The Silent Man (27 page)

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

 

 

 

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

“So what’s his name?” Wells said.

“And what do you give me in return?”

“A truce. Your life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Wells found he had nothing to say.

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

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

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

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

“Right. Six months.”

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

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

“Another hypothetical.”

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

“Or you’re making all this up.”

Kowalski shook his head.

“So what’s the Turk’s name?”

“Do we have a deal?”

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

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

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

“You’re an honorable man, Mr. Wells.”

“There was a time I thought so too.”

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

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

“Wish we had the other,” he said.

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

“She?”

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

“Because it blows up second.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” Yusuf said.

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

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

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

“But—”

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

Yusuf nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he couldn’t take that chance.

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