The Silent Man

1

A weaker man would have found Shamir Taghi’s pain unbearable. The average American, used to popping Tylenol and Advil for every ache, would have found Shamir Taghi’s pain unbearable.

But Shamir wasn’t American. He was a Kazakh who lived in Russia, and he was fifty-eight years old, and he was dying of cancer. Lung cancer that had reached his bones. He felt as though he were being cut open from the inside out, tiny claws tearing apart his ribs.

Yet every day Shamir faced his pain. No morphine or hydrocodone for him. Those were expensive drugs, and he was a poor man. Instead he gobbled down aspirin, brought by his son Rafik from the pharmacy in Makushino in big white bottles with peeling labels. For all the good the pills did him, they might as well have been filled with sugar.

Before the cancer came, Shamir had been a strong man, 200 pounds, his muscles swollen by a lifetime of work. Now he weighed 140 pounds. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t bear to swallow. He couldn’t even smoke anymore, his only sin.

The pain. There were no words for it.

But it would be ending soon.

A week before, his son had brought a man to see him. A light-skinned Arab who came recommended by the imam of the local mosque. A quiet man, well schooled in the Book, which meant more and more to Shamir as his death approached. The man knelt on the concrete floor of Shamir’s apartment and took his hand.

“Father,” he’d said, and Shamir had looked at Rafik before realizing his mistake. “Father, do you want the Prophet to smile on you at your death?”

Shamir nodded.

“Then will you do something for me? For all Muslims?”

THE KAMAZ TANKER TRUCK roared down the two-lane road at sixty-five miles an hour, its driver’s-side wheels exactly on the centerline. A quarter-mile ahead, an oncoming Lada pulled to the side, giving the tanker plenty of room to pass. High in the cab of the Kamaz, Nikolai Nepetrov smiled as the Lada moved over. Nepetrov was used to playing highway chicken, and winning. What driver would take on a tanker loaded with eight thousand gallons of gasoline?

For five years, Nepetrov had run gas from the massive Sibneft refinery at Omsk to stations in Chelyabinsk, five hundred miles west. He was thoroughly sick of the trip. On maps, the Omsk-Chelyabinsk road looked like a four-lane highway. In reality the road was two lanes most of the way, clogged by army convoys that rattled along at thirty miles an hour. In fact, Nepetrov had been stuck behind a convoy this morning. He’d finally passed it a few miles back, on a short stretch where the highway really was four lanes.

The Lada disappeared behind him, leaving empty pavement ahead, two lanes with thick firs on both sides. Nepetrov popped in the clutch, downshifted, stomped on the gas. The hardy hum of the engine rumbled through the cab. He put his hands high on the truck’s oversized wheel and began to sing, loudly and well: Po ulitse mostovoi, shla dyevitsa za vodoi.

“Along the paved road, there went a girl to fetch water, there went a girl to fetch water, to fetch the cold spring water.” A Russian folk tune, one of his favorites. His voice echoed through the cab. “Behind her a young lad is shouting: ‘Lass, stand still! Lass, stand still! Let’s have a little talk!’”

Nepetrov felt a pleasant itch in his crotch as he imagined the young woman, wearing woolen tights against the cold. She held a wooden bucket as she bent over the well, her legs slightly apart. Perhaps when he dropped off this fuel he would reach into his pocket for a few hundred rubles, find a woman for his amusement. Though his lass would be wearing too much makeup and stink of all the other men she’d had that day.

Outside, thick gray clouds blocked the sun. The temperature had fallen since morning, the first real cold snap of the long Siberian winter. Nepetrov wore a hat and leather driving gloves. He preferred not to use his heater. The cold kept him awake. He put aside the lass with the bucket and slipped into a new song.

“Down the Volga, Mother Volga, over the wide sheet of water, there rises a thunderstorm, a huge thunderstorm. ”

The road was still clear, aside from a big tractor dragging a load of bricks toward him. Nepetrov upshifted and feathered the gas pedal, watching with satisfaction as the speedometer rose to 120 kilometers—75 miles — an hour.

“Nothing is to be seen on the waves, there is only a small black ship.”

SHAMIR GRIPPED THE WHEEL of the tractor, watching the big tanker truck rumble at him. Even the wind couldn’t soothe his burning bones. With every rut in the road, the claws inside him dug deeper.

Whatever came next, he’d be leaving this pain behind.

Five. The big truck was about three hundred meters away and steaming along. Shamir edged the tractor toward the center of the road, real estate that the truck had already claimed. “Now’s the time, father,” the Arab had told him a few minutes before, after getting a call on his mobile phone. “We’ll be with you. We’ll all be watching you.”

Four. The truck could have moved back into its lane to give Shamir room. Instead it veered toward Shamir, bearing down on him, trying to force him to the edge of the road. Its air horn fired a long blast in warning.

Three. Shamir pulled the tractor slightly to the right as if he were getting out of the truck’s way. The air horn blasted again.

Two. “Allahu akbar.” God is great. The words emerged in a whisper from Shamir’s ruined throat.

One. He twisted the wheel hard left.

“THERE IS ONLY a small black ship — NO!”

Suddenly the tractor blocked the road ahead. Nepetrov had only bad choices. Jerk the wheel hard left and skid into the trees. Stamp his brakes and jackknife the tanker behind him. He chose to do nothing at all, hoping that he might somehow smash the tractor into pieces and survive. Perhaps he would have, if not for the bricks the tractor was hauling.

The crash killed Shamir instantly. Nepetrov wasn’t so lucky. The force of the collision split the cab from the tanker. The cab rolled forward, and for a wild moment Nepetrov saw the pavement coming up at him through the windshield. Then the cab flipped onto its side, bouncing down the road, breaking apart. It trailed metal and glass and coolant for seventy-five feet before finally it stopped.

Behind the cab, the tanker slid forward, its undercarriage grinding against the road, kicking up a sea of sparks. It smashed into the back of the cab and stopped. For a moment the two pieces of the truck rested beside each other, a parody of the vehicle they had once been.

Inside the cab Nepetrov tried to get his bearings. Still alive, though he couldn’t understand how. His seat belt had saved him. That crazy farmer on his tractor. Why hadn’t he moved? No matter. Now. he needed to get out. He reached for the belt. But his arms weren’t working. In fact, as he looked at his right wrist he saw a bone poking through his skin. Though it didn’t hurt, didn’t bother him at all. What about his legs? He tried to wriggle in his seat, but he couldn’t move. Caged like a chicken. A chicken on the way to the slaughterhouse.

Bang! The cab jolted forward as the tanker hit it. “No,” Nepetrov whispered.

The tanker didn’t have an automatic fire protection system or the other safety equipment standard on its cousins in Western Europe and the United States. It was a Molotov cocktail on sixteen wheels. Now it was lit.

Hanging from the seat, coughing blood, awaiting the inevitable, Nepetrov began to sing. “There is only a small black ship with glistening white sails—”

Behind him, the tanker blew up, over sixty thousand pounds of gasoline. The blast wave swallowed Nepetrov and his next verse forever, tearing him apart instantly, or as close to instantly as possible, a death merciless and merciful at once. He never knew he’d been part of anything but a freak accident.

A TIGER, a Russian Humvee painted camouflage green, led the convoy. Two uniformed men sat in front, faces tense, breath visible in the cold. A BTR-80, an armored personnel carrier, followed the Tiger. The BTR was wide and tall, with eight oversized wheels and an angled front deck to deflect rocket-propelled grenades.

Then a truck, a Ural 4320 with a special cargo compartment, its walls made of inch-thick steel. Two men shivered inside the unheated cargo hold, their AK-47s held loosely at their sides. Beside the men, two big steel boxes lay on either side of the hold, twenty-four feet long, four feet high and nearly as wide. Chains connected the boxes to the floor of the truck. Each box held a short-range SS-26 missile, called the Iskander by the Russian army, a nuclear-tipped weapon with a range of about three hundred miles.

During transport, the Iskander’s nuclear bomb was removed and boxed separately, in a steel case about the size of a small trunk. The cases were carried alongside the missiles in the cargo hold. The warheads they held were the most precious and destructive treasure ever created, weighing just three hundred pounds but with the power to tear the heart out of a city.

The men in the back of the Ural knew that the warheads were engineered to be impervious to fires, earthquakes, meteorites, and everything else the universe might throw at them. If terrorists put a bomb under the road and blew a hole in the Ural’s cargo compartment, the explosion might kill the soldiers. But the warheads would not go off, not without first being armed — a procedure that required codes that no one on this convoy had. The safeguards were as close to perfect as human beings could devise. In the two generations since the United States detonated the first nuclear weapon, nations around the world had conducted hundreds of nuclear tests. But no bomb had ever exploded by accident.

And still, as they sat shivering under the fluorescent lights of the hold, the men wondered: How would it feel? If a dozen somethings went wrong, and the trillion-to-one odds came to pass? If one of the warheads blew, exploding with the power of 200 kilotons of explosive? Two hundred kilotons. 200,000 tons. 440,000,000 pounds. Exploding not ten feet from where they sat. How would it feel? What would they feel? The answer, they knew, was that they would most likely feel nothing at all.

But somehow that fact provided little comfort.

BEHIND THE URAL, the convoy continued.

Another Ural. Another Tiger. Two more Urals. Finally a second BTR and two final Tigers. Ten vehicles in all, carrying forty men and eight missiles. They rolled slowly, a concession to the weak winter light and the lousy road. The convoy’s commander, Major Yuri Akilev of the 12th GUMO, the military unit responsible for the security of Russia’s nuclear weapons, knew this route well. He had budgeted eight hours to cover the three hundred miles from Ishim to the Mayak nuclear plant, their destination. They’d made fine time until early afternoon, when the road ahead had filled with traffic. After a few minutes of waiting, Akilev sent up a sergeant to find out what had happened. The man reported that there’d been an accident ahead. A tanker truck was burning and blocking the road.

Akilev wasn’t surprised. Like many Russians, he saw life as a series of meaningless accidents laughed at, if not actually encouraged, by an angry God. But he wished the crash hadn’t happened on this stretch of highway, too narrow for him to turn his vehicles around.

For hours, he and his men waited, passing the time by cursing the drunkenness of Russian drivers, the foolishness of Russian engineers, and the ugliness of the local women. Akilev warned his men to remain alert, on the tiny chance that the accident was somehow a setup to block the road so terrorists could attack his convoy. But he wasn’t overly worried. His men were well-trained, and his BTRs were equipped with 14.5-millimeter machine guns that could stop anything short of a tank. If he truly needed help, he could get reinforcements by helicopter in two hours at most. He could defend himself for two hours.

Anyway, where would terrorists go even if they did manage to steal a bomb? The whole of the Russian army would be chasing them. In the last year, Akilev had led convoys down this road a dozen times, so often that his cargo almost seemed routine. Russia moved its nuclear weapons far more frequently than the United States did. The Russians had no choice. The chemical propellant that fueled their missiles was toxic, prone to corroding warhead shells. So Russia constantly needed to refurbish its arsenal, moving weapons from bases to the giant plant at Mayak, the heart of the Russian nuclear complex.

Yes, the trip almost seemed routine. But not quite. Akilev was always happy when he reached Mayak and his cargo became someone else’s problem.

Finally the tanker fire burned out and the local road crews roused themselves to clear the highway and free his trucks. The sun was already down by the time the convoy began moving again. Akilev had hoped to reach the Mayak plant by sunset. Instead, he and his men would ride well into the night. They had to move slowly after dark. The highway was unlit and they couldn’t chance an accident.

Akilev would rather have stopped for the night, but he had no choice. There were no bases between here and Mayak. Anyway, the convoy was due by midnight. Never mind that the plant would effectively be closed by then. The convoy was due, and as long as it arrived by 11:59 p.m., Akilev would get credit for a job well done. If he crossed the gate at Mayak at 12:01 a.m., on the other hand. Akilev shook his head. No one had ever accused the Russian army of having sensible rules.

GRIGORY FARZADOV SAT in his decrepit kitchen, sipping peach brandy from a chipped glass, watching the LCD timer on his microwave count down toward zero. He wore no pants or shirt, only gray underwear that billowed around his giant haunches. The temperature outside had fallen close to zero, but a film of sweat covered his belly and legs.

Grigory was a hulking shambles of a man, a cross between Frankenstein and Mr. Potato Head, with big soft hands and pitted skin. He’d never been married or had a girlfriend. He’d never even had sex without having to pay for it. He had been cursed with a fine mind and a fiercely ugly body. He wished every day for the reverse, but the choice wasn’t his to make. Fate made fools of men. He’d been born alone, and he’d surely die alone.

Beep. Beep.

Dinner was ready. Grigory lumbered up and extracted a pepperoni pizza from the microwave. He cut the slices into small bites, savoring each forkful. His movements were oddly dainty, in sharp contrast to his size — and his surroundings. Leaky pipes had discolored the kitchen’s walls and loosened the plaster from the ceiling. The rest of the apartment wasn’t much better. The electricity cut out sporadically, always when Grigory had just settled in to watch television. At least the heat worked, but too well. From November through April, he kept the windows open, and still he sweated.

Worst of all was his next-door neighbor Mikhail, a worthless drunk who divided his time between watching pornography and battering his wife. One particularly ugly night a year earlier, Grigory had knocked on Mikhail’s door and threatened to call the police. A half-hour later, he heard Mikhail outside his door, shouting, “Out, you fat coward!” The ranting continued until Grigory made the mistake of opening up. When he did, Mikhail pulled him into the hallway and jammed a pistol under his chin.

“If you ever interfere with me again, you elephant—” Mikhail shoved Grigory down and launched a glob of spit at his face. As Grigory curled on the concrete floor, Mikhail kicked him, his steel-tipped boots leaving bruises that didn’t fade for weeks.

But Mikhail wasn’t a problem anymore, Grigory thought. No. His new friends had taken care of Mikhail. Grigory shivered, suddenly cold despite the overheated apartment, and poured himself another glass of peach brandy. Very soon he would need to make his decision. Though it was really no decision at all. He tossed the brandy down the sink. He would need to be sober tonight.

FOR THIS LIFE Grigory had trained in operations research for six years at Ural State University in Ekaterinburg. He hadn’t been at the top of his class. Those men went to energy companies like Gazprom. The middling students, like Grigory, weren’t so lucky. They became engineers for Rosatom, the ministry that controlled Russia’s nuclear weapons plants and storage depots. Grigory worked at the weapons depot at Mayak as a manager in the PC&A unit, responsible for the protection, control, and accounting of nuclear material. He lived in Ozersk, the “closed city”—protected by checkpoints and a barbed-wire fence — that surrounded Mayak.

Grigory didn’t have many friends. But for most of his life he’d been close to his cousin Tajid. Like Grigory, Tajid lived in Ozersk and worked at Mayak, as a security guard. On the long cold nights when the very walls of his apartment mocked his loneliness, Grigory often found his way to Tajid’s. He always took a bottle of Stolichnaya and a fresh orange for Tajid’s wife by way of apology for the intrusion. He and Tajid sat in Tajid’s kitchen and drank until Grigory staggered home.

But over the last three years, Grigory had become less welcome at his cousin’s apartment. Tajid had fallen in with a bunch of Kazakhs. They claimed to be taxi drivers, but they hardly worked, from what Grigory could see. They spent their time drinking coffee and reading the Quran. Tajid and Grigory had both been born Muslim, but they’d never practiced the religion growing up. In their youth, the Communists had frowned on organized religion. Today, the Russian government still discouraged Islam, though it wasn’t illegal. Employees at Mayak were warned against becoming overly involved with “foreign religious groups,” which everyone knew was code for Islamic fundamentalists.

“What do you want with those peasants?” Grigory asked his cousin one winter night. “They aren’t even Russian.”

“They follow the true path, cousin. Come, see for yourself.”

“Look at me. You think I have any reason to believe in God?” Grigory laughed. “A drink, cousin?”

“I told you I don’t drink anymore.”

“Suit yourself.” Grigory threw back a shot of vodka.

The next time Grigory showed up at Tajid’s apartment, Tajid wasn’t alone. One of the Muslims was there, too. Tajid looked at the bottle of vodka Grigory held. “Give me that,” he said, his voice low and angry.

Grigory handed the bottle over and watched in horror as Tajid tossed it out his window.

“Never bring alcohol to my home again.”

“Cousin—”

“Go. Now. You bring me disrepute.”

Grigory hadn’t known what to say. Tajid was his oldest friend. His only friend, really, aside from the old men at the city chess club, who were as lonely as he.

He’d left Tajid alone for a few months. Then, finally, he’d worked up the courage to return to his cousin’s apartment — this time carrying no vodka, only a bag of dates. When he knocked on the door Tajid hugged him, surprising him.

“I was just thinking of you, cousin.”

Over a cup of strong sweet coffee, he’d told Grigory why.

At first, Grigory had believed, wanted to believe, that Tajid was joking. But after Tajid insisted he was serious a second time, and a third, Grigory had stopped arguing.

“It’s impossible,” he’d said to deflect his nervousness. “Can’t be done.”

“Of course it can,” Tajid said. “You’ve said so yourself many times.”

Indeed, Grigory and his cousin had often talked about the problems at Mayak. Rosatom had dramatically improved the defenses of its nuclear plants since the 1990s, when guards didn’t show up and warheads were stored in warehouses protected only by cheap padlocks. But weaknesses remained, especially in the hours after new warheads arrived. Having finished the dangerous work of moving warheads, convoy commanders were eager to sign over their shipments and leave. Sometimes too eager.

“I don’t want to be involved in this.”

“But my friends already know about you. Your job at the plant.”

“Tajid.” Grigory felt a sinking sensation in his belly, a hopeless feeling that would become uncomfortably familiar. “What do they know?”

“Only your name and your job.”

“My name?”

“My cousin, you can do this.”

“Even if I could find a way—” Grigory broke off, hardly able to believe he was even pretending to consider the suggestion. “How do you know the men proposing this aren’t agents of the FSB”—the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB—“or the GUMO?”

“My sheikh vouches for them.”

“That might be enough for you, Tajid, but I need more.”

“Your neighbor Mikhail, does he still bother you?”

“Today and every day. Worthless scum. Why do you ask?”

“We’ll talk soon, cousin.”

A WEEK LATER, Grigory came home to find his apartment unusually quiet. He soon realized why. No porn actresses were screeching in fake pleasure next door.

