The Silent Man

The Saudi nodded. For a few seconds the room was so quiet that Nasiji could hear his own breathing. “These Americans,” Ahmed said finally.

“They need a taste.” Nasiji didn’t tell the sheikh that if his plan succeeded it wouldn’t destroy just New York or Washington, but all of America. That vision might have been too much even for this man.

Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette. “Let me ask you, then. What will you need?”

“To start? A Canadian or American passport, a real one. Also one from Europe. Safe houses in Germany and Russia. Men I can trust in both places. And money, lots of it.”

“It’s a long list.”

“It’ll get longer as we get closer.”

The sheikh nodded.

“Most of all, we need someone in the United States we can absolutely trust, someone with a bit of land. A few acres so we won’t be bothered.”

“Inside the United States? Why?”

“We’ll need to assemble the bomb there. The material itself isn’t very noticeable, but the finished weapon is.”

“Do you really think you can do this?”

“I can’t promise success. But it’s not impossible. Acquiring the material is the most difficult part. If God wills that. ”

“Inshallah,” the sheikh said. “Inshallah.” He clapped his hands together. “All right. First, let’s get you out of Iraq before the Americans find you. We’ll meet in Amman in a week and talk more about your plans. You’ll have the chance to revenge your family, I promise you that.”

To his astonishment, Nasiji felt his eyes well with tears. He turned away so the Saudi couldn’t see his face.

FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS, Ahmed Faisal kept his word to Nasiji. All over the world Faisal and his cousin knew men who wanted to support the jihad. In Montreal, the director of an Algerian community center. In Berlin, the owner of an Afghan restaurant. In Sarajevo, a used-truck dealer. In Chelyabinsk, an imam. All willing to help Nasiji without question. They put him up in their homes, so he didn’t leave a paper trail. They passed along cash. A few provided more crucial support. The Canadian passport in Nasiji’s pocket identified him as Jad Ghani of Montreal. Nasiji didn’t have to worry that an immigration officer would identify the passport as fake — because it wasn’t.

Jad Ghani actually existed. He was mildly retarded, lived at home, and had been born in Montreal the same year as Nasiji. Jad’s father, a fervent believer, had been more than happy to apply for a passport for his son, using photos of Nasiji. And so Nasiji had a genuine Canadian passport, which would easily get him through border controls anywhere in Europe or the United States.

Nasiji’s first big break came when Faisal put him in touch with Yusuf al Haj, who’d served for six years as an engineer in the Syrian army. Yusuf had two great virtues. He spoke excellent Russian. And he was a stone-cold psychopath. The Syrians had discharged him for beating an enlisted man nearly to death when the soldier argued with an order he gave. But Nasiji knew how to deal with madmen. He’d seen Iraqi jihadis as crazy as Yusuf. The key with them was never to show weakness. They were wolves, these men. If they smelled doubt or fear, they would turn instantly.

Slowly, Nasiji put together his network. He arranged a transport system and put together a workshop in the United States. Along the way he discovered certain weaknesses in his plan that he now believed he’d fixed.

But without the material, his plans meant nothing. He’d be practicing dry runs and designing dummy bombs for the rest of his life. Russia was his best bet, he knew. The North Koreans couldn’t be trusted, and the Pakistanis were so paranoid about what the Americans would do to them if their bombs went missing that the security of their stockpile was actually quite good.

So Nasiji and Yusuf traveled across southern Russia, pretending to be traders who wanted to export Russian motorcycles to the Middle East. For months, they got nowhere. They traveled freely into the closed cities, but the bases where the bombs were held were another matter. Then the imam in Chelyabinsk told them of a security worker in Ozersk who might be willing to help.

Nasiji plotted the theft but left Yusuf in charge of handling the Farzadov cousins. If the Russians unearthed the plot, Yusuf was replaceable. Anyway, Yusuf had a talent for this work. He frightened people so much that they would agree to almost anything just to keep him calm.

Nasiji had decided on the Black Sea route because he wasn’t sure what the Russians would do once they discovered the theft. They wouldn’t want to cause a worldwide panic, so they probably wouldn’t make a public announcement. But they might try to close their borders, and the Kazakhs might cooperate with them. Best to get the material into Europe quickly.

Despite everything, Nasiji had scarcely trusted his eyes when he saw the twin bombs in Yusuf’s Nissan. He pulled a handheld radiation detector from his pocket to be sure. Yes. The radiation signature was faint but distinct. They were real.

He reached inside the toolboxes and touched the cylinders, one hand on each, the steel cold under his fingers. An electric charge ran through his body, as if he were conducting current from one warhead to the other.

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Nasiji said.

“Hmm?”

“It’s what the Americans said when they blew up the first bomb.”

“Someone said that?”

“Oppenheimer. A Jew American physicist. It comes from a book of Indian prayers. The fireball went up and Oppenheimer said, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

“That’s how I felt, too, when I saw them. Only I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

“Do you know what the scientists call them?”

“Bombs?”

“Gadgets.” Nasiji said the word in English.

“Gadget?”

“It doesn’t translate well into Arabic. It means, a sort of toy. A mechanical device.”

“Why this word?”

“Don’t you see? It’s a joke. Such a powerful weapon, and they call it a gadget. Like it’s a mobile phone.”

“Gidgit.” Yusuf smiled, trying to play along.

Nasiji closed the trunk. “You’ve done well, Yusuf.”

AFTER THE TRIP over the Black Sea, which gave Yusuf the chance to dispose of the Farzadov cousins, the bombs arrived in Turkey. Yusuf watched over them in a rental apartment in an Istanbul suburb for four days, and then the next step was ready.

For a year, Nasiji had been buying toolboxes and cabinets from a factory in central Turkey. He bought them in lots of eight hundred, enough to fill a forty-foot shipping container, and sent them by ship to Trieste, Italy, and then on to Hamburg, where he sold them at cost to German hardware stores.

Nasiji wasn’t trying to start a hardware business. He wanted to build a pattern of shipments, a key to avoiding scrutiny by customs agents. Hundreds of thousands of containers came through Trieste each year, far too many for customs authorities to examine. So the agents concentrated their efforts on new shippers, shippers who had a history of evading duties, and shippers from countries that were known to be problematic, like Nigeria. Anyone outside those categories — say, a once-a-month shipper from Istanbul with a clean record — had a better chance of being hit by a meteor than being randomly searched.

The Turkish tool cabinets were delivered to a warehouse in Istanbul’s bustling harbor district. There Yusuf added his own packages, stowing them inside crates 301 and 303. The crates were packed in a container that was put aboard the UND Birlik, a ship that regularly ran the Istanbul-Trieste route. Five days later, the container was offloaded at Trieste and transferred to a truck for the drive to Hamburg. As Nasiji had expected, no customs agent ever even looked at the container.