The Silent Man

15

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

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

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

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

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

“Interesting,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, uncle.”

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

“The Americans.”

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

“The Americans?”

“Just so.”

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

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

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

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

“Look at him. He’s no threat.”

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

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

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

“Are you all right, uncle?”

“I miss my cigarettes. And my pills.”

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

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

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

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

“Of course.”

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

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

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

“All right. I promise.”

“Good. Now tell me about your auntie.”

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

“Time’s up.”

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

“Time’s up.”

“You can’t — I won’t—”

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

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

“What’s this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much will it all cost?”

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

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

“I think you can guess.”

“A bomb.”

“A big bomb.”

“The biggest?”

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

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

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

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

In the years since their first meeting, Bashir had met Nasiji several more times in Montreal. But Bashir was under no illusions about who was in charge of the operation. Its ultimate success or failure would fall on Nasiji. It was Nasiji who had decided to bring the bombs in through Canada, where Bashir and his wife would pick them up, ferry them to Nova Scotia, and truck them over the United States border. In a big SUV filled with ski equipment and suitcases, the bombs wouldn’t stand out. Bashir had wondered about the scheme, which seemed to him too complicated by half, but Nasiji was the boss.

Now they’d suffered disaster, no way around it. Nasiji had always told Bashir they’d have two bombs to work with. Two into one, he called the plan. And though Bashir wasn’t a nuclear physicist, he understood that being short of material made their task immensely more complicated.

Well, at least they’d gotten the one bomb across the border. After the pickup, Bashir and Thalia had driven across Newfoundland through the night and caught a ferry to Sydney, Nova Scotia, a roiling two-hundred-mile trip. From Sydney they drove to Montreal. They told the border guards on the New York State Thruway that the skiing on Mont Tremblant had been great but promised that next time they’d try Lake Placid. Then they were through.

Meanwhile, Nasiji and Yusuf had taken the easy way in. After resting for a night in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, they’d hopped a Continental flight that conveniently enough went nonstop to Newark. From there they would rent a car and drive to the farm. And the real work of making the bomb would begin.

16

Zurich was calm and rich and Wells disliked it immediately, for no good reason. Maybe because Kowalski lived here. Maybe that was enough. Wells hadn’t taken any great precautions for this trip. He’d even checked into the hotel under his own name. He had his Glock and the agency knew he was here, all the protection he needed. He couldn’t imagine Kowalski had invited him just to take another shot at him.

Wells was staying at the Baur au Lac, a five-star hotel downtown. The place stank of endless wealth, fortunes that would last until the sun exploded and its flames swallowed the world. Perversely, Wells had taken a suite, handing over his agency credit card, imagining an auditor at Langley choking on his coffee as he saw the $3,000-a-night room.

As soon as the bellhop left him in the room, he reached for the phone. Kowalski answered on the first ring. “Hallo?”

“I’m at the Baur au Lac.” Come and get me, Wells thought.

“Mr. Wells. Shall we meet in the bar in the lobby, tonight at six?”

“I’ll be there.” Wells hung up.

THE BAR WAS REALLY a sitting room, a fifty-foot square with dark wood walls and a faded gold carpet. Men in dark suits and white shirts sat at tables sipping beers, reading Die Zeit or the Financial Times. In one corner a fifty-something blonde in an electric-blue blouse, diamonds glittering on her wrist and neck and ears, sat on a couch between two younger men, talking equally to them both. They leaned forward as if they’d never heard anything so interesting. Her investment advisers, perhaps. Or nephews hoping for a loan.

Kowalski sat in the opposite corner, slumped on a sofa behind a low coffee table. He was wearing a rumpled blue suit, cream shirt, no tie. He seemed smaller than when Wells had seen him last, though hardly svelte. Two men flanked him, one about Wells’s size, the other tall and thin and ugly. They stood as Wells walked near, and Wells recognized the big one, Anatoly Tarasov, Kowalski’s head of security. He was shorter than Wells but thicker in the shoulders. He had the cauliflower ears and flattened nose of a boxer. Wells figured he could go twelve rounds with Tarasov, but he wasn’t sure he’d get the decision. The other man stood to the side and didn’t bother with eye contact, focusing instead on Wells’s hands. His own hands were slipped under his jacket. He was the dangerous one. He was the shooter.

As Wells reached the table, Kowalski grunted and stood and extended a hand. Wells let it dangle in the air until Kowalski pulled it back and lowered himself down to the couch.

“Mr. Wells. I hope you don’t mind my bringing friends. This is Anatoly, and the gentleman in the corner is called the Dragon.” Kowalski raised his glass. “Would you like a drink? I’m having Riesling, very dry. Very nice.”

Wells saw no reason to speak.

“You know where the word hotel comes from?” Kowalski said. “Six, seven hundred years ago, the Middle Ages, trade picked up and merchants began to travel, selling goods. They needed places to stay. Before that travelers had slept in monasteries or castles, but these merchants didn’t know the local priests or barons. They were stuck. So in the bigger towns, the leading bars added hostels — places anyone could stay, with his safety guaranteed.”

“And hostels became hotels.”

“Exactly. Consider this such a place. Don’t be afraid to have a drink. Take my glass if you like.”

“You think I’m afraid?” Wells said. “I didn’t come here for your hospitality. Or history lessons.”

“Besides, your bosses know you’re here, and if I touch you all the bodyguards in the world can’t protect me,” Kowalski said. “A Black Hawk full of Deltas will come to my house and grab me and toss me into the Zürichsee from a thousand meters up.”

“You have a vivid imagination.”

“Maybe a drink later, then. When we know each other better.” Kowalski sipped his wine. “You like Zurich, Mr. Wells? Each year we win the award for the best quality of life. Though for a man of action such as yourself, it must be boring.”

Wells wouldn’t have guessed he could feel anything other than hate for Kowalski. But he did, a profound irritation that sat atop his disgust like barbed wire on an electrified fence. Kowalski reminded Wells of George Tyson, the agency’s head of counterintelligence, another fat man who could never get to the point and who took more than he gave when he finally did.

“And our women are beautiful, of course,” Kowalski said. “The Swiss misses.”

Wells thought of Exley, crying silent tears as she levered herself down the hospital hallway. Kowalski, no one else, was to blame for those tears. And now he was joking about the women of Zurich? Wells’s throat tightened. Instantly, the room was twenty degrees cooler and the conversations around them no longer existed. The universe had shrunk to this corner.

Wells looked at the Dragon, the shooter, and then at Tarasov, calculating geometries. Could he get to his Glock and get two shots off, take out the Dragon first and then Tarasov? Doubtful. He’d need two guns, a cross-draw, Jesse James style. Those only worked in the movies.

The other men seemed to sense that Kowalski had pushed Wells too far. The Dragon reached under his jacket for his own weapon, a little snubnose that he held now beneath his waist, under his clasped hands. Kowalski didn’t move, but his eyes opened slightly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wells. I was impolite. But let’s not disturb the peace of our neighbors.”

Wells leaned back, rested his hands in his lap. Kowalski nodded at the Dragon and the snubnose disappeared.

“Do you have something to tell me? Because now’s the time.” Wells pushed back his chair. “Now or not at all.”

“First, sincerely, I’m sorry about last month. I made a terrible mistake. What you did to me in the Hamptons, it unsettled my equilibrium. I overreacted.”

Wells stood. Kowalski raised a big hand to hold him off.

“I want peace between us. I have something for you.”

For the first time since he’d seen Kowalski, Wells smiled. “This isn’t a bribe, right? Even you aren’t that stupid.”

“A bribe, yes. But not money. Information.”

Wells sat.

FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES, Kowalski filled Wells in on the call he’d gotten from Andrei Pavlov, the deputy director of Rosatom, and about his suspicion that a nuclear weapon had gone missing. Wells didn’t tell Kowalski about the report that Duto had passed to him, but the details seemed to line up.

“So the Russians are missing material,” Wells said when Kowalski was done. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“All right. Let me start at the beginning. Two years ago, a man comes to me, a Turk who lives in Germany, he wants three thousand AKs, a million rounds.”

“What’s his name?”

“Let’s call him the Turk.”

“Clever,” Wells said. “So you did the deal. You weren’t worried the German police were setting you up? Or someone else?”

“If the German police try to sting me, I know it before the men who are running the operation. Anyway, this wasn’t illegal, what he wanted.”

“Isn’t it unusual for someone to come to you like this, out of the blue?”

“Not so much. People know who I am, they know what I do, if they call me I answer. Or one of my men does.”

“But he comes to you, wants to spend a few hundred thousand on rifles, you don’t ask where they’re going.”

“Of course I do. He told me Nigeria, he knew a general there, they’d done business before, used jeeps. This time, the man wanted AKs for a brigade of police, paramilitaries.”

“And this guy, the Turk, he wasn’t lying about the buyer?”

“On a first-time sale like this, I don’t do the deal until I’m sure. So I checked. The story was what the Turk said, Nigeria. It isn’t complicated. You understand how it works?”

Wells shook his head.

“The Turk comes to me with these papers called end-user certificates, a promise by the Nigerian government that the weapons won’t be resold. I check, make sure everything’s in order, I set up the deal. AKs are easy to find, they make them all over the world, China, Russia, Bulgaria, wherever. I buy the AKs for $150, sell them for $220 each, including the transport. Three thousand guns, $70, a nice little profit, $210,000, plus the ammunition. A small deal, but for a few hours work, a few phone calls, not bad.”

“And the Nigerian government can’t do this on its own?”

“Of course it can.” Kowalski’s heavy eyes were half-closed now, as if having to explain all this bored him. “And $220 is a very fair price for a new rifle. But you must understand, the license, the EUC, end-user certificate, it says four thousand AKs, not three thousand.”

“So?”

“So the Turk, or the general, somewhere up the line they’re adding a thousand AKs of their own, old bad guns, maybe cost twenty dollars each, and pocketing the difference. The general finds the Turk, the Turk finds me, everybody makes money. They don’t ask me for a kick-back, even, they just want me to forget the extra thousand rifles. And I’m very good about things like that.”

“No doubt,” Wells said.

“Then, last year, the Turk, he calls me again, another order. Bigger. This time six thousand AKs, a few machine guns, plus a few SPG-nines. Just four.”

“The Spear?” Wells had seen them in Afghanistan. The Spear was a 73-millimeter recoilless rifle, Russian-designed. Basically an oversized bazooka. It was advertised as an antitank gun, but that was an exaggeration. The Spear could take out pickup trucks and medium-armored Humvees, but it wasn’t much use against anything heavier.

“Yes.”

“Did he say why he wanted those?”

“No. Same deal as before. This time the license says eight thousand rifles. Okay. And the Spears, it’s a little strange, they’re under a separate license, but so what, who cares? It’s not like he’s buying a tank.”

“So you sold him the guns.”

“I am an arms dealer, Mr. Wells. I do arms deals. But then, a few months ago—”

“When?”

“Six. Six months. The Turk called me again. This time he wanted beryllium. He was coy about it, very cagey, but he wasn’t joking.”

“Beryllium?”

“A metal. It’s for bombs. Nuclear.”

“Can you use it for anything else?”

“Not so much. Do you understand the physics?” Kowalski explained the rudiments of bomb design, scribbling on a pad he’d brought. After a few minutes, Wells understood, or thought he did.

“So the beryllium reflects the neutrons back at the bomb?”

“Exactly. It goes around the core of the nuclear material and speeds up the chain reaction. But you can’t make a bomb with it. It’s useless without the plutonium or the uranium. And the Turk didn’t seem to have that. His question was more in the nature of a hypothetical. If he needed beryllium, could I get it? I told him probably not, but for the right price, I would look.”

“Were you surprised he came to you? You could have gone right to the Swiss police. Or even the Germans.”

“We did two deals already, they went well, so no. Anyway, everyone knows I don’t go to the authorities. If I can’t make a deal, I don’t make it. But that’s my business, no one else’s. And there’s no law against asking about beryllium.”

What a fine human being you are, Wells didn’t say. “All right. He came to you. Suppose the Turk and his friends could get enough HEU or plutonium for a bomb. Would it be hard to make?”

“I’m not an expert, but I don’t think so.”

“How many men?”

“Fewer than five. Remember, this is very old technology.”

Wells thought of the new Russian estimate of missing material. “If they had the uranium, how long would it take?”

“I don’t know. It depends if they know what they’re doing, how much they have. Two weeks at least, three months at most.”

“If they have enough. Whoever they are. It’s all theoretical. All smoke.”

“All smoke,” Kowalski agreed. “But what if it’s not?”

Wells looked around. This bar was the wrong place for the discussion they were having, and not because it was insecure, though it was. The room around them just didn’t match the subject at hand. But then what room would? An underground bunker at Strategic Air Command headquarters, maybe. World maps glowing on wall-sized monitors. Stern-faced men with stars on their shoulderboards watching the beast slouch closer. Not here, not with a fifty-something bottle blonde three couches away.

“You know what,” Wells said to Kowalski. “I will have a drink.”

THE BAUR AU LAC didn’t have Bud, so Wells ordered a Heineken. The waiter’s nose twitched at the order, nonetheless he returned in a few seconds with the bottle and delivered a perfect pour into a long tall glass.

“So what’s his name?” Wells said.

“And what do you give me in return?”

“A truce. Your life.”

“Maybe it’s your life. Maybe my men will get you this time. I don’t have to do this.”

“Then why bother?” Wells said. “This bomb, even if it’s real, it won’t go off in Zurich. So why do you care? Worried that it’ll be bad for business?”

“A nuclear explosion? Bad for business?” Kowalski smirked. “In New York, let’s say. The United States will go mad. You’ll threaten every country between Morocco and Bangladesh and actually attack half of them. New bombers, new aircraft carriers, new tanks, laser guns. Satellites that fire missiles. A trillion dollars a year in spending. More. You don’t believe me? Look at what’s happened since September 11. That was nothing compared to this.”

“Even if you’re right, we won’t be buying those weapons from you.”

“If the United States goes mad, the rest of the world has to respond. The Russians add a thousand tanks, and so the Chinese build up five divisions of their own. Then the Indians, and the Pakistanis, and the Bangladeshis, and — I believe your President Reagan called it the trickle-down effect.”

Kowalski was right, Wells realized. After the initial shock, and the promises to disarm and rid the world of nuclear weapons, after the empty words had faded, the world would get ready for World War III. The tank factories in Russia and the missile plants in China would run overtime until America finally felt safe again. Which meant they would never stop. And here in Zurich, Pierre Kowalski would connect buyers and sellers and take his cut along the way.

Kowalski was right. But still he hadn’t answered Wells’s question.

“Then why tell me this? Why cost yourself money? How many men have died from the weapons you’ve sold? In Sudan, everywhere else? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand? You’re a little atomic bomb yourself.”

Kowalski didn’t blink. “In Rwanda, 1994, the genocide. The Hutu killed the Tutsi for a month. No one knows how many died. Let’s say a million. A nice round number. They didn’t use my weapons, Mr. Wells. They used clubs. Clubs and machetes.”

“So what are you saying? With your guns they could have killed the million in a week, saved some time.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand. These Africans and Arabs and all the rest. They come to me for tools, tools they can’t make on their own, but they kill each other or not all the same.”

“You’re just following orders. Like the Nazi guards.”

“I provide a service. I leave the trigger-pulling, the order-following, to men like you.”

And then Wells found he had nothing to say.

“You presume to lecture me on morality. But I’ll answer you anyway. This bomb, this isn’t Africans hacking each other up for sport, as they always have, always will. This gives a few angry men the power to change the world. A great city gone. For what? Fables in a book? No. I don’t want that.”

The casual racism was astonishing, but Wells found he didn’t know how to argue. He hated these quick-tongued men who sliced up truth and mixed it with lies and fed it back to him. “Why come to me with this?” he said finally. “You must have contacts at NATO and the Pentagon. And I know you have friends at the Kremlin. Why not go there?”

“I don’t need a truce with them,” Kowalski said. “This deal, it’s between us personally. If you say we’re even, we’re even. What you do with the information after that, it’s up to you. Give it to NATO if you like, or your bosses. Though I know you prefer to work alone.”

I prefer to work with Exley, Wells didn’t say. But thanks to you, I can’t. “Tell me something,” he said. “This man, the Turk, he contacted you months ago, you said.”

“Right. Six months.”

“So why do you think he’ll want to hear from you now? Don’t you think he’ll be suspicious if you come to him out of the blue?”

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from me. Because he called again two days ago, asked me if there was any chance I might have found a way to get him the stuff.”

“Another hypothetical.”

“I don’t think so. Either they have enough for a bomb and they want to make it bigger, or they’re a bit short and want to be sure.”

“Or you’re making all this up.”

Kowalski shook his head.

“So what’s the Turk’s name?”

“Do we have a deal?”