Mikhail’s body was found the next day, dumped on a back road outside Chelyabinsk. He’d been shot between the eyes. Worse, he’d been stabbed over and over, his ears and tongue cut off, or so the rumors went. Grigory heard the news and poured himself a glass of vodka, waiting for the phone to ring. He didn’t have to wait long.

“You heard what happened to your neighbor?”

Grigory was silent.

“When can we meet?” Tajid said.

“Whenever you like.”

“An hour, then. At the Moscow”—a rundown café on the edge of Ozersk.

Tajid hung up and Grigory threw back his vodka. The drink warmed his belly but his mind was still cold. Tajid’s men had proved in the most emphatic way possible that they weren’t police agents. They’d also sent Grigory a lesson in what might happen to him if he didn’t cooperate. Two doves with one arrow.

TAJID SAT IN A CORNER of the Moscow with another man, a light-skinned Arab, small, clean-shaven, and neatly dressed, his only distinctive feature his almond-shaped brown eyes. He wore a black leather jacket and a thin gold bracelet. In all, he looked more like a junior member of the mafiya than the jihadi Grigory had expected. But then this man would want to blend in, Grigory thought.

“Your cousin speaks highly of you,” the Arab said in Russian, extending his hand. “I am Yusuf.”

Grigory couldn’t pretend he was a brave man. Nonetheless he screwed up his courage. “Yusuf. This thing you propose to take. what will you do with it?” Even now, Grigory could not make himself say bomb.

Tajid frowned. “Cousin, you’ve only just arrived and already—”

“Let him ask,” Yusuf said. He looked at Grigory. “Truly I don’t know. But I promise you this. We won’t use them inside Russia. Part of my job is to get them out.”

“Them?”

“We need two.”

“Madness.”

“Madness or no, we need two.”

“Let me ask you something else, then.” Grigory spoke with bravado he did not feel. “Since we are friends now, speaking frankly as friends do.”

“Go on.”

“You understand these devices have locks? What the Americans call permissive action links? They cannot be used without the proper codes, and the codes cannot be broken. Not even by the most skilled cryptographer. So you must know that whether you steal one of these, or two, or a hundred, they’re useless to you. Unless you have some way of breaking into the Kremlin for the codes.”

“Grigory, you’re very smart. I’m merely a technician. I have a shopping list. And I would like your help in filling it.”

“I don’t think it’s possible, Yusuf. I would tell you, I swear.”

Yusuf patted Grigory’s shoulders. Despite himself, Grigory flinched. “Consider all the alternatives. There’s always a way. Meanwhile—”

Yusuf reached into his jacket and slid a thick white envelope across the table. Grigory peered inside. A wad of green hundred-dollar bills, the new kind, counterfeit-proof, secured with a red rubber band. Grigory tried to hand the envelope back to Yusuf but the little Arab raised a hand.

“Yours,” he said. “Whatever you decide. If you help us I promise ten times more.”

“Very generous of you,” Grigory said. “Now I can buy all the vodka I like.” His tone was ironic, but Yusuf didn’t seem to notice.

Yusuf stood, touched Grigory’s arm. His fingers were as weightless as the devil’s. “We’ll meet again soon. I hope you can work with us.”

SURE ENOUGH, A WEEK LATER, Grigory heard the knocking on his door, a light rapping, so soft that at first he hoped he was dreaming. But the knocking continued, and Grigory opened the door, knowing what he’d see.

“Cousin,” Tajid said. Yusuf stood beside him, holding a leather satchel.

They came in and sat around the plastic table in the kitchen. “Would you like coffee?” Grigory said. He poured himself a glass of vodka. Let them watch him drink.

“Your cousin says you’re an excellent chess player,” Yusuf said.

“Mediocre at best.”

“I’m sure you’re lying. We must play.”

“Whenever you like.”

“So have you given any thought to my proposal?” Yusuf opened his satchel and extracted two oranges and a long curved knife with an ebony handle in a leather sheath. He slid the sheath off, revealing the sharpest blade Grigory had ever seen. Under the fluorescent kitchen lights the blade gleamed silver.

The devil, Grigory thought. Truly, he’s the devil.

“Tajid tells me you like oranges,” Yusuf said.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Not me,” Yusuf said. “They’re too fleshy. Something almost human about them.” He worked the blade through the first orange, slicing it in half, then quarters, his movements fine and careful.

Then a frenzy seemed to come over him and he cut faster and faster, turning the fruit into a pulpy mess, not recognizable as an orange at all, its juice dribbling off the table onto the crackled linoleum floor. “I get excited,” he said. “It was the same with your neighbor.” He stood and moved behind Grigory, the knife poised in his hand.

“Please,” Grigory said.

“May I use your sink?”

“I’ll help. I promise.”

“I can do it myself.” Yusuf washed the blade gently, humming to himself.

“I mean with your project. I’ll help.”

Yusuf dried the knife, sheathed it. “This is wonderful news.”

“You don’t have to pay me.”

“Of course we’ll pay, Grigory,” Yusuf said. “We keep our word.”

“But—” Grigory hesitated. “Shall we talk about this now?”

“Why not?”

“So. I don’t want to disappoint you”—Grigory looked at the knife—“but this isn’t as simple as you imagine. We’ve tightened security, switched to the American system. No one enters the warehouses alone. Ever. Always two men, with a third watching on a camera. And you need a reason to enter.”

Yusuf swept up the mess of the orange, threw it in the sink, and sat down beside Grigory. “Even you? Your cousin says you’re very senior.”

“Not so senior. Why do you think I live here? Anyway, the president himself must have a partner when he visits the depot.”

“Depot.”

“What we call the warehouses where we keep the weapons.”

“Do you always have the same person with you? Someone for me to talk with?”

“To improve security, the pairings are random. Also—” Again Grigory hesitated. He didn’t think he’d ever feared anyone as much as this man.

“Yes,” Yusuf said.

“I work nights now. Along with Tajid. I audit the work we’ve done the previous day. It’s paperwork. The plant is basically closed. There’s no reason for anyone to be inside the depots. The guards check them at the beginning and end of each shift. Otherwise they’re not touched. We figure the less they’re entered, the better.”

“But you could go inside. If you had a reason.”

“Perhaps. But I’d be watched.”

Yusuf idly peeled the second orange. “Surely there’s another way.”

Tajid coughed. “What about when the convoys come, cousin? Didn’t you say—”

“I know what I’ve said. But the convoys never arrive at night.”

“But if they did?” Yusuf popped an orange slice in his mouth.

“I thought you said you didn’t like oranges.”

“Who doesn’t like oranges? Especially in this miserable cold.”

Now the devil can laugh about his joke, now that he’s won, Grigory thought. Aloud he said, “The same rules are supposed to apply when a convoy arrives and we move warheads in or out of the depots. Always two men. But sometimes we get sloppy. The pairings aren’t always random. The convoy commanders want to hand over the material and be gone.”

“So if a convoy came late, you would receive it?”

“It’s not my job. But the man who would, he’s a drunk. He sleeps all night.”

“So you could receive it. And you could pick your partner.”

Grigory drank down his vodka and poured himself another glass. “But none of this matters, you see. The convoys arrive during the day. Always.”

“The convoys, do they always take the same route?”

“In theory, no, for security reasons. But effectively, yes. In winter there’s really only one road they can use.”

“And you know when they’re due to arrive?”

“For production purposes, we must. You aren’t thinking of attacking a convoy, are you? It’s impossible. You’d need hundreds of men.”

“No. Delaying it.”

“But how?”

“Leave that to me.”

“In that case. If you could. It’s possible—” Grigory turned over the scene in his mind. “Not guaranteed. I would need some luck. But it’s possible.”

“Can you find the dates of the next convoys and show me their route by tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Until tomorrow, then.” Yusuf flipped his satchel over his shoulder and stood. Tajid followed. When they’d left, Grigory sat at his kitchen table. The devil had left a stink of oranges and Grigory knew that for the rest of his life, which he feared wouldn’t be long, the fruit would never again cross his lips.

Grigory grabbed a rag from under the sink, wiped furiously across the kitchen table, hoping to rid the kitchen of the sweet orange smell. What was he doing? How could he consider helping these men steal a special weapon? No, no euphemisms now, no pretty names. It wasn’t a special weapon. It was a nuclear bomb.

But then, what choice did he have? He would be signing his own death warrant if he told the police what Yusuf planned. Even if the police believed him and arrested his cousin and Yusuf, Yusuf ’s friends would find him afterward. They would gut him front to back and toss his innards in the trash.

Anyway, what he’d told Yusuf was true. Without the codes, the weapons were useless. And Yusuf couldn’t possibly get the codes. Could he? No. Impossible. The codes were more heavily guarded than even the weapons themselves.

Grigory finished mopping and tossed aside the rag. He wouldn’t say anything to the police, not yet. Perhaps later, when he had more evidence. but he knew he was lying to himself. This was the moment to go to the police, not later. The further this went, the harder it would be for him to get himself out.

Fine. He would help. He would hope that Yusuf stuck to whatever bargain they made and didn’t kill him as soon as Grigory handed over the warheads. In the worst of all cases, if he learned that Yusuf had somehow gotten the codes, he would tell the police everything he knew.

“Only a fool trusts the devil,” Grigory said to the empty kitchen. He took another slug of vodka, but this time the drink was bitter in his throat.

THE DAYS HAD GONE quickly after that meeting, too quickly for Grigory. He gave Yusuf the dates when the next five convoys were scheduled to arrive. The little Arab disappeared for a few days and Grigory hoped he might be gone for good. And one night he looked at the envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills. He put on his best black shirt and covered himself in cologne, a new bottle he’d bought a day before. Hugo Boss, it was called. Grigory didn’t know it, but it sounded fancy. Then he extracted twenty of the bills and made his way to the Paddy O’Shea, a knockoff Irish bar that had somehow become the fanciest nightspot in Ozersk. The Russians felt a kinship with the Irish, their cousins in heavy drinking, gloomy novels, and depressive behavior. The Paddy played true to every Irish stereotype imaginable, throwing in a few Scottish stereotypes for good measure, like the set of fake bagpipes hanging from the ceiling of the bar. Grigory ordered shots of Jameson at 100 rubles — about $5—each for everyone at the bar. He pulled the wad of hundreds from his pocket, making sure the women in the place saw it. They did, and they forgot his pocked skin. For one night, he felt beautiful.

When he woke the next morning, the two hookers he’d brought home were gone. So was the envelope with the rest of his money. He’d hidden it, but not well enough. When he staggered into the bathroom to vomit, he discovered that they’d even taken his bottle of cologne. He knelt over his toilet, throwing up whiskey and Guinness, a thick brown ink that rolled down his chin and stuck to the sides of the toilet. He knew he should be ashamed, but he wasn’t, not a bit.

In the next month, convoys came and went. Grigory allowed himself to exhale. Maybe Yusuf had seen the difficulties he faced.

THE KNOCK CAME on a quiet afternoon. Outside, the sun had set. On the concrete plaza of the apartment complex, kids were playing in the dark. Grigory expected to see his cousin, but when he opened the door, Yusuf was alone.

“Is there still a convoy this Thursday?”

“I’ll double-check tonight, but yes. But the convoy is due in the afternoon.”

“Inshallah”—God willing—“it will be late.”

“The later the better.”

“I understand. Now explain again how you will do this.”

Grigory did. Even as he said the words, he wondered if he’d have the courage to go ahead. Yusuf must have sensed his uncertainty, for when Grigory finished he was silent. Finally he sat next to Grigory on the lumpy couch. He was much smaller than Grigory. And yet he radiated a strength that Grigory couldn’t hope to match.

“After you’re finished, I’ll meet you here. We’ll go on from there.”

“At best you’ll have only a few days. After Tajid and I don’t show up at work, they’ll open the boxes as a matter of course. Certainly, by the middle of next week they’ll sound the alarm. We’ll be the most wanted men in Russia.”

“That will be plenty of time. Inshallah.” Yusuf stood. “You aren’t a believer, Grigory. I hope one day you will be. In the meantime, this will prove our sincerity.” He reached into his pocket for an envelope like the other one he’d given Grigory. He tossed it beside the chess set where Grigory traced out positions from his books. “Go with God,” he said.

In return, Grigory said. nothing. This man takes my tongue along with everything else, he thought. Without a word he reached out for the envelope.

NOW THURSDAY HAD COME, far too quickly. Maybe he’d be lucky. Maybe the convoy would already have arrived, and the steel boxes would be locked in the depot where he couldn’t get to them.

Yet somehow Grigory knew he wouldn’t escape so easily. He wasn’t a superstitious man, and he certainly wasn’t religious. He was a scientist. But the devil had tapped his shoulder and asked him for a game of chess, and he had no choice but to play. He had to see this through.

He finished his microwaved pizza and cleaned his plate. He pulled on his pants and found a clean blue shirt in his closet. He turned on the taps to wash his face and found the usual trickle of lukewarm brown water. He clipped on his badge, grabbed his thick winter coat, laced up his boots. And as he walked out the door, he felt almost relieved. What would be would be.

2

They sat in a circle in the basement room, crutches and prostheses laid by their chairs. The night outside was cold and clear, but the narrow baseboard heaters, and the body heat of a dozen men, kept the room uncomfortably warm. A refrigerator stocked with soda sat in one corner, and the men held Cokes and coffee cups.

They’d been silent for almost a minute when a young man in a gray T-shirt whispered a single word: “Overpasses.”

Grunts of recognition from the rest of the circle. The man looked around uncertainly, as if he’d surprised himself by speaking at all. His name was Paul Redburn, but he’d introduced himself as Stitch, tribute to the seventy stitches sewn into his stomach. And so Stitch he was.

“Tell us, Stitch.” This from the group’s informal leader, Kyle Stewart, a marine sergeant who’d come home two years before — against his wishes — after taking a sniper’s bullet in the neck in Ramadi.

“How you were talking about stuff that makes you crazy,” said Redburn. “All out of relation to what it should. Like when somebody from high school says how they almost signed up and then they got some lame bullshit why they didn’t.”

“I want to wreck them,” Stewart said. “Not afraid to say it.”

“For me it’s overpasses. Every half-mile on 202, there’s an overpass. And every time I drive under one. every time. I wonder if some haji’s watching, gonna grab his phone, call his buddies so they know I’m coming.”

“Or just toss a grenade down on the roof,” said the man to Redburn’s right. Freddie Sanchez, an army private who had lost his right leg when a bomb blew out his Humvee in Baghdad.

“That is so,” Redburn said. “And you know, some days are easier, some days I can just about do it. Then some days I have to pull off, find another way to get where I’m going.” He fingered the small silver cross that hung from his neck. “Just like everything else.”

“I almost wrecked a few months ago,” Sanchez said. “On the Beltway. First time on a highway since I got back. I was in the slow lane, taking it easy. It was fine for a while and then I spotted this bag of trash on the side. And I thought. I didn’t think at all. Just went left. Put some space between me and that IED.” Sanchez ducked his head, looked at the space where his leg should have been. “I’m saying I was back there. Not like I was imagining it. I was there. I almost took out this Toyota, chick driving, two kids in the back.”

“You didn’t, though,” Stewart said.

“No. I didn’t. But the worst part was, when I saw what I done, I was so damn mad at that chick in the Toyota. My heart was taking off in my chest. My head, I wanted to—” Sanchez broke off. Sweat glowed on his forehead under the fluorescent lights. The room was silent again as the group waited for him to say what he had to say. These men were used to waiting.

“I’m just glad my gun’s locked up in my closet,” Sanchez said finally. “If I had that thing on my hip, everybody on the road would be in a lot of trouble.”

Every week, they met in a church in downtown Silver Spring. The Central Maryland Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Group, a big name for a simple organization. Between twelve and twenty guys showed up, usually. A half-dozen regulars. The rest floated in and out. They came here to talk about the things they didn’t want to say to their wives or girlfriends, the things that only other soldiers could understand. They had plenty to say, John Wells thought.

Most soldiers came back from Iraq and Afghanistan basically intact. But ten thousand men and women had been hurt badly enough to require serious surgery. Others had memories they couldn’t shake, of buddies blown apart, civilians killed in raids gone wrong. The wounds in their minds didn’t necessarily match the injuries the world could see. The amputees sometimes joked that life was easier for them. No one ever doubted their sacrifice. They never had to apologize for having bad days.

“Thanks, Freddie,” Stewart said. “Hour’s almost up, got to give back the room. But before we do—”

He turned to Wells. “Jim, you been here a bunch of times, but you don’t say much. Anything you’d like to get off your chest?”

Wells shook his head. “I guess not,” he said. To avoid distracting the other men, Wells used a fake name at these sessions. Everyone in America had learned his name two years before, when he stopped a terrorist attack on New York, but his face was still a mystery to most people. The CIA had managed to keep pictures of him out of general circulation, though a few old ones were floating around the Web.

Stewart leaned forward, offering Wells a deceptively soft smile. “Mind if I ask, Jim, where’d you serve? Reserves? Guard? You’re a little gray for active duty.”

“If it’s all the same, I’d rather not say.”

Stewart slid his chair a half-foot closer to Wells. A couple of the other regulars leaned in, too. They’d planned this, Wells thought.

“Can’t let you off that easy, Jim. Can’t have men who aren’t vets in here.” Stewart wasn’t smiling anymore. “Can’t have accountants sneaking in, listening so they got something to say on singles night at the Marriott. Man might get hurt that way.”

“No one ever accused me of being an accountant before,” Wells said. He searched for a way to be honest without saying too much. “I was a Ranger back in the nineties and that’s the truth,” he said.

“No war then.”

“I’ve seen war.”

“You ever been to Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” Wells said. He didn’t add that he’d fought for both the Taliban and the United States. “Listen, Sergeant, it does me good being here. But I understand. You don’t trust me, I won’t come back.”

“Just tell us something,” Stewart said. “So we know.”

All right, Wells thought. You want me to talk—

“I’ll tell you about a dream I have,” he said. “I’m in an apartment. Over there. Windows taped over. And I’m supposed to be a hostage. Wearing an orange jumpsuit. And my throat’s getting slit when the clock hits midnight. I know this. I know what’s meant to happen.”

Now Wells was the one sweating. He wiped a hand across his forehead.

“Only I’m not the hostage,” he said. “I’ve got the knife. And these guys, these four guys, they’re the ones tied up. They’re begging me. And I hear Johnny Cash singing. ‘I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ round the bend.’ ‘Folsom Prison Blues.’ And then the clock hits midnight and I start cutting.”

