The Silent Man

27

The mission could be explained in three words. Accomplishing it required a lot more effort.

Find a ship.

A ship that had departed Hamburg on New Year’s Eve, supposedly bound for West Africa, but had never arrived. A ship that was somewhere in the North Atlantic, unless it was in the Caribbean, or the Pacific, or docked, or even scuttled. A ship that was thoroughly anonymous, not a supertanker or a yacht but a midsize freighter like tens of thousands of others around the world. A ship that was called the Juno, unless its name had been changed. A ship that carried no visible weapons but still needed to be approached cautiously. Most of all, a ship that had to be found quickly, so its hold could be searched with Geiger counters, its crew questioned, and its captain put in a rubber room and subjected to every interrogation technique that the dark wizards of the CIA had ever invented.

The task was formidable, even with the National Security Agency and the navy making it their highest priority. Nonetheless, this was the kind of problem the United States knew how to solve, a technical puzzle that could be cracked with pure effort and brainpower. For once, no need to win hearts and minds in Baghdad or Kabul. Just find that damn freighter. Around NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, through the Atlantic Fleet command in Norfolk, the order went out. By yesterday, if possible.

Photographs of the Juno, along with its engineering specifications — height, length, displacement, and the shape of its superstructure — were sent to every American and British naval vessel in the Atlantic. Within twelve hours, the Atlantic Fleet had posted frigates outside the major East Coast harbors, from Miami to Portland, Maine. Meanwhile, Coast Guard cutters visited every ship that had docked in the last two weeks and that matched, or almost matched, the Juno’s specs.

At the same time, the Atlantic Fleet command ordered destroyers and cruisers to run alongside the main sea lanes that crossed the North Atlantic, in case the Juno was still somewhere en route or sailing back to Europe. The Royal Navy sent its own flotilla west. In three days, the vessels identified every ship that fit the Juno’s profile. Impressive work, especially considering the winter weather and the fact that the sun shone for barely eight hours a day on the main route between London and New York.

Impressive, but fruitless. The navy’s efforts came up empty. The Juno wasn’t on the sea lanes between Europe and the United States. And it wasn’t docked in any port anywhere in the United States, Canada, Britain, or Western Europe.

MEANWHILE, the NSA’s Advanced Keyhole satellites were searching the rest of the Atlantic. The satellites could capture ships in great detail, down to their names and the foot-square patches of rust on their hulls. They could also take photographs that covered several square miles and captured dozens of boats at once.

But they had a problem. They couldn’t do both, not at the same time. The camera capable of both super-wide and super-fine resolution hadn’t been invented yet. And from Greenland to South America, the Atlantic covered more than forty million square miles. Even if the satellites photographed it in one-square-mile chunks, they would need forty million images to cover it.

To work around the problem, two dozen software engineers spent a long night at Fort Meade writing code. By morning, they’d created an application that turned the agency’s face-recognition software into a crude boat-recognition program. The software couldn’t find the Juno. But it could rule out in real time ninety-five percent of the boats spotted by the satellites as too big, too small, or the wrong shape.

The other five percent were classified as possibles and photographed again at one-meter resolution. Those images were then reviewed by the NSA’s analysts, who eliminated any ship that appeared significantly different from the original photographs of the Juno, on the theory that the Juno could not have had time to undergo major structural work since leaving Hamburg.

The analysts were able to rule out another ninety percent of the boats that had gotten through the first pass. Even so, not every satellite shot was definitive. Many of the ships had gray hulls and decks that didn’t stand out against the dark water of the Atlantic. They could only be ruled in or out after being seen and photographed at sea level, by helicopters, drones, or naval aircraft. Their names and locations were passed to the navy for a final inspection.

AT LANGLEY, Exley and Shafer tracked the search in the annex of the operations center in the basement of New Headquarters Building. The annex and the entire center were classified as Blue Zones, restricted to employees with Top Secret/SCI/NO FORN clearances. Originally, contractors had been excluded, too, but after the operations center went dark twice in six months, the agency gave in and hired a team from Lockheed to fix the electronics that supported it.

The annex was a high-ceilinged room, about thirty feet square, with concrete floors and a distractingly loud ventilation system. On two walls, oversized monitors projected digital maps of the Atlantic, cut up into 400,000 patches of ten square miles each. The maps divided the ocean into three colors. Green represented areas that had been searched and cleared. Red stood for areas where suspect ships had been found and needed to be checked. And yellow symbolized areas that hadn’t yet been searched. An unfortunate choice. When the hunt for the Juno started, the Atlantic appeared to be filled with urine.

As hours and then days passed, patches of green appeared on the maps, spreading out from the East Coast along the major shipping routes like a shipborne virus. Tiny blips of red appeared, then vanished. A third monitor contained the names and photographs of suspect ships. As suspect boats were cleared, they disappeared from the screen, replaced with new targets.

On the second morning, the satellites picked up a boat off the coast of Nicaragua that looked to be almost a perfect match. But when a helicopter buzzed it, it turned out to be a freighter that had been built by the same Korean shipyard as the Juno.

By then, Exley was thoroughly sick of staring at the monitors.

“Ellis. We’re useless here. Let’s find something else to do.”

“Last week you were ready to quit,” Shafer said. “Now you’re looking for work.”

“This is it. One last job and then I’m done.”

“If you say so.”

“I told my kids and I’m keeping my word. I’m serious.” But was she? If an interrogator had shot her full of sodium thiopental at that moment, she didn’t know what she would have said.

“Uh-huh,” Shafer said. “Meanwhile, let’s go figure out where Bernard Kygeli gets his money. If anything happens here, they can call us.”

NO ONE HAD OFFICIALLY told Henry Williams that his career was over. But he knew, as surely as if the secretary of the navy had sent him a card congratulating him for thirty years of able service and welcoming him to retirement. He imagined the card would have a golfer on the cover and say something like “You’ve Knocked the Ball out of the Park — Now It’s Time to Hit That Hole in One” in big block letters that his middle-aged eyes would have no problem reading. Like he was a lawyer who’d spent his career behind a desk instead of a man who’d given up his marriage and everything else on land for a life at sea. Instead of a destroyer captain, for Pete’s sake.

But the navy didn’t tolerate failure. And Williams had failed the summer before. Just outside Shanghai, his ship, the USS Decatur, had rammed a fishing trawler filled with Chinese college students. The ramming had killed twenty-two Chinese and pushed the United States and China to the brink of war. In retaliation, a Chinese submarine had torpedoed the Decatur, killing seventeen of Williams’s sailors.

An internal inquiry by the navy found that Williams had committed no wrongdoing in either incident. But Williams knew he would never escape the stigma of what had happened. During the months the Decatur was in dry dock, Williams had been persona non grata at the meetings in Honolulu and Annapolis, where senior officers discussed the future of the service. After the Decatur was recommissioned, it had lost its place in the Ronald Reagan carrier battle group and been shipped back to the East Coast to do laps in the Atlantic. And his superior officers no longer asked him what vessel he hoped to command next. No, his hopes to move further up the ranks, to earn an admiral’s gold braids, had ended in the East China Sea. In two months, when the Decatur was done with this tour, he’d retire. Honorably, with a full pension.

He had no idea what he’d do next. The Decatur’s namesake, Stephen Decatur, had gone out with his spurs on, dying in a duel in 1820—a story Williams loved telling. But duels were no longer politically correct. Williams supposed he’d wind up going home to Dallas, burning his afternoons playing golf. Or maybe he’d start consulting with some defense contractor. Either way he’d secretly be hoping for a quick heart attack.

Was Williams bitter about what had happened? His commanding officers had put him in a damn-near-impossible position, then punished him for failing to find a way out of it. In return for a career of loyal service, he’d been ditched like a rusted-out propeller. Though he could see the other side, too. The navy had plenty of commanders with spotless records. It didn’t have to take a chance by promoting one with a blemish as big as his. And pissing off the Chinese wasn’t in anyone’s interest. Especially since America and China were both pretending that the festivities the previous summer had never happened.

In the meantime, Williams still ran the Decatur, and he wasn’t coasting into retirement. He’d always run a clean ship. Now he was pushing his officers and crew harder than ever. He knew his sailors weren’t happy, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t asking for anything beyond the navy’s own regulations. He simply wanted them followed, to the letter. And if regulations said that officers weren’t to eat until the captain arrived at meals, or that sailors were forbidden to keep pornography even in their own personal footlockers, well, rules were rules. What are they gonna do, fire me?

So, yeah, he was bitter. He didn’t think anyone could blame him.

THE ORDERS CAME near midnight local time, as they were about to cross the equator on a hot dry night in the central Atlantic, slightly closer to West Africa than Brazil. The Decatur was to move east and north, off the coast of Sierra Leone and Liberia, just outside the sea lanes that ran between Europe and West Africa.

There, Williams and his crew would watch for a freighter that had gone missing on a run from Hamburg to Lagos. Somebody thought this ship, the Juno, was carrying more than a couple tablespoons of capital-S, capital-N, capital-M Special Nuclear Material. The whole Atlantic Fleet was looking for it, as well as every satellite the NSA had.

As soon as the orders arrived, Williams lightened up some, took his foot off the crew’s collective neck. Didn’t take a head-shrinker to figure out why. For the first time since Shanghai, the Decatur had a mission. The navy still trusted him a little. And so Williams ordered the Decatur ’s four massive gas turbines to full throttle and turned his ship east at twenty-five knots. By noon the next day, they reached their new position, the sun fierce overhead, the sea quiet, not even the hint of a breeze. Except during hurricane season, weather hardly existed in this part of the Atlantic. Fall and winter and spring were the same, an eternity of hot dry days.

Further orders weren’t long in coming. Twice in two days, Williams was ordered to check on ships that the NSA’s satellites deemed worthy of a closer look. Each time he’d put up the SH-60B Seahawk helicopter the Decatur carried, though each time he’d been sure they were wrong. In one case, the target looked too wide to him to be the Juno, and in the other too tall.

When the helo came back empty-handed the second time, Williams decided that he wasn’t going to wait to be told what to do next. The NSA might have the satellites, but it didn’t know squat about ships. He was going with his gut now, and his gut told him that the Juno was nowhere near West Africa. Why would it be? If it had followed the route on its original manifest, it would have reached Lagos weeks before. On the other hand, if it had made a drop off the American coast, it probably would have turned away, sailed southeast at full speed to get into the open Atlantic as quickly as possible. In that case, it would be west of him, and possibly south as well, depending on its speed. Williams decided to head southwest, back where he’d been when his orders arrived. He knew the risk he was taking, ignoring a direct order from the Atlantic Fleet command, and he didn’t care.

“You sure you want to do this,” the Decatur’s executive officer said.

“Until they take my ship from me, I’m running it as I see fit.”

OVERNIGHT THEY RAN southwest at twenty-five knots into the open ocean. By morning, Norfolk was asking where they were. “Better fishing in deep waters,” Williams messaged back. Let them chew on that for a while.

He put the Seahawk in the air and ordered it to push south to the limits of its fuel tanks and to notify him of any ship that remotely resembled the Juno. Three hours later, it came back, dry and empty. He ordered it refueled and sent out again, this time to the southwest. The mission was a waste of fuel, a 10,000-to-1 shot. The helicopter faced the same problem as the satellites. It had to fly close to the waves so it could see the details of the boats below, but staying low limited its field of vision.

But somehow Williams wasn’t surprised when the call came in an hour later. Eighty nautical miles to the southwest of the Decatur, the SH-60’s pilot had spotted a freighter that matched the Juno’s basic design. “Wants to know if they should take a look,” Stan Umsle, the Decatur’s tactical information officer, said.

“Go for it,” Williams said.

Two minutes later, the radio buzzed again. Umsle listened. “You’re not going to believe this, sir. The boat, it’s headed southeast, 165 degrees, fourteen knots. And they’re certain it’s the Juno.”

“How do they know?”

“They say it’s got Juno painted on the side in big white letters.”

“Good enough for me.” Somehow Williams kept his tone steady, though he wanted to howl in joy. Finding this boat might not save his career, but at least he could retire now with his head up, as something more than the captain who’d nearly started a war between America and China. “Take us to thirty knots, heading two hundred,” he said to Umsle. “Now.”

Then he called Rear Admiral Josh Rogers, who was overseeing the western half of the search from Norfolk, with the good news. Rogers listened in silence, then said, “I don’t suppose I should ask why you were three hundred nautical miles from where you were told to be.”

“No, sir,” Williams said. “You shouldn’t.”

Williams half-expected Rogers to tell him to wait so the navy could bring in the SEALs. Instead, Rogers ordered him to make the interdiction as soon as possible. “Ask nicely first. But if they don’t stop, you are authorized to disable their engines.”

“I don’t mean to be a stickler, but under what authority, sir? This is open ocean and they’ve got as much right to be on it as we do. They’re not even headed for an American port.”

“If that ship is carrying nuclear material, it’s violating who knows how many United States laws and UN resolutions. Tell them whatever you want, but stop them. If they’re clean, we’ll offer a thousand apologies for wasting their precious time.”

“Yes, sir, Admiral. We’ll get it done.”

“Roger that.” Rogers hung up.

Williams looked at Umsle. “Lieutenant, get a tac team ready to board the Juno. I’m not sure what law or UN resolution or intergalactic ordinance we’re going to use as an excuse, but we’re going in.”

“Intergalactic ordinance, sir?”

“Just get a team together. Make sure they know what they’re looking for.” Williams went up to the Decatur’s bridge and sent his executive officer down to manage the combat information center. He wanted to see this ship for himself.

Intercepting the Juno, which was traveling in a straight line at a piddling eleven knots, was almost embarrassingly easy for the Decatur. Within two hours, the freighter was visible from the destroyer’s bridge, a speck on the ocean to the southwest. A half-hour after that, the two ships were less than five nautical miles apart, and the Juno was clearly outlined against the sea.

In another fifteen minutes, the Decatur and the freighter were sailing parallel. The destroyer towered over the Juno, twice as long and almost three times as high. Even if the freighter had been larger, the missile launchers and guns that sprouted from the deck of the Decatur left no doubt which vessel was in charge.

“We have radio contact?” Williams asked the bridge communications officer.

“Yes, sir.”

