At that level of purity, even a simple sphere of uranium, with no reflector, no compression, would go critical and produce a nuclear explosion at a size of about fifty kilograms. They were short, but they were in the ballpark.
Nasiji wondered if Bernard could somehow deliver the beryllium without getting busted. Doubtful. But even without beryllium, they could try a steel reflector. Steel wouldn’t be as effective as beryllium, but it would help. Maybe a double-gun assembly, to achieve maximum acceleration, if Yusuf and Bashir could somehow handle the welding.
With thirty-two kilograms, putting this bomb together wouldn’t be easy. But it might not be impossible, and he knew the tricks. Slowly, over sixty-five years, first the physics and then the engineering details of building these bombs had leaked out.
Yusuf emerged from the stable, walked up to him tentatively.
“Sayyid, I must say this. I’m sorry for my stupid questions. It’s confusing, that’s all.”
“It’s I who should apologize,” Nasiji said. “My temper—”
“And I wanted to say, if it’s really impossible with this much, we’ll get more. We’ll leave this here, go back to Russia, find another martyr.”
Nasiji smiled at the stars. He couldn’t help but admire Yusuf’s attitude, though they couldn’t get within a hundred kilometers of a stockpile now.
“No need, Yusuf. We’ll make do. I have some ideas.”
“Is it possible?”
“God willing. We’ve come too far to quit.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Nasiji took his physics and engineering textbooks and a sketchpad and Bashir’s laptop and shut himself up in the farmhouse basement beside the Ping-Pong table. Bashir tried to follow, but Nasiji shooed him away.
“Tell Thalia to leave my lunch at the top of the stairs. Dinner too, most likely.”
“You don’t want help?”
“Not for this.”
“All right, Sayyid. But you’re going to see us anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“There’s no toilet in the basement. Unless you plan to bring down a bucket.”
At first, Nasiji spent hours sketching out possible ways to set off the plutonium primary inside the Iskander. After all, as Yusuf had pointed out, they already had a bomb. Why not use it? But finally he gave up. He couldn’t figure out a foolproof way to trigger the explosives attached to the bomb, and creating a new trigger, though theoretically possible, would take too long.
That night he went back to his original plan, the gun-type uranium bomb, the Little Boy design. One piece of enriched uranium was molded into a piece that looked like a length of pipe. A second, smaller piece was shaped into a solid cylinder that fit snugly within the larger piece. Both pieces were subcritical, meaning they were each too small to detonate on their own.
The solid cylinder was placed at the end of the gun barrel. Then the pipe-shaped piece was shot at it, creating a single piece that contained a supercritical mass of uranium, big enough to set off a nuclear explosion. The Americans had placed a neutron initiator, a few grams of beryllium and polonium, at the center of the bomb to make sure the detonation happened on schedule. But the initiator wasn’t strictly necessary. The uranium would detonate on its own even without it. As Nasiji had told Yusuf, the great virtue of the design was its simplicity. If the bomb came together quickly enough and had enough uranium, it couldn’t help but go off.
What Nasiji hadn’t explained to Yusuf was that placing metal around the uranium core would make the explosion happen more efficiently, thus allowing the use of less uranium. The metal was called a reflector, because it bounced the neutrons, causing the chain reaction back at the exploding core. Beryllium was the ideal material for the reflector. A sphere of uranium surrounded by beryllium could produce a nuclear explosion with as little as sixteen kilograms of uranium—a critical mass less than one-third that of an unreflected sphere.
So, as an insurance policy, Nasiji had asked Bernard six months ago to try to get a cache of beryllium. But Bernard had reported back that the stuff couldn’t be had, not without taking a huge risk, possibly alerting the German authorities. Nasiji had told him to back off, not push too hard. With two warheads, Nasiji figured he would have enough material to make a bomb of his own.