Wells stood up from the table. “I’ll think it over.”

“Think fast. You know better than I do, these men won’t wait.”

“Last question,” Wells said. “So you give me the name, whatever else you have. How do you know I won’t kill you anyway?”

“You’re an honorable man, Mr. Wells.”

“There was a time I thought so too.”

17

For five weeks, the Iskander warhead had been in motion, across five thousand miles, seven countries, three continents, an ocean. Even without detonating, it had left plenty of damage. Harmless as a Gypsy curse, Major Yuri Akilev had said to Grigory Farzadov on the night Grigory stole the bomb. Now Grigory was dead. His cousin Tajid, too. And for his inadvertent role in the theft, Yuri was facing a court-martial sure to put him in a Siberian prison camp for the rest of his life.

Now the Gypsy curse had reached its final stop, the stable behind the Repard farmhouse. It sat on the floor beside the vacuum furnace as Yusuf and Bashir and Nasiji stood around it like thirsty college kids waiting to tap a keg. Nasiji tapped the steel cylinder, fiddled with the eight-digit locks on the panel on its side, tried to flick the arming switches up and down and found they wouldn’t move.

“Wish we had the other,” he said.

“So what now,” Yusuf said. “We open her up?”

“She?”

“Of course she,” Yusuf said. “This thing’s just like a woman. The sooner we get inside, the better.”

“No cutting today,” Nasiji said. “Today we talk about how these gadgets work.”

THE BASEMENT of the farmhouse had been refinished in the 1970s but not updated since. It was one big room with particleboard walls, a broken Ping-Pong table on one end and a pool table missing half its felt on the other, relics of happier days. In the middle, in front of an ugly synthetic couch, were three big whiteboards that Nasiji had asked Bashir to get. And in this unlikely setting, Nasiji gave them a primer on nuclear weapons design.

“The first thing to understand is that the bomb is actually two bombs.” He sketched a cylinder on the whiteboard in thick black marker, put a big W at its top. “This is the warhead. In fact, to be technical, the warhead includes an outer casing. What we have is usually called the physics package—” Nasiji was showing off now, unable to help himself, reminding Bashir of his more irritating medical school professors. “But I’m going to call it the warhead for the sake of simplicity. Now, inside the warhead, as I said, two bombs. Both nuclear.” Nasiji drew a couple of thick black circles inside the cylinder, one above the other.

At this Yusuf perked up. “Two nuclear bombs? So there are two explosions?”

“There are, but they happen more or less at exactly the same time. Anyone watching would see one blast. Now the first bomb to explode”—Nasiji tapped the bottom circle—“is called the primary. It’s a very old design. Basically a fancy version of the bomb that the Americans dropped on Nagasaki. It’s plutonium, and all around it is high explosive. The high explosive blows up and pushes together the plutonium and that explodes.”

Nasiji sketched the implosion mechanism on one of the whiteboards, concentric circles to represent the different layers of the bomb. “I’m leaving out a lot of detail, of course. I’ll tell you more later, but the truth is we’re going to try not to touch the primary at all. We don’t need it. We’re aiming for the other bomb, the secondary. Want to guess why it’s called that, Yusuf?”

“Because it blows up second.”

“Very good. So the physics behind the second bomb are more complicated, but the bomb itself is a simple design. It’s built in layers, uranium at the very center, then lithium around that, then more uranium.”

“I don’t understand,” Yusuf said. “Just uranium and lithium? Where’s the trigger?”

“The first bomb is the trigger. When it detonates, it creates a wave of energy that pushes together the material in the second bomb.”

Bashir thought he understood. “So the first bomb sets off the second bomb, just the way the explosives around the first bomb set that one off?”

“Exactly,” Nasiji said. “And because the secondary is coming together under such force, it blows up with incredible power. So this is what’s called a two-stage bomb. Or a thermonuclear, because it’s all the heat from the first bomb that sets off the second bomb. You know those films of the bombs they set off over the Pacific, the Russians and the Americans, those giant mushroom clouds.”

“Of course,” Yusuf said.

“Well, those were thermonuclear bombs, just like this one. A lot bigger, but the same design.”

“So we’re going to make one of them, too, once we’re done taking this one apart?”

“I wish,” Nasiji said. “No, what we’re going to do is take the uranium, the U-235, from the second bomb. The secondary. And then we’re going to make a bomb of our own, a simple one, a one-stager. Assuming we have enough material, that the storm and that fool captain didn’t ruin it for us.” Nasiji sighed. “But I can’t think about that now. Let’s talk about what we’re going to see in this gadget of ours once we get it open.”

“But—”

“I know what you’re going to ask, Yusuf. If these designs are national secrets, how do I know? Yes?”

Yusuf nodded.

“That first bomb was a long time ago. Over the years, the facts have come out. Mainly about the American designs. But remember, these bombs, American or Russian, they’re all roughly the same, because the physics are the same everywhere. Everyone has the same design problems, and there are only so many solutions. The basics haven’t changed since the 1950s.”

So for the next several hours, Nasiji sketched out, in detail, what they would see once they broke through the outer casing of the warhead. The initiator, which released neutrons into the center of the primary bomb just as the explosion began, speeding up the chain reaction. The plates of plastic explosive around the primary. The hard plastic foam that was turned into plasma by the first explosion and channeled the energy that set off the second bomb. The explanation was complex and Bashir was glad when Thalia knocked on the door and announced that lunch was ready.

They trooped upstairs for dates and couscous with raisins and carrots and fresh orange juice that Thalia had squeezed herself. She stood in the kitchen and shyly watched them eat, coming in only to clear dishes and refill glasses. “You like it?” she said when they were done and Yusuf and Nasiji had disappeared downstairs.

“Very much.” He patted her arm tentatively, and under her headscarf she smiled.

“Good,” she said. “I don’t want you to be hungry.”

“Not much chance of that.” He ran a hand over his belly. He’d once been thin, but too many years of fourteen-hour days in surgery had filled him out.

“No, don’t hide him. I like him.” She put a finger to Bashir’s stomach and smiled. His pulse quickened at her unexpected touch. She’d been inexperienced when they married, a real virgin who’d never even kissed a man. Now she was becoming increasingly comfortable with him in their bedroom, but she was still shy outside it.

“We’ll keep him then,” he said. She giggled. Sometimes he forgot she was just twenty-two. He was embarrassed now. “So, back to work.”

FOR THE REST of the afternoon, Nasiji took them through the physics behind the bomb. Bashir sensed Nasiji was talking for himself as much as for them, reminding himself of the concepts that would help him design their own bomb. The faint winter light outside the basement windows disappeared and still Nasiji talked, even after Bashir began to doze and Yusuf laid his head on the table.

“Enough,” Yusuf said, as Nasiji began to diagram the decay of a U- 235 atom. “This might as well be Hebrew for all the sense I can make of it.”

“But if something happens to me, you need to know—”

“If something happens to you, we’ll shoot one piece of uranium at the other and hope for the best. That’s what all this comes down to, right?” Yusuf waved a hand at the three whiteboards, filled edge to edge with equations and diagrams in smudged black ink. “Before lunch was fine, but now we’re wasting time. Let’s cut the thing open and see what we find.”

Slowly, Nasiji nodded. “It’s a whole desert of sand I’ve given you, isn’t it? And you’re right. What matters is what’s inside that warhead. Tomorrow we find out.”

18

Wells sat in his suite at the Baur au Lac, pretending to watch television, flicking between CNN and BBC and Sky, pretending he hadn’t already made up his mind, pretending he hadn’t already wasted most of a day chewing over a decision that was no decision at all.

He couldn’t say no to Kowalski. He needed the name. Though part of him wondered whether he and Duto and Shafer weren’t overreacting. Probably this would turn out to be nothing, another in the long string of false alarms since 9/11.

But he couldn’t take that chance.

Wells wished he could be certain why Kowalski had come to him, wondered if there was some double- or triple-cross he wasn’t seeing. Most likely not. The simplest explanation was usually the best, and the simplest explanation here was that Kowalski feared he’d be sent straight to hell if a bomb went off and the United States found out that he had information that could have stopped it. So he’d decided to give Wells the name, get Wells off his back, two birds, one stone.

Wells had been ready, more than ready, to make Kowalski pay for Exley and all those nameless Africans who had died from the bullets that Kowalski sold. Even at the price of losing Exley. And maybe one day Exley would have forgiven him, understood that he’d needed to kill Kowalski to make sense of all the rest of the killing he’d done. Or maybe not. But though Wells always would have hated himself for driving her away, he never would have been sorry for killing Kowalski.

Or maybe. he would have found a way to change his mind. Maybe he would have realized that vengeance wasn’t his to take. And then he could have told Exley: I’m not going after him. Maybe it’s too late, but I want you to know. I’m sorry.

Instead Wells would lose both ways. Snake eyes. Kowalski would live. And yet Wells wouldn’t be able to tell Exley that he’d found peace in his heart and walked away from the fight. Kowalski was simply buying his way out, plea-bargaining for his own survival.

As Wells had known all day. Now he was wasting time, and Kowalski was right. These terrorists, whoever they were, they wouldn’t wait once the bomb was done. Wells flicked off the television and picked up the phone.

A HALF-HOUR LATER, the hotel’s Bentley brought him through snow-covered streets to the gates of Kowalski’s mansion. Wells stepped out and watched as the big black sedan, a brick on wheels, silently rolled away. Then he pushed the bell and the wrought-iron gates swung open and he walked up the gravel driveway toward the house, three stories high and wide and made of solid red brick. It looked like it belonged in Boston and not Zurich.

The front door was opened by a uniformed housekeeper. She curtseyed and stepped aside, revealing the most beautiful woman Wells had ever seen, tall and slim and high-breasted and wearing a black crepe dress that seemed molded to her body.

“Nadia,” she said, extending a hand.

“John.” Wells stood in the door, trying to brush off his long blue overcoat, feeling clumsy as a sixth-grader on his first date. He’d expected to be met by Tarasov, or the shooter whom Kowalski called the Dragon. Not this creature, whose eyes were as blue as Exley’s.

“Please, come in. Let Fredrika take it.”

The housekeeper helped him out of the coat and gloves and disappeared. Nadia cocked her head and looked at Wells, a butterfly smile flitting over her face, as if he’d whispered a joke that she hadn’t quite heard. “Are you cold? Would you like a drink?”

Wells shook his head.

“Follow me, please.”

The mansion was even more opulent than Wells had expected, its walls lined with Impressionist art. Wells caught a glimpse of what looked like a Renoir as they passed the dining room, and a Degas pastel in a dim alcove.

In front of him, Nadia’s hips swung sideways and her red heels clacked on the oak floors beneath them. Her dress whispered as she walked. It was modest, knee-length, but Wells imagined Nadia’s thighs underneath, could almost see them. He hadn’t felt so attracted to a woman other than Exley in years, but this woman exuded sex as naturally as a lake spouted fog at dawn. He forced himself to look away. He was being cruel to Exley, and stupid besides. He was here for a deal, not to steal Kowalski’s concubine.

Nadia knocked on a closed wooden door.

“Come,” Kowalski said softly.

A flare of anger burned away Wells’s lust. Now that he was on the verge of making peace, he hated Kowalski more than ever. He had planned to come to this meeting unarmed, but just as he walked out of his hotel room he’d grabbed his Glock and tucked it in a shoulder holster. He was glad to have it. Though he knew he ought not to be. He was here for a name, nothing more.

UNLIKE THE REST of the mansion, the drawing room was sleek and modern. In its center was the most striking sculpture that Wells had ever seen. If sculpture was the right word for it. It was a transparent plastic box, five feet high, eight feet long, four feet wide, with weapons inside — an RPG and an AK-47, encircled by a ring of grenades — held fast in a clear plastic goo, perfectly preserved, every detail visible. Wells rapped his fist on the plastic box. The launcher and the rifle didn’t move.

“You’ve heard of Damien Hirst?” Kowalski said. He sat on a black couch whose sleekness seemed inappropriate for his big body. The tall shooter whom Kowalski had called the Dragon sat beside him. They made a ridiculous pair, Abbott and Costello.

Wells hadn’t heard of Damien Hirst. He kept his eyes on the weapons, sealed for eternity inside the box. He feared that if he looked at Kowalski, he would lose control. In the holster below his left armpit the Glock itched, begging to be drawn.

“He’s British. An artist. In 1991, he put the carcass of a tiger shark in a box like this,” Kowalski said. “A whole shark! It made him famous. It was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. A good title, don’t you think? Since then, it’s been cows and sheep and lots of other dead animals in boxes. Now he’s very rich.”

Wells said nothing, and after a few seconds, Kowalski continued. “A few years ago, I was in London at an opening of his and asked him if he might do something for me. He came up with this. A play on the original. A bit derivative, but I like it. Reminds me where my money comes from. I imagine you don’t think much of it. A waste of a good AK, you probably think.”

“Why not just put a dead African in?” Wells said. “Eliminate the middleman.”

Kowalski laughed, a short barking chuckle. “So you do have a sense of humor. I wasn’t sure. All those men you’ve bumped into over the years, you think they saw a tiger shark when you turned out the lights on them? The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

Nadia was still by the door. “Get out of here,” Wells said to her. She smiled at him, a smile that despite everything sent a surge of desire through Wells, and backed out and closed the door. When Wells glanced back at the couch, the Dragon had drawn his pistol.

“Very chivalrous,” Kowalski said. “You must like her. Something else we have in common.”

“The name,” Wells said.

“The name for a truce.”

“The name and an introduction.”

Kowalski raised his hands. “I’m to vouch for you? No. No, no, no. I give you the name, you do what you like with it. Have your friends from Langley trap him. Or the Germans. Cameras in the walls. Satellites. All your toys. You think you’re going to infiltrate, fool this man? I heard from Ivan Markov about your introductions.”

“Name’s no good without it,” Wells said, with a patience he didn’t feel. He left the sculpture behind and walked to the window. The snow was still coming down. The glass offered him a reflection of Kowalski and the Dragon on the couch. The Dragon was tracking him with the snubnose, his body twisted sideways so he would have a clear shot if Wells spun. But if Wells kept moving along the window, the Dragon’s firing angle would be partially blocked by Kowalski’s bulk.

“Tell him you don’t want to be involved, but you know somebody who can get the stuff,” Wells said.

“And who will you be this time? You speak Polish? Russian?”

Wells watched the window.

“You think your Arabic’s going to come in handy for this?” There was a sneer in Kowalski’s voice, the same sneer Wells had heard a few months before in a mansion in the Hamptons, before Wells had shut him up with a stun gun to the throat and started the mad cycle that had landed him in this room. “You think he believes an Arab can help him? If an Arab could get this stuff, he wouldn’t be coming to me.”

“You’re awful brave with that bodyguard next to you,” Wells said. “Those boys in Moscow were brave, too.” He turned to face Kowalski and the Dragon, keeping his hands loose by his sides. A shoulder holster wasn’t an easy draw and the Dragon was surely quick, but Wells would take his chances. “Tell him whatever you like. I’m a friend you know from way back when. Doesn’t matter. If he needs the stuff as much as you say, he’ll bite.”

Kowalski sighed, and Wells saw that for all his talk he didn’t want to push their battle any further. “And then we’re even?”

Wells nodded.

“In that case. His name’s Bernard Kygeli.” Kowalski plucked a cell phone from his pocket. For the next ten minutes, Wells watched in silence as he spoke rapid-fire German, Wells catching a word here and there, mostly place names—Hamburg, Zimbabwe. “Gut,” Kowalski finally said. “Gut. Bitte.” He hung up, slid his phone shut.

“Went goot?” Wells said.

“Your name is Roland. You’re an old friend of mine, a Rhodesian I’ve known a long time. I came to you because you have friends in Warsaw and the Poles have a big beryllium plant. You’re not sure, but you think maybe you can get the stuff for him. At a big price. He said not to worry, money wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Any hint of how close they are?”

“No. And I didn’t ask.”

“The meeting,” Wells said.

“He said no, but I told him you required it. This isn’t guns or grenades and you need to see him face to face. Finally, he said okay. Tomorrow in Hamburg at six p.m. The plaza outside the Rathaus, the old city hall.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then we’re done.”

“You’re not staying for dinner? Nadia will be disappointed.” Kowalski pushed himself off the couch and pursed his lips into a rictus grin and extended a meaty hand toward him. Before Wells could stop himself, he’d extended his own hand and they shook. Kowalski’s palm was cool and dry and they stood together for a long moment, gripping and grinning for invisible, or maybe real, cameras. Finally, Wells pulled his arm away.

“Save the world, won’t you, Mr. Wells?” Kowalski grinned at him. “And don’t forget to save me, too.”