Williams grabbed his headset. “This is Captain Henry Williams of the United States Navy. To whom am I speaking?”

“Captain Alvar Haxhi.” Haxhi had a heavy Eastern European accept. No surprise. Lots of ship captains were from Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

“You are the commander of the Juno, registered in Monrovia, Liberia?”

“That is correct.”

“Captain Haxhi, by order of the United States Navy, you are commanded to stop so my men can board and search your vessel.”

“Under what law of the sea do you make this demand?” The captain sounded surprisingly unworried given the circumstances.

“We have reason to believe your vessel is carrying sensitive material that belongs to the United States government. If you don’t allow us to board, I’ve been authorized to use deadly force.”

A pause. “Then I suppose I have no choice.”

THE BOARDING WENT smoothly enough. Over the radio, Williams asked Haxhi to come to the Decatur so he could be interviewed about the Juno’s movements.

“I will not leave my ship,” Haxhi said.

“Under any circumstances?”

“You and I both know this boarding is very much illegal, Captain. I allow it because I must. But I will not leave my men.”

Williams had to respect that attitude. “Then I’ll come to you.”

A half-hour later, Williams was sitting with Haxhi in the captain’s cabin on the Juno, an unadorned white-painted room ten feet square. The cabin stank of Eastern European cigarettes and was furnished with a metal desk, a full-sized wooden bed, and a dresser, all bolted to the floor. Two photographs of a pretty young woman were taped over his desk, Haxhi’s wife or girlfriend or maybe even his daughter, and a couple of Albanian novels lay on his bed. Otherwise, the cabin was devoid of any signs of personality, except for the putting green nailed to the floor.

“You like to golf?” Williams said.

“Of course, Captain. Do you?”

“I think it’s a big waste of time. Tell me where you’ve been.”

“The stupidest of trips,” Haxhi said. “We were on way to Nigeria. When we reached a hundred kilometers from Lagos, my manager called, said, Head west to Caracas.”

The story was implausible to the point of being insulting. “When was this?” Williams said evenly.

“Ten, eleven days. I can check.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“One time.”

“And who is your manager?”

“Name is Serge.”

“Serge what?”

“I just call him Serge. But, sure, we have his name on the manifest.”

“What’s the company?”

“Called Socine Expo.”

“You have a phone number, address, e-mail?”

Haxhi gave him all three.

“How’d you end up here?”

“I told you, after Lagos, they tell us Venezuela. We go there, all the way across the Atlantic, and then when we’re two hundred kilometers from Caracas, they tell us, back. To Jo’burg this time. So we turn around again.”

“Not a very well-run company. You wasted a lot of diesel.”

“Bosses change their minds. Why they’re bosses.”

“And when we found you?”

“As I said, on way back from Caracas.”

“You short on food or fuel?”

“Have plenty of both.”

“Your crew must be sick of this.”

“My crew, they do what I tell them.”

That much Williams believed. “You have logs to support this story of yours?”

Haxhi nodded at his desk. “Of course. Maybe you tell me what you looking for? Maybe I can help.”

“You get to wait here until we’re done looking around. It may be a while. I’m going to put a sentry outside the door, so don’t be stupid.”

“Mr. American Captain. You must be kidding. Look at my ship and look at yours. Maybe I am stupid but crazy I am not.”

FOR THE NEXT SIX HOURS, the Decatur’s crew combed the Juno with radiation detectors, looking for any hints that uranium or plutonium had been carried on the ship. But they found only the car parts that were listed on the manifest, a hull of crates packed with gear shafts, tires, brake drums, and shocks. The destroyer’s medic examined the sailors on the Juno for radiation sickness but found nothing unusual. Williams tried to talk to the sailors but got nowhere. To a man, they claimed they couldn’t speak English. He went back to Haxhi’s cabin, now clouded with smoke.

“Captain, may I get you anything?”

“My ship. Get it back to me.” Haxhi offered Williams the pack. “Cigarette?”

Williams shook his head.

“Have you found it yet, what you’re looking for?”

“No, and we’re not going anywhere until we do. And neither are you.”

“What about my delivery?” Haxhi asked the question with a straight face.

“Those poor South Africans, waiting for your precious car parts?” Williams almost laughed. “They’ll have to hang on a few more days. Let me tell you something, Captain. Pretty soon half the U.S. Navy’s going to be here. If we have to put this rustbucket in dry dock and cut holes in it from stem to stern, we will.”

“Whatever you like to do, you will do. But I am sure, this thing you’re looking for, you will not find it.” Haxhi exhaled a cloud of smoke in Williams’s direction, though not exactly at him. He was too confident, Williams thought. Whatever contraband the Juno had been carrying, loose uranium, a bomb, whatever, it was long gone.

Then Williams knew what he needed to do. He should have thought of it before, but better late than never.

“Sit tight, Captain,” Williams said. “I’ll be back.”

He ordered the Juno’s crew assembled on the front of the freighter’s deck, in two lines. To starboard the sun was setting, turning the sky a brilliant crimson. “Red sky at night, a sailor’s delight,” Williams said to the crew, pointing at the sun. “Red sky at morn, sailor be warned. I know some of you know what I’m saying. I know some of you speak English. And if you don’t, there are men on my crew who speak French, German, Spanish. They’re going to translate.”

One by one, the Decatur’s bilingual sailors repeated Williams’s message to the men. They stood still, their mouths shut, hardly moving even to breathe.

“I know you all are pretending you don’t understand. I see you standing there like a bunch of damn deaf-mutes who’ve been commanded to sail the oceans until the Second Coming. And I know it’s a bunch of bull. Let me explain this to you. We didn’t want to board your vessel, but we must find the contraband you were carrying. We don’t blame any of you. We understand that you probably didn’t know what you had. But we must find it.”

A pause for translation.

“Now, we could separate you, interrogate you one by one, pick a few of you to put in our brig. But we’re low on time. So I’m going to extend a one-time offer. On my authority as a captain in the United States Navy, and on my honor as commander of the USS Decatur.”

Translation. The sailors in the Juno looked curiously at one another as they heard Williams’s words.

“I promise that any man who gives us the truth about your route, helps us find the cargo you were carrying, will receive American citizenship. Your immediate family as well. Wife, children, parents, all to the United States. Right now. No red tape. You have my word, and the word of my crew.” Was he allowed to make this deal? Surely not. No more than the Decatur was allowed to leave its position off the African coast. But if he could get the information his admirals needed, no one would care. And if they did. what are you going to do, fire me? “I’ll take two men. The first two to come forward, no more, so decide quickly.”

Williams signaled for his translators.

But even before they could speak, two men stepped out of line.

28

Wells banged the brass lion knocker against Bernard Kygeli’s front door.

“Hullo? Hey?”

“Ja?” Bernard’s wife.

“It’s Roland.”

“Nein.”

“Open up, you handkerchief-wearing twit. I need Bernard.” Wells hadn’t seen Bernard in almost a week, since the meeting in the hotel. Two days before, Wells had called Bernard and briefly updated him on the progress he was supposedly making in getting the beryllium and promised to deliver the rest within seventy-two hours. Bernard had seemed satisfied. Wells figured he’d try to string Bernard along for a few more days, give the agency as much time as possible to find out where the bombmakers were hiding.

But this morning, Shafer had called Wells, told him he needed to get hold of Bernard. Immediately. Bernard wasn’t answering his phone. So Wells had come to the house.

“Nein. Not here.”

“Where is he then?”

But the house stayed silent. Wells waited a minute more, then dropped to a crouch and scuttled along the front porch. He vaulted over the rail of the porch and ran into the backyard, which was hidden from the neighbors by a high white wall. Most of the yard was taken up by a little garden, the plants wrapped in blue plastic to protect them from the winter. Three recycling bins stood tidily beside the back door of the house, which opened into the kitchen. The savory smell of Turkish coffee wafted into the yard through a half-open kitchen window.

For this visit, Wells had brought his Glock. He unzipped his jacket and started to pull the pistol from his shoulder holster. Then he changed his mind. He left the gun in the holster and stepped to the door and peeked inside. The kitchen was empty. Wells tested the door. Locked. He pushed on the window but couldn’t raise it.

Wells was wearing a black wool knit cap low on his head. He pulled off the cap and wrapped his gloved hand in it and punched through the window beside the door. The glass cracked with the sweet tinkle of a distant ice-cream truck. Wells reached in and opened the door and stepped inside. “Bernard,” he yelled. “It’s Roland.” Heavy steps thumped through the house toward the kitchen. Wells pulled his pistol. Helmut, Bernard’s son, skidded into the kitchen on black dress socks. He held a poker in both hands. He stepped toward Wells but stopped when he saw the Glock.

“Put it down,” Wells said.

“We’re calling the police.”

“No you’re not. Put it down, boy.”

Helmut laid the poker on the kitchen table.

“Good.” Wells tucked away his gun and stepped toward Helmut.

“Where’s your father?”

“At the warehouse.”

Wells lunged and grabbed the poker as Helmut shrank back against the refrigerator.

“I was just there. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I swear.”

“Bloody hell. Do you have any idea what he’s gotten us into?”

Wells pressed Helmut against the refrigerator and put his gloved left hand around Helmut’s neck and lifted and squeezed—

To his right, Wells sensed as much as saw a shape coming at him through the doorway—

Still holding Helmut, he swung the poker diagonally downward, a quick blind slash that ended when the iron rod thumped solidly into bone—

A woman screamed and a knife clattered to the floor and Helmut swung his skinny arms wildly at Wells like a puppet trying to slip its strings—

But Wells kept his grip until Helmut’s shoulders drooped and he gave up—

Wells loosened up on Helmut and kicked the knife to the far end of the kitchen. Meanwhile, Bernard’s wife, his would-be attacker, held her damaged hand to her chest and groaned. Wells wasn’t sure if he’d broken any bones, but she’d be black-and-blue for sure. He jabbed at her with the poker to keep her at bay.

“Tell your mother to step back,” Wells said. “Before I start shooting.”

Helmut fired German at his mother. Wells was surprised that they didn’t speak Arabic or Turkish with each other, but maybe Helmut had never learned it. Finally, the woman retreated. Wells stepped back to the far end of the kitchen and dropped the poker and drew his Glock.

“Crazy family,” he said. “Helmut the screenwriter, his killer mom, his disappearing dad. What’s her name, anyway?”

“Ayelet.”

“Tell Omelet I need her husband.”

“Ayelet.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass. You two talkee-fastee and find me Bernard or we’re all in trouble.”

But after talking to his mother, Helmut shook his head. “She doesn’t know. And I don’t either.”

“Lying.”

“No. He left yesterday morning and he hasn’t been home since.”

Did the BND know where Bernard was? Wells wondered. They had to. Then why hadn’t they told Shafer? Or had the Germans somehow lost him? “Let’s go,” Wells said. “I want a look around.”

“I don’t understand,” Helmut said. “Are you Polizei?”

“Do I look like the constabulary? Your father owes me three million euros. I want my money and I don’t want to wind up in some Kraut jail.” Wells walked through the living room to Bernard’s office. The door was locked, but Wells put his shoulder to it and popped it.

Inside, the file cabinets were empty and the papers on Bernard’s desk were gone. So was his laptop dock. Only the maps and the volumes of maritime law remained.

“Bloody hell,” Wells said, not acting anymore. The BND better know where he is. “Did you know about this?”

“No.”

Ayelet murmured something to Helmut. “She says he burned his papers.” Wells walked back into the living room. Heaps of charred ash filled the fireplace. Wells kicked through them but found nothing of value. Then, deeper in the fireplace, a lump of melted plastic. Bernard’s laptop, permanently rebooted. Bernard had taken advantage of the cold weather to get rid of his records without attracting the BND’s attention.

“When did he do this?”

“Last night.”

Wells backhanded Helmut across the face, hard enough that the kid nearly banged his head on the marble fireplace mantel. “You told me he left yesterday morning.”

“He came back last night to burn the stuff. Just for an hour.”

Wells pulled Helmut close, got a faceful of the kid’s cologne. “Who else was in on this?”

“I don’t even know what you’re doing here. You think my father talks to me?” Helmut’s voice was a piteous but truthful whine.

“You don’t know what we’re doing? I’ll tell you, then. Your dear old da’ asked me to find him some beryllium. Know what that’s for, Helmut? Atomic bombs. Try that in one of your movies. Your dad wants an A-bomb.”

“That’s—” But Helmut had nothing else to say.

“You ever seen anyone from the BND with your dad?” Wells said. “Think hard.”

Helmut shook his head.

“Then who’s it for, Helmut?”

Helmut hesitated. His eyes flicked at his mother, at the floor, and then finally back at Wells. “I don’t know.” He knew something, maybe not a name, but something. Even so, Wells decided to hold off on pushing the question. Finding Bernard was the key. Wells grabbed Helmut and pulled him close and stuck the Glock under his chin. Helmut’s cologne could no longer hide the reek of his sweat. Wells didn’t like scaring civilians this way, but he didn’t see any choice.

“Your dad and me, we had a deal. And I intend to get paid. And if he goes down, he had best keep his mouth shut and never mention me to anyone. Otherwise I will kill you and your ugly twit of a mother and your sisters. So find Bernard and tell him I want to see him in person. Do you understand?”

“You have a foul mouth,” Helmut said through clenched teeth.

“And an even fouler mind at that. But I keep my promises. Tell him.”

And with his message delivered, Wells flung Helmut aside and stalked out.

AN HOUR LATER, from his hotel room, Wells called Shafer. “Bernard is AWOL.” Wells told Shafer about the empty office and his run-in with Helmut.

“That’s a problem,” Shafer said.

“Why did he run?”

Shafer told Wells about the Decatur and the Juno.

“And you didn’t tell me about this?”

“I wanted you outside the loop so you wouldn’t blow your cover. Anyway, we didn’t find the Juno until yesterday, so there was nothing to tell.”

“And it wasn’t carrying anything.”

“Clean. But the crew members say it sailed from Hamburg to somewhere off eastern Canada and that there it dropped two guys off. Both Arab. They hardly talked to the crew during the trip, mostly stayed in their cabin, and the captain gave strict orders that they weren’t to be disturbed. Like ghosts, one of the crew said.”

“Names or faces?”