Wells took a breath. “I’m cutting, and it’s slow going. You ever put a knife in someone? And I’m trying to make myself stop, but I can’t. And then I look at the guy I’m cutting. And—”

Wells broke off. A few seconds later, Stewart spoke, very quietly. “You?”

“Yeah. Me. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that when I wake up, I look over at my fiancée and I—”

Again Wells found himself unable to speak.

“You want to hurt her?” Stewart said.

The men in the circle looked at him steadily. Wells knew they would wait as long as he wanted. He felt their patience under him, holding him, and then he could speak.

“I would never. It’s not even a thought. It’s more like a word. Knife. Cut.”

“Does it keep you up?” Stewart said.

“It’s not like I have it all the time.”

“You ever said anything about it to her?”

Wells shook his head.

“You think she knows?”

The question surprised Wells, but he knew the answer. “She knows. Maybe not exactly, but she knows.”

THE FLORISTS WERE CLOSED, but on his way home Wells found a dozen roses at Whole Foods. When he opened the front door, he heard Exley singing to herself in the kitchen. He padded in, hiding the bouquet behind his back, and found her at the table, surrounded by travel guides for South America. She was wearing a red sweater that matched the roses.

He tipped back her head, kissed her, handed over the bouquet as smoothly as he could. She put a hand to his face, ran it down his neck. He felt his pulse against her fingertips.

“When did you turn into such a romantic?” she said.

“About halfway home.” He still couldn’t get used to the idea that they lived in a house, their house, one they owned together, with an eat-in kitchen and rooms for her kids when they visited. An upstairs and downstairs. A garden.

This was the first house, the first piece of real estate, he’d ever owned. Exley had pushed for it. So had the agency, which said they needed a detached house, someplace a security detail could watch them full-time without bothering the neighbors too much. Wells hadn’t argued, and now they owned a house and were planning romantic get-aways to South America. Yuppies. And still Wells’s restlessness — and his dreams — showed no signs of fading.

Wells was beginning to think they never would. He’d spent the better part of a decade working undercover to infiltrate al-Qaeda for the CIA. He’d come back to the United States to stop a massive al-Qaeda attack with Exley’s help. More recently he and Exley had helped avert war between the United States and China. The missions had saved untold lives.

But Wells didn’t know the men he’d saved, only the ones he’d killed. Some had been villains by anyone’s definition, terrorists targeting civilians. But others had merely been doing their jobs, protecting themselves, following orders they didn’t necessarily agree with or even understand. Chinese policemen. Afghan guerrillas. He couldn’t pretend they were his enemies. He’d killed them all because he’d had no choice. He’d killed them—

“For the greater good,” he said aloud.

“What greater good?” Exley said.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Now he was trying to put his head back on, gather his strength. Because he knew. The world wouldn’t stay quiet very long.

Exley stood, busied herself cutting rose stems, putting the flowers in a cut-glass vase. “How were the guys?” she said.

“I finally talked a little,” Wells said.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

As an answer, he stood, wrapped an arm around her and another under her legs and picked her up. Wells was six-two and muscular, twice Exley’s size, and he lifted her easily. She cupped his face in her hands, locked her blue eyes on him.

“Got the trip all planned yet?”

“Close,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to help?”

“I’m not making decisions these days,” he said. “I’m in a decision-free mode.”

“No decisions at all? So I can do what I like with you.”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why don’t you take me upstairs?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

HE’D JUST PUT HER DOWN on the bed when the doorbell rang.

“Ignore it,” she said. She pulled her sweater off. Underneath she was wearing only a thin white T-shirt that clung to her nipples. She tugged him down. He’d begun to slip off her T-shirt when the bell rang again.

Downstairs he flipped on the porch lights and peered through the front door’s bulletproof glass. A tall black man in a long blue overcoat stood on the porch. Adam Michaels, the head of the CIA security detail that watched the house.

Wells didn’t particularly like the idea of being guarded this way, but he understood the need, especially when Exley’s kids visited. Anyway, Michaels and his guys were discreet.

“Sorry to bother you, John,” Michaels said.

“No bother.”

“Can I ask you and Ms. Exley to come outside, take a look at somebody?”

THE MAN STOOD under a streetlight. He was white, wearing jeans, a Yankees cap, black gloves, and a thin leather jacket that didn’t look like much good against the cold. Two of Michaels’s men watched him, their hands close to the pistols on their hips.

Wells looked him over, carefully. “Never seen him before.”

“Me, neither,” Exley said.

“Who is he?” Wells said.

“Nobody, probably,” Michaels said. “But we’ve seen him five, six times the last couple days. Walking by the house, front and back. Slow and careful. Like he’s casing it. This time we stopped him, asked him what he was doing.”

“It’s a free country,” Wells said.

“That’s what he said,” Michaels said.

“What’s his name?”

“Says it’s Victor, but he’s got no ID. From his accent, he’s probably Russian.”

Wells walked over to the man, examined him closely. Nope. Definitely a stranger. Wells stuck out his hand. The man hesitated, then shook it.

“Victor,” Wells said. “I’m John Wells.”

“Nice to meet you.” The Russian accent was unmistakable.

“You looking for me? Because I’m right here.”

“Why would I be looking for you? I don’t know you. Just walking when these men grab me. Make me stand here and it’s cold.”

“You know a Spetsnaz named Sergei Tupenov?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Me, neither,” Wells said. “Victor. You like the Yankees?”

“Sure.”

“Big fan?”

“Sure.”

“Who’s their shortstop?”

Victor frowned. “Shortstop? What kind of question is this?”

“Fair enough,” Wells said. “You have a nice night. See you around.”

He walked back to Michaels. “Anything?”

“Nope,” Wells said.

“Any good threats come your way the last few weeks?” Exley said.

“On you two?” Michaels said. “Course not. Don’t you know everybody loves you?” Michaels paused. “Seriously, the usual nonsense. I’m more worried about the ones we don’t get.”

“True enough,” Exley said.

“So if you don’t recognize him, guess we have to cut him loose.” Michaels turned to Victor. “Get out of here,” he said. “And do me a favor. Don’t come back. Find another block to walk.” The Russian glared at them, then walked off, slowly.

And as Wells watched Victor go, he heard Johnny Cash, singing in the night. I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ round the bend.

3

The Mayak complex stretched across hundreds of acres, encompassed dozens of buildings, and was protected by three separate layers of security. Foreigners, and most Russians, were barred not only from Mayak, but from Ozersk, the city that surrounded the plant. During the Soviet era, Ozersk hadn’t appeared on maps, or even had a name. It had been called Chelyabinsk-65, for its location, sixty-five kilometers from Chelyabinsk, the province’s capital. After the USSR collapsed, the Russian government had acknowledged Ozersk’s existence and allowed foreigners into the city. But now a new cold war — or at least a cold peace — was dawning. The Kremlin had again closed the gates to Ozersk and its other nuclear cities.

Of course, plenty of outsiders, like Yusuf, evaded the outer city checkpoints with fake identification and found their way into Ozersk. But a second level of security protected Mayak. The plant had its own guard force, an electrical fence, and closed-circuit cameras at every entrance. To further improve security, only managers like Grigory were allowed to bring their cars into the plant. Ordinary employees were required to park outside the perimeter and ride buses around the complex.

Finally, a third layer of fencing, guards, and high-intensity lights surrounded the “special area,” the depots where warheads were stored. Only employees with at least five years’ experience were allowed in the special area. And except for convoy trucks, all vehicles were barred from the area. The plant’s managers worked just outside the special area, in a hulking three-story concrete building whose narrow deep-set windows gave it the look of a maximum security prison.

GRIGORY FARZADOV TURNED his Volga sedan off the four-lane avenue that connected the front gates of the complex with the special area, and rolled into the headquarters parking lot. Unlike senior managers, he didn’t have a designated spot, but working at night meant he could always park near the front doors. A good thing, too, since the parking lot was covered with an inch of black ice, a combination of water, dirt, sand, and grease that froze in November and didn’t melt until April. Every year Grigory took at least one nasty fall, found himself on the ground with his knee or his wrist aching, just short of broken. This cursed place, where even walking was a chore. If he succeeded tonight, he would take Yusuf ’s money and go somewhere warm, someplace where he wouldn’t have to wear mittens six months a year. If he succeeded tonight. And Yusuf didn’t kill him afterward.

Inside the front doors, a bored guard glanced at Grigory’s badge and waved him in. The guard’s name was Dmitri. He and Grigory had been hired around the same time, fifteen years before. As much as the cameras and fences, the long tenures of men like Grigory and Dmitri guaranteed Mayak’s security. No one new was allowed anywhere near the depots. But that familiarity had a downside. The insiders couldn’t really imagine one another capable of theft or sabotage. Tonight Grigory would take advantage of that blindness.

“Evening,” said Grigory. “How are you?”

“As usual, thanks. Yourself?”

“This beastly cold. Looking forward to spring.”

“Already?”

“Today and every day,” Grigory said. He remembered Mikhail and stifled a shiver. He’d condemned his neighbor to a frightful death with the same four words.

Grigory had arrived for his shift early, as always. He busied himself with paperwork for a few minutes before walking down the hall to the office of Garry Pliakov, the deputy manager of operations. Pliakov oversaw the handling of all special nuclear material — the phrase that both Russians and Americans used for plutonium-239 and uranium- 235, the two atoms that formed the core of nuclear weapons.

The Russian nuclear bureaucracy still hadn’t gone completely digital; Pliakov’s office was thick with personnel reports, orders from Rosatom’s headquarters, details of convoys arriving and departing, the papers neatly organized in folders on the shelves around his desk.

“Wasn’t a convoy due today? I don’t see the paperwork,” Grigory said.

“Those bastards are late.”

Yusuf had kept his promise. Grigory wasn’t surprised. “What, they stopped for a drink?”

“They say an accident blocked the highway. They’re hoping to arrive by ten o’clock. You know what that means. A cold night for you, unless Oleg”—the night manager at the plant—“decides to stay sober.”

Pliakov smiled. He was a decent man who invited Grigory to his apartment for a drink once a year or so. For a moment, Grigory’s resolve wavered. Could he really betray all these men he’d worked with for years? Then he remembered the way that Yusuf had torn apart the orange.

“No need for Oleg,” Grigory said. “I’ll do it.”

“Of course. Check the cucumber crates and then into the north warehouse.”

The special area had two storage depots. The north one was a low concrete building that held a couple hundred warheads that were still in active service but had been brought to Mayak for repair. The south warehouse was larger and dug deep belowground. It provided permanent storage for decommissioned and obsolete warheads. Though if the new cold war really got hot, they could always be put back into service.

“I know the procedure. I signed one in a couple of years ago.”

“Good. I’ll send over the codes in a few minutes, before I go.” In yet another security precaution, the codes to open the cucumber crates — Russian jargon for the boxes that held the warheads — were not carried on the weapons convoys. Instead, they were sent to Mayak over the secure private network that linked Russia’s nuclear facilities. Even if terrorists attacked the convoy and stole the boxes, they wouldn’t be able to unlock them and would have to cut them open to get to the warheads inside.

“All right. See you tomorrow, Garry.”

“Tomorrow.”

NO NIGHT HAD EVER PASSED so slowly. Over and over, Grigory’s eyes migrated upward, to the clock over his desk. Each time they did, he was shocked at how slowly its hands had moved. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Two minutes. Through his narrow window, he saw that snow had begun to fall.

At nine o’clock he wandered down the hall to check on Oleg. The night manager lay on the couch in his office, a bottle of vodka half hidden under a cushion, his shirt untucked and pants unbuttoned, his potbelly rising and falling with each breath. When Grigory walked in, his eyes fluttered open and he treated Grigory to the patronizing smile he’d given Grigory a thousand times before. The smile that said, maybe vodka has turned my liver to rot, but I’ve got a wife and family waiting for me and you go home every morning to nothing but your own empty hand. Or maybe Grigory was projecting. Maybe Oleg was just thinking of his next drink. Even so, Grigory wouldn’t miss that smile.

Oleg mumbled something.

“Yes?”

“The lights,” Oleg said. “Make yourself useful for a change. Turn them off. And close the door. I don’t want you looking at me. What if you get hungry?”

“Of course, boss.”

Grigory turned off the lights and went back to his office. When he checked again a few minutes later, he heard Oleg’s heavy snores. No, Oleg wouldn’t be a problem.

Ten o’clock. Weren’t they supposed to arrive by now? Where were they? He walked over to the security center, a windowless room where guards monitored the plant’s alarms and cameras.

Tajid nodded as Grigory walked in. He was fiddling with a screen that had gone dark. Monitors broke all the time, but the failure of this particular screen was no accident. It was one of three that watched the north weapons depot. Without it, the men in here would be partly blinded to what was happening in the warehouse.

“Hello, cousin,” Tajid said. He looked perfectly normal. The room looked perfectly normal. Another endless night at Mayak. Grigory still couldn’t quite believe what he was about to do. He pointed to the darkened monitor.

“You broke it watching pornos?”

“We don’t need pornos,” said Arkady Merin, the senior night security officer. “We use our imagination. And sometimes Tatu.”

Against all regulations, a fat black tabby lurked in the security office. Two winters before, a guard had found the cat in the special area during a blizzard. In her search for shelter, she’d somehow gotten through the electrified fences. She wasn’t wearing a tag, and she ought to have been put down. But Arkady had taken a shine to her and made her the mascot for the guards. He named her Tatu, after a pair of Russian lesbian singers popular a few years back.

“Anything happening?”

“Quiet as a virgin in a whorehouse,” Arkady said. The perimeter and inner gates were staffed around the clock, but the operations center emptied out at night. This evening, only three men were on duty — Arkady, Tajid, and Marat, a fifty-something guard with a gritty, phlegmy smoker’s cough that for the last few weeks had gotten worse.

“When’s that dammed convoy due?”

“Eleven, they’re saying.”

“Another delay?”

“One of the BTRs had engine trouble.”

“They’re cursed. And such a night for it.”

“Could be worse. Could be February.” Arkady turned back to his monitors.

“Call me when they arrive,” Grigory said. “Our esteemed boss is dreaming up new and better ways to manage and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Dreaming up? Such wit, Grigory,” Arkady smiled.

Grigory left. Hanging around wouldn’t look natural. He needed to look natural. But back in his office, he couldn’t work. He gave up trying and sat at his desk, watching the second hand tick. He knew what he was about to do was wrong, beyond wrong, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. He never would have guessed he could break the rules so easily. Perhaps every man carried a beast inside him.

A few years back, a serial killer had worked his way through Chelyabinsk, killing dozens of prostitutes before one escaped from his truck and called the police. The killer — Grigory couldn’t recall his name, but he was an electrician, he’d strangled his victims with thick black cords — grinned his way through his trial, and when the judge asked him if he had anything to say, any apologies to offer, he shook his head. “You’re lucky you caught me, for I would have gone on forever,” he said. “You can’t imagine how it feels.”

At this moment, Grigory thought he could.

THE PHONE RANG. “They’re here. At the main gate.”

“Thanks, Arkady.”

Grigory grabbed his coat and the paperwork he would need, including the single sheet of paper that held the codes to unlock the warhead boxes. Easy, he told himself. No rush. The delivery was a minor break from routine, nothing more. He walked slowly to the security office. “Come on, Tajid. Enough pornos tonight. Let’s greet our visitors.”

The first test. If Arkady raised a stink about the fact that Grigory had asked his cousin to be his partner on the delivery, they’d fail right away. But Grigory didn’t expect Arkady to object. He wouldn’t want to go himself, and sending old Marat into the cold would be callous. Sure enough, Arkady was feeding Tatu and hardly looked up.

“Have fun, Tajid,” he said.

“A real humanitarian, you are.” Tajid grabbed his coat and gloves and followed his cousin out.

First test passed.

OUTSIDE, the freezing wind hit Grigory full in the face. The snow was still falling, lightly now, covering the ground with a thin white rime.

Grigory was wearing a heavy down jacket and a sweater and woolen gloves, but he hadn’t bothered with proper boots or a hat tonight, and the wind found his feet and face and attacked them. Human beings weren’t meant to live this way. Maybe for a year or two, but not decade after decade. Not their whole lives.

Fortunately, the Volga started easily. Grigory had replaced the battery a few weeks before. Tajid and Grigory sat in silence for a moment, blowing on their hands, their breath filling the car. “No second thoughts, cousin?” Grigory said.

“None. You?”

“I’m not thinking at all.”

“Probably that’s best.”

Grigory put the Volga into gear and drove down the deserted avenue to the main gate. The convoy sat in a parking lot just inside the guard posts, the Ural trucks glowing under neon arc lights. The Volga looked like a toy beside the BTRs and Urals. Grigory parked beside the convoy and stepped out. A trim man wearing the single silver star of a major greeted him. Despite the cold, he wore only a thin wool coat and a hat with fur earflaps. He extended a hand.

“Major Yuri Akilev.”

“Grigory Farzadov. You’ve had a long trip.” Grigory’s heart was pounding, but his voice sounded normal.

“The cards turn ugly and the bottles go dry,” Akilev said. “No reason to expect anything else.”

“A man after my own heart,” Grigory said. “That’s it. A thousand years of history right there.”

“Even so, I’d like to get my men inside.”

Grigory pointed down the security fence at a squat two-story concrete building a few hundred yards away. “Our overflow barracks. You can send the BTRs and Tigers there while we unload.”

“Is there food?”

This major was a good commander, concerned about the welfare of his men, Grigory thought. “Not at this hour, but they’ll have hot showers and warm beds.”

“That’ll do.”

“But make sure you bring a couple of extra men with you to unload the crates.”

Akilev passed along the order to his sergeant. A moment later, the armored personnel carriers and three of the Tigers rumbled off, leaving just Grigory’s Volga, the commander’s Tiger, and the four Urals that held the bombs.

“Follow me.”

Grigory stopped the Volga at the guard post that protected the entrance to the special area. The post hut was made of thick concrete blocks, hardly bigger than a tollbooth, and had entrances on both sides of the restricted zone. The guards inside the hut theoretically would be the last line of defense in case of an all-out assault on the plant. In reality, the hut was the most boring place to work at Mayak, especially at night, when the special area was locked down and empty. Between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., the post was staffed by a single guard, who slept most of the shift.

Through the thick window of the guardhouse, Grigory saw cheap black boots resting on a desk.

“Who’s on duty tonight?” he said to Tajid.

