The Silent Man

“No questions. Come. Please.” The kid’s German manners taking over, undercutting his effort at toughness. Wells followed him along the Alsterfleet, a narrow canal that connected the Binnenalster with the Elbe. They stopped by a high-sided cargo van, a white Sprinter. The kid raised the back latch and stepped into the empty cargo compartment.

“Get in.”

Suddenly, Wells was sick of this game, sick of cutouts and fake passports, bodyguards and hard stares, pistols drawn and holstered. Helmut, Bernard, whoever you are, you’re not going to win, he almost said. We’ll find you, kill you hot or cold, blow up your houses, or send you to Gitmo for a trial that ends with you strapped to a gurney and a needle in your arm. Doesn’t matter. You’ll die either way. You can’t win. September 11 was a fluke, you surprised us. It’ll never happen again. And even if you do pull this off, somehow, even if somehow you manage to blow up Manhattan or London, what then? You think killing a million people is going to help the cause? You think you’re going to roll back a thousand years of progress? What, exactly, are you trying to do? You think this is Islam? Wells had converted to Islam during his years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and though he didn’t pray much now, no one would ever convince him that these jihadi nihilists spoke for the religion, no matter how many surahs they quoted, how many pilgrimages they took.

“Get in?” Wells said. “Or what?”

“Get in,” the kid repeated. But he couldn’t keep his voice from breaking. And out of pity as much as anything else, pity and the knowledge that he could snap the kid in half, Wells stepped into the cargo compartment.

A few seconds later a gloved hand pulled down the back gate and locked him and the kid in darkness. Wells ought to have been worried but he wasn’t. The van rolled off and he wondered whether he was overconfident, setting himself up for a fall. Locked in a truck, no backup, no tracking device. Not exactly textbook tradecraft. But if he couldn’t take li’l Helmut, he deserved what he got.

The overhead light came on, a weak bulb. Helmut stood across the compartment, ten feet away, holding a pistol, a.45 ACP. Wells couldn’t be a hundred percent sure in the dim light, but the pistol looked fake.

“Take off your clothes.”

Wells shook his head. He ought to feel some fear, a twinge at least, but he could only muster annoyance.

“We must be sure you’re not wearing, you know, a microphone. A bug.”

“A bug. If you say so.” Wells had left his pistol in the hotel. He stripped, pulling off his jacket, sweater, T- shirt. He noticed again that he hadn’t managed to lose all of the weight he’d put on for his trip to Moscow. Irritating. He stacked everything in a neat pile in a corner. The compartment was cold, air rushing in from a couple of holes punched in the floor, but Wells didn’t mind.

He carefully unlaced his boots, slipped them off, his socks, his jeans, slowly, one leg at a time, Wells seeing now something he hadn’t expected, Helmut’s eyes shiny under the glasses.

“Take a good look.” Wells turning his flat Montana drawl into the clipped syllables of an African mercenary. He put his thumbs into the elastic band of his boxers and spun, a slow twist. As he did, Helmut took an involuntary step forward, his mouth half open.

Wells finished his turn and stepped forward and the kid stepped back as if Wells had threatened him, Wells understanding now. “Underwear, too?” Wells said. “Want the whole thing?”

“It’s okay.” The kid tilted his head away, then back, trying to look and not to look.

“Better check, can’t be sure, right? They have these little mikes, they tape them down there—” Wells slipped his fingers into the front of his shorts.

“Enough! Get dressed. Please.”

“Your call.” Wells had pushed this too far already. This guy was gay, and Wells would bet anything in the world that whoever was driving the truck didn’t know it. He dressed quickly. “How much longer?”

With Wells fully clothed, Helmut could meet his eyes again. “I don’t know exactly. Fifteen minutes. The city, there’s traffic.”

“Who’s driving?”

“Bernard.”

“Who’s Bernard?” Wells knew he could ask the kid anything now and get an answer.

“My father.”

Wells shook his head, this job getting weirder and weirder. The guy looking to his son for help. Amateur hour. Or maybe just extreme compartmentalization, no one else Bernard could trust. “You don’t know what this is about, do you?”

Helmut shook his head. “He asked me to bring you to the van, see if you had a wire.”

“And if I did?”

“I was supposed to knock on the front compartment.”

“Then?”

“I don’t know. He said it would be an adventure, I could use it in one of my movies.”

“You make movies.”

“I’m trying. But, you know, it’s very hard in Germany, all the real talent is in the United States, and the money, too, or even Berlin, I’d be better off there, but my father—”

Wells cut him off, not interested in this not-so-hard-luck story. “The gun’s fake, yeh?”

“Yes, from a film I made, a short, it won an award at the Hamburg festival, it’s small, but it’s something —”

And Helmut rattled on, to cover his embarrassment or his arousal or because like every other Hollywood wannabe in the world, he couldn’t shut his mouth when he had an audience. Fortunately, the ride lasted only another fifteen minutes.

When the back gate rolled up again, they were inside a warehouse, mostly empty, big wooden crates scattered around the concrete floor. A middle-aged German man stood looking up at them. He wore leather gloves and held a pistol, a Glock, and this gun was real.

Helmut’s eyes widened when he saw the pistol. He asked something, but the man waved the question away and barked at them in rapid-fire German.

“Nein,” Helmut said when Bernard was done. He stepped forward and Wells thought for a moment of keeping him in the van, using him as a shield, but then decided to let him go. Wells still wasn’t sure how to play this, whether to let Bernard take the lead or not.

Helmut jumped out the back of the truck and disappeared from Wells’s sight.

“Roland Albert,” Bernard said.

“Yes.”

“I’m Bernard,” he said in English. “May I see your wallet?” These Germans, always so polite. Wells fished it out of his jeans, tossed it down. “Your passport?” Wells sent that down, too. Bernard flipped through them. Apparently satisfied, he waved Wells down and tucked the pistol into his pants. A few seconds later, the van coughed to life and rolled away, leaving just Wells and Bernard and a Mercedes sedan that had been hidden behind the van.

Wells suddenly knew what to do. As the truck rumbled out of sight, he stepped forward and without a word jammed his heavy right fist into Bernard’s gut, Bernard grunting softly, “Ooh,” his mouth half-open, reaching for his Glock but not finding it. It was in Wells’s left hand. Wells hit Bernard again, doubled him over this time; Bernard, almost sixty, was not a fighter.

“What was that, man? That bloody nonsense.” Wells didn’t curse much, but Roland Albert did. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you both, you and that poof son of yours. If we didn’t have a friend in common, I would.”

Bernard tried to respond but could only manage a wheezy asthmatic cough.

“Amateur hour. This is amateur hour here. Bloody Helmut. Helmut and his fake poof gun.” Wells laughed, a choked half-snort, then cut himself off. He didn’t want to overdo the bad-guy act. “Your friends better be smarter than you. Let’s get to it, mate? You want this stuff? You sure?”

Bernard stumbled to the Mercedes, short painful steps, and propped himself against its trunk. “Yes.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred kilos.”

“How soon?”

“One week.”