“We’ve shown the crew a couple hundred possibles. No matches yet. Anyway, these guys were carrying four wooden crates. Two as big as steamer trunks. Much more than you’d need to carry a few kilos of HEU. Which means the Russians are lying. I’m sure you’re shocked.”

“If they have that much material, why do they need the beryllium?”

“We asked the boys at Los Alamos the same question. Their best guess was that maybe these guys have a few hundred kilos of material, but not military-grade. The way the physics work, if it’s sixty or seventy percent enriched, you need much more uranium than if it’s 93.5. Or it could be components for a bomb, or some kind of shielding. Outside chance they have a finished bomb, but we think that’s unlikely. It would have gone off already.”

“And this was when?”

“January 10 or 11. More than two weeks ago.”

“So where exactly did the drop happen?”

“No one on the crew can tell us.”

“How is that possible?”

“The navy says these freighters, they’re not democracies. Officers’ orders aren’t questioned. Ever. And this time, only the captain and the first mate knew exactly where they were. And the first mate went overboard when they were bringing the crates in. Maybe intentional, maybe an accident. That leaves the captain. Haxhi is his name. Albanian. And he’s not talking, not yet. But we’re guessing it must have been Nova Scotia. Highways from there lead straight to the U.S. border. The Canadians are checking their naval records for suspicious contacts. But they haven’t found anything, and considering this was a couple weeks ago, they probably won’t.”

“They still have to get it over the border.”

“Unless they have a hard-on for Montreal, yeah. We’re figuring they drove. Why go to so much trouble, sailing these crates across the Atlantic, and then try to airmail them from Canada? Plus the crates, whatever’s in them, FedEx or DHL would notice. So they drove. Probable entry points are Maine and New York. We’ve checked the border records, looking for pairs of Arab guys. We even checked immigration records for Arab men who flew in from Canada on passports from Middle Eastern countries or Europe. And we’ve found a couple of hundred since January 1. We’re trying to track them down. But there’s nobody who pops out. Nobody who crosses with the Gray Book or the Black Book. No surprise. They would have been flagged and arrested at the border. So whoever these guys are, they probably have American or Canadian passports.”

“We checking those?”

“Close to fifty thousand people fly between the United States and Canada every day. A four-day window, that’s two hundred thousand people. Even if we just go for the obvious Arab names, cut out everyone else, we’re stuck with maybe five thousand to check. And we’re three weeks late, which means bad forwarding addresses, or no addresses at all, for ninety percent of them. It’s impossible.”

Wells digested this bad news in silence. Four crates. Carrying uranium, bombs, who knew what? Now, most likely, on American soil.

“Still there, John? It gets worse. The crew of the Juno says that Haxhi, the captain, after the Decatur showed up, but before it boarded the Juno, he made a call on his sat phone. Then he tossed the phone. Probably he and Bernard were running a traffic light, an indirect. A preset alarm.”

“I get it, Ellis.” The goal was to eliminate direct links between the Juno and Bernard but still have a way to let Bernard know if the Juno ran into trouble. The solution was a cut-out voice mail, one that Haxhi would call only if he believed he was in serious trouble. Bernard would check the voice mail every day. As long as it was empty, he’d know that Haxhi was safe. The light was green. But if Haxhi thought the Juno was going to be boarded, he’d leave a message, a yellow signal. If he didn’t call back with an all-clear within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, the signal went red. Bernard would assume that Haxhi had been taken down — and that he was next on the list.

“When did the Decatur find the Juno?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Makes sense,” Wells said. “Bernard checks the voice mail, gets the message, burns his stuff, takes off. I’m useless here now, Ellis. Bernard probably thinks I’m with the BND. Even if he doesn’t, he’s not going to look to me for help. The Germans should move in, take him down. Assuming they know where he is. I’ll catch the next flight to Washington.”

“You going commercial or you want an Air Force ride?”

“Whatever’s quicker. Probably commercial.”

“Sure you wouldn’t rather stay in Hamburg? It’s outside the blast radius.” Click.

WELLS CHECKED THE FLIGHTS. Continental had an evening nonstop from Hamburg to Newark, getting in around 10 p.m. Eastern. From there he could grab the last connection of the night to Reagan. He still had a couple of hours, plenty of time to make the flight. He made the reservation and began to pack. But just as he finished and zipped up, his second phone, Roland Albert’s phone, rang.

Roland’s phone? Only Bernard had that number. The caller identification showed a local Hamburg exchange. “Roland here.”

“I need to see you.” The voice was Bernard’s. “Now.”

29

The bomb was ungainly-looking, a sphere of steel with the long barrel of the Spear recoilless rifle sticking from its side. More than ungainly. Ugly. It looked like an oversized, broken barbell, like a bowling ball attached to a stovepipe. It looked like an Introduction to Sculpture 101 project produced by a particularly dismal student. It looked like anything but what it was, Bashir thought.

Bashir had the stable to himself this morning, after two long days of working beside Nasiji and Yusuf, forging the steel tamper and welding the barrel of the Spear to the hole that tunneled into its heart.

“You don’t know the trouble you’re about to cause,” Bashir said to the bomb. Even now, he couldn’t believe that this jerry-rigged heap of metal could have anything like the destructive power that Nasiji expected. Bashir stared at the bomb. “Don’t you have any manners, Mr. Gadget? You must know ignoring me isn’t polite. Especially since I’m the one who made you. And it was tiring work.”

Indeed, Bashir had hardly slept the last few days. He hadn’t been so exhausted since his first year as a surgical resident, when he’d caught himself more than once in the middle of rounds leaning against a wall and trying to sleep standing up. Bashir took another look at his handiwork, trying to decide if he was proud or ashamed. The steel ball was solid and strong, its seams invisible.

Bashir and Nasiji and Yusuf had tested the design three days before, using steel in place of the uranium that would be at the center of the live bomb. For the test, they loaded the outer half of the dummy steel pit and the 73-millimeter explosive round into the breech of the barrel. Then they covered the Spear and the tamper with heavy wool blankets to dull the noise from the blast. To be safe, they’d already moved all their equipment — and, of course, the partially disassembled Iskander warhead — out of the stable.

The Spear was fired by a trigger inside a pistol grip attached to its barrel. They would blow the real bomb simply by pulling the trigger. No point in trying to set it off from a distance. When it went, so would they. But for this practice firing Bashir soldered the tip of a flexible spool of thin steel wire to the trigger. Then Yusuf cut a hole in the wall of the stable and ran the spool through it.

Outside, Bashir walked through the woods, unspooling the wire until the slack was gone. He stood behind a tree, shivering, pulling lightly on the wire. The steel felt almost alive under his gloved fingertips, tensing and loosening as if a fish were hooked on the end of the line. Dusk had fallen and night was coming quickly, the weak winter sun disappearing into the hills behind them.

“Ready?” Bashir said.

Nasiji reached for the wire. Bashir wanted to pull the trigger himself. He was the one who’d forged the tamper, after all. But without a word he handed it over. Nasiji held the wire, closed his eyes — he might have been praying — gave the wire a sturdy tug—

And boom!

The explosion echoed through the woods, sending squirrels chittering angrily from the trees around them. A bird, big and black and fast, some kind of crow, took off from a stand of pines and flew straight at Bashir before turning up into the night. The stable shook, and though it held, a piece of the wall disappeared, sending shingles in their direction.

“Bang-bang,” Yusuf said. He grinned and squeezed Nasiji’s shoulder like a proud father.

They walked together back into the stable and looked at their handiwork. The steel tamper had held, but the force of the explosion had bowed it slightly. It was no longer a perfect sphere. The backblast had split the Spear from the tamper and smashed it into the side of the stable, leaving a jagged hole in the wall. The steel barrel had crumpled in half. It wouldn’t be of any use to them except as scrap, but they had a second tube in reserve.

Nasiji shined a penlight into the hole in the tamper.

“Not bad,” he said.

Bashir peered inside. The high-explosive round and the pieces of the pit had fused into a single mass, still warm to the touch, in the center of the tamper.

“Looks like a scrambled egg,” Yusuf said.

“Not perfect, though,” Nasiji said to Bashir. Nasiji reached in with pliers, tugged the crumpled, charred mass of steel out of the hole. “You can still see the outlines of the two pieces.”

“So?”

“So the live pit needs to come together more closely, within a millimeter. The tighter the fit, the less the chance of predetonation.”

“A fizzle,” Yusuf said in English. Bashir had learned that Yusuf used the word fizzle at every opportunity. He seemed to find it hilarious.

“You can do a better job, yes, Bashir?”

“Of course.” Bashir didn’t like Nasiji talking to him as though he were a child, but what could he say? Nasiji had controlled this project long before Bashir had ever been involved. No excuses, Bashir told himself. The truth. the truth was that until the last few days, he hadn’t minded letting Nasiji run this operation. That way he hadn’t had to think over what they were doing.

YET EVEN AFTER THE PRACTICE FIRING, even as they forged the replacement tamper, Bashir kept working, not a word about his doubts to Nasiji. For the next two days, standing over the forge, washed by its infernal heat, he tried to sort out the reasons for his silence: a runny mix of fear, confusion, esprit de corps, and anger. Fear of what they would do if he tried to stop them. More important, fear of what they would do to his wife. He had signed up for this project with eyes open, and he would accept the consequences if he tried to back out. But he wouldn’t allow Thalia to suffer.

At the same time, Bashir wasn’t sure if he had the right to undo Nasiji and Yusuf’s work. The time for doubt had come and gone. How could he substitute his judgment for theirs? They were a team. If the Americans found them together, they would certainly die as a team.

Bashir couldn’t forget his uncle either. The old man in the visitors’ room in Tora, heavy and gentle and about to be destroyed. Bashir no longer thought that all Americans were evil — he’d seen too much compassion, too many tears in his emergency room — but they were certainly heedless. Nasiji wasn’t wrong to hate them. They’d caused great misery all over the world, especially for Muslims. Maybe this bomb was the answer.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have to take any action. Maybe the bomb would fail on its own. Maybe they’d be caught before they were done. And so Bashir procrastinated, putting off any decision, forgetting that procrastination was a choice in and of itself.

While Bashir worked with Yusuf to reforge the tamper, Nasiji had his own project. He was installing emergency flashers in the grille and rear of the used black Chevy Suburban that Bashir had bought a few months before, a private sale. Bashir had paid cash and never reregistered the Suburban, so it couldn’t be connected to him. Nasiji also picked up a couple of scrap Washington plates. Nothing intimidated other drivers, or even cops, more than a black Suburban with D.C. plates and hidden flashers, the combination preferred by the FBI. The lights wouldn’t get them onto the White House grounds, but they might get them close enough to make a difference.

Bashir also spent a day forging a second tamper, this one with a hole at its center big enough to accommodate a beryllium reflector as well as the pit. Nasiji insisted they make both, though he no longer seemed certain they would get the beryllium. His contact in Germany still hadn’t gotten the second shipment of the metal. And even if it arrived now, sending it to the United States before the State of the Union would be impossible.

“At least this way we’ll have time to make sure the design is perfect,” Bashir said. He was secretly glad for the holdup. Without the State of the Union as a deadline, they might not blow the bomb for months.

“Whatever happens with the beryllium, I want us to be ready,” Nasiji said. “If we wait too long, we’ll wake up with the FBI breaking down our doors.”

So they came to the stable before sunrise and worked until close to midnight. They returned to the house only to eat. The kitchen smelled of chicken and lemon and chickpeas, Thalia’s contribution to the cause. She’d asked Bashir twice if she could see the bomb. Both times he’d refused. Now, at meals, she was strangely focused on Nasiji. She even made sure his plate was full before turning to her husband. Bashir reminded himself that she was young and impressionable and probably in love with the idea of having this secret.

AFTER FORTY-EIGHT HOURS of nearly nonstop work, they finished the tampers. Nasiji and Yusuf drove to Binghamton to find an Internet café and check on the beryllium. Bashir turned his attention to sintering the mold for the uranium pit. As Nasiji had demanded, he was trying to shrink the gap between the pieces of the pit — the cylinder that fit in the center of the tamper and the pipe-shaped piece that they would fire at it — to less than one millimeter.

Bashir finished the first piece around lunchtime, melting the precious pieces of uranium, then pouring the molten metal — a thick gray-black soup — into the ceramic mold he’d created and transferring the mold to the vacuum forge. Through the inch-thick window of the forge, he could see that the uranium was setting perfectly. He turned down the gas until the metal solidified. Then he removed the mold from the forge and laid it on a steel plate to cool. He was just beginning to work on the second piece when Nasiji and Yusuf ran into the stable.

“Sayyid,” Bashir said. “Take a look—”

“How long before you’re done?” Nasiji’s eyes were narrow, half-shut, his jaw thrust forward.

“I’ve just finished the first part.” Bashir pointed to the piece cooling on the tungsten plate, a dark gray cylinder of uranium, just six inches long, less than three inches in diameter. Nearly pure U-235, it weighed nineteen kilograms.

“That’s it?” Nasiji reached for it.

“Don’t touch. It’s still cooling.”

“How long for the rest, the cylinder?”

“It’s more complicated. It will take another day or so, at least.”

“No. You finish it tonight.”

“What’s wrong, Sayyid?”

“The Americans, they found the ship that brought Yusuf and me over.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. It was far from here, but somehow they discovered it. We have to assume that Bernard has been arrested or will be soon. The message came yesterday. Very bad luck we didn’t see it until now. Bernard should have called me directly, but he must have been afraid to take the chance.”

“But he doesn’t know where we are. They don’t know me or you. They can’t track us here. We have plenty of time.” Bashir hoped his voice didn’t sound as desperate as he felt. In his head he heard a clock ticking, so loudly that for a moment he wondered if it was real. The moment of decision was here, far sooner than he’d expected. He wasn’t sure whom he feared more, the Americans or the men beside him.

“If they’ve found him, they’re only one step from us. We have to get the gadget done as quickly as possible, get it out of here.”

“Can you reach him? Find out whether he’s been taken?”

Nasiji laid a hand on Bashir’s bicep and squeezed, his fingers digging in as though he wanted to snap Bashir’s arm in half. “Stick to your forge, Doctor. Let me worry about this.”