“Roster said Boris Hiterov.”

“With the hair.”

“Yes.”

Boris Hiterov. A lifer. No better or worse than the average guard. With any luck, he’d have taken a couple of shots of vodka to help him sleep. Grigory cranked down his window. The second test was about to begin.

BEEP! Grigory leaned on the Volga’s horn. Inside the hut, the boots kicked up with almost comic speed. Hiterov opened the window, just a crack. He was a big man, though not as big as Grigory, with dark brown hair that he wore up in a sort of pompadour. He was very proud of his hair.

“Boris!” Grigory yelled. “We’re here.”

A puzzled look settled on Hiterov’s face. “Who’s that?”

“The convoy! Let us in, you damned fool!” The insults were key here. Grigory wanted to remind Hiterov of his place in the plant’s hierarchy.

“Yes. But Grigory, you know the rule.”

Indeed Grigory did. Even if he hadn’t, the black-lettered sign in front of him was clear. No private automobiles. Official vehicles only.

“If you think I’m leaving this car and walking, you’ve drunk away the last of your brains.” The north warehouse was about three hundred yards away, not really a long walk, but the cold night was working to Grigory’s advantage.

“Why don’t you ride with the convoy?”

“The commander’s Tiger is full. Maybe you’d like me to sit on his lap.”

“But if anyone finds out—”

“No one will. Open the gate and go back to sleep, you wretch.”

Hiterov slammed the window shut. The electrified gate slowly rolled back, its wheels screeching in the cold.

Second test passed.

TO KEEP AMERICAN SPY SATELLITES from seeing their exact locations, both the north and south warehouses had been concealed under metal sheds as big as airplane hangars. Grigory drove into the north shed now, followed by Akilev’s convoy. Inside, the shed was bright as a sunny afternoon, thanks to arc lights mounted high on its girders.

The weapons depot, a windowless concrete building one hundred feet long and sixty feet wide, sat in the northeast corner of the shed. The entrance to the depot was a wide steel door with no visible locks or opening mechanism. Four surveillance cameras focused on it. A half-dozen others watched the rest of the shed. But the cameras couldn’t see everything, Grigory knew. He parked near the door to the shed, got out of his Volga, and turned to Akilev.

“Have your trucks park here and unload the cucumber crates. I’m going to get you out of here as quickly as I can.” Grigory spoke firmly, as if he were the major’s superior officer. He had to be in control, give Akilev no room for questions. He felt sharp and strong, as if he’d burned through the first rapid-fire moves of a chess match and settled into the midgame. He’d arranged the board as he liked. Now he needed to press forward.

“As you say.” Eager to get some sleep, Akilev’s men quickly unloaded the warhead crates. Meanwhile Grigory called to headquarters to tell Arkady that he and Tajid would be entering the warehouse. The steel door to the depot was three feet thick and could be unlocked only from headquarters — another security measure.

Arkady picked up after five rings. “Sleeping, Arkady?”

“Of course not. Everything on schedule?”

“Cold as your wife’s tits. Otherwise fine.”

“My wife has no tits,” Arkady said. “Let me know when you’ve checked the crates.”

Grigory hung up and turned to Akilev. “Ready to be done with this?”

“More than you know.”

From his pocket Grigory unfolded the sheet that held the codes to unlock the warhead crates. He punched a twenty-two-digit code into the numeric keypad attached to the lid of the crate nearest him. The magnetic lock popped open and Grigory opened the crate. The warhead sat naked and sterile, a cylinder about two feet long and eighteen inches in diameter, held firm by the rubberized interior of the cucumber crate. A string of numbers and Cyrillic letters, painted in red, gave the warhead’s serial number and its specifications. Halfway up the cylinder, a control panel stuck out, a simple metal plate with three switches side by side: Armed/Not Armed; Full Yield/Half Yield/Low Yield; Airburst/Groundburst. Beside the plate, the warhead’s locking mechanism, two eight-digit combination locks and a circular keyhole. Everything about the bomb was simple and low-tech, designed for reliability and ease of use by frontline soldiers who were likely to be under attack as they readied the warhead for launch.

“Hardly looks like it’s worth the trouble,” Grigory said to Akilev.

“Harmless as a Gypsy curse.”

Grigory closed the crate, which locked automatically. They moved on to the second crate, the third, and on down to the eighth. All the boxes were full.

“Well done, Major.”

“You thought I’d lost one?”

Grigory grabbed the file that held his inventory receipts from the Volga. He dated and signed the papers and handed them to Akilev. “Sign here,” he said.

“But aren’t we supposed to wait until the boxes are inside the warehouse?”

Third test. “If you like,” Grigory said. “But me and Tajid will need at least two hours to put the crates in their proper places. I thought you and your men might want some rest. Your choice.”

“Can we help you move the crates inside the depot?”

“I’m afraid not. Not that I don’t trust you—” Yes, Grigory thought. Turn back the question of trust on him.

“I understand. And you don’t mind if we leave. You’re certain.”

“Not a bit.”

“All right.” Akilev signed the papers and handed them back to Grigory. “Thanks for this. It’s been a very long day.” He whistled sharply to his men. They jumped into the Urals, which started with a heavy diesel thump. A minute later, the Tiger and the trucks had disappeared from the shed, leaving Grigory and his cousin alone.

Third test passed.

TO HIS SURPRISE, Grigory felt no excitement. He was relaxed, yet hyperaware of his surroundings. The grain of the pavement beneath his feet, the cold air against his face, the hum of the arc lights above his head — he saw and heard everything at once. This must be how God feels, he thought.

He called Arkady. “The crates checked out.”

“Has the convoy gone? On the monitors—”

“I told them they could. No need to make them wait for us.”

“But how will you—”

“We drove in.”

“Grigory, you know that’s not allowed—”

“So write me up. But meanwhile open the damn door, so we can put them away and be done.”

Arkady hung up. A few seconds later, the big steel door creaked open. Grigory and Tajid hefted two crates onto a forklift beside the door. Grigory drove into the cool depths of the warehouse, Tajid walking slowly behind him. Dropping the crates off took twenty minutes. When they were done, they loaded two more crates and repeated the procedure.

Fourth test. The third set of crates had come from the truck that had been nearest the Volga. Grigory waited until the cameras mounted on the rafters of the shed were facing away from him. The cameras made long, slow loops around the warehouse. For Grigory, who knew the pattern, they were easy to avoid.

Quickly, Grigory popped the trunk of the Volga and pulled out a pair of steel toolboxes, two feet by two feet by three feet, each half-filled with hard rubber balls the size of large marbles.

Toolboxes in hand, Grigory strode over to the crates and again keyed in the codes to unlock them. He reached into the first crate and grabbed for the cylinder. He had never actually touched a warhead before. To save weight and space, the damn thing didn’t have handles, and Grigory wasn’t sure how to lift it. He wedged his fingers underneath and began to pull. The warhead slipped back, nearly breaking his hands, and he fired curses at his cousin.

“Come on, you oaf. Help.”

On the second try they lifted the cylinder and transferred it into the toolbox, arranging the rubber balls so that it wouldn’t roll around. Quickly, they repeated the operation with the second crate.

Grigory snuck a look at the cameras on the ceiling. Still safe. He and Tajid slipped the toolboxes into the trunk, one over each wheel well. The lightbulb inside the trunk was dead, and the trunk was dirty with old newspapers and bottles of antifreeze and a spare tire and wrenches and a jack. Grigory covered the toolboxes with blankets and slammed down the lid. A thorough search would spot the boxes, but a flashlight quickly shined over the trunk wouldn’t. So he hoped. He closed the Volga lid and looked around. The cameras were still pointing away.

Fourth test passed.

WITH THE WARHEADS in his trunk, Grigory’s self-confidence began to flag. Until now he’d been playing a game, outsmarting Arkady and Boris Hiterov and Major Akilev, which wasn’t hard, since none of them knew they were playing at all. Bringing the Volga in was a technical infraction, nothing more.

Now, though, he’d crossed the border into something else. What if he’d been caught in some elaborate setup? What if the FSB had recruited Tajid to betray him? What if a force of agents waited outside the fence at this moment—

“Cousin,” Tajid said sharply, knocking Grigory from his reverie. “Let’s be done.”

So they went back into the warehouse, first with the two empty crates and then the final two. Grigory heart pounded in his chest. He was grateful for the cold air.

Then they were done. Grigory called Arkady, who answered on the second ring. This time he’d been awake, awaiting the call, Grigory figured. A bad sign.

“We’re done. Thank God. I think my balls have frozen.”

“Fine, then.” Arkady sounded annoyed. Grigory hung up and stepped away as the steel door slid closed. The shed was empty, the forklift beside the door. The place looked exactly as they had found it.

Grigory and Tajid slid into the Volga. Grigory hoped no one would notice that the car was sitting lower now. “Do you really believe we’ll get out of here, cousin?”

“Inshallah. It’s God’s will.”

“If you say so.” Grigory turned the key and the Volga started immediately.

BUT WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the guard hut, the fence was still closed.

“Damn Boris.” Grigory honked. The rear door of the hut opened and Hiterov stepped out, holding a flashlight. Its beam caught Grigory in the eyes. Grigory felt his bowels tighten.

Grigory rolled down his window. “What’s this, Boris?”

“I have to check the car. Arkady’s orders.”

Fifth test. This one unexpected. Grigory felt as he did playing chess when an opponent found a weakness and counterattacked, leaving him naked. Grigory opened the door, stepped out of the car. “Come on, Tajid. Into the cold while he finds the bombs we’ve stolen.” He hoped he had the right tone of sarcasm in his voice.

“You think I want to be out here?” Hiterov whined. Nonetheless he leaned into the car, shined the flashlight over the front seats, then into the back. “Now the trunk.”

Grigory unlocked the trunk. Hiterov poked the beam of his light inside.

“What a mess. Don’t you ever clean this thing?”

“Only on nights I’m screwing your wife in the backseat.”

With his free hand, Hiterov poked ineffectually at the papers and antifreeze bottles. Grigory imagined how he would explain the warheads to the police and the FSB. An experiment, a test of the plant’s security. Maybe he’d tell the truth, try to trade his life for Yusuf’s, though he’d still wind up in a Siberian jail until he died.

Finally, Hiterov stood up. He hadn’t found them. He hadn’t noticed the toolboxes, hadn’t even moved the blankets.

“Inspection over. Tell Arkady I did as he asked.”

“Tell him yourself.” Grigory and Tajid slipped back into the Volga as Hiterov disappeared into the hut. The gate opened and Grigory put the Volga into gear and rolled out.

Fifth test passed. Game over. Checkmate.

The rest was simple. They checked in at headquarters and handed over the paperwork. Arkady complained about the way Grigory had broken the rules, and Grigory apologized dutifully. Four a.m. came, the end of Grigory’s shift. “See you, Tajid,” he said to his cousin, whose shift didn’t end for another hour. “Have a good weekend, Arkady.”

“You and your mother, too.”

Grigory walked out of headquarters and into the frigid night. The lights of the buildings around him glowed brightly, but nothing moved. In the distance, somewhere outside the gates of the plant, a truck rumbled. He walked toward the Volga. It wasn’t too late. He could still turn around, confess to Arkady, explain the theft as a crazy practical joke.

Too late, not too late, too late. Forget it. He’d won. Now he wanted his reward, whatever it was. He settled himself inside the Volga, slipped key into ignition.

“Inshallah,” he said. The foolishness that contented his cousin. God willing. What a strange thing to say. As if God had anything to do with this game they were playing. He pursed his lips, said it again. “Inshallah.” He drove off, toward the plant’s main gate, two stolen nuclear warheads in his trunk.

4

Cottage cheese.

Cottage cheese and melon. Cottage cheese and low-fat granola. Cottage cheese and an egg-white omelette. In the last three months, Pierre Kowalski had eaten cottage cheese all the ways it could be eaten. Now he was eating it again, spooning the rubbery white junk into his mouth. He choked it down with a glass of Evian, trying to pretend it had any taste at all.

“This is no way to live,” he grumbled in French across the table at Nadia Zorinova, his girlfriend, a twenty-two-year-old whose pert nose and ice-blue eyes were currently gracing the cover of Spanish Vogue.

“Now you know how we models feel.” Nadia smirked at him with her million-dollar lips. “Soon you’ll be ready to walk the runway.”

Nadia. This mansion on Lake Zurich, another in Monte Carlo. A yacht complete with its own helicopter pad. A billion dollars spread in banks around the world. The ear of defense ministers and presidents from Buenos Aires to Bangkok. Kowalski had everything he wanted. Everything but this. cottage cheese.

Kowalski never wanted to see cottage cheese again, not unless it was sitting next to a steak. A thick filet mignon, medium rare, in a pepper-corn sauce, accompanied by a bottle of burgundy. He picked up his plate, Wedgwood bone china, and spun it across the room like a $600 Frisbee. It crashed into the fireplace and exploded in a thousand shards, scattering cottage cheese and grapes across the floor.

Nadia’s smirk widened. “Pierre, you mustn’t keep destroying the china.”

“It’s replaceable.” Like you, Kowalski mentally added. Though Nadia had her charms. A few weeks earlier, she’d just missed being cast as an underwear model for Calvin Klein.

“Would you like something else?”

“Do you plan to cook it for me?”

THREE MONTHS BEFORE, Kowalski had brought his personal physician, Dr. Émile Breton, to his mansion for a physical. The appointment was not entirely routine. For weeks, he’d found himself unable to. perform, despite Nadia’s most tender ministrations. He’d never suffered that problem before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Years before, his endowment had earned him the nickname “Cinquante,” French for “fifty,” a reference not to the American rapper but to the.50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms ever made.

So Kowalski’s troubles left him puzzled. Perhaps his advancing age? Whatever the problem, he expected that Breton would take care of it with a prescription for Viagra or some similar elixir. The doctor had other ideas. He weighed Kowalski, drew blood, insisted that Kowalski come to his office for a treadmill stress test. And then he returned to Kowalski’s mansion to deliver the bad news in person.

“Pierre. You must change your diet, begin to exercise. You’ve gained ten kilos”—twenty-two pounds—“in two years.”

“You’ve been saying the same thing for as long as I’ve known you.” Kowalski smirked. “Would you like lunch, Doctor? It’s quail today, in a sauce of figs.”

“This isn’t a joke. Your cholesterol, your weight, your glucose. Disastrous, all of it.”

“Aren’t there those balloons?”

“Angioplasty. Yes, you may need that as well. But unless you take your diet more seriously, it’s only postponing the inevitable. Your arteries are nearly blocked. Why do you think you’re having such trouble with that delightful girl out there?”

Kowalski’s smile faded. “Now I see I have your attention,” the doctor said.

“What about the pills?”

“If you don’t lose at least twenty-five kilos”—almost sixty pounds—“Viagra will be useless.”

“You’re beginning to depress me.”

“Forty kilos would be even better. Tell your chef to throw away the quail, cook some vegetables.”

“Forty kilos? That’s nearly one-third of my weight.” Kowalski weighed 130 kilos — almost 290 pounds.

“I know.” He handed Kowalski a card: H. W. Rossi, spécialiste de diète. “If you’re serious about remaining alive, call him. I’ve seen him work miracles with men like you.”

INDEED, under the watchful eyes of Rossi, who seemed to survive solely on vegetables and an occasional piece of broiled trout, Kowalski had lost thirteen kilos in three months. Over the last few weeks, his libido had even started to return. Even so, the diet wore on him. Kowalski had always been a master at presenting a smooth face to the world. Now, though, he found himself irritable, prone to silly tricks like flinging plates across the room.

Yes, the diet was bothering him. The diet. And the knowledge that John Wells was still alive.

Kowalski was the world’s largest private arms dealer, a conduit for weapons from Russia, France, and the United States to armies all over the developing world. His father, Frederick, had gotten into the business in the late 1950s, recognizing that the newly liberated nations of Africa would need weapons and that Europe had millions of guns left over from World War II, moldering in warehouses.

The business took off in 1975, when Frederick brokered a deal between France and a young Iraqi dictator named Saddam Hussein. By then, Kowalski was at Oxford, studying political science. A few months before Kowalski graduated, Frederick asked when he would join the firm.

“Never,” Kowalski said.

Frederick looked at his son with the cool dark eyes that were a family trait.

Kowalski felt the need to explain, though he didn’t want to offend his father by questioning the morality of the business. “I want to make my own success.”

Frederick raised his hand. “Pierre. C’est bon. When you change your mind, you’ll find an open door.”

It will never happen, Kowalski thought. “Thank you, Papa,” he said aloud.

But his father was right. After five years of working in Paris for Lazard Frères, the investment bank, Kowalski had grown supremely bored. These pompous executives in their hand-tailored suits thought they ruled the world. But the men who really ruled, the generals who held whole nations in their grip, didn’t pay lawyers to squabble at each other. When they saw something they wanted, they took it. If they made a mistake, they didn’t get a fat severance package and a new job a few months later. They paid with their lives.

And those men — they came to his father for help. All over Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Frederick Kowalski was treated like royalty. Pierre was disgusted, too, with the hypocrisy he saw every day in business. These companies, with their trade associations and their codes of ethics, as if they cared about anything but their profits. At least the Africans didn’t hide their greed. On his fifth anniversary, just as his boss at Lazard told him he was on track to become a partner, Pierre handed in his resignation.

Two days later, he was back in Zurich. When he appeared at his father’s office on Bahnhofstrasse, Frederick smiled.

“Come to join me?”

Pierre nodded, feeling slightly abashed. Until now he hadn’t considered the possibility that he might have waited too long, that his father might be angry at him, might even reject him.

“What took so long?” Frederick said.

The business became Kowalski père et fils a few years later, and Kowalski took over when Frederick suffered a stroke in 1999. Besides his daughter, Anna, a regular in the pages of the fashion magazines, Kowalski fils had two sons from his first and only marriage. So far, neither had shown interest in becoming part of the trade. But Kowalski expected they’d change their minds soon enough.

Like his father, he ran the business on a few simple principles. He never promised customers weapons he couldn’t deliver. He never stored his merchandise on Swiss soil. He always made sure he was paid up front. He never worked twice with anyone who tried to burn him.

And he never made threats he didn’t intend to keep.