We’re not the same, Wells wanted to say. Not even close. You can tell me we are, tell me this is all a big cosmic joke, but you’re wrong. But he was through arguing. He’d gotten the name. He reached for his phone to have the hotel send the Bentley for him, then changed his mind. He would walk along the lake instead, let the snow cover him, cool him off. In this house, his emotions ran too hot.

AT THE DOOR, Nadia was waiting with his coat. She slipped it over his shoulders and rested an easy hand on his back and Wells felt a shock of desire rope down his spine into his groin.

“Good luck,” she said out of the side of her mouth.

“Whatever he’s paying you, I hope it’s worth it. Hope you’re socking every franc under the mattress.” Wells knew he ought to keep his mouth shut — she must make a gibbering idiot of every man who walked into this house — but he couldn’t stop himself.

She put her hand to his face and tilted his head and kissed his cheek. “Good luck,” she repeated. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

Wells walked out.

BACK IN HIS SUITE, Wells found his Kyocera satellite phone, a big black handset with a finger-sized antenna poking from the top, and punched in an eighteen-digit number and listened to silence for thirty seconds. In the 1990s, Motorola had spent billions of dollars to build a satellite network called Iridium, able to carry calls from any point in the world, including both poles.

But Iridium had been a bust. The calls cost several dollars a minute, and standard cell networks worked well enough for most business travelers. In 1999, Iridium had gone into bankruptcy. But the satellites had never been shut off. Though the network was still theoretically open to anyone, it was mainly used now by the Pentagon and CIA. The number that Wells had called was known as a sniffer. Software on the other end of the line looked for abnormalities in the connection that might indicate the phone or the connection had been tampered with. Bottom line, a silent line meant a clean phone. Or so the engineers at Langley had told Wells, and he wasn’t going to contradict them.

Of course, a clean phone was useless if the room was bugged, so Wells wandered back downstairs and into the silent streets of Zurich. It was not even ten p.m., but the city was as quiet as a castle with the moat up, the burghers and bankers home counting the day’s profits. Wells walked down the Bahnhofstrasse along the locked stores and called Shafer, filled him in.

Five minutes later: “Okay, spell the name for me.”

“B-A-S-S-I-M. K-Y-G-E-L–I. But goes by Bernard. Runs an ex-im business in Hamburg called Tukham.”

“Turkham? Like Turkey-Hamburg?”

“No, T-U-K-H-A-M. No R.”

“Any idea why?”

“Maybe he’s not a good speller, Ellis. Focus here.”

“And wants beryllium.”

“So he says. I’m meeting him tomorrow. Six p.m.”

“John.” Shafer was silent, four thousand miles away, and Wells felt him trying to figure out what to say next. Finally he sighed, as if he knew that trying to dissuade Wells from this meeting would be pointless. “All right. What’s your cover?”

Wells explained. “Can you get me papers?”

“To Germany in twenty hours? Sure. Piece of cake. Pick a last name.”

“Albert.”

“Albert? Okay. Roland Albert. Rhodesian mercenary. Better get you a British passport. We’ll hook you up with a courier in Hamburg. Can you do a Rhodesian accent?”

“Shrimp on the barbie, mate?”

“Not Australian, John. Rhodesian.” Shafer started to laugh and stopped. “This isn’t a joke. Not with five kilos of HEU missing. You know I have to tell Duto. He’ll tell the BND, get things started.”

“Give me the first meeting, at least.”

“And your fat friend? Any business left with him?”

“Deal’s a deal,” Wells said. “How’s Jenny?”

“Better every day,” Shafer said. “Sends her love.”

Wells hung up. He was directly across from the central Zurich train station now — the Hauptbahnhof, which, logically enough, marked the northern end of the Bahnhofstrasse — and he turned right and began to walk beside the narrow Limmat River, which flowed gently out of the Zürichsee. He called Exley’s cell phone, a useless exercise. She wasn’t answering him.

But tonight she did.

“Hello?” That voice. Smoky and sweet and husky and knowing. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, she whispered to him until she herself fell asleep and even then he would hear her voice comforting him. He was ashamed of every halfpenny of lust he’d had for Nadia.

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“Zurich.”

“Zurich,” she said. He waited for her to ask him why, but she didn’t. “Is it safe?” she said finally. An old joke of theirs, from the scene in Marathon Man.

“Is it safe?” Wells laughed. “It couldn’t be safer if it tried.”

She was silent for a few seconds. Normally Wells didn’t mind these pauses, but tonight he wanted her to talk, tell him she was past the worst of it, they were past the worst of it.

“How are you, Jenny? How’s your back?”

“Not skiing yet, but give me time.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Another pause.

“So. I wanted to tell you. The thing I came here for, I worked it out.”

“I don’t want to talk about that, John.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” The smoke and the sweetness were gone.

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” she said. “I’m tired, is all. Lots of rehab today. I wish you were here.”

“I can come back.” Wells tried to keep his voice steady.

“Not till you know what you want.”

“All right,” he said. “I love you, Jenny.”

“I love you, too.” And then she was gone.

19

In addition to its side control panel, the warhead had a hinged steel plate on top to allow technicians to access its guts. A tough-looking lock, a steel box the size of a deck of cards, covered half the plate, preventing it from being raised. Nasiji poked at the box with a screwdriver. “We could try to force it,” he said. “But I don’t like the look of it. Let’s cut around it, peel off the casing.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Bashir said. “The biggest danger we face is from the plastic and these traps, not the bomb.”

Nasiji nodded to the wall of gear in the back of the stable. “Ready?”

“Let’s pray,” Yusuf said.

So Bashir grabbed three prayer rugs from the house, and for fifteen minutes the three men prostrated themselves and asked Allah for his support, finishing with Surah 2:201. “Oh Lord! Give us good in this world and good in the hereafter, and defend us from the torment of the Fire.” When they were done, they rolled up the rugs and set them aside and pulled on long rubber boots and gloves and face shields and goggles and heat-resistant coats.

“Before we start,” Bashir said. “I thought, perhaps, we should film all this. One day the world will want to know how we did what we did.”

“We talked about this,” Nasiji said. For the first time, his voice betrayed impatience. “No cameras. No more speeches, no more prayers, no more visits to the bathroom. The nitrogen now. It’s time.”

So Bashir and Yusuf picked up an insulated container of liquid nitrogen, called a dewar, and carried it to a thick-sided plastic tub that sat next to the warhead. They tipped the dewar over the tub, pouring until the liquid came nearly to the brim. The nitrogen, cooled to seventy-seven degrees above absolute zero, bubbled madly as it evaporated.

“Into the bucket.”

Bashir and Nasiji picked up the warhead and lowered it into the bucket. There was no guarantee, but cooling the cylinder might make an accidental explosion less likely. Bashir felt as though he were in the operating room in Corning, about to make the day’s first cut, the patient prepped and unconscious on the operating table beneath him. It’s really happening, Bashir thought. He wanted to mark the moment, but the set of Nasiji’s jaw discouraged idle chatter.

As the cylinder cooled, the only sound in the stable was the nitrogen’s bubbling. Then Bashir breathed deep and picked up a circular saw, its blades diamond-tipped to cut through concrete. He flicked it on, feeling it vibrate in his gloved hands. As gently as he could, Bashir touched the saw to the top of the cylinder, avoiding the locked panel. The saw screeched and jumped back as it touched the steel. Bashir pushed down harder, hard enough that the blades bit into the steel and began to grind through it. Bashir held the saw in place for a few seconds, then pulled it up as Nasiji stepped forward with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the top of the warhead.

Bashir turned off the saw, put it down, and ran a finger over the hole he poked into the steel. It was barely a quarter-inch deep and two inches long and revealed nothing at all.

“Again,” Nasiji said.

Bashir flicked on the saw and felt it come to life. He lined it up with the groove he’d just cut. He sliced in slowly, controlling the saw through the steel, until it broke through and slipped forward—

Then, without warning, compressed air began to whoosh out of the cylinder, filling Bashir’s nostrils with a strong sour smell—

Bashir pulled back the saw as Nasiji stepped forward and sprayed the casing with a fire extinguisher—

Bashir coughed wildly and twisted sideways, nearly cutting Nasiji in half. Nasiji jumped back as Yusuf reached to unplug the saw—

And then it was over. The compressed air stopped coming. Bashir counted one, two, three, four, five, waiting for the explosion. But nothing happened and Bashir put down the saw and shined a flashlight into the hole and touched the groove with his gloved fingers.

“What was that?” Yusuf said.

Bashir shook his head. He was still coughing, but the gas, whatever it was, didn’t seem to be toxic. He leaned against the workbench and tried not to laugh as his fear faded. “I don’t know. Some kind of gas to keep the parts from corroding. It was under pressure inside and once we broke through the sidewall, it burst.”

“Most likely argon or neon, a noble gas, to keep the electronics inside the weapon stable,” Nasiji said. “It’s probably not dangerous, but give it a minute to air. You almost took my head off with that saw, you know.”

“I wasn’t expecting it,” Bashir said sheepishly.

“It’s a lesson for all of us,” Nasiji said. “Take it a centimeter at a time. We really don’t know what’s inside.”

“The look on your face,” Yusuf said to Bashir. He opened his mouth, an exaggerated gasp of fear.

“Easy to be bold from across the room,” Bashir said.

INCH BY INCH, they opened the warhead. They weren’t trying to preserve the components as a functioning weapon, so they didn’t have to make perfect cuts. Even so, the work was slow and nerve-racking. As they widened the hole and exposed the inside of the shell, they poured liquid nitrogen inside, trying to freeze the bomb’s circuitry.

By late in the day, they’d cut away the arming panel and exposed two flat green boards loaded with primitive electronic circuitry, capacitators and black transistors as big as quarters. They looked like they belonged in an old radio, not a nuclear warhead.

“Not like what they show in the movies,” Bashir said.

“Remember, they probably designed this in the mid-1980s, and they were far behind the United States in computers even then. And besides, for something like this, cutting-edge technology doesn’t matter. Only reliability.”

“It’s all going to get vaporized anyway,” Yusuf said.

“Yes,” Nasiji said. “See, they have duplicates of everything. Two circuit boards, two altimeters, four batteries — and probably just one needed to set off the primary.”

The batteries were the size of cigarette packs, sealed in plastic and attached to the inside of the steel casing. They fed two pairs of red and black wires that snaked through a steel shield into the heart of the cylinder, the bottom half where the primary was placed. “They want to be sure it will work even if part of the arming mechanism fails. Probably they expect ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent reliability.”

“Not one hundred?”

“Remember, they have thousands of these warheads. They can still blow up the world if a few don’t work.”

“Yes, well. I’ll bet they wish they had this one back.”

Nasiji yawned. “Let’s get a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.”

THAT NIGHT BASHIR DREAMED of sawing through the metal inch by inch. When he woke up, his fingers were inside his wife. Even before he was fully conscious, he’d slipped up her nightgown and spread her legs apart and pushed himself inside her. She was asleep when he started, but she woke up fast. The thought of the bomb drove him and he didn’t last long, but he didn’t mind and neither did she. She covered her mouth with her palm so Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t hear her moans. When he was done, he fell back to sleep and didn’t wake until Nasiji knocked on the bedroom door at nine a.m.

A half-hour later, he and Nasiji and Yusuf were in the stable, examining the naked guts of the warhead, trying to decide their next step. Nasiji favored cutting the battery wires before they sawed any further into the guts of the bomb. Bashir thought they might be better off leaving the wires alone.

“Didn’t you say we didn’t have to touch the primary at all?” he asked Nasiji.

“That was before we had a look. Now I see that the secondary won’t come out easily and I’d rather be sure the detonators are asleep.”

“If there’s any kind of trap, it’s going to blow when we take out the batteries.”

Nasiji shook his head, and Bashir saw that he wasn’t going to win this argument. “It must have a positive action,” Nasiji said.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s possible to design the plastic so that it will go off unless there’s a constant flow of power from the batteries. In other words, if the power is cut, the plastic explodes. A negative action. But then what if the batteries go dead? Much too dangerous. So it must have a positive action. Goes off only if the batteries fire. And that means the safest course is to cut the power—”

Nasiji was the engineer, and Nasiji had stolen the bombs. This decision was his. So Bashir reached into the toolbox at his feet and handed Nasiji a pair of wire cutters. Then he picked up a second pair, feeling their smooth plastic handles in his hand.

“Both pairs of wires, the same time.”

“On three.” They stood next to each other and slipped the cutters’ blades around the wires. “One. Two. Three.”

The wire was brittle after being dosed with liquid nitrogen the night before. Bashir squeezed the handles together, feeling the tension — and then the plastic outer casing of the wires shattered into a hundred tiny pieces, and he tore smoothly through the copper underneath. Beside him Nasiji cut through his own wire. They waited for the bomb to sputter. Or for an explosion they would never see. But the seconds ticked by, and then a minute and then another, and the bomb sat inert.

“It’s done,” Nasiji said, not triumphantly, just a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that they’d passed another way station on a very long race.

They put aside the clippers and Bashir picked up the saw and they got back to work sawing around the cylinder, trying to remove the entire top half and expose the shell of U-235 that formed the rim of the secondary. Hard work, and slow, but steady and, with the batteries removed, safe enough. Bashir was already calculating how many days they would need before they could remove the secondary and get at the U-235. One? Two? Three at most. Then they’d have the raw material to start building their own bomb.

20

Give me the bad news,” Duto said as soon as Shafer walked into his office.

“How do you know it’s bad? Maybe it’s good.” Shafer wandered to Duto’s bookcase, plucked out An Army at Dawn, the Rick Atkinson book about the North African campaign in World War II, flipped through it aimlessly.

“It’s never good, these chats of ours,” Duto said. “And you called me, so it’s worse than usual. Stop wasting time.”

“You may be right.” For the next five minutes, Shafer told Duto where Wells was and what had happened with Kowalski. Duto didn’t say a word, the only sign of his anger a faint flush in his cheeks. Years before, when Duto had run the Directorate of Operations, now the National Clandestine Service, he’d been a screamer and sometimes even a thrower. Pens, briefing books, on one infamous occasion a laptop loaded with encrypted files. The techs had needed two weeks to recover everything. But since his promotion to director, Duto kept his anger bottled up. Shafer figured some management consultant had told him that controlled rage was more effective than fist-pounding. It was true, too.

“All right, again, from the top,” Duto said, when Shafer was done.

“Why?”

“I need to hear this twice.”

Shafer did. By the time he was done, Duto’s face had turned a ripe pink, the color of a medium-rare steak. “You’re telling me that Wells already screwed us with the Russians. And then he gets a call from Pierre Kowalski and he dances over to Zurich to see him?”

“I believe he flew. Swiss Air.”

“And you signed off on this?”

“It’s John, okay. You see me telling him what to do?”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“And further that the real reason all this happened with Kowalski, the reason Wells and Exley got hit last month, wasn’t because we screwed up Kowalski’s play in Afghanistan last year. It goes back to Wells taping his head in the Hamptons?”

“Duct-taping, yes.”

“Which you and John and Jennifer, the three of you, didn’t see fit to mention until now. And now Kowalski, to get Wells off his back, gave up a name. A Turkish refugee in Germany—”

“Not a refugee, a legal immigrant, a business owner—”

“Don’t give a damn if he’s the president of the Elks Club, Ellis.” Duto picking up momentum now. “He’s trying to build a nuke—”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“We know he wants beryllium. Desperate for it. And instead of coming straight to me on this, you tell Wells to meet the guy, Bernard, Bassim, whatever he’s called, on his own?”

“Again, Wells told me.”

“And Wells is pretending to be a mercenary? From Rhodesia?”

“Correct.”

Duto clenched and unclenched his fists three times, like a basketball coach signaling a play in from the sidelines. “You’re two little kids, kindergartners painting the walls with crayons. You can’t help yourselves. You just push me until I have no choice.” Shafer wondered whether he was going to see an old-time explosion. But Duto breathed deep, ran a hand over his face, controlled himself. “What do we know about the Turkish guy? Bernard?”

“He’s not in the Black Book”—the CIA’s database of 4,500 known or suspected terrorists—“nor the Gray Book”—a broader list, 37,000 names in all, friends, relatives, and associates of the people in the Black Book. “He’s not in the TSC database”—yet another list, this one managed by the FBI Terrorist Screening Center, mainly for the use of local law enforcement agencies.

“Any criminal record at all?”

“Can’t be sure because we don’t have fingerprints, but his name isn’t in the NCIC database”—a list of fifty million names, almost everyone who had ever been arrested, convicted, jailed, or paroled in the United States. “Interpol doesn’t have anything either.”

“The NSA?”

“Still checking.”

“Germans have any files on him? BND, local police?”

“I haven’t asked. Wanted to come to you first.”

“Nice of you. How about his business?”

