The Silent Man

9

The sapphire nestled in the V of Nadia’s black silk dress, glowing as blue as her eyes.

“Pierre,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

“Perfect,” the Tiffany’s saleswoman purred.

“Perfect.” What else could Kowalski say? Perfect was the perfect word to describe the necklace, the stone perfectly settled between Nadia’s perfect breasts. He could survey the bankers strolling down Bahnhofstrasse to their 100-franc lunches. Nine out of ten would agree that Nadia and her sapphire were perfect. The tenth would be blind.

Kowalski steered the saleswoman — Frederica, middle-aged and trim, her brown hair neatly bobbed, a more suitable match for him than Nadia would ever be — to the counter in the back room, where Nadia couldn’t see them. Unlike lesser items, the necklace had no price tag.

“Six cent mille,” she said, knowing the question. Six hundred thousand francs translated into about $570,000. Absurd, even by the standards of the $5,000 handbags and $10,000 dresses he regularly bought Nadia.

“But the stone is flawless,” she said. “It will never lose its value.” Frederica cocked her head and peeked into the front room. “And look at her.”

Kowalski followed Frederica’s gaze. Nadia caught him looking and smiled and folded her white swan arms across her stomach, lifting her breasts slightly so that the sapphire settled between them like a newborn about to suckle. She was jaw-dropping, breathtaking, all of her. The irony, of course, was that she would have looked just as good in a potato sack. The jewelry and the couture dresses helped less beautiful women, but they were wasted on her.

This thought had occurred to Kowalski before. Normally it pleased him enormously. But not today. Nothing was pleasing him today. For weeks, nothing had pleased him. Not since—

Frederica laid a hand on Kowalski’s arm. “What do you think, monsieur?”

“It is beautiful,” Kowalski admitted. He handed Frederica his black Amex card, idly wondering how much she would make on the sale. “Run it through, madame,” Kowalski said. “But quickly.”

Kowalski didn’t like being in public anymore. Not even in the heart of Zurich, one of the safest cities in the world. Not even with the door to Tiffany’s locked and his bodyguards outside. After all, John Wells had gotten to him in the Hamptons when he’d had five guards protecting him. And that was before Wells had a real reason to hate him.

Frederica disappeared into the back. The Tiffany’s on Bahnhofstrasse didn’t do anything as déclassé as conducting business where customers might see it. Kowalski walked back to Nadia, who wrinkled her nose at him as if she didn’t know what he’d decided.

“Pierre? Did you decide?”

“Kitten. Even I have limits. But I spoke to Frederica and we’re getting you a very nice charm bracelet. You know, the silver.”

Nadia’s hands fluttered up to her neck.

“But it’s so pretty, Pierre. And you said—” She broke off. She looked like a puppy whose favorite toy had suddenly gone missing. Kowalski reached for her and squeezed her against him.

“Of course it’s yours. You know I don’t deny you.”

“Pierre.” She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. They stood that way, a parody of a diamond ad, the fat middle-aged man clinging to the young sylph, until Frederica came back with the receipt.

KOWALSKI WAS IN HIS OFFICE that afternoon when Tarasov, his head of security, appeared. “May I?”

“Come.”

Tarasov walked in, followed by a tall, thin man in a red and blue tracksuit. The man was one of the ugliest creatures Kowalski had ever seen, with patchy blond hair and tiny deep-set eyes. “This is Dragon, the man I mentioned. Dragon, meet Monsieur Kowalski.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Dragon mumbled in sixth-grade French.

“You prefer I call you Dragon, or Monsieur Dragon?” Kowalski knew he shouldn’t mock this man, his newest employee, but he couldn’t help himself. Dragon. Had anyone ever looked less like a dragon?

Dragon tucked his hands under his arms. “Dragon is fine,” he said. “There’s no need for formality.”

“Dragon it is,” Kowalski said.

“I’ve explained the terms to Dragon and he’s agreeable,” Tarasov said.

“It will be an honor,” Dragon said.

“Bon,” Kowalski said. “Please wait outside, Dragon. And close the door.”

Dragon left, and Kowalski turned to Tarasov.

“That’s him? Your famous shooter? He doesn’t look like much.” Kowalski had told Tarasov to beef up security, and not with the muscle-bound cretins who had been so useless in the Hamptons. Tarasov had come back with Dragon, supposedly the deadliest shooter anywhere between Zagreb and Athens. Not just one of the deadliest, the deadliest. Kowalski wondered how he’d gotten the title. It wasn’t as if the Serbian paramilitaries could have held a competition. Or maybe they had, back in the 1990s, during the nasty little wars that had torn up the Balkans.

“He’s the best,” Tarasov said.

“Didn’t you say that about Markov’s men? Let’s hope he’s more successful with Wells than they were, if it comes to that.”

“I’ll take responsibility.”

“Anatoly. You take responsibility for nothing but spending your salary. If I want empty words, I’ll turn on the television. Just get that Dragon some suits. I don’t want him running around like a Serb gangster. Even if that’s what he is.”

Tarasov left, and Kowalski was alone. He stared at the Zürichsee — Lake Zurich — and the mountains that rose gently behind the lake to the south. The sun had already disappeared to the west, behind the city. Across the lake, factories and homes glowed placidly in December twilight. But the view didn’t soothe Kowalski.

In 1980, not long after he joined his father in the firm, Kowalski had struggled to close his first major deal, with a cocky general from Suriname who’d brought his mistress along with him for the trip. The general didn’t want to negotiate, he told his father.

“I’ve put together a package that suits his needs, but he insists it’s too expensive.”

“Yes?”

“The list is thirty-two million, but I’ve told him we’re flexible. We could go as low as twenty-seven and still make a profit. I don’t see why he won’t negotiate. Too busy with his mistress.”

“Pierre, I could have handled this myself. You know why I let you?”

“No, Father.” Kowalski had wondered himself.

“What’s our most powerful weapon?”

The question puzzled Kowalski. “I suppose the APCs with the mounted cannons—”

“Pierre. I see they taught you nothing at Lazard. Our most powerful weapon is information. How big is General Pauline’s budget?”

“The dossier said twenty-one million.”

“Correct. And our source told us that was a strict limit. So why are you offering a package for thirty-two million?”

“The Sikorskys I recommended suit his needs better than—”

“He can’t afford them. And when you press him, you make him feel poor. Now call him, before he leaves Zurich. Get him what he needs at twenty-one million.”

“But the Sikorskys—”

“Don’t pretend you can tell the difference between a Sikorsky and a mosquito. You may know all the specs, but you’re not a soldier. Always remember that.”

Until the end of his life, Kowalski’s father could make him feel like a misbehaving child.

“And even if you could tell the difference, do you think General Pauline could? He’s not fighting the American marines. He’s chasing rebels around the jungle until both sides are too bored to keep fighting. Most of what we sell sits in hangars until it’s rusted out. It’s there to make the generals and the defense ministers and presidents feel better about themselves, to puff up their chests. This man has come all the way to Zurich to make a deal. Not to be embarrassed in front of his woman. Let’s use the knowledge we have to accommodate him.”

“Yes, Father.”

Kowalski had never forgotten that lesson. He spent millions of francs a year to cultivate informers in armies and intelligence services all over the world. But at this most crucial moment, his sources in the United States had proven useless. The Americans had kept any information about their investigation into the attack from leaking, not just to the press but to the ex-CIA agents and retired army officers who were Kowalski’s sources in Washington. Had the agency learned of Markov’s involvement? Publicly, the men had been identified only as “foreign nationals,” not Russians. They had been traced to the hotel where they’d been staying, but no further. But was the United States actually further along? And what about Wells? Had he guessed Kowalski’s role in the attack? Too many questions without answers. Damn Markov and his men for their bungling. For his part, Markov had told Kowalski that he wasn’t worried. Easy for him to say. He was holed up in Moscow, untouchable as long as the Kremlin didn’t turn on him.

Markov had the Kremlin. Kowalski had the Dragon, another overpaid Eastern European eating his food and taking up space under his roof. His own fault. He’d made this mess.

His landline trilled. Thérèse, his secretary.

“Monsieur,” Thérèse said. “A call from Andrei Pavlov. Shall I take a message?”

Pavlov was a deputy director at Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. Two years before, he and Kowalski had sold the Iranian government centrifuges to enrich uranium, a highly profitable deal.

“Put him through.”

The line fell silent. Then: “Pierre, my old comrade.”

“Andrei.”

For fifteen minutes Pavlov blathered about a new Rosatom power plant and the money he’d made trading oil futures. “Of course it would be nothing to you, Pierre, or to the Abramoviches of the world, but for a man like me it’s a real fortune.” Finally, just as Kowalski was about to lose all patience, Pavlov said casually, “So. I don’t suppose you heard about our missing material?”

Missing material? Rosatom would only worry about one kind of missing material. And the fact that Pavlov had waited so long to mention it, and then mentioned it so casually, signaled that Rosatom must be very worried indeed.

“Just the rumors,” Kowalski said.

“A minor matter. A kilo or two of low-grade stuff. Maybe three.”

“Yes, of course.” Kowalski stretched his bluff. “But I heard it was HEU.” Highly enriched uranium, suitable for a nuclear weapon, not the less-enriched kind used to generate electricity in power plants.

“No, not HEU. Somewhere in the middle. But whoever has it may be bragging, saying it’s the good stuff, enough for a bomb. And you know, the Americans will make a stink if someone finds it before we do. And sometimes you hear about things.” Pavlov cleared his throat. “Anyhow, if you hear anything, if you could see your way clear to let us know, we wouldn’t forget it.”

Kowalski decided to push for information. “This stuff, when did it get lost? And where?”

“Last seen in Mayak a couple of weeks back.”

Mayak. The biggest nuclear weapons plant in the world. Another sign this was more serious that Pavlov was letting on. But Kowalski didn’t want to ask any more questions. Pavlov had probably said more than he’d meant to already.

“I’ll ask some people,” Kowalski said. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you. And promise you’ll come to Zurich soon. Nadia and I must take you to dinner. She misses her countrymen.”

“Delightful.” Pavlov hung up and Kowalski considered for a minute, remembering a phone call he’d received a few months before, one of the few offers he’d ever turned down flat. He wondered if he could afford to spare Tarasov with Wells on the loose. On the other hand. he had to know if Pavlov’s call meant what he suspected.

He called Tarasov. “Anatoly. Get your passport. You’re going to Moscow.”

10

On the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s legendary nightlife strip, the hookers were having a slow night. They stood in their usual spot, in front of a small public courtyard between kebob stands and novelty shops specializing in fake pistols and dull knives. They shuffled in their boots, a dozen miserable women, each an even ten feet from the next. Even whores couldn’t escape the German passion for order.

Hamburg’s true red-light district was a few blocks south, on Herbertstrasse, a single street sixty yards long where the prostitutes sat in shop windows as they did in Amsterdam. Only adult men were allowed on Herbertstrasse, and high wooden fences on both ends kept out women and children. Despite the ugliness of the trade, the street possessed a certain hard glamour. The prostitutes posed on their stools in lace bras and panties, watching men swirl on the pavement beneath them. Police monitored Herbertstrasse, and the prostitutes there registered with the city and were tested regularly for HIV. But the discount hookers on the Reeperbahn had no glamour at all. They wore puffy down jackets and tight jeans, and their faces were young and unformed, yet already worn. They looked like high school juniors who had fallen asleep in their beds and woken up in hell.

A steady stream of tourists and sailors and locals walked by the courtyard. The women gave them all the same treatment, a whispered invitation, half-coo, half-hiss. Any man foolish enough to stop found himself in a whispered tête-à-tête with a hand on his arm. But it was only 10 p.m. and a drizzle dampened the air, and the men were still mostly sober and mostly saying no. So the women smoked and stamped their feet to stay warm and ran their hands through their bleached blond hair and waited for business to improve.

NEAR THE BACK of the courtyard, Sayyid Nasiji watched the whores’ dance. He’d never understood the German attitude toward these women. A police station stood only a couple of blocks away. Why did the German cops tolerate this dismal scene? How had these women fallen so low? Where were their families?

Nasiji didn’t delude himself. Muslim nations had prostitutes, too. But at least Muslims were ashamed of the flesh trade and tried to stop it. The Germans seemed almost proud that women were selling themselves in public. They jammed the Reeperbahn. And the crowd wasn’t just sailors or ugly old men with no choice. Students and office workers came here to dance at the clubs speckled among the strip parlors.

Yet Nasiji liked Germany. He’d attended college at the Technical University of Munich, five hundred miles south of here. He’d initially planned to specialize in nuclear physics. But he was Iraqi, and his professors warned him that most nuclear power plants probably wouldn’t hire him. So he stuck to chemical engineering. Still, he spent most of his free time in the university’s nuclear labs.

Nasiji had grown up in Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad. His father, Khalid, was a brigadier general in Saddam’s Republican Guard. Khalid had risen far enough in the ranks to build a two-story concrete house and buy a used BMW 735i, his pride. But he had cannily avoided trying to reach the top of the Guard, dodging the bloody purges that swept away his bosses every few years.

Nasiji was the second-oldest of five kids, the favorite of his parents. His intelligence was obvious from his first days in school. After he graduated first in his high school class, Khalid encouraged him to study in Europe, getting him a visa to Germany and permission to leave Iraq.

Nasiji’s family was moderately religious, and Nasiji had grown up praying each week at the big Mother of All Battles Mosque in Ghazaliya. In Munich, he kept his faith, praying five times daily, never eating pork or drinking.

But Nasiji was hardly a fanatic. By the spring of 2001, his last year in Munich, his friends had grown outspoken about their hate for Europe and the United States. A couple even talked about quitting school and joining the jihadis training in Afghanistan. Nasiji wasn’t interested. He preferred to spend his time studying. And though he never argued with his friends, he thought that complaining about the West was a waste of breath. He was a visitor to Germany, after all. He would follow its customs and laws, and hope for the same respect from the Germans if they visited Iraq.