Several months before, John Wells had attacked Kowalski at a rented mansion in East Hampton, New York. Wells had. Kowalski didn’t even like to remember what Wells had done. Handcuffed him, shocked him with a stun gun, covered his head with duct tape. He was lucky he hadn’t suffocated. Wells had worn a mask, but Kowalski had learned his identity a few weeks later. Now he wanted revenge, the revenge that he had promised the masked man in his bedroom that night. On Wells, and Exley, too, who’d helped Wells.

“You must know you’re making a terrible mistake,” Kowalski had said at the time. “Whoever you are. Even if you think you’re safe. I’ll break the rules for you.” Now Kowalski meant to keep his promise. Wells would pay for what he’d done.

A HAND TOUCHED his shoulder, snapping him out of that summer night. Nadia stood beside him. “Pierre, are you all right? Your face was so. black.”

He kissed her cheek. “Too much cottage cheese.”

A light knock on the door. Anatoly Tarasov, Kowalski’s head of security, a former Russian Spetsnaz officer, entered. A walking tornado, capable of extraordinary violence.

“Have you finished?” Kowalski said to Nadia.

“Yes.” Her lunch had consisted of two pieces of melon and a boiled egg, and yet she seemed satisfied. He couldn’t imagine how.

“Then wait for me in the drawing room. Today we’ll go for a shop.”

She kissed him and glided out. Tarasov waited until she was gone, then closed the door and sat beside him. “You like her.”

“She’s sweet,” Kowalski said. “Sweeter than most of them.”

“Or a better actress.”

“Perhaps. Have you news on our friend?”

“You won’t wish to hear it. The CIA has two teams, two men each, watching the house where he and the woman live.”

“Around the clock?”

“Around the clock. One team in front, one in back. There’s a third in plainclothes that comes and goes.”

“What about their vehicles?” Putting a bomb underneath a car was the easiest way to assassinate someone.

“Garaged. They travel to work in separate cars most days. The woman drives a Dodge minivan, and Wells a Subaru. Sometimes he rides a motorcycle, but not in the winter. Two of the guards follow in a chase car.”

“Are their cars armored?”

“It doesn’t seem so. At Langley, they’re untouchable, naturally. They also have a private office in a place called Tyson’s Corner. But they spend most of their time at the agency now. And the private building has its own security. One of the CIA guards has a post outside the door and the other watches the cars. There’s a third guard in their office.”

“Could we reach them there?”

“They never open the door when there’s anyone else on the floor, and there are cameras on the corridor.”

“How about the elevator?”

“Such a confined space isn’t ideal. If Wells gets a hand up—”

“I understand.” They would have only one chance at Wells and Exley. Kowalski didn’t want to waste it.

“Also, the guards at the house have noticed our scout.”

Kowalski’s stomach began to ache. “They’ve blown it already? Markov said these were his best men.”

Ivan Markov was recently retired from the FSB. Kowalski had given Markov $2 million up front to kill Wells and Exley, with the promise of another $3 million for a successful job.

“Nothing’s blown, Pierre. Our man was asked an idle question by the agents outside the house. He gave an idle answer. Nothing more. We shouldn’t underestimate the CIA. Perhaps they cannot catch bin Laden, but they are perfectly capable of watching a house in Washington.”

For a moment Kowalski wondered whether he ought to call off this assassination. He had known all along that Wells and Exley were not ideal targets. They were high-profile, and Wells was more than capable of defending himself. Still, Kowalski had figured that Markov’s men would finish the task quickly.

A few days of watching, then a few pounds of explosive attached to the undercarriage of Wells’s car. A three-man team. No elaborate surveillance required. And when he’d given Markov Wells’s name, the general had actually smiled. The Russians didn’t like Americans much these days, Kowalski thought.

But now. this job was turning messy.

“What do you think?” he asked Tarasov.

“I think that once you begin a mission like this. ” Tarasov trailed off. But Kowalski understood. The Russians respected strength. Bombings, poisonings, assassinations, Siberan prison camps — Russian leaders used every weapon at their disposal to remain in power, without apology. If Kowalski backed off, Markov would not be impressed. He would pass the word to his old bosses in the Kremlin: Pierre Kowalski has gone soft. The Russians were Kowalski’s most important business partner. He couldn’t afford to look weak to them.

And yet. he had built this mansion, built his empire, by thinking clearly, never letting emotion cloud his business dealings. Only women had the luxury of setting reason aside in their decisions.

He didn’t need to kill John Wells. Why take this risk?

“Thank you, Anatoly.” Kowalski nodded to the door. “Come back in a quarter-hour.” He needed a few minutes alone. A few minutes to think.

TARASOV REAPPEARED fifteen minutes later.

“So the home is impossible,” Kowalski said. “And also the office.”

“Not impossible, but—”

“Then we will hit them in between, I think.”

“I thought you might say that.”

“Will Markov want more men?”

“He believes in three-man teams.”

“And these men?”

“The best, Pierre. I know them myself.”

“Good,” Kowalski said. “Now let me find that girl before she gets herself into trouble.” He pushed himself from the table and padded toward Nadia. In the desperate weeks to come, he would ask himself more than once whether he would have made a different decision if he hadn’t been so damned hungry.

5

Wells awoke to Exley’s hands on his back, sliding across the base of his spine, over his hips, up to the thick muscles in his shoulders. Outside their bedroom the sky was dark, no sign of dawn in the winter night.

“Time is it?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Have you been awake long?”

“Hush, John.”

He tried to turn on his side, but she pressed him down.

“I’m treating you. Close your eyes.”

Wells closed his eyes and tried to float, though weightlessness had never come easy to him. Except on his motorcycle on a good clean road. And hiking through the Bitterroots growing up, leaves crunching under his feet, the comforting weight of a rifle on his shoulder, the sky blue and wide and cloudless, the tips of the mountains painted with snow that never melted. Above him eagles and falcons circling, spreading their wings to catch thermals. Exley’s hands pulled him up and Wells left his gun behind and rose to meet the raptors. He made great mile-wide loops, peering at the mountains below until the sky turned black. He wondered what had happened to Exley. But no matter where he turned, she was gone.

HE WOKE AGAIN to the blare of the radio by their bed: 6:45. The sky outside had turned gray and the WTOP announcer was promising a blustery cold day. Exley was gone, and the shower was running. He wandered into the bathroom.

“Come in here. I’ll wash you.”

Exley liked to mother him sometimes, pretend he couldn’t take care of himself. Wells wondered sometimes whether all women had this instinct. Maybe she did it to cut him down, make him more manageable. Or maybe she just liked him clean. Living in Afghanistan, he’d gone weeks, even months, without washing himself properly. Old habits died hard.

“I can handle it.”

“Get in here.”

“Why is it I think you’re looking for more than a shower this morning?”

At that, a hand reached out from the curtain and tugged him in.

AFTERWARD, she sat beside him on the edge of the bed. She was flushed and pink, her mouth open, her lips swollen. Wells was breathing hard, too.

“So good today,” she said.

“You always say that.”

“No, it’s true. I’m just glad we have our own house now. So I can make all the noise I want.” She kissed his cheek.

“Let’s get dressed. Or we’ll never get out of here.”

“Then let’s not. Let’s stay in here forever. Make a little world, just us.” She wrapped her arms around him. Her blue eyes shone and he knew she was serious. Like him, she’d devoted her life to the agency, given up everything — her first husband, her kids, her friends.

But since Wells had come back from China, she’d begun to pull away from the CIA. She was more engaged in planning their vacation than with anything happening at Langley. She kept extending the trip, too. First they were going to South America for two weeks. Then a month. Now she was talking about visiting Africa, too, six weeks in all. He’d joked that she should look into Antarctica.

Wells couldn’t blame her, not after everything that had happened over the last two years. But quit? Retire? He couldn’t imagine it. The job was all he knew how to do.

The job was all he was. He disentangled himself from her.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll stay in here forever.”

“You promise, John.”

“I promise.”

EXLEY HEADED BACK into the bathroom to put her face on. But do you love me, John? Do you really? Do you even know what the word means? Loving Wells was like throwing quarters down a mineshaft. She could hear the faint echo when the coins hit bottom, but she had to listen hard.

Not that she could complain. She’d made this choice, or more correctly the choice had made her. She couldn’t imagine ever being with anyone else. She would take as much of him as he could give. And maybe, one day, she’d find the key and he’d be hers for good.

Not likely.

BACK IN THE BEDROOM, Wells was doing push-ups, the scar on his back twitching with each rep. He was nearly forty, and he’d taken a lot of abuse the last two years, but physical therapy and constant exercise and his natural strength had saved him. He still looked like the football player he’d once been, his muscles laced atop one another like illustrations in an anatomy textbook.

“Come on, sit on my back,” he said.

“What are you, fourteen? You just showered. Now you’re going to be sweaty again.” Nonetheless she kneeled atop him while he finished another twenty reps. Wells was showing off, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. He was never more endearing than when he was acting like a big kid. And she found touching him this way nearly irresistible. He finished and she stayed on him, not wanting to move.

“Up,” he said. “You’re going to break me.”

“You asked for it.” She ran a finger across the sweat on his back. “Come on. Let’s get dressed, go to work. Such as it is.”

EXLEY’S DODGE CARAVAN was six years old and had a deep dent in its back fender from a tailgating cabbie. Inside, the carpets were grimy and cluttered with broken pens, coins, half-filled bottles of diet soda. Its heaters poured out an indefinable but vaguely unpleasant odor.

“You ever going to get something nicer?” Wells said. “A seventy-two Pinto, maybe.”

“Didn’t you used to say that Western materialism disgusts you?”

“Western materialism? Western? Have you checked out the Indians and the Chinese lately? I give up.”

“Really?”

“No, but I make an exception for cars. So sue me.” In fact, Wells had just bought a Subaru Impreza WRX, a turbocharged rice rocket that didn’t look special but could go from zero to sixty in just over four seconds. “Seriously, you’ve got to do something about this thing. It belongs on Pimp My Ride. Maybe I’ll send them a video.”

“How do you know about Pimp My Ride?”

“I’m hip.”

At that, Exley laughed. “You are many things, John, but hip isn’t one of them.”

WASHINGTON WAS NOTORIOUS for its traffic, but even by those standards the city was having a miserable morning. Constitution Avenue went bumper to bumper at 18th Street, a full five blocks from the ramp to the Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, one of the main routes connecting D.C. and Arlington.

Wells flicked on the radio only to hear that someone had ditched a car at the end of the bridge, by the exit ramp to the George Washington Parkway. The 14th Street Bridge was messed up, too, thanks to a car fire that had started around 6 a.m. The fire had quickly been put out, but the incident was still being investigated. Wells turned off the radio. “We should have stayed in bed.”

“Told you so.”

A Ducati zipped by on the left, a beautiful bike, low and red, sailing through the narrow aisle of asphalt created by the stopped cars in each lane. The driver and passenger were bundled against the cold, wearing thick gloves and black helmets with mirrored face-masks. They peered at the minivan as they rolled by.

“I believe they’re laughing at us,” Wells said. “That bike is probably worth ten times as much as this thing.”

“Let them laugh. It’s freezing out there.”

“If we’d taken my bike we’d be there already.” Harley and Honda sold the romance of the open road in their ads, but cutting through traffic jams was one of the underappreciated pleasures of riding.

“Who rides a motorcycle when it’s thirty degrees?”

“You’ve got me to block the wind.”

“Nothing blocks the wind in weather like this.”

Wells’s cell phone rang — Steve Feder, who ran their security detail during the day. Feder was riding shotgun in their chase car, a black Chevy Suburban directly behind them. “Should I turn on my flashers, get us out of here?”

“Not unless there’s something you think we need to be concerned about,” Wells said. He looked back and Feder gave him a little wave, Queen-of-England style.

“Nothing specific.”

“Then it’s all right. We can wait like everybody else.”

“Fair enough.” Click.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they’d gotten only to the block between 20th and 21st Streets, the Federal Reserve building filling the block to their right, protected by big concrete stanchions. Wells didn’t pretend to understand what went on in there. The light ahead turned green and they shuffled forward a few car lengths.

“Maybe they finally got it out of the way.”

“Maybe,” Exley said. “What’re you thinking?”

Wells nodded at the Fed. “Looks solid, doesn’t it? All these big, gray buildings.”

“It’s held up awhile.”

“Maybe we’ve just been lucky.”

“It’s a solid ship. And there’s a lot of us running around looking for leaks.”

“Is that what we are? Sounds glamorous.”

In the distance behind them, Wells heard a motorcycle engine. Then another.

And suddenly he knew.

Who rides a motorcycle when it’s thirty degrees?

Accidents on two bridges.

Too many coincidences this morning.

If he was wrong. no harm no foul. He’d call it paranoia and have something to talk about at the support group this week. But he knew.

He looked back, but his view was blocked by the bulk of the Suburban. He leaned forward and examined the passenger-side mirror. There. A red sportbike on his side, cutting between the traffic and the curb. Maybe ten cars back, three hundred feet in all, including the gaps between vehicles. Closing, slowly and steadily.

“Jenny. Check your mirror. Do you see a motorcycle?”

Exley leaned forward, peeked at her mirror. “Sure. A black bike. Back a ways.”

The red bike was 150 feet away, five car lengths. With his left hand, he unbuckled his seat belt. Then Exley’s. With his right, he reached under his jacket. He carried his Glock in an armpit holster under his left shoulder.

The traffic inched forward. On his side, the red bike was now only about three car lengths behind. Wells pulled the Glock, the big pistol solid in his hand. Time seemed to slow, a good sign. His reflexes were accelerating. Because he was right-handed, he’d have to get out of the van, expose himself, if he wanted a clean shot. Not what he wanted. But he had no choice.

“Open your door, Jenny. NOW.”

Wells couldn’t take the time to look at her, but he heard her door open. He reached across his body and opened his own door with his left hand, blocking the path of the bike.

In one smooth motion, he swung himself out of the minivan, left leg over right, and dropped to his knees, the gun in his right hand. He knew he had almost no time to decide. If he was wrong, he was about to kill a couple guys who were trying to beat traffic.

The bike was a red Ducati carrying two men. Just like the one that had passed them before. It was maybe fifty feet away, rolling slowly beside the Suburban chase car, nearly stopped, and then—

Then the passenger on the bike reached down and flicked something under the body of the big SUV.

“Grenade!” Wells yelled.

The Ducati revved toward him. He fired. The bike came fast, but the bullet was faster. The shot caught the rider in his right shoulder and the bike twisted right but stayed up, its front wheel barely ten feet from Wells. Wells shifted his aim and fired again. The mirrored face-plate of the helmet shattered. The rider’s head jerked back and his body slumped in death and his hands came off the bars. The bike started to go down—

And there were two explosions under the Suburban in quick succession—

Boom! Boom!

The Suburban lifted off the ground—

BOOM!

A larger explosion followed as the SUV’s gas tank blew—

Thick black smoke filled the air—

Wells kept shooting, aiming now at the second man on the Ducati, who was reaching under his jacket. But the bike was skidding down, giving Wells a clean look. Wells took his time and caught the guy with a shot to the side of the head. His helmet twitched. He fell off the back of the bike and hit the asphalt with a heavy dead thump.

Wells was already shifting his focus. Two grenades. Two motorcycles. He braced himself against the side of the minivan and spun. On the far side of the Caravan, by its left rear wheel, another rider stood, his bike between his legs, a pistol in his gloved right hand.

The pistol jerked twice in succession, crack-crack—

“John!” Exley screamed, a high hopeless sound—

Wells fired through the minivan, his only choice, knowing that if he missed, he risked killing an innocent driver in the cars behind the shooter—

And missed.

The rider turned toward Wells and fired. The round smashed through the van’s window—

And missed.

Wells sprang left, looking for a cleaner shot, a shot that wouldn’t be blocked by the van’s second row of seats. The rider reached under his jacket with his left hand. Wells fired, separated from the guy only by the width of the van—

The 9-millimeter slug from Wells’s Glock caught the guy full in the chest, tore open his leather jacket. Its force jerked him back, standing him upright. But he didn’t go down. Bulletproof vest, Wells thought. He ducked as the guy lifted his pistol and fired two shots, wild and high, then threw down the pistol and again reached into his jacket.

Wells slowed himself. Last chance. If he missed this time, the guy would toss a grenade under the van and cook Exley.

He aimed carefully through the van and squeezed the trigger.

Crack. Through the van, Wells saw the rider’s face-plate shatter. The guy fell backward, his helmet cracking against the roof of the BMW behind him, dead already.

WELLS RAN AROUND THE VAN to the driver’s side. Exley lay in the front seat, moaning, slumped forward.

“John.”

“Just stay still.”

Already he could hear sirens. Behind them, the Suburban crackled and burned, throwing off gobs of smoke that stank of gasoline and charred flesh. The agents inside were surely dead. Five dead here this morning. As long as it wasn’t six.

He didn’t see the wound. He pulled up her sweater. There it was, blooming red on her white shirt, the right side, just above the waist. Maybe the liver, Wells thought. If it was the liver, they’d better get her to a hospital quick before she bled out. He pressed down on it and she moaned again. Her warm blood seeped between his fingers. A bad one.

He put his hand to her cheek and listened to the sirens draw close. And he wondered who’d done this to them. He wondered who would pay.

6

In the dark, Grigory Farzadov couldn’t see the waves. But he could hear them, banging against the hull like living beasts. Thump. Thump. Thump-thoomp. In the last hour, their intensity had steadily increased. And yet Grigory didn’t mind. He’d grown up thousands of kilometers from the ocean. He’d never seen the Pacific or the Atlantic. He didn’t even know how to swim. But all his life he’d envied those lucky souls who lived on the water. Now he was one of them. Sort of.

His cousin wasn’t so sanguine. As the Tambulz Dream—the little fishing trawler that had been their home for a day — rocked sideways, Tajid laid a hand on his stomach and gripped the dirty steel rail that ran around the cabin. He’d already vomited once. Meanwhile Yusuf sat in a corner, cursing under his breath, his eyes dead and flat as ever. Grigory was sure that if he looked hard enough he would see smoke coming off Yusuf ’s head, and smell the faint stink of sulfur.

Though maybe the smell was just the Black Sea, a famously dank waterway. The sea lay between six countries — Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine — and had possessed a bad reputation for at least three thousand years. Technically, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean formed a single body of water, linked through the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that divided Istanbul. But the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean had little in common with the Black Sea. The complex currents that connected the two left the Black Sea’s depths a toxic stew, thick with salt and hydrogen sulfide, poisonous to fish.

