The Silent Man

much? You come in here, you waste my time with this nonsense, no proof—”

“I speak for my government. And we want official assurance that you have full control of your arsenal.”

“Then it’s your government that’s wasting my time.” Davydenko stood. “We answer to our own president. Not to yours. Do we come to the White House demanding that you confirm that your nuclear weapons are safe in their silos? Do we? Do you play these games with the Chinese or the French or the British?”

“No.” Purdy knew he shouldn’t answer, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Correct. Only us. Always you treat us like children. We would never behave with such insolence. Yet you, you come in here and — Let me give you a piece of advice, Mr. Ambassador. Drink your green tea and let us handle our investigation. As for this mythical person seeking this mythical component, if and when you decide to behave ethically and tell us what you know, I will be willing to listen.”

“Is that your official response, then?” Purdy wished he could come up with something snappier, but at least he was holding his ground.

“My official response is that I have business to attend to. My captain will show you out.”

WHEN PURDY WAS GONE, Davydenko walked down the hall to Zubrov’s office, just outside the presidential suite, and relayed the conversation. Not that he needed to. The conference room was miked. Zubrov had been listening all along.

“Goddamn bombs,” Zubrov said. “All these years we had all these missiles pointed at each other and nothing happened. We spent the fifties blowing up the Pacific, ten megatons at a time. Nothing. Now two assholes steal two two-hundred-kilo warheads and everything turns upside down. What do you think, General? This component, is it real?”

“That little man is too weak to lie. And they wouldn’t have sent him unless they were worried.”

“Then why won’t they tell us about this component?”

“I think what he said is true,” Davydenko said. “They’re angry that we haven’t talked to them.”

“If they only knew how little we’ve found.”

“Is there anything new on that front?”

“I wish.” The Russian investigation had stalled completely. No one in Chelyabinsk had any idea what had happened to the Farzadov cousins. Not even Tajid’s wife. The FSB had taken her into custody and spread the word to Muslim leaders in southern Russia that she wouldn’t be released until Tajid turned himself in. But Tajid was still missing. Either he’d left Russia behind or he was dead. Meanwhile, the other men in the Mayak plant had been questioned, and questioned some more, by the best interrogators the FSB had. At this point, the FSB was satisfied that no one knew anything. And as for the men who must have helped the cousins outside the plant, no one knew anything about them either. No names, no descriptions, no fingerprints, no photographs. They were smoke.

“What about this component?” Zubrov said. “What could he be talking about? Some kind of detonator? A missile?”

“A detonator wouldn’t be so expensive and I don’t know why he’d call a missile a component.” Davydenko shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. They don’t need any additional components to use these bombs. Just the codes. And they don’t have those. I’m not even sure this is related to the theft.”

“Call Pavlov”—the Rosatom deputy director—“see if he has any ideas.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, General. Let me know.” Zubrov dismissed Davydenko with a salute. When the general had closed the door, Zubrov ran a hand over his thick jowls. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink before noon, but today he wanted one. He wondered if he ought to tell President Medvedev that they should come clean with the United States, acknowledge the theft. But Medvedev would never agree. He wouldn’t accept losing face that way. Not unless he was sure that he had no other choice. And he did have a choice. Rosatom and the generals insisted that the weapons couldn’t be used without the codes. They’d said a dozen times: no codes, no bombs.

But what if all these fancy green uniforms were wrong? After all, these thieves had gotten into a depot that was supposed to be unbreakable. What if they had some way of cracking the codes? Or getting around them? Then what? Suppose they blew up half of Manhattan, killed a million Americans? And what if the United States linked the weapons to the Russian arsenal? Would the White House demand that Moscow be destroyed in turn?

The engineers had better be right about their damn bombs, Zubrov thought. They better not have missed anything. Or else the United States and Russia might be headed for a war that would make all the others that had ever happened look like soccer friendlies. Damn the bombs. Damn the engineers, the physicists, and mutually assured destruction. “Damn it all,” Zubrov said to the empty room.

Zubrov opened the bottom drawer of his big wooden desk, where he kept a bottle of Stoli vodka, a ceremonial gift from the president on his first day as military adviser. He reached down for it, pulled out the bottle and a dusty glass, cleaned the glass with his shirtsleeve and unscrewed the bottle for the first time. Vodka kept forever, another of its many good qualities. He poured himself a healthy shot, though not too healthy. He would have to call Medvedev after this drink. He raised his glass to the empty room, but he couldn’t think of a toast. He drank it down in silence.

23

The uranium-235 that Nasiji and Bashir and Yusuf had extracted from the warhead didn’t look like much. A hollow sphere of gray-black metal, cut into jagged slices like an orange rind, the pieces in a plastic box on a workbench. Jumbled among them was a second sphere, solid, not much larger than an oversized grape — the “spark plug” of U-235 that had formed the center of the secondary.

Nasiji weighed the pieces on a digital scale beside the box, first one by one, then all together. Thirty-two kilos — seventy pounds — in all. Nasiji stared at the scale, a muscle twitching in his jaw, a vein pulsing madly in his forehead.

“We’ll work it out,” Bashir said. “We’re close.”

But Nasiji didn’t respond. Until, finally, he put the pieces back into the box and ran his hands through his hair and smiled. His change of mood was as disconcerting as his fury had been. Were you pretending to be crazy then, Bashir wanted to ask, or are you pretending to be sane now? But he supposed he knew the answer. None of them were sane. How could they be? They were building a nuclear bomb. In a stable.

Is this right? For the first time since he’d gotten involved in this scheme, that simple question came to Bashir. Was it his place to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, the same Americans he tried to save on the operating table?

Then he thought of his uncle, in that awful prison at Tora. Egyptians had killed him, but the United States was responsible. The Americans were the puppetmasters all over the Muslim world. Saddam Hussein had been one of their puppets, too. As long as he did what they wanted, fought wars against the Iranians, they didn’t care what he did to his people. But when he stood up to them, they came after him. This place, the United States, had killed millions of Muslims. A bomb like this was the only way to stop them, to even the score. It wouldn’t be pretty, but no war ever was. So Bashir forced the question out of his mind.

He hoped it wouldn’t come back.

THE IMAGE PLAYED over and over in Nasiji’s mind, a video he couldn’t turn off: the crate falling out of the lifeboat and sinking into the Atlantic. If only they’d held on to the second bomb. Instead. when he looked at the numbers on the scale, he couldn’t help but feel as though the devil was working to thwart him.

Again he gathered up the pieces and scattered them on the scale and looked at the black numbers staring at him: 32.002 kilograms. The Russians had been precise, he’d give them that.

“Thirty-two kilos,” Yusuf said. “What does that mean?”

“It’s not enough, that’s what it means.”

“Please, Sayyid,” Yusuf said. “I know you explained before, but if it works for the Russian bomb, why do we need more?”