The Silent Man (40 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.”