After graduation, Nasiji came back to Baghdad. He was home on September 11 when Khalid called with word of the attack. Nasiji and his brothers ran to the television and watched as the Trade Center towers burned. Amir, the oldest and most anti-American of Nasiji’s brothers, shouted gleefully when the first skyscraper went down.

“This makes you happy?” Nasiji asked Amir.

“Should I weep? Poor America. Did you forget what they did to us in 1991, Sayyid? All those years in Germany made you soft? They deserve what they get, the Americans. No jobs, empty stores — they’re to blame. These stupid sanctions. Beggars on the streets. There were never beggars before.”

Nasiji couldn’t disagree. After the Gulf War in 1991, the United States and United Nations had imposed sanctions that had crippled Iraq’s economy. Nasiji hadn’t found a job since coming home, though the Technical University was among the top schools in Europe. Even so, he knew he couldn’t let his brother’s words go unchallenged. “So our economy stinks. Killing those people, ordinary men going to work, what good does that do for anyone?”

“Remember five, six years ago, before you stopped brawling? Back in school, when every afternoon we looked around for Shia to beat? You know what you said to me then?”

“That was a long time ago, Amir.” Nasiji preferred to forget his days as a fighter.

“You loved it. And then one day you just stopped. You never did tell us why.”

“Forget it. What did I say?”

“That sometimes it’s necessary to tell the world you exist. And the best way is with a closed fist.”

“I was sixteen, Amir.”

“Even so. When the Americans bombed us ten years ago, they killed plenty of ordinary people. I don’t remember seeing them shed any tears. Now they understand how we feel. We’ve told them we exist.”

“I had American professors in Munich. They were always fair.”

“You’re so naive. Look at Egypt. They use Arabs against Arabs. Muslims against Muslims. And the way they help Israel. One Yid is worth a million of us. You watch. They’ll find some way to turn this against us. They’ll come and steal our oil.”

AMIR’S WORDS SEEMED eerily prophetic to Nasiji in the months that followed, as the United States geared up to attack Iraq. The protests, the United Nations votes, nothing made any difference. The American tanks came to Kuwait and then over the border.

For the Nasiji family, the invasion was a disaster. Khalid lost his job as a general when the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army. As a high-ranking Baathist, he was barred from working for the new government. Some of Khalid’s fellow Republican Guard officers began organizing resistance to the occupation. Khalid refused. “Let’s see what happens,” he told his family. “Maybe it’s for the best.” Then the violence started. In November 2003, a cousin of Nasiji’s was killed at an American checkpoint. Another died in a suicide bombing.

The next month, Amir joined a cell of Sunni insurgents. Sayyid tried to stop him, but Amir insisted. “They’ll kill us all if we let them,” he said. He lasted four months. In April 2004, an American sniper shot him at 3 a.m. as he planted a bomb on the highway that connected Baghdad and Fallujah.

Fouad, the youngest of the brothers, died next. After Amir’s death, Fouad joined a local militia to fight the Shia who were taking over Ghazaliya block by block. Three months later, Fouad disappeared. A week later, kids found his body in a soccer field, his fingers hacked off, his face covered with cigarette burns.

In Muslim tradition, the family held Fouad’s funeral as quickly as possible, just one day after his body was found, at a mosque in Khudra, a Sunni neighborhood just south of Ghazaliya. Around the coffin, the women of the family screeched and moaned, an unearthly, terrifying lament of loss that seemed to demand a response from the blue sky overhead. Khalid wore his Republican Guard uniform to the funeral, a pointless gesture of defiance against the Shia who had killed his son. Once he had filled out the green uniform proudly. Now it hung loose on his shoulders and one of the sideboards had come askew. He mumbled the same words to all the men who greeted him at the funeral. “Too soon for this. Too soon.” He had turned old, Nasiji saw.

The ceremony took less than an hour, and afterward the family piled into Khalid’s BMW to head back to Ghazaliya. As they were about to leave, Nasiji hopped out, deciding to ride home with his cousin Alaa instead. The choice saved his life.

On an overpass over the main western highway out of Baghdad, two Toyota 4Runners forced Khalid’s BMW to a stop. Four men jumped from the Toyotas, AK-47s poised, shooting even before their feet hit the pavement. They blasted out the BMW’s windows and kept firing. Thirty seconds later, they were gone.

Nasiji reached the overpass a few minutes later. The BMW’s metal skin was pockmarked with too many holes to count. Blood and bone and gristle festooned the interior. The shooters had fired so many rounds at such close range that Khalid’s skull was almost gone and the green of his uniform had turned black with blood.

On the sedan’s hood the killers had left a mocking present, a wall clock whose background was a picture of Saddam. In the old days, Saddam had presented favored members of the Baathist Party with trinkets like the clock as signs of his affection. A note lay beside the clock, crudely scrawled Arabic: “All Baathists die! Revenge for the Shia! Iraq for Iraqis, not Saddam’s vermin!”

AS HIS BROTHER AMIR had reminded him on September 11, Nasiji knew how to fight. He was only five-nine, but he had a middleweight’s build — lean, muscular, and quick. Growing up, he and his brothers had gained a reputation as bullies. They knew that their father could save them from trouble with a word to the local cops.

During brawls, Nasiji used his speed to overcome bigger kids, ducking inside their looping punches and hitting them until they ran or went down. He was the fiercest of his brothers, always ready for a fight. Yet he’d grown almost afraid of the excitement he felt when he knew a brawl was coming, the way his mouth grew dry and his hands seemed to swell.

One afternoon, a Shia teenager from Shula, a slum north of Ghazaliya, bumped into Nasiji’s sister in a local market. The contact was accidental, but Nasiji didn’t care. As the Shia — Nasiji never did find out his name — walked home, Nasiji pushed him onto a side street off the main road.

The Shia was skinny, not a fighter. Nasiji looked around to be sure no one was watching, then dragged the kid into a garbage-strewn alley invisible from the road. He punched the Shia in the stomach until the boy doubled over. The kid’s shoulders heaved as he gasped for breath.

“You’re nothing,” Nasiji said. “Say it.”

“I’m n-n-nothing.”

The kid looked up. Nasiji caught him across the face with a straight right, snapping back his head. The boy collapsed onto the broken concrete.

“Please,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

“Give me your hand,” Nasiji said. The Shia limply raised his arm. Nasiji grabbed the boy’s hand and twisted his pinky sideways until it snapped. The kid pulled back his arm and screamed, a sharp animal cry. Nasiji lined up to kick him. And something more. Hurt him. He didn’t know where the words came from, but suddenly he had an overwhelming urge to hear the boy scream. Nasiji looked around for a brick, a stone, anything. Kill him. The Shia must have seen the madness in Nasiji’s eyes, for he scrabbled backward, his legs kicking wildly.

“Allah. Please. I beg you. I’m sorry. Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

Nasiji looked away from the boy to find a brick. When he turned back he saw for the first time how pathetic the Shia really was. The kid’s T-shirt was dirty and his sneakers didn’t match. Tears and snot flowed down his face. Nasiji’s rage faded and a heavy shame filled his belly. He stepped back. “Filthy cur. Go back to Shula and never touch a girl in Ghazaliya again. We don’t want your fleas.”

The kid scrambled and ran. Nasiji walked out of the alley, his head pounding, heart beating so quickly that even an hour later it hadn’t returned to normal. What if a rock had been handy? What if he hadn’t had those few seconds to collect himself?

Nasiji told no one about what had happened that day, what he’d almost done. He stopped fighting and devoted himself to studying. For a decade, he pushed aside his murderous thoughts, locked down the beast inside him.

On the overpass in Ghazaliya, beside the bloodied bodies of his father and mother and sister and brother, he opened the cage.

HE JOINED THE SUNNI MILITIA battling the Shia for control of Ghazaliya. But he quickly tired of fighting other Iraqis. The Shia weren’t to blame for this madness. Everything had been fine until the invasion. The United States had destroyed Iraq. Nasiji saw the truth now.

So Nasiji left Ghazaliya for Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, where former Baathists were organizing the Sunni insurgency. He was easily accepted. Everyone in Tikrit knew what had happened to his father. Nasiji had only one quirk. He had no interest in operations against the Shia. Only Americans.

He quickly gained a reputation as fearless and vicious. In early 2006 he led an ambush against an American convoy traveling through Mahmoudiyah. His men killed three soldiers and kidnapped two more, hiding them in a farmhouse a few miles south of Fallujah. Nasiji interrogated the men for a few days, but they didn’t have much to tell. He told them he’d let them go if they begged for their lives. They knew he was lying, perhaps, but they couldn’t help themselves.

He watched their mouths move as they spoke, but he couldn’t hear them at all, only the little voice in his head whispering, Kill them. When their pleas were done, he blew out their brains and left their bodies in a field for dogs to eat. Then he uploaded the video to a jihadi Web site, to prove to the world that Americans were weak when they didn’t have tanks or helicopters to protect them.

After the Mahmoudiyah operation, Nasiji’s anger curdled into something calmer and nastier. Over the course of a year, he and his men had killed two dozen soldiers with ambushes and roadside bombs. A good haul. But hardly enough to make a difference in this war. The American bases were impenetrable. He could only pick soldiers off one by one as they traveled in convoys. Eventually he’d be shot in a firefight, or the Americans would learn his name and seek him out. Inevitably they’d get him. Besides, how would killing even a hundred soldiers make a difference? The Americans didn’t care how many of their soldiers died here, or how much damage they caused.

“Ordinary people die all the time here and they don’t care,” his brother Amir had said on September 11. “Now they understand.”

But Amir had been wrong. The Americans hadn’t understood the message of September 11 at all. To teach them, Nasiji would need to give them a lesson they would never forget. He would need to use the knowledge he’d gained in Munich to turn their cities into lakes of fire.

NASIJI WENT BACK to Tikrit with an unusual request. He heard nothing for two weeks, and he wondered if he’d overreached. Then, near midnight, as he rested in a house in Ghazaliya, his phone trilled. “Sayyid. It’s arranged. For tomorrow.” The voice belonged to a Syrian he knew only as Bas. “Tell me where you are.”

Nasiji gave his location.

“I’ll send a car at six a.m. Whoever you’re with, don’t tell them. Just go.”

“Of course. Bas?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

That night Nasiji hardly slept. Curled on his metal cot, his AK laid neatly on a sheet on the concrete floor beneath him, he folded his arms behind his head and wondered: Would the sheikh listen to him? He was nothing, a jihadi like a million others. He closed his eyes and saw his father’s BMW on the overpass. What he’d first seen that day wasn’t the bodies or even the bullet holes, but the puddles of oil and gas leaking from the car. As if he hadn’t been willing to look into the BMW itself, as if the fluid took the place of the blood he knew he’d see when he looked up—

And then he had, he had looked up—

No. Enough. Put it aside. “Not what they’ve done to you,” he murmured to himself. “What you’ll do to them.” He passed the night half-asleep, his eyes fluttering open every few minutes. He was glad for morning.

Six a.m. came and went, and then seven. Nasiji worried that his driver had been ambushed or arrested. But as he was about to call Bas, a white Toyota Crown with tinted windows pulled up outside the house.

FOUR HOURS LATER, Nasiji found himself in a house south of Ramadi, kissing the hand of a heavy man in a dishdasha, the flowing white robe favored by Saudis.

The man was Sheikh Ahmed Faisal. He and his cousin Abdul were third-tier Saudi princes — and the biggest source of cash for the Iraqi insurgency. The Faisals did in Iraq what Osama bin Laden had once done in Afghanistan, funneling in cash and jihadis to fight the United States. Abdul rarely left Riyadh, but Ahmed came to Iraq every so often to track the progress of the war.

Ahmed raised his hand. “Please sit,” he said. The Saudi’s black beard was neatly trimmed, his robe immaculate, making Nasiji conscious of his own scruffy beard and dirty jeans.

“Thank you, Sheikh,” Nasiji said. “This visit is an honor. Every day, all of us in Iraq appreciate your great kindnesses.”

“I’ve seen the video from Mahmoudiyah. If we had more soldiers like you, the Americans might be gone already.” Ahmed spoke a refined classical Arabic that Nasiji had heard only on Al Jazeera. The sheikh tapped the silver case on the table between them. “Cigarette?”

“No, thank you. I’m sure you have many men more important than me to see, so I won’t take much of your time.” Quickly, Nasiji outlined his plan.

When he was done, Ahmed lit a fresh cigarette and took a deep drag. “Young man,” he said. “Many others have had this idea. They’ve all failed.”

“I have certain advantages.”

“Your training. Yes. If not for that, I would not have met you.”

“If I get the material, I won’t waste it.”

“But there’s something else. You must understand the consequences of this. When the moment comes, you won’t have doubts?”

“Has anyone told you what happened to my family?”

The Saudi nodded. For a few seconds the room was so quiet that Nasiji could hear his own breathing. “These Americans,” Ahmed said finally.

“They need a taste.” Nasiji didn’t tell the sheikh that if his plan succeeded it wouldn’t destroy just New York or Washington, but all of America. That vision might have been too much even for this man.

Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette. “Let me ask you, then. What will you need?”

“To start? A Canadian or American passport, a real one. Also one from Europe. Safe houses in Germany and Russia. Men I can trust in both places. And money, lots of it.”

“It’s a long list.”

“It’ll get longer as we get closer.”

The sheikh nodded.

“Most of all, we need someone in the United States we can absolutely trust, someone with a bit of land. A few acres so we won’t be bothered.”

“Inside the United States? Why?”

“We’ll need to assemble the bomb there. The material itself isn’t very noticeable, but the finished weapon is.”

“Do you really think you can do this?”

“I can’t promise success. But it’s not impossible. Acquiring the material is the most difficult part. If God wills that. ”

“Inshallah,” the sheikh said. “Inshallah.” He clapped his hands together. “All right. First, let’s get you out of Iraq before the Americans find you. We’ll meet in Amman in a week and talk more about your plans. You’ll have the chance to revenge your family, I promise you that.”

