The Silent Man

8

Finding the Pathfinder didn’t take long. Fifteen hours after the attack, just about the time that Wells and Shafer got home, a D.C. cop spotted the Pathfinder parked in Northeast, two blocks from the Rhode Island Avenue Red Line metro stop.

Inside the Pathfinder’s glove box were two Polish passports, $12,000 in cash, and a disposable cell phone. The passports had been issued two months before. They were the same ones the would-be assassins had used to enter the United States through Atlanta. A few hours later, four thousand miles away, the famously bad-tempered agents of the WSI, the Polish military intelligence service, arrested the clerk who’d issued the passports. He confessed immediately — a wise choice — but insisted he’d had no idea what the men who’d bought the passports had planned to do with them. They were Russian, he said, and paid cash.

Meanwhile, the phone was handed over to the wizards at the National Security Agency. The phone shouldn’t have yielded any information. It was a disposable. Its call registers had been deleted. And it hadn’t even been used to place any calls. But through some magic Wells didn’t claim to understand, the NSA’s engineers found records for two incoming calls in the phone’s memory. Both had been received the night before the assassination attempt. They were sixteen-digit numbers, international, country code 7, city code 495. Moscow, Russia. When the agency first tried to trace them, neither existed. Like the northern Virginia extensions that led to CIA headquarters, they couldn’t be found in conventional telco databases.

The next day, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador to Russia, asked for a meeting with the Russian interior minister, Aleksandr Milov. Without mentioning the cell phones, Purdy said that evidence connected Russia with the terrorist attack in Washington.

What evidence? Milov asked. Had the assassins been definitely identified? Not yet, Purdy conceded. But the assassins were traveling on false Polish passports, and the passport clerk who issued them said the men were Russian. Would Russia allow the United States to send its own agents to Moscow to investigate further leads?

First, Milov said, allow him to express the Kremlin’s outrage at the attack. In broad daylight. And so close to the White House. Terrible. Of course the Russian government would offer whatever help it could, Milov said. Of course, of course, of course.

But. unfortunately. the Kremlin could not allow American investigators on Russian soil. To do so would violate Russian sovereignty and be an affront to the FSB, which was certainly as skilled as the FBI. At least as skilled. In any event, Milov was certain that no Russians would ever commit an attack. The Poles were notorious liars and probably trying to deflect attention from their own guilt.

Nonetheless, the FSB wanted to prove its goodwill. If the United States would share the evidence it had gathered so far, the FSB would gladly send its own agents to Washington to aid the investigation. They could be on their way on the next Aeroflot flight. A joint Russian-American effort to combat terrorism. No? Well, then, the Kremlin would wait for instructions from the United States.

“And yadda yadda yadda,” Shafer said, when he’d finished telling Wells what had happened. They were in a conference room at GW Hospital. Exley had just undergone surgery to clean up her spine. The early report from the doctors was positive. The center of her spinal cord was undamaged. Her rehab would be difficult but she should be able to walk again.

“They gave us nothing?”

“Pretty much. But I do have some good news from Fort Meade—” the NSA. “They think they can trace the Moscow end of the call to a specific address.”

“Even though the numbers don’t exist?”

“Correct. And even if they’re never used again. Don’t ask me how.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“But there’s a catch. Even if they can track it, they say we can’t ever disclose what they’ve found, either publicly or privately, to the Russians. NSA doesn’t want the Kremlin to know how far we can get inside their phone networks.”

“And how far is that?”

“All the way, give or take.”

“But even if we can’t go public with it, we’ll know.”

“Apparently. Though if the numbers track to some ninety-year-old babushka, we may have to reconsider.”

“We’ll have a name.”

“Maybe a company, maybe a person. What then? Planning a trip to Moscow?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You have. It’s obvious. How about a better idea? Help her get better and let everyone else work this for a while.”

“Ellis Shafer, giving the team-player speech. Did Duto put a chip in your brain?”

“Don’t be stupid. The whole agency wants what you want.”

“And what’s that?”

Shafer paused.

“I was going to say justice. But you don’t want justice. You want a scalp.”

Wells didn’t disagree.

“You always told me violence was a last resort for you. That you’d never killed unless you had no choice.”

Wells closed his eyes and looked at the faces of the men he’d killed. In Afghanistan, in Atlanta, in New York, in China. “It’s been a last resort an awful lot,” he said. “Rarely as deserved as this.”

“Prosecutors have a name for this, what you’re planning: ‘with malice aforethought.’ Premeditated murder. First degree. Exley told me you were thinking about quitting after what happened in China. Maybe you should have.”

Wells said nothing.

“What? You think she shouldn’t have said? She has to pretend you’re a robot, too?”

“I’m fine, Ellis.”

“She had to tell someone.”

“And who did you have to tell?” Wells hated being talked about this way.

“No one. It ends with me. But ask yourself this: Will going to Moscow put the dreams away, give you an honest night’s sleep? Let the rest of us handle it.”

“Wise advice from the desk jockey of all desk jockeys. You know better than anyone that if I don’t push, it won’t happen.”

“We lost two of our own. You’re wrong.”

“We won’t piss off the Kremlin.”

“Give it some time. Us. Me.”

Now Wells stood, pushed past Shafer, moving the smaller man out of his way with an easy hand on Shafer’s shoulder. He opened the door.

“Let me know when we get that name, Ellis.”

A DAY LATER the NSA reported that both numbers led to the same six-story office building in central Moscow. The building had four tenants, all connected to the Russian military, the FSB, or both. One was a security company that provided protection for American multinationals doing business in Moscow. Another seemed to be a front company for the Russian army, like the ones the Defense Department used to hire software programmers who didn’t want to work full-time for the government. The third was little more than a shell corporation, probably used to move money out of Russia. None of them were likely to have been involved in the attack.

But the fourth caught Wells’s attention. Helosrus Ltd. The agency’s file on Helosrus was slim but damning.

“Helosrus is owned by Ivan Markov, former assistant chief of operations for the FSB. Markov maintains a close relationship with current FSB officers, some of whom are said to be silent partners in Helosrus. The company’s legitimate business consists of providing guards for executives at companies with close ties to the Russian government, such as the natural gas monopoly Gazprom. Its agents have a reputation for being aggressive and