The Silent Man

“Even if you’re right, we won’t be buying those weapons from you.”

“If the United States goes mad, the rest of the world has to respond. The Russians add a thousand tanks, and so the Chinese build up five divisions of their own. Then the Indians, and the Pakistanis, and the Bangladeshis, and — I believe your President Reagan called it the trickle-down effect.”

Kowalski was right, Wells realized. After the initial shock, and the promises to disarm and rid the world of nuclear weapons, after the empty words had faded, the world would get ready for World War III. The tank factories in Russia and the missile plants in China would run overtime until America finally felt safe again. Which meant they would never stop. And here in Zurich, Pierre Kowalski would connect buyers and sellers and take his cut along the way.

Kowalski was right. But still he hadn’t answered Wells’s question.

“Then why tell me this? Why cost yourself money? How many men have died from the weapons you’ve sold? In Sudan, everywhere else? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand? You’re a little atomic bomb yourself.”

Kowalski didn’t blink. “In Rwanda, 1994, the genocide. The Hutu killed the Tutsi for a month. No one knows how many died. Let’s say a million. A nice round number. They didn’t use my weapons, Mr. Wells. They used clubs. Clubs and machetes.”

“So what are you saying? With your guns they could have killed the million in a week, saved some time.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand. These Africans and Arabs and all the rest. They come to me for tools, tools they can’t make on their own, but they kill each other or not all the same.”

“You’re just following orders. Like the Nazi guards.”

“I provide a service. I leave the trigger-pulling, the order-following, to men like you.”

And then Wells found he had nothing to say.

“You presume to lecture me on morality. But I’ll answer you anyway. This bomb, this isn’t Africans hacking each other up for sport, as they always have, always will. This gives a few angry men the power to change the world. A great city gone. For what? Fables in a book? No. I don’t want that.”

The casual racism was astonishing, but Wells found he didn’t know how to argue. He hated these quick- tongued men who sliced up truth and mixed it with lies and fed it back to him. “Why come to me with this?” he said finally. “You must have contacts at NATO and the Pentagon. And I know you have friends at the Kremlin. Why not go there?”

“I don’t need a truce with them,” Kowalski said. “This deal, it’s between us personally. If you say we’re even, we’re even. What you do with the information after that, it’s up to you. Give it to NATO if you like, or your bosses. Though I know you prefer to work alone.”

I prefer to work with Exley, Wells didn’t say. But thanks to you, I can’t. “Tell me something,” he said. “This man, the Turk, he contacted you months ago, you said.”

“Right. Six months.”

“So why do you think he’ll want to hear from you now? Don’t you think he’ll be suspicious if you come to him out of the blue?”

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear from me. Because he called again two days ago, asked me if there was any chance I might have found a way to get him the stuff.”

“Another hypothetical.”

“I don’t think so. Either they have enough for a bomb and they want to make it bigger, or they’re a bit short and want to be sure.”

“Or you’re making all this up.”

Kowalski shook his head.

“So what’s the Turk’s name?”

“Do we have a deal?”

Wells stood up from the table. “I’ll think it over.”

“Think fast. You know better than I do, these men won’t wait.”

“Last question,” Wells said. “So you give me the name, whatever else you have. How do you know I won’t kill you anyway?”

“You’re an honorable man, Mr. Wells.”

“There was a time I thought so too.”

17

For five weeks, the Iskander warhead had been in motion, across five thousand miles, seven countries, three continents, an ocean. Even without detonating, it had left plenty of damage. Harmless as a Gypsy curse, Major Yuri Akilev had said to Grigory Farzadov on the night Grigory stole the bomb. Now Grigory was dead. His cousin Tajid, too. And for his inadvertent role in the theft, Yuri was facing a court-martial sure to put him in a Siberian prison camp for the rest of his life.

Now the Gypsy curse had reached its final stop, the stable behind the Repard farmhouse. It sat on the floor beside the vacuum furnace as Yusuf and Bashir and Nasiji stood around it like thirsty college kids waiting to tap a keg. Nasiji tapped the steel cylinder, fiddled with the eight-digit locks on the panel on its side, tried to flick the arming switches up and down and found they wouldn’t move.

“Wish we had the other,” he said.

“So what now,” Yusuf said. “We open her up?”

“She?”

“Of course she,” Yusuf said. “This thing’s just like a woman. The sooner we get inside, the better.”

“No cutting today,” Nasiji said. “Today we talk about how these gadgets work.”

THE BASEMENT of the farmhouse had been refinished in the 1970s but not updated since. It was one big room with particleboard walls, a broken Ping-Pong table on one end and a pool table missing half its felt on the other, relics of happier days. In the middle, in front of an ugly synthetic couch, were three big whiteboards that Nasiji had asked Bashir to get. And in this unlikely setting, Nasiji gave them a primer on nuclear weapons design.

“The first thing to understand is that the bomb is actually two bombs.” He sketched a cylinder on the whiteboard in thick black marker, put a big W at its top. “This is the warhead. In fact, to be technical, the warhead includes an outer casing. What we have is usually called the physics package—” Nasiji was showing off now, unable to help himself, reminding Bashir of his more irritating medical school professors. “But I’m going to call it the warhead for the sake of simplicity. Now, inside the warhead, as I said, two bombs. Both nuclear.” Nasiji drew a couple of thick black circles inside the cylinder, one above the other.

At this Yusuf perked up. “Two nuclear bombs? So there are two explosions?”

“There are, but they happen more or less at exactly the same time. Anyone watching would see one blast. Now the first bomb to explode”—Nasiji tapped the bottom circle—“is called the primary. It’s a very old design. Basically a fancy version of the bomb that the Americans dropped on Nagasaki. It’s plutonium, and all around it is high explosive. The high explosive blows up and pushes together the plutonium and that explodes.”

Nasiji sketched the implosion mechanism on one of the whiteboards, concentric circles to represent the different layers of the bomb. “I’m leaving out a lot of detail, of course. I’ll tell you more later, but the truth is we’re going to try not to touch the primary at all. We don’t need it. We’re aiming for the other bomb, the secondary. Want to guess why it’s called that, Yusuf?”

“Because it blows up second.”

“Very good. So the physics behind the second bomb are more complicated, but the bomb itself is a simple design. It’s built in layers, uranium at the very center, then lithium around that, then more uranium.”

“I don’t understand,” Yusuf said. “Just uranium and lithium? Where’s the trigger?”

“The first bomb is the trigger. When it detonates, it creates a wave of energy that pushes together the