The sea’s surface was hardly more pleasant, regularly racked by storms powerful enough to split oil tankers in half. Even so, anchovy and sturgeon lived in the sea’s upper layer, and fishing trawlers set out each day to catch what they could. This ship was one of them, a simple vessel, about a hundred feet long, its hull a faded blue, its one-story cabin white. Grigory knew nothing about boats, but even he could see that this one had seen better days. One of its cabin windows was missing, replaced with wooden planks. The engines growled madly when the captain pushed the throttle forward. Besides Grigory, Yusuf, and Tajid, the trawler carried a crew of three, the captain and two younger men who seemed to be his sons.

More than that, Grigory didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure where they were headed, though he assumed somewhere on the Turkish coast. Yusuf wasn’t saying, and Grigory had learned the hard way not to ask.

STILL, their escape had gone smoothly so far, Grigory had to admit. When he arrived at his apartment building at 5 a.m. on the night of the theft, the sun still hours from rising, there was Yusuf, sitting in an old Nissan sedan. As soon as Grigory parked, Yusuf was at his window.

“You have them.”

“A pleasure to see you, too.”

“You have them.”

“It was more trouble than I expected.” Grigory was enjoying himself now.

“If you don’t have them, you’d better tell me now.”

“Of course.”

“Of course, you have them? Or of course you don’t? Grigory, I swear—”

“They’re in the trunk.”

To Grigory’s surprise, Yusuf clapped his hands. “Congratulations, Grigory.” Yusuf pulled the Volga’s door open and tugged Grigory out. Grigory wondered whether the little Arab planned to cut his throat. Instead, Yusuf hugged him, wrapping his arms around Grigory’s bulk like a circus clown trying to saddle an elephant.

“Ready to go?”

“My bag is upstairs.”

“Then get it.”

Grigory hadn’t found much in his apartment worth taking. In a cheap nylon bag, he’d packed a half-dozen books, two pornographic DVDs starring the American Jenna Jamison, a few shirts and sweaters and long underwear, and both of his chess sets, his good wooden one and a little magnetic travel set. He’d taken his passport, though he couldn’t see what use it would be. Soon enough he’d have a new name and nationality. Or be dead.

Grigory rode the creaking elevator downstairs for the final time and tossed the bag into the backseat of the Volga. Yusuf grabbed his arm. “Show me, Grigory.”

Grigory popped the trunk of the Volga and moved aside the junk to reveal the toolboxes. Yusuf flipped open the boxes and stood in silence over the trunk. “They don’t look like much,” he said at last.

“What did you expect? A ticking clock? Something glowing?”

“They’re real?”

Grigory laughed, a crazy giggle that set his flabby stomach bouncing. All he’d gone through, and now this.

“They don’t impress you, Yusuf? They’re real. More real than anything else in this stupid world, I’d say.”

“All right.” Yusuf snapped the boxes closed. “We’ll put them in my car, leave this heap.”

“Whatever you like.”

They shifted the bombs to the Nissan, and Grigory threw his bag in as well. “Shall I drive?” Grigory said. “Since we’re partners now?”

“You’ll drive if I’m dead. Maybe not even then.”

“I was joking, Yusuf. You’ve heard of jokes?”

“Quiet.”

Grigory slid into the Nissan, which stank of cheap air freshener. They drove to Tajid’s apartment and waited for him to arrive. Then the three of them drove out of Ozersk. Grigory craned his neck left and right as they left the city, feeling like a kid taking his first big trip. He didn’t expect to be back.

JUST OUTSIDE SAMARA, southwest of Chelyabinsk, they were filling up at a dingy petrol station when a Toyota sedan stopped in front of them. Yusuf trotted to it and slipped into the passenger seat. Grigory had always known that Yusuf couldn’t be acting alone, but this was the first proof he’d seen. He poked at his cousin, who was dozing in the backseat.

“Tajid, who’s that?” Grigory pointed to the Toyota. “Have you seen Yusuf with anyone before?”

“No questions, cousin. Don’t you understand that by now?”

When Yusuf returned, Grigory couldn’t help himself. “A new friend, Yusuf?”

Yusuf said nothing.

“Who was that, anyway?”

Yusuf backhanded Grigory across the face, hard, then tugged his ear until he thought it might tear off.

“Come on, Yusuf,” he said. “Please. Please.”

Yusuf looked back at Tajid. “Control this overripe turd,” he said. “Or I will.” He put the car in gear as Grigory sniffed at his armpits. He didn’t smell great, it was true. Too bad the whores had taken his cologne.

West of Samara they turned south and followed the Volga River. Near Saratov, with the sun already down again, Yusuf’s cell phone rang. He listened for a moment. “Nam,” he said, Arabic for “yes.” “Nam.” Without another word, he hung up. They drove into Saratov — a million-person city on the Volga — and Yusuf threaded his way through the streets unerringly, despite the dim streetlights and honking traffic. Suddenly, Grigory understood that Yusuf had taken this trip before.

These men, whoever they are, they’ve practiced, he thought. This theft had been planned for months. Maybe years. Such preparation seemed beyond Yusuf. He was dangerous, but no great thinker. For the hundredth time, Grigory wondered who was running this operation, and what the ultimate plans were. Blackmail? Or did they intend to use the bombs?

Yusuf turned left onto a narrow street fronted by an eight-story apartment building as ugly as Grigory’s own. He drove past it and parked in the courtyard of a two-story brick building covered in peeling yellow paint. “Come.” Yusuf stepped out of the car and opened the door of the apartment nearest the Nissan. He popped the Nissan’s trunk, and he and Grigory grabbed the toolboxes and hefted them into the apartment.

Inside, the apartment was filled with lime-green furniture. The television, a boxy wooden monstrosity, played silently, a game show, the Russian version of Deal or No Deal. The place was tidy but not really clean. The floral-patterned wallpaper peeled at the corners. A cheap chandelier hung crookedly from the ceiling, half its bulbs burned out. Grigory sensed that an old man lived here, hanging on but too tired or weak to clean the place. There were no pictures, no books or newspapers, no hints of the owner’s personality at all, aside from a prayer rug in the corner.

No one was home, but the owner, whoever he was, had left them supper, mounds of black bread, and jam and butter, and slices of grayish boiled beef. Aside from the bread and jam, it wasn’t much of a meal. Grigory didn’t care. He was famished. He hadn’t eaten since the night before. He couldn’t remember going so long without a meal. Fortunately, there was plenty of bread, and Grigory slapped jam on it until he was full, ignoring Yusuf’s dark looks. In this, at least, he would indulge himself.

AFTER DINNER, Yusuf pulled a digital video camera and tripod from his bag. He set them up in the living room, facing the chair in the corner. Grigory’s anxiety rose. He didn’t know what this nonsense was about, but it couldn’t be good.

When he was done, Yusuf tapped the chair. “Grigory,” he said. “Sit. We’re making a film.”

Grigory’s mind turned to the death videos he’d seen from Russian soldiers in Chechnya, where the hapless victims gave their names and ranks before being gutted. Yusuf clapped his hands peremptorily. “Come on. I promise it’s nothing.”

So Grigory arranged his bulk in the chair and looked at the unblinking camera eye. Yusuf handed Grigory a sheet of paper. “Memorize this and say it. And make sure your ID from the plant is visible so everyone will know it’s you.”

Grigory read the sheet. “But this isn’t true. And they’ll know it. They know they didn’t give me the codes. Why do you want me to say it if it isn’t true? I’ll be a fool.”

“When we make our demands, we’re going to include this. To increase the pressure.”

“Demands?”

“Of course we wouldn’t use the bombs. We’re selling them back. One billion euros each, two billion for both”—more than three billion dollars.

“You’re not going to blow them up?”

“How could we? We don’t have the codes. But this way they’ll be under extra pressure to make a deal.” Yusuf laid a hand on Grigory’s shoulder, and despite himself Grigory flinched. “Come on, Grigory. Don’t make me frighten you. Don’t think too much about it. Just say what’s on the sheet.”

“If you say so.” Grigory tried to ignore the tightness in his belly that told him he was a greater fool than ever. He memorized the words and spoke to the camera. He needed a few takes, but finally Yusuf pronounced himself satisfied.

“We’ll make a star of you yet, Grigory.”

BEFORE BED, Yusuf and Tajid prayed. They hadn’t kept to the usual schedule, five times daily. Grigory supposed they were allowed to break the rules on this mission so as not to attract attention. Grigory kneeled with them, listening to the words but not reciting them.

Then they sacked out on the floor of the living room. Grigory didn’t think he would sleep, but he did. He dreamed he was swimming in a pool filled with cologne and slept straight through until 5 a.m., when Yusuf kicked him awake. “Let’s go.”

“Can’t we hang around, watch TV?”

Yusuf squeezed his hands together. “A joke, right?”

“Very good.” Grigory knew he was making a mistake inciting the devil this way, but he didn’t much care. Yusuf would kill him or not, and a joke or two wouldn’t much matter either way.

“You’re lucky for my orders,” Yusuf said.

THEY HEADED SOUTH toward Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, site of some of the fiercest fighting in all of World War II. The Nazis and Soviets had battled for eleven long months for the city that bore Stalin’s name, both sides ordered never to surrender. By the time the fighting was done, almost a million men on each side were dead and the city was ash. And yet the cargo in their trunk could do just as much damage as all those men, Grigory thought. Secret armies, these bombs were.

By late afternoon the land turned hilly, and to the southeast Grigory could see the mountains of the Caucasus, big gray slabs of rock that disappeared in the haze. It was night when they reached Novorossiysk, on the coast. A day and a half had passed since Grigory drove out of Mayak with the bombs in his trunk. Grigory hoped they would leave Russia tonight. They didn’t have much time left. In another day or two, someone would be assigned to make sure that the weapons were present. Of course no one would think that a bomb was really missing, but with him and Tajid gone, they’d check anyway, just to be sure. And what a surprise they’d have.

Novorossiysk was a gray industrial city, the biggest Russian port on the Black Sea. Apartment buildings crawled up the hills that rose from the coast. The air stank of oil from the storage tanks on the harbor, round white behemoths a hundred feet high. They passed along its edge and turned southeast along the narrow coast road. The hills jutted up to their east and the sea lay to their west. The road was dark and slick and Yusuf drove carefully, both hands on the wheel.

“You know, even if we get in an accident, they won’t go off,” Grigory said.

“Are you ever quiet? You’re worse than a woman.”

Half an hour later, outside Gelendzhik, Yusuf pulled onto the grounds of a deserted hotel closed for the winter. A rutted road rose up a hill toward the hotel, a concrete building with a few ugly frills. Behind the hotel, a dozen cottages sat among leafless trees. Beside the cottage farthest from the hotel, Yusuf cut the engine and they sat in the dark. The rain had stopped, but the air was cold and damp. They waited in silence, listening to the cars on the coast road, and to their breathing.

They passed an hour that way. The car grew cold, but Yusuf didn’t seem to mind. He closed his eyes and dozed lightly. Grigory tried to do the same, but he couldn’t. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw everything that had happened since Friday, the convoy arriving, the masterful way he’d played Major Akilev, the way Boris had checked the trunk. It was as if he’d been born two days ago, and everything before that hardly existed.

“Tajid,” he said. “When Boris checked the car, were you nervous? Was your heart pounding?”

“I suppose.”

“That’s all you can say? You suppose. These bombs in our trunk, our lives facing us, and what did you think? Wasn’t your heart pounding?”

“You know what,” Yusuf said abruptly. “I never knew before. But two days with you have shown me. There’re only two kinds of people in the world.”

Grigory waited for Yusuf to explain, but he said nothing. “Shall I guess? The fat and the thin?” Silence. “Men and women?” Silence. “The strong and the weak?” Silence. “The tall and the short.” Silence. “Come, Yusuf, give us your wisdom.”

“Those who can keep their thoughts to themselves,” Yusuf said. “And those who can’t. Sometimes I could cut your throat for a few minutes of peace.”

“Only sometimes?”

Grigory never got to hear Yusuf’s reply, because at that moment a car scraped up the hotel driveway. It was the same Toyota that had stopped beside them at the petrol station the day before. The Toyota parked next to them and a man stepped out, an Arab by the look of him, darker than Yusuf. He wore a cap and a heavy jacket. The man was in charge, Grigory saw immediately. Yusuf treated him with a deference he wouldn’t have given Grigory even if Grigory had put a gun to his head.

Yusuf and the man walked behind the Nissan, and Yusuf flipped up the trunk lid. A minute or so later, the trunk lid was lowered. The man sat in back beside Tajid and pulled off his cap, revealing a nearly bald head — unusual for an Arab. He was in his thirties, medium height, with a neatly trimmed goatee, wide dark eyes, a handsome round face. He looked gentle, though Grigory was certain he wasn’t.

They drove down the hill, leaving the Toyota behind. At the coast road, Yusuf swung left, to the southeast. “I won’t ask you how you did it, but it’s a great accomplishment,” the bald man said.

“At last,” Grigory said. “Someone understands.”

THEY MADE GOOD TIME for a while, but then the road became a true coastal serpentine, rising and falling along the swooping contours of the hills. Yusuf drove slowly, and after two hours they’d traveled barely seventy kilometers — forty miles. But neither Yusuf nor the man in the back showed any impatience. Grigory figured they must have driven the route before and knew how long it would take.

Russians called this strip of the coast their Riviera, and during the summer, this road was jammed with vacationers. Now the houses and hotels scattered through the hills were mostly dark, closed for the winter.

Just past midnight, Yusuf swung off the road, to the right, down a narrow track that hugged a steep cliff down to the sea. When they reached the base of the cliff, they were in a campsite beside a narrow, heavily forested cove. The main road stretched high above them on a concrete bridge supported by a dozen pillars. With trees all around them and thick gray clouds blocking the moon, they were invisible from the road.

“I hope you’ve arranged a boat,” Grigory said. “Otherwise it’s a long way to swim.”

No one bothered to answer.

“Hard to believe the Olympics will be in Sochi in 2014, isn’t it? Though I don’t suppose any of us will be there.” Silence. Grigory sighed. “All right, then. Tell me this, Yusuf, since you’re such a philosopher, dividing the world into categories. What’s the harm in a bit of chatter?”

“Nothing.”

“At least he speaks! Go on, then.”

“As long as you’ve got something to say. Which you don’t.”

“And who made you emperor?”

“My knife.”

“Yes, because you have a weapon, you can do as you please, insult me or anyone you like. Some world this is.”

“Shh,” the bald man in the back said. “Listen.”

In the silence, Grigory heard the distant rumble of a boat engine.

The man in the back swung open his door and the others followed. Yusuf popped the trunk and they pulled up the toolboxes and their bags. By the time they were done, the boat had arrived, a black motorboat with an open deck. Grigory couldn’t imagine it would get them across the Black Sea. Nonetheless they transferred everything to the boat, and then Yusuf and the bald man hugged briefly and whispered in Arabic.

The motorboat’s captain clapped his hands together, obviously anxious to be gone. Yusuf and Grigory and Tajid stepped into the boat. “Allah yisallimak,” the bald man said to them all. God keep you safe. He waved at them as the boat turned and headed for the open sea. And then he disappeared.

THEY LOST SIGHT of the coast within an hour, and Grigory began to get nervous. But the captain steered confidently, occasionally checking the GPS tacked to the dash of the boat.

The fishing trawler was running without lights and Grigory didn’t see it until they were almost on top of it. They drew up alongside and someone inside threw down a rope. The motorboat’s captain tied the two boats together. The men in the trawler hauled up the toolboxes in a reinforced net and then sent down a rope ladder. Grigory wasn’t sure he would make it up, but somehow he did, the ladder creaking under his bulk. Tajid and Yusuf followed. The motorboat turned back toward the coast and the trawler rumbled into the sea.

THE SUN ROSE and set again and all the while they headed west. Grigory passed the time by amusing himself with his magnetized chessboard, even playing a couple of games with the ship’s captain. At midday the seas picked up, and by nightfall the waves batted the boat like a cat playing with a mouse. About then, Tajid threw up.

But Grigory, to his surprise, felt fine. Another unexpected talent. First he’d stolen the bombs. Now this. A new day for Grigory. He closed his eyes and imagined his future. He’d take the money they gave him, go on a diet, and—

He startled as someone tapped his shoulder. Yusuf. He was smiling, a thin smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth and frightened Grigory.

“Let’s play chess,” Yusuf said.

So Grigory set up the board and they played, twice. Yusuf played well, but Grigory beat him both times. Yusuf’s smile never faded.

“Let’s go,” Yusuf said when they were done, nodding at the door that led to the storage room behind the main cabin.

“What?”

“It’s time, Grigory.”

Grigory didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Please, Yusuf,” he whispered. His bowels came loose and he thought for a moment he would soil himself.

“Don’t beg,” Yusuf said. “I’m giving you the chance to do this properly, with dignity.”

“But you promised, and I’ve done everything you asked.” It’s the chess, Grigory thought madly. He’s angry about the chess. If I hadn’t beaten him—

“You knew how this would end, Grigory. It’s the same for all of us.”

Yes, of course, all of us, but why now for me? Whynowwhynowwhynow. the words clung together in Grigory’s mind, all question and no answer.

“I should have turned you in.” So many chances, so many wrong choices.

“Come on.”

Yusuf carried a pistol to go with his knife. Grigory knew he couldn’t escape. The sea surrounded them. And he couldn’t swim. So he pushed himself up and took the two steps to the storage room. Yusuf closed the door behind them. A single bulb lit the space, which was empty aside from a rusty anchor and a few nets balled up in the corner, stinking faintly of the sea’s sulfurous brine. A fitting place to die.

“Lie down,” Yusuf said.

“Is this about the chess?” Grigory couldn’t stop himself. “We can play again. As much as you like. You’ll win, I promise.”

“Lie down. On your stomach with your hands above your head.”

“I will. But tell me. Was what you said about blackmail true, or do you plan to use them?”

“You think we’ve gone to this much trouble to give them back?”

“Then what about the video? Why did you make me do that?”

“Down, Grigory.” Yusuf’s voice was at once soothing and commanding, as if Grigory were an unruly dog who needed a firm master.

“But you don’t have the codes.”

“Lie down.”

And Grigory did. A plastic tarp covered the floor. For him. His coffin.

“Do you want to pray, Grigory? It’s never too late. Allah is always listening.”

“Fuck you and your crazy Allah.”

“I want to read you something. A poem that was written for Sheikh bin Laden.”