To his astonishment, Nasiji felt his eyes well with tears. He turned away so the Saudi couldn’t see his face.

FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS, Ahmed Faisal kept his word to Nasiji. All over the world Faisal and his cousin knew men who wanted to support the jihad. In Montreal, the director of an Algerian community center. In Berlin, the owner of an Afghan restaurant. In Sarajevo, a used-truck dealer. In Chelyabinsk, an imam. All willing to help Nasiji without question. They put him up in their homes, so he didn’t leave a paper trail. They passed along cash. A few provided more crucial support. The Canadian passport in Nasiji’s pocket identified him as Jad Ghani of Montreal. Nasiji didn’t have to worry that an immigration officer would identify the passport as fake — because it wasn’t.

Jad Ghani actually existed. He was mildly retarded, lived at home, and had been born in Montreal the same year as Nasiji. Jad’s father, a fervent believer, had been more than happy to apply for a passport for his son, using photos of Nasiji. And so Nasiji had a genuine Canadian passport, which would easily get him through border controls anywhere in Europe or the United States.

Nasiji’s first big break came when Faisal put him in touch with Yusuf al Haj, who’d served for six years as an engineer in the Syrian army. Yusuf had two great virtues. He spoke excellent Russian. And he was a stone-cold psychopath. The Syrians had discharged him for beating an enlisted man nearly to death when the soldier argued with an order he gave. But Nasiji knew how to deal with madmen. He’d seen Iraqi jihadis as crazy as Yusuf. The key with them was never to show weakness. They were wolves, these men. If they smelled doubt or fear, they would turn instantly.

Slowly, Nasiji put together his network. He arranged a transport system and put together a workshop in the United States. Along the way he discovered certain weaknesses in his plan that he now believed he’d fixed.

But without the material, his plans meant nothing. He’d be practicing dry runs and designing dummy bombs for the rest of his life. Russia was his best bet, he knew. The North Koreans couldn’t be trusted, and the Pakistanis were so paranoid about what the Americans would do to them if their bombs went missing that the security of their stockpile was actually quite good.

So Nasiji and Yusuf traveled across southern Russia, pretending to be traders who wanted to export Russian motorcycles to the Middle East. For months, they got nowhere. They traveled freely into the closed cities, but the bases where the bombs were held were another matter. Then the imam in Chelyabinsk told them of a security worker in Ozersk who might be willing to help.

Nasiji plotted the theft but left Yusuf in charge of handling the Farzadov cousins. If the Russians unearthed the plot, Yusuf was replaceable. Anyway, Yusuf had a talent for this work. He frightened people so much that they would agree to almost anything just to keep him calm.

Nasiji had decided on the Black Sea route because he wasn’t sure what the Russians would do once they discovered the theft. They wouldn’t want to cause a worldwide panic, so they probably wouldn’t make a public announcement. But they might try to close their borders, and the Kazakhs might cooperate with them. Best to get the material into Europe quickly.

Despite everything, Nasiji had scarcely trusted his eyes when he saw the twin bombs in Yusuf’s Nissan. He pulled a handheld radiation detector from his pocket to be sure. Yes. The radiation signature was faint but distinct. They were real.

He reached inside the toolboxes and touched the cylinders, one hand on each, the steel cold under his fingers. An electric charge ran through his body, as if he were conducting current from one warhead to the other.

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Nasiji said.

“Hmm?”

“It’s what the Americans said when they blew up the first bomb.”

“Someone said that?”

“Oppenheimer. A Jew American physicist. It comes from a book of Indian prayers. The fireball went up and Oppenheimer said, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

“That’s how I felt, too, when I saw them. Only I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

“Do you know what the scientists call them?”

“Bombs?”

“Gadgets.” Nasiji said the word in English.

“Gadget?”

“It doesn’t translate well into Arabic. It means, a sort of toy. A mechanical device.”

“Why this word?”

“Don’t you see? It’s a joke. Such a powerful weapon, and they call it a gadget. Like it’s a mobile phone.”

“Gidgit.” Yusuf smiled, trying to play along.

Nasiji closed the trunk. “You’ve done well, Yusuf.”

AFTER THE TRIP over the Black Sea, which gave Yusuf the chance to dispose of the Farzadov cousins, the bombs arrived in Turkey. Yusuf watched over them in a rental apartment in an Istanbul suburb for four days, and then the next step was ready.

For a year, Nasiji had been buying toolboxes and cabinets from a factory in central Turkey. He bought them in lots of eight hundred, enough to fill a forty-foot shipping container, and sent them by ship to Trieste, Italy, and then on to Hamburg, where he sold them at cost to German hardware stores.

Nasiji wasn’t trying to start a hardware business. He wanted to build a pattern of shipments, a key to avoiding scrutiny by customs agents. Hundreds of thousands of containers came through Trieste each year, far too many for customs authorities to examine. So the agents concentrated their efforts on new shippers, shippers who had a history of evading duties, and shippers from countries that were known to be problematic, like Nigeria. Anyone outside those categories — say, a once-a-month shipper from Istanbul with a clean record — had a better chance of being hit by a meteor than being randomly searched.

The Turkish tool cabinets were delivered to a warehouse in Istanbul’s bustling harbor district. There Yusuf added his own packages, stowing them inside crates 301 and 303. The crates were packed in a container that was put aboard the UND Birlik, a ship that regularly ran the Istanbul-Trieste route. Five days later, the container was offloaded at Trieste and transferred to a truck for the drive to Hamburg. As Nasiji had expected, no customs agent ever even looked at the container.

NOW NASIJI AND THE CONTAINER had arrived in Hamburg.

In the courtyard on the Reeperbahn, one of the whores finally found a customer, a young man in a denim jacket. She wrapped her arm in his and they walked toward the little streets where love hotels provided cheap beds by the hour. The man’s eyes slid over Nasiji as they walked past, but he didn’t break stride. No surprise. Nasiji could hang out in the courtyard all night and no one, not even the whores, would bother him. Strangely enough, despite the noise and constant traffic, he found the Reeperbahn a good place to think.

Nasiji wondered when the Russians would publicly disclose the theft. Ahmed Faisal, who had connections in the Saudi intelligence agency, had told him that the FSB had issued a bulletin asking Interpol and the United States to detain the Farzadov cousins. Still, Nasiji believed he was well ahead of his enemies. Grigory and Tajid were no longer around to spill their secrets. Now only three men knew exactly where the bombs were: Nasiji himself, Yusuf, and the man he was about to meet. And so even the cold Hamburg drizzle couldn’t dampen his mood as he waited for his contact, a man who called himself Bernard.

Bernard’s real name was Bassim Kygeli. He’d emigrated from Turkey in 1979 and quickly realized that Germans preferred to do business with Bernard, not Bassim. So he was Bernard on his business cards and in his corporate records. Starting with rugs and trinkets, he built a successful import-export business. Over the years, he progressed to furniture and then machine tools. He brought a bride from Istanbul and together they had three children. They lived in a two-story white house in Hamburg’s wealthy northern district, halfway between the airport and downtown.

Yet as the years progressed and his wealth grew, Bernard became more angry, not less, at the United States and Germany. The Americans kept Muslims down and then congratulated themselves for their humanity. The Germans had been American lapdogs for so long that they had no opinions of their own anymore.

In the late 1990s, Bernard realized he would be more valuable to the jihadi cause if he kept a low profile. He donated thousands of euros a year to the relief organizations that supported Palestinian refugees. That wasn’t illegal and there was no harm in it. But he stayed out of Hamburg’s radical mosques, and he never gave money directly to jihadi charities. As a result, his name didn’t show up on any terrorist watch lists. The CIA and the FBI; the French DGSE; MI-5 and -6; even the BND, the German intelligence agency — none had ever heard of Bernard Kygeli.

And so Bernard was incredibly valuable to Sayyid Nasiji. Sure, Nasiji sometimes grew frustrated with the man, who had no idea of the risks Nasiji took. Still, he always felt better after a night in the guest room at Bernard’s house, drinking sweet tea and eating the delicious dinners that Bernard’s wife made, kebobs and hummus and grape leaves stuffed with rice.

The thought of dinner reminded Nasiji that he hadn’t eaten all day, and he was more than happy to see Bernard’s black Mercedes sedan pull up to the curb in front of the whores, who quickly swarmed the car. Nasiji pushed through them and slipped inside the car, ignoring the whores’ backtalk.

Bernard eased the Mercedes away from the curb. “Tell me again why we must meet on the Reeperbahn, Sayyid?”

“Because our friends at the BND would never expect it.”

“Maybe you just like the girls.”

“Hardly. How are you, my friend?”

“The same. Watching the Kurds make fools of us Turks.”

“While the Americans laugh.”

“Yes. Meanwhile, Helmut”—Bernard’s oldest child and only son—“spends his nights at cafés. Says his screenplay is almost finished.” Helmut had quit the University of Hamburg a year before, supposedly to make movies. Nasiji had met him twice. He was a foppish manchild who stank of sweet cologne.

“You ought to kick him out.”

“I have. Last week. I hope it’s not too late. My fault, you know. I never should have named him Helmut. It was the old days. I was trying to pass.”

Nasiji had heard these laments before. “How are your other two?”

“The girls? Like all women.” Bernard steered the Mercedes into one of the tunnels that cut under the Elbe River. The Elbe had been the source of Hamburg’s wealth for centuries, the waterway that linked Germany to the North Sea and the rest of the world. Most of the city lay north of the river, while the giant port complex was located to the south.

“How’s Zaineb?” After Helmut, Bernard had gone back to traditional Muslim names for his kids. Zaineb was the older of Bernard’s two daughters. Nasiji had only met her once. She was petite, with fine dark hair and a throaty laugh like a bus engine, a laugh that seemed to indicate she found the world impossibly funny. In another life Nasiji would have married her.

“She’s fine.”

“Is she around this evening?”

“Visiting a cousin.”

“Away again.” Bernard wanted Zaineb to have nothing to do with him, Nasiji thought. Though he couldn’t blame the man. “Maybe one day I’ll get to see her again.”

“Of course.”

“You Turks are such liars.”

“No worse than you Iraqis.”

They emerged from the tunnel on the south side of the river, to the port zone, block-long docks crosscut by canals, as much water as land. On the wharves, shipping containers were stacked in five-high piles. Cranes towered hundreds of feet overhead. Giant container ships, among the largest structures ever built, rested silently in the canals, gleaming under high-intensity spotlights. The biggest ships were a quarter-mile and could carry 200,000 tons of cargo — the equivalent of 100,000 cars.

“It’s like a race of giants has taken over,” Nasiji said. “And then left again.” Indeed, aside from an occasional security guard, the wharves were empty.

“The boats have gotten bigger and bigger,” Bernard said. “After a while you don’t think about it.” They passed over a bridge, to the southern half of the port. Here the canals were narrower, the ships and cranes slightly smaller. Bernard turned right and drove beside a high wall until he reached a guardhouse. The guardhouse’s window opened and a fiftyish man with long hair leaned out.

“Yes?” Bernard lowered his window and the guard nodded. “Oh, hello, Bernard. Good evening.”

“Georg.”

The gate swung open.

“He knows you,” Nasiji said.

“He should. I’ve owned this warehouse for fifteen years.”

Bernard turned down a dead-end road that led to a locked fence. Behind it was a brick warehouse and a parking lot littered with a half-dozen containers. High on the building, a red-lettered sign proclaimed: “Tukham GmBH, Bernard Kygeli, Prop.” Bernard unlocked the fence and parked outside the warehouse. He keyed in an alarm code and stepped inside. Nasiji followed.

“No one’s watching it?”

“My men would wonder if I asked them to guard a shipment of cabinets, Sayyid. Don’t worry. It’s fine.” Indeed the long padlock on the end of the container was still locked. Bernard picked up a crowbar and broke it off with a flick of his wrist.

TEN MINUTES LATER, they’d dragged out crates 301 and 303. Nasiji popped them open, opened the tool cabinets inside, and. there they were.

“May I touch?” Bernard said. He reached down—

“NO!” Nasiji screamed.

Bernard jumped back. “What?” He scuttled backward, away from the warheads, a hand raised protectively.

Nasiji laughed. “Sorry, Bernard. I couldn’t resist. It’s perfectly safe. Touch them, kick them, run them over. Doesn’t matter. They can’t go off.”

Bernard closed his eyes and ran a limp hand over his forehead. “Damn you, Sayyid. My heart. my doctor says—” Bernard leaned against a crate and waited for the spasm to pass. “So, the ship goes in two days. You’re sure you want to do it this way? It seems overly complicated. Why don’t you let me send them?”

“I told you, I tried that once myself, a dummy run from Russia, said it was motorcycle parts, and the Americans opened the box.”

“That was Russia. I can send them from Hamburg directly to New York or Baltimore. You see how easy it was from Istanbul.”

“I don’t want to take a chance at customs. I want to use your boat. This way, Yusuf and I watch over them directly, then our friends drive them in from Canada.”

“I don’t agree, but it’s your choice. Now let me show you what I have for you.”

In the back left corner of the warehouse, empty crates and pallets were neatly stacked before a metal cage, its gate protected by a heavy combination lock. Bernard pushed aside the pallets, opened the lock. The men stepped inside the cage, which held two dusty wooden crates, one square, the other long and narrow, both covered with Chinese characters. Bernard grabbed a crowbar and popped the top of the longer crate, revealing two steel tubes packed tightly inside. They were identical, each about six feet long, painted dark green. Their back ends flared out like rocket nozzles, and small sights were attached to their tops, just above their breeches. They were Russian-designed SPG-9 Spear recoilless rifles. Like the AK-47, another brilliant Russian weapon, they were easy to use, built for deserts and jungles, low-tech but effective. The Red Army had first put the SPG-9 in service in 1962, and it had been killing people ever since.

“You leave these here?” Nasiji said. “In the open?”

