The Silent Man

“Damn Boris.” Grigory honked. The rear door of the hut opened and Hiterov stepped out, holding a flashlight. Its beam caught Grigory in the eyes. Grigory felt his bowels tighten.

Grigory rolled down his window. “What’s this, Boris?”

“I have to check the car. Arkady’s orders.”

Fifth test. This one unexpected. Grigory felt as he did playing chess when an opponent found a weakness and counterattacked, leaving him naked. Grigory opened the door, stepped out of the car. “Come on, Tajid. Into the cold while he finds the bombs we’ve stolen.” He hoped he had the right tone of sarcasm in his voice.

“You think I want to be out here?” Hiterov whined. Nonetheless he leaned into the car, shined the flashlight over the front seats, then into the back. “Now the trunk.”

Grigory unlocked the trunk. Hiterov poked the beam of his light inside.

“What a mess. Don’t you ever clean this thing?”

“Only on nights I’m screwing your wife in the backseat.”

With his free hand, Hiterov poked ineffectually at the papers and antifreeze bottles. Grigory imagined how he would explain the warheads to the police and the FSB. An experiment, a test of the plant’s security. Maybe he’d tell the truth, try to trade his life for Yusuf’s, though he’d still wind up in a Siberian jail until he died.

Finally, Hiterov stood up. He hadn’t found them. He hadn’t noticed the toolboxes, hadn’t even moved the blankets.

“Inspection over. Tell Arkady I did as he asked.”

“Tell him yourself.” Grigory and Tajid slipped back into the Volga as Hiterov disappeared into the hut. The gate opened and Grigory put the Volga into gear and rolled out.

Fifth test passed. Game over. Checkmate.

The rest was simple. They checked in at headquarters and handed over the paperwork. Arkady complained about the way Grigory had broken the rules, and Grigory apologized dutifully. Four a.m. came, the end of Grigory’s shift. “See you, Tajid,” he said to his cousin, whose shift didn’t end for another hour. “Have a good weekend, Arkady.”

“You and your mother, too.”

Grigory walked out of headquarters and into the frigid night. The lights of the buildings around him glowed brightly, but nothing moved. In the distance, somewhere outside the gates of the plant, a truck rumbled. He walked toward the Volga. It wasn’t too late. He could still turn around, confess to Arkady, explain the theft as a crazy practical joke.

Too late, not too late, too late. Forget it. He’d won. Now he wanted his reward, whatever it was. He settled himself inside the Volga, slipped key into ignition.

“Inshallah,” he said. The foolishness that contented his cousin. God willing. What a strange thing to say. As if God had anything to do with this game they were playing. He pursed his lips, said it again. “Inshallah.” He drove off, toward the plant’s main gate, two stolen nuclear warheads in his trunk.

4

ZURICH

Cottage cheese.

Cottage cheese and melon. Cottage cheese and low-fat granola. Cottage cheese and an egg-white omelette. In the last three months, Pierre Kowalski had eaten cottage cheese all the ways it could be eaten. Now he was eating it again, spooning the rubbery white junk into his mouth. He choked it down with a glass of Evian, trying to pretend it had any taste at all.

“This is no way to live,” he grumbled in French across the table at Nadia Zorinova, his girlfriend, a twenty- two-year-old whose pert nose and ice-blue eyes were currently gracing the cover of Spanish Vogue.

“Now you know how we models feel.” Nadia smirked at him with her million-dollar lips. “Soon you’ll be ready to walk the runway.”

Nadia. This mansion on Lake Zurich, another in Monte Carlo. A yacht complete with its own helicopter pad. A billion dollars spread in banks around the world. The ear of defense ministers and presidents from Buenos Aires to Bangkok. Kowalski had everything he wanted. Everything but this. cottage cheese.

Kowalski never wanted to see cottage cheese again, not unless it was sitting next to a steak. A thick filet mignon, medium rare, in a pepper-corn sauce, accompanied by a bottle of burgundy. He picked up his plate, Wedgwood bone china, and spun it across the room like a $600 Frisbee. It crashed into the fireplace and exploded in a thousand shards, scattering cottage cheese and grapes across the floor.

Nadia’s smirk widened. “Pierre, you mustn’t keep destroying the china.”

“It’s replaceable.” Like you, Kowalski mentally added. Though Nadia had her charms. A few weeks earlier, she’d just missed being cast as an underwear model for Calvin Klein.

“Would you like something else?”

“Do you plan to cook it for me?”

THREE MONTHS BEFORE, Kowalski had brought his personal physician, Dr. Emile Breton, to his mansion for a physical. The appointment was not entirely routine. For weeks, he’d found himself unable to. perform, despite Nadia’s most tender ministrations. He’d never suffered that problem before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Years before, his endowment had earned him the nickname “Cinquante,” French for “fifty,” a reference not to the American rapper but to the.50-caliber sniper rifle, among the most powerful firearms ever made.

So Kowalski’s troubles left him puzzled. Perhaps his advancing age? Whatever the problem, he expected that Breton would take care of it with a prescription for Viagra or some similar elixir. The doctor had other ideas. He weighed Kowalski, drew blood, insisted that Kowalski come to his office for a treadmill stress test. And then he returned to Kowalski’s mansion to deliver the bad news in person.

“Pierre. You must change your diet, begin to exercise. You’ve gained ten kilos”—twenty-two pounds—“in two years.”

“You’ve been saying the same thing for as long as I’ve known you.” Kowalski smirked. “Would you like lunch, Doctor? It’s quail today, in a sauce of figs.”

“This isn’t a joke. Your cholesterol, your weight, your glucose. Disastrous, all of it.”

“Aren’t there those balloons?”

“Angioplasty. Yes, you may need that as well. But unless you take your diet more seriously, it’s only postponing the inevitable. Your arteries are nearly blocked. Why do you think you’re having such trouble with that delightful girl out there?”

Kowalski’s smile faded. “Now I see I have your attention,” the doctor said.

“What about the pills?”

“If you don’t lose at least twenty-five kilos”—almost sixty pounds—“Viagra will be useless.”

“You’re beginning to depress me.”

“Forty kilos would be even better. Tell your chef to throw away the quail, cook some vegetables.”

“Forty kilos? That’s nearly one-third of my weight.” Kowalski weighed 130 kilos — almost 290 pounds.

“I know.” He handed Kowalski a card: H. W. Rossi, specialiste de diete. “If you’re serious about remaining alive, call him. I’ve seen him work miracles with men like you.”

INDEED, under the watchful eyes of Rossi, who seemed to survive solely on vegetables and an occasional piece of broiled trout, Kowalski had lost thirteen kilos in three months. Over the last few weeks, his libido had even started to return. Even so, the diet wore on him. Kowalski had always been a master at presenting a smooth face to the world. Now, though, he found himself irritable, prone to silly tricks like flinging plates across the room.

Yes, the diet was bothering him. The diet. And the knowledge that John Wells was still alive.

Kowalski was the world’s largest private arms dealer, a conduit for weapons from Russia, France, and the