The Silent Man

“Five or no go. Your boys can’t get you more?” Wells hoped Bernard might give him a hint where the money was coming from. But Bernard only nodded.

“Five, then.”

“See. Easy enough. Five million euros, twenty-five thousand a kilo. And I absolutely need two now.”

“One.”

“Two or—” Wells pointed to the door.

Bernard looked at the pistol beside him. But “When?” was all he said.

“By tomorrow night. Wire transfer. I’ll get you the account number.”

“And the metal—”

“Within the week. But don’t come looking for me again, Bernard. I won’t be in this hotel, and I won’t be under my name. And if I see you again when I don’t expect you”—Wells tapped his pistol—“I’m going to assume the worst.”

“I understand.” Bernard picked up his unloaded pistol and walked out.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,” Wells said after the door closed and Bernard’s footsteps disappeared down the carpeted hall. “Yes, indeed.”

25

As a rule, offices at Langley were neat. Stacks of paper were security hazards, not to mention evidence of an untidy mind that might reach a conclusion at odds with what the rest of the agency wanted to hear.

Shafer’s office was an exception, of course. Paper covered his desk, and files were piled on the coffee table and around the couch: estimates of China’s military capability, primers on nuclear weapons design, a classified analysis of recent Russian attempts to penetrate the CIA. As Exley poked her head in, she was happy to see that most of the piles looked just as they had six weeks earlier, the last time she’d been in here. She limped in, one careful step at a time, and pushed aside a file marked “Top Secret/SCI” to sit on the couch. She held up the file.

“Ellis. Shouldn’t this be locked up?”

“Please. It’s a report on this antimissile system the Jews are putting together.” Shafer, Jewish himself, insisted on referring to Israel as “the Jews.”

“So?”

“So it was in the Times three weeks ago. And on Debka”—a Web site that focused on the Israeli and Arab militaries—“two weeks before that. You know what I think. We’d be better off if we stopped stamping ‘Top Secret’ on every page of dreck we write. By the way, you look great, Jennifer.

“I mean, honestly, you look like crap, like you’re in agony when you twist that leg wrong, but it’s good to see you. Really good.”

“You always know just how to make a girl smile, Ellis.”

“Sorry.” Shafer gave her the abashed smile of a five-year-old caught with a handful of Oreos, a face she’d seen him make before, more than once.

“Did you ask me to come in just to make me feel good about myself?”

“I need your brain.”

Exley had a glimmer of how Wells must feel. I try to get out, but they keep pulling me back in. Even before the shooting, she’d been trying to escape this madness-making job, seeing if she might convince Wells to escape with her. Maybe not all the way out. Maybe they could move to the Farm for a couple of years, train the bright young things who would be the next generation to keep the world safe for democracy and capitalism. Though not necessarily in that order.

Then Kowalski had reached out and touched them and Wells had proven what she’d always known, that he couldn’t be housebroken no matter how hard she tried. She’d begged him to wait, and even so he’d bared his fangs and counterattacked as instinctively as a pit bull tossed into a ring. Maybe Wells was so confident in his own ability to get through the worst situations that he didn’t see the danger he faced. Or maybe he simply didn’t care whether he lived or died.

But she did. If not for herself, then for her kids. When she saw them at GW Hospital the day after the shooting, she couldn’t stop crying. Twice in two years, they’d stood beside her hospital bed and held her hand and told her they loved her and everything would be all right. As if they were responsible for her and not the other way around. Whether God or fate or sheer luck had kept her alive, she didn’t know. But she couldn’t take more chances. She couldn’t imagine not seeing her kids again. That day, she’d promised herself she would quit.

But quitting meant giving up Wells forever, and she couldn’t imagine that either. To take her mind off the impossible choice, she’d pressed her rehab as hard as she could. If her nurses asked her to walk, she went until her legs and her spine burned and she had to lie down to recover. If they asked for fifty leg lifts, she gave them a hundred. They’d told her more than once that she wasn’t helping herself by pushing so hard. But the pain distracted her from thinking about Wells.

This morning, Shafer had called and asked her to come in. He’d made the request as casually as if he were asking her if she wanted an extra ticket to a Nationals game. Even so she’d hesitated. But then her curiosity took over; she wondered how being back would feel. As she and her bodyguards rolled by the truck-bomb barriers that guarded the main entrance to Langley, she was overcome with a strange nostalgia, as though she were visiting her old college campus for the first time a year after graduating. She loved this place and understood these people and wanted to be one of them and yet she didn’t feel connected to them.

Now, in Shafer’s office, Exley felt different, more engaged. Shafer was her rock at the agency. He’d hardly changed in all the years she’d known him. He was rumpled, energetic, a bad dresser and messy eater, but most of all brilliant, sometimes too brilliant. For years, she’d wondered if Shafer deliberately played up his eccentricities to add to his mystique as an absentminded genius. Today, for example, a big coffee stain covered his right shirt cuff. Could he really have done that accidentally?

Shafer had never fit in with the agency’s buttoned-up bureaucracy. He’d been on the verge of being marginalized before Exley and Wells saved New York. Now he and Duto had reached an accommodation. Duto let him and Wells and Exley run their own shop. In return, Shafer did his best to control Wells. So far, the deal had worked for both sides, though Exley didn’t believe it would last. Shafer didn’t trust Duto, and the feeling was mutual.

“You need my brain,” Exley said now. “Don’t you know I’m done?”

“Just desk work. I’ll bet after six weeks at home, you’re ready for some excitement. Take your mind off things. So—” and before she could object, Ellis filled her in on the missing uranium, and then on the way that Kowalski had connected Wells with Bernard Kygeli.

“John and Kowalski are buddies now?” Exley said when Shafer finished.

“Strange world,” Shafer said. “But Bernard’s a dead end. The BND, the Hamburg police, nobody has anything on him. He pays his taxes, keeps his Mercedes polished. He probably buys Girl Scout cookies, if they have Girl Scouts in Germany—”

“I get it,” Exley said. “Did they talk to the harbormaster?”

“The port authorities don’t know much about him. He’s been there a long time but he’s small-time and it’s a giant port and he’s never been in trouble, so. ”

“What about customs records?”

“Nothing unusual. Cabinets and rugs from Turkey. Also he sent some silverware two months ago from Poland to South Africa. The Poles checked and the factory confirms the sale.”

“He ship to the United States?”

“Not so far as we can tell.”

Exley could hardly believe how easily she was slipping back into this routine. But a few minutes of thinking out loud didn’t obligate her to come back forever. Anyway, Shafer was right. No one had ever gotten shot at a desk at Langley. “What about the general?” she said. “This Nigerian that Bernard bought the AKs for? Any chance he’s in on it?”