“Yes, Sayyid. But what about the beryllium? I thought you said—”

“If we don’t move now, we’re going to lose everything. Anyway, we’ll try for the State of the Union.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.” Nasiji leaned back, opened his eyes, looked Bashir up and down. “Is something wrong, Bashir? Losing your nerve?”

“You asked me that before, and the answer’s the same: no. Now, take your hand off my arm so I can get back to work.”

“Good,” Nasiji said. “I’m glad there’s some fight in you yet. God willing, we’ll finish this pit tonight, get the pieces together, be ready to travel in the morning.”

“God willing.” And then what?

30

I need to see you.” The voice was Bernard’s. “Now.”

“Where are you?” Wells said.

“I have your money. The final three million. It’s yours. I don’t want you to hurt my family.”

“Wire transfer it like the two.”

“It’s cash. I must hand it over face-to-face.”

“BND watching you? You setting me up?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Let’s meet somewhere nice and public.”

“That wouldn’t be safe for either of us. You want your money, come to the Stern Hotel. Room 317.”

“Three-one-seven?”

“On the Reeperbahn.” Bernard hung up.

This meeting would end badly, Wells knew. He’d done too good a job scaring Bernard. Now Bernard thought he had only one way to be sure that Wells wouldn’t come after his family.

Wells stripped to his gray T-shirt and pulled on the bulletproof vest he carried and put a heavy wool sweater on over it. The vest offered limited protection, but it was better than nothing. He strapped his shoulder holster around his sweater and tucked in his Glock and hid the holster with a loose-fitting leather jacket. Cold weather made carrying pistols easy. He headed for the door, reconsidered, grabbed his phone, called Shafer.

“At the Flughafen already?” Shafer said.

“The Germans know where Bernard is?”

“Not at the moment.” Disgust dripped across the Atlantic. “So the associate director of the BND just informed me. Not at the moment.”

“I do.” Wells explained the call he’d just received.

“Good. The BND can bring him in.”

“I’ll get him.”

“Thought you were done freelancing. Let the Germans handle him.”

“He’s expecting me. He sees anybody else coming, he’ll jump out the window. I show, it’ll slow him down. He’s still not sure what side I’m on.”

“The best way to do this is with a tac team and some flash-bangs.”

“That worked great in Munich.”

“Nineteen seventy-two was a long time ago. The Germans have learned a few things. You’re not the only one who can do this, John. You keep making the same mistake. Definition of insanity and all that.”

“Save me the fortune-cookie wisdom. I’ll bring him in, get back to Langley before tomorrow morning.”

“You planning to fly commercial or just flap your cape and go?”

“Funny, Ellis.”

“I have to call the BND. But I’ll give you an hour. Plenty of time to get there.”

“Two hours.”

“Two hours.”

The late-afternoon Hamburg traffic was heavy, and Wells wished he had left the Mercedes at the hotel and taken the U-Bahn. Forty minutes passed before he reached the Reeperbahn, quiet and gray in the twilight. The long cold winter nights were enough to keep even the most debased whoremongers at home. On the south side of the avenue, he saw the Stern—

Surrounded by German police cars and dozens of officers in riot gear. Wells looked twice, hoping that the cops were there coincidentally to bust an unlicensed brothel or a heroin-dealing kebob shop. But as he watched, three men in helmets and face shields ran into the hotel. Shafer hadn’t given him two hours. Shafer hadn’t given him five minutes.

Wells parked the Mercedes in an alley off the Reeperbahn and grabbed his sat phone.

“Tell me I’m not seeing this.”

“I had to, John. Their country, their op.”

“Their op? Who found him? Who’s been playing him?”

“What are you gonna do with him? You can’t arrest him. And they say no renditions.” A delivery truck turned into the alley behind the Mercedes and honked, a quick double-tap, move along. “He’s a German national, he stays on German soil. I promised them.”

“You promised me, Ellis. Two hours.” Wells hung up. He would deal with Shafer later. Betrayal and betrayal and betrayal. He jumped out of the Mercedes, ignoring the shouts of the delivery driver, and dodged traffic as he ran across the Reeperbahn, heading for the armored police van parked outside the hotel’s entrance.

“Halt! Halt!” A big man in a black flak jacket, Polizei emblazoned across the chest in white, trotted at Wells, right hand hovering over the pistol on his hip. Wells slowed.

“I need to talk to the agent in charge, whoever’s running the show—”

“You are American?” the officer said. “This is a police action. Very serious. You must leave.”

“I know the guy in there,” Wells said desperately. “I gave him to you.”

The officer put a heavy hand on Wells’s shoulder and steered him away from the hotel.

“Listen, my name’s John Wells—”

From above, the thump of a flash-bang grenade, and then another. Wells and the officer swung around, watching as a window blew at the west end of the hotel, three stories up, glass pouring like confetti toward the pavement, a pair of hookers screaming and shielding their mascaraed eyes—

Then a single gunshot.

The officer pushed Wells to the street, landed on top of him, 250 pounds of German cop protecting him. Wells barely restrained himself from rolling the guy over and punching him in the face. “Let me up.”

“When it is safe.”

“It’s safe now,” Wells said, staring down at the Reeperbahn pavement, cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans. “Unless that guy up there can shoot when he’s dead.”

The officer rolled over and Wells stood. A team of medics ran into the hotel, carrying a stretcher and a defibrillator. Too late, Wells was sure. They’d gone in hard and slow and given Bernard plenty of time to take the coward’s way out. Or the hero’s. Depending on who was telling the story. Either way Bernard wouldn’t be much help.

Three minutes of explanations later, Wells found himself outside the hotel’s front door, pleading with the BND agent in charge to let him inside.

“You want to see the room? But the man inside is dead. He killed himself, yes?”

“No doubt. Maybe he left me something.”

“We will find it.”

“I’d like to look for myself.” You guys blew this top to bottom, so please don’t make me beg, Wells didn’t say.

But the agent seemed to understand. “As you wish. Jergen will accompany you.”

THE STERN CATERED to British chavs who piled into cheap charter flights for weekend vacations in Hamburg: all the pilsner they could swallow and a stop at the brothels on Herbertstrasse. Good times. The third-floor carpet had once been blue. Now it was closer to black and covered with cigarette burns. The plaster in the hallway was laced with fist-sized holes where guests had traded punches with each other and maybe a few unlucky hookers. A dozen BND agents stood outside the room, murmuring to one another, knocking around what had happened, what had gone wrong, the stories they would tell their bosses and the internal investigators who would second-guess every decision they had and hadn’t made. They fell silent as Wells passed.

And in Room 317, Bernard Kygeli, the top of his head split like an overcooked egg. He lay on his back on the queen-sized bed, his blood soaking through the cheap wool blanket. The medics weren’t even pretending to work on him. Bernard hadn’t taken any chances when the BND came through the door. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and swallowed eternity. His brains were splattered on the grimy yellow wall behind the bed.

Wells knew he ought to feel a touch of pity for Bernard, or at least disgust at the ugly way he’d died. But he could muster only annoyance, the annoyance of a district manager whose top salesman had just quit. Bernard should have stuck around a little bit longer, instead of bailing this way, leaving him shorthanded with the end of the quarter coming up. Not a team player.

From the neck down, Bernard was undamaged, oddly dapper in a blue suit with a pale pink shirt and dark red tie, his black leather dress shoes hanging limply off the bed. A bitter wind blew in through the shattered window, carrying in the rising blare of European sirens — Ooh-Ooh! Ooh-Ooh! — from the flotilla of police vehicles below. Wells peeked out the window. A television truck had already appeared at the end of the block, just beyond the east edge of the hotel.

“Anyone search him yet?”

Jergen consulted with the other cops. “No.”

Wells grabbed latex gloves from one of the medics, strapped them on, sifted through Bernard’s pockets, hoping for a cell phone, a flash drive, an engraved pen, a business card, a hotel receipt, any clue at all. In Bernard’s inside suit pocket, he found six keys — house, office, and warehouse, most likely. In the right front pants pocket, a wallet, smooth black leather. Wells flipped through it. A gold Amex card, seven 50-euro notes, a creased headshot of two young women, pretty, both wearing headscarves. His daughters, presumably.

And in the left pocket, a thickly folded piece of lined notebook paper. Wells unfolded it and found a scrawl in Arabic, shakily written in thin blue pen—

Why, when it is said to you, Go and fight in God’s way, do you dig your heels in the earth? Do you prefer this world to the life to come? How small the enjoyment of this world is, compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place, but you cannot harm Him in any way. God has power over all things.

“What is it?” Jergen said.

“A suicide note. From the Quran.” The ninth Surah, if Wells remembered right. He tucked the paper and Bernard’s wallet and the keys where he’d found them. He pulled open the squeaking closet doors, looked inside the particleboard dresser, stuck his head in the bathroom, ducked his head under the bed. He found nothing but two roaches in the tub and a couple of dusty condom wrappers, surely pre-dating Bernard’s arrival.

“He say anything when you came in?” Wells said to the agent in charge. “Allahu Akbar? Anything at all?”

The cop shook his head. “Just the pistol in his mouth, and—”

“Yeah.”

When Wells and Jergen returned to the front entrance, they found a tall man in a gray suit. He extended a hand to Wells.

“Mr. Wells,” he said. “I’m Gerhard Tobertal. Assistant director of the BND for Hamburg—”

“Yeah, you’re the one who lost him.” Wells leaned forward, put his face close to Tobertal’s, staring into the German’s blue eyes. “Get your men out of here. All of them.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t you see anything?” Wells knew that his rage was counterproductive, but he couldn’t help himself. First Shafer and now this. “You blew the surveillance and the takedown, too, and now you want CNN here, talking about how a terrorist killed himself on the Reeperbahn? So all Bernard’s friends know he’s dead.”

“Mr. Wells—”

“Make it go away. Pull your guys and make it a no-name junkie overdose. And when you hit his house, do it fast and quiet in the middle of the night. If you know how. Maybe we’re lucky and the compartmentalization saves us, and his buddies don’t find out for a few extra hours.”

“I don’t appreciate being talked to this way—”

“Then do your job.” Wells turned away. If he hurried, he could still make his flight.

31

This time Wells had no problem at immigration. The opposite, in fact. A Homeland Security officer waited for him when the flight arrived at Newark. “Mr. Wells,” she said as he walked out of the companionway, the first passenger off. “This way.”

She led him along the glassed-in second floor that overlooked the C Concourse, a long walkway, no exits, that connected international arrivals with the Newark customs hall. She was young and strong and Wells had to jog to keep up. He felt heavy and slow. He’d lost a night’s sleep — it was nearly 10 p.m. in Newark, 4 a.m. in Germany — and even the frigid jetway air hadn’t shocked him awake. Maybe he was getting old.

When Wells had come home after his decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wealth of the United States had overwhelmed him. Not just the size of the stores, aisle upon aisle of products for every conceivable desire, but the buildings themselves, high-ceilinged and fitted tightly together. Even the lights, banks of bright fluorescents where Afghans would make do with a single sixty-watt bulb. Americans might complain about the price of electricity but they sure weren’t afraid to use it. For his first few months back, Wells found himself wondering whether he had landed in a fifty-state Potemkin village, if the malls and office parks and highways he saw were nothing more than stage sets. So much abundance couldn’t be real.

Fortunately or not, the feeling faded. Now, after two years of motorcycles and perfect teeth and flat-screen televisions and grocery stores filled with fresh fruit, Wells was again used to, if not exactly comfortable with, his country’s riches.

Tonight, though, he felt a different dislocation, a kind of real-time nostalgia for the people on the concourse below him. The family clumped together slurping sodas outside the Subway, two tiny kids dressed identically in puffy red jackets and jeans and white sneakers, not a fashion statement, just a sale at Wal-Mart. The sales rep in a demure gray suit-and-skirt set, leaning against a wall, checking her BlackBerry, then pumping her fist in quiet triumph, deal closed and bonus won. The middle-aged man with the darkest skin Wells had ever seen, stepping up to gate C-89 to hug an equally dark woman wearing a bright orange and green dress under her winter coat.

No matter where it blew, the bomb would destroy this place. The buildings would be rebuilt. Maybe, eventually, the economy would recover. But the idea of the United States as the world’s lighthouse, the land given peace and justice and prosperity so that it could export those gifts everywhere else, would never return. And maybe America had never lived up to that promise. Maybe it had never become the shining city that the plastic patriots claimed. But dreams had power even if they didn’t come true. The world would be a poorer place if the American dream died.

WHEN THEY REACHED CUSTOMS, Wells didn’t even have to hand over his passport. The agent simply guided him through to the booths, and then he was back officially on American soil. Five minutes later, he was at C-101, catching the last flight of the night to D.C.

At National, another surprise, Shafer waited. He extended his hand, a wrinkly paw sticking from his too-short shirt cuffs. Wells let it dangle until Shafer pulled it back.

“All right,” Shafer said. “I earned that. You want to talk about it? Hug it out?”

Wells ignored him and headed for the exit. Shafer trotted behind him, yapping at his heels. “I wanted you to see that you can’t fly solo all the time. An object lesson. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out how I expected—”

“Enough,” Wells said. When this ended, if it ever ended, they’d have a chance to discuss what Shafer had done. Or, more likely, to bury it along with all the other miscommunications and fibs and flat-out lies that Wells and the agency had traded over the years.

At the front of the terminal, a Crown Vic and two SUVs waited, black Suburbans with armored windows and antennas jutting from their roofs. Two agents in suits stood outside the lead truck. As Wells and Shafer approached, the back doors to the front Suburban popped open. Wells and Shafer slipped inside and the Suburbans took off, their red-and-blues flashing, roaring up the George Washington Parkway at eighty miles an hour.

“Subtle, Ellis.”

“Duto’s orders.”

“So tell me where we stand.”

“Maybe two hours ago, we got good news. They broke Haxhi. The captain. Don’t ask me how.”

Wells didn’t need to ask. He knew. A few months before, in China, he’d been on the receiving end of a torture session that had left his ribs broken and his shoulder loose in its socket. Even now his ribs ached at the thought. Round and round it goes, he didn’t say. Where it stops nobody knows.

“He gave us the names of the smugglers?”