“I’ve only started to look in public records, but it seems legit. He shows up in the Dun and Bradstreet corporate records for Germany, he’s listed in the Hamburg phone book, he’s in the Hamburg port database. Even got a Web site. Brings in rugs and machinery from Turkey, exports used cars and clothes to Africa.”

“Does he send anything to the United States?”

“Doesn’t look that way, but I’m checking.”

“You’re going to have a lot of other people helping you check, Ellis.”

“So be it,” Shafer said. “Long as they don’t get in my way.”

At that, Duto’s fists opened and closed, three times, another play called in. “Back to Wells. He’s meeting this guy when?”

“A couple hours from now. Six p.m. in Hamburg, noon here.”

“With no backup.”

“None whatsoever.”

“And no way of knowing that Kowalski didn’t triple him up, give his real name to this guy? No way of knowing that besides losing a nuke, we might wind up with a videotape of John Wells, our precious national hero, getting his head chopped off while bin Laden watches?”

“You sure you wouldn’t mind? You gave us that pretty speech about how we’re all on the same team, but your passion seems to have cooled.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t, but the White House would.”

“Kowalski’s on very thin ice and it’s not in his interest to play that kind of game.”

Duto drummed his fingers against his big oak desk, horses on the backstretch, coming around the far turn, lots of race left. Shafer wasn’t good at keeping his mouth shut, hated these silences, but this time he resolved to outlast Duto.

“You know the stakes here,” Duto said finally. “Why don’t you act like it?”

Because I trust Wells a lot more than I trust you, Shafer didn’t say. He’d already pissed Duto off plenty. “Worst case, he doesn’t get anything, we go in, pick up this guy Bernard, we’re right back where we started.”

“Worst case, Wells spooks him, sends him flying, and we miss our chance at his friends. Whoever they are. Wherever they are.”

“Vinny, he’s been in tight before and it’s always worked out. The BND’s more likely to spook this guy than Wells is. I say we give Wells a couple days before we tell the Germans.”

“Are you kidding me?” Duto said. He smiled, a big fake grin. “You are. You’re kidding me. Ellis Shafer, you joker you. I know you and John and Jenny, you have this us-against-the-world thing going, the three musketeers, all of it—”

“But—”

“No. You listen now. Last month, one muskeeter almost got killed and now the other one’s trigger-happy like a twelve-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto—”

“Grand Theft Auto?” Shafer smiled, trying to lighten the mood.

“My nephews, they’re teenagers, what can I say?” Duto smiled, too, but the break in the storm didn’t last. “And you come in here with your smirk and tell me there’s a guy in Hamburg wants beryllium. Then with a straight face you tell me to keep the BND in the dark, let the great John Wells do his thing. Little Boy Two blows up in Potsdamer Platz, vaporizes that fancy new Reichstag of theirs, what do you think the Germans are going to say to that?”

“The bomb’s not in Germany—”

“You don’t know that, Ellis. You don’t know shit. And this is too important for guessing.”

“Here’s what I know,” Shafer said. “These guys don’t care about Berlin. New York, D.C., maybe London, maybe Moscow — that’s it for them. Max damage, max symbolism.”

“Maybe. Even so, this is on German soil and we’re telling the BND.”

“You think they’ll help us on this?” The CIA didn’t have a great reputation in Germany these days, not after the fiascos over renditions and the Iraq war.

“They got the same report on the missing uranium as everybody else. They’ll help.”

“Fine,” Shafer mumbled. He’d lost this fight. Duto had made up his mind. And part of him was relieved. Much as he disliked Duto, this mission was too important to be outside the chain of command. “Vinny, there’s something I’m not seeing here. Why won’t the Russians be straight with us on this?”

“I asked Joe”—Joe Morgau, the head of the agency’s Russia desk—“the same thing. He says four possibilities. In order of likelihood. One, it’s reflex. They lie to us so much they don’t know how to tell the truth anymore. Two, they’re embarrassed, so they’re burying the truth, hoping it doesn’t come back on them.”

“Sounds like something we would do.”

“Three, they don’t know exactly what’s missing and they don’t want to scare us. Four, there’s some bigger power struggle happening in the Kremlin and this is part of it in some way we can’t see.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to find the stuff, whatever it is, and we’ve got to assume the Russians aren’t going to help.” Duto paused. “Here’s what I’ll do for you, Ellis. It’s”—Duto looked at his watch—“ten a.m. now. Four p.m. in Germany. I’ll give Wells this one meeting tonight. I’ll call Mieke”—Josef Mieke, the director of the BND—“around six p.m. our time, midnight over there. He won’t get the message until the morning. Then he’ll want to talk to me, make sure it’s real, that we’re not exaggerating. That’ll give you a few hours to get hold of Wells, tell him what’s coming, so he doesn’t do anything dumb and spook the Germans. But this is it. The last time.”

“You’re a prick. but I love you anyway.” Shafer stood, aiming to get to the door before Duto could change his mind. Wells would have one night with Bernard before the Germans showed up.

“Don’t make me regret this.”

“I suspect you regret it already.” Shafer grabbed the Atkinson book and left.

21

The Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg was an architectural marvel, two dozen train platforms under an arched steel roof that stretched four hundred feet, the space open, no supporting columns cutting it up. The trains never stopped coming, stubby commuter S-Bahns and sleek long-distance expresses painted with the red-and-white DB logo, bound for Berlin, Munich, Paris. On the platforms, men and women lined up, quick-checked their tickets to be sure they had the right cabins, grabbed their briefcases and suitcases, and stepped up into cars, only to be replaced a few minutes later by new passengers waiting for new trains. Everyone was properly bundled against the cold, long wool coats and scarves and leather gloves, and no one pushed and no one ran. They were German, after all.

Wells watched the endless flow from a self-serve snack shop on a balcony overlooking the platforms; 4:04 turned 4:05 on the big digital clock above him. His contact was five minutes late, maybe the only person in all of Hamburg who was not on schedule. At six p.m., Wells was supposed to meet with Bernard Kygeli, and if he didn’t have the right papers he might as well not show up.

Then he saw the man Shafer had told him to expect: late twenties, shoulder-length dark hair, orange Patagonia jacket. The guy sidled up to Wells’s table and dropped a hotel keycard beside his coffee cup. “Park Hyatt 402,” he murmured to the air. “Four-oh-two,” Wells said quietly, confirming, as the courier turned and left. Wells liked the way the guy had handled the drop, how he hadn’t wasted time being subtle, no need since nobody was watching. Wells pocketed the key and sipped his coffee until the clock hit 4:10, plenty of time for his contact to disappear, then pulled himself up and left the station behind.

A winter wind was flying in off the North Sea and down the Elbe, sending a shiver through the sunless city. But the stores on Mönckebergstrasse were bustling, lit up with white lights and thick with shoppers taking advantage of the sales.

The Hyatt was only a couple of blocks from the station, and again Wells appreciated the courier’s efficiency. Room 402 was a suite at the end of a short corridor, empty, a black leather briefcase on the king-sized bed. Wells turned the locks to 2004—the year his Red Sox had won the World Series after eighty-six years of baseball misery — and flipped it open.

Inside, two manila envelopes. The first held his new papers: an Irish passport, a British driver’s license, and credit cards. All in the name of Roland Albert. “Roland Albert,” Wells said to the empty room. “Roland Albert. Albert Roland? Roland Albert?” He wished he’d picked a better name. The license and passport had his real date of birth to make it easier to remember, a nice touch. Wells made sure he had the London address memorized, then swapped the fakes for his real credit cards and passport.

The second envelope held a two-page dossier from Shafer on the target. Wells scanned it twice, found little of interest besides the guy’s real name — Bassim. He tossed both envelopes back into the briefcase, locked it, left it on the bed for his nameless courier, then walked to the Kempinski Hotel, behind the train station, to check in under Roland Albert’s name, be sure his identity was live.

THE RATHAUS FILLED the south end of a plaza just off the Binnenalster, the little lake in the center of downtown Hamburg. Like the train station, the city hall was a reminder of Hamburg’s prosperity, a broad building with a clock tower at its center. Wells stood beside the wooden front door, wearing a cap with the logo of the Bayern Munich soccer team, as Bernard had asked him to do.

Six o’clock came and went, and 6:15. Wells tucked his hands under his arms against the cold and watched the shoppers and commuters go by. The setup for this meeting stank of amateur hour. Wells already knew Bernard’s name, after all. Why not just meet at his warehouse? But if Bernard wanted these pointless precautions, Wells wouldn’t argue.

A woman with dyed blond hair turned the corner of the Rathaus, a pixie in faded blue jeans, taking short, quick tottering steps. The walk was so much like Exley’s that for a second Wells thought the woman was Exley, that Exley had somehow found him here. He felt a flutter in his chest.

But of course Exley was rehabbing in Washington and didn’t know where he was. And as the pixie stepped closer, Wells saw she was younger than Exley and had the wrong color eyes, brown instead of blue. She caught him looking and smiled, tentatively, almost flirting. He watched her until she disappeared, thinking of the lyrics of an old Gin Blossoms song. You can’t call it cheatin’,’cause she reminds me of you.

A man walked across the plaza toward Wells. He was Turkish, but young, early twenties. Skinny under his winter clothes and pale for a Turk, faded. Three steps from Wells he stopped, cocked his head. He wore black glasses with deliberately thick frames. He looked like a programmer or a Web designer. Wells couldn’t see this little guy doing business with Nigerian generals and building a nuke. And Bernard was much older, according to Shafer’s dossier.

“You are Roland,” he said in English, with a heavy German accent.

“You Bernard?”

“My name is Helmut.” Said with an affected dignity.

“Helmut who?”

“No questions. Come. Please.” The kid’s German manners taking over, undercutting his effort at toughness. Wells followed him along the Alsterfleet, a narrow canal that connected the Binnenalster with the Elbe. They stopped by a high-sided cargo van, a white Sprinter. The kid raised the back latch and stepped into the empty cargo compartment.

“Get in.”

Suddenly, Wells was sick of this game, sick of cutouts and fake passports, bodyguards and hard stares, pistols drawn and holstered. Helmut, Bernard, whoever you are, you’re not going to win, he almost said. We’ll find you, kill you hot or cold, blow up your houses, or send you to Gitmo for a trial that ends with you strapped to a gurney and a needle in your arm. Doesn’t matter. You’ll die either way. You can’t win. September 11 was a fluke, you surprised us. It’ll never happen again. And even if you do pull this off, somehow, even if somehow you manage to blow up Manhattan or London, what then? You think killing a million people is going to help the cause? You think you’re going to roll back a thousand years of progress? What, exactly, are you trying to do? You think this is Islam? Wells had converted to Islam during his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and though he didn’t pray much now, no one would ever convince him that these jihadi nihilists spoke for the religion, no matter how many surahs they quoted, how many pilgrimages they took.

“Get in?” Wells said. “Or what?”

“Get in,” the kid repeated. But he couldn’t keep his voice from breaking. And out of pity as much as anything else, pity and the knowledge that he could snap the kid in half, Wells stepped into the cargo compartment.

A few seconds later a gloved hand pulled down the back gate and locked him and the kid in darkness. Wells ought to have been worried but he wasn’t. The van rolled off and he wondered whether he was overconfident, setting himself up for a fall. Locked in a truck, no backup, no tracking device. Not exactly textbook tradecraft. But if he couldn’t take li’l Helmut, he deserved what he got.

The overhead light came on, a weak bulb. Helmut stood across the compartment, ten feet away, holding a pistol, a.45 ACP. Wells couldn’t be a hundred percent sure in the dim light, but the pistol looked fake.

“Take off your clothes.”

Wells shook his head. He ought to feel some fear, a twinge at least, but he could only muster annoyance.

“We must be sure you’re not wearing, you know, a microphone. A bug.”

“A bug. If you say so.” Wells had left his pistol in the hotel. He stripped, pulling off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt. He noticed again that he hadn’t managed to lose all of the weight he’d put on for his trip to Moscow. Irritating. He stacked everything in a neat pile in a corner. The compartment was cold, air rushing in from a couple of holes punched in the floor, but Wells didn’t mind.

He carefully unlaced his boots, slipped them off, his socks, his jeans, slowly, one leg at a time, Wells seeing now something he hadn’t expected, Helmut’s eyes shiny under the glasses.

“Take a good look.” Wells turning his flat Montana drawl into the clipped syllables of an African mercenary. He put his thumbs into the elastic band of his boxers and spun, a slow twist. As he did, Helmut took an involuntary step forward, his mouth half open.

Wells finished his turn and stepped forward and the kid stepped back as if Wells had threatened him, Wells understanding now. “Underwear, too?” Wells said. “Want the whole thing?”

“It’s okay.” The kid tilted his head away, then back, trying to look and not to look.

“Better check, can’t be sure, right? They have these little mikes, they tape them down there—” Wells slipped his fingers into the front of his shorts.

“Enough! Get dressed. Please.”

“Your call.” Wells had pushed this too far already. This guy was gay, and Wells would bet anything in the world that whoever was driving the truck didn’t know it. He dressed quickly. “How much longer?”

With Wells fully clothed, Helmut could meet his eyes again. “I don’t know exactly. Fifteen minutes. The city, there’s traffic.”

“Who’s driving?”

“Bernard.”

“Who’s Bernard?” Wells knew he could ask the kid anything now and get an answer.

“My father.”

Wells shook his head, this job getting weirder and weirder. The guy looking to his son for help. Amateur hour. Or maybe just extreme compartmentalization, no one else Bernard could trust. “You don’t know what this is about, do you?”

Helmut shook his head. “He asked me to bring you to the van, see if you had a wire.”

“And if I did?”

“I was supposed to knock on the front compartment.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know. He said it would be an adventure, I could use it in one of my movies.”

“You make movies.”

“I’m trying. But, you know, it’s very hard in Germany, all the real talent is in the United States, and the money, too, or even Berlin, I’d be better off there, but my father—”

Wells cut him off, not interested in this not-so-hard-luck story. “The gun’s fake, yeh?”

“Yes, from a film I made, a short, it won an award at the Hamburg festival, it’s small, but it’s something—”

And Helmut rattled on, to cover his embarrassment or his arousal or because like every other Hollywood wannabe in the world, he couldn’t shut his mouth when he had an audience. Fortunately, the ride lasted only another fifteen minutes.

When the back gate rolled up again, they were inside a warehouse, mostly empty, big wooden crates scattered around the concrete floor. A middle-aged German man stood looking up at them. He wore leather gloves and held a pistol, a Glock, and this gun was real.

Helmut’s eyes widened when he saw the pistol. He asked something, but the man waved the question away and barked at them in rapid-fire German.

“Nein,” Helmut said when Bernard was done. He stepped forward and Wells thought for a moment of keeping him in the van, using him as a shield, but then decided to let him go. Wells still wasn’t sure how to play this, whether to let Bernard take the lead or not.

Helmut jumped out the back of the truck and disappeared from Wells’s sight.

“Roland Albert,” Bernard said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Bernard,” he said in English. “May I see your wallet?” These Germans, always so polite. Wells fished it out of his jeans, tossed it down. “Your passport?” Wells sent that down, too. Bernard flipped through them. Apparently satisfied, he waved Wells down and tucked the pistol into his pants. A few seconds later, the van coughed to life and rolled away, leaving just Wells and Bernard and a Mercedes sedan that had been hidden behind the van.

Wells suddenly knew what to do. As the truck rumbled out of sight, he stepped forward and without a word jammed his heavy right fist into Bernard’s gut, Bernard grunting softly, “Ooh,” his mouth half-open, reaching for his Glock but not finding it. It was in Wells’s left hand. Wells hit Bernard again, doubled him over this time; Bernard, almost sixty, was not a fighter.

“What was that, man? That bloody nonsense.” Wells didn’t curse much, but Roland Albert did. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you both, you and that poof son of yours. If we didn’t have a friend in common, I would.”

Bernard tried to respond but could only manage a wheezy asthmatic cough.

“Amateur hour. This is amateur hour here. Bloody Helmut. Helmut and his fake poof gun.” Wells laughed, a choked half-snort, then cut himself off. He didn’t want to overdo the bad-guy act. “Your friends better be smarter than you. Let’s get to it, mate? You want this stuff? You sure?”

Bernard stumbled to the Mercedes, short painful steps, and propped himself against its trunk. “Yes.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred kilos.”

“How soon?”

“One week.”

“Christ almighty. Two hundred kilos of beryllium in a week. Why not ask for a couple MIGs, something easy?”

“I can pay.”

“Yeh. How much?”

“Three million euros.” About five million dollars. The guy had money from somewhere, another question Wells and the agency would have to answer.

“Ten.”

“Four.” Bernard coughed lightly. “All I have.”

“Four may not get you two hundred, then, eh. We’ll see. Now. I don’t want to know nothing more about this. Not what you’re doing with it. Not where or why. Nothing about your friends.”

“I don’t know where it’s going anyway.”

