The Silent Man (24 page)

Weeks earlier, the Russian Ministry of Defense had warned a NATO liaison officer in Moscow that five hundred grams, just over a pound, of highly enriched uranium had disappeared from the Mayak weapons plant. The smugglers were believed to be Grigory Farzadov and Tajid Farzadov, cousins who lived in Ozersk. Photographs and basic biographical data on the cousins were attached. The Russians did not believe there was an immediate threat and asked NATO not to publicize the theft, but they urged the United States and Europe to increase security at ports and border crossings.

As was standard operating procedure, NATO had passed the report on to the Terrorist Threat Information Center, the joint FBI-CIA working group based at Langley, for evaluation. The center had classified the report as moderate-to-high priority. Russian nuclear material regularly went missing, and five hundred grams was not nearly enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Further, unlike plutonium, enriched uranium was not useful for dirty bombs. Nonetheless, the fact that the Russians had reported the disappearance at all was unusual. “Is there more to this?” one agency analyst had written.

The question had been prescient. Thirty-six hours before, the Russians had given NATO what they called an “update” on the theft at Chelyabinsk. Suddenly their estimate of the missing material had increased from five hundred grams to five kilograms—eleven pounds.

“This what you were hinting at back in the car?” Wells said to Shafer.

Shafer nodded. “Heard the basics this morning, but I haven’t seen the details.”

Wells handed him the file. “What happened? Did the Russians miss a zero?”

“We just don’t know,” Duto said. “When you were in Moscow, did you pick up any unusual vibes, anything that might have been related to this?”

“There was a lot of security in central Moscow. I got stopped a bunch. I put it down to my beard and my coloring. But maybe it was this. And one of the guys who stopped me had a radiation detector, one of those clip-on ones that look like a pager.” Wells paused. “Who else knows?”

“All the European agencies. For two days we and they checked every trace, every wire, every humint”—human intelligence sources, also known as informants—“every message board, every bank account in our databases. Nobody’s found anything. Anywhere. No references to nuclear material, no unusual transactions, no hints that anything’s coming.”

“Reminds me of Khadri,” Wells said. “He kept his mouth shut too.”

Shafer finished reading and handed the file back to Duto. “That’s the whole report? Nothing scrubbed?”

“That’s it,” Duto said.

“Then how come there’s no figure for the enrichment? Was it eighty percent? Ninety percent? Ninety-five?”

“The Russians haven’t told us.”

“Have we asked?” Shafer said.

“Of course. This is all they’ll give us. Op sec”—operational security—“or so they say. They think the Farzadov cousins aren’t in Russia anymore, and they’re probably right. Once the FSB is on you, there aren’t too many places to hide over there.”

“These guys have terrorist ties? Russian mafia?”

“The FSB won’t say.”

“Religion?”

“Tajid is a practicing Muslim, but Grigory seems to be secular.” Duto looked at Wells. “How about you, John? Anything you want to know?”

“Is what’s missing enough for a bomb?”

“Not according to Los Alamos,” Duto said. “They say the minimum amount of HEU necessary to make a bomb is fifteen to twenty kilos. And that’s with some very sophisticated tools. Terrorists would need even more.”

“That’s slightly reassuring,” Wells said. “Unless these guys stole fifty kilograms instead of five. Do we think the Kremlin would tell us if the threat was imminent?”

“We hope,” Duto said. He didn’t look hopeful.

“So what now?” Wells said. “For Ellis and me, I mean.”

“I don’t have anything specific for you. Stay ready, that’s all.”

“We aim to please,” Shafer said.

“John—” Duto stopped. “I already know the answer to this. But you know these guys as well as anyone. If they got one, would they use it?”

Wells thought back to the hate of the United States he’d seen during his years in the mountains. Hate, fueled by religion, and by the bitter truth that Americans had so much and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan so little. The anger had only increased since the United States invaded Iraq. So many jihadis, so eager to die, to strap bombs to their chests and tear themselves to pieces. They killed by the ones and twos, and when they were lucky, by the dozens.