“Not that. Says he doesn’t know and maybe it’s true. But he did give up the drop point. It’s not Nova Scotia. Southeastern Newfoundland. Near St. John’s. That’s the capital.”

“Newfoundland?” Wells tried to picture eastern Canada. “That’s an island, right?”

“Correct. Best guess, they went in that way because they thought there wouldn’t be a big Canadian navy presence. Which there isn’t. So they land those crates, ferry them to Nova Scotia, drive them in.”

“But somebody’s got to meet them.”

“Looks like it.”

“Anything else? The magicians”—the NSA—“have any luck?”

Shafer shook his head. “There was one sat phone left on the boat. Not activated. The cell number you have for Bernard didn’t go anywhere. Neither did his e-mail addresses. The Germans hit his house and office and warehouse while you were in the air, but so far they haven’t gotten anything useful.”

“The laptop?”

“Tough to recover anything from a melted hard drive. Though they’re trying.”

“The son, Helmut, he knew something,” Wells said. “I’m sure of it. Maybe a name.”

“They’ll push him. Anything else, John? It’s the fourth quarter now, late.”

“Yeah, and they got the ball.”

Wells closed his eyes, tried to think. But sleep was on him like a glove and all he could remember was the airport, the family on Concourse C—

“You’re assuming the crates came in by land, but maybe the courier handled the crossing and the bad guys flew in. Anybody check flights from St. John’s?”

“I don’t know if it’s happened yet, but it’s on the top sheet. If there’s a direct flight between the United States and Newfoundland, so they didn’t get lost in a transfer in Toronto or somewhere, maybe we’ll catch a break.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER, they reached Langley. And then the biggest surprise yet. Exley, on Shafer’s couch, leaning forward, staring intently at a wall map of the North Atlantic and North America that was posted to a corkboard in the middle of the office. She’d cut her hair. Wells had never seen it so short, cropped on the sides and almost spiky on top. She looked like a punk singer. Wells didn’t know what the haircut meant. Otherwise, she was as beautiful as ever. The short hair accentuated her blue eyes and she’d lost a few pounds, not many, but she hadn’t been very big to start with and now her cheeks had a sorrowful sharpness to them. She stood when she saw him and he crossed to her and picked her up and hugged her like he was trying to meld their bodies together. She put her arms around him, but when he tried to kiss her she ducked her head. He set her down and she put a hand on his arm.

“You stayed,” Shafer said.

“Couldn’t miss this,” she said. A smile flitted across her lips, narrow, quiet, almost maternal. “The prodigal son returns.”

“You look great,” Wells said. He ran a hand over her hair.

“Last time it was this short, I was in college,” Exley said.

“But I thought—” Wells broke off, not wanting to say the wrong thing, or anything at all, just to look at her.

“Old habits,” she said. “I swore I’d just come in to see Ellis, and then I swore I’d only work for a day or two, and then I swore I wouldn’t be here when you got back, and look at me. Nothing changes but the hair and the hole in my liver. But now I swear when this one’s done, so am I.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She smiled and Wells felt his heart take two beats at once. Maybe they would find a way to be together after this, maybe they wouldn’t, but he was sure she would always love him.

“Reunion’s over, kids,” Shafer said. “Work to do. Anything new?”

“We gave the RCMP what we know”—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—“and they’re hitting the ferry offices now. They’ll get records of trucks that sailed from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia since January 1. We can check those against our border crossing records. But they’re telling us not to expect much. Passenger vehicles don’t register and there aren’t any cameras on the boats or the docks.”

“What about the flights?”

“Better news there. One nonstop a day out of St. John’s to Newark.”

“That’s the only nonstop to the United States?”

“The one and only. The FBI is getting a warrant for the manifests. And we’re sorting the immigration records at Newark. If they came in on that flight, we ought to have their names and faces and passports within a couple of hours.”

“Then we can start checking car rentals, airlines, credit cards, cell phones,” Shafer said.

“No problems with a warrant?” Wells said.

“We’ll get a finding from the president. I think even the ACLU won’t mind.”

“Any decision on releasing the names of the bombmakers publicly, if we get them?”

“Duto and the rest of the big-boy club”—official title, the Homeland Security Emergency Interagency Executive Committee—“are heading to the White House to talk about that now. You know the problem.”

The problem, as always, was that publicizing the manhunt might push the terrorists to immediately detonate whatever they had. But putting out their names was also the quickest and most efficient way to find them. The problem was made even more complicated by the fact that the State of the Union was scheduled for the next night. Allowing it to proceed with a nuclear bomb potentially loose would be insane. But canceling it would be as good as telling the terrorists to blow the bomb immediately.

“So what can I do?” Wells said.

“You? Let the machine crank for a couple hours, get some sleep,” Shafer said to Wells. “There’s nothing for you to do now and tomorrow’s going to be a long day. Dream about Bernard if you can. These guys have been careful the whole way and I don’t think we’re going to find them right away even with their names. Bernard’s the closest we’ve come so far and you’re the closest we came to him.”

“I’ll do my best,” Wells said. He lay down on the couch and tried to rest his head on Exley’s lap, but she pushed him off.

“Not now.”

So he shuffled down the hall to his office and lay on the floor and closed his eyes and dreamed of Bernard. Bernard, lying on his deathbed in the Hotel Stern, trying through his cracked skull to tell him the secrets of the bombmakers. Where they were. What their crates held. But then a German agent wearing a bear suit suddenly parachuted into his office and Bernard disappeared. Then Wells was in Bernard’s office again, tapping on the melted keys of Bernard’s laptop, looking at the burned-out screen. He reached down for a sip of coffee—

And suddenly woke.

In Shafer’s office, Exley and Shafer were hunched over his screen.

“Ellis. Jenny. Can you think of any reason why Bernard Kygeli would have a coffee cup from Penn State?”

“Penn State as in Pennsylvania State University in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania? Not a good one.”

“He did. In his office.”

“Kids go there?” This from Exley.

“Don’t think so. They live in Hamburg.”

“Cousins, nephews?” Shafer thinking out loud now. “The BND can give us the names of any relatives he has in Germany. And I guess we get the FBI to look for students with Arab names. Though I’m not sure we’ll be able to bring anybody in without some kind of connection. You’re sure it was Penn State.”

“I’m sure.”

“Forty thousand students just in undergrad. Too bad it wasn’t Swarthmore.”

“There was something else. ” Wells shook his head. The memory, whatever it was, lurked just outside his consciousness.

“Go back to dreamland, John, see what else you get.”

32

Bashir lay awake, his fingers interlaced behind his head, his wife snoring gently beside him. His last night as a husband. His last night as a surgeon. His last night.

He saw now that he had agreed to help build this gadget without believing they would succeed. Like every Egyptian child, he’d dreamed of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup finals, bringing the trophy home to Cairo. Through grade school, he worked on his kicks, his footwork, even his headers. But on the day he turned nine, playing with his friends and cousins in a dusty park around the corner from his apartment, he’d realized he wouldn’t have the chance. He wasn’t the slowest player on the field, but he was far from the fastest. And though his footwork was solid, his friends — two of them, anyway — controlled the ball so easily that they seemed to have it leashed to a string.

And this was just one little field. All over the neighborhood, all over Cairo, millions of kids were playing soccer. He wasn’t even the best here. How would he ever be the best in Egypt? The realization didn’t spoil Bashir’s love for soccer. He still played, and he still dreamed of playing beneath the lights in Paris or London or Barcelona. But for the rest of his childhood, he knew his vision was nothing more than a pleasant fantasy.

Somehow he’d deluded himself into thinking this project was equally impossible. Even as the stable turned into a machine shop, even after he learned how to forge steel, even after Nasiji and Yusuf arrived in Newfoundland, even after they disassembled the warhead and built the molds and crafted the dummy bomb, even this week as he’d molded the pits, he’d somehow failed to accept the reality of the project. He didn’t know whether his imagination had been too strong or too weak.

Now the bomb was done. He and Yusuf had finished the second piece of the uranium pit three hours before. Bashir had surprised himself with his speed, but then Nasiji’s scowl and Yusuf’s dead eyes were powerful motivators. Nasiji had briefly slid the two pieces of the pit over each other — a step that was safe as long as the pit was in the open air and not surrounded by the reflective steel tamper. The pieces fit together as lock and key. Then they had fused the bottom piece to the hole in the tamper, using a steel cap to be sure that it was exactly centered. The penultimate step, welding the recoilless rifle with the tamper, took only a few minutes. Finally, they’d used high-strength epoxy to glue the waterglass-shaped cap of uranium to the Spear’s high-explosive 73-millimeter round.

And then they were done. The bomb could be fired as quickly as Nasiji or Bashir or Yusuf could load the round into the barrel of the Spear and pull the trigger. After they were finished, Yusuf and Nasiji silently examined their handiwork, backyard barbecuers contemplating a perfectly cooked steak. Bashir puttered around the stable, putting tools in place, wiping down the welding torch.

Finally, Nasiji whistled sharply at Bashir.

“Quit that,” Nasiji said. “There’s no point. We won’t be making another one.”

“Yes,” Bashir said. “I suppose my surgical training, I always neaten up after the operation—” he was stammering now.

“It’s late,” Nasiji said. “Let’s have supper and then to bed.”

OVER DINNER, Nasiji outlined their final steps. In the morning they’d load the bomb and the remains of the Iskander into the Suburban, drive to the final safe house — a place Bashir hadn’t even known about before tonight, a temporary spot where they could stay for a few hours but no longer — and hole up for their final run to Washington. The State of the Union started around 9 p.m. and Nasiji didn’t want them on the D.C. streets for very long beforehand. If the State of the Union was canceled or postponed, they’d assume that their plot had been discovered and that they were being hunted. In that case, they’d head for New York City and try to hit midtown Manhattan. Philadelphia, the city closest to their safe house, was the third option. Before they left, they would upload the video they’d made to several jihadi Web sites, and FedEx copies of the DVD to CNN, The New York Times, and other Western media outlets. Without the beryllium, the detonation probably would be too small to be confused with a real Russian weapon, but the video could add to the Americans’ confusion and increase the pressure for a retaliatory strike.

“Before you sleep, make your absolutions,” Nasiji said, as Thalia cleaned the table. “Tomorrow we won’t have much time. Make your peace with Allah tonight. Think of the reasons you’ve chosen this path. Think of what the Sheikh”—bin Laden—“said before the Crusaders came to Iraq.”

Nasiji pushed back his chair. “Come with me,” he said. He walked outside.

In the dark, under the clean pale starlight, the three men stood shivering. A thick crust of snow covered the trees and the earth, white and silent, reminding Bashir how far he was from home.

“I shall lead my steed and hurl us both at the target,” Nasiji said. “Oh Lord, if my end is nigh, may my tomb not be draped in green mantles. No, let it be the belly of an eagle, perched on high with his kin. So let me be a martyr, dwelling in a high mountain pass among a band of knights.”

Nasiji reached out his hands for Yusuf and Bashir.

“Tomorrow we descend from the pass.”

A FINE, KNIGHTLY MOMENT. Then Bashir had come to his bed and his wife had clutched at him with the same ardor she’d displayed all week, grinding her hips against his and making the fluttering noises that he’d thought until now existed only on the banned pornographic channels that half of Egypt watched on satellite television. He wondered if she was making love to him, Nasiji, the bomb, or all three at once.

When they were done, she wrapped her arms around him and whispered, “Tomorrow.”

She was nervous, Bashir thought. Understandable. “My love,” he said. “I wish this weren’t all happening so fast. If we had time, I would have sent you home. But it’ll be safer for you to stay here. You’ll just have to tell the Americans when they come that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we kept it secret from you—”

“My Bashir. My husband. I’m coming with you.”

Bashir was silent. He couldn’t have heard her right. “No,” he said finally. “I won’t allow it. You don’t understand what these bombs do—”

“I do.”

He rolled atop her, pushing her down. “You don’t. And as your husband, I order you—”

“I’m coming. Bashir, if they find me here, do you think they’ll believe I had no idea? Why shouldn’t I come? Why shouldn’t I be part of this?”

“All right,” Bashir said. Nasiji wouldn’t possibly allow her along, but for tonight Bashir decided to let her think she’d be included. Otherwise she would never sleep.

“Are you scared, my husband?”

“Why would you think that?”

“There’s no reason to be. This, what you’ve built, it’s Allah’s will.”

“Yes? Did you speak to him?” Bashir tried to smile in the dark, to make his words a joke, but he couldn’t.

“I’m not a prophet, Bashir.” Not a hint of laughter in her answer. “But this I know.” She kissed him again. A few minutes later, her breath eased and he knew she was asleep beside him, one hand wrapped around his arm, her nostrils fluttering, her full lips opened slightly. The sleep of a child. His wife, blessed with a certainty he couldn’t imagine.

33

The Black Hawks from Langley and the Pentagon arrived on the back lawn of the White House just as the armored limousines from the FBI and Foggy Bottom rolled through the E Street gates. One by one, a string of grim-faced men made their way into the west wing of the White House. Midnight had already passed, but each visitor had independently chosen to wear a freshly pressed suit and a smoothly knotted tie. The gravity of this meeting demanded formality.

Inside the White House, they were directed not to the Situation Room, as they’d expected, but to the Oval Office. No one questioned the choice. Like the suits and ties, the Oval Office seemed appropriate. Anyway, the Situation Room was cramped and low-ceilinged and not particularly comfortable compared to the double O.

The meeting had been scheduled for 12:15 a.m. and the president didn’t like latecomers. Duto, the last to arrive, slipped in at 12:13 and took his seat beside the secretary of defense. Everyone else in the room was equally senior: the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the secretaries of state and homeland security, and the national security adviser. Principals only. The director of Los Alamos and the general in charge of Strategic Air Command were waiting by their phones in case the president had questions, but they weren’t part of the meeting.

Duto had been in this office hundreds of times before, but he couldn’t remember a situation as serious as this one. The confrontation with China had been tricky, but they hadn’t realized how tricky until after it ended. At the time, no one had really thought they were facing a nuclear threat. This time they knew better. And until they could narrow down where the bad guys were hiding, they had only two options: tell everyone in the country and create a national panic, or hold the information close while they searched in secret.