The flat denial stopped Wells. “No?”

“We’re not so stupid as you think.”

“Good then,” Wells said. “Glad to hear it. Give me your mobile number.”

Bernard did.

“I’ll call you in two days, three maybe, if it’s possible.”

“You are not certain? Then you should know there are others looking, too.”

“Serious? Got the old Easter egg hunt going, do you?”

Bernard nodded.

“That doesn’t make me happy. Best be careful. Too many on the trail, even the BND may sniff it out. Now. Two more items of business. Next time we meet in your office, yeh? And I need the saloon.”

“The saloon?”

Wells tapped the trunk of the Mercedes. “For my troubles, chum. Whether or not I get your stuff, I keep the car.”

“Nein.”

“Nein? Try again.”

Bernard reached into his jacket, handed over the keys. Wells threw Bernard’s Glock across the warehouse and clicked open the doors to the car, slipped in. “Nice. Heated seats?”

“Of course.”

“Of course.” Wells slid the key into the ignition and rolled off, watching Bernard’s face disappear in his rearview mirror. He could no longer discount the reality of the threat he and the agency faced, but he felt an unexpected elation. For the first time in months, he’d pulled off a mission exactly as planned. Bernard wouldn’t question his bona fides again. And now Wells ought to be able to stall him for at least three days, probably more.

Meanwhile, though he preferred motorcycles, he had to admit the Mercedes was a great ride. He flicked on the wipers, flicked on the sedan’s xenon headlights, and left Bernard and the warehouse behind.

But his mood faded by the time he found his way back to downtown Hamburg. Did Bernard really not know where his friends were building the bomb? Did he have another source of beryllium, or was he lying to bluff Wells into moving quickly?

Too many unknowns, only one certainty. Somewhere, maybe just a few miles from here, maybe over the border in France or Poland, maybe on a different continent, a handful of determined men were trying to build a nuke. And though they might be wrong, they believed they were close.

22

The barricades at the Kutafya Tower rose and the long black Cadillac wheeled slowly up the ramp to the Kremlin, passing a handful of tourists braving the cold. Behind bulletproof glass, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador, watched as the high brick walls loomed closer until they were all he could see. Whenever Purdy came up this ramp, he felt like Luke Skywalker approaching the Death Star and finding that he’d left his light saber back with Yoda.

For the whole of his twenty-five years at the State Department, Purdy had wanted to be ambassador to Russia. He’d found the country fascinating ever since he’d happened onto a Russian literature class his sophomore year at the University of Virginia. The assignments he’d taken in Belarus and Kazakhstan, the meetings where he’d swallowed his tongue and watched his bosses take credit for memos he’d written, the hours he’d spent perfecting his Russian, the fights he’d had with his wife when he insisted she learn the language, too, they’d all been in the service of getting this job.

And he’d gotten it. The big donors had wanted cushier posts, in London and Paris and Tokyo and Buenos Aires. So the secretary of state had been able to go inside the foreign service and make the pick that the department’s career officers wanted. Walter Mark Purdy. He’d been so thrilled when the call came that he hadn’t slept for two days. Finally, he’d gotten his doctor to prescribe him some Ambien.

Be careful what you wish for. These days Purdy was sorry he’d ever gotten the job. He was a dog who’d been chasing a car for twenty-five years, and finally caught it, only to find. that he was a dog with his jaws clamped around a car’s back bumper.

The Russians had never been easy. Now they were impossible. They were still seething about the nineties, when planeloads of well-meaning Ivy League political scientists and World Bank economists had come to Moscow to tell them how stupid and poor they were, how they needed to listen to their betters in Washington and London. In public, they were surly. In private, they were worse, deliberately nasty to anyone less senior than the secretary of state.

And Purdy knew now that he was the wrong man for the job. Dealing with the Russians successfully meant screaming back, making sure they knew they didn’t have carte blanche. Walking out of meetings if necessary. But by nature and training, Purdy was a diplomat, not a screamer. He knew the burden that history had put on Russia, how for centuries the tsars and nobles had grown fat while the peasants starved. How in 1919 the people had destroyed their masters, only to see them replaced with a new set.

Purdy wanted to give the hard men across the table the benefit of the doubt. He wanted them to know that he’d visited all of Tolstoy’s museums and read every word the man had ever written. Pushkin and Chekhov, too. He wanted them to see that he loved Russia, that he, and by extension the country he represented, were ready for a relationship based on mutual respect.

They couldn’t have cared less.

He tried to change his tactics, toughen up, yell when they yelled. But his heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t afraid of them, not exactly. He just hated these manufactured confrontations. But he knew each time he let them bully him in private, he was reinforcing their worst tendencies, goading them to believe that the United States could be bullied, too.

Purdy had always been level-headed, easygoing, reasonably happy, but after two years as ambassador he was more and more depressed. A political appointee, some billionaire Silicon Valley mogul with an ego to match his bankroll, would have made a better representative for the United States than he did. Even if the mogul didn’t speak a word of Russian. Impossible but true. A political appointee would never have let himself get steamrolled. He would have screamed back. Then the Russians would have pulled out a bottle or ten of vodka and both sides would have drunk themselves silly and hugged each other good night.

He’d worked for this job his whole life, he’d gotten it, and now he’d found out he was wrong for it. It was a cosmic joke. The kind of irony that Tolstoy would have appreciated. Chekhov, anyway. Tolstoy wasn’t much of an ironist.

And this assignment today. Another disaster waiting to happen. The Russians did not like to be questioned about the security of their nuclear arsenal. Not at all. The problems at Russian nuclear weapons depots were one of the issues that the geniuses of the 1990s had harped on the most. Even back then the generals in charge of Russia’s strategic weapons had not enjoyed being told how to do their jobs. They were affronted by the American attitude that Russia was just another third-world country that couldn’t be trusted with nukes. After all, Russia had successfully maintained its nuclear stockpile for more than fifty years, nearly as long as the United States.

The Kremlin grew even more suspicious when the American experts pressed for access to the weapons. The generals at the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom asked openly whether the United States wanted to leave Russia defenseless by disabling all Russia’s nukes and missiles. Between 1998 and 2003, the United States had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a secure depot at the Mayak plant to store plutonium from disassembled nuclear weapons. The depot had concrete walls ten feet thick and could hold twenty-five tons of plutonium. By any measure, it was the most secure warehouse for nuclear materials in all of Russia. It was almost empty. The Russian government had no plans to entrust its nuclear weapons to a building that American engineers had designed. Purdy couldn’t blame the Kremlin for being suspicious. If circumstances were reversed, the United States would hardly put all its nukes in a warehouse that Russia had designed. Just trust us, boys. We’re all on the same side. Really.

Now Purdy was about to stir up this messy nest of national pride and national security again. And for what purpose? When the instructions to set up the meeting had come two days before, he’d told the secretary of state he’d be wasting his breath.

But he’d been overruled. Langley had come up with something that had made the White House sit up and take notice, and so Purdy got to put his dick on the block for the Russians to chop off. No. This time he was going to be tough. Really. He sighed and shuffled through the thin folder of papers he’d brought as the Cadillac rolled through the Trinity Gate Tower at the top of the ramp and entered the Kremlin proper.

Whatever his problems with the job, Purdy always loved this view. Unlike the White House, the Kremlin wasn’t a single building. It was a complex of more than a dozen massive structures inside a fort in the center of Moscow, on a hill that overlooked the Moscow River. To the south of the Trinity Gate were museums and churches open to tourists. North of the gate, toward Red Square, were government offices, closed to the public. No signs marked the two sides, but tourists who wandered toward the northern buildings were quickly warned back to the public areas.

On both sides the buildings were oversized and sturdy, covered with the snow that blanketed Moscow five months a year. This complex had survived invasions by Hitler and Napoleon, misrule by the tsars and Stalin. Some of the buildings inside were five hundred years old, mute testimony to the Russian capacity to endure. To endure foreign attackers, gulags and show trials, and endless mornings like this one, overcast and bitter, with a light snow falling from the gray sky. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun still shined, or so Purdy wanted to believe.

The Cadillac rolled on, alongside the massive Arsenal, which housed the elite soldiers who guarded the Kremlin, toward the yellow walls of the Senate, the gigantic triangular building where the president of Russia had his offices. Purdy gathered up his papers, wondering half-seriously if he should make a quick detour, pray at the Assumption Cathedral for a couple of minutes, light a candle to Saint George.

His dream job. Hah.

THE RUSSIANS HAD PROMISED Purdy a meeting with Anatoly Zubrov, the senior military adviser to President Medvedev. But it was General Sasha Davydenko, Zubrov’s deputy, who awaited Purdy in a windowless conference room on the Senate’s third floor. Davydenko was tall and trim and wore a flawless green uniform with enough combat decorations to stop a bullet in the unlikely event he was ever near one again.

“General Davydenko,” Purdy said. “Will Anatoly be joining us?”

“He’s been called into an urgent meeting. I assure you anything you tell me will reach him.”

Urgent meeting, right. He was probably on the beach in Brazil, and Davydenko hadn’t even bothered to make an excuse for his absence. “I was told he’d be here. This is unacceptable.”

Davydenko gave the tiniest of shrugs. “Mr. Ambassador. It’s winter in Moscow. What do you expect?” Walk out, Purdy thought. Just go. But he’d come to relay a message, and the message had to be delivered.

“Unacceptable,” Purdy said again.

“Can my men get you anything? Perhaps a glass of tea? Green tea?” Davydenko raised his eyebrows, making the suggestion seem ridiculously effete. Purdy had asked for green tea once before in these offices. An instant mistake. He might as well have requested a bottle of baby formula.

“Thank you, but no. I’m sure you’re busy—” Purdy gritted his teeth. Now he was apologizing for taking the time of a guy he hadn’t even come to see? Davydenko nodded slightly, as though both men knew the enormity of the favor he was doing for Purdy by agreeing to this meeting.

“My government has an urgent request.”

“Yes.”

“We’d like an accounting, a full accounting, of the material that’s gone missing. The nuclear material.”

“Yes?”

“The MoD originally said that five hundred grams of HEU had disappeared. Then, approximately three weeks ago, that estimate was increased to five kilograms. Where it remains. For now.”

“Yes.” Davydenko tilted his head away from Purdy, examined the ceiling, as if Purdy were barely worth listening to, a junior army officer rather than an emissary of the most powerful nation on earth. Purdy reminded himself of his vow in the Cadillac.

“General—” he snapped. “Do I have your attention?”

Davydenko pursed his lips. He seemed faintly surprised that the mouse had roared, Purdy thought. Finally, he nodded. “Of course, Mr. Ambassador. You have all the attention you require. Go on.”

“As I said. Your country has not provided the United States or the international community with an accounting of the missing material. You haven’t specified its enrichment. Nor have you given us any intelligence on the thieves. Do you believe they’re mafiya? Terrorists? Do they have the ability to use the material? Are they still within your borders, or have they escaped? Do you even have any answers to those questions?”

Purdy paused, hoping that Davydenko would speak. But the general had gone back to his earlier pose, looking at the ceiling.

“General,” Purdy said. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the urgency of ensuring that we never have a nuclear event on Russian or American soil. All we’re asking is a candid assessment of the threat. You owe us that much.”

“The Russian government is fully able to handle this investigation, Mr. Ambassador. If and when we need assistance, from the United States or NATO or anyone else, we will not hesitate to ask for it. I assure you.”

“Because we have learned that a person who may be affiliated with a terrorist group is urgently seeking a component crucial to building a nuclear weapon—”

“Excuse me?” Now Davydenko did look surprised. “You have learned what?”

“Someone—”

“Who?”

“I can’t say. But this person has offered several million dollars for a component of a nuclear weapon.”

“What component?”

“Again, I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” Purdy allowed himself to smile. For the first time in a year, he had something on these guys. “Ironic, isn’t it, that your government has been so uncooperative and yet you demand whatever scraps of information we have.”

“What is ironic, Mr. Ambassador, is that you presume to come into the Kremlin and tell us how to run our own investigation. And that you have information you refuse to share. This is not the way friends treat each other.”

“Are we friends?”

“This is not the way great nations build trust.” Davydenko banged his fist on the table and the empty glass in front of Purdy jumped. “I ask again, do you have something to tell me?”

“I will tell you that the person who is attempting to buy this component is not here in Russia.”

“Do you have any reason to connect this person, assuming he exists at all, with our missing material?”

Purdy hesitated. “Not at the moment.”

“Not at the moment.” Davydenko spoke with the sarcastic tone that senior Russian officials seemed able to deploy at any time. “Perhaps the next moment, then? The one after that? Maybe tomorrow? Next week? Mr. Ambassador, did you decide on this fool errand yourself? Did you miss seeing me so much? You come in here, you waste my time with this nonsense, no proof—”

“I speak for my government. And we want official assurance that you have full control of your arsenal.”

“Then it’s your government that’s wasting my time.” Davydenko stood. “We answer to our own president. Not to yours. Do we come to the White House demanding that you confirm that your nuclear weapons are safe in their silos? Do we? Do you play these games with the Chinese or the French or the British?”

“No.” Purdy knew he shouldn’t answer, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Correct. Only us. Always you treat us like children. We would never behave with such insolence. Yet you, you come in here and — Let me give you a piece of advice, Mr. Ambassador. Drink your green tea and let us handle our investigation. As for this mythical person seeking this mythical component, if and when you decide to behave ethically and tell us what you know, I will be willing to listen.”

“Is that your official response, then?” Purdy wished he could come up with something snappier, but at least he was holding his ground.

“My official response is that I have business to attend to. My captain will show you out.”

WHEN PURDY WAS GONE, Davydenko walked down the hall to Zubrov’s office, just outside the presidential suite, and relayed the conversation. Not that he needed to. The conference room was miked. Zubrov had been listening all along.

“Goddamn bombs,” Zubrov said. “All these years we had all these missiles pointed at each other and nothing happened. We spent the fifties blowing up the Pacific, ten megatons at a time. Nothing. Now two assholes steal two two-hundred-kilo warheads and everything turns upside down. What do you think, General? This component, is it real?”

“That little man is too weak to lie. And they wouldn’t have sent him unless they were worried.”

“Then why won’t they tell us about this component?”

“I think what he said is true,” Davydenko said. “They’re angry that we haven’t talked to them.”

“If they only knew how little we’ve found.”

“Is there anything new on that front?”

“I wish.” The Russian investigation had stalled completely. No one in Chelyabinsk had any idea what had happened to the Farzadov cousins. Not even Tajid’s wife. The FSB had taken her into custody and spread the word to Muslim leaders in southern Russia that she wouldn’t be released until Tajid turned himself in. But Tajid was still missing. Either he’d left Russia behind or he was dead. Meanwhile, the other men in the Mayak plant had been questioned, and questioned some more, by the best interrogators the FSB had. At this point, the FSB was satisfied that no one knew anything. And as for the men who must have helped the cousins outside the plant, no one knew anything about them either. No names, no descriptions, no fingerprints, no photographs. They were smoke.

“What about this component?” Zubrov said. “What could he be talking about? Some kind of detonator? A missile?”

“A detonator wouldn’t be so expensive and I don’t know why he’d call a missile a component.” Davydenko shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. They don’t need any additional components to use these bombs. Just the codes. And they don’t have those. I’m not even sure this is related to the theft.”

“Call Pavlov”—the Rosatom deputy director—“see if he has any ideas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, General. Let me know.” Zubrov dismissed Davydenko with a salute. When the general had closed the door, Zubrov ran a hand over his thick jowls. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink before noon, but today he wanted one. He wondered if he ought to tell President Medvedev that they should come clean with the United States, acknowledge the theft. But Medvedev would never agree. He wouldn’t accept losing face that way. Not unless he was sure that he had no other choice. And he did have a choice. Rosatom and the generals insisted that the weapons couldn’t be used without the codes. They’d said a dozen times: no codes, no bombs.

But what if all these fancy green uniforms were wrong? After all, these thieves had gotten into a depot that was supposed to be unbreakable. What if they had some way of cracking the codes? Or getting around them? Then what? Suppose they blew up half of Manhattan, killed a million Americans? And what if the United States linked the weapons to the Russian arsenal? Would the White House demand that Moscow be destroyed in turn?

The engineers had better be right about their damn bombs, Zubrov thought. They better not have missed anything. Or else the United States and Russia might be headed for a war that would make all the others that had ever happened look like soccer friendlies. Damn the bombs. Damn the engineers, the physicists, and mutually assured destruction. “Damn it all,” Zubrov said to the empty room.

Zubrov opened the bottom drawer of his big wooden desk, where he kept a bottle of Stoli vodka, a ceremonial gift from the president on his first day as military adviser. He reached down for it, pulled out the bottle and a dusty glass, cleaned the glass with his shirtsleeve and unscrewed the bottle for the first time. Vodka kept forever, another of its many good qualities. He poured himself a healthy shot, though not too healthy. He would have to call Medvedev after this drink. He raised his glass to the empty room, but he couldn’t think of a toast. He drank it down in silence.