“Suicide’s the tough part,” Wells said. “Once you decide to cross that bridge, why not take as many friends along as you can?” Wells almost laughed but didn’t. “Would they use it? Like you said, you already know the answer.”

 

 

 

SO WELLS
had it backward. The meeting with Duto turned out to be relatively painless. But talking with Exley was impossible. When they left Langley that night, Wells figured Shafer would take him home. Instead, Shafer turned toward his house.

“Appreciate the offer, Ellis, but I’d rather sleep with Jenny.”

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

“If you won’t take me, I’ll get a cab.”

“Give it time, John. She begged you not to go, not to leave her, and you went anyway.” Shafer paused. “I know what you want to do, run home, tell her you love her, everything’s going to be all right. But trust me, whatever you say will seem meaningless to her right now. What she wants is for you to prove that you can listen to her.”

“I do—”

“Then
listen.
She’d rather you stay away.”

“But—” Wells snapped his mouth shut. He couldn’t argue with Shafer’s logic. “How long?”

“I think it’ll be easier once she’s out of rehab,” Shafer said. “I’ll talk to her in a day or two. Believe me. This is better.”

So Wells slept in Shafer’s basement for a night before moving to an anonymous safe house in Vienna, Virginia. Like all safe houses, the place was entirely without personality, white walls and cheap wooden chairs and generic Manet posters in black frames, the real-estate equivalent of purgatory. Shafer asked if he wanted guards, but Wells refused. He’d had enough security for a while, enough guys with guns around.

The house did have two handy pieces of equipment in its basement, a treadmill and a Nautilus machine. Wells worked out for three hours a day, aiming to lose the fifteen pounds he’d put on for the Russia trip, hoping to rid his body of any vestige of that failed mission. Every day for a week, he asked Shafer if Exley was ready to see him. Every day for a week, Shafer said no. Every night, Wells sat by the phone, willing himself not to call her. Four times, he dialed all but the last digit of her cell before hanging up, feeling as lonely and foolish as a lovesick geek aching for the prom queen.

At night, alone in the house, he wondered if Exley would join the rest of the friends and family he’d left behind. Heather, his ex-wife, remarried now. Evan, his son, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He found himself Googling them, hoping to find scraps of their lives on the Internet, wondering if he should go back to Montana, try to see his boy. But he’d tried visiting Heather and Evan once before and the trip had ended badly. For now, anyway, Exley was all he had. If he even had her anymore.

Meanwhile, the search for the Farzadovs went on, without success. The agency and its European cousins were working on the assumption that the Farzadovs would eventually have to surface to sell the HEU. But so far the Farzadovs had stayed out of sight. And the Kremlin was still refusing to disclose exactly what it knew about the theft.

 

 

 

SO ON HIS NINTH NIGHT BACK,
Wells found himself alone in a booth at the Denny’s on 66. Wondering when Exley would see him again and what they’d say to each other. Wondering what he would have to give up in himself to get her back, whether he wanted to change and if he was even capable.

After an hour of drinking coffee, Wells had no answers, but at least he could feel his hands again. The teenagers had gone, leaving just him and Diane. Wells reached for his wallet, figuring he’d leave a couple of twenties under his cup and disappear, head back home. To the safe house. Then his cell phone buzzed. A restricted number. Maybe Exley was calling, reaching out. Maybe she missed him as much as he missed her. He answered—

“Hello? Have I reached John Wells?” Not Exley. A man. Some kind of European accent. Wells had heard the voice before but he couldn’t place it. And then he could. The bedroom in the Hamptons, a man warning him,
“You’ll pay for this, what you’ve done tonight. Even if you think you’re safe.”

“Yes.”

“This is Pierre Kowalski.”

Wells closed his eyes and stroked a hand across his forehead and waited.

“I have something to discuss with you. Can you come to Zurich?”

T
he Repard family had owned the house for more than a century. Then, on a rainy March morning, just outside Elmira on Route 17, Jesse Repard took a turn too fast and flipped his Ford Explorer into a ravine. He was thrown through the driver’s-side window and died instantly. His wife, Agnes, fractured her spine at the C-2 vertebra and was paralyzed from the neck down. In the back, their two-year-old son, Damon, was untouched, not even a cut.

