The Silent Man (25 page)

Beside the furnace was a metal lathe. Beside that, an open gas-fired furnace, where Bashir heated and shaped the molds that would be used to cast the uranium at the heart of the bomb. Against the back wall, a liquid nitrogen plant, essentially a powerful refrigerator that produced five liters per hour of super-cold liquid. Next to the nitrogen plant, arranged on hooks and metal shelves, Bashir’s work clothes and other personal equipment: a fire-resistant coat, long rubber boots and gloves, a plastic face shield and goggles. A respirator mask. Heavy steel tongs and clamps for picking up buckets of molten metal. Three fire extinguishers. A horror movie’s worth of saws: a table saw, a chain saw, a diamond-studded rotating saw capable of cutting steel or uranium. Outside and behind, a Caterpillar generator, so that Bashir wouldn’t have to draw electricity from the power grid to run the equipment.

Bashir had bought most of the stuff on eBay and from machinery supply companies across the Northeast. He’d taken care never to approach the same dealer twice. No special licenses or permits were required for any of the tools, but Bashir didn’t want anyone to ask why he was putting together a factory in his backyard.

Buying the vacuum furnace was more complicated. It was more than $50,000, and mainly used in steel mills and high-end university labs. After talking with Sayyid Nasiji, Bashir decided that the best way to get the furnace without attracting attention was to import it from China. American laws strictly regulated the
export
of equipment with possible military applications. That policy had been useful decades before, when the United States, Germany, and Japan had been the only countries that could produce high-end machines like vacuum furnaces.

But the laws said nothing about the import of advanced equipment. No one had considered the possibility that terrorists working on American soil might look outside the United States for the equipment they needed. After a few hours of Internet research and four phone calls to China, Bashir ordered the vacuum furnace online. It arrived two months later at a warehouse in Elmira, no questions asked.

 

 

 

BY DAY,
Bashir was a general surgeon in Corning, a town of eleven thousand in upstate New York, 250 miles northwest of New York City. He was Egyptian, the only son of an upper-middle-class family in Cairo. He’d gotten stellar grades at Cairo University, graduated in three years at twenty-one, and come to the United States for medical school and residency, both at Ohio State. At twenty-eight, his residency complete, he returned to Egypt to find a bride. He stayed just a few months in Cairo before coming back to Corning—and buying the Repard house.

That bare-bones résumé, though accurate, left out some facts that surely would have interested the CIA. When Bashir was eleven, his father died. With money tight, his mother sent him to live with her half sister Noor. Noor’s husband, Ayman Is’mail, owned a trucking company—and secretly was a devout member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that favored turning Egypt into a strict Islamic state. Ayman and Noor, who had no children, raised Bashir as their own, inculcating him with the Muslim Brotherhood’s beliefs.

Ayman especially hated Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. “A pharaoh,” he told Bashir. “With his imperial court and his crumbling empire. Look at how he treats his people. How he locks up anyone who opposes him. And do you know who’s behind it all?”

“No, uncle.”

“You do. You’ve heard me give this speech a hundred times. Tell me.”

“The Americans.”

Ayman nodded. “The Americans. They say they want democracy for everyone. But if we Egyptians demand leaders who will stand up to them, they put us down. Who do you think pays for the prisons and the Mukhabarat?”

“The Americans?”

“Just so.”

Ayman was careful to avoid associating with the Brotherhood in public. But when Bashir was eighteen and just about to enter Cairo University, the Mukhabarat arrested Ayman in a raid on a Brotherhood meeting in Cairo. For two weeks, Bashir and Noor did not know what had happened to him. Finally they learned that the police had sent him to the notorious Tora prison complex, fifteen miles south of Cairo. Even after they found out, another week passed before the lawyer they’d hired convinced the Mukhabarat to let Bashir visit the prison.

The concrete-walled meeting room at Tora where Bashir waited for Ayman was windowless and stifling, more than a hundred degrees. The stench of sewage soaked the air, so heavy that after a few minutes Bashir found himself pinching his nose and breathing through his mouth. Outside the room, men shouted at one another endlessly, a cacophony of voices that rose and fell as erratically as wind whistling across the Sahara. About an hour into his wait, Bashir heard, or thought he heard, a high eerie voice screaming like a teakettle’s whistle. But after a few seconds, the scream stopped. It never did return, and eventually Bashir wondered if he’d imagined it.