Now, though, they were short of uranium. Beryllium was the shortest route to making a full-sized bomb. Nasiji had asked Bernard to try again. And only yesterday, in a coded e-mail message, Bernard reported he’d made contact with a man who might be able to provide the stuff. But Nasiji wasn’t at all sure Bernard would come through. In the meantime, they’d have to plan on using a simpler material, something they could pick up in Rochester or Buffalo without attracting too much attention. Tungsten carbide would probably be too much for Bashir to forge. In the end, steel would probably have to do. With that thought, Nasiji spent several hours calculating the optimal thickness of a steel reflector.
The calculation was complex, but the necessary variables were available: the neutron multiplication number for steel, the average number of collisions before capture, the likelihood of a neutron emerging from a collision. He found in the end that the tamper ought to be about twenty centimeters thick—about what he would have guessed before he’d done any of the math.
Finally, he designed the uranium core and the steel tamper around it. Basically, the bomb would look like a cannonball with a hole on the top. They would weld the artillery barrel into the hole and then fire the uranium plug down the barrel into the hole. The plug would slide over the uranium core in the middle of the barrel, and—Boom.
At 3 a.m. that night, Nasiji was done. He had a basic design, not fancy, but a start. Bashir and Yusuf could get to work forging the molds for the reflector and the core.
WHEN NASIJI EMERGED from the stairs, blinking in the light of the kitchen, he expected to be alone. But they’d waited up for him. Tried to, anyway. Bashir dozed on a rickety wooden chair, a half-eaten plate of hummus and baked chicken on the table before him. Yusuf curled up on the rug under the kitchen table.
They jerked up as he walked in.
“It’s done,” Nasiji said.
“What’s done?” Bashir said, running a hand across his mouth to wipe away the sleep.
“I’ve finished the design.”
“But . . . you said last night it wasn’t possible.” This from Yusuf.
“I can’t guarantee it will work. We’ll see.” Over and over, Nasiji had run the numbers, tried to calculate whether the thirty-two kilos they had would be enough for a chain reaction inside a steel reflector. But the equations required a level of detail about the subatomic properties of iron and uranium that he didn’t have, and the math got messy. Forty kilos would be enough, he was sure. Twenty wouldn’t. Thirty-two? They wouldn’t know until they pulled the trigger.
24
A solid bronze knocker shaped like a lion sat in the center of the front door of Bernard Kygeli’s house. Wells swung the knocker against the heavy black wood, picked it up and clanged it again.
“Hullo! Anyone home!” he shouted. “It’s Roland.”
“Ja?” a woman’s voice said. Then a few questions in German. A woman’s face, framed by a headscarf, peeked out at Wells. He was dressed for the occasion, holding a briefcase and wearing black gloves and a new gray suit he’d bought at the fancy department store downtown.
“I don’t speak German. Sprechen Deutsch nicht! And I’m freezing my stones off out here.” Wells was hardly exaggerating. For days, the weather in Hamburg and Warsaw had been miserable, a hard wind driving sheets of rain and sleet horizontally through the streets. Wells knocked again, hard. “Stupid woman. Is Helmut home?”
“Helmut?” The door opened a notch, revealing a middle-aged woman who wore a long-sleeved jacket that was tailored, black with gold filigree, modest but stylish. Wells put his shoulder to the door and popped it open. Its edge caught the woman and she stumbled back and dropped to a knee. Wells stepped inside and shoved the door shut. The woman yelled at
him in German, less frightened than angry. He pulled her up, a hand under her elbow, and put a finger to his lips.
“Shh! I’m not here to hurt you.” Wells wasn’t sure what he would do if the woman didn’t quiet down. But she did. Her stare was angry but not quite furious, as if she thought he might have the right to enter the house.
“Where’s Helmut? Upstairs?” Wells pointed at the stairs.
“Helmut—” she pointed at the door.
“What about Bernard?”
“Bernard—” again at the door.
“Good, then,” Wells said. “Now be a decent girl and get me a Hefeweizen.” He pantomimed raising a bottle to his lips. Once again, Wells found the character of Roland Albert, beryllium-dealing Rhodesian mercenary, only too easy to take on. A shrink, or Exley, would no doubt have a field day watching him put his conscience aside for an hour and order this woman around. Bad guys had all the fun.