Bernard had grown a touch tired of having Nasiji second-guess him. “You think my men touch that lock if I don’t say so, Sayyid? Now lift with me.” They grabbed the barrel and heaved it up.

“Not too bad.”

“No. This is the new SPG, a bit shorter and lighter, about forty kilos”—ninety pounds. “I suppose I sound like a salesman. But you already have two heavy crates, so I wanted to keep it as light as possible.”

Bernard broke open the second crate, revealing a dozen steel canisters, each painted black, just over two feet long, but narrow, like stretched-out soup cans or oversized bullets. “The rounds. New design from the Polish, the highest velocity available. Near five hundred meters a second.”

NASIJI PICKED UP a round. The canister was light, no more than six kilograms. He passed it from hand to hand. Standard theory said that the pieces of the uranium pit needed to come together at three hundred meters a second or more to lessen the risk of preimplosion. The problem was that every extra gram of weight that he added to the round would reduce its acceleration and slow its top speed. He’d have to be very careful to keep the pit, and the reflector around it, as light as possible.

“What about the beryllium?” Nasiji said.

Bernard shook his head. “Much harder than getting these. Almost as hard as getting those nasties out there, believe it or not. Only one reason anyone would want that quantity of beryllium and everyone knows it. There are only two people I trust enough even to mention it to, and they both said no. I can’t push. It won’t help anyone if my name shows up on a list of people looking to get dual-use material. Anyway, isn’t it just insurance?”

“Probably. Until I get inside the bombs and do the math, I won’t know for sure.”

“Then I’ll keep trying. Meanwhile, let’s get back to my house so you can sleep. You’ll thank me when you’re on the North Atlantic.”

11

Wells stood under the glowing ultraviolet rays, trying not to feel silly as the minutes ticked by. Outside, night had fallen and the temperature was just above zero. But inside Ultra Spa, the sun never set.

Wells was the only man in the place and had drawn a suspicious look from the cashier when he arrived. But she took his rubles and led him down a dingy tile hall, past saunas and a tiny lap pool, to a room where a half-dozen stand-up tanning booths crackled with an electrical hum. Wells stripped down to his boxer briefs, earning an appreciative look from the cashier despite the slight gut he’d put on. She put a hand on his arm as she chose a booth and punched in his time, fifteen minutes. She gave him a pair of goggles and in he went.

He wondered if any spy manual anywhere mentioned tanning salons. Doubtful. But he had no choice. He needed to keep his skin as dark as possible, no easy task in Moscow at the end of December. He intended to approach Markov as Jalal Sawaya, leader of a radical Lebanese Christian independence group, the Flowers of Lebanon. Jalal wanted to hire Markov’s men to blow up the headquarters of the Syrian intelligence service in Damascus, revenge for Syrian-backed car bombings in Beirut. He had 250,000 euros — almost $400,000—in his suitcase to prove he was serious.

So went Wells’s cover story, anyway. In his saner moments, he knew it was thin. Worse than thin. Gaunt. The Flowers of Lebanon did exist, but they hadn’t been heard from in years. The Syrians had dismembered them very efficiently. Jalal Sawaya was a figment of Wells’s imagination, though the name was common enough in Lebanon. Further, even if Markov did believe that Jalal was real, he would surely wonder why Jalal had approached him and not a terrorist group closer to home.

But Markov didn’t have to be planning to accept Jalal’s offer, or even to believe the story. As long as Markov agreed to meet with Jalal, even if it was only to steal the money he carried, Wells would have his chance.

EVEN BEFORE HE ARRIVED on Russian soil, Wells got a hint that his beard and olive skin wouldn’t be an asset in Moscow. Though he was in first class, and booked under the name Glenn Kramon with his new American passport, the Aeroflot attendants were slow to serve him. He’d wondered if he was imagining their attitude, until an attendant called him to the front galley ninety minutes into the flight. “Mr. Kramon, the captain wishes to speak with you.”

The captain was a tall man with close-cut hair and a wide Slavic face. “You are Mr. Kramon?”

“Yes,” Wells said.

“You are Egyptian?”

“American. Want to see my passport?”

“You are Muslim?”

“I’m a Unitarian,” Wells said. For some reason, Unitarian was the first denomination to pop into his head. He hoped the captain wouldn’t ask him any doctrinal questions. Did Unitarians believe in faith or works?

“What is Unitarian?”

“Christian. What is this, Twenty Questions? Don’t you have a plane to fly?” Wells knew he should keep his mouth shut, but his temper was rising.

“Your passport, please?” Wells handed it over. The captain flipped through the pages and finally nodded. “Thank you. Please go back to your seat,” he said, as if Wells had demanded to speak to him, not the other way around. For the rest of the flight, the attendants ignored Wells entirely.

AT SHEREMETYEVO-2 IMMIGRATION, the cool reception continued. “Passport?” the agent said in English. He was a trim man with hostile brown eyes and a mustache that curled over his upper lip. Wells handed over Kramon’s passport and the entry/exit card that all visitors to Russia were required to fill out.

“Visiting Russia for vacation? Now?”

“I got a good fare.”

“What hotel?”

“The Novotel. Found it on Expedia. I can show you the reservation.” Wells began to sort through his computer bag.

“Forget it.” The guard flipped through his passport, scanned his visa, and typed into his terminal. He tore off half of the entry card and handed the other half back to Wells. “Entry card. Don’t lose.”

“Thanks.”

But the guard had already turned his attention to the woman in line behind him.

A half-hour later, Wells checked into the Novotel, lay down on his bed, fell asleep before he could even get his clothes off. He woke dry-mouthed and tense, certain he’d heard someone scratching at his door. He flipped off the bed, moved noiselessly to the door, pulled it open. The hallway outside was empty. Wells brushed his teeth, undressed, went back to bed, closed his eyes, and resolved to dream of Exley. But if he did he couldn’t remember.

The next morning Wells opened his second suitcase, a big, green, hard-sided Samsonite plastic case, the kind that hadn’t been in style for at least thirty years and that inevitably banged its owner’s shins and left them black and blue. Wells flipped it open, tossed out the clothes and shoes inside. At the base of the case were four almost invisible indentations, the tops of flathead screws that had been machined into place. With his Swiss Army knife, Wells unscrewed them. Underneath was a compartment eight inches long, four inches wide, four inches deep. It held Wells’s Lebanese passport and five hundred bills of 500 euros each—250,000 euros in all, tamped into two packets, each no larger than a narrow paperback book. Wells silently thanked the European Central Bank for deciding to put the 500-euro bill — sometimes called the “bin Laden,” because it was so rarely seen — into circulation, though he couldn’t imagine what the bureaucrats at the bank had been thinking. Who but gamblers, drug smugglers, and spies needed a bill worth almost $1,000?

Besides the money and the passport, the concealed compartment held a few other necessities that Wells had requested from the agency’s Division of Science and Technology. Unfortunately, they didn’t include a gun, which would have been too dangerous to try to smuggle in without a diplomatic bag. Wells took the Lebanese passport and twenty of the bills—10,000 euros in all — and tucked them in his pocket. He left everything else, replaced the panel, and repacked the suitcase.

A few minutes later, Samsonite in hand, he headed for the Mendeleevskaya metro station beside the Novotel. The station, like most of those in the Moscow subway, had been designed to double as an air-raid shelter. Its platform was several hundred feet underground, reached by an escalator whose base couldn’t be seen from its top. Wells found the long ride down oddly calming. The Freudians and the Buddhists would love these tunnels. One endless line of Muscovites silently descending into the earth, another rising from it, death and resurrection played out endlessly in miniature.

Wells took the gray line to Borovitskaya and switched to the red. At Park Kultury, he moved to the circle line, riding it six stops before crossing the platform and reversing direction. Basic countersurveillance. The subway cars were Soviet-era, made of blue corrugated steel with big windows, and they emerged from the tunnels with a pressurized whoosh as if they were powered by air and not electricity. They came every two minutes or so, making the switches very easy. After an hour of riding the trains, with four different transfers, Wells was sure that he hadn’t been followed. Not that there was any reason for him to expect surveillance. He was on an American passport, after all, and Americans visited Moscow even in December. Finally, he switched to the gray line and rode south another seven stops to Yuzhnaya.

When he emerged from the train, he was far from the glitter of Moscow’s city center. Brownish snow covered the streets, and the apartment buildings were mostly cheap concrete left over from the Soviet era. The wind picked up and cut through his jacket and jeans. He looked at the little city map he’d brought and made his way to the Petersburg, a little one-star hotel almost in the shadow of the MKAD, the ring road that surrounded Moscow.

The hotel’s lobby was hardly warmer than the street, and the front desk was empty. Wells rang twice on a little bell before a woman in her mid-thirties wandered out. She had dark skin and a mustache and wore a puffy blue jacket against the cold.

“Yes?” she said.

“You have rooms?” Wells said.

“Of course,” she said.

She didn’t ask for his passport, but he handed it over anyway. The Lebanese this time. The room was 1,200 rubles a night, about $50, one-eighth the price of the Novotel. For that, Wells got a soft double bed and a plastic shower that ran a trickle of lukewarm water. No key-cards here. The door had a big brass lock that an experienced thief, or even a savvy twelve-year-old, could force in seconds.

Wells stowed the suitcase in the tiny closet and headed out. He would sleep at the Novotel, but he wanted to keep his options open. At an outdoor market, he bought a two-pound tub of cheap, oily peanut butter and a loaf of Russian black bread. Then he found Ultra Spa. He intended to stay as fat and dark as possible.

THE NEXT MORNING, Wells made his way to the building that was home to Markov’s company. The offices were in the middle of the Arbat district, the center of old Moscow, a half-mile west of the Kremlin, in a refurbished apartment building two blocks down from the Canadian embassy. Two security cameras watched the front entrance. Four more monitored the edges of the building. A big man stood just outside the entrance doors, which were made of heavy dark glass like a cheap ashtray and blocked any view of the lobby. A gate to the south side protected a parking lot that held a half-dozen Mercedes and BMW sedans and a Hummer H1.

Wells didn’t break stride. Besides the Aeroflot incident, he’d drawn some tough looks on the subway. Chechen terrorists had repeatedly attacked Moscow since 2000, and Arabs were not loved here, not unless they came from Saudi Arabia and wanted to discuss how to keep the price of oil high.

Wells had arrived in Moscow with only a vague plan to get to Markov. He’d figured on finding the bars and clubs where junior FSB officers hung out, reach out to private security firms whose investigators might know Markov, grease the skids with some of the money in his briefcase. But now that he was here, the odds against that plan seemed impossibly long. As an Arab, even a Christian Arab, he was immediately distrusted. He’d need months to overcome that suspicion. If Shafer couldn’t help, Wells would be reduced to trying to break into Markov’s house or assassinate him on the street.

He e-mailed Shafer, explaining. A day later, Shafer replied with a name, phone number, and two sentences. Nicholas Rosette. He has a temper. Don’t lie to him and don’t piss him off. Wells and Rosette arranged to meet at a shopping mall in northern Moscow the next afternoon. “I’ll be the Frenchman in the beret,” Rosette e-mailed.

With a day to burn before the meeting, Wells wandered through central Moscow, the boulevards and narrow streets around the Kremlin. The city was loud and busy and shockingly rich. The GUM mall, which stood across Red Square from Lenin’s tomb, was filled with Hermès and Dior and Cartier and dozens of other snotty stores. The fact that $4,000 purses were being sold a hundred yards from the mummified founder of Communist Russia struck Wells as deeply ironic. But the Muscovites in the mall didn’t seem to care. They wandered happily, shopping bags heavy in their hands. Wells considered buying Exley some official Russian Olympic gear from the 2014 winter games in Sochi — he was supposed to be a tourist, after all — but changed his mind when he saw the price tag on the hat he was fingering: 2,200 rubles, almost $100. For a baseball cap. Wells checked the math three times in his head, figuring he’d made a mistake. Who was buying these trifles? And why? Russia was supposed to be poor, a broken third-world country. Oil had turned its fortunes in a hurry.

THE MALL THAT ROSETTE had chosen for their meet was outside the downtown core, near the end of the green metro line. The place wasn’t in the same league as the GUM, but it was still plenty prosperous, with an IMAX movie theater and an array of stores that would have been familiar at any suburban mall in the United States. Though no Starbucks. For some reason, Moscow didn’t have any. Wells was meeting Rosette at the local equivalent, a place called the Coffee Bean. Wells ordered two black coffees, found a seat against a wall where he could watch the door, and waited.

And waited. Rosette showed up forty-five minutes late. Wells didn’t recognize him at first. He was in his early sixties, wearing a finely cut blue suit, his hair a distinguished silver. The beret he’d promised poked from his overcoat pocket. Wells wouldn’t have guessed he was French, but he didn’t look Russian either. German, maybe, or Swedish. Rosette took his time ordering and finally wandered over to Wells’s table. Up close, he wasn’t so impressive; he had a fleshy face and a drinker’s nose, the skin cut with thin red stripes like a contour map.

“Come,” he said to Wells in English.

They walked through the mall, a conspicuous pair. Rosette was nearly as tall as Wells, and better dressed than any other man in the mall. Wealthy Russian women dressed absurdly well — hence the luxury stores at the GUM — but the men tended to favor tracksuits and jeans.

“So why did you bring me up here?”

“I thought you might want to see Moscow, Mr. Wells,” Rosette said. “Besides, I had shopping to do.” He laughed a little French laugh, humph-humph.

So the joke’s on me, Wells didn’t say. “Call me John.”

“Fine. Call me Nicholas. St. Nicholas.”

“Nicholas, then. Let me ask you. If you didn’t know who I was, how long would you need to figure me out?”

“Pretty soon, maybe. The hair, the tan, not bad, and it looks like you gained a few kilos, too, but it only goes so far. What’s your comic book?”

“Comic book?”

“What we French call the cover story.”

Wells explained.

“And you want to meet Ivan Markov. You know this isn’t a good idea. Did Shafer tell you about me?”

