The Silent Man (20 page)

Unfortunately for Roman, the card wasn’t a typical MasterCard. Its top edge was actually a steel blade sharp enough to cut glass. Wells sliced the blade into Roman’s neck, under his chin, through skin and fat and muscle. At the same time, he dropped the stun gun and wrapped his left hand around the back of Roman’s neck and jerked Roman’s head forward, pulling his neck deeper onto the blade, cutting the carotid in half. Roman screamed, the pure high terror of a desperate animal. His hands flew up as he tried to stanch the blood pouring out of his neck. But he had no chance. His eyes rolled up as bright red arterial blood pumped out and he began to die a messy death. He slumped forward onto Wells, his body shielding Wells from the bodyguards.

Wells slid his left hand down Roman’s back and reached for Roman’s pistol. He grabbed it and dropped the safety and aimed across the back of the Maybach and fired three times, the shots echoing in the car. With Roman’s body blocking him, Wells couldn’t see where he was shooting, but with only six feet between him and the guard, he didn’t care. He heard the guard scream and thump against the side of the car. He shifted the pistol toward the driver’s seat and pulled the trigger three more times, catching the Maybach’s driver as he turned toward Wells. The driver twitched in his seat and groaned and fell silent.

And then Roman’s groans were the only sound in the car. He seemed to be trying to speak, but Wells wasn’t sure. The guttural sounds he made were the static from a radio at the edge of the dial, half-heard words fading into haze. Was he apologizing, begging for mercy, promising revenge? No matter. He had nothing left to do but die. He would die and Wells would live.

Wells reached into Roman’s jacket pocket and grabbed his cell phone and Roman’s own cell phone, both slick with blood. Wells pushed Roman onto his back on the floor of the Maybach and stepped out of the car. Lights had flickered on in the apartment buildings beside the hotel, but no one was on the street and there were no sirens yet. Wells tossed his jacket, soaked with blood, into the back beside Roman. Then he dumped the driver’s body on the ground. He slipped in behind the wheel and left the driver and the bodyguard behind. He tried not to listen, but he couldn’t escape hearing every gurgling breath as Roman wound down to silence.

 

 

 

FORTUNATELY FOR WELLS,
the local Moscow police, unlike the FSB, were understaffed and underpaid, slow to respond to crimes outside the golden district around the Kremlin. Wells headed south and east and didn’t hear the first distant sirens until he’d been driving for seven minutes, easily enough to get him outside the danger zone. He drove for a few minutes more and then ditched the Maybach in an alley off a narrow street that was just a couple yards from a metro station. The car would be found by morning, but he had no choice.

Wells cut the lights and sat in the silent Maybach. He wanted to explode, to put a fist through the window, but he controlled his anger. He’d played the fool too many times already tonight. He’d blown his chance at Markov and at Kowalski, too. He’d killed three men and missed the real target. He’d made it impossible for the agency ever to investigate the attack on him and Exley. How could they approach the Russians about Markov? At best, both sides would pretend that the twin attacks in Washington and Moscow had never happened. At worst, depending on how much juice Markov had with the Kremlin, Russia might feel the need to retaliate for what Wells had done, and the FSB and CIA would get drawn into tit-for-tat killings. Not what the world needed.

Well, at least Nicholas Rosette would be able to tell Shafer that he’d repaid his debt for whatever had happened in the Congo all those years before.

Wells washed his hands and face of Roman’s blood as best he could with the dregs of a water bottle the Maybach’s driver had carried. The driver’s overcoat, long blue wool, was on the seat beside him. Wells grabbed it and stepped out and pulled on the coat, hiding his bloody shirt and pants. As long as no one looked too closely, he’d be all right. He walked toward the subway, listening to the distant sirens. He dumped Jalal Sawaya’s passport into a sewer grate. Jalal was as dead as Roman and his bodyguards. Wells would book a ticket on Delta in the morning, the first flight out, and depend on an American passport and the name Glenn Kramon to get home.