The Repard house was impossible to navigate in a wheelchair and too expensive for Agnes to maintain. She had no choice but to sell it and the thirty-seven acres of land around it, quick. But upstate New York’s economy was worse than lousy, and the property was too small to be farmed efficiently but too big for most families. For three months, the place sat on the market without attracting even a low-ball bid. Agnes’s agent told her she needed to chop her asking price fifteen percent, maybe more.

Then a young couple came to see the property. He was in charge, Agnes saw that right off. He was a surgeon from Mercy Hospital, down the road in Corning. She walked a step behind him and didn’t say much. But immediately they seemed to take to the place. They liked its thick stone walls, the heavy stand of oak trees that screened the front of the property. They especially liked the big stable behind the house.

The Repards hadn’t owned horses in decades, and the stable had been crumbling when Agnes and Jesse married. A year before the accident, Jesse had started to restore it. He’d torn out the stalls and reshingled the roof, turning the stable into a giant shed, fifty feet long by eighty feet wide with dirt floors and wooden walls. Agnes had handled the exterior, painting the walls fire-engine red.

“Chose the colors myself,” Agnes told the surgeon from Corning. “I figured we’d have lots of kids and one day we’d have horses for them. They’d grow up here and one of them would take over the house from us, keep it in the family.” She knew she shouldn’t talk so much but she couldn’t help herself, as if by telling him her plans she’d bring them back to life.

“Interesting,” he said.

But he didn’t seem interested, much less interested than he’d been when he pulled a tape measure from his pocket and wrote the stable’s dimensions on a memo pad. Or later, when he stood on the porch of the house and scanned the grass and the trees and the hills with binoculars.

“You can see,” Agnes said. “I mean you can’t see anything, you can see that. It’s nice and quiet. Private.” She was nervous now. She needed a good price for the place, enough money for Damon to have a decent childhood. Damn you, Jesse, for your speeding and not wearing your seat belt. For leaving me, and for leaving me like this. She hoped she wouldn’t start crying, the more so since she couldn’t even wipe away the tears herself.

“Yes,” he said. “I like privacy. Americans have a saying, the home is the castle, and I agree with that.”

He was a handsome man, tall and slightly heavy, with a soft lilting accent. He was from the Middle East, she wasn’t sure where and she didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to take the chance of offending him. His name was Bashir, she thought he’d said. His wife wore the headscarf the Muslims liked and a brown dress that covered her from neck to toes. It was a hot June day, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. Agnes supposed she was used to the heat.

Bashir visited again the next day, without his agent or his wife, but with his tape measure. He must have liked the measurements because two days after that her agent called back and said Bashir had offered to buy the place. At the asking price, and for cash.

“Said they’re looking to have kids and they thought it would be perfect,” the agent said. “They even want the furniture, the rugs, all of it. They want to move right in, and they’ll pay another forty thousand for all your stuff. It’s like hitting the lottery, this kind of offer. It never happens like this.”

Agnes agreed that the deal seemed too good to be true, especially since the furniture in the house was a little bit raggedy and not worth anything like $40,000. She kept waiting for the catch. But there wasn’t one. The papers were signed in under a month. Her first bit of luck since that day on the road. She moved into a first-floor apartment in Ithaca with Damon and tried to forget the house and everything else that had been her life before the accident. She never went back to the place. She did see it again, though, on television. And when the reporters started calling, one after the next, to ask about it, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

Not when she thought of Bashir on her porch, scanning the hills with binoculars.

 

 

 

THE STABLE
behind the Repard house still had the cheery red paint job. Inside, however, the place looked more like a high-end machine shop.

The strangest-looking piece of equipment sat in the very center of the stable, a black block four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet long. Handles and valves jutted from its sides, and a burnished door of inch-thick steel capped it. It looked like a washing machine built by the devil. It was a vacuum furnace, a masterpiece of engineering, able to heat metal ingots to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in an oxygen-free vacuum.