Grigory heard Yusuf unfold a piece of paper. Then:

Grigory’s heart pounded wildly. He was dying for this? For a moment, he wanted to stand and fight. But he knew he wouldn’t even reach his knees before Yusuf finished him.

“Are you ready to bare your chest?”

Grigory turned his head and spat on the tarp. Not much of a protest and half the saliva rolled down his cheek, but at least he would die a man, not a beggar. “Fuck you, I said.”

“Your choice. Close your eyes.”

At the base of his skull, where his hair touched his neck, Grigory felt the tip of the pistol graze his skin. It pulled back, then touched him again, higher this time. Yusuf must have done this before; he was placing the pistol so Grigory’s skull wouldn’t deflect the bullet. To his surprise, the pistol was warm, not cold, and then Grigory remembered it had been lying in Yusuf’s armpit. Such a strange last thought—

THE PISTOL BARKED, and Grigory Farzadov was dead. Tajid followed. To Yusuf’s annoyance, where Grigory had accepted his fate with a certain poise, Tajid blubbered like a child. He moaned about his family and promised that if Yusuf just let him be, he would never ever say anything to anyone. It was all the same, though, all the same in the end, because Yusuf had the gun.

When he was done, Yusuf and the fishermen wound up the two bodies in the tarp and wrapped thick steel chains around them and threw the whole package into an old anchovy net. They put the luggage that Grigory and Tajid had brought with them into another net and weighted that one down as well. Then they dumped both nets overboard. Yusuf could have prayed for the cousins, but he didn’t. Grigory didn’t deserve Allah’s blessing and Tajid’s whining had irritated him. The nets sank into the water and the waves kept coming, as if Grigory and Tajid had never existed at all. And the boat and its cargo turned south and made for the Turkish coast.

7

Wells stalked the first-floor corridors of George Washington Hospital, long strides cutting through the clean white halls. He reached the double doors that marked the entrance to surgery, turned, paced back to the entrance.

The hospital was on 23rd and I, seven blocks from the shooting. The first ambulance had come in five minutes, the first cops two minutes later. Wells flashed his identification at them, shook off their questions, told them they could find him at GW if they needed him. Then he sprinted up 21st, wishing all the while that the hospital was farther away so he could keep running.

He’d made enemies of some of the most dangerous men in the world. Then he’d refused to take the most elementary precautions. He and Exley drove unarmored cars, took the same route to work most days. If he’d been on his own, his happy-fool act wouldn’t have mattered. but he wasn’t.

When he reached the hospital, Exley was already in surgery. No one would be able to tell him anything for at least an hour, the nurses said. So Wells walked the halls, expecting someone would tell him to stop moving, sit down. But the orderlies looked at his agency identification and the blood on his hands and his empty shoulder holster and didn’t say a word.

A HAND TOUCHED his shoulder. He turned to see Ellis Shafer, his boss.

“John.” Shafer gave Wells an awkward half-hug and led him to a door marked by a brass sign that said “Family Room B.” Inside, they sat on uncomfortable plastic chairs around a battered wooden table. Wells wondered at the conversations that had taken place in here, well-meaning doctors and their hard truths. I’m sorry, but we’ve tried everything.

“What happened, John?”

Wells told him.

“Was the Russian there today?” Wells had told Shafer about the strange incident with the Russian outside their house.

“They were wearing helmets.”

“You didn’t check? Afterward?”

“I had to keep pressure on her so she didn’t bleed out.”

A light knock. The door opened — Michaels, the head of Wells’s security detail. He squeezed Wells’s arm, set a laptop on the table.

“I’m sorry, John. We should have done a better job. My guys—”

“Your guys never had a chance.”

Michaels grimaced. Wells balled up his hands, dug his fingernails into his palms. “Didn’t mean that how it sounded. Just that it all went down so quick. They were pros, whoever they were.”

Michaels pulled up a photograph on the laptop. A fleshy face, black eyes shiny and dead, hair still tousled from the helmet he’d been wearing. The collar of his leather jacket was just visible at the bottom of the screen. Then a second photo, a full-body shot, the corpse curled against the curb where Wells had shot him two hours before. Blood trickled from a corner of his mouth. Wells knew him immediately. The Russian who’d come to the house the week before.

“He was on the red bike,” Michaels said. “The passenger.”

“We have a name?”

“Not yet. We’re running their prints against immigration.” Michaels pulled up more images, the other two men that Wells had shot. “You know them?”

Wells shook his head.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because maybe you want to settle this yourself, but I’ve got a stake. Two of my guys. Even if they never had a chance.”

Wells said nothing. At this point, he didn’t plan to tell Michaels that though he didn’t know his assassins, he had a pretty good idea who’d sent them.

“Any of them carrying ID?” Shafer said.

“No. But the bikes had temporary Georgia tags. And one of the guys had a Marriott keycard in his pocket. We’re checking every hotel within a hundred miles and we’ll go from there. The first guy was carrying a key to a Pathfinder. We haven’t found it yet.” Michaels drummed his big fingers on the table. “We don’t have to do it now but we’re going to need an official statement, John. For us, the D.C. police, the FBI.”

“Sure.”

“Shouldn’t take long. With all the weapons we found on them—”

“I told you it’s no problem.”

“I’ll let you know when I hear more. I’m sorry, John. I mean it. We owed you better.” Michaels disappeared into the hall.

Shafer waited until the door was closed.

“You think you know who did this, don’t you?”

Wells said nothing.

“Don’t play with me, John. I’ve known her longer than you have.”

“Yes, I think I know.”

“So tell me.” Shafer waited. “Of course. I get it. Your fault and you’re the only one who can fix it. The man of steel. Don’t you see this is how you got into this mess?”

“You just love being the smartest guy in the room, don’t you, Ellis.”

“Let me help you.”

Wells shook his head. The silence stretched on as an ugly fifties-style clock above the table clicked away the seconds. Finally, Shafer stood, reached for the door.

“All right. Play it your way.”

“Pierre Kowalski. I think.”

Shafer sat. “Why? He’s lucky we didn’t bust him for helping the Chinese.”

“I never told you what I did when I broke into his house.” Wells explained how he’d tied Kowalski up, humiliated him.

“You wrapped his head in duct tape,” Shafer said when Wells was done.

“I made sure he could breathe.”

“That was thoughtful.”

“So you see.”

“Yeah, I see why he might be pissed.” Wells saw the unasked question on Shafer’s face: Why? What were you thinking? Even now Wells couldn’t fully unlock his motivations. He knew only that he hated Kowalski. To sell weapons, to profit from death, couldn’t be denied or explained away.

“Even so, maybe it wasn’t him,” Shafer said. “Maybe it was al-Qaeda.”

“Qaeda would have put a truck bomb in front of the house. Kowalski was furious that night I taped him up. Told me he’d get me no matter what. And we know he’s got contacts in Russia. These guys this morning, they were pros. You get it now, Ellis? You see why I think I may have to do this myself?”

“I get it.”

Neither of them needed to say the obvious: These days, Russia was going out of its way to prove that it didn’t need the West. In 2006, when a former KGB operative was poisoned at a London restaurant, the Kremlin had basically refused to help Scotland Yard investigate. If the connection between Kowalski and today’s assassination ran through Moscow, the CIA would have a tough job convincing the Russians to cooperate.

“It’s not so bad, John,” Shafer said. “Two of our own died today. Practically in front of the White House. We can’t ignore that kind of provocation. If we can lock it down, find the link, the big man will put a lot of pressure on the Kremlin.”

“If we can lock it down.”

“Promise me one thing. Whatever you do, tell me. Ahead of time. At least give me a chance to give you some advice. Since I am the smartest guy in the room.”

“All right.”

“Now let’s find out how your girl’s doing.”

“Our girl,” Wells said.

“Our girl.”

But the nurses had no news. Exley was still in surgery.

“What does that mean?” Shafer said.

“It means she’s still in surgery. Are you a relative, sir?”

Wells leaned into the nurse. “Ms. Exley is my fiancée. So, please, if you have any information—”

“I don’t. You probably won’t hear much for a while more.”

“Thank you.”

“Fiancée?” Shafer whispered as the nurse walked away. “Was it a special invisible ring? Because I didn’t see it.”

“She didn’t care about the ring.”

“You really don’t understand women at all.”

And you don’t understand Exley, Wells didn’t say. She would have been happy with a Cracker Jack ring. Though maybe Shafer was right. He’d managed to stay married for thirty years; Wells had barely lasted two.

“Were you going to make it official?” Shafer said. “Or did she not care about that part either?”

“New Year’s, we were saying. Something simple, our way. Just before the South America trip. The trip was the honeymoon.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“We didn’t tell anyone. Just her kids. Not even our exes yet.” Wells turned away from Shafer, leaned his head against a wall, closed his eyes. The white plaster was cool and reassuring.

“Ellis, what am I gonna say to her kids?”

“That you love her. And that she’s going to be fine.”

WHEN WELLS OPENED HIS EYES, Vinny Duto, the CIA director, was beside him. Around Duto stood five sides of beef, the director’s security detail.

Duto extended a hand, and Wells saw no alternative but to take it. Since the Times Square mission, when Duto had questioned Wells’s loyalty, Wells could barely stand being in the same room as the man. The feeling was mutual, he supposed. Duto viewed him as arrogant, untouchable, a loose cannon. Maybe Duto was right.

“I’m sorry, John. Truly. How is she?”

“Still in surgery.”

Duto gently rested a hand on Wells’s shoulder. “Mind coming out to the car so we can talk in private?”

The car was a heavily armored Suburban with run-flat tires, a specially raised undercarriage, and inch-thick glass that could stop an automatic rifle round. Wells followed Duto into the backseats.

“John,” Duto said. “I want you to know that we will do everything we can here. Everything possible to catch whoever did this.”

Wells stared out the Suburban’s smoked windows, watching as a heavyset woman picked her way down the sidewalk toward the hospital. A thin cold rain was falling, and the media hordes had already arrived, the camera trucks and long-lens photographers. The D.C. police had set up a block-long perimeter around the hospital to hold them at bay. Good. Wells had no appetite for their nonsense.

“You have a pretty nice ride here, Vinny. I was just telling Jennifer this morning we needed to trade up.”

Again Duto put a hand on Wells’s shoulder. This time Wells shook him off. “Whatever it takes, we’ll get these guys.”

“Or have a good excuse if you don’t.”

Duto’s mask slipped for a moment and Wells saw the anger underneath it, the tightness around his eyes and the angry curl of his mouth. The agency’s job was to predict chaos, and prevent it wherever possible. The lawyers, the top-secret classifications, the chains of command, all of them were efforts to bring order to a world that insisted on anarchy. More than anything, Duto hated to be surprised, hated unexpected questions from his bosses. This morning, he’d gotten lots of those, Wells was sure.

“What I’m saying is, if the Russians are involved we’ve got to play this carefully. But it will be our highest priority.”

“I get that part,” Wells said. He bit his lip to stifle his next sentence: And when Medvedev tells you to stuff it, that he’ll never let an American investigative team on Russian soil, what will you do then? Threaten to nuke Moscow if he doesn’t change his mind?

“Any ideas who did this?” Duto said.

“There’re a lot of people who don’t like me.”

“So let us investigate, get the evidence.”

The evidence is dead, Wells didn’t say. It’s lying on Constitution Avenue. I killed them a little too good. Should have let one live so we could talk to him.

Wells looked out at the camera trucks. “The media’s gonna go crazy on this. You going to tell them that this was aimed at Jennifer and me?”

“No,” Duto said. “And we’re going to ask anyone who figures it out to keep you out of it. Your name will just add to the fire here.”

“You want to tamp it down as quick as possible so you can investigate better,” Wells said.

“This isn’t just from me. The president told me directly, fifteen minutes ago, that he values our relationship with Russia. And that he wants us to be on firm footing, whatever we do. Assuming you’re correct about the nationality of the men.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Let us figure out who was paying these guys,” Duto said. “Build a case. Do it the right way. And then we’ll nail whoever did this.”

“I hear you,” Wells said. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll share everything you get with me.”

“Of course, John.” Duto extended his hand and they shook. Wells wondered if Duto knew that Wells had no intention of sitting back and letting the agency and FBI screw this up. Probably. He might not even care. He’d sent the message, officially. The Suburban was probably bugged. Just in case anyone ever wanted proof of this conversation. Now Duto was safe, whatever Wells did.

BACK INSIDE THE HOSPITAL the hours passed miserably. David and Jessica, Exley’s kids, showed up, along with Randy, Exley’s ex-husband, had brought them. The kids hugged Wells, but Randy didn’t even shake his hand. He was everything Wells wasn’t. Wearing business casual, a little paunchy, with close-cropped hair and a black laptop bag. He’d loved Exley, Wells knew. Maybe he still did. He stared across the waiting room at Wells, his eyes shouting an accusation: You did this. Your fault.

Finally, around 2 p.m., a man in clean blue scrubs emerged from the double doors that marked the entrance to the emergency rooms. His surgical mask dangled from his neck and his eyes were tired, but he moved confidently.

He looked around the waiting area and signaled to Wells. Randy also rose and the three of them stood in an unfriendly huddle.

“I’m Dr. Patel. Are you both relatives?”

“I’m John Wells. Her fiancé.”

“When did that happen?” Randy said.

“We were planning to tell you.”

“And you are?” Patel said to Randy.

“Her ex-husband.” He pointed to David and Jessica. “Those are our kids.”

“In that case, Ms. Exley’s injuries were quite severe. She’s fortunate she arrived at the hospital so quickly. The bullets were fired from behind, at an angle. They entered through her back.” Patel touched his back to indicate where the wounds had been. “One damaged her lower spine, the L-two and L-three vertebrae. The other pierced her liver. That was our immediate focus, since liver injuries bleed heavily. Indeed, Ms. Exley lost several pints of blood, but we’ve now stanched the bleeding and I believe she’s out of immediate danger. We’ve left the damaged vertebrae alone. She’ll need a second operation to repair her spine tomorrow. But I would say her long-term prognosis is favorable. As you may know, the liver is adept at renewing itself.”

“Thank you,” Wells said.

“Thank God,” Randy said.

Patel raised his hand. “Understand. Even if the second operation goes smoothly, she has rehabilitation ahead to regain full use of her legs.”

“She’s paralyzed,” Randy said.

“We believe it’s temporary. There’s severe inflammation around the spinal cord, but the nerve bundles appear intact. The swelling ought to fade over time and she’ll regain motor control. But there are no guarantees with this type of injury.”

“Can we see her?”

“For a minute.” Patel nodded at Exley’s kids. “I wouldn’t recommend letting them see her yet. She’s quite tired.”

“Quite,” Randy said. He turned to Wells. “Happy, John? Get everything you came for?” His breath was middle-manager minty and he had a forced grin on his face, the smile of a vampire about to plunge his teeth into a victim’s neck. Wells took a half-step back, wondering whether Randy would really be foolish enough to swing at him in here.

“Gentlemen,” Patel said. “Are you all right?”

“Fine and dandy,” Randy said.

“All right. Mr. Wells, please come with me.” To Randy: “You can wait here, sir, with your children.”

Wells followed Patel down a wide corridor and into a room marked “ER Recovery 1.” As soon as he stepped in, Wells understood why the doctor hadn’t wanted David and Jessica to see Exley. Her eyes were closed and sunken, her face drawn, exhausted, nearly white under the room’s harsh lights. Monitors beeped around her, measuring her pulse, respiration, and other vitals. Bags of solution fed a tube into her arm. Two more tubes, one slowly pulsing with clear liquid, the other bright red with blood, poked from the gauze that covered her stomach. His dear girl. And this was his fault, his and his alone.

Wells wrapped her hand in his. Her pulse fluttered fast and weak in his palm. Her eyes opened, slid shut, opened again and found him.

“John.” Her voice was dull and dry.

“Jenny.”

“Where?”

“You know if I’m here, it can’t be heaven.” Her eyes flickered and he saw that she hadn’t gotten the joke. “It’s GW Hospital.”

“The motorcycles.”

He squeezed her hand.

“Yes. I’ll tell you later. The whole story. Are you okay? In pain?” She grunted, a soft sigh that seemed to indicate that her consciousness had been dulled beyond quotidian concerns like pain.

“You’ll be fine,” Wells said. “Better than new. I promise.”

She closed her eyes. Patel touched his arm. “She needs to rest.”

“Jenny. David and Jessica are outside.” He kissed her cheek. “We’ll all be waiting. I love you.” She didn’t answer.

SHE STARTED TO BLEED AGAIN an hour later. The nurses called Wells over and whispered the bad news. She was back in surgery. He endured another two hours of miserable waiting before Patel emerged again, not as dapper or as confident this time. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke so quietly that Wells had to lean in to hear him.

“It’s not surprising, given the severity of the initial injury. We have it controlled now, but we had to give her more blood.”

“Can I see her?” Wells was alone now. The nurses had moved Randy, David, and Jessica to a separate waiting area.

“Certainly not tonight. Tonight she rests. Possibly tomorrow.”

WELLS LEFT A FEW MINUTES LATER, sitting in the back of an ambulance, the only sure way to get through the media cordon. He emerged at his house to find three Suburbans parked in front. Two men sat inside each of the SUVs, peering out. Two more men were on the porch, all wearing Kevlar flak jackets. Agency guards. Michaels had told Wells to expect them. Wells supposed he understood the logic. But he hated the idea of having the house he shared with Exley turned into a fortified garrison.

The guard nearest the front door raised a hand as Wells inserted his key into the lock. “Mr. Wells. Leon Allam,” he said. He raised his identification.

“Good to meet you,” Wells said.

“Mind if we come in with you? Just to be sure everything’s cool.” Allam had a soldier’s tight haircut, and his Kevlar looked ridiculous over his suit and tie. Wells tried not to dislike the guy. He was just doing his job.

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Wells turned the key in the lock. “I’ll holler if I need you.”

“Yes, sir. But I’d be a lot more comfortable if I could come in.”

Wells felt his temper rise. “You asking or ordering?”

“I’m asking.”

“In that case, you can come in. As long as you and your men agree to trade in those flak jackets for bulletproof vests that’ll fit under your suits. No need to scare the neighbors.”

Allam paused. “All right, sir. If Mr. Michaels agrees.”

“And stop saying ‘sir.’ I can’t stand it. I’m John.”

Wells turned the lock in the door and Allam grabbed his arm.

“I’d like to go in first, secure the entry.”

