The Silent Man (34 page)

“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.

“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.

“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.”

 

 

 

BERNARD SAT ON
Wells’s bed, his shoulders hunched, arms folded, face an angry red. Wells had given him back his pistol after tossing the clip. The gun, the same Glock Bernard had carried in the warehouse, sat uselessly beside him.

“What do you think you’re doing? Eh?”

“You come to my house—”

“Look at me, Bernard.”

Bernard turned his head toward Wells, slowly, as if the motion itself were painful.

“That’s twice you’ve pointed that gun at me. You idiot.
Twice.
And twice I’ve let you live. I promise if you do it a third time, I won’t be so polite. I swear on Allah, Muhammad, all the sheikhs in Saudi Arabia.”

“You insult my wife.”

“I didn’t touch your wife.”

“You involved her in this.
Kaffir,
” Bernard muttered under his breath, the Arab word for infidel.

“
Kaffir?
You think I don’t know what that means? I’ve been in this game a long time. Watch your mouth.”

“Why did you come to my house?”

“I wanted to see who I was dealing with. You understand? Wanted to make sure you didn’t have a medal from the BND on your office wall. And you weren’t home, so I took a look-see. I didn’t hurt your wife, did I? Instead of coming over here, trying to threaten me, you ought to thank me. You saw the present I left you? Ten kilos, 99.7 percent pure. Assay it if you don’t believe me. I’ll get you the rest in a week, maybe less.”

“Yes?”

“But first tell me how you figured out I was staying here.”

Bernard smiled. “You’re under your own name. This was the eighth hotel I called. When I got here, I told the concierge I was an old friend, wanted to surprise you. I gave him a hundred euros.”

“Not bad. For an amateur. Where’s my money?”

“Your money?”

“I’ve shown you I can come through. It’s your turn now. I want two million euros. Three million more on delivery.”

“I only have four. I told you.”

“Five or no go. Your boys can’t get you more?” Wells hoped Bernard might give him a hint where the money was coming from. But Bernard only nodded.

“Five, then.”

“See. Easy enough. Five million euros, twenty-five thousand a kilo. And I absolutely need two now.”

“One.”

“Two or—” Wells pointed to the door.

Bernard looked at the pistol beside him. But “When?” was all he said.

“By tomorrow night. Wire transfer. I’ll get you the account number.”

“And the metal—”

“Within the week. But don’t come looking for me again, Bernard. I won’t be in this hotel, and I won’t be under my name. And if I see you again when I don’t expect you”—Wells tapped his pistol—“I’m going to assume the worst.”

“I understand.” Bernard picked up his unloaded pistol and walked out.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,” Wells said after the door closed and Bernard’s footsteps disappeared down the carpeted hall. “Yes, indeed.”

A
s a rule, offices at Langley were neat. Stacks of paper were security hazards, not to mention evidence of an untidy mind that might reach a conclusion at odds with what the rest of the agency wanted to hear.

Shafer’s office was an exception, of course. Paper covered his desk, and files were piled on the coffee table and around the couch: estimates of China’s military capability, primers on nuclear weapons design, a classified analysis of recent Russian attempts to penetrate the CIA. As Exley poked her head in, she was happy to see that most of the piles looked just as they had six weeks earlier, the last time she’d been in here. She limped in, one careful step at a time, and pushed aside a file marked “Top Secret/SCI” to sit on the couch. She held up the file.

“Ellis. Shouldn’t this be locked up?”

“Please. It’s a report on this antimissile system the Jews are putting together.” Shafer, Jewish himself, insisted on referring to Israel as “the Jews.”

“So?”

“So it was in the
Times
three weeks ago. And on Debka”—a Web site that focused on the Israeli and Arab militaries—“two weeks before that. You know what I think. We’d be better off if we stopped stamping ‘Top Secret’ on every page of dreck we write. By the way, you look great, Jennifer.