Duto didn’t mind letting someone else make the decision. The way he saw it, his job was to lay out the options, maybe pushing one a bit more than another, but never explicitly expressing his opinion unless asked. After the president decided what to do, the agency would carry out his orders as best it could. In truth, though, the CIA’s powers were more limited than either its critics or its supporters believed. Want to invade a country? Call in the army. Hoping for a prediction of what Afghanistan will be like twenty years from now? Get a crystal ball. The agency was neither all-powerful nor all-knowing. It gave its best guesses, did the nasty work that no one else would, and tried not to embarrass the United States along the way.

It was a big, heavy bureaucracy, and Duto spent much of his time just trying to keep it going, and much of the rest keeping it afloat in the even bigger bureaucracy that was the American intelligence community. He didn’t set policy, and he didn’t try to embarrass the president. And so he survived. He’d survived two administrations, a mole, Guantánamo, and that near-miss in New York. He’d survived long enough to defend the CIA’s turf, his turf, from the FBI and the Defense Department, which had tried to muscle in on the covert operations that by right and custom belonged only to Langley. And yet some of his own agents, the very men and women whose turf he was protecting, had the gall to call him a lapdog.

Like John Wells. Duto knew exactly how Wells saw him. And Wells had proven useful the last couple of years, no doubt about it. But he didn’t like Wells and he never would. The guy grated on him. Wells was like Kobe Bryant, Duto thought. Big skills and an even bigger ego. Guys like that always imagined they were indispensable. And they were, for a while. But no one was indispensable. These guys, they lost a step and the game moved past them. The teams were eternal, but the players came and went. One day, Wells would lose a step, too. And when that moment came, Duto would gladly show him the door.

BUT FIRST THEY HAD to get through this night, and the next day.

In the Oval Office, Duto and the other six men waited in silence. No one wanted to be caught bantering about the weather or the Super Bowl when the president arrived. He showed at 12:17, wearing khakis and a blue shirt, thumbs looped into his belt, as if he were about to host a late-night card game instead of discussing the most dangerous nuclear threat the United States had faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis. His chief of staff, a tall man with pasty skin trailed a step behind. The chief of staff’s name was Bob Hatch. Inevitably, and accurately, he was known in the top ranks of the government as Hatchet.

The president nodded at each of the men in the room and sat down behind his massive desk. Tucked under his arm, Hatchet held the briefing book that the CIA and FBI had prepared two hours before. At a nod from the president, Hatchet dropped — not placed, dropped — the book on the desk. It thumped against the wood, the sound of failure. The president put a finger on top of the book.

“Here’s my executive summary. We don’t know where these men are. Nor their names. Nor who’s paying them. Nor if they have a working bomb. Nor their targets. As for the Russians, they’re lying to us, but we don’t know why.” The president’s eyes had locked on Duto. “Director, would you say I’ve accurately summarized the report?”

“Mr. President, I can’t disagree with what you say. However, we have made great progress in the last six hours. We believe that in the next few hours, certainly by sunrise, we will have the names and passports under which they entered the United States. We’re pursuing every possible avenue to get answers to your questions. As to whether they may attempt to use the bombs for ransom, we judge that possibility unlikely, sir.”

The president took his eyes off Duto and glanced around the room. “I hoped this report would help me decide whether I should postpone the State of the Union. Or evacuate New York and Washington, God forbid.” He tapped the book impatiently. “Instead I get this. I can’t order any evacuations, not off this. I’m not going to terrify the country until I’m certain what we face. I’m not going to cancel the State of the Union either, though I am going to order the Vice to stay home. Just in case. Until we get more information, I don’t think we should make anything public at all. We’re going to treat this as a law enforcement matter. BOLOs, right? That’s what they’re called?” He was looking at the head of the FBI now.

“Yes, sir. Means be on the lookout for. We send them to the agencies, counterterrorism units at the big police forces—”

“I know what it means and what you do. So we’ll start with that. And if you can nail these guys down to the point where going public would actually make sense, I’ll reconsider.” Again he looked around the room. “I’m not going to do anything as juvenile as threatening to fire any of you. We’re way past that. I am simply going to tell you something you already know. We need to find these men before they blow this bomb. Or it’s over. Understand?”

Silent nods.

“Now, let’s turn to another equally pleasant topic. If we don’t find it. And it takes out midtown Manhattan. Or the Loop. Or this very office. What then? If it turns out that this weapon has come from the Russian arsenal, what then? Do we hit back? With what? We’re going to talk this out for fifteen minutes. Then you’re going to go back to your offices and make sure it never happens. But first. This is a yes-or-no question. We’ll discuss it after. How many of you think nuclear retaliation is justified in the case of a nuclear attack on American soil?”

Duto had thought he’d understood the danger they faced. But he realized, as the president asked his question, that he hadn’t. Not really. The late-night helicopter ride to the White House, this meeting, they’d all seemed almost unreal. No, they hadn’t found the bombmakers yet. But they would, and then the world would go back to normal, and this night would seem almost a dream. Or, more accurately, the crowning moment of his career, the moment that would put his memoirs on the best-seller list.

But now the president was asking about nuclear retaliation. The president believed this bomb might go off. And if he believed it, Duto had to believe it, too. A nuclear bomb on American soil.

“I want a show of hands,” the president said. “If you believe nuclear retaliation is justified, raise your hand.”

There were seven of them in the room, not counting the president and his chief of staff. Seven hands rose. “Now, what if it’s a Russian nuke but we can’t be sure the Russians were involved? What then?”

Christ, Duto thought. Can I? Can we? But he kept his hand up. There could be no excuses. No honest mistakes. Someone would have to pay. And as he looked around the room, he saw he was in the majority. Only the secretary of state and the director of the FBI had lowered their hands. Five-to-two in favor of retaliation.

“Doomsday it is,” the president said. He didn’t smile.

34

N°. Bashir heard a voice, not inside his head but a real voice, a man speaking. Had he fallen asleep? The clock said 1:58, so he must have. But he hadn’t. He was sure. He sat up and looked around, but the room was empty. It had spoken with such power. Allah? Muhammad? Whoever had spoken, he needed to obey.

No. He couldn’t allow it. He would go to the stable and take the the uranium and disappear. Maybe he would go directly to the police. Or he would simply vanish. In a day or two, he’d call Thalia and tell her to go back to Egypt, call Nasiji and Yusuf and tell them to leave, that the police would be raiding the house and the stable.

Either way, Washington would still be standing tomorrow. Yes. He breathed slowly, inhaling and exhaling five times, a step he sometimes took before entering the operating room. He waited for doubts but felt none. He was making the right decision. He touched his wife’s forehead and she stirred in her sleep. And then he rolled out of bed and noiselessly padded to the rocking chair — a relic of the house’s previous owners — where he’d stacked his jeans and sneakers and sweater.

HE PADDED DOWN the second-floor hallway, sneakers cradled in his hands, trying not to set off the creaky wooden planks. He edged past the bedroom where the Repard kids had once lived and where Nasiji and Yusuf now slept in twin beds decorated with Star Wars blankets.

A plank groaned lightly and Bashir pulled his weight off it and leaned against the wall waiting for Nasiji or Yusuf to rouse. But the rhythm of their breathing didn’t change. So Bashir slipped down the stairs and pulled on his shoes and walked out the kitchen door and—

Creak! —

How had he forgotten the soft plank on the porch? He waited for the house lights to come on, for Nasiji and Yusuf to emerge. I heard something outside. I wanted to check.

The house stayed silent. After a minute, Bashir headed down the path connecting the house and the stable, a river of brown brick between the snow-covered ground on either side. Yusuf cleared the path every day. He seemed to enjoy shoveling. Bashir wondered what Yusuf thought of the bomb. He’d never said. He reminded Bashir of a tiger at the zoo in Cairo, a big lazy beast. Once the tiger had strolled to the front of his cage and pushed himself up on his hind paws and leaned against the bars. He towered over Bashir, three meters from his paws to the black tip of his nose. He yawned and turned his head and looked Bashir up and down, slowly, almost gently. Meat, his eyes said. And I’m hungry.

Yusuf had eyes like that. Bashir would be happy never to see them again.

IN THE STABLE, Bashir flicked on a penlight, followed its narrow beam to the Spear round with the uranium cap attached. It sat on a steel workbench beside the bomb, just where he’d left it. He would need less than a minute to grab it, get to the Suburban, be gone. He fingered his car keys, safe in his pocket. Good.

Was he sure? He was. He walked across the stable, picked up the cap.

He was halfway back to the door when the lights clicked on—

And Yusuf walked in, pistol in hand.

Bashir froze. “Yusuf,” he said. “I was worried. So stupid of us to leave it out—”

“Hush.”

“You must have the wrong idea.”

“Thalia said this might happen. She told Sayyid.”

Bashir found himself shaking his head. “Thalia. ” My Thalia? My wife?

His wife had betrayed him? Impossible. But apparently not, because here came Yusuf, stalking toward him, blocking the door—

And Bashir ran.

Not for the door. Running for the door meant running toward Yusuf. He ran for the blue tarp they had put over the hole in the stable wall, the hole blown open when they tested the dummy bomb. The hole was narrow and splintery and Bashir wasn’t sure he would fit but it was his only chance. If Nasiji had wanted to talk things over, he would have come, too. Instead he’d sent Yusuf, gun in hand, with one order and one order only.

Yusuf didn’t shoot when Bashir started to run. Bashir guessed he was afraid of hitting the bomb. Bashir dropped the uranium plug and tore at the tarp, tugging it from the nails that held it to the walls. He squirmed through, the splinters from the wall cutting at his hands—

And heard Yusuf ’s pistol bark and felt the burn in his right shoulder at the same time. The impact of the shot shoved him through the hole and into the snow behind the stable. He landed hard, and when he tried to catch himself with his right hand, a blast of pain shot up his arm and through his shoulder and stole his breath. He couldn’t even scream.

Then he heard the second shot. It missed, scattering the snow in front of him, giving him the strength to pull himself up and run for the woods. A few hundred meters to the south, on the back side of this hill, a narrow creek marked the boundary between the Repard property and the state park behind it. Eventually the creek reached the state road that connected Addison and Corning. If he could just get to the road.

He blundered through the woods, cracking branches and scattering snow with every step. He knew he was leaving a trail, but he couldn’t help himself. His shoulder still hurt, but instead of an electric charge, now he felt a solid lump of heat and pain, as though a charcoal briquette had been sewn into his back.

Behind him, and not far, he heard Yusuf, blundering through branches. His one hope: Yusuf wasn’t used to this terrain either. Every thirty seconds or so, Yusuf’s flashlight caught Bashir, but each time Bashir ducked and turned sideways to escape. He forced himself not to look back. Whether Yusuf was ten meters away or a hundred didn’t matter. The creek. And then the road.

Even so, Bashir felt himself fading as he topped the hill and made his way down to the creek. The snow was thicker here, and Bashir’s jeans and sneakers were soaked and his feet had turned to blocks of wood. Though he wanted to run, he had to step carefully. He couldn’t risk a fall. Yusuf would surely be on him. His shoulder was still leaking blood, a warm trail down his chest and right arm.

“Stop,” Yusuf yelled behind him. “Stop running. Let’s talk about this.”

“The tiger speaks,” Bashir yelled back, but his breath was faint and he wished he’d said nothing.

“What?”

Bashir saved his breath and ran, step-step-step, through the woods, lifting his legs as high as he could, thinking of the soccer drills that he’d done as a kid, bouncing the ball off his knees. A thin cloud cover had blown in but the stars still threw off enough light to reveal the contours of the rolling earth under the snow.

Step-step-step.

“Stop!” Yusuf yelled again, his voice stronger, angrier. “You can’t escape. Be a man.”

The truth. No false promises of safety. The glare of Yusuf’s flashlight caught Bashir again, more powerfully now, and Bashir knew he must be only a few steps ahead. A surge of adrenaline and fear powered through him and his steps came more quickly, and though his shoulder and arm and chest were slick with blood, somehow he drew away. Behind him, he heard Yusuf stumble and curse, and for the first time since the stable lights had snapped on he thought he might live. He reached the bottom of the hill and the creek and turned and—

His right leg slipped through the thin creek ice and onto the slick stones underneath. He lost his balance and fell and landed square on his shoulder and the charcoal in his back burned hotter than ever. He screamed, a vicious sound that seemed to come from somewhere outside him, and he knew he needed to try to stand, but the pain was overwhelming.

The flashlight caught him and he heard Yusuf coming down the hill. He made one more try, grabbing the trunk of a birch beside the creek with his good left hand and pulling himself up. He reached his feet and stumbled forward in the thin snow alongside the creek.

But the light got stronger and stronger and he knew the tiger had him now.

Then his feet were kicked out and he crashed down and knew he wouldn’t be getting up again. His burial ground would be a bed of pine needles in a country that wasn’t his.

“Turn around,” Yusuf said above him, and Bashir didn’t argue. The time for argument was through. He pushed himself against a log and rolled over and stared into the blinding glare of Yusuf’s flashlight. Behind the light, Yusuf’s breaths came fast, and despite his terror Bashir congratulated himself for making Yusuf run.

Yusuf reached down for him and Bashir promised himself that whatever happened he wouldn’t beg and then—

Yusuf reached under his good left arm and pulled him up and frog-marched him back to the stable, retracing his steps. Bashir could hardly see the path and twice needed to lean against a tree to rest. He supposed he was going into shock from the blood he’d lost.

The third time he tried to rest, Yusuf reached over and squeezed his bad shoulder and the pain brought him back to reality for a few seconds. “Coward,” Yusuf said. “We’re almost there.”

IN THE STABLE, Nasiji waited for them.

“Sit down, Bashir,” he said, and Bashir stumbled gratefully down.

“Stable floor,” he said. “No better or worse than pine needles.”

“Shut up and look at me,” Nasiji said. Bashir raised his head. “Are you a spy, Bashir?”

“No. Are you, Sayyid?”

“Then why?”

“It’s too much,” Bashir said. “Much too much.”

“So you tried to destroy all we’ve done? All of us, you included? Yusuf always said you were weak.”

Bashir’s head drooped. But he did mean to ask something. What? Then he remembered. “Did Thalia—”

“Tell us? Of course she did.”

