The Silent Man

this practice firing Bashir soldered the tip of a flexible spool of thin steel wire to the trigger. Then Yusuf cut a hole in the wall of the stable and ran the spool through it.

Outside, Bashir walked through the woods, unspooling the wire until the slack was gone. He stood behind a tree, shivering, pulling lightly on the wire. The steel felt almost alive under his gloved fingertips, tensing and loosening as if a fish were hooked on the end of the line. Dusk had fallen and night was coming quickly, the weak winter sun disappearing into the hills behind them.

“Ready?” Bashir said.

Nasiji reached for the wire. Bashir wanted to pull the trigger himself. He was the one who’d forged the tamper, after all. But without a word he handed it over. Nasiji held the wire, closed his eyes — he might have been praying — gave the wire a sturdy tug—

And boom!

The explosion echoed through the woods, sending squirrels chittering angrily from the trees around them. A bird, big and black and fast, some kind of crow, took off from a stand of pines and flew straight at Bashir before turning up into the night. The stable shook, and though it held, a piece of the wall disappeared, sending shingles in their direction.

“Bang-bang,” Yusuf said. He grinned and squeezed Nasiji’s shoulder like a proud father.

They walked together back into the stable and looked at their handiwork. The steel tamper had held, but the force of the explosion had bowed it slightly. It was no longer a perfect sphere. The backblast had split the Spear from the tamper and smashed it into the side of the stable, leaving a jagged hole in the wall. The steel barrel had crumpled in half. It wouldn’t be of any use to them except as scrap, but they had a second tube in reserve.

Nasiji shined a penlight into the hole in the tamper.

“Not bad,” he said.

Bashir peered inside. The high-explosive round and the pieces of the pit had fused into a single mass, still warm to the touch, in the center of the tamper.

“Looks like a scrambled egg,” Yusuf said.

“Not perfect, though,” Nasiji said to Bashir. Nasiji reached in with pliers, tugged the crumpled, charred mass of steel out of the hole. “You can still see the outlines of the two pieces.”

“So?”

“So the live pit needs to come together more closely, within a millimeter. The tighter the fit, the less the chance of predetonation.”

“A fizzle,” Yusuf said in English. Bashir had learned that Yusuf used the word fizzle at every opportunity. He seemed to find it hilarious.

“You can do a better job, yes, Bashir?”

“Of course.” Bashir didn’t like Nasiji talking to him as though he were a child, but what could he say? Nasiji had controlled this project long before Bashir had ever been involved. No excuses, Bashir told himself. The truth. the truth was that until the last few days, he hadn’t minded letting Nasiji run this operation. That way he hadn’t had to think over what they were doing.

YET EVEN AFTER THE PRACTICE FIRING, even as they forged the replacement tamper, Bashir kept working, not a word about his doubts to Nasiji. For the next two days, standing over the forge, washed by its infernal heat, he tried to sort out the reasons for his silence: a runny mix of fear, confusion, esprit de corps, and anger. Fear of what they would do if he tried to stop them. More important, fear of what they would do to his wife. He had signed up for this project with eyes open, and he would accept the consequences if he tried to back out. But he wouldn’t allow Thalia to suffer.

At the same time, Bashir wasn’t sure if he had the right to undo Nasiji and Yusuf’s work. The time for doubt had come and gone. How could he substitute his judgment for theirs? They were a team. If the Americans found them together, they would certainly die as a team.

Bashir couldn’t forget his uncle either. The old man in the visitors’ room in Tora, heavy and gentle and about to be destroyed. Bashir no longer thought that all Americans were evil — he’d seen too much compassion, too many tears in his emergency room — but they were certainly heedless. Nasiji wasn’t wrong to hate them. They’d caused great misery all over the world, especially for Muslims. Maybe this bomb was the answer.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have to take any action. Maybe the bomb would fail on its own. Maybe they’d be caught before they were done. And so Bashir procrastinated, putting off any decision, forgetting that procrastination was a choice in and of itself.

While Bashir worked with Yusuf to reforge the tamper, Nasiji had his own project. He was installing emergency flashers in the grille and rear of the used black Chevy Suburban that Bashir had bought a few months before, a private sale. Bashir had paid cash and never reregistered the Suburban, so it couldn’t be connected to him. Nasiji also picked up a couple of scrap Washington plates. Nothing intimidated other drivers, or even cops, more than a black Suburban with D.C. plates and hidden flashers, the combination preferred by the FBI. The lights wouldn’t get them onto the White House grounds, but they might get them close enough to make a difference.

Bashir also spent a day forging a second tamper, this one with a hole at its center big enough to accommodate a beryllium reflector as well as the pit. Nasiji insisted they make both, though he no longer seemed certain they would get the beryllium. His contact in Germany still hadn’t gotten the second shipment of the metal. And even if it arrived now, sending it to the United States before the State of the Union would be impossible.

“At least this way we’ll have time to make sure the design is perfect,” Bashir said. He was secretly glad for the holdup. Without the State of the Union as a deadline, they might not blow the bomb for months.

“Whatever happens with the beryllium, I want us to be ready,” Nasiji said. “If we wait too long, we’ll wake up with the FBI breaking down our doors.”

So they came to the stable before sunrise and worked until close to midnight. They returned to the house only to eat. The kitchen smelled of chicken and lemon and chickpeas, Thalia’s contribution to the cause. She’d asked Bashir twice if she could see the bomb. Both times he’d refused. Now, at meals, she was strangely focused on Nasiji. She even made sure his plate was full before turning to her husband. Bashir reminded himself that she was young and impressionable and probably in love with the idea of having this secret.

AFTER FORTY-EIGHT HOURS of nearly nonstop work, they finished the tampers. Nasiji and Yusuf drove to Binghamton to find an Internet cafe and check on the beryllium. Bashir turned his attention to sintering the mold for the uranium pit. As Nasiji had demanded, he was trying to shrink the gap between the pieces of the pit — the cylinder that fit in the center of the tamper and the pipe-shaped piece that they would fire at it — to less than one millimeter.

Bashir finished the first piece around lunchtime, melting the precious pieces of uranium, then pouring the molten metal — a thick gray-black soup — into the ceramic mold he’d created and transferring the mold to the vacuum forge. Through the inch-thick window of the forge, he could see that the uranium was setting perfectly. He turned down the gas until the metal solidified. Then he removed the mold from the forge and laid it on a steel plate to cool. He was just beginning to work on the second piece when Nasiji and Yusuf ran into the stable.

“Sayyid,” Bashir said. “Take a look—”

“How long before you’re done?” Nasiji’s eyes were narrow, half-shut, his jaw thrust forward.

“I’ve just finished the first part.” Bashir pointed to the piece cooling on the tungsten plate, a dark gray cylinder of uranium, just six inches long, less than three inches in diameter. Nearly pure U-235, it weighed nineteen kilograms.

“That’s it?” Nasiji reached for it.

“Don’t touch. It’s still cooling.”

“How long for the rest, the cylinder?”

“It’s more complicated. It will take another day or so, at least.”

“No. You finish it tonight.”

“What’s wrong, Sayyid?”

“The Americans, they found the ship that brought Yusuf and me over.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. It was far from here, but somehow they discovered it. We have to assume that Bernard has been arrested or will be soon. The message came yesterday. Very bad luck we didn’t see it until now. Bernard should