“Hefeweizen? Bier? Nein.”
“Right. You people don’t drink. Fine. I’ll make myself at home then.” Wells reached into his suit pocket, found the handcuffs he’d tucked inside it, then reconsidered. “Whyn’t you show me around? Otherwise I’ll have to hook you to a doorknob or some such nonsense.” Wells pantomimed that he wanted to look around the house.
She seemed to understand and walked beside him as he wandered through the first floor. She was far more relaxed than most American or European women would be under similar circumstances. Wells had seen this passivity before in women in Afghanistan. As far as he could tell, the attitude came both from fatalism and a deep-in-the-bones understanding that whatever Wells wanted with her husband was men’s business and didn’t include her. The average self-respecting Western woman would have a very hard time reaching the same conclusion.
The house was expensively furnished, Persian rugs, wood-paneled walls, leather couches and bookcases loaded with texts in German and Turkish. But there were no photographs or art of any kind, aside from a few framed Quranic verses and a single photo of the Kaaba, the black stone at the center of Mecca. The lack of artwork was a sign of Bernard’s piety. Observant Muslims believed that the Quran forbade the display of images, which competed unnecessarily with Allah’s majesty. That prohibition didn’t apply to televisions. A massive Sony flat-panel was tacked to the living room wall.
Bernard’s wife—Wells still didn’t know her name—acted up only once, when Wells started to open a door at the back of the living room. “Nein,” she said. She wagged a finger at him. “Verboten.”
“Verboten? You funning me?” Wells pressed on the door’s handle. Locked, with a simple push-button mechanism. He slipped a credit card from his wallet and popped it.
Inside, a small office, neatly organized, two file cabinets and a fine brown desk, a map of the world with shipping routes outlined from Hamburg to Istanbul and Lagos and Accra and Cape Town and Dubai, though none to the United States. Two thick leather-bound volumes with ships etched into their covers, one called Seerecht, the other Gesetz von der See. Wells figured they had something to do with maritime law. A coffee cup with the logo of the Penn State University soccer team, the Nittany Lions. Wells picked it up, looked at it curiously, set it down. A fancy pen-and-pencil set. The base for an IBM ThinkPad, though the laptop itself was nowhere in sight. A handful of papers stacked in a tray. Wells leafed through them, finding nothing of interest except a bill from a New York law firm, Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein—$32,000 for “insurance recovery.” Bernard’s wife watched him crossly from the doorway. Evidently she’d been warned never to enter the office.
Wells tugged on the filing cabinets and was slightly surprised when they opened. Inside, neat rows of hanging folders, stacked by year. One cabinet appeared to have nothing but German tax records, the other invoices for shipments and customs forms. No nuclear weapons blueprints, though the tax forms were plenty frightening. Wells lifted the cabinets, wiggled them forward an inch and peeked behind them, ran his hand under the desk, then ducked his head under it to examine its bottom for hidden compartments. He pulled the map off the wall, checked for a safe. Nothing anywhere. The floor and walls seemed solid, though he’d need much more time to be sure and he didn’t want to press his luck. The real prize was the computer and Bernard was keeping that close. “Let’s go,” he said. He left the door to the office open, but Bernard’s wife closed it.
In the living room, Wells sat on the couch, stretched his feet on the glass coffee table. From his new briefcase, he extracted two brick-sized blocks of light gray metal carefully wrapped in plastic. Five kilograms—about eleven pounds—of beryllium each. Wells laid the bricks on the coffee table. The metal came straight from a Department of Energy stockpile in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, though it of course bore no markings. Wells had told Shafer that he needed to get Bernard enough beryllium to buy some time, convince the guy he was serious. Shafer had gotten Duto to sign off after the weapons designers at Los Alamos agreed that ten kilograms of beryllium wouldn’t be enough to make a meaningful difference to the bombmakers even if Bernard somehow got it to them.
Wells tapped the bricks. “Don’t touch,” he said to Bernard’s wife. “Verboten. I’m serious. Got it?” Beryllium flaked into small particles, and though the metal was safe to touch, it was toxic if it was inhaled. Even small amounts of it caused a nasty inflammatory reaction in the lungs.