Bashir closed his eyes. “Do what you want with him, Yusuf,” Nasiji said, and Bashir heard him walk away. And then Yusuf’s steady breathing was the only sound in the stable.

“You shouldn’t have run,” Yusuf said. “I would have made this easier. Traitor.”

Bashir opened his eyes to see Yusuf whetting a blade.

“Don’t worry, Yusuf,” he said. “It’ll be easy enough.”

And when Yusuf kneeled astride him and dug the knife into his gut and tore open skin and sinew and arteries—

And then repositioned himself and raised and lowered the blade into Bashir as rhythmically, mechanically as a jackhammer cutting concrete.

Bashir didn’t argue, didn’t even scream. He just closed his eyes and saw the tiger in the Cairo zoo. And, sure enough, the pain rose like the whine of a teakettle and then disappeared.

THEN ONLY A MAN and a corpse were left in the stable, twined as lovers, and Yusuf’s breath came fast and hot as he worked the knife into Bashir’s throat and face. Yusuf chopped until the body underneath him no longer had a nose or ears or eyes or a mouth. Even then Yusuf wasn’t satisfied, even then he wanted to do more, but he couldn’t think of anything else. So he dug the blade into Bashir’s chest and left it there and stood and walked out of the stable and into the clean white snow.

35

Wells opened his eyes and woke, as sharply as a bat snapped in half over an angry batter’s knee, to find Exley standing over him. He didn’t know how long he’d slept but he felt strong and ready, his reflexes fueled by the sure knowledge of combat to come.

“Time is it?”

“Eight.” Six hours. He’d been out longer than he thought.

“Did you sleep, Jennifer? You shouldn’t push like this.” She looked slack, exhausted, her face shiny with sweat. Even as he stood up, she sagged against his desk.

“We tracked them into the country,” she said. “They flew from St. John’s to Newark. January 13. Canadian passports.”

“We’re sure.”

“Checked their pictures with the crew on the Juno. It’s them. They came in under the names Jad Ghani and Kamel al-Bachary. From Montreal. The Canadians have addresses and are waiting for our go to kick down doors up there. That’s the good news. Bad news is there’s nothing on this end. The airlines and rental agencies don’t have anything in their databases. They used other names for the rentals, or didn’t fly or rent a car. Or didn’t use a national agency.”

“These guys.”

Exley closed her eyes. “FBI has every agent between Boston and Washington hitting rental companies, see if anybody recognizes their pictures. They’re trying to get them done by noon, then on to hotels and motels. Meanwhile we got a warrant for the credit card companies. But those databases are so big it’ll take some time to check their names.”

“Anything else?”

“All the toll takers at the bridges and tunnels into New York and up and down Ninety-five have their pictures. Though if they have an E-Z Pass, it won’t make a difference. We put some radiation sniffers on the Beltway and the tunnels, too, but if the bomb’s properly shielded, they won’t do much. Specially if it’s HEU and not plutonium.”

“So basically if we can’t find them before they leave whatever safe house they’re at. ”

Now Exley looked at Wells. “The odds are bad, yes. Not impossible, but bad.”

“The Germans get anything yet?”

“The kid, Bernard’s son, Helmut, he’s talking, confirms he saw one of them. The guy who came in under the Jad passport. Says the guy spoke German and that Bernard always called him Sayyid. But nothing more, no phone numbers or e-mails or anything.”

“How about Penn State? Anything there?”

“Nothing yet.”

“So when do we go public?”

“Hasn’t been decided.”

“What about the Russians?”

“We gave them the names and pictures and they said they’ll get back to us. Last I heard, they still haven’t told us what’s really in the crates or even confirmed these guys are connected to the missing material. The president’s going to talk to Medvedev directly as soon as possible, but who knows what that’ll do. And the White House is trying to figure out whether they should cancel the State of the Union tonight. So there’s your update.”

Wells laid the back of his hand on Exley’s forehead to test her temperature and found her running a fever. “You ought to lie down, Jenny.”

“I’ll sleep in the infirmary for a couple of hours.”

“Why don’t you go home?”

“Why don’t you come with me?”

He was silent. Her eyes went wet and then her cheeks and eyes hardened, her face becoming a mask, the emotion disappearing inch by inch. Say yes, he told himself. You don’t have to do this. But he did.

“You know,” she said. “I’ll go home, wait for you. You don’t even have to come. If you can promise me one thing. Promise me when we find these guys, you won’t go after them. You’ll sit tight here with Ellis.”

“It’s my op.”

“They’ll put half the army in the air. They don’t need you. You’re in the way. And it goes off, what then? You going to outrun the fireball?”

“I can’t ask someone else to take a risk I won’t take myself.”

She put her arm around his neck. A peace offering. “You’ve taken enough risks. Some might say you’ve gotten greedy. Let someone else have this one. Come home.”

He didn’t know how to convince her. Probably because she was right. After a minute of silence, she ran her hand down his arm, took his hand.

“This thing you have in you, this thing that won’t let you stop, I have it, too,” she said. “I came back here. I swore I wouldn’t, but I did. The difference between you and me is that I have some other things, too. My kids. I thought I had you. You, you just have this.”

“I have a son. I have you.”

“You haven’t seen Evan in how long? And you don’t have me, John. You don’t.” She stood and kissed him on the lips, a wet openmouthed kiss that brought him back to their very first kiss, barely two years before, on a day when she’d saved his life and nearly died in the process.

The kiss went on and he closed his eyes and pulled her to him. But she put a hand on his face and pushed him away. And without another word, she walked out.

THE CALL CAME three hours later. An FBI team had found the Avis office in Morristown, New Jersey, where “Jad” and “Kamel” rented their car. The agent who’d been working on January 13 wasn’t at the office when they arrived. But when they tracked him to his apartment, he immediately recognized the photographs. Jad had rented a Pontiac G6, dark blue, 11,347 miles, for a month. He’d used an international driver’s license and a Turkish passport and a MasterCard, all in the name of Dawood Askari. How exactly he’d gotten those useful items was a question they’d answer later.

For now they had the name he was using in the United States. And something even more precious. Avis equipped its vehicles with LoJack, the antitheft system, which could be activated remotely to broadcast a stolen car’s location. According to the system, the G6 was parked on a farm outside the town of Addison, New York — three hundred miles from Washington, and slightly closer to Manhattan. The farm belonged to a surgeon named Bashir Is’mail, who worked at a hospital in Corning.

Now two companies of Rangers had been scrambled from Fort Drum, a big army base about 150 miles north of Addison. FBI agents were en route from Buffalo and Albany. The New York State Police had been given the plate number and description of the G6 and asked to set up observation posts — not roadblocks — on the highways and state roads around Corning. And a half-dozen F-16 fighter-bombers were being put in the air from Andrews Air Force Base.

Meanwhile, the job of taking the house had been given to a Delta unit that was officially called the 9th Special Operations Group/Emergency Response and unofficially known as Red Team. Red Team had two squads, one based at Andrews and the other at West Point. It worked alongside the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a group of scientists responsible for finding and defusing nuclear and dirty bombs. The Red Team soldiers carried gamma and alpha ray detectors and radiological protective gear and were authorized to shoot on sight anyone they reasonably suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon. Each Red Team squad had twelve soldiers and two Black Hawks dedicated to its transport and was ready to scramble within thirty minutes, twenty-four hours a day.

“When are they taking off?” Wells said. He’d been sitting in Shafer’s office as Shafer flicked between calls and e-mail and IM to track the plan. But Shafer was focused on his screen and paid no attention to the question. “Ellis.”

“Company C is shipping out in fifteen from Andrews,” Shafer said. “They’re gonna set down in Corning, switch over to SUVs that the state police will have waiting, go in on the ground instead of helicopter so whoever’s at the farm won’t hear them coming. I don’t want to tell you this, but they’ve got a spot for you. They’ve got eleven guys and you’ll make twelve. You want to ride with them?”

“What do you think?”

“What I think and what I wish are two different things.”

“Aren’t they always?”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Wells stood on a helipad at Langley, shielding his eyes from the winter sun as the Black Hawk swept in. He wore a helmet and his lightweight bulletproof vest and carried an M-4, an automatic rifle with a grenade launcher attached below the barrel.

The helicopter touched down and Wells ran through the frigid wind-storm whipped up by its blades and jumped into the cabin. He strapped himself in and the crew chief hopped out to check on him and then they took off. He didn’t expect to know any of the men, but as he looked around he recognized one, Brett Gaffan, a sergeant he’d met a few months before in Afghanistan. Gaffan and he had spent a long night together, pinned on open ground under fire from Taliban guerrillas.

After the mission, they’d traded e-mail addresses and vowed to stay in touch, but they hadn’t. Wells guessed that his reputation intimidated Gaffan, who wouldn’t want Wells to think he was sucking up, keeping in contact in case Wells could do him a favor. But Wells had no such excuse. He’d simply forgotten. He remembered the men he killed but forgot the ones he saved or fought beside. You just have this, Exley had said. He didn’t want to believe her, but she was right.

The Black Hawk’s cabin was frigid as they flew over the hills of western Maryland and then into Pennsylvania, roughly tracking U.S. 15. They passed a stretch of open fields, two low ridges facing each other, the landscape as familiar to Wells as a dream, and as the helicopter swept by he realized he was seeing Gettysburg. But even before he could imagine Grant and Lee and the armies in blue and gray, the fields were gone. They were running at 170 knots, roughly 200 miles an hour, the effective maximum cruising speed for these modified Hawks.

They rolled north along ground that was heavily wooded and hilly, blurred towns disappearing as fast as they came, heating oil tankers and tractor-trailers chugging on the roads beneath them. At Harrisburg, the State Capitol flashed before them and then was gone. For a while they flew along the Susquehanna, the river flowing wide and sluggish, chunks of ice floating in its dark brown water. In front of them, the hills grew until they were the Appalachians and the patches of snow on the ground thickened until they weren’t patches anymore.

No one in the cabin spoke and no one smiled. Wells understood. The quickest reflexes and all the Kevlar in the world wouldn’t matter if this bomb blew. So Wells closed his eyes and listened to the music in his head, Springsteen asking, Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? / Or is it something worse?.

Would he ever see Exley again? Whether or not he survived?

THE HELICOPTER SLOWED and Wells opened his eyes. They came down in an empty parking lot outside an abandoned factory, its bricks cracking and its smokestacks stained. The other three Black Hawks were already down, and eighteen soldiers stood beside them, checking their gear, along with about fifteen state troopers. Four Suburbans, two marked and two unmarked, and two unmarked Crown Vics waited for them, lights on and engines running.

As the fourth Black Hawk landed, the Deltas began to huddle around a tall man who, unusually for a Special Operations officer, wore a standard camouflage uniform, a lieutenant colonel’s oak leaves on his shoulderboards, and Giese on his name tag. As Wells joined the huddle, Giese looked at him and nodded. Wells nodded back, all the introduction he needed, and all he would get. Giese spread a four-foot-square satellite photo of the Repard farm on the hood of one of the Suburbans. The property had two buildings, the main house and a stable behind it. The G6 was clearly visible, parked in front of the main house, along with a second vehicle, a Ford Expedition.

“We’re guessing that whatever they have is in the back building. But it could be in the basement of the main house or even hidden somewhere else on the property,” Giese said. “We put up a sniffer”—a plane with equipment that could detect radioactive particles—“but it didn’t find anything. So we really don’t know.

“C Company’s going in first. We’ll leave the Black Hawks here, drive to the perimeter of the property and move along the driveway on foot. The state police have blocked the road that leads to the farm where it runs across Route 417. The police are giving us a ride, but they’re not going in. Meanwhile, B Company will ride in and land between the house and the stable. But only after C has hit the buildings. I don’t want these guys to know we’re coming.”

Giese handed out wallet-sized copies of the Newark immigration photographs. “Our primary targets. Our ROE”—rules of engagement—“say you can shoot on sight, no warning. We don’t know what they have, whether it’s a bomb or just material. But I want you to assume the worst. Assume they have a megaton bomb and they can trigger it remotely. And act accordingly. Any questions?”

“Whose property is it, sir?”

“According to the records, it belongs to a surgeon from Egypt. He bought it a couple of years ago and we can assume he’s part of whatever they’re doing. We’re still getting a photograph of him, but it doesn’t matter what he looks like. Once we cross that perimeter, everyone you see is subject to the ROE. Women and children included.”

“Children, sir?”

“If a child has the detonator, then he’s more dangerous than any adult. Other questions?”

Silence.

“All right. I’m going to ride lead. We don’t have time for any fancy speeches, and I don’t have to tell you what this means. So I won’t. But I would like to offer a quick prayer. If you want to join, huddle up and bow your heads and close your eyes.”

Every man did. Including Wells.

“Dear God, please help us overcome the enemy we face and keep our country safe from this most dangerous weapon. And please return us this night to our families and homes. Amen.”

“Amen,” twenty-three voices said in return.

“Saddle up.”

THE TROOPERS DROVE FAST, lights flashing but no sirens. Wells and Gaffan sat in the rear Crown Vic.

“Sergeant.”

“Mr. Wells.”

“What did I tell you about calling me mister? Or sir? I wish I’d known you were in D.C. We could have had a beer.”

“I just got moved a couple months ago, sir. I mean John.”

“Who’d you piss off to wind up on this detail?”

Gaffan laughed. “I requested it. My wife was joking about divorcing me if she didn’t start seeing me more, and after a while it didn’t sound like she was joking. Anyway, I was tired of Afghanistan. Chasing those Talibs around the caves. It never ends, does it?”

“It does for some. When we get through this, we’re going out for a drink. And this time, I want you to hold me to it.”

“I’ll do that. Think they have a bomb?”

Wells shook his head. No point in guessing.

The convoy turned off 86 and onto 15. Then onto 417, and five minutes after that through a roadblock and left onto a nameless narrow road into the woods. A minute later, they pulled up outside the driveway, a rutted asphalt track that disappeared through thick woods over a low rise. A gray wooden mailbox beside the road announced “Repard” in faint black letters.

The Suburbans and Crown Vics pulled over and the soldiers threw open the doors and stepped onto the road. When all twelve men were out, the vehicles rolled away. The only sound was the trickle of snow-melt dripping off branches. Without a word, the Deltas dropped the safeties on their M-16s and M-4s, checked the slides on their pistols, adjusted their Kevlar and bulletproof vests. They nodded to each other and lined up in pairs by the side of the driveway. Then Giese threw two fingers forward, and they began to run.