“No.”

“I’m a DGSE man”—Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French intelligence service—“for a long time. Too long.”

“Here?”

“Here, there, everywhere. Now here again. Long enough to see the Russians go from strong to weak and back to strong. I liked them better when they were weak. All this”—Rosette looked around the mall—“brings out the worst in them. A suffering Russian is noble. A rich Russian is a pig. A pig with a Rolex who can’t even tell time.”

“If you say so.”

“Any other questions?”

“How do you know Ellis? If you care to tell.”

They’d looped around the mall and were back at the Coffee Bean. Rosette led them to a corner and sat.

“Many years ago Ellis did me a favor,” he said, quietly. The tables around them were empty, but even if they’d been full no one but Wells could have heard. “In the Congo. Though at the time it was called Zaire.”

“Shafer served in Africa?” Wells couldn’t picture Shafer anywhere but the Washington suburbs.

“He told me that one day I would repay him. I thought he was wrong. Now you come here, with your beard and your ridiculous cover. A Lebanese freedom fighter. Truly a comic book. And Shafer says it’s time for his favor. Why Markov? You think he did this attack on you and your girlfriend?”

“I want to talk to him.”

“Talk? Is that all?”

Wells shrugged.

“You’re right. I don’t want to know.” Rosette stood. “I’ll set it up. Be sure to get out fast after your talk. These men here, they aren’t nice.”

“I’m used to that.”

“Congratulations.”

“You don’t like me much, Nicholas.”

“You’re complicating my life.”

“Then why help me?”

“Not everyone in Moscow favors Markov. Some people won’t mind if your conversation with him gets heated.”

“So you’re using me.”

Rosette sat back down and leaned into Wells and pursed his thick lips. Wells immediately regretted his words.

“I’m using you?” Though Rosette’s voice stayed quiet, his fury was unmistakable. “You ask for my help and I give it to you and then you pretend I’ve wronged you. Only an American could be so stupid. You’re all the same with your false naïveté.”

Rosette exhaled heavily. Wells smelled the alcohol on his breath, heavy red wine under the coffee.

“Markov has enemies, but he has friends, too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have lasted. If it comes out that I helped you, when it comes out, I’ll be stuck in some foolish Russian squabbles that are best avoided. Not how I meant to end my career.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I haven’t finished yet, Mr. Wells. John. I’m sure you’re very good at what you do. Dressing like an Arab and playing bang-bang. Americans always want to come in with their guns and fix the world and leave. But this game you’ve stuck yourself in, it’s much trickier. It doesn’t end when you say. It goes on and on, and when you’ve forgotten you ever played at all, it comes back to destroy you.”

I’ve done all right so far, Wells thought. And so has the United States. And last I checked, France had a second-rate economy and a third-rate army and got attention mainly for the sex lives of its president. But he kept his mouth shut. He’d said too much already.

Rosette stood for a second time. “Your boss, Ellis,” he said. “He saved me from Mobutu. Maybe you’ve heard of Mobutu? Maybe you skimmed a history book? Maybe you saw a documentary on him on CNN? Between the commercials?”

“You sure can lay it on thick.”

“Mobutu Sese Soko. I made a mistake with a girlfriend of his. He had so many. It was hard to keep track. And even after his men arrested me, I didn’t take it seriously. I thought being white would be my protection. But in those days Mobutu thought he was God. Maybe in Zaire he was God. You understand? He spoke and the rivers filled with blood. That sounds like God to me. Even being white was no guarantee. But that little Shafer saved me. To this day, I don’t know how. And I promised him I would repay him if I could. And now he asks me for this favor for you. And because Markov has enemies as well as friends, it’s possible. So I’ll vouch for you. But if Markov sees through this comic book of yours and puts a bullet in you, a whole magazine, I won’t shed any tears for you. I’ll pour a glass of burgundy and tell Shafer we’re even. Understand?”

“Clear as crystal,” Wells said.

Despite the lecture, Rosette kept his word. The following morning he e-mailed Wells to meet him at 1:30 p.m. at the ice rink at the Hermitage Gardens on Karetny Ryad Street, a mile north of the Kremlin. Wells gave himself plenty of time for countersurveillance, three subway lines, two cabs, and a long walk. He was certain he hadn’t been traced. As certain as he could be, anyway, considering he was in the home city of what was probably the best intelligence service in the world.

The Hermitage Gardens rink was easy enough to find, filled with kids and teenagers who skated endless loops to the cheery lyrics of Rihanna and the Spice Girls. Again, Rosette was a few minutes late. A countersurveillance technique, or just rudeness? Wells wasn’t sure.

“We skating?” he said when the Frenchman finally arrived.

“Alas, no.” Today Rosette was dressed down, a heavy wool coat and a thick fur hat. Now he did look Russian, at least to Wells.

They found a cab and rode in the heavy traffic for half an hour before pulling off the third ring road near a huge stadium. They made a left and a right and stopped outside a subway entrance.

They stepped out and Rosette guided Wells toward the entrance to a huge flea market. All around them women carried plastic bags filled with junk. Their faces were heavy, their skin gray under cheap fur hats, their steps exhausted. The booths of the flea market were endless, but the products weren’t. Every shopkeeper had the same dull gray pots and pans of paper-thin steel, the same dull sneakers, their color fading even before they took a single step, the same dull jeans, dyed a heavy overripe blue. Lenin’s tomb belonged here, not opposite the GUM.

“Don’t let the Ritz-Carlton and the GUM and the Bentley dealership across from the Ministry of Defense fool you,” Rosette said. “This is how most of them live. Especially outside Moscow. A million of them steal all the oil money. A few million more get rich servicing the thieves. Everyone else drinks and waits to die.”

“Sounds like fun,” Wells said.

“Not so different than America.”

“You ever been to America?”

“All right,” Rosette said. “We’ll save that for another time. Tonight you meet Roman Yansky. You know him?”

“The name, sure.” Yansky was Markov’s second-in-command, a former commander in the Spetsnaz.

“I called him this morning, gave him the comic book, the whole sad story. I said I knew your family from Beirut and that your father had been a source for me. I said that I’d recommended Helosrus to you. He wasn’t very interested until I told him that you were most assuredly stupid enough to have brought the money with you. He says he will meet you tonight at the Ten Places club but you must bring fifty thousand euros. Eleven p.m. To prove your sincerity, he said. I think he kept a straight face when he said it, but since we were on the phone I can’t be sure.”

“The Ten Places club?”

“A private place on Tverskoy. Not far from the ice skating rink where we met. Very exclusive.”

“All right.”

“You understand he may just take whatever you bring and shoot you. Or he may take you to your hotel to pick up the rest of the money and then shoot you.”

Or you may have blown my cover, and he’ll shoot me whether he gets the money or not, Wells didn’t say. Rosette was proving useful, but Wells was beginning to dislike him as much as Vinny Duto.

They walked out of the flea market. Rosette led Wells to his car, an Opel parked near the metro stop. For the next hour Rosette drove around the quiet streets of Khamovniki, the Moscow neighborhood around the flea market, practicing their cover stories: where and when they’d met, how they’d stayed in touch, the payoff that Rosette expected for setting up the meeting.

“Enough,” Rosette finally said, stopping beside a subway station and waving Wells out. “This foolishness won’t take more than a few minutes. He wants your money, nothing else.”

AFTER HE WAS DONE, Wells headed over to the Petersburg hotel for a nap. He felt refreshed and sharp when he woke. He didn’t know why, but he was sure that he would succeed tonight, convince Roman to get him to Markov. And then? Then he would do what came naturally.

But a few minutes later, his certainty faded. He understood he’d been lying to himself, pushing himself forward despite the obvious flaws in his plan. There’s no such thing as a false sense of well-being. Wells couldn’t remember where exactly he’d read those words, but they weren’t true. It wasn’t too late, he knew. He could still call off the meeting, let Rosette curse him out, fly back to Exley tomorrow.

And leave Markov untouched? Miss this chance?

No.

Wells opened up the false compartment in his Samsonite and counted out fifty of the 500-euro bills, 25,000 euros in all, and stuffed them in his jacket. Then he taped fifty more bills to the bottom of the night table next to the bed. He left the rest of the bills in the suitcase and sorted through the other equipment he’d brought: three ballpoint pens. One was actually a tiny stun gun, capable of delivering a single massive shock. The other two hid spring-loaded syringes filled with ketamine and liquid Valium, a mix that worked as an exceptionally fast-acting anesthetic.

Wells slipped two of the pens — the stun gun and one of the syringes — into his jacket pocket, then grabbed his suitcase and walked down to the lobby and rang the front bell and shivered in the silent lobby until the mustached woman emerged.

“Can you hold this for me?” Wells lifted the suitcase. “Just tonight.”

TEN PLACES DIDN’T HAVE a velvet rope or a sign to mark its entrance. Just two massive men standing in front of a gleaming steel door, and a few unlucky would-be clubgoers standing beside them, stamping their feet against the cold. The bouncers frowned when Wells approached, but when Wells gave them Roman’s name they opened the door and waved him in. Wells found himself in a steel passageway twenty feet long. At the far end, two large men blocked another metal door. To the right, a bottle blonde sat behind a pane of inch-thick glass in a cashier’s office.

“Cover is one hundred euros,” she said.

Wells handed over a 500-euro bill. “Keep the change,” he said, earning only a small smile. A 400-euro tip didn’t go far at this club.

In front of the second door, one of the bouncers patted him down while the other ran a handheld metal detector over him. When they were done, the cashier pressed a red button and the steel door clicked open. The bouncers stood aside to let Wells pass.

Inside, the club was small, but even gaudier than Wells had expected. A half-dozen women in G-strings and pasties shimmied on a platform hoisted over the center of the room. Three more stood behind the bar, serving drinks. The dance floor was in the center of the club, only about twenty feet square, but packed. At 100 euros a head, somebody was getting rich. Rosette sat with Roman, a big man in a black leather jacket, at a table near the back. As Wells approached, Rosette stood and kissed him on both cheeks.

“Jalal,” he said in Arabic. “So good to see you.”

“Nicholas,” Wells replied in Arabic. “My old friend.”

“They don’t have clubs like this in Beirut.”

“No, they don’t. But maybe one day. When the Syrians are gone and peace comes back.”

“We hope.” Rosette nodded to the man in the leather jacket. “Jalal, this is Roman.”

Wells extended a hand and Roman enveloped it in his own giant paw. The Russian was Wells’s height, six-two, and had a boxer’s squashed nose and small ugly eyes. They sat and Rosette lined up three shot glasses and filled them from a Stoli bottle in an ice bucket beside the table.

“A toast.” Rosette spoke in Russian. When he was done, Roman laughed and the three men emptied their glasses. Wells hadn’t drunk vodka straight since college. The liquid was cold and warm at the same time and left a pleasant burn in his throat.

“What did you say?” Wells said to Rosette.

“Old farmer’s toast. I want to buy a house, but I haven’t the money. I have the money to buy a goat, but I don’t want one. So here’s to having wants and needs come together.”

“The wisdom of the Russian serf.”

“Very deep. And now I must go. I hope the marriage is happy, both families approve.”

Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai — the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult’s world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he’d go back without a second thought.

Roman the Russian poured another shot for them.

“Drink,” he said in Arabic, rough but understandable.

“You know Arabic?”

“I was in Libya three years. A military adviser.” He raised his glass. “To our friend, the crazy Frenchman.” They drank.

“Do you know why this is called Ten Places? You’re supposed to be a billionaire to be in here. Ten places of wealth. A one and nine zeros. Of course, a billionaire in rubles isn’t the same as a billionaire in dollars, but even so.”

“I’m afraid I don’t qualify.”

“Well, then, let’s go.” Roman stood and Wells followed. They walked through the club, the dancers parting for Roman, careful not to touch him. But instead of taking the stairs to the front entrance, Roman led Wells to an exit behind the bar. They walked up a dimly lit staircase to an unmarked door.

“Go on,” Roman said. Wells pushed it open and emerged into an alley by the side of the club. Outside, a black Maybach waited, the oversized Mercedes limousine, with two men in front.

“Put your hands on the trunk and spread your legs,” Roman said. Wells did. Roman frisked him, thoroughly. “Empty your pockets.”

In his pockets Wells had only his special pens, a cell phone, his Lebanese passport, his packet of euros, and his wallet. All in Jalal’s name, of course.

Roman pocketed the phone and the packet of euros, gave back everything else, opened the Maybach’s door and steered Wells into the back. The sedan rolled off. Roman unzipped his jacket and slouched in the seat beside Wells. His hand hung loosely over a pistol tucked into a holster on his right hip.

“Jalal, tell me what you want.”

Wells did.

“And Rosette recommended us.”

“He said he’d worked with you.”

Roman frowned. “I want to believe you, Jalal. And the Frenchman and I have known each other a long time. But this plan of yours. You ask Russians for help against the Syrians, our allies.”

“Who else should I ask? The Americans? The Jews? Since 1975 the Syrians do what they want to us. We bring a million people to protest in Beirut, one Lebanese in five, it doesn’t matter. Have you ever been to Lebanon? Once it was beautiful. I’ll go to hell itself and ask the devil if he’ll help me.”

Roman pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket and unfolded it. He flicked on the Maybach’s backseat light, looked between the paper and Wells as though he were watching a tennis match. Finally he handed the sheet to Wells.

And Wells found he was looking at—

An old picture of himself. A printout of a photograph available on the Internet. His college yearbook headshot from Dartmouth.

Wells allowed a puzzled look to settle on his face. Best to stay relaxed. Even if Roman had already decided to kill him, he wouldn’t do so in a moving car. Too risky. “What is this?”

“You.”

“Not me.”

“No? Your cousin, maybe? Thinner, a little cleaner? You don’t see the resemblance?”

“Not really.” Wells handed back the paper. “Who is it?”

“John Wells. The American spy.”

“I am who I say,” Wells said. “See.” He reached into his pocket for his Lebanese passport and wallet.