23

The uranium-235 that Nasiji and Bashir and Yusuf had extracted from the warhead didn’t look like much. A hollow sphere of gray-black metal, cut into jagged slices like an orange rind, the pieces in a plastic box on a workbench. Jumbled among them was a second sphere, solid, not much larger than an oversized grape — the “spark plug” of U-235 that had formed the center of the secondary.

Nasiji weighed the pieces on a digital scale beside the box, first one by one, then all together. Thirty-two kilos — seventy pounds — in all. Nasiji stared at the scale, a muscle twitching in his jaw, a vein pulsing madly in his forehead.

“We’ll work it out,” Bashir said. “We’re close.”

But Nasiji didn’t respond. Until, finally, he put the pieces back into the box and ran his hands through his hair and smiled. His change of mood was as disconcerting as his fury had been. Were you pretending to be crazy then, Bashir wanted to ask, or are you pretending to be sane now? But he supposed he knew the answer. None of them were sane. How could they be? They were building a nuclear bomb. In a stable.

Is this right? For the first time since he’d gotten involved in this scheme, that simple question came to Bashir. Was it his place to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, the same Americans he tried to save on the operating table?

Then he thought of his uncle, in that awful prison at Tora. Egyptians had killed him, but the United States was responsible. The Americans were the puppetmasters all over the Muslim world. Saddam Hussein had been one of their puppets, too. As long as he did what they wanted, fought wars against the Iranians, they didn’t care what he did to his people. But when he stood up to them, they came after him. This place, the United States, had killed millions of Muslims. A bomb like this was the only way to stop them, to even the score. It wouldn’t be pretty, but no war ever was. So Bashir forced the question out of his mind.

He hoped it wouldn’t come back.

THE IMAGE PLAYED over and over in Nasiji’s mind, a video he couldn’t turn off: the crate falling out of the lifeboat and sinking into the Atlantic. If only they’d held on to the second bomb. Instead. when he looked at the numbers on the scale, he couldn’t help but feel as though the devil was working to thwart him.

Again he gathered up the pieces and scattered them on the scale and looked at the black numbers staring at him: 32.002 kilograms. The Russians had been precise, he’d give them that.

“Thirty-two kilos,” Yusuf said. “What does that mean?”

“It’s not enough, that’s what it means.”

“Please, Sayyid,” Yusuf said. “I know you explained before, but if it works for the Russian bomb, why do we need more?”

“Yusuf—”

“I’m just trying to understand.”

“The secondary, the bomb we took apart, the pieces fit together into a globe, right? And when the first bomb, the primary, goes off, the secondary gets smashed together, becomes supercritical”—that word in English.

“Super-critic-al?” Yusuf sounded like he was auditioning, badly, for a part in Mary Poppins.

“I told you before. Supercritical means the explosion is speeding up, more and more energy is being released. The Russians, the Americans, they’ve figured out how to smash the material very fast, and that means they need less material to cause an explosion. Ever since the 1940s, we’ve known this is how it works.”

“But we can’t smash it together as fast as they can.”

“That’s right. The gun that we’re using, it will shoot the uranium piece at four hundred meters a second”—a quarter-mile a second, nine hundred miles an hour.

“Isn’t that fast?”

“Compared to how quickly the fission reaction happens, it’s slow. So we need more uranium, a bigger sphere, to make sure the bomb will go off.”

“But if it’s so complicated, why don’t we use the Russian bomb?”

“I should just go back to Iraq, leave this to you.”

“Sayyid—”

“I tell you again. The secondary won’t go off without the primary. And the primary, I promise you, it’s been engineered so it won’t go off unless it’s been properly armed. With those famous codes. And we can’t use our own explosive to set it off either. You can’t just paste dynamite around those bombs and push a big handle. The explosive has to be placed and detonated just so, or the bomb won’t go off. We don’t have the equipment. Synchronous detonators and high-grade explosive and a lathe that can cut to the tolerances we need. And even if we could buy them, I don’t know if we have the skill to use them. It would take us six months practicing and testing to be sure. You want to live here for six months, hope no one notices?”

Nasiji pointed at the recoilless rifles stacked against the wall. “The kind of bomb I want to make, it’s so much easier. Mold the pieces into the right shapes, two masses, both just subcritical, fire one at the other. As long as you have enough material and you fire it fast enough, it’s certain to work. With sixty kilos, it would have been a joke. We could have done it in a week. Now. ”

“But isn’t there a half way?” Yusuf said. “We have half as much material as we wanted. Can’t we make a bomb half as big?”

“That’s not how the physics work,” Nasiji said. “Trust me.” Why hadn’t he found a way to detonate the bomb they’d stolen, instead of leaving himself in this mess? Why hadn’t he listened to Bernard and Bashir and sent the bombs to New York on a container ship, instead of being tricky and sending them through Newfoundland? Why hadn’t he made sure that both crates were properly locked down in the lifeboat? He was so stupid. He had failed his father, failed his family, failed his people. His father.

He felt his anger build again and walked out of the stable and into the cold night air. He leaned against an oak tree and craned back his head and looked through the naked branches at the stars, the ultimate nuclear-power plants.

Away from the scale’s figures and Yusuf’s questions, his stomach began to unclench. He was being too hard on himself. Thirty-two kilograms was a massive amount of enriched uranium, more than anyone outside a weapons laboratory had ever seen. Little Boy had been sixty-four kilos, but Little Boy had been made from 80 percent enriched uranium — not nearly as pure as the material they had. He hadn’t tested these pieces yet, but they were surely 93.5 percent enriched, standard weapons-grade.

At that level of purity, even a simple sphere of uranium, with no reflector, no compression, would go critical and produce a nuclear explosion at a size of about fifty kilograms. They were short, but they were in the ballpark.

Nasiji wondered if Bernard could somehow deliver the beryllium without getting busted. Doubtful. But even without beryllium, they could try a steel reflector. Steel wouldn’t be as effective as beryllium, but it would help. Maybe a double-gun assembly, to achieve maximum acceleration, if Yusuf and Bashir could somehow handle the welding.

With thirty-two kilograms, putting this bomb together wouldn’t be easy. But it might not be impossible, and he knew the tricks. Slowly, over sixty-five years, first the physics and then the engineering details of building these bombs had leaked out.

Yusuf emerged from the stable, walked up to him tentatively.

“Sayyid, I must say this. I’m sorry for my stupid questions. It’s confusing, that’s all.”

“It’s I who should apologize,” Nasiji said. “My temper—”

“And I wanted to say, if it’s really impossible with this much, we’ll get more. We’ll leave this here, go back to Russia, find another martyr.”

Nasiji smiled at the stars. He couldn’t help but admire Yusuf’s attitude, though they couldn’t get within a hundred kilometers of a stockpile now.

“No need, Yusuf. We’ll make do. I have some ideas.”

“Is it possible?”

“God willing. We’ve come too far to quit.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Nasiji took his physics and engineering textbooks and a sketchpad and Bashir’s laptop and shut himself up in the farmhouse basement beside the Ping-Pong table. Bashir tried to follow, but Nasiji shooed him away.

“Tell Thalia to leave my lunch at the top of the stairs. Dinner too, most likely.”

“You don’t want help?”

“Not for this.”

“All right, Sayyid. But you’re going to see us anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“There’s no toilet in the basement. Unless you plan to bring down a bucket.”

At first, Nasiji spent hours sketching out possible ways to set off the plutonium primary inside the Iskander. After all, as Yusuf had pointed out, they already had a bomb. Why not use it? But finally he gave up. He couldn’t figure out a foolproof way to trigger the explosives attached to the bomb, and creating a new trigger, though theoretically possible, would take too long.

That night he went back to his original plan, the gun-type uranium bomb, the Little Boy design. One piece of enriched uranium was molded into a piece that looked like a length of pipe. A second, smaller piece was shaped into a solid cylinder that fit snugly within the larger piece. Both pieces were subcritical, meaning they were each too small to detonate on their own.

The solid cylinder was placed at the end of the gun barrel. Then the pipe-shaped piece was shot at it, creating a single piece that contained a supercritical mass of uranium, big enough to set off a nuclear explosion. The Americans had placed a neutron initiator, a few grams of beryllium and polonium, at the center of the bomb to make sure the detonation happened on schedule. But the initiator wasn’t strictly necessary. The uranium would detonate on its own even without it. As Nasiji had told Yusuf, the great virtue of the design was its simplicity. If the bomb came together quickly enough and had enough uranium, it couldn’t help but go off.

What Nasiji hadn’t explained to Yusuf was that placing metal around the uranium core would make the explosion happen more efficiently, thus allowing the use of less uranium. The metal was called a reflector, because it bounced the neutrons, causing the chain reaction back at the exploding core. Beryllium was the ideal material for the reflector. A sphere of uranium surrounded by beryllium could produce a nuclear explosion with as little as sixteen kilograms of uranium — a critical mass less than one-third that of an unreflected sphere.

So, as an insurance policy, Nasiji had asked Bernard six months ago to try to get a cache of beryllium. But Bernard had reported back that the stuff couldn’t be had, not without taking a huge risk, possibly alerting the German authorities. Nasiji had told him to back off, not push too hard. With two warheads, Nasiji figured he would have enough material to make a bomb of his own.

Now, though, they were short of uranium. Beryllium was the shortest route to making a full-sized bomb. Nasiji had asked Bernard to try again. And only yesterday, in a coded e-mail message, Bernard reported he’d made contact with a man who might be able to provide the stuff. But Nasiji wasn’t at all sure Bernard would come through. In the meantime, they’d have to plan on using a simpler material, something they could pick up in Rochester or Buffalo without attracting too much attention. Tungsten carbide would probably be too much for Bashir to forge. In the end, steel would probably have to do. With that thought, Nasiji spent several hours calculating the optimal thickness of a steel reflector.

The calculation was complex, but the necessary variables were available: the neutron multiplication number for steel, the average number of collisions before capture, the likelihood of a neutron emerging from a collision. He found in the end that the tamper ought to be about twenty centimeters thick — about what he would have guessed before he’d done any of the math.

Finally, he designed the uranium core and the steel tamper around it. Basically, the bomb would look like a cannonball with a hole on the top. They would weld the artillery barrel into the hole and then fire the uranium plug down the barrel into the hole. The plug would slide over the uranium core in the middle of the barrel, and—Boom.

At 3 a.m. that night, Nasiji was done. He had a basic design, not fancy, but a start. Bashir and Yusuf could get to work forging the molds for the reflector and the core.

WHEN NASIJI EMERGED from the stairs, blinking in the light of the kitchen, he expected to be alone. But they’d waited up for him. Tried to, anyway. Bashir dozed on a rickety wooden chair, a half-eaten plate of hummus and baked chicken on the table before him. Yusuf curled up on the rug under the kitchen table.

They jerked up as he walked in.

“It’s done,” Nasiji said.

“What’s done?” Bashir said, running a hand across his mouth to wipe away the sleep.

“I’ve finished the design.”

“But. you said last night it wasn’t possible.” This from Yusuf.

“I can’t guarantee it will work. We’ll see.” Over and over, Nasiji had run the numbers, tried to calculate whether the thirty-two kilos they had would be enough for a chain reaction inside a steel reflector. But the equations required a level of detail about the subatomic properties of iron and uranium that he didn’t have, and the math got messy. Forty kilos would be enough, he was sure. Twenty wouldn’t. Thirty-two? They wouldn’t know until they pulled the trigger.

24

A solid bronze knocker shaped like a lion sat in the center of the front door of Bernard Kygeli’s house. Wells swung the knocker against the heavy black wood, picked it up and clanged it again.

“Hullo! Anyone home!” he shouted. “It’s Roland.”

“Ja?” a woman’s voice said. Then a few questions in German. A woman’s face, framed by a headscarf, peeked out at Wells. He was dressed for the occasion, holding a briefcase and wearing black gloves and a new gray suit he’d bought at the fancy department store downtown.

“I don’t speak German. Sprechen Deutsch nicht! And I’m freezing my stones off out here.” Wells was hardly exaggerating. For days, the weather in Hamburg and Warsaw had been miserable, a hard wind driving sheets of rain and sleet horizontally through the streets. Wells knocked again, hard. “Stupid woman. Is Helmut home?”

“Helmut?” The door opened a notch, revealing a middle-aged woman who wore a long-sleeved jacket that was tailored, black with gold filigree, modest but stylish. Wells put his shoulder to the door and popped it open. Its edge caught the woman and she stumbled back and dropped to a knee. Wells stepped inside and shoved the door shut. The woman yelled at him in German, less frightened than angry. He pulled her up, a hand under her elbow, and put a finger to his lips.

“Shh! I’m not here to hurt you.” Wells wasn’t sure what he would do if the woman didn’t quiet down. But she did. Her stare was angry but not quite furious, as if she thought he might have the right to enter the house.

“Where’s Helmut? Upstairs?” Wells pointed at the stairs.

“Helmut—” she pointed at the door.

“What about Bernard?”

“Bernard—” again at the door.

“Good, then,” Wells said. “Now be a decent girl and get me a Hefeweizen.” He pantomimed raising a bottle to his lips. Once again, Wells found the character of Roland Albert, beryllium-dealing Rhodesian mercenary, only too easy to take on. A shrink, or Exley, would no doubt have a field day watching him put his conscience aside for an hour and order this woman around. Bad guys had all the fun.

“Hefeweizen? Bier? Nein.”

“Right. You people don’t drink. Fine. I’ll make myself at home then.” Wells reached into his suit pocket, found the handcuffs he’d tucked inside it, then reconsidered. “Whyn’t you show me around? Otherwise I’ll have to hook you to a doorknob or some such nonsense.” Wells pantomimed that he wanted to look around the house.

She seemed to understand and walked beside him as he wandered through the first floor. She was far more relaxed than most American or European women would be under similar circumstances. Wells had seen this passivity before in women in Afghanistan. As far as he could tell, the attitude came both from fatalism and a deep-in-the-bones understanding that whatever Wells wanted with her husband was men’s business and didn’t include her. The average self-respecting Western woman would have a very hard time reaching the same conclusion.

The house was expensively furnished, Persian rugs, wood-paneled walls, leather couches and bookcases loaded with texts in German and Turkish. But there were no photographs or art of any kind, aside from a few framed Quranic verses and a single photo of the Kaaba, the black stone at the center of Mecca. The lack of artwork was a sign of Bernard’s piety. Observant Muslims believed that the Quran forbade the display of images, which competed unnecessarily with Allah’s majesty. That prohibition didn’t apply to televisions. A massive Sony flat-panel was tacked to the living room wall.

Bernard’s wife — Wells still didn’t know her name — acted up only once, when Wells started to open a door at the back of the living room. “Nein,” she said. She wagged a finger at him. “Verboten.”

“Verboten? You funning me?” Wells pressed on the door’s handle. Locked, with a simple push-button mechanism. He slipped a credit card from his wallet and popped it.

Inside, a small office, neatly organized, two file cabinets and a fine brown desk, a map of the world with shipping routes outlined from Hamburg to Istanbul and Lagos and Accra and Cape Town and Dubai, though none to the United States. Two thick leather-bound volumes with ships etched into their covers, one called Seerecht, the other Gesetz von der See. Wells figured they had something to do with maritime law. A coffee cup with the logo of the Penn State University soccer team, the Nittany Lions. Wells picked it up, looked at it curiously, set it down. A fancy pen-and-pencil set. The base for an IBM ThinkPad, though the laptop itself was nowhere in sight. A handful of papers stacked in a tray. Wells leafed through them, finding nothing of interest except a bill from a New York law firm, Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein—$32,000 for “insurance recovery.” Bernard’s wife watched him crossly from the doorway. Evidently she’d been warned never to enter the office.

Wells tugged on the filing cabinets and was slightly surprised when they opened. Inside, neat rows of hanging folders, stacked by year. One cabinet appeared to have nothing but German tax records, the other invoices for shipments and customs forms. No nuclear weapons blueprints, though the tax forms were plenty frightening. Wells lifted the cabinets, wiggled them forward an inch and peeked behind them, ran his hand under the desk, then ducked his head under it to examine its bottom for hidden compartments. He pulled the map off the wall, checked for a safe. Nothing anywhere. The floor and walls seemed solid, though he’d need much more time to be sure and he didn’t want to press his luck. The real prize was the computer and Bernard was keeping that close. “Let’s go,” he said. He left the door to the office open, but Bernard’s wife closed it.

