The Silent Man

“Christ almighty. Two hundred kilos of beryllium in a week. Why not ask for a couple MIGs, something easy?”

“I can pay.”

“Yeh. How much?”

“Three million euros.” About five million dollars. The guy had money from somewhere, another question Wells and the agency would have to answer.

“Ten.”

“Four.” Bernard coughed lightly. “All I have.”

“Four may not get you two hundred, then, eh. We’ll see. Now. I don’t want to know nothing more about this. Not what you’re doing with it. Not where or why. Nothing about your friends.”

“I don’t know where it’s going anyway.”

The flat denial stopped Wells. “No?”

“We’re not so stupid as you think.”

“Good then,” Wells said. “Glad to hear it. Give me your mobile number.”

Bernard did.

“I’ll call you in two days, three maybe, if it’s possible.”

“You are not certain? Then you should know there are others looking, too.”

“Serious? Got the old Easter egg hunt going, do you?”

Bernard nodded.

“That doesn’t make me happy. Best be careful. Too many on the trail, even the BND may sniff it out. Now. Two more items of business. Next time we meet in your office, yeh? And I need the saloon.”

“The saloon?”

Wells tapped the trunk of the Mercedes. “For my troubles, chum. Whether or not I get your stuff, I keep the car.”

“Nein.”

“Nein? Try again.”

Bernard reached into his jacket, handed over the keys. Wells threw Bernard’s Glock across the warehouse and clicked open the doors to the car, slipped in. “Nice. Heated seats?”

“Of course.”

“Of course.” Wells slid the key into the ignition and rolled off, watching Bernard’s face disappear in his rearview mirror. He could no longer discount the reality of the threat he and the agency faced, but he felt an unexpected elation. For the first time in months, he’d pulled off a mission exactly as planned. Bernard wouldn’t question his bona fides again. And now Wells ought to be able to stall him for at least three days, probably more.

Meanwhile, though he preferred motorcycles, he had to admit the Mercedes was a great ride. He flicked on the wipers, flicked on the sedan’s xenon headlights, and left Bernard and the warehouse behind.

But his mood faded by the time he found his way back to downtown Hamburg. Did Bernard really not know where his friends were building the bomb? Did he have another source of beryllium, or was he lying to bluff Wells into moving quickly?

Too many unknowns, only one certainty. Somewhere, maybe just a few miles from here, maybe over the border in France or Poland, maybe on a different continent, a handful of determined men were trying to build a nuke. And though they might be wrong, they believed they were close.

22

MOSCOW

The barricades at the Kutafya Tower rose and the long black Cadillac wheeled slowly up the ramp to the Kremlin, passing a handful of tourists braving the cold. Behind bulletproof glass, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador, watched as the high brick walls loomed closer until they were all he could see. Whenever Purdy came up this ramp, he felt like Luke Skywalker approaching the Death Star and finding that he’d left his light saber back with Yoda.

For the whole of his twenty-five years at the State Department, Purdy had wanted to be ambassador to Russia. He’d found the country fascinating ever since he’d happened onto a Russian literature class his sophomore year at the University of Virginia. The assignments he’d taken in Belarus and Kazakhstan, the meetings where he’d swallowed his tongue and watched his bosses take credit for memos he’d written, the hours he’d spent perfecting his Russian, the fights he’d had with his wife when he insisted she learn the language, too, they’d all been in the service of getting this job.

And he’d gotten it. The big donors had wanted cushier posts, in London and Paris and Tokyo and Buenos Aires. So the secretary of state had been able to go inside the foreign service and make the pick that the department’s career officers wanted. Walter Mark Purdy. He’d been so thrilled when the call came that he hadn’t slept for two days. Finally, he’d gotten his doctor to prescribe him some Ambien.

Be careful what you wish for. These days Purdy was sorry he’d ever gotten the job. He was a dog who’d been chasing a car for twenty-five years, and finally caught it, only to find. that he was a dog with his jaws clamped around a car’s back bumper.

The Russians had never been easy. Now they were impossible. They were still seething about the nineties, when planeloads of well-meaning Ivy League political scientists and World Bank economists had come to Moscow to tell them how stupid and poor they were, how they needed to listen to their betters in Washington and London. In public, they were surly. In private, they were worse, deliberately nasty to anyone less senior than the secretary of state.

And Purdy knew now that he was the wrong man for the job. Dealing with the Russians successfully meant screaming back, making sure they knew they didn’t have carte blanche. Walking out of meetings if necessary. But by nature and training, Purdy was a diplomat, not a screamer. He knew the burden that history had put on Russia, how for centuries the tsars and nobles had grown fat while the peasants starved. How in 1919 the people had destroyed their masters, only to see them replaced with a new set.

Purdy wanted to give the hard men across the table the benefit of the doubt. He wanted them to know that he’d visited all of Tolstoy’s museums and read every word the man had ever written. Pushkin and Chekhov, too. He wanted them to see that he loved Russia, that he, and by extension the country he represented, were ready for a relationship based on mutual respect.

They couldn’t have cared less.

He tried to change his tactics, toughen up, yell when they yelled. But his heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t afraid of them, not exactly. He just hated these manufactured confrontations. But he knew each time he let them bully him in private, he was reinforcing their worst tendencies, goading them to believe that the United States could be bullied, too.

Purdy had always been level-headed, easygoing, reasonably happy, but after two years as ambassador he was more and more depressed. A political appointee, some billionaire Silicon Valley mogul with an ego to match his bankroll, would have made a better representative for the United States than he did. Even if the mogul didn’t speak a word of Russian. Impossible but true. A political appointee would never have let himself get steamrolled. He would have screamed back. Then the Russians would have pulled out a bottle or ten of vodka and both sides would have drunk themselves silly and hugged each other good night.

He’d worked for this job his whole life, he’d gotten it, and now he’d found out he was wrong for it. It was a cosmic joke. The kind of irony that Tolstoy would have appreciated. Chekhov, anyway. Tolstoy wasn’t much of an ironist.

And this assignment today. Another disaster waiting to happen. The Russians did not like to be questioned about the security of their nuclear arsenal. Not at all. The problems at Russian nuclear weapons depots were one of the issues that the geniuses of the 1990s had harped on the most. Even back then the generals in charge of Russia’s strategic weapons had not enjoyed being told how to do their jobs. They were affronted by the American attitude that Russia was just another third-world country that