“Don’t bother me with that.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with me. If you don’t want to make a deal, that’s fine. I’ll find someone else.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What else can I say? I am who I am. You’ve talked to Rosette.”

Roman tucked away the photograph, plucked out a cell phone and made a call. He spoke quietly in Russian for a few seconds, listened, spoke again. Wells couldn’t understand the words, but he knew now that Ivan Markov was too cautious ever to see him. At best, these men would take his money and put him on an Aeroflot flight to Damascus, let the Syrians have him.

At worst. at worst he’d been in tighter spots. Though this was close. Three on one, and the three all had guns. Wells only had the two pens. and the final surprise in his wallet. He put his passport away and tucked his wallet loosely against his hip.

Roman hung up, reached into his pocket for the packet of euros he’d taken from Wells. He thumbed through it, shook his head.

“I said fifty thousand. This is twenty-five.”

“I didn’t think I should bring it all at once.” A real spy would have handed over all the money at once, kept the transaction smooth. Wells had hoped his amateur act would help convince Roman he was who he claimed to be. But at this point, he doubted anything he did would matter.

“You don’t understand your position very well. Where’s the rest?”

“My hotel.”

“Where?”

Wells told him. Roman barked an order in Russian and the Maybach swung south.

“THIS IS IT?” Roman said when they reached the hotel. “Not very impressive.”

“I’m saving my money for you.”

“What room? And where’s the money?”

Wells told him. Roman said something to the bodyguard in the front seat. He nodded and got out. Wells reached for the door.

Roman clapped a hand on him. “You and I wait here.”

Wells didn’t argue. He had found out what he wanted to know. Roman was big, not fast. The Maybach was an exceptionally wide car and Roman had needed almost a full second to reach across to get him. Plenty of time for Wells. They sat silently in the back of the car until Roman’s phone rang for a second time. He had a quick conversation in Russian, hung up, and turned to Wells.

“You seem relaxed, Jalal. Why aren’t you nervous?”

“Why would I be nervous?”

“I accuse you of being an American spy. You deny it calmly. I ask you where you’ve hidden your money. You tell me.”

“It’s not mine.”

“Whose then?”

“It belongs to the Flowers.”

“You come to a country, you don’t speak the language, you think you can hire men you’ve never met for this mission? You’re very stupid. Or you have something else in mind. Either way you’re too dangerous for me to deal with.”

Wells was silent, weighing his options. If he moved too soon, he’d destroy any chance at Markov. If he waited too long, he’d die. Coming here had been a mistake. He saw now. He’d always trusted his instincts, but this time they’d betrayed him. Or maybe he’d ignored them in his fury. Either way he’d made the most basic mistake. He’d underestimated his enemies, overreached, trapped himself.

He saw only one way out.

THREE MINUTES LATER, the bodyguard returned, holding the other packet of euros. Roman looked away, up at the guard. As he did, Wells drew a credit card from his wallet with his right hand. With his left hand, he reached for one of his special ballpoint pens, the stun gun.

The bodyguard handed the bills to Roman, who flipped through them.

“This is it?” he said to Wells.

“The other twenty-five thousand, yes.”

“Rosette said you had more. He said you had two hundred fifty thousand.”

“Not in the room.” Wells felt his pulse rise.

“Where, then?”

“You must think I’m a fool.”

“Call it a fee. For wasting our time.”

Wells pretended to consider the offer. “I’ll get it.” Wells reached for the door, and again Roman reached for him.

“You’re not—”

BUT ROMAN NEVER GOT to finish his sentence, or say anything else at all.

As he grabbed Wells’s right arm, Wells twisted toward him. With his left hand, Wells jabbed the stun gun through Roman’s black wool Armani pants and into the meat of his thigh. The electricity flowed and Roman yelped, a clotted grunt of pain, and twisted back and reached down for the stun gun to tear it away from his leg. The simplest of errors. Roman should have gone for his pistol. Instead he’d become fixated on the fire in his leg. He would pay for that mistake with his life. As he reached down, Wells slashed upward with his right hand, the hand that held the card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12

The field was striped orange and black like a cartoon tiger’s stripes. All the players wore army uniforms. The man dribbling the ball was a general. Nasiji could tell from the stars on his shoulders. Defenders came at him, but he flung them aside and no referee seemed to care. The general had no face, but even so Nasiji recognized him. Khalid, his father. Nasiji raised a fist to cheer—

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

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

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

“Sayyid,” Yusuf said.

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

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

“Do you need the bucket?” Yusuf said.

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

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

“Not today, I think,” Yusuf said.

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

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

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

“Sure,” Nasiji said.

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

“Sayyid, you promised.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

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

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

“So do we have the codes?”

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

“What could be more important than the codes?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Not really, no.”

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“And this takes a few seconds?”

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

“Millions of kilograms?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Fizzle?”

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

“In half?”

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

Yusuf smirked. “Male and female.”

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

“No fizzle.”

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

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

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

“How big?”

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to win another chess game.”

Yusuf reached for the board, but Nasiji waved him off. “Not now. Let’s get to the wheelhouse.”

NASIJI DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about ships, but even he could see that the Juno was a well-run vessel. It was twenty years old, but it looked newer. Its crew washed down its corridors and communal areas every morning. Even so, ever since the coast of Britain had disappeared behind them the previous week, Nasiji hadn’t felt comfortable. He could never quite forget the water that surrounded them.

“Can you believe anyone would do this for pleasure?” he said to Yusuf as they climbed the stairs that led to the wheelhouse. “Sail, I mean?”

“Why not? All those big yachts floating around. Someone must like it.”

“Not me.”

“I figured that out by now.” Nasiji could hear the smirk in Yusuf’s voice.

The wheelhouse was empty when they arrived, except for the captain, Haxhi. He was Albanian, and of course Muslim, a squat man with wide legs and a thick chest. A low center of gravity came in handy on these waves, Nasiji thought.

“Gentlemen, how are you? A bit green.”

“Fine.” Nasiji found himself irritated that his seasickness had become a shipwide joke. “Where is everyone?”

“Sometimes I like to be up here alone.” Haxhi showed them a map of the North Atlantic mounted on the back wall of the wheelhouse. “I have good news and bad news. First, the good news. We’re on schedule for tonight. Our current location—”

Haxhi pointed to a spot east-southeast of Newfoundland, an L-shaped Canadian province that jutted into the Atlantic. They planned to bring the crates ashore in a cove on the southeastern coast of Newfoundland, near Trepassey, a village of nine hundred, really not much more than a few dozen houses clustered against the ocean and the big gray sky.

“We’re about four hundred kilometers from the landing point. We should be off the coast in twelve hours. Just before midnight. After that, another ninety minutes.”

Nasiji reached for the satellite phone in his jacket. He didn’t like using these. They were easy for the Americans to track. But he’d bought the phone only a few weeks before and only used it twice. And as far as he knew, no one was looking for him. Anyway, this was a call he had to make. He punched in an American number with a 716 area code — upstate New York — and a few seconds later the connection clicked in.

“Hello?”

“Doctor?”

“Nam.”

“We’ll be in tonight. Around one a.m. You have the location.”

“Of course.”

“Good. We’ll see you tonight.”

“Inshallah.”

“Inshallah.”

Nasiji ended the call and tucked away the phone. “Thank you, Captain.”

“You forgot the bad news.”

“What could that possibly be?”

Haxhi motioned to the glass windows at the front of the wheelhouse. In the distance, heavy clouds, more black than gray, filled the horizon. “Those.”

NASIJI WAS MISERABLE for the next few hours. He stayed in the wheelhouse for a while with the captain and Yusuf. Finally he staggered back to his cabin, where he filled the bucket beside his bed with vomit — twice. Haidar, the steward, came by with Dramamine, which Nasiji accepted, and Xanax, which he turned down. Better to suffer than to put himself in a haze. But when he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, his dreams were black poems, unfinished stanzas that always ended at the same place, the overpass where his family had died.

Just before nightfall, Yusuf rejoined him in the cabin. The Juno’s crew was entirely Muslim, and the call to prayer came over the ship’s intercom five times daily, as Muslim law required. At sunset, the call for the fifth and final daily prayer — the mugrib—came, and Yusuf knelt on the floor of the cabin. Nasiji watched.

“You didn’t want to pray?” Yusuf said when he was done.

“I didn’t want to throw up.”

“Why do you think Allah’s chosen us for this mission, Sayyid?” Yusuf had never raised the question before. It seemed to be as close as he could come to questioning his faith, or the morality of what they were doing, Nasiji thought.

“Because he knew we were strong enough to carry it off.” The easy answer.

“Does he speak to you?”

“Do I look like a prophet, Yusuf?”

“But you’re certain.”

“Yes. We’re his instrument.” If divine sanction would soothe Yusuf, then Nasiji would give it to him. Let Yusuf think what he wished, as long as his hands stayed steady. Nasiji didn’t need God’s voice in his ear to know why he’d undertaken this quest.

“Do you imagine what it will be like when we set it off?”

“Of course.”

“Does it scare you? Killing all those people.”

“No. Not for this life or the next.” This was true. “Never forget it was the Americans who set off the first bomb. You know the Enola Gay?”

“What is that?”

“The plane the Americans used to drop that first bomb on Hiroshima. The pilot who flew it was called Paul. He lived a long time, until he was more than ninety. One day I saw an interview he gave. They asked him if he felt sad about what he’d done.”

“And was he?”

“Not at all.” Nasiji tried to remember exactly what Paul Tibbets had said. “He said, ‘We’ve never fought a war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. That’s their tough luck for being there.’”

AFTER NIGHTFALL the waves lessened and Nasiji slept, waking to a light tapping on their cabin door. “The captain says it’s time,” Haidar said. Nasiji’s watch read 23:30.

When they reached the wheelhouse, Nasiji saw that the rain had stopped. But thudding clouds covered the sky and the black waves beneath them were topped with white foam. “Ready for the little boat?” Haxhi said.

“How long will it take?”

“Ninety minutes, maybe. It’s twenty kilometers”—twelve miles.

“We can’t get closer?”

“There’s not much chance the Canadians will notice us here. Closer in. ”

“Fine.”

“It won’t be the most pleasant hour of your life, but you’ll be fine. Believe it or not, this is average weather for the North Atlantic in January.”

“Who’s bringing us in?”

“Me and Ebban”—the first mate—“I told you you’d be safe and you will. At least on the water. Land is another story.”

“That part I’ll handle.”

“Let’s go, then.”

The lifeboat was lashed with cables to the freighter’s port side, a high-sided steel boat, painted black, with a small outboard engine. Haxhi and his men had already pulled off the heavy green plastic tarp that covered it and laid the warhead crates inside. They were wrapped in plastic and strapped to the sides of the boat with thick ropes. As Nasiji watched, they wrapped the long SPG crate in plastic and wedged it snugly under the lifeboat’s benches. The fourth and smallest crate, the one that held the rounds, they also wrapped in plastic and tucked under the front bench.

Nasiji stepped forward gingerly toward the lifeboat, eyeing the black waves below. He could hardly believe that this little boat, six meters long, would get them to shore. Haxhi handed him a life jacket, orange and battered. He snapped it over his windbreaker. A blast of harsh Atlantic wind cut through his gloves and sweater and settled mercilessly into his lungs.

“Step back and keep clear,” Haxhi said.

Nasiji stepped back and Haxhi yelled “Now!” to Ebban, the first mate, another Albanian, who stood beside a spool of cable attached to the side of the Juno’s superstructure. Ebban turned the handle on the spool. The cable, which was wound through braces attached to the side of the lifeboat, played out. Inch by inch, the lifeboat slid toward the edge of the Juno as Haxhi guided it toward a gap in the steel railing.

Bang! The lifeboat cleared the side of the deck and slipped down, clanging against the side of the Juno. Holding the railing with his right hand, Haxhi reached back with his left to Nasiji. “All right, two big steps and in.”

“Jump?”

“You can’t miss.”

Nasiji took Haxhi’s hand, stepped through the gap, and fell—

Into the boat. He regained his feet and pulled himself forward to the front bench. Yusuf followed. Then Ebban and finally Haxhi.

“Go,” Haxhi shouted back to Haidar, who had taken over the spool from Ebban. The boat lurched downward, foot by foot, into the water below. It landed with a huge splash and rocked sideways, clanging hard against the Juno. Ebban loosened the cables and freed it. In the back, Haxhi started the outboard. The engine grunted twice and then kicked into action. Haxhi pushed the motor down and steered the boat away.

The black outline of the freighter quickly disappeared behind them. The slap of the waves and the hum of the outboard were the only sounds. After about twenty minutes Nasiji saw the first sign of land — a light, faintly visible through the clouds, tracking from right to left before him, disappearing, then returning. On each pass, the light was slightly stronger. A lighthouse. Proof they hadn’t left solid ground entirely behind.

Nasiji was feeling almost comfortable. Then the wind picked up and the clouds thickened and the light before them disappeared. The waves rose and slapped against the side of the boat. One broke over and caught Nasiji with a flume of water so cold that for a few seconds he could hardly breathe. Snow began to blow sideways across the boat, leaving them nearly blind. Nasiji huddled low in the center of the boat, one hand on each of the crates.

“Where did this come from?”

“It happens. It’ll pass.” But Haxhi’s voice had a new tension. Haxhi muttered something to Ebban. The first mate moved to the front of the boat and began to chatter at Haxhi about the direction of the waves and the wind. Haxhi tacked aggressively, running the boat against the side of the waves instead of coming at them directly. With no light, he checked the GPS frequently now.