She nodded. “Good,” he said. “Tell Bernard I’ll call him tonight.” Wells pantomimed putting a phone to his ear.
WELLS STEPPED into the Mercedes he was now thinking of as his own—or at least Roland Albert’s—and cruised past a Deutsche Telekom service van parked about fifty yards from the house.
Twenty minutes later, he left the Mercedes with the valet at the Kempinski, pulled out his satellite phone. Shafer picked up on the second ring.
“Ellis. I thought you said no static posts.” Wells had insisted that he work entirely apart from the BND agents monitoring Bernard’s movements. But Shafer had assured him that the Germans would be cautious. Rather than watching the house from fixed positions, they would rely on drive-bys with a dozen anonymous cars, each passing the house every fifteen minutes or so.
“I did.”
“Then why is a telco van sitting down the block from Bernard Kygeli’s house? Subtle.”
“Maybe somebody wants DSL.”
“Ellis—”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Anything else I should know?” The BND had tapped Bernard’s phones—home, cell, work—and thrown a replicator on his fiber-optic connection that allowed them to see the Web traffic that came into and out of his house and office. His trash was being searched and his tax records for the last decade examined.
“He may be an amateur, but he’s cautious,” Shafer said. “Two days ago, he bought a prepaid cell, made a couple of calls, tossed it in the river. Yesterday he went into an Internet café off the Reeperbahn for three minutes, but he was gone before we knew what terminal he was at. And that traffic isn’t stored anyway. I don’t think he’s in charge. He’s just checking in with whoever has the stuff, letting them know he’s working on getting the beryllium.”
“How about the money?”
“The business looks legit. And there’s been no transfers from Dubai or Saudi or anyplace. But we don’t see anything like four million euros loose. In fact, it looks like he’s been slipping a little bit the last year or two. We don’t know why. But his bank balances have been trending down. Anyway, he’s got a million-five stashed away in the accounts we can see, plus the house is worth another million. If he’s got it, it’s in a Swiss account or a safe box somewhere. Or maybe he’s not planning to pay you at all.”
Was Bernard crazy enough to plan on killing Roland Albert after he got the beryllium? “I can’t see it,” Wells said. “He’s not a fighter.”
“Pride goeth, John. You leave him the package?”
“Yes. Took a look around his house, too. See if you can find any connection to a law firm in New York. Snyder
, Gonzalez, and Lein, it’s called. They did some work for him last year. Something to do with insurance.”
“New York? Weird. All right, spell it for me.”
Wells did.
“I’ll check it out,” Shafer said. “Be safe.”
“Aren’t I always?” Wells hung up.
HE WENT BACK to the Kempinski, worked out for almost two hours, weights plus eight miles on the treadmill. He showered, dressed, reached for his phone to call Bernard, then changed his mind and decided to let the man stew for a few hours more. He lay on the bed and napped—
And woke to a heavy knock on his door.
“Yeh?” Even muzzy-headed with sleep, Wells remembered that in this room he was Roland Albert.
“Polizei!”
“What do you want?”
Rap! Rap! “Open the door, Mr. Albert!” This in English.
The voice sounded like Bernard’s. Wells wished he could look through the peephole, but doing that was an easy way to get a bullet in the eye. Whoever the guy was, Wells wanted him out of the corridor before he attracted other guests’ attention. Wells moved silently to the door, grabbed his Glock, unlocked the door, and in one smooth motion pulled it open with his right hand while holding the pistol across his body with his left.
Bernard stood in the corridor, pistol at his side. He tried to raise it, but Wells lunged through the doorway, knocked his arm up and back, and pinned him against the opposite wall of the corridor as quietly as he could.
Wells jerked Bernard’s arm down so the pistol pointed at the carpeted floor of the corridor. “Drop it,” Wells said.
Bernard hesitated. “Before I break your arm, you bloody idiot.” The pistol landed with a soft plop on the carpet. Wells kicked it away. “Now get inside.”
The Silent Man Page 26