In the living room, Wells sat on the couch, stretched his feet on the glass coffee table. From his new briefcase, he extracted two brick-sized blocks of light gray metal carefully wrapped in plastic. Five kilograms — about eleven pounds — of beryllium each. Wells laid the bricks on the coffee table. The metal came straight from a Department of Energy stockpile in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, though it of course bore no markings. Wells had told Shafer that he needed to get Bernard enough beryllium to buy some time, convince the guy he was serious. Shafer had gotten Duto to sign off after the weapons designers at Los Alamos agreed that ten kilograms of beryllium wouldn’t be enough to make a meaningful difference to the bombmakers even if Bernard somehow got it to them.

Wells tapped the bricks. “Don’t touch,” he said to Bernard’s wife. “Verboten. I’m serious. Got it?” Beryllium flaked into small particles, and though the metal was safe to touch, it was toxic if it was inhaled. Even small amounts of it caused a nasty inflammatory reaction in the lungs.

She nodded. “Good,” he said. “Tell Bernard I’ll call him tonight.” Wells pantomimed putting a phone to his ear.

WELLS STEPPED into the Mercedes he was now thinking of as his own — or at least Roland Albert’s — and cruised past a Deutsche Telekom service van parked about fifty yards from the house.

Twenty minutes later, he left the Mercedes with the valet at the Kempinski, pulled out his satellite phone. Shafer picked up on the second ring.

“Ellis. I thought you said no static posts.” Wells had insisted that he work entirely apart from the BND agents monitoring Bernard’s movements. But Shafer had assured him that the Germans would be cautious. Rather than watching the house from fixed positions, they would rely on drive-bys with a dozen anonymous cars, each passing the house every fifteen minutes or so.

“I did.”

“Then why is a telco van sitting down the block from Bernard Kygeli’s house? Subtle.”

“Maybe somebody wants DSL.”

“Ellis—”

“I’ll look into it.”

“Anything else I should know?” The BND had tapped Bernard’s phones — home, cell, work — and thrown a replicator on his fiber-optic connection that allowed them to see the Web traffic that came into and out of his house and office. His trash was being searched and his tax records for the last decade examined.

“He may be an amateur, but he’s cautious,” Shafer said. “Two days ago, he bought a prepaid cell, made a couple of calls, tossed it in the river. Yesterday he went into an Internet café off the Reeperbahn for three minutes, but he was gone before we knew what terminal he was at. And that traffic isn’t stored anyway. I don’t think he’s in charge. He’s just checking in with whoever has the stuff, letting them know he’s working on getting the beryllium.”

“How about the money?”

“The business looks legit. And there’s been no transfers from Dubai or Saudi or anyplace. But we don’t see anything like four million euros loose. In fact, it looks like he’s been slipping a little bit the last year or two. We don’t know why. But his bank balances have been trending down. Anyway, he’s got a million-five stashed away in the accounts we can see, plus the house is worth another million. If he’s got it, it’s in a Swiss account or a safe box somewhere. Or maybe he’s not planning to pay you at all.”

Was Bernard crazy enough to plan on killing Roland Albert after he got the beryllium? “I can’t see it,” Wells said. “He’s not a fighter.”

“Pride goeth, John. You leave him the package?”

“Yes. Took a look around his house, too. See if you can find any connection to a law firm in New York. Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein, it’s called. They did some work for him last year. Something to do with insurance.”

“New York? Weird. All right, spell it for me.”

Wells did.

“I’ll check it out,” Shafer said. “Be safe.”

“Aren’t I always?” Wells hung up.

HE WENT BACK to the Kempinski, worked out for almost two hours, weights plus eight miles on the treadmill. He showered, dressed, reached for his phone to call Bernard, then changed his mind and decided to let the man stew for a few hours more. He lay on the bed and napped—

And woke to a heavy knock on his door.

“Yeh?” Even muzzy-headed with sleep, Wells remembered that in this room he was Roland Albert.

“Polizei!”

“What do you want?”

Rap! Rap! “Open the door, Mr. Albert!” This in English.

The voice sounded like Bernard’s. Wells wished he could look through the peephole, but doing that was an easy way to get a bullet in the eye. Whoever the guy was, Wells wanted him out of the corridor before he attracted other guests’ attention. Wells moved silently to the door, grabbed his Glock, unlocked the door, and in one smooth motion pulled it open with his right hand while holding the pistol across his body with his left.

Bernard stood in the corridor, pistol at his side. He tried to raise it, but Wells lunged through the doorway, knocked his arm up and back, and pinned him against the opposite wall of the corridor as quietly as he could.

Wells jerked Bernard’s arm down so the pistol pointed at the carpeted floor of the corridor. “Drop it,” Wells said.

Bernard hesitated. “Before I break your arm, you bloody idiot.” The pistol landed with a soft plop on the carpet. Wells kicked it away. “Now get inside.”

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

“What do you think you’re doing? Eh?”

“You come to my house—”

“Look at me, Bernard.”

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

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

“You insult my wife.”

“I didn’t touch your wife.”

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

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

“Why did you come to my house?”

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

“Your money?”

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

“I only have four. I told you.”

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

“Five, then.”

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

“One.”

“Two or—” Wells pointed to the door.

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

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

“And the metal—”

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

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

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

25

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

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

“Ellis. Shouldn’t this be locked up?”

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

“So?”

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

“I mean, honestly, you look like crap, like you’re in agony when you twist that leg wrong, but it’s good to see you. Really good.”

“You always know just how to make a girl smile, Ellis.”

“Sorry.” Shafer gave her the abashed smile of a five-year-old caught with a handful of Oreos, a face she’d seen him make before, more than once.

“Did you ask me to come in just to make me feel good about myself?”

“I need your brain.”

Exley had a glimmer of how Wells must feel. I try to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Even before the shooting, she’d been trying to escape this madness-making job, seeing if she might convince Wells to escape with her. Maybe not all the way out. Maybe they could move to the Farm for a couple of years, train the bright young things who would be the next generation to keep the world safe for democracy and capitalism. Though not necessarily in that order.

Then Kowalski had reached out and touched them and Wells had proven what she’d always known, that he couldn’t be housebroken no matter how hard she tried. She’d begged him to wait, and even so he’d bared his fangs and counterattacked as instinctively as a pit bull tossed into a ring. Maybe Wells was so confident in his own ability to get through the worst situations that he didn’t see the danger he faced. Or maybe he simply didn’t care whether he lived or died.

But she did. If not for herself, then for her kids. When she saw them at GW Hospital the day after the shooting, she couldn’t stop crying. Twice in two years, they’d stood beside her hospital bed and held her hand and told her they loved her and everything would be all right. As if they were responsible for her and not the other way around. Whether God or fate or sheer luck had kept her alive, she didn’t know. But she couldn’t take more chances. She couldn’t imagine not seeing her kids again. That day, she’d promised herself she would quit.

But quitting meant giving up Wells forever, and she couldn’t imagine that either. To take her mind off the impossible choice, she’d pressed her rehab as hard as she could. If her nurses asked her to walk, she went until her legs and her spine burned and she had to lie down to recover. If they asked for fifty leg lifts, she gave them a hundred. They’d told her more than once that she wasn’t helping herself by pushing so hard. But the pain distracted her from thinking about Wells.

This morning, Shafer had called and asked her to come in. He’d made the request as casually as if he were asking her if she wanted an extra ticket to a Nationals game. Even so she’d hesitated. But then her curiosity took over; she wondered how being back would feel. As she and her bodyguards rolled by the truck-bomb barriers that guarded the main entrance to Langley, she was overcome with a strange nostalgia, as though she were visiting her old college campus for the first time a year after graduating. She loved this place and understood these people and wanted to be one of them and yet she didn’t feel connected to them.

Now, in Shafer’s office, Exley felt different, more engaged. Shafer was her rock at the agency. He’d hardly changed in all the years she’d known him. He was rumpled, energetic, a bad dresser and messy eater, but most of all brilliant, sometimes too brilliant. For years, she’d wondered if Shafer deliberately played up his eccentricities to add to his mystique as an absentminded genius. Today, for example, a big coffee stain covered his right shirt cuff. Could he really have done that accidentally?

Shafer had never fit in with the agency’s buttoned-up bureaucracy. He’d been on the verge of being marginalized before Exley and Wells saved New York. Now he and Duto had reached an accommodation. Duto let him and Wells and Exley run their own shop. In return, Shafer did his best to control Wells. So far, the deal had worked for both sides, though Exley didn’t believe it would last. Shafer didn’t trust Duto, and the feeling was mutual.

“You need my brain,” Exley said now. “Don’t you know I’m done?”

“Just desk work. I’ll bet after six weeks at home, you’re ready for some excitement. Take your mind off things. So—” and before she could object, Ellis filled her in on the missing uranium, and then on the way that Kowalski had connected Wells with Bernard Kygeli.

“John and Kowalski are buddies now?” Exley said when Shafer finished.

“Strange world,” Shafer said. “But Bernard’s a dead end. The BND, the Hamburg police, nobody has anything on him. He pays his taxes, keeps his Mercedes polished. He probably buys Girl Scout cookies, if they have Girl Scouts in Germany—”

“I get it,” Exley said. “Did they talk to the harbormaster?”

“The port authorities don’t know much about him. He’s been there a long time but he’s small-time and it’s a giant port and he’s never been in trouble, so. ”

“What about customs records?”

“Nothing unusual. Cabinets and rugs from Turkey. Also he sent some silverware two months ago from Poland to South Africa. The Poles checked and the factory confirms the sale.”

“He ship to the United States?”

“Not so far as we can tell.”

Exley could hardly believe how easily she was slipping back into this routine. But a few minutes of thinking out loud didn’t obligate her to come back forever. Anyway, Shafer was right. No one had ever gotten shot at a desk at Langley. “What about the general?” she said. “This Nigerian that Bernard bought the AKs for? Any chance he’s in on it?”

“Doubt it. Those look like real deals. Then when Bernard was looking for beryllium, he went to Kowalski since he had the connection already.”

“And we can’t figure out where he’s getting his money?”

“He makes a decent living legitimately through the business. We could go in, turn his house upside down—”

“But then he’ll know we’re looking and—”

“He’ll tip the guys who are making the bomb. Exactly. We can’t take a chance on spooking him. Same reason we haven’t talked to any of his workers or gone at that law firm in New York yet. We could try to talk to them quietly, pull the national security card, but if they call him we’re in trouble.”

“What law firm in New York?”

“I didn’t mention this?” Shafer explained how Wells had gone to Bernard’s house and found the bill from Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein.

“Have we checked his ships?”

“He doesn’t own ships. At least they’re not in his corporate record or registered in Germany or anywhere else we can find. We looked. And the harbormaster didn’t mention them.”

“Come on, Ellis. He has a decent-sized ex-im business, he makes regular runs, he must own a boat or two. They’re not in his name, that’s all. Some shell company in the Caymans or Gibraltar is holding them, with a lawyer as the corporate nominee.”

“And you think that law firm in New York is the connection?”

“I don’t know,” Exley said. “But we ought to pull the suits they’ve filed, see what turns up.”

“I missed you,” Shafer said.

BESIDES NEW YORK, Snyder, Gonzalez, and Lein had offices in Baltimore and Miami. The firm specialized in representing ship and aircraft owners against insurance companies and boatyards. Most of the suits were straightforward, and Exley didn’t see any connections to Hamburg. Certainly none to Bassim Kygeli. By the end of the afternoon, her back was aching so badly that she’d been reduced to lying on Shafer’s floor. “All right, Ellis,” she said. “I’m not sure I can stand, but it’s time for me to go.”

“Give it a few more minutes. Don’t you like reading about all these rich guys whining because they ordered a helicopter pad for their yacht and got an extra Jacuzzi or vice versa?”

Another half-hour crawled by. And then Shafer stood and clapped his hands. “Check this out. Two years ago, our friends at Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe filed suit against AIG. On behalf of a company called YRL Ltd.”

“AIG, the world’s biggest insurance company?”

“The one and only,” Shafer said. “YRL looks to be a shell. Based in the Caymans. But the suit was filed in New York because that’s where AIG is headquartered. YRL wants AIG to pay a four-million-dollar insurance claim for a freighter called the Greton, registered out of Liberia. About two years ago, the Greton burned up off the Nigerian coast.”

“Anybody die?”

“Doesn’t look that way. Anyway, AIG won’t pay. It says the Greton didn’t have a decent fire-suppression system or an adequately trained crew. Basically that it was an accident waiting to happen.”

“So who won?”

“The lawyers. Two years gone, a dozen claims and counterclaims already and they’ve barely started discovery. By the time they’re done, they’re going to spend more on the suit than the boat was ever worth. But—” Shafer stepped out from behind his desk and stood beside Exley and jabbed at the filing he was reading. “Lookee here.”

“Lookee here?”

Shafer tossed the filing to Exley. “Page eight.”

On page eight, a description of the Greton: “used primarily to bring cargo from Turkey to ports in Western Africa. Frequently chartered by Tukham, Ltd., an import-export company based in Hamburg.” Tukham, Ltd. was Bernard Kygeli’s company.

“You are one smart girl,” Shafer said. “And I say that in the most sexist way possible.”

“Guess we should find out who owns YRL.”

“And what other boats YRL owns.”

Exley checked her watch: 6:30. “The corporate registry in the Caymans is closed for the night. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.”

“We? That mean you’re coming in tomorrow?”

Exley didn’t bother to answer.

THE INCORPORATION PAPERS that YRL Ltd. had filed with the Cayman Secretary of State’s Office were only two pages long. But they told Exley and Shafer everything. YRL’s president was one Bassim Kygeli, of Hamburg, Germany.

Within the hour, they’d checked ship registries worldwide for boats registered to YRL. They found one more: the Juno, also registered in Liberia. YRL had bought it two years before, presumably as a replacement for the ill-fated Greton. It had been built in Korea in 1987 and displaced 22,000 tons, a pipsqueak compared to the newest and largest container ships. But more than big enough to carry a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Exley couldn’t find pictures of the Juno online, but AIG would have some and a quick call from Langley would shake them loose.

“If the Greton is out of commission, that’s got to be the one,” Shafer said.

“Assuming that Bernard shipped the stuff on his own boat.”

“What’s the point of owning a boat if you can’t use it for something like this?” Shafer said. “Anyway, it’s the first place to look.”

Exley checked the Hamburg port records. “Shows up only twice in Hamburg in the last two years. Once last summer. And on December 31. Happy New Year. It left Hamburg with a load of used car parts. No mention of Tukham or Kygeli. It’s supposedly being managed by a company called Socine Expo.” Exley looked up Socine on the D&B corporate database. “Socine’s offices are at the same building as Tukham, 29 Josefstrasse.”

“Wouldn’t you know,” Shafer said. “No wonder the German port records don’t connect Bernard and the Juno. Where’s it headed? I’ll bet New York.”

“Close,” Exley said. “Dock records say Lagos, Nigeria.”

“Then it should have gotten there already.”

“Think the Nigerians have their port records online?” With a few keystrokes, Exley sniffed out the records. “Amazing but true. They do. Arrivals and departures in Lagos. In English. I’m not surprised about the Germans, but the Nigerians?”

“Nothing about the Internet surprises me anymore.”

“Well, this won’t surprise you either,” Exley said. “There’s no record of the Juno.”

“Which means it’s either in port here or somewhere in the Atlantic. We’d best tell Duto, get the navy looking for it. How hard can it be to find a two-hundred-foot-long boat? The Atlantic’s only a couple of million square miles.”

“You going to tell John about this?”

“Not yet. At this point, the less he knows, the better off he is. He seems to be handling Bernard decently so far.”

“How is he, Ellis?”

“Oh, no. I’m not playing matchmaker. You want to know, you ask him yourself.”

26

Even waiting for the Juno in Newfoundland, Bashir had never been this cold. A front had blown in from Canada and encased the entire Northeast in frigid polar air. He and Nasiji and Yusuf needed heavy gloves and thick jackets for the half-minute walk between the Repard house and the stable.

But inside, the stable was as hot as Iraq in July. The gas-fired furnace at its center roared as Bashir melted steel in a thick-walled tungsten carbide pot. The steel glowed as red as the devil’s own soup. Bashir stood four feet from the furnace, but even so the flames scorched his hands.

“Are we close?” Nasiji said.

“A few minutes. No wonder hell is supposed to be hot. Imagine spending eternity in those flames.”

“We won’t be the ones in them.”

Bashir wished he could be so sure. As they moved close to finishing the bomb, his doubts were growing. Two nights before, with Thalia asleep, he’d crept to his laptop and read about nuclear explosions, looked at photographs of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The violence these bombs unleashed was unimaginable, though it didn’t have to be imagined. It had already happened.