T
he field was striped orange and black like a cartoon tiger’s stripes. All the players wore army uniforms. The man dribbling the ball was a general. Nasiji could tell from the stars on his shoulders. Defenders came at him, but he flung them aside and no referee seemed to care. The general had no face, but even so Nasiji recognized him. Khalid, his father. Nasiji raised a fist to cheer—

And suddenly the field turned into a wide Baghdad street, rising toward an overpass. Not that way, Nasiji tried to say. Go around. But he couldn’t get the words out of his throat and then the road pitched sideways and Nasiji knew what was about to happen and—

A hand squeezed his shoulder. He flung up a fist, nearly striking Yusuf.
Yusuf ?
Baghdad disappeared as Nasiji got his bearings. Nothing had changed. He was lying on a narrow bed in a windowless cabin, its walls a drab gray. At his feet, the desk where his books were strapped down so they wouldn’t go airborne when the waves got fierce. And in the corner, the crates. Of course the crates. The two big ones that held the bombs, the long narrow one that carried the SPG rifles, and finally the small one that held the rounds.

Nasiji ran a hand over his fevered face. The dream had left him sick. The dream or the waves. He’d rather be anywhere, even fighting the Shia in Ghazaliya, than this ship.

“Sayyid,” Yusuf said.

“I’m fine,” Nasiji said. “Tired of this useless ocean, is all. Ready to land so we can work.”

Yusuf nodded, though he didn’t seem convinced. Nasiji sat up and put a hand against the wall to steady himself. The swells were worse this morning. The worst part was that he could have avoided this misery. Bernard had warned him back in Hamburg, but he hadn’t listened. No matter. Soon enough they’d be back on land.

“Do you need the bucket?” Yusuf said.

A soft rap on the cabin’s door. Haidar, the little Algerian who brought their meals, stood outside. “Sirs, the captain asks you to come up at eleven hundred. Would you like breakfast?”

The boat rolled lightly to the left, then harder to the right. Nasiji’s guts rose into his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned.

“Not today, I think,” Yusuf said.

 

 

 

FOR NINE DAYS,
the
Juno
had sailed west at a steady sixteen knots across the Atlantic. For most of the trip, the sky had been a leaden gray, bringing squalls of rain, snow, and a harsh icy sleet. Nasiji and Yusuf rarely left their cabin. Haidar brought them meals, thick meat stews and mashed potatoes, strange food that sat in Nasiji’s stomach and cramped his bowels.

To pass the time, he studied the physics textbooks he’d brought on board, readying himself for the bomb-making problems he would soon have to solve. When he’d read all he could, he played chess with Yusuf on the little magnetic board that had belonged to Grigory Farzadov until his detour to the bottom of the Black Sea. Nasiji thought of himself as a solid player. But to his irritation, he lost to Yusuf as often as he won. The Syrian knew dozens of openings, and Nasiji always seemed to be playing from behind.

Now, as Haidar closed the door to their cabin, Yusuf picked up the board. “A game? Or are you too sick?”

“Sure,” Nasiji said.

Yusuf set up the pieces and sat beside Nasiji. “Promise something, Sayyid.”

“What’s that?”

“If I win, you’ll tell me how we’re going to make them work.” Yusuf nodded at the crates, which were attached to the floor of the cabin with thick steel chains.

“That again.” For days, Yusuf had asked Nasiji to explain the plan. Nasiji had refused, for no particularly good reason. He supposed that part of him enjoyed twitting Yusuf. “All right. But I play white. And if I win, or even if we draw, you’ll stop asking about it until we get to the United States.”

“Fine,” Yusuf said. When the game began, Yusuf pummeled him with an opening Nasiji had never seen before. After only an hour, Nasiji had no choice but to concede. Yusuf put the board away with a satisfied smirk.

“Don’t we need to go upstairs, talk to the captain?” In fact it was only 10:15.

“Sayyid, you promised.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“How do we blow them up, Sayyid? We don’t have the codes.”

“Strange,” Nasiji said. “Everyone’s obsessed with the codes. Not just you. The Russians would have told the whole world what we’d done if they thought we had them. Every police, every customs agent, every soldier from Moscow to Washington would be looking for us. Instead they’re keeping quiet. It’s our biggest advantage.”

“So do we have the codes?”

