The Silent Man (41 page)

“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?

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—

“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.

T
his 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.