The wind picked up more, then gusted suddenly—

And a big wave, the biggest Nasiji had seen yet, swept in from the port side—

And the boat rocked hard and Nasiji thought they might capsize—

And the crate beside Nasiji’s left foot began to wobble—

And as the boat swung up and bounced down again, somehow the crate came loose from its ropes—

And Nasiji tried to steady it but he couldn’t keep hold of it and another wave crashed into the boat and knocked him down and he had to forget the crate and wrap his arms around the cold metal seat as tightly as he could to keep from being thrown out—

And the crate tumbled, loose now, the wood crashing against the boat’s steel, and rolled sideways and perched for a fraction of a second on the gunwale of the boat—

And then fell out as another wave knocked into them — and splashed into the water and sank—

“NO!” Nasiji yelled—

And as he did, he heard Ebban scream “Allah!”—

And twisted his head forward to see Ebban clinging to the front of the boat, losing his grip—

And falling into the water.

JUST AS SUDDENLY as it had hit, the worst of the squall seemed to pass. The boat steadied. The waves grabbed Ebban and pulled him away. He fought, trying desperately to make his way toward them as the waves thrashed him.

“Here!” he screamed to them. “Here!”

Haxhi swung the tiller sideways to turn the boat. Nasiji stepped toward the back of the boat and reached for his arm.

“What—”

“We’ve lost one already. We can’t afford it.”

“Help me!” Ebban’s voice was high and terrified. “Please!”

“He’s my first mate,” Haxhi said uncertainly. “I’ve known him—”

“He’ll freeze to death even if we can rescue him,” Nasiji said. Yusuf inched toward Haxhi, one hand on the long curved dagger that had so frightened poor Grigory Farzadov.

Haxhi took one last glimpse at Ebban and turned away. “God forgive us, then,” Haxhi said. “All of us.” He turned the lifeboat toward shore and gunned the engine.

An endless minute passed before Ebban’s screams faded. In the boat the three men were silent, even when the wind lessened and the snow stopped and the lighthouse spotlight broke through the clouds again.

We’re Allah’s instrument, Nasiji had told Yusuf this afternoon. But Allah had deserted them this night. Three years of work, the perfect theft, destroyed by a knot tied too loosely and a freak squall that had passed as fast as it came.

They still had one bomb left. How much uranium did it hold? He was hoping for thirty kilograms. But he didn’t think he could build a gun-type bomb with thirty kilograms of uranium. That’s why I stole two. I needed two. I had to have two. And I did. But now I don’t. Maybe, with a beryllium reflector. but he had no beryllium. Well, tomorrow morning he’d ask Bernard to try again for some. Meanwhile they still had to get this bomb off this boat and over the United States border and then begin the tedious, dangerous work of exposing the core.

For the next half-hour, Nasiji sat at the front of the boat, his head bowed into the wind, as the outlines of the granite headlands of Newfoundland finally emerged through the clouds and Nasiji, like the Vikings and the English and all the explorers before him, caught his first glimpse of a new world. The English had come to conquer North America. They’d succeeded only too well. Now Nasiji was here to give their bastard descendants a lesson in humility.

As they closed on the land, Nasiji glimpsed a few lights from the houses of Trepassey. The village ran along a road carved into the side of the coast, behind and above the outcropping where the lighthouse stood proudly alone. But they were still at least two kilometers — more than a mile — from the village, and even as Nasiji recognized its shape, Haxhi slowed the boat’s engine and steered them west and out of sight. Slowly, he steered toward a little half-moon cove that was shielded from the eye of the lighthouse by a crumbling cliff. They entered the cove and the waves shrank and the Atlantic sighed and released them at last. Though its waters had extracted more than enough tribute tonight, Nasiji thought.

Haxhi beached the lifeboat and killed the engine. The SUV, a big Ford, sat at the inner edge of the cove. The Ford rolled forward on the big flat stones that formed the beach and stopped beside them. Bashir, a tall man with thick black hair, emerged and walked toward the boat as Yusuf and Nasiji jumped out. “My brothers,” he said.

13

The steak filled Kowalski’s plate, a cowboy’s wet dream, an inch thick and marbled through with rich fat. A slab of grass-fed Kobe beef straight off the Swiss Air nonstop that connected Tokyo and Zurich. Seared in butter on the oversized Viking range in Kowalski’s kitchen, delivered directly to the dining room, still cooking in its own juices, sizzling and succulent, medium-rare.

Kowalski had dreamed of this piece of meat ever since that infernal dietician Rossi arrived in his life with his broiled fish and his tofu salads. Today he had decided to defy Rossi and indulge himself. A steak, the best money could buy, and a bottle of burgundy.

So why wasn’t he hungry?

Kowalski cut off a tiny corner of the steak and lifted it to his lips. And yet as he looked at his plate, he saw nothing but Roman Yansky’s corpse, his neck sawn nearly in half, his body drenched in so much of his own blood that he seemed to have been painted red. Kowalski had asked Markov to e-mail him the photographs that the FSB and the Moscow police had taken of the scene. Now he wished he hadn’t. He felt like a condemned prisoner eating his last meal. He choked the steak down with a swig of wine and pushed his plate aside. Maybe he ought to become a vegetarian.

“Pierre,” Nadia said soothingly. “Are you all right?”

Her fingers fluttered involuntarily to the sapphire necklace he’d bought her from Tiffany’s, as if she needed to remind herself why she was here with him.

“It’s that fool Rossi,” he said. “I hear him in my head. Fish, fish, and only fish. Nonsense, I know. But I can’t shake it.”

“You’ve been good,” she said. “There’s no harm in a steak now and then. I’ve been reading this book called The Secret, an American book—”

Kowalski stifled a groan at the thought of Nadia reading.

“Alessandra gave it to me.”

“What is this, Models’ Book Club?”

“And it says that the secret to happiness is to wish for what you want, to realize and self-actualize—”

“Please, Nadia. I have enough trouble actualizing anyone else, much less myself.”

“Hush. Yes, realize and self-actualize and your dreams will come true. Like this.” She lifted the necklace, and despite himself Kowalski was stunned by its brilliance. “I walked by Tiffany’s and wished for it a dozen times, and now. here it is.”

A dozen wishes and 600,000 francs, Kowalski thought. “Only a dozen wishes? Imagine what you could have had for a hundred.”

“No, Pierre. This was what I wanted.” She spoke unironically and with absolute certainty. He wasn’t sure whether she didn’t get the joke or simply refused to engage it. Or maybe she believed every word she was saying. After all, the sheer genetic good luck of having been born beautiful had carried her from a village in eastern Ukraine to this mansion.

She seemed to read his mind. She smiled, a brilliant open smile that had sold lipstick from Sydney to Stockholm. “Why not wish for a necklace? If I don’t get it, I’m no worse off than before.” She reached across the table and pushed his plate toward him. “Now you’ve wished for your steak and it’s come and you must enjoy it. Before it gets cold.”

It was a philosophy both idiotic and irrefutable. Kowalski couldn’t help but eat. As long as he kept his mind off Roman Yansky, the meat actually was quite tasty. He had nearly finished it when his phone trilled. Tarasov.

“Yes, Anatoly?”

“We’ve just landed.”

“Good.” Tarasov’s flight from Moscow had twice been delayed by heavy snow in Zurich. “Be in my office in an hour.”

KOWALSKI AND TARASOV stared in silence at the Zürichsee. A thick white blanket of snow covered the ground, hiding the southern shore of the lake and giving the illusion that the water extended to infinity.

Finally, Tarasov cleared his throat.

“Where should I begin?”

“He killed those men as if they were children.” Somehow Kowalski couldn’t bring himself to say Wells’s name, as if the mere act of speaking it would make Wells appear in this room like a genie.

“Not children, Pierre. I knew Roman fifteen years.”

“Then how?”

“He and they are the only ones who know for sure. And they can hardly tell. So it’s only guessing now. They were ready for trouble. They weren’t sure who he was but they didn’t trust his story, even though the Frenchman had vouched for him. He was frisked at the club, the Ten Places, before he met Roman. The doorman is certain he wasn’t carrying a knife. Yet somehow he got to Roman, cut him open. Shot the other two with Roman’s pistol.”

“He’s very quick,” Kowalski said, remembering that night in the Hamptons. “He sees and decides and moves all at once—”

“Put me in a room with him and we’ll see who is quicker,” Tarasov said. But his voice wavered.

“You don’t even believe your own words,” Kowalski said.

“He didn’t get what he wanted. Markov’s still alive.”

“I’m sure that’s comforting for Roman and the bodyguards. You encouraged this, Anatoly. Last summer you told me to go after him.”

“And last week you told me that my only responsibility was spending my salary.”

Kowalski’s chest clenched. Was this the heart attack Dr. Breton had promised him? Finally the pain faded, though he felt flushed and short of breath. Tarasov laid a hand on his arm.

“If I die of a heart attack, do you think our American friend will call us even?”

“Shall I call your doctor?”

Kowalski sat down heavily. “Forget it. Just tell me what Markov told you.”

“Well, he disappeared quickly,” Tarasov said. “He was probably on an American passport. The Frenchman who vouched for him left the day after the attacks, on a diplomatic passport. They’ve both vanished.”

“So what has Markov done? Gone to the FSB?”

“He doesn’t feel he can.”

Markov was in a tough spot, Tarasov explained. He couldn’t finger Wells for the murders without admitting that he and Kowalski had been behind the attack in Washington. He feared if he confessed that attack, his friends at the FSB would be furious. They’d surely want revenge, but on whom? Wells, for killing Russians in the middle of Moscow? Markov and Kowalski, for the initial attack? All three?

So Markov was keeping his mouth shut. He’d told police investigating the attack that he had no idea who had targeted his men. Everyone knew he had plenty of enemies. As a result, the Moscow police, not the FSB, were leading the investigation, and were naturally focusing inside Russia. Anyway, the FSB had other concerns at the moment, Tarasov said.

“Other concerns?”

“I’ll get to those.”

“So Markov’s bought some time. For him and us. Does he know how Wells found him?”

Tarasov shook his head. “He thinks the American investigation must be further along than anyone knows.”

“Does Wells know about me?”

“Markov has no idea. He thinks we should just keep our mouths shut for a while. Let Wells be. He says Wells must know that he can’t get to us now,” Tarasov said. “And if he keeps on, the results will be disastrous for America and Russia both. Markov killed two CIA men in Washington, Wells killed three of Markov’s in Moscow, so they’re even.”

Kowalski considered. “Maybe Wells would agree that he’s even with Markov. But he won’t feel that way about me. If he thinks I ordered the attack, he won’t stop until I’m gone. In fact—”

Kowalski broke off as Markov’s next step became obvious to him. He wondered if it was equally obvious to Markov. Probably. Probably Markov was trying to find Wells even now. To confess. To apologize. And to give Wells a name. Pierre Kowalski. You remember him, naturally? Yes, he hired me. Perhaps you’d guessed already. But I thought you would want to be certain.

And after that call. Wells would have only one target left. He couldn’t get to Markov. He’d pushed his luck in Moscow too far already. But Zurich wasn’t Moscow, and Kowalski didn’t have the Kremlin protecting him. Worst of all, Kowalski didn’t have anything to give to convince Wells to quit hunting him. Maybe he ought to try Nadia’s suggestion and just wish for Wells to disappear.

Kowalski reached into his desk for a battered pack of Dunhills. He hadn’t smoked for years, but tonight seemed like a good time to start again. Maybe he could smoke and eat his way into a heart attack and deny Wells the pleasure of killing him.

“So no one knows where Wells is?”

“Probably Washington. Maybe your friends there can find him?”

The Dunhill was stale, and after a single puff Kowalski tossed it aside. “Not yet. One thing I’m sure of, now that he’s on the scent, he won’t let up. We won’t have to go after him. He’ll come to us.”

“All right,” Tarasov said. “As for the other thing—”

“What other thing?”

“The uranium.”

“Of course.” Kowalski had been so focused on Wells that he’d forgotten the reason he’d sent Tarasov to Russia in the first place. “What about it?”

“No one’s talking much. Not even my oldest friends. But I think you were right. They’ve had a bad loss, more serious than they told you.”

“How bad? A kilo? Two kilos?”

Tarasov rubbed his neck tiredly. “It seems impossible. But I think they might have lost a bomb. Or at least enough material to make one.”

For the second time in five minutes Kowalski felt as though a big hand had reached through his ribs into his chest and given his heart an unfriendly squeeze. A nuclear weapon was missing?

“You said lost. Lost or stolen?”

“Stolen.”

“Are you sure?”

“No one will tell me for sure. But they’re going full-blast down around Chelyabinsk. Half the FSB is there. Lots of arrests, lots of Muslims getting knocked around.”

“What else?”

“They’ve put all their bases on lockdown. And the Mayak plant. They’re inventorying all their weapons. This I know for sure. And on the highways into Moscow they’ve set up rolling roadblocks. Not constant. I don’t think they want to frighten people.”

“No one’s noticed?”

“You know the media there. If the Kremlin says don’t talk about something, they don’t.”

“Anything else?”

“They’ve asked Interpol and even the United States to look for a man named Grigory Farzadov. They’re saying he’s a smuggler. But he’s not a smuggler. He’s a manager at the Mayak plant. He and his cousin disappeared several weeks ago and haven’t been seen since. The cousin also works at the plant. Or worked.”

“Are they Russian?”

“They must be, to have worked at the plant.”

“Anything else?”

“Not just now.”

“All right. Thank you, Anatoly. Leave me now. I need to think about this.”

At the door, Tarasov turned. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“Don’t we both know by now that anything’s possible?”

A FEW MINUTES LATER, Nadia peeked in.

“Are you all right, Pierre?”

“Yes, angel. Come in.”

She sat beside him on the couch and ran a hand over his face. She wore yoga pants and a tight black wool sweater. If Kowalski hadn’t been so worried about a heart attack, he would have popped open the bottle of Viagra he kept in the desk drawer and taken her right then. Tried to, anyway. “I know I’m not supposed to ask about business, but is something wrong?”

“I’m dealing with a very unpleasant man,” Kowalski said.

“You’ve tried to talk with him.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“You should try. You’re very persuasive, you know.” She kissed his cheek.

“But in business, Nadia, you need leverage. You understand?” Kowalski wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt the need to explain himself, but he did.