“Secure the entry. By all means.” Wells restrained himself from pointing out that anyone inside the house would be well aware by now that they were coming in. He stepped out of the way and Allam pushed open the door and jumped inside.

“Secure!” he yelled a few seconds later.

“Where do they get you guys?” Wells murmured to himself.

A few minutes later, with Allam downstairs, Wells stepped into the shower and hit himself with a blast of frigid water. He wanted to hurt himself, run in the dark until his knees burned and his feet blistered, but the shower would have to do for now. He needed to catch up on the investigation. He dressed, packed a kit bag. He would sleep at Langley until Exley came home. He couldn’t bear to spend his nights in this empty house, with her gone and the guards outside.

He refused Allam’s offer of a ride in an armored Suburban and instead took his little Impreza out from the garage. But Allam insisted that the Suburbans ride shotgun front and back, their emergency lights flashing as the convoy rolled out.

And as they flew toward Langley with the Suburbans running their sirens at eighty miles an hour, Wells realized that even if Exley recovered completely, and for the sake of his sanity he had to believe she would, their lives wouldn’t be normal for a very long time. This attack had destroyed whatever privacy they had left. They’d live in a bubble for the foreseeable future.

Another reason to make Kowalski pay.

AT LANGLEY, Shafer briefed Wells that the CIA and FBI had set up a joint task force, eighty agents, with the promise of more to come if they were needed. Following the card key, the investigators had tracked the Russians to the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington. The Marriott staff reported that the men had checked in six days before, to rooms 402, 403, and 404. They’d used a single credit card, a MasterCard from Bank Zachodni in Warsaw. They’d kept to themselves, saying they were visiting Washington on business and expected to stay about a week, possibly longer. They’d parked only the Pathfinder, not the motorcycles, which they’d apparently stashed elsewhere. They’d asked for quiet rooms. When they’d checked in, the clerk had gotten a plate number for the Pathfinder from them, which caused a brief whirr of excitement at the agency, but when the agency ran the number, it was fake. In all, no one at the Marriott found anything odd about them. They weren’t American, but so what? People from every nation in the world had business in Washington.

While the hotel staff was questioned, rooms 402, 403, and 404 were searched to their foundations, every piece of furniture removed and disassembled. So far, the investigators hadn’t found much. In 402, a Russian copy of The Da Vinci Code, lightly read. In 403, a pack of Marlboro Reds, crumpled and empty, and an empty pack of matches from Reverse, a Moscow nightclub. The agency’s Russia desk, which was assisting the investigation, reported that Reverse was known to be popular with Russian intelligence officers. In 404, a bottle of vodka, half-empty, and three clean glasses.

But no passports, real or fake. No cash. No computers. No cell phones. No Pathfinder in the Marriott’s parking lot. The assassins had apparently planned to ditch their motorcycles, pull off their masks, take a cab or the Metro to the Pathfinder, and disappear. With their faces hidden and the motorcycles bought under fake names, their tracks would be lost.

Wells had rendered that plan inoperative. The task force now had faces and fingerprints from the corpses. Investigators were checking the prints against the FBI national criminal database, as well as the prints that foreign visitors to the United States were required to provide when they entered the country. The criminal database hadn’t matched any hits. The immigration records had, for two of the men. They’d entered the United States three weeks earlier, on a nonstop Delta flight from Warsaw to Atlanta. They had valid Polish passports with valid U.S. tourist visas, issued a few weeks before in Warsaw. They were brothers, and their names were Jerzy and Jozef Godinski, according to the record.

Already, Langley had asked the Polish government, which unlike the Kremlin was a good friend of the United States, to help it track down the men — if they existed at all. Everyone at Langley figured that both the names and the passports would be fake. As for the third man, the passenger on the Ducati, his fingerprints didn’t match any on file. Which meant he’d come in on a foreign diplomatic passport. Or illegally over the Mexican border. Or by car from Canada, where fingerprint checks were not yet routine. Put another way, the investigators had no idea how he’d gotten in. Not yet, anyway.

“So that’s what we know,” Shafer said when he was done.

“Have we called the Russians yet?”

“No proof they were Russian yet. The credit card’s the best lead so far. Until we find the Pathfinder.”

“You think they stowed everything in it?”

“They had to keep their passports and cells somewhere. Unless they had a safe house. And if they had a safe house, why stay at a hotel?”

THE MAINTENANCE STAFF found a cot and brought it to Wells’s office on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. But when Wells closed his eyes, he couldn’t sleep. He swore he could smell her, her lemony perfume. Near midnight, Shafer walked in. “Come on. Get dressed.”

“Did they find something?”

“I’m taking you home. To Casa Shafer. We’ll have a beer, watch TV, pretend today never happened.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. Get dressed. I promise, you’ll have lots of time for whatever bloody revenge fantasy you’re cooking up.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

8

Finding the Pathfinder didn’t take long. Fifteen hours after the attack, just about the time that Wells and Shafer got home, a D.C. cop spotted the Pathfinder parked in Northeast, two blocks from the Rhode Island Avenue Red Line metro stop.

Inside the Pathfinder’s glove box were two Polish passports, $12,000 in cash, and a disposable cell phone. The passports had been issued two months before. They were the same ones the would-be assassins had used to enter the United States through Atlanta. A few hours later, four thousand miles away, the famously bad-tempered agents of the WSI, the Polish military intelligence service, arrested the clerk who’d issued the passports. He confessed immediately — a wise choice — but insisted he’d had no idea what the men who’d bought the passports had planned to do with them. They were Russian, he said, and paid cash.

Meanwhile, the phone was handed over to the wizards at the National Security Agency. The phone shouldn’t have yielded any information. It was a disposable. Its call registers had been deleted. And it hadn’t even been used to place any calls. But through some magic Wells didn’t claim to understand, the NSA’s engineers found records for two incoming calls in the phone’s memory. Both had been received the night before the assassination attempt. They were sixteen-digit numbers, international, country code 7, city code 495. Moscow, Russia. When the agency first tried to trace them, neither existed. Like the northern Virginia extensions that led to CIA headquarters, they couldn’t be found in conventional telco databases.

The next day, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador to Russia, asked for a meeting with the Russian interior minister, Aleksandr Milov. Without mentioning the cell phones, Purdy said that evidence connected Russia with the terrorist attack in Washington.

What evidence? Milov asked. Had the assassins been definitely identified? Not yet, Purdy conceded. But the assassins were traveling on false Polish passports, and the passport clerk who issued them said the men were Russian. Would Russia allow the United States to send its own agents to Moscow to investigate further leads?

First, Milov said, allow him to express the Kremlin’s outrage at the attack. In broad daylight. And so close to the White House. Terrible. Of course the Russian government would offer whatever help it could, Milov said. Of course, of course, of course.

But. unfortunately. the Kremlin could not allow American investigators on Russian soil. To do so would violate Russian sovereignty and be an affront to the FSB, which was certainly as skilled as the FBI. At least as skilled. In any event, Milov was certain that no Russians would ever commit an attack. The Poles were notorious liars and probably trying to deflect attention from their own guilt.

Nonetheless, the FSB wanted to prove its goodwill. If the United States would share the evidence it had gathered so far, the FSB would gladly send its own agents to Washington to aid the investigation. They could be on their way on the next Aeroflot flight. A joint Russian-American effort to combat terrorism. No? Well, then, the Kremlin would wait for instructions from the United States.

“And yadda yadda yadda,” Shafer said, when he’d finished telling Wells what had happened. They were in a conference room at GW Hospital. Exley had just undergone surgery to clean up her spine. The early report from the doctors was positive. The center of her spinal cord was undamaged. Her rehab would be difficult but she should be able to walk again.

“They gave us nothing?”

“Pretty much. But I do have some good news from Fort Meade—” the NSA. “They think they can trace the Moscow end of the call to a specific address.”

“Even though the numbers don’t exist?”

“Correct. And even if they’re never used again. Don’t ask me how.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“But there’s a catch. Even if they can track it, they say we can’t ever disclose what they’ve found, either publicly or privately, to the Russians. NSA doesn’t want the Kremlin to know how far we can get inside their phone networks.”

“And how far is that?”

“All the way, give or take.”

“But even if we can’t go public with it, we’ll know.”

“Apparently. Though if the numbers track to some ninety-year-old babushka, we may have to reconsider.”

“We’ll have a name.”

“Maybe a company, maybe a person. What then? Planning a trip to Moscow?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You have. It’s obvious. How about a better idea? Help her get better and let everyone else work this for a while.”

“Ellis Shafer, giving the team-player speech. Did Duto put a chip in your brain?”

“Don’t be stupid. The whole agency wants what you want.”

“And what’s that?”

Shafer paused.

“I was going to say justice. But you don’t want justice. You want a scalp.”

Wells didn’t disagree.

“You always told me violence was a last resort for you. That you’d never killed unless you had no choice.”

Wells closed his eyes and looked at the faces of the men he’d killed. In Afghanistan, in Atlanta, in New York, in China. “It’s been a last resort an awful lot,” he said. “Rarely as deserved as this.”

“Prosecutors have a name for this, what you’re planning: ‘with malice aforethought.’ Premeditated murder. First degree. Exley told me you were thinking about quitting after what happened in China. Maybe you should have.”

Wells said nothing.

“What? You think she shouldn’t have said? She has to pretend you’re a robot, too?”

“I’m fine, Ellis.”

“She had to tell someone.”

“And who did you have to tell?” Wells hated being talked about this way.

“No one. It ends with me. But ask yourself this: Will going to Moscow put the dreams away, give you an honest night’s sleep? Let the rest of us handle it.”

“Wise advice from the desk jockey of all desk jockeys. You know better than anyone that if I don’t push, it won’t happen.”

“We lost two of our own. You’re wrong.”

“We won’t piss off the Kremlin.”

“Give it some time. Us. Me.”

Now Wells stood, pushed past Shafer, moving the smaller man out of his way with an easy hand on Shafer’s shoulder. He opened the door.

“Let me know when we get that name, Ellis.”

A DAY LATER the NSA reported that both numbers led to the same six-story office building in central Moscow. The building had four tenants, all connected to the Russian military, the FSB, or both. One was a security company that provided protection for American multinationals doing business in Moscow. Another seemed to be a front company for the Russian army, like the ones the Defense Department used to hire software programmers who didn’t want to work full-time for the government. The third was little more than a shell corporation, probably used to move money out of Russia. None of them were likely to have been involved in the attack.

But the fourth caught Wells’s attention. Helosrus Ltd. The agency’s file on Helosrus was slim but damning.

“Helosrus is owned by Ivan Markov, former assistant chief of operations for the FSB. Markov maintains a close relationship with current FSB officers, some of whom are said to be silent partners in Helosrus. The company’s legitimate business consists of providing guards for executives at companies with close ties to the Russian government, such as the natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Its agents have a reputation for being aggressive and eager to use force.

“Helosrus is willing to accept jobs that other security companies will not, including extra-legal operations. A confidential source within the Russian government reports that the FSB has used Helosrus operatives to harass Russian opposition parties. The extent of this harassment is unknown.

“Helosrus also conducts operations outside of Russia. The nature of these operations is unknown. In July, a confidential source for another foreign intelligence service reported that Helosrus operatives were responsible for the plane crash that killed Sasha Kordevsky.” Kordevsky had made, or stolen, billions of dollars in the Russian oil business before losing the Kremlin’s favor and being forced into exile in London. His Gulfstream had crashed into a mountain following the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of business, financial, and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland. “The source offered no evidence to back his claim. Of note, Swiss aviation authorities ruled the crash an accident after a thorough investigation.”

The pieces fit, Wells thought. Kowalski got his weapons from Russia. Of course he would know Markov. They’d probably done business together. And Wells knew firsthand from his previous run-in with Kowalski that Kowalski looked to Moscow when he needed help on dangerous jobs.

But this time Kowalski had overreached — and left fingerprints. As he read over the Helosrus file, Wells wondered why Kowalski had made such a foolish mistake. Presumably, he’d figured that his hired assassins would escape cleanly and that the CIA and everyone else would assume that Muslim terrorists were behind the attack, given Wells’s history with al-Qaeda.

FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS, Wells readied himself for Moscow. As a rule, he hated trying to disguise his identity, but this time he had no choice. He couldn’t exactly show up at the Helosrus offices and ask to see Markov.

So he dyed his hair black and didn’t shave. He bought an unlimited pass to Solar Planet in Washington, and every day he stood inside a tanning booth for three ten-minute sessions. Wells was a quarter-Lebanese by birth, and two weeks under the UV rays turned his skin nearly as dark as it had been during his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With his dark hair, scruffy beard, and olive skin, he suddenly looked more Arab than American.

Along with the tanning, Wells started eating as he never had before, junk and more junk — French fries, chocolate bars, double cheese-burgers, doughnuts, ice cream, milkshakes. The first couple of days were fun, and then his body rebelled and he had to force the food down his throat. After one particularly greasy piece of fried chicken he found himself doubled over a toilet.

But he gained more than a pound a day, sixteen pounds total, and wound up with the beginnings of a double chin and a spare tire. Between his new face and the flab on his chin and his gut, he became a new person. Of course, Exley and Shafer and anyone who really knew him wouldn’t be deceived. But Ivan Markov had never seen him, except in photographs. And he didn’t have to fool Markov or his men for long. Just long enough to get a meeting with them, somewhere nice and private.

On his ninth day of eating and tanning, Wells stopped by the basement offices of the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. He left with several unusual pieces of gear — not available in stores, as the engineers liked to joke — as well as five new passports in five different names. Two were American, one French, one Lebanese, and one Syrian.

He drove into D.C. and gave one of the American passports to a courier service that charged him $400 and promised a Russian tourist visa in two days or less. His new Lebanese passport came with a fake Russian visa and entry documents of its own. Those couldn’t get him through Russian immigration, but for what Wells was planning they would be handy anyway.

AFTER THREE DAYS at George Washington, Exley was moved to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where she could be more easily guarded. Her back and her left leg hurt terribly from the damage to the nerves in her spine, and she could stay on her feet for only a few minutes at a time. Wells visited her every day, spending hours with her in the afternoons, after her rehab sessions, which she refused to let him watch. He turned her on her side and rubbed her back for as long as she would let him.

Despite her pain, she quickly weaned herself from the morphine drip and Vicodin that the doctors offered her. She didn’t need to tell Wells why. Her father had been an alcoholic, and she feared becoming addicted to anything. But she couldn’t conceal the price she paid for refusing the medicine. Her eyes were wet with tears when she came back from rehab sessions.

As her second week in the hospital began, he brought in Bonfire of the Vanities, one of her favorite books, and read aloud for her.

“As if reading his mind, Maria said, ‘You’re behind the times, Sherman. Real estate brokers are very chic now.’”

Exley smiled wanly. “Maria’s supposed to sound southern, John. Not retarded.”

“I was going for southern.”

“I hope your Arabic’s more convincing.”

“So do I.”

She raised a hand to his face and ran it over his scruffy beard. “You’ve been going native for a week now and I’ve been pretending not to notice. Want to tell me?”

Wells put the book aside and looked into her tired eyes. “Want to know?”

“I want you to shave off that beard and stay here and work on your southern accent.”

Wells didn’t say anything.

“You think you’re doing this for me, but you’re not. You’re like an addict. It tears you up, but you can’t stop.” She looked at him, and he found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Argue, John. Yell. I don’t care. Just let me know somebody’s in there listening.”

She was right and she wasn’t. Wells had never felt quite this way before. Even if he was wrong, and he probably was wrong, he couldn’t stop himself. He wanted these men to pay for what they’d done to Exley. Even if she didn’t. And he’d told Shafer the truth. These men deserved to die more than most of the men he’d killed. They’d set out to murder him, and they’d failed. When he came for them, they would know exactly why he’d targeted them. And that would be a great relief.

“I can’t let this pass, Jenny. I know I should, but I can’t.” Wells reached for the book. “Come on, let’s read some more.”

“All right, John. We won’t talk about it anymore.” Exley closed her eyes. “But promise me. You won’t tell me when you’re leaving. No heads-up.”

He squeezed her hand.

“No heads-up,” she said. “I mean it.”

THE VISA CAME THROUGH the next morning, and he booked himself a first-class ticket on that afternoon’s Aeroflot flight 318, Dulles to Moscow nonstop. It was round-trip, with the return two weeks away, though Wells hoped he wouldn’t need that long. He drove home, packed, made his way to Langley to see Shafer. He’d talked with Shafer only in passing in the days since their argument, mainly so Shafer could update him on the progress of the official investigation into the attacks. The FBI was working to trace the path the assassins had taken between Atlanta and Washington and determine whether they’d had support from conspirators inside the United States. Meanwhile, the WSI and the agency were trying to find out how the assassins had entered Poland and where they had lived in Warsaw while they waited for their fake Polish passports. The task force was aiming to find conclusive evidence that the assassins were Russians, so that the White House could demand the Kremlin’s cooperation without having to reveal how the NSA had unearthed the Helosrus phone numbers. Unfortunately, progress had been slow so far. The FBI hadn’t found any evidence of conspirators in the United States, and the Poles hadn’t been able to track the men’s movements in Warsaw. Going directly to the Russian government with the information from the cell phone would have been far simpler. But Russia could make life difficult for the United States in innumerable ways, from covertly supporting Iran’s nuclear program to reducing its oil output and driving crude prices even higher. And so the White House had let Duto know that it wasn’t anxious to confront the Kremlin unless the FBI and CIA came up with hard proof of Russian involvement in the attack. Wells felt a familiar bureaucratic stasis settling in. In situations as complex as this one, any action carried risks. Doing nothing was the safest course.

“I’M ON MY WAY TO DULLES, ” Wells said to Shafer.

“You’re losing her, John,” Shafer said. “She’s disappearing before your eyes.”

“Can we not talk about that?”

“Then why are you here?”

“I may need your help in Moscow.”

“Why would I help you when I don’t want you to go at all?”

“Because you’d rather I don’t get killed.”

“Maybe. So sit for a minute, tell me what you’re planning.”

Wells explained. When he was done, Shafer shook his head vigorously, sending a small cloud of dandruff flying. “You’ve got no shot,” Shafer said.

“You must know someone. You always do.”

“I’ll think about it,” Shafer said.

“Tell her I’m gone,” Wells said. “She asked me not to tell her.”

“John—”

Wells walked out.

THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC on the way to Dulles. And the flight to Moscow left exactly on time.