The Silent Man

away.

The black outline of the freighter quickly disappeared behind them. The slap of the waves and the hum of the outboard were the only sounds. After about twenty minutes Nasiji saw the first sign of land — a light, faintly visible through the clouds, tracking from right to left before him, disappearing, then returning. On each pass, the light was slightly stronger. A lighthouse. Proof they hadn’t left solid ground entirely behind.

Nasiji was feeling almost comfortable. Then the wind picked up and the clouds thickened and the light before them disappeared. The waves rose and slapped against the side of the boat. One broke over and caught Nasiji with a flume of water so cold that for a few seconds he could hardly breathe. Snow began to blow sideways across the boat, leaving them nearly blind. Nasiji huddled low in the center of the boat, one hand on each of the crates.

“Where did this come from?”

“It happens. It’ll pass.” But Haxhi’s voice had a new tension. Haxhi muttered something to Ebban. The first mate moved to the front of the boat and began to chatter at Haxhi about the direction of the waves and the wind. Haxhi tacked aggressively, running the boat against the side of the waves instead of coming at them directly. With no light, he checked the GPS frequently now.

The wind picked up more, then gusted suddenly—

And a big wave, the biggest Nasiji had seen yet, swept in from the port side—

And the boat rocked hard and Nasiji thought they might capsize—

And the crate beside Nasiji’s left foot began to wobble—

And as the boat swung up and bounced down again, somehow the crate came loose from its ropes—

And Nasiji tried to steady it but he couldn’t keep hold of it and another wave crashed into the boat and knocked him down and he had to forget the crate and wrap his arms around the cold metal seat as tightly as he could to keep from being thrown out—

And the crate tumbled, loose now, the wood crashing against the boat’s steel, and rolled sideways and perched for a fraction of a second on the gunwale of the boat—

And then fell out as another wave knocked into them — and splashed into the water and sank—

“NO!” Nasiji yelled—

And as he did, he heard Ebban scream “Allah!”—

And twisted his head forward to see Ebban clinging to the front of the boat, losing his grip—

And falling into the water.

JUST AS SUDDENLY as it had hit, the worst of the squall seemed to pass. The boat steadied. The waves grabbed Ebban and pulled him away. He fought, trying desperately to make his way toward them as the waves thrashed him.

“Here!” he screamed to them. “Here!”

Haxhi swung the tiller sideways to turn the boat. Nasiji stepped toward the back of the boat and reached for his arm.

“What—”

“We’ve lost one already. We can’t afford it.”

“Help me!” Ebban’s voice was high and terrified. “Please!”

“He’s my first mate,” Haxhi said uncertainly. “I’ve known him—”

“He’ll freeze to death even if we can rescue him,” Nasiji said. Yusuf inched toward Haxhi, one hand on the long curved dagger that had so frightened poor Grigory Farzadov.

Haxhi took one last glimpse at Ebban and turned away. “God forgive us, then,” Haxhi said. “All of us.” He turned the lifeboat toward shore and gunned the engine.

An endless minute passed before Ebban’s screams faded. In the boat the three men were silent, even when the wind lessened and the snow stopped and the lighthouse spotlight broke through the clouds again.

We’re Allah’s instrument, Nasiji had told Yusuf this afternoon. But Allah had deserted them this night. Three years of work, the perfect theft, destroyed by a knot tied too loosely and a freak squall that had passed as fast as it came.

They still had one bomb left. How much uranium did it hold? He was hoping for thirty kilograms. But he didn’t think he could build a gun-type bomb with thirty kilograms of uranium. That’s why I stole two. I needed two. I had to have two. And I did. But now I don’t. Maybe, with a beryllium reflector. but he had no beryllium. Well, tomorrow morning he’d ask Bernard to try again for some. Meanwhile they still had to get this bomb off this boat and over the United States border and then begin the tedious, dangerous work of exposing the core.

For the next half-hour, Nasiji sat at the front of the boat, his head bowed into the wind, as the outlines of the granite headlands of Newfoundland finally emerged through the clouds and Nasiji, like the Vikings and the English and all the explorers before him, caught his first glimpse of a new world. The English had come to conquer North America. They’d succeeded only too well. Now Nasiji was here to give their bastard descendants a lesson in humility.

As they closed on the land, Nasiji glimpsed a few lights from the houses of Trepassey. The village ran along a road carved into the side of the coast, behind and above the outcropping where the lighthouse stood proudly alone. But they were still at least two kilometers — more than a mile — from the village, and even as Nasiji recognized its shape, Haxhi slowed the boat’s engine and steered them west and out of sight. Slowly, he steered toward a little half-moon cove that was shielded from the eye of the lighthouse by a crumbling cliff. They entered the cove and the waves shrank and the Atlantic sighed and released them at last. Though its waters had extracted more than enough tribute tonight, Nasiji thought.

Haxhi beached the lifeboat and killed the engine. The SUV, a big Ford, sat at the inner edge of the cove. The Ford rolled forward on the big flat stones that formed the beach and stopped beside them. Bashir, a tall man with thick black hair, emerged and walked toward the boat as Yusuf and Nasiji jumped out. “My brothers,” he said.

13

ZURICH

The steak filled Kowalski’s plate, a cowboy’s wet dream, an inch thick and marbled through with rich fat. A slab of grass-fed Kobe beef straight off the Swiss Air nonstop that connected Tokyo and Zurich. Seared in butter on the oversized Viking range in Kowalski’s kitchen, delivered directly to the dining room, still cooking in its own juices, sizzling and succulent, medium-rare.

Kowalski had dreamed of this piece of meat ever since that infernal dietician Rossi arrived in his life with his broiled fish and his tofu salads. Today he had decided to defy Rossi and indulge himself. A steak, the best money could buy, and a bottle of burgundy.

So why wasn’t he hungry?

Kowalski cut off a tiny corner of the steak and lifted it to his lips. And yet as he looked at his plate, he saw nothing but Roman Yansky’s corpse, his neck sawn nearly in half, his body drenched in so much of his own blood that he seemed to have been painted red. Kowalski had asked Markov to e-mail him the photographs that the FSB and the Moscow police had taken of the scene. Now he wished he hadn’t. He felt like a condemned prisoner eating his last meal. He choked the steak down with a swig of wine and pushed his plate aside. Maybe he ought to become a vegetarian.

“Pierre,” Nadia said soothingly. “Are you all right?”

Her fingers fluttered involuntarily to the sapphire necklace he’d bought her from Tiffany’s, as if she needed to remind herself why she was here with him.

“It’s that fool Rossi,” he said. “I hear him in my head. Fish, fish, and only fish. Nonsense, I know. But I can’t shake it.”

“You’ve been good,” she said. “There’s no harm in a steak now and then. I’ve been reading this book called The Secret, an American book—”

Kowalski stifled a groan at the thought of Nadia reading.

“Alessandra gave it to me.”