“Sure. You give him something, he gives you.”

“And I don’t have anything to give him.”

But even as he spoke, Kowalski realized he might be wrong. If Tarasov was right, he might have something very valuable indeed for Wells.

14

Wells wound down the handle of his Honda and poured west on 66 through the Virginia exburbs at eighty miles an hour. Tonight he had become tiresome even to himself. The burned-out cop downing whiskey at an empty bar, moaning that he’d never make detective. The third-rate poet sipping cappuccino in Starbucks, bitching how he’d never get published. And Wells tonight, the world-weary spy sucking down gasoline and ruing his fate. I saved the world and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. Usually he heard songs in his head as he rode, but tonight even the asphalt and the wind were too bored with him to talk.

To complete his misery, Wells hadn’t dressed properly for the cold. He could barely keep a grip on the handlebars. The scar tissue in his back had turned into a solid block of ice, and his bad left shoulder — worked over by the Chinese a few months before — felt about ready to pop loose. He wasn’t a machine. Though he pretended he was. And everyone seemed to believe him.

In the Honda’s lone eye Wells saw a sign for an exit a mile ahead. He closed his eyes and counted ten. Then five more. One. two. three. four. five. Before the darkness could take him too far, he looked up. He’d ridden blind almost a half-mile. He laid off the gas, gearing down into fourth. The bike was solid and quick under him. Whatever his sins, he still knew how to ride. At the bottom of the ramp, he swung left under the highway. He’d seen a Denny’s sign on the other side of the highway and that sounded about right.

The restaurant was empty, aside from a table of teenagers joking loudly about whatever teenagers joked about these days. The boys had tight haircuts and the girls wore sweatshirts that even Wells could tell weren’t fashionable. No doubt they lived farther out on 66, maybe even somewhere on 81. To the south and west of here, Virginia turned country fast.

One of the kids was dipping, spitting into a Coke can under the table. He wore a U.S. Marines T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. Wells wanted to ask the kid if he was really enlisting, and if so why he’d decided to sign up, what he hoped to find. But he kept his mouth shut. The world needed soldiers, and if the kid wanted to become one, Wells could hardly tell him he was making a mistake.

No one in the place noticed Wells, and for that he was happy.

The waitress came over, fifty-five, with a smoker’s lined face and brown eyes and heavy shoulders and sensible black shoes. She smiled at him, a big creased smile, as she placed a glass of water on the table. And Wells felt even more of a fool. This woman was probably living in a trailer up in the hills trying to make ends meet, and she was taking care of him.

She looked at the helmet. “You all right? Cold night for riding.”

“That it is.”

“Well, you know you can stay in here till you get warm. As long as you like.”

“I look that bad?”

“Tired, is all. What can I get you?”

Wells ordered coffee and scrambled eggs and hash browns. No Grand Slam for him, he didn’t eat pork, the last trace of his Muslim identity. Then he indulged himself with a chocolate milkshake. The food came fast. The ride had left him with an appetite, and he inhaled the shake and ate every scrap of food. The waitress — Diane was her name — kept her word, filling up his coffee cup but otherwise leaving him alone, leaving him to think over the last few days.

GETTING OUT OF RUSSIA the morning after the murders had been easy. The agent at Sheremetyevo flipped through his American passport and looked him up and down, taking in his freshly pressed shirt and the TAG Heuer watch he was wearing to complete his cover. Just another American. Without a word, he stamped the passport and Wells was free to go.

But his arrival in New York was another story. As soon as the immigration agent at JFK scanned his passport, Wells knew something was wrong. Her smile faded, then returned at higher wattage. To keep him happy until the guards arrived, he assumed. Sure enough, a door at the end of the long hallway opened and three big men in blue uniforms strode his way.

“Can you come with us?” the lead uniform said.

Wells didn’t argue. They frisked him, took his shoes, wallet, belt. Then they shunted him to a narrow holding cell, windowless and concrete. A guard checked him every hour, peeking through a steel panel in the door. Wells didn’t mind the holdup. He closed his eyes and napped on the narrow steel cot. He found himself in a crumbling mosque, looking through a crack in the ceiling at the blue sky above. He knelt to pray and saw beside him Omar Khadri, the terrorist whom Wells had killed in Times Square. Khadri finished his prayers and turned to Wells. You’ve lost your way, Khadri told him. You’ve lost the faith and you’ll pay. Khadri’s teeth were fangs and he—

Wells tired of the dream. He knew he was dreaming and decided to wake and did. Instead of sleeping, he examined imperfections in the concrete, looking for patterns in the meaningless whorls.

“Waiting for me to pass a baggie?” Wells said to the guard about six hours on. “May take a while.”

“Someone’ll be here soon enough.” The guard clanked the panel shut.

Two hours more passed before the door finally opened. Wells popped up. Shafer and two guards stood outside. Wells shrank into a corner. “Noo!” he yelled. The guards took a half-step back.

“Send me to Guantánamo,” Wells said. “But don’t leave me with him.”

“John, enough,” Shafer said.

“This guy’s into crazy stuff. I’m serious. Cattle prods, nipple clamps—”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m leaving you here.”

“Fine,” Wells said sulkily.

“This is John Wells,” Shafer said to the guards as Wells slid into his shoes. “Bet you didn’t think he’d be such a jackass.”

NEITHER OF THEM SPOKE until they reached the New Jersey Turnpike and Shafer said, “Duto wanted to teach you a lesson, leave you in the Hotel JFK for a couple of days. I told him it wouldn’t be much of a lesson.”

Wells didn’t respond. Shafer was right, of course. Shafer knew that ten years in the Northwest Frontier had taught him patience.

“You stepped in it this time, John.”

“Ellis, watch the road.” Shafer was driving a black agency Suburban, and, illegally, flashing the red lights mounted in the grille as he cut through traffic. “As far as I can see, the agency still owes me a couple of favors.”

“I’m not talking about the agency.”

“Please, no Exley advice, Ellis. Stick to Duto. Does he know where I was?”

“Of course he knows.” Shafer sounded irritated at the question. “And he knows about Markov.”

“What about the Russians? Have they fingered me?”

“Strangely enough, no. At least they haven’t said anything to us.”

“Markov’s staying quiet.”

An eighteen-wheeler blasted them with its airhorn as Shafer cut in front of it.

“You’re the worst driver I’ve ever seen. And that includes the jihadis.”

Shafer slowed down, turned his head, stared at Wells. “I hope this little trip of yours was worth it.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know.” Shafer flicked on the radio, WCBS 880, the all-news station in New York, and they listened to the world’s hum. Two dead soldiers in Iraq, a big oil find off the coast of Brazil, some starlet arrested again, the Giants getting ready for the NFC finals. Last and least, a triple murder in the South Bronx, drug-related, the police said. No news on Wells’s own triple murder in Moscow, but why would there be? Every minute, people everywhere died too soon. Three dead in Moscow, two in Bangkok, four in Johannesburg, one in Newark, an endless tide of mayhem, far too much for a single radio station to track. The police would always be in business.

“Not much happening,” Wells said aloud.

“Maybe there is.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll let Duto tell you.”

WHEN THEY REACHED the Beltway, Wells thought Shafer would swing east, toward 295, the feeder road that led to central Washington and Exley. Instead he turned west, the highway to Langley. It was near midnight and the road was nearly empty and they made good time. In barely fifteen minutes they’d crossed the long flat bridge that spanned the Potomac and turned onto the Georgetown Pike.

“Now?” Wells said.

“Duto wants to see you.”

“When did he start working so hard? When did you turn into his errand boy?” Wells wanted to see Exley, not Vinny Duto.

“Let’s get it over with.”

Just past midnight, they walked into Duto’s office, a square room with a heavy wooden desk and views over the Langley campus. The windows were bulletproof glass, tinted, and three layers thick for security. The furniture was generic chief executive, a mahogany desk and heavy brown leather chairs. Wells wondered whether Duto had chosen the decor in a deliberate effort to connect with the agency’s WASPy history, the Ivy League mystique that had permeated the place during the 1950s, when half the CIA seemed to have gone to Yale. Duto had actually attended the University of Minnesota, where he’d graduated in three years with a history degree. Oddly enough, Wells was the only Ivy Leaguer in the room. Shafer had gone to MIT.

An oversized wooden bookcase across from Duto’s desk was filled with military histories, beginning with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and stretching through the millennia. The titles of the newest books, about the Iraq war, didn’t inspire confidence: Fiasco, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Generation Kill. The books were slightly out-of-order, as if Duto had actually read them. Wells wondered. He’d never thought of Duto as intellectually curious.

“John.” Duto was reading a black-bordered file and didn’t rise from behind his desk, didn’t extend a hand.

Wells sat. “Commandante Duto.” Duto didn’t smile. He scribbled a note on a yellow legal pad and flipped the file closed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Duto said. “You’re thinking, you can drag me in here at midnight, yell at me, make me sit through this, but you can’t touch me. After what I’ve done, I’m untouchable. But you’re wrong. It’ll be ugly as hell, but I can get rid of you.” Duto’s tone was steady.

“Vinny—” Shafer said.

“This is between me and him, and if you don’t like it, the door’s behind you,” Duto said to Shafer, without breaking eye contact with Wells. “Understand this, John. If what happened in Moscow comes out, you’ll have to go. We’ll protect you, we’ll tell everybody you had PTSD and snapped. Maybe it’s even true. We’ll make sure you never get charged with anything. And it’ll be a real tragedy, losing John Wells, the hero of Times Square. But that’ll be that. Can’t have a guy who just murdered three Russians on the U.S. government payroll.”

“I guess we’re skipping the small talk,” Wells said.

“And if you’ve thought it through at all, which I’ll bet you haven’t, since thinking ahead isn’t your strong suit, you’re probably figuring that worst case, even if we fire you, you’ll get by. Because you’ve always gotten by. But ask yourself, John, if you didn’t have this, what would you do? Be a mercenary? Be a stuntman, maybe?”

“Stuntman,” Wells said. The idea was oddly appealing.

“How about a mercenary? You see yourself protecting some billionaire in Mexico City?”

“Maybe I’ll move back to Montana and fish.”

“You may think you want to stop, but you’re way past that now.”

The intimacy of Duto’s tone irritated Wells. “When did we get to be such good friends, Vinny?”

“Guys like you, there’s only one way out. Two ways, but they’re the same. You get too old, or you die.”

“Isn’t that true for everybody?”

“You don’t even see what we do for you. We’re the reason you can look in the mirror and say, I did it all for the good guys. Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May not be much, but it’s something. Without it, you’re just a stone-cold killer.”

“If you’re my moral compass, I’m in worse shape than I thought.”

“Then leave right now, go to Moscow or Beijing or wherever. Plenty of people would be glad to hire a man with your talents.” Duto waited. “No, John? I didn’t think so.”

“You made your point,” Shafer said. “No need to rub his face in it.”

“You think I don’t like you, John,” Duto said. “And I don’t. You’ve been twitchy ever since you came back and you’re getting worse. But lemme tell you a secret. I think I’d still rather have you playing for us.”

A vote of confidence. Not exactly what Wells had expected to hear.

“But can I make a request? Next time, at least give us a chance. Make killing three guys the last resort. Not the first.”

“I get it.” Wells hated the idea of apologizing to this man. But what could he do? Duto was right. In third grade, tossing a baseball with his friends in the street in Hamilton, Wells had broken the window of a neighbor’s house. He still remembered the glistening sound of the glass shattering, how the pride he’d felt at the unexpected strength of his arm had faded into fear. I did wrong. It was an accident, but I did wrong and I have to tell. Tonight he had the same feeling. “I’m sorry, Vinny,” he said. “Three guys dead and I didn’t even get the one I came for. I apologize. Nothing else to say.”

The apology seemed to surprise Duto as much as Duto’s endorsement had surprised Wells. “It’s all right,” Duto said finally. “You had reason.”

“Nobody’s gonna believe this,” Shafer said. “Lions and lambs together. Though I can’t tell who’s who.” He stood, stretched his arms out toward Wells and Duto. “Group hug? Circle of trust?”

“Quiet, Ellis,” Duto said.

Wells wasn’t sure what came next. He’d apologized, but his visceral dislike for Duto remained. “So,” he said. “Where does that leave us? With the Russians?”

“Smiling and lying,” Duto said. “Same as ever. So far the FSB hasn’t fingered you, at least to us.”

“You think it’s possible they don’t know?”

“Maybe Markov is keeping his mouth shut because he knows he can’t let on it was you without admitting that he’s behind the attack here. If you’ll leave Markov alone it all might disappear.” Duto leaned forward. “Can you live with that? If not, we’re right back where we started.”

Wells looked away from Duto, scanning the bookcase. He’d blown his chance at Markov forever. The man wouldn’t leave Moscow for the next ten years. Anyway, Markov was just a functionary, an order-taker for Kowalski. He’d tried to kill Wells and failed. Now Wells had done the same to him.

“Done.”

“Simple as that,” Duto said.

“Simple as that.”

“What about Pierre Kowalski?”

Wells shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Of course Duto knew. Shafer must have told him, probably by way of explanation for the reason why Wells had been so sure the killers were Russian.

“What about him?”

“You’ll let us take care of him, instead of going at him yourself?”

After the apology he’d just made, Wells didn’t see a choice. “Okay.”

“You sure?” Duto waited.

“I’m sure.”

“Good. Because if you’re back on the reservation, I have something for you. What’s been keeping me here tonight.”

Duto handed Wells a thin folder, red with a black border. Just six pages inside, but by the time Wells was done reading, he understood why Duto was still at the office.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s it,” Duto said.

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

“The Russians haven’t told us.”

“Have we asked?” Shafer said.

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

“These guys have terrorist ties? Russian mafia?”

“The FSB won’t say.”

“Religion?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We aim to please,” Shafer said.

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

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

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

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

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

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

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

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

“I do—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“This is Pierre Kowalski.”

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

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