“We don’t have the codes. We have something more important.”

“What could be more important than the codes?”

“
The bombs.
What’s the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon, Yusuf?”

Yusuf paused, seeming to wonder if Nasiji was asking a trick question. Finally he said, “Getting the stuff, the nuclear material.”

“Correct. The design is easy. The uranium is the hard part. But these bombs have all the uranium we need.”

“So we put our own explosives around the bombs and set them off?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.” Now that Yusuf had made him open up, Nasiji was enjoying the chance to explain what he’d worked out for himself and kept secret for so long. “You understand the basics of how these bombs work?”

“Not really, no.”

“Inside, they have uranium and plutonium. Those are atoms, heavy ones, and unstable. If they break up, they release little particles called neutrons. Then those neutrons hit other atoms and split them up, too. That releases more neutrons. It’s a chain reaction. And all along, the splitting up of the atoms is releasing energy, too. That makes the explosion.”

Yusuf looked at the crates. “But they don’t go off on their own?”

“No. To start the chain reaction, you need to smash the bomb together.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated, but when you push the bomb together you increase the chances that the neutrons will crash into atoms and split them apart. Everything happens very quickly. After just a few cycles of splitting, so many neutrons are loose that the reaction is uncontrollable. It doesn’t stop until the power of the explosion tears apart the uranium at the core and the bomb destroys itself.”

“And this takes a few seconds?”

“No, much faster. More quickly than you can imagine, a fraction of a second. But in that time we release tremendous energy and radiation. The equivalent of thousands of tons of explosive, millions of kilograms, much bigger than any conventional bomb.”

“
Millions
of kilograms?”

“Just so. Imagine one truck filled with regular bombs. One of these bombs is like a thousand of those. And that would be a small one.”

Yusuf’s head swiveled between Nasiji and the crates in the corner. “And we have the material. So we can make our own bomb.”

“Correct. There should be more than enough uranium in these two bombs to make one of our own.”

“But I thought you said these are hard to make.”

“Some bombs are easier than others. These bombs, it’s complicated and I’ll explain more to you when it’s time to disassemble them, they actually each have two bombs inside. Conventional explosive, plastic, sets off the first bomb. Then the first bomb sets off the second. It’s very elegant, this design, and efficient. All the bombs today use it. But the explosive charges on the first bomb have to be placed perfectly and blown up in precise order. Or else the nuclear explosion won’t happen. The bomb will
fizzle.
” Nasiji said the last word in English.

“The pieces don’t come together quickly enough. And then it splits apart before the chain reaction can really take off. It still blows up, but with much less power. Our bomb will be a different design, what’s called a gun type. Instead of a single ball of uranium surrounded by explosives, we split uranium into two pieces—”

“In half?”

“Not exactly. The two sides have different shapes. One is a hollow cylinder, like a piston in a car engine. The other is the right size to fill the cylinder exactly.”

Yusuf smirked. “Male and female.”

“Sure. We put the two sides about two meters apart. We fire one side at the other with the Spear. They smash together. The chain reaction takes over. And—
boom.
”

“No
fizzle.
”

“No
fizzle.
The one the United States used to blow up Hiroshima, the Little Boy, was this kind. The Americans were so confident in the design, they never tested it. They just dropped it. And it worked.”

Yusuf was silent. He rubbed his fingers on his temples like a student grappling with algebra for the first time. “Hmm . . .” he finally said. “So we’ll take all the uranium in these two warheads, the four bombs inside, and put it together into one of our own.”

“Yes, my friend. Just so. Our bomb won’t be as big as either of these bombs, but it will still be big enough.”

“How big?”

“
Inshallah,
as big as the one in Hiroshima. Fifteen kilotons or so. That bomb killed one hundred thousand people, vaporized a square kilometer.”

“But . . . I still don’t get one part. We’re going to take these bombs apart, saw them open, to get to the uranium inside. What if they have, you know, traps?”

“They might. We won’t know until we get them open. Nobody’s ever done this before. But remember, these bombs have been designed so they don’t go off even if they’re damaged in a fire or a plane crash. They’re very stable. And even if there are traps, I think I have a way to deal with them.”