Most civilians assumed that the lethality of a nuclear bomb resulted from the radiation it produced, the gamma rays and neutrons that caused leukemia and other cancers. But radiation, though terrifying, was not the deadliest part of the blast. Even a small bomb — like the ones dropped on Japan, like the one they were making — created a fireball hundreds of feet around, with a temperature of seven thousand degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the sun. The fireball could burn the skin of people standing two miles away. The most horrifying pictures from Hiroshima came from the triage tents where the burn victims had gathered to die, their skin torn off, their clothes melted to their bodies.

At the same time, the explosion produced a massive shock wave that traveled at almost a thousand miles an hour, faster than the speed of sound. In other words, the blast hit before its victims could hear it coming. The wave was far stronger than the biggest tornado or hurricane, leveling buildings and tearing people to shreds. For the first half-mile from the epicenter of the blast, no human being or animal, no matter how well protected, could survive.

Along with the shock wave and the fireball came a blast of radiation. The splitting of the uranium atoms released gamma rays, high-energy particles that ricocheted through the body like tiny bullets, killing cells and damaging DNA. The rays attacked the entire body, but they were especially damaging to soft tissue and marrow. The most heavily dosed victims suffered acute radiation sickness and bled out, hemorrhaging through their skin. Other victims seemed fine for the first few weeks after the explosion. Then their hair fell out, their skin sloughed off as if they were rattlesnakes molting, their stomachs turned into bloody sinkholes. Unable to eat or drink, they starved to death. And even at relatively low doses, the radiation could kill years later by causing leukemia and lymphoma.

Bashir wasn’t afraid of bloody viscera or broken bones, of puncture wounds or charred flesh. He’d been a surgeon for seven years, long enough to see all manner of horrors. An old man whose glasses had melted to his face because he’d tried to save a few dollars fixing his hot water heater himself, instead of hiring a mechanic. A motorcyclist who’d had both legs and his pelvis crushed by an SUV. Worst of all, an eleven-year-old boy who’d fallen off the roof of his house during a Fourth of July barbecue and had the terrible luck to puncture his stomach and chest on a wrought-iron fence. The firefighters and EMTs worried that the kid would bleed out if they pulled him off the spikes, so they cut the fence and brought him to the hospital with the iron still in him. He was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, Bashir remembered, and with the spikes sticking out, the shirt looked like a novelty gift gone wrong. The medics hadn’t wanted to give the boy painkillers for fear of putting him into shock. When he arrived in the operating room, he was too frightened or in too much pain or both to talk. He just nodded when Bashir told him they were going to fix him, but they’d have to hold him down to get him free of the spikes. They’d put a mouth-guard in to protect his teeth and his tongue and started to pull. But the iron in his abdomen was in deeper than they’d imagined, into the muscle behind the stomach, and the kid screamed until his eyes rolled up and he fell unconscious, foam flecked at the corner of his mouth. The boy had lived, but Bashir would never forget the way he screamed. Or that when they finally wormed out the spike, bits of partially digested corn kernels were stuck to its prongs.

In his years as a surgeon, he’d saved a few lives. But this bomb would undo the good he’d done a thousand times over. The deaths would come by the hundreds of thousands, a poet’s nightmare vision of the apocalypse. Only this inferno existed outside the pages of the Quran or the Bible. This jerry-rigged monster they were building from a few pieces of uranium and steel, it was real. No matter that they were in a hundred-year-old stable instead of a laboratory surrounded by guards and barbed wire. The physics of a nuclear explosion were the same here as in Los Alamos. They didn’t need security guards, or thousands of engineers and scientists, or a billion-dollar budget. If they had enough uranium, and they pushed it together into a critical mass quickly enough, they would get a nuclear explosion. Full stop.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shocked the world so much that for two generations nations had come together to prevent another nuclear blast. They’d built tens of thousands of bombs. But they’d never again used one, not against civilians, not even on enemy armies. Not the Americans, not the Russians, not the Indians or the Pakistanis. Not even the Jews. They’d all kept the genie inside the bottle.

Now Bashir and Nasiji and Yusuf, and a few other men whose names he didn’t even know, were going to break the taboo. Who were they to cast the world’s wisdom aside? They weren’t presidents or kings or prime ministers. They weren’t imams whose names were known by pious Muslims around the world. They weren’t even famous generals. They were a few men who’d gotten their hands on a few precious kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Now they were going to use it. They weren’t going to declare war, or warn anyone what was coming. And though they had only one bomb, Nasiji was hoping to use it to start a much bigger conflict, Bashir knew.

Yet. why should they hold themselves to a higher standard than the United States, which hadn’t warned civilians out of Hiroshima or Nagasaki before it vaporized those cities? And why shouldn’t America pay for its crimes? They’re at war with us. They kill us in ones and twos and sometimes by the hundreds. Shouldn’t we be at war with them? And the struggle long predated the invasion of Iraq. Since the first Crusade, Christians had tried to destroy Islam.

Bashir knew he was running in circles now. He’d been arguing with himself for three days, the same words and phrases chasing each other through his head. Hiroshima. Abu Ghraib. Radiation poisoning. Crusaders. Leukemia. Hiroshima—again, but this time as an argument for giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine.

More than anything, Bashir wished he could talk to his uncle Ayman’s friends in the Muslim Brotherhood. They were wise men, honest and pious, not prone to excess, and deeply knowledgeable about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. If even one of them approved this mission Bashir wouldn’t have worried. But he couldn’t ask them what they thought. And he couldn’t raise any of his doubts with Nasiji or Yusuf. Whatever had happened to Nasiji’s family in Iraq, and Bashir knew only the outlines of the story, it had erased any reservations Nasiji might once have had. As for Yusuf. Yusuf was a perfect jihadi. He would kill until he was killed and expect heaven as his reward.

No, talking about this with Nasiji and Yusuf wouldn’t be wise. That left him with Thalia, but Thalia was a child. He would have to figure this out for himself. In the meantime, he saw no alternative but to keep working on the bomb.

“BASHIR!” NASIJI SAID SHARPLY. “It was ready five minutes ago. How much longer are you planning to stir it?”

Bashir pulled himself from Hiroshima and focused on the forge. Distracted by his thoughts, he’d been stirring the steel with a tungsten carbide pole to improve its consistency. Now it was ready to be poured.

“Of course, Sayyid.”

Bashir set aside the pole and grabbed a set of tungsten tongs. He reached down into the furnace and squeezed the tongs tightly around the pot. Waves of heat blasted under his face shield and gloves.

Nasiji wrapped a second set of tongs around the pot. “Careful, Doctor. No spills. One hundred kilos”—220 pounds—“of this stuff might itch a bit.”

“Yes,” Bashir said, thinking of the charred skin he’d seen on the Hiroshima burn victims. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

They lifted the pot and took three steps to a spherical mold eighteen inches in diameter, made of high-purity ceramic. A second, smaller mold fit inside the first, to create the space for the artillery tube and the uranium plug. Bashir had sintered the molds — fused them from a powder of ceramic particles — in the vacuum furnace the day before.

“We pour on three. One. Two. Three.”

Slowly they poured the steel into the mold, their fourth pour so far. When they were done the mold was about half full. The tamper would be finished by late that afternoon. Once it had cooled, Bashir would cast the two pieces of the explosive pit — the narrow cylinder that fit inside the tamper and the larger piece, shaped like a pipe, that they fired at the cylinder and slid over it. The two shapes were relatively simple, but making sure they fit together smoothly was crucial. Before he cast the pit out of uranium, he planned to take a practice run using a steel ingot. Once he’d finished the pieces of the dummy steel pit, they would weld the steel cylinder into the tamper, then weld the muzzle of the recoilless rifle into the hole at the top of the sphere.

Once the muzzle had been attached, probably no later than tomorrow afternoon, they would fire a water glass at the plug, a test to make sure the two pieces fit together properly and that the barrel of the rifle wouldn’t explode from the stress. Nasiji had insisted on the practice test. They could make another tamper easily, he said. And Bashir hadn’t objected. Anything to give him more time.

THAT NIGHT NASIJI AND YUSUF left to check their e-mail accounts, something they’d done every couple of days since they arrived, never going to the same Internet café, or even the same town, twice. When they came home, Nasiji was smiling.

“I need you to put together a second mold, Bashir,” he said. “One that has space for a beryllium reflector. It’s easy: it fits between the uranium pit and the tamper. I’ll show you the design.”

“We’re getting the beryllium, then?”

“No guarantees. But it’s promising. Our contact says he’s received ten kilos of it and thinks the rest will come soon.”

“When will we know?”

“You’ll know when I tell you.”

TWO DAYS LATER, while Bashir tinkered with the design of the molds, Nasiji and Yusuf drove to Rochester and came back with a Sony digital video camera, a tripod, and even a spotlight. Then they disappeared into the basement. Bashir asked them what they were doing, but Nasiji was oddly coy. “My second career,” he said. “With Yusuf as the producer.”

The next morning, Nasiji called Bashir downstairs. The camera and spotlight were set in front of an Iraqi flag.

“I didn’t want to tell you beforehand,” he said. “I wanted you to see it with fresh eyes.” With a theatrical flourish, he flipped open the laptop and started the media player.

The video opened with Nasiji, sitting cross-legged in front of an Iraqi flag, red and white and green. He was dressed in Western clothes — jeans and a blue button-down shirt. He sat on the floor, a dagger sheathed on his hip, a beatific smile on his face, looking like a yoga instructor from hell.

“My name is Sayyid Nasiji. I was born in Baghdad, Iraq. With my own eyes, I have seen the destruction the Americans have brought to Iraq. With my own eyes, I have seen the bodies of my father and mother and sister and brothers. I represent the Army of the Believers,” he said in Arabic. “For many years we have waited for this day. We and all true Muslims. Now we have brought the wrath of Allah on the kaffirs. The shortest path to freedom is the path that sheds blood far and wide. And we are not afraid of blood.”

Nasiji drew the dagger that was on his hip and scraped the blade across a cutting stone. Scrape. Scrape. Tiny sparks flew off the edge of the knife.

“America thought we could only use knives and guns. America thought we could not make the special weapon, that we hadn’t the technology. And I cannot lie. Anyone who tries to build such a weapon faces great difficulties. So you may ask, where did this bomb come from?”

A new image filled the screen: Grigory, sitting on a couch, a black sheet as background. The video that Yusuf had filmed in Russia, two nights before he killed Grigory and Tajid.

“My name is Grigory Farzadov,” he said in Russian. “I am an engineer at the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in Ozersk, Russia.” Grigory held up his plant security identification and his Russian passport. As he spoke, the camera’s focus tightened on his identification. “Several months ago I was approached by a group of men who told me that they wanted to steal a nuclear bomb and asked for my help. Naturally, I reported this action to my supervisor, Garry Pliakov. He is deputy manager of operations at Mayak. A week later, Garry told me that he wanted me to help the smugglers steal the bomb. He told me I was to provide the smugglers the codes to activate the weapon. I asked him why we should take this action. He told me that President Medvedev himself had made the decision and I was not to question it. He told me that if I did not do as I was told, I would be tried for treason. Naturally, I did not argue. I still do not understand why, but we have given the men the bomb.”

“Do you think Grigory is lying?” Nasiji said.

Then an image of the warhead, lying on its side on the dirt floor of the stable. The camera focused on the Cyrillic lettering atop the warhead.

“There is your answer,” Nasiji said. “This bomb comes from Russia. The Russian government gave it to us. Could we have broken into the Mayak plant ourselves? Could we have discovered the codes ourselves? Of course not. We were given this bomb. And the Russians, they knew where we planned to use it. Remember this, America, when you are deciding what to do next. Now, I do not know why the Russians gave us this weapon. Probably they intend to attack you for themselves and are using us as a mask. Probably they didn’t expect that we would expose them this way.

“But we want you to understand what’s happened, America. We want you to know that it isn’t just Muslims who are finished with you. It’s Russians, Chinese, everyone. Everyone sees how you rule the world. Everyone wants you to pull back your armies and let us live in peace. This explosion is divine retribution for all the evil that you have committed. Do not forget your sins, America. Remember that we Muslims want to live in peace with you. We have blown up this bomb because you’ve given us no choice. You must decide what action to take next. But do not retaliate. Understand this lesson and make peace with the world.”

Nasiji stood and raised the dagger, holding the tip to his neck.

“You can never stop us, America. For a thousand years, we have died for Islam. If we must, we will die for a thousand more. Nothing frightens us. Now, please, take this moment to change your path.”

He pressed the knife into his neck, drew a single drop of blood. He pointed the blade directly at the camera.

“Allahu Akbar.”

Nasiji stopped the playback. “That’s it. I’m planning to put your names in, too. Let the world see who we are. And if you want to make your own statements, we might consider that. Though I think it works better this way. One voice, yes?”

“Genius,” Yusuf said.

“Bashir,” Nasiji said, a kid fishing for compliments. “What do you think? Maybe I ought to use a plain black background instead of the Iraqi flag. I don’t want them to think Iraq is their only sin.”

BASHIR COULDN’T TAKE his eyes off the screen, the final image, Nasiji leaning forward, staring into the camera, the dagger held high in his hand. A madman. Or worse. Nasiji’s black eyes seemed to glow red as coals. An illusion of the camera, the spotlight on his face. Had to be.

“Will it work?” Bashir said.

“Probably they won’t believe it,” Nasiji said. “They’ll say I’m lying, trying to get them to attack Russia. But it’s worth trying. I’m hoping we’ll be done in time to set this gadget of ours off at the big speech, the State of the Union—”

“But that’s hardly a week away—” A week? This was all going to happen within a week?

“I know. I don’t think we can get the beryllium by then, and if we don’t have it we’ll wait. The beryllium’s the only way we can be sure we’ll get a full detonation. But if we can, imagine it. The whole American government is there. President, vice president, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all of them. All gone.”

“But the security must be enormous.”

“Yes, but they can’t close down all of Washington. And their security, it’s designed against a truck bomb. Not one of these. If we succeed, the generals will be the only ones left. And they’ll want to strike back. Quickly. And if they think we’re telling the truth, they’ll have no choice. They’ll fire all their missiles at Russia. The Russians will fire all their missiles back. The end of the United States of America. Russia, too. Every city will be gone. The two countries that hate Muslims the most, wiped away. The Crusaders, beaten forever.”

And a hundred million people will die, Bashir didn’t say. More. Two hundred million. Three hundred million. More. A number so large it couldn’t be counted, couldn’t even be imagined.

“Sayyid,” he said. “I want the Americans to suffer. But this. will Allah smile on this?”

“Losing your nerve?”

“Not at all. But isn’t there anyone we can talk with, ask for guidance?”

“All these years, they’ve given us war. All these years, Muslims have been dying. We must destroy them, Bashir. Nothing less.”

“God willing,” Yusuf said.

“You’re right,” Bashir said. He wished he could be as sure as he sounded, as sure as Nasiji and Yusuf. “Anyway, I think you ought to have a black flag. Yusuf and I aren’t Iraqi, and Iraq isn’t their only sin. As you say.”

“I’ll redo it.”

“Then what?”

“When we’re ready, just before we go, we’ll send copies to CNN and Al Jazeera and a few other places. We’ll upload it to our own Web sites, too, in case they won’t run it. But we’ll have to time it right, so it isn’t posted until afterward.”

“And if we can’t get the beryllium in time?”

“We’ll wait. No State of the Union. But we’ll still destroy the White House, kill the president, blow up the middle of Washington. And when they see the video, they’ll know who to blame. I’m only sorry we won’t be around to see it.”

THAT NIGHT, Bashir lay beside Thalia, unable to sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the charred wooden houses and corpses in the streets, terrified even in death by what they’d seen. He wished he’d never looked.

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Thalia said quietly to him in Arabic. Doctor. He loved to hear her call him that. But tonight the word cut him. Doctors were meant to save lives.

“Nothing, my wife. Now sleep.”

“Bashir, tell me. And then we’ll both sleep.”

Bashir wondered if he could tell her. But why not? She was his wife, after all. “Yusuf and Sayyid, you know, this thing we’re making in the stable, it’s a bomb. A special bomb. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“You did?”

“Yes, my husband. I know I’m not very smart, but the things you and Sayyid were saying, I figured it out.”

“A big bomb. It will kill a lot of people.”

Thalia squeezed his hand. “How many?”

“I don’t know. But many.”

“Here? In America?”

“Yes.”

“So it would be kaffirs.” Her voice had a girlish excitement that surprised him.

“Muslims, too. It won’t discriminate. And Nasiji has a plan. He’s hoping to start a big war between the United States and Russia. If it works, there could be hundreds more bombs like this. Even thousands, maybe. Does that bother you?”

“No.” And Bashir’s surprise became astonishment as his wife slid her hand down his stomach and reached for him, something she’d never done unbidden before. Bashir couldn’t think of anything to say, and so he lay silent as she stroked him hard and then straddled his legs and guided him into her, all the while whispering, “No no no.”