Hyatt was only a couple of blocks from
the station, and again Wells appreciated the courier’s efficiency. Room 402 was a suite at the end of a short corridor, empty, a black leather briefcase on the king-sized bed. Wells turned the locks to 2004—the year his Red Sox had won the World Series after eighty-six years of baseball misery—and flipped it open.
Inside, two manila envelopes. The first held his new papers: an Irish passport, a British driver’s license, and credit cards. All in the name of Roland Albert. “Roland Albert,” Wells said to the empty room. “Roland Albert. Albert Roland? Roland Albert?” He wished he’d picked a better name. The license and passport had his real date of birth to make it easier to remember, a nice touch. Wells made sure he had the London address memorized, then swapped the fakes for his real credit cards and passport.
The second envelope held a two-page dossier from Shafer on the target. Wells scanned it twice, found little of interest besides the guy’s real name—Bassim. He tossed both envelopes back into the briefcase, locked it, left it on the bed for his nameless courier, then walked to the Kempinski Hotel, behind the train station, to check in under Roland Albert’s name, be sure his identity was live.
THE RATHAUS FILLED the south end of a plaza just off the Binnenalster, the little lake in the center of downtown Hamburg. Like the train station, the city hall was a reminder of Hamburg’s prosperity, a broad building with a clock tower at its center. Wells stood beside the wooden front door, wearing a cap with the logo of the Bayern Munich soccer team, as Bernard had asked him to do.
Six o’clock came and went, and 6:15. Wells tucked his hands under his arms against the cold and watched the shoppers and commuters go by. The setup for this meeting stank of amateur hour. Wells already knew Bernard’s name, after all. Why not just meet at his warehouse? But if Bernard wanted these pointless precautions, Wells wouldn’t argue.
A woman with dyed blond hair turned the corner of the Rathaus, a pixie in faded blue jeans, taking short, quick tottering steps. The walk was so much like Exley’s that for a second Wells thought the woman was Exley, that Exley had somehow found him here. He felt a flutter in his chest.
The Silent Man Page 23
