The Silent Man

“You think I don’t like you, John,” Duto said. “And I don’t. You’ve been twitchy ever since you came back and you’re getting worse. But lemme tell you a secret. I think I’d still rather have you playing for us.”

A vote of confidence. Not exactly what Wells had expected to hear.

“But can I make a request? Next time, at least give us a chance. Make killing three guys the last resort. Not the first.”

“I get it.” Wells hated the idea of apologizing to this man. But what could he do? Duto was right. In third grade, tossing a baseball with his friends in the street in Hamilton, Wells had broken the window of a neighbor’s house. He still remembered the glistening sound of the glass shattering, how the pride he’d felt at the unexpected strength of his arm had faded into fear. I did wrong. It was an accident, but I did wrong and I have to tell. Tonight he had the same feeling. “I’m sorry, Vinny,” he said. “Three guys dead and I didn’t even get the one I came for. I apologize. Nothing else to say.”

The apology seemed to surprise Duto as much as Duto’s endorsement had surprised Wells. “It’s all right,” Duto said finally. “You had reason.”

“Nobody’s gonna believe this,” Shafer said. “Lions and lambs together. Though I can’t tell who’s who.” He stood, stretched his arms out toward Wells and Duto. “Group hug? Circle of trust?”

“Quiet, Ellis,” Duto said.

Wells wasn’t sure what came next. He’d apologized, but his visceral dislike for Duto remained. “So,” he said. “Where does that leave us? With the Russians?”

“Smiling and lying,” Duto said. “Same as ever. So far the FSB hasn’t fingered you, at least to us.”

“You think it’s possible they don’t know?”

“Maybe Markov is keeping his mouth shut because he knows he can’t let on it was you without admitting that he’s behind the attack here. If you’ll leave Markov alone it all might disappear.” Duto leaned forward. “Can you live with that? If not, we’re right back where we started.”

Wells looked away from Duto, scanning the bookcase. He’d blown his chance at Markov forever. The man wouldn’t leave Moscow for the next ten years. Anyway, Markov was just a functionary, an order-taker for Kowalski. He’d tried to kill Wells and failed. Now Wells had done the same to him.

“Done.”

“Simple as that,” Duto said.

“Simple as that.”

“What about Pierre Kowalski?”

Wells shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Of course Duto knew. Shafer must have told him, probably by way of explanation for the reason why Wells had been so sure the killers were Russian.

“What about him?”

“You’ll let us take care of him, instead of going at him yourself?”

After the apology he’d just made, Wells didn’t see a choice. “Okay.”

“You sure?” Duto waited.

“I’m sure.”

“Good. Because if you’re back on the reservation, I have something for you. What’s been keeping me here tonight.”

Duto handed Wells a thin folder, red with a black border. Just six pages inside, but by the time Wells was done reading, he understood why Duto was still at the office.

Weeks earlier, the Russian Ministry of Defense had warned a NATO liaison officer in Moscow that five hundred grams, just over a pound, of highly enriched uranium had disappeared from the Mayak weapons plant. The smugglers were believed to be Grigory Farzadov and Tajid Farzadov, cousins who lived in Ozersk. Photographs and basic biographical data on the cousins were attached. The Russians did not believe there was an immediate threat and asked NATO not to publicize the theft, but they urged the United States and Europe to increase security at ports and border crossings.

As was standard operating procedure, NATO had passed the report on to the Terrorist Threat Information Center, the joint FBI–CIA working group based at Langley, for evaluation. The center had classified the report as moderate-to-high priority. Russian nuclear material regularly went missing, and five hundred grams was not nearly enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Further, unlike plutonium, enriched uranium was not useful for dirty bombs. Nonetheless, the fact that the Russians had reported the disappearance at all was unusual. “Is there more to this?” one agency analyst had written.

The question had been prescient. Thirty-six hours before, the Russians had given NATO what they called an “update” on the theft at Chelyabinsk. Suddenly their estimate of the missing material had increased from five hundred grams to five kilograms — eleven pounds.

“This what you were hinting at back in the car?” Wells said to Shafer.

Shafer nodded. “Heard the basics this morning, but I haven’t seen the details.”

Wells handed him the file. “What happened? Did the Russians miss a zero?”

“We just don’t know,” Duto said. “When you were in Moscow, did you pick up any unusual vibes, anything that might have been related to this?”

“There was a lot of security in central Moscow. I got stopped a bunch. I put it down to my beard and my coloring. But maybe it was this. And one of the guys who stopped me had a radiation detector, one of those clip-on ones that look like a pager.” Wells paused. “Who else knows?”

“All the European agencies. For two days we and they checked every trace, every wire, every humint”— human intelligence sources, also known as informants—“every message board, every bank account in our databases. Nobody’s found anything. Anywhere. No references to nuclear material, no unusual transactions, no hints that anything’s coming.”

“Reminds me of Khadri,” Wells said. “He kept his mouth shut too.”

Shafer finished reading and handed the file back to Duto. “That’s the whole report? Nothing scrubbed?”

“That’s it,” Duto said.

“Then how come there’s no figure for the enrichment? Was it eighty percent? Ninety percent? Ninety- five?”

“The Russians haven’t told us.”

“Have we asked?” Shafer said.

“Of course. This is all they’ll give us. Op sec”—operational security—“or so they say. They think the Farzadov cousins aren’t in Russia anymore, and they’re probably right. Once the FSB is on you, there aren’t too many places to hide over there.”

“These guys have terrorist ties? Russian mafia?”

“The FSB won’t say.”

“Religion?”

“Tajid is a practicing Muslim, but Grigory seems to be secular.” Duto looked at Wells. “How about you, John? Anything you want to know?”

“Is what’s missing enough for a bomb?”

“Not according to Los Alamos,” Duto said. “They say the minimum amount of HEU necessary to make a bomb is fifteen to twenty kilos. And that’s with some very sophisticated tools. Terrorists would need even more.”

“That’s slightly reassuring,” Wells said. “Unless these guys stole fifty kilograms instead of five. Do we think the Kremlin would tell us if the threat was imminent?”

“We hope,” Duto said. He didn’t look hopeful.

“So what now?” Wells said. “For Ellis and me, I mean.”

“I don’t have anything specific for you. Stay ready, that’s all.”

“We aim to please,” Shafer said.

“John—” Duto stopped. “I already know the answer to this. But you know these guys as well as anyone. If they got one, would they use it?”

Wells thought back to the hate of the United States he’d seen during his years in the mountains. Hate, fueled by religion, and by the bitter truth that Americans had so much and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan so little. The anger had only increased since the United States invaded Iraq. So many jihadis, so eager to die, to strap bombs to their chests and tear themselves to pieces. They killed by the ones and twos, and when they were lucky, by the