Bashir waited two hours for the guards to bring Ayman in. When they finally did, Bashir almost wished he’d had to wait longer. The three weeks Ayman spent in jail had not been kind to him. He limped into the concrete-walled meeting room, hands cuffed behind his back, stomach poking sadly out of a cheap white T-shirt a size too small. Ayman, who had taken such care of his appearance. His skin had the grayish pallor of a plate of hummus that had sat too long in the sun. Pushed along by a guard, he shuffled to the narrow wooden bench where Bashir sat and straddled it uncomfortably.

“Won’t you uncuff him? Please?” Bashir said to the guard. In response, the man pointed to a hand-lettered Arabic sign taped awkwardly to the wall:
Prisoners are restrained at all times in the meeting area.

“Look at him. He’s no threat.”

“Even so, removing the handcuffs is complicated.” Complicated. A code word for a bribe.

“A hundred pounds,” Ayman said under his breath.

Bashir had known he would need to pay bribes to get into Tora, even with the official approval from Mukhabarat headquarters. He’d come prepared with 400 Egyptian pounds, about $75. But he had foolishly spent the last of his money for the chance to bring a bottle of Ayman’s blood pressure medicine into the waiting room. He had nothing left for this guard. He shook his head. The guard walked out, slamming the door behind him.

“Are you all right, uncle?”

“I miss my cigarettes. And my pills.”

“No cigarettes, but the pills I have. What happened to your leg?”

Ayman laughed. “I banged it on a door. So they tell me.”

“They’re hurting you.” Rough treatment was common at Tora, but Bashir was surprised that the guards would hurt his uncle. Though he wasn’t well-connected politically, Ayman had plenty of money. And he wasn’t a terrorist. He believed the government should be replaced, but peacefully, through elections.

“They’re afraid, these guards,” Ayman said. “Afraid of their masters, afraid they’ll wind up in here with us if they treat us like humans and not animals.” He checked over his shoulder to be sure the guard wasn’t lurking outside the door, then leaned forward, toward Bashir. “I want you to promise me something.”

“Of course.”

“If I don’t get out of here, you won’t forget what I’ve told you. About Mubarak and especially the Americans. The Americans are behind it all.”

“What do you mean, if you don’t get out?” Bashir hoped his voice didn’t betray his panic. He called Ayman his uncle, but in truth the man was more like a father to him.

“I’ll be fine. But I want you to promise, just in case.”

“All right. I promise.”

“Good. Now tell me about your auntie.”

“She misses you terribly.” Bashir began to fill him in about Noor, but after a few minutes the guard reappeared.

“Time’s up.”

Bashir couldn’t help himself. “Time’s up! We’re supposed to have an hour. It’s hardly been five minutes.”

“Time’s up.”

“You can’t—I won’t—”

“Don’t argue,” Ayman said under his breath. “You’ll just make it worse.”

The guard pulled Ayman up as Bashir fumbled in his pocket for the bottle of pills he’d brought. “Uncle, here,” he said. He reached out to tuck the bottle into Ayman’s T-shirt pocket, but the guard—Bashir never did find out his name—grabbed the bottle.

“What’s this?”

“It’s only medicine,” Ayman said. “For my heart.”

“It’s contraband,” the guard said. “Illegal.”

Bashir couldn’t believe the man was serious. Did he really think these pills were contraband? The guard shook the bottle sideways, rattling the pills inside, squinting at the words on the label. He can’t read, Bashir realized. He can’t read and he won’t admit it.

“Please,” Ayman said. “I swear to Allah—”

“Illegal,” the guard said again. He twisted the cap open and spilled the pills down and ground them into the concrete with his cheap black shoes. “You’re lucky I don’t arrest you,” he said to Bashir. He reached behind Ayman’s back and dragged him toward the door.

“I’ll get you your medicine,” Bashir shouted to his uncle. “Tomorrow.”

But Bashir couldn’t keep his promise. Every day for a week, he fought through Cairo’s traffic jams to return to the prison. But the guards wouldn’t let him meet Ayman no matter how much money he offered. On the eighth morning, as he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to leave, the phone rang. Noor picked it up and listened. Without saying a word, she dropped the phone and fell to her knees and began to scream and beat her head against the yellow linoleum floor of the kitchen. Bashir knew immediately. On the day that his father died, his mother had screamed the same way.