At the top of the rise, they threw themselves down. The house was two hundred yards down the driveway, the Pontiac and Ford parked in front. The lights were out and Wells saw no signs of motion inside. Now they had to choose. They could run up the driveway, moving quickly but visible to anyone inside the house. Or they could spread into the woods, a slower and noisier but better hidden route. After a few seconds, Giese pointed his fingertips down the path. Two by two, the commandos ran toward the house. The first six men ran around it and toward the stable in back. The next four set up on the porch with a battering ram, preparing to break open the front door. Wells and Gaffan ran to the back of the house.

The back door was unlocked. Wells slung it open and followed Gaffan into the kitchen. Three plates sat on the table, along with a dish of cucumber slices, a carton of orange juice, and a basket of pitas. Wells pulled open a cheap wooden door that looked like it led to the basement. Bingo. Gaffan took the stairs two at a time and Wells followed.

In the basement, three clean whiteboards, a broken Ping-Pong table, three cans of Coke. No bomb, no terrorists hiding in corners. They ran back up the stairs and into the kitchen, where the other two teams waited. The other soldiers shook their heads. The house was clear. The stable, too, apparently. They hadn’t heard any shots or explosions or calls for help. These men, whoever they were, had eluded them again.

Then Gaffan’s radio buzzed. “The stable,” he said.

GIESE POKED with his foot at the brutalized corpse on the floor of the stable. “Seems they had a falling-out,” he said.

“We know which one this is?” Wells said.

Giese shook his head. “You find anything?”

“The house is empty but there’s food in the kitchen,” Wells said. “Looks like they ate breakfast and left. It’s”—Wells looked at his watch—“one-thirty now. Say they left between seven and ten.”

“In six hours, they could get three hundred, four hundred miles,” Giese said. “They could be in New York already, or Washington. Halfway to Chicago.”

“Unless we shut down the whole eastern half of the country, we can’t freeze them. And if we do, they’ll know where they stand and they’ll blow this thing wherever they are.”

“That’s a White House decision,” Giese said. “But in a couple hours, they’re going to have to cancel the State of the Union and then the game’s going to be up anyway. And for all we know, word’s leaking already. Too many people have bits of it.” He sighed and reached for his phone. “I have to call in. They’ll probably bring us back to Andrews, let the Rangers and the state cops take over here. You going to ride with us?”

Wells shook his head. He wanted to look around the house and the stable, see if he could connect anything he saw with Bernard Kygeli. There was something he wasn’t remembering. Maybe the house would spark it.

“Mind leaving me Gaffan?” he said. “I know him from Afghanistan.”

Giese tilted his head. “Guess we’ll make do with ten. Here’s my cell.” He passed on the number. “You think of anything, let me know. Time’s short.”

“Indeed.”

36

What are we looking for?” Gaffan said.

“We’ll know when we see it. Wear gloves and leave everything how you found it.”

They went back into the house, looked into the closets, under the beds, inside the heavy wooden furniture. With its rocking chairs and patchwork quilts, the house looked more like a bed-and-breakfast than a terrorist camp. The closet in the master bedroom was filled with skirts, long and modest, and long-sleeve blouses. Four people had been here — the two terrorists, Bashir, and a woman. Three were gone, one dead. Wells didn’t understand. Had they fought over the woman? Had one lost his nerve? And why had they left? Had Bernard gotten an alarm to them? If this house had the answers, Wells couldn’t find them.

Sirens began to scream up the driveway. In minutes, cops and FBI agents would be overrunning the place. Maybe he should have gone back to Andrews after all.

Wells’s phone buzzed. Shafer. “They’re not here,” he said.

“I heard. You decided to stay, enjoy the scenery?”

“Give me some good news.”

“There isn’t any. If we haven’t found them by five, the president will announce that the State of the Union has been canceled and release their names and photographs publicly. It’s going to leak by then anyway. Already there’s stuff on the Internet, rumors. Nobody’s put it together yet, but they will.”

Wells looked at his watch: 2:15.

“We know what they’re driving?”

“The only car registered to Bashir is that Ford. If I had to guess, I’d say they bought something else and didn’t retag it. It’s got to be something big, though. A van or SUV.”

“There’s only about fifty million of those.”

“I told you no good news. What, they didn’t leave a map with a big X marking safe house?”

“You think they have another safe house?”

“Maybe not a true safe house, but these guys are too smart just to be driving around, especially if the car’s not registered. They’ve got someplace to crash.”

Wells thought of the coffee mug in Bernard Kygeli’s office. “How about Penn State? From there, it’s interstate to New York and D.C.”

“We’re looking, but we can’t find anybody connected to Kygeli.”

“All right. If anything happens, call me.”

“If anything happens, you may hear it all the way up there.” Click.

“Who was that?” Gaffan said.

“My boss.”

“What now?”

The keys to Bashir’s Expedition were in a candy dish on the kitchen table. Wells picked them up. “We’re going to Happy Valley.”

Gaffan shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“Happy Valley, Pennsylvania. Penn State.”

A New York State trooper escorted them in a Suburban, calling ahead so that the Pennsylvania troopers knew they were coming. They rolled down 15, and at the state border were handed off to a Pennsylvania trooper in an unmarked Mustang. The highway was narrow and the Expedition was wide, but somehow Gaffan kept the speedometer pinned at 105 most of the way down. They’d get to Penn State by four, give or take, Wells thought. Then what? He had no idea.

THE PLACE WAS sparsely furnished and small, two rooms and a galley kitchen. Cheap, simple college housing. Nasiji let them in with the key that Bernard had given him. They parked the Suburban in the parking lot directly outside, no need to be fancy. They’d taken out the two back rows of seats. The gadget was in the back, facing backward, the tamper close to the back gate. On the way down, Yusuf had driven, with Thalia next to him. Nasiji lay in the back, next to the Spear, hidden by the tinted windows, the uranium round between his legs.

No one could track them here, and all they needed to do was wait. The woman who lived here had no idea what they were planning, of course. Nasiji hoped she wouldn’t show up until they arrived. She would only complicate things.

In the apartment, Nasiji watched CNN with the sound off, waiting for the screen crawl that might tell him that they’d been found, that the State of the Union had been canceled or a farm in upstate New York had been raided. But the afternoon rolled by quietly and he began to think that they’d gotten away. They would leave just before sunset and head southeast to Harrisburg. There they would decide whether to turn south toward Washington — if the State of the Union was still happening — or east toward Philadelphia and New York. Once they were on the road, they ought to be unstoppable. He couldn’t imagine how anyone could connect them with the Suburban, and the police lights would help.

The mission hadn’t gone according to plan, he had to admit. They’d lost the second bomb. The Americans had found the Juno. And then, last night, Bashir’s unforgivable treachery.

Even so, they were close. By the end of this night, the American government might no longer exist. If. If they could get into Washington, get close to the Capitol. If the bomb didn’t fizzle. If Allah smiled on them. Nasiji lowered himself to the floor and began to pray.

TEN MILES OUTSIDE STATE COLLEGE, a billboard for Penn State football towered over Route 220. Go Nittany Lions. And then Wells remembered. The coffee mug in Bernard’s office hadn’t been for Penn State. It had been for Penn State soccer.

He called Shafer.

“Ellis. Have the FBI call Penn State, get the soccer team roster. That’s the connection.”

“You sure?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I’ll Google it. Penn State athletics. It’s all football. Soccer. No Arab or Turkish-sounding names, nobody from Turkey or Germany or anywhere in the Middle East.”

“Try the J.V.”

A few seconds later, Shafer came back. “No, John. You still want me to call the FBI? They’ve got a few other things to do.”

“What about women?” Gaffan said.

Wells clapped a hand to his forehead. “Of course.”

“Of course what?” Shafer said.

“Check the women’s roster.”

Shafer clicked away. “Wouldn’t you know? Aymet Helsi. From Blankenese, Germany. Says here she’s a goalie. You want to bet your buddy Bernard knows her family? Maybe he’s helping with her tuition?”

“You have an address?”

“As soon as I hang up, I’ll get the FBI to get a warrant, get her address from the registrar. Meantime let’s see if she’s got a, yes, she’s listed. The last twenty-year-old with a landline.”

“Address.”

“Ten Vairo Boulevard, unit 239-04. Looks like it’s part of a big apartment complex called Vairo Village. You want me to stay on the line, give you directions?”

“We’ve got a GPS.”

“I’ll call the army. But you’re going to get there first, no matter what. I don’t suppose I can convince you to wait.”

Wells was silent.

“John, do me a favor and don’t get killed. She’ll never forgive you. Or me.” Click.

FOLLOWING THE GPS’S chirped orders, Gaffan turned right onto the Mount Nittany Expressway, Route 322, the east-west highway that ran along the northern edge of town. At Waddle Road, less than a mile from the apartment, Gaffan pulled off. Wells tapped his shoulder. “Pull over.” Wells hopped out, told the trooper what had happened.

“I gotta call the State College cops,” the trooper said.

“Sit tight for five minutes. We’ll go in first, no sirens.”

“But what about evacuating—”

“There’s no evacuating from this,” Wells said. “Let us go in first.”

AT 4:25, THE NEWS CRAWL on CNN began to promise a major announcement from the White House at 5 p.m. Then the crawl reported that the FBI would hold a briefing following the White House announcement. Nasiji didn’t need to see more.

“We’re going,” he said to Yusuf and Thalia. “Now.”

WELLS AND GAFFAN rolled down Oakwood Avenue. The GPS informed them that Vairo Boulevard was ahead on their right. They reached a stop sign, turned right onto Vairo. The apartment complex was across the road, dozens of brown-and-white buildings around a long cul-de-sac.

Gaffan started to swing in. “No,” Wells said. “Next one.”

He pointed to the sign in front: “Phase 1—Units 1-100.” Wells lowered the window of the Expedition and cradled his M-4. His mouth was dry, his fingers gnarled. If his hunch was wrong, he might be about to shoot an innocent college student. And if it was right.

They reached the next block: “Phase 2—Units 201–300.” Gaffan swung in. They rolled slowly down the street, which was really just a big parking lot for the complex. The buildings were identical, each two stories, white and brown, laid out roughly in a rectangle that extended several hundred feet around the parking lot. They were moving up the longer side of the rectangle, north from Vairo Boulevard, as the parking lot divided into four rows.

“We know what kind of car we’re looking for?”

“Something big,” Wells said.

And Wells saw it. A black Suburban at the far end of the complex, moving south away from them, toward the exit. He touched Gaffan’s shoulder.

“Let’s see what building they came out of.”

They swung right, down the northern edge of the complex, the top of the rectangle, as the Suburban rolled away. Number 239 lay at the northeastern flank of the complex, where Wells had first seen the Suburban. Gaffan slowed down. “We going in?”

“No.”

NASIJI LAY ON THE FLOOR of the Suburban, the uranium pit tucked between his legs. On the ride down from Addison, the position had left him vaguely carsick, but it allowed him to load and fire the Spear in seconds. Inshallah. How silly to worry about a bit of stomach pain when he was about to give his body to a nuclear fireball. He wasn’t afraid. Or perhaps he was. Anyone would be. But he had chosen this course, and unlike that coward Bashir, he would see it through. His father, his mother, they hadn’t asked to die either. He and Yusuf and even Thalia would join Mohammed Atta and the other martyrs who had given themselves to liberate Islam.

Nasiji clutched the pit tight and closed his eyes. They stopped, waiting for traffic to clear so they could join the traffic on Vairo Boulevard. Soon they would be on the highway, just another anonymous black SUV traveling through the Pennsylvania night, burning the gasoline that the Americans had invaded Iraq to steal. In half an hour, he would hear what the president had to say and then he would decide where to take their precious cargo.

THE SUBURBAN STOPPED at the intersection of the parking lot and Vairo Boulevard, stuck behind a car that was waiting to make a left turn.

“Ram them,” Wells said. “Hard.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Gaffan stamped the gas pedal and the Expedition surged, its big engine roaring—

CRASH. The Expedition’s massive grille buckled the rear of the Suburban, shattering the back windows. The collision threw Wells forward but his seat belt caught and airbags popped from all over, front and side. He didn’t even drop his M-4. He juddered back into his seat and even before the steam started to rise from the Expedition’s crumpled radiator, he’d unbuckled his seat belt. For a moment, he couldn’t open his door, but he put his shoulder to it and popped it out. Through the Suburban’s broken windows, Wells saw a man in the back of the truck, crawling toward what looked like a big rocket-propelled grenade tube, a Spear, maybe. A strange ball was attached to the muzzle of the Spear.

“Stop!” Wells yelled in Arabic. He stepped out of the Ford and dropped the safety on the M-4, wondering if he really was about to start shooting, without warning, at three people in an SUV he’d never seen before. The man in the Suburban didn’t look back. He inched forward and stretched out his right arm for the barrel of the Spear.

THE COLLISION TOSSED Nasiji backward, throwing him into the Suburban’s rear doors. Shards of glass covered him and he dropped the pit. No. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine how, but they’d been tracked. Only one choice left. This stupid place wasn’t Washington or New York, but it would have to do. He reached around and found the pit and inched forward. Outside the car, a man yelled “Stop” in Arabic, and Nasiji remembered the American soldiers in Iraq, always giving orders. He pushed himself forward. If he could just load the pit.

THE SUBURBAN LURCHED FORWARD, metal tearing metal, pulling apart the grille of the Expedition. In a moment, it would be free. Wells stepped forward and propelled himself onto the hood of the Expedition and began to shoot, first at the man in the back, tearing him open, three in the chest and then two in the head to be sure, and switched to full auto and tore up the driver and passenger seats until blood and brains splattered the front windshield and the Suburban was still.

AND THEN WELLS leaned back against the hood of the Ford and looked at what he’d done. A hand squeezed his shoulder and a voice, Gaffan’s, said his name. But Wells only shook his head and sat in the cold, shivering, as the police arrived in ones and twos and then by the dozens, and Vairo Village turned into a mad clanking, flashing carnival, with him the main attraction, its mute and beating heart.