The Mukhabarat officers said Ayman had been found dead in his cell. A heart attack. Nothing anyone could have done. He was unwell, as anyone could see. They offered honest and heartfelt sorrows, a thousand condolences, an endless epic in true Egyptian style, and every word emptier than the next. They’d murdered him. Whether they’d actually beaten him to death or killed him by withholding his medicine was irrelevant. They’d murdered him.

On the day of Ayman’s funeral, Bashir promised he would avenge his uncle. And, intuitively, he understood the path to take. He’d been planning to study law at university, following in his father’s footsteps. Now he reconsidered. Why become a lawyer in a country that had no law? The Mukhabarat had never connected him to the Brotherhood. He had no police record. His name was clean. And so he transferred to the medicine program at Cairo. Every country in the world trusted doctors, no matter their nationality or religion. If he could earn an American medical degree, even the United States would be glad to have him. He studied madly at Cairo for three years, biology and chemistry and physics, earning the best grades of anyone in his class, paving his way to Ohio State.

All along he quietly kept in touch with his uncle’s friends in the Brotherhood, making sure they knew that he was still with them. Like him, they understood his potential value, and the need for patience. After finishing his residency, Bashir joined a program that offered foreign medical graduates American citizenship if they would practice in underserved areas for five years. Even the Americans needed doctors, just as he’d figured.

In the months before he started his new job, he came back to Cairo, looking for a wife. Noor, his aunt, introduced him to the daughter of her second cousin, Thalia, only nineteen, a twittering sweet girl with almond eyes and thick black hair and breasts that jutted from her robes despite her best efforts to keep them hidden. Bashir wanted her immediately. Even better, he knew she had been raised to be a good Muslim wife. America, Egypt, Pakistan; their future would be whatever he said. They were married six weeks after their first meeting.

The call Bashir had awaited for so long came just a few weeks after he and Thalia moved back to the United States. A nameless Arab, Iraqi by the sound of his voice, said they had mutual friends and asked if they could meet in Montreal.

Wandering through the big botanical garden just east of Montreal’s downtown on a fine April day, the Iraqi—Sayyid Nasiji was his name— explained what he needed. A big space where they wouldn’t be disturbed, a lathe, a vacuum furnace, a PC with some basic engineering software, and a dozen other tools.

“How much will it all cost?”

“Money won’t be a problem,” Nasiji said.

“And what’s the point of all this equipment?” Bashir said.

“I think you can guess.”

“A bomb.”

“A big bomb.”

“The biggest?”

Nasiji stopped, put a hand on Bashir’s shoulder, an oddly intimate gesture. “Are you ready for that, Doctor? They told me about you and your uncle and I thought you would be. But you spend your days stitching these Americans together, saving the sick ones. So if this is too much—”

Bashir thought back to the casual cruelty of the guard at Tora, and about all he’d learned about the United States in his years living there. His uncle had been right. The Americans were behind it all, behind the corruption in Egypt and all over the Arab world, behind the war in Iraq, the stifling poverty in Pakistan. “Yes,” he said. “I’m ready.”

 

 

 

LEARNING TO USE
the vacuum furnace, the lathe, and the rest of the equipment wasn’t easy, especially since Bashir kept up his work at the hospital. Fortunately, he’d always been good with tools, and his training as a surgeon had refined his hand-eye coordination. After ordering some basic metallurgy textbooks and videos, he got to work practicing, first with aluminum, which melted at relatively low temperatures, and then with iron and steel. He found the equipment was surprisingly finicky, especially the vacuum furnace. Too much heat, applied too fast, and the molds melted down instead of casting the material inside them.

But over a year’s worth of late nights, Bashir grew comfortable with the equipment. The simplicity of the shapes he was trying to create helped him. After successfully casting several steel molds, he began training on depleted uranium. Depleted uranium was the opposite of enriched uranium, the metal left over from the enrichment process, and actually contained less of the radioactive U-235 isotope than natural uranium ore. It was useless for nuclear weapons, and so it was legal to purchase and to own without a license. But its melting point and density were practically identical to that of the uranium used in bombs, so it was ideal for practice casting.