careful the whole way and I don’t think we’re going to find them right away even with their names. Bernard’s the closest we’ve come so far and you’re the closest we came to him.”
“I’ll do my best,” Wells said. He lay down on the couch and tried to rest his head on Exley’s lap, but she pushed him off.
“Not now.”
So he shuffled down the hall to his office and lay on the floor and closed his eyes and dreamed of Bernard. Bernard, lying on his deathbed in the Hotel Stern, trying through his cracked skull to tell him the secrets of the bombmakers. Where they were. What their crates held. But then a German agent wearing a bear suit suddenly parachuted into his office and Bernard disappeared. Then Wells was in Bernard’s office again, tapping on the melted keys of Bernard’s laptop, looking at the burned-out screen. He reached down for a sip of coffee—
And suddenly woke.
In Shafer’s office, Exley and Shafer were hunched over his screen.
“Ellis. Jenny. Can you think of any reason why Bernard Kygeli would have a coffee cup from Penn State?”
“Penn State as in Pennsylvania State University in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania? Not a good one.”
“He did. In his office.”
“Kids go there?” This from Exley.
“Don’t think so. They live in Hamburg.”
“Cousins, nephews?” Shafer thinking out loud now. “The BND can give us the names of any relatives he has in Germany. And I guess we get the FBI to look for students with Arab names. Though I’m not sure we’ll be able to bring anybody in without some kind of connection. You’re sure it was Penn State.”
“I’m sure.”
“Forty thousand students just in undergrad. Too bad it wasn’t Swarthmore.”
“There was something else. ” Wells shook his head. The memory, whatever it was, lurked just outside his consciousness.
“Go back to dreamland, John, see what else you get.”
32
Bashir lay awake, his fingers interlaced behind his head, his wife snoring gently beside him. His last night as a husband. His last night as a surgeon. His last night.
He saw now that he had agreed to help build this gadget without believing they would succeed. Like every Egyptian child, he’d dreamed of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup finals, bringing the trophy home to Cairo. Through grade school, he worked on his kicks, his footwork, even his headers. But on the day he turned nine, playing with his friends and cousins in a dusty park around the corner from his apartment, he’d realized he wouldn’t have the chance. He wasn’t the slowest player on the field, but he was far from the fastest. And though his footwork was solid, his friends — two of them, anyway — controlled the ball so easily that they seemed to have it leashed to a string.
And this was just one little field. All over the neighborhood, all over Cairo, millions of kids were playing soccer. He wasn’t even the best here. How would he ever be the best in Egypt? The realization didn’t spoil Bashir’s love for soccer. He still played, and he still dreamed of playing beneath the lights in Paris or London or Barcelona. But for the rest of his childhood, he knew his vision was nothing more than a pleasant fantasy.
Somehow he’d deluded himself into thinking this project was equally impossible. Even as the stable turned into a machine shop, even after he learned how to forge steel, even after Nasiji and Yusuf arrived in Newfoundland, even after they disassembled the warhead and built the molds and crafted the dummy bomb, even this week as he’d molded the pits, he’d somehow failed to accept the reality of the project. He didn’t know whether his imagination had been too strong or too weak.
Now the bomb was done. He and Yusuf had finished the second piece of the uranium pit three hours before. Bashir had surprised himself with his speed, but then Nasiji’s scowl and Yusuf’s dead eyes were powerful motivators. Nasiji had briefly slid the two pieces of the pit over each other — a step that was safe as long as the pit was in the open air and not surrounded by the reflective steel tamper. The pieces fit together as lock and key. Then they had fused the bottom piece to the hole in the tamper, using a steel cap to be sure that it was exactly centered. The penultimate step, welding the recoilless rifle with the tamper, took only a few minutes. Finally, they’d used high-strength epoxy to glue the waterglass-shaped cap of uranium to the Spear’s high-explosive 73-millimeter round.
And then they were done. The bomb could be fired as quickly as Nasiji or Bashir or Yusuf could load the round into the barrel of the Spear and pull the trigger. After they were finished, Yusuf and Nasiji silently examined their handiwork, backyard barbecuers contemplating a perfectly cooked steak. Bashir puttered around the stable, putting tools in place, wiping down the welding torch.
Finally, Nasiji whistled sharply at Bashir.
“Quit that,” Nasiji said. “There’s no point. We won’t be making another one.”
“Yes,” Bashir said. “I suppose my surgical training, I always neaten up after the operation—” he was stammering now.
“It’s late,” Nasiji said. “Let’s have supper and then to bed.”
OVER DINNER, Nasiji outlined their final steps. In the morning they’d load the bomb and the remains of the Iskander into the Suburban, drive to the final safe house — a place Bashir hadn’t even known about before tonight, a temporary spot where they could stay for a few hours but no longer — and hole up for their final run to Washington. The State of the Union started around 9 p.m. and Nasiji didn’t want them on the D.C. streets for very long beforehand. If the State of the Union was canceled or postponed, they’d assume that their plot had been discovered and that they were being hunted. In that case, they’d head for New York City and try to hit midtown Manhattan. Philadelphia, the city closest to their safe house, was the third option. Before they left, they would upload the video they’d made to several jihadi Web sites, and FedEx copies of the DVD to CNN,
“Before you sleep, make your absolutions,” Nasiji said, as Thalia cleaned the table. “Tomorrow we won’t have much time. Make your peace with Allah tonight. Think of the reasons you’ve chosen this path. Think of what the Sheikh”—bin Laden—“said before the Crusaders came to Iraq.”
Nasiji pushed back his chair. “Come with me,” he said. He walked outside.
In the dark, under the clean pale starlight, the three men stood shivering. A thick crust of snow covered the trees and the earth, white and silent, reminding Bashir how far he was from home.
Nasiji reached out his hands for Yusuf and Bashir.
“Tomorrow we descend from the pass.”
A FINE, KNIGHTLY MOMENT. Then Bashir had come to his bed and his wife had clutched at him with the same ardor she’d displayed all week, grinding her hips against his and making the fluttering noises that he’d thought until now existed only on the banned pornographic channels that half of Egypt watched on satellite television. He wondered if she was making love to him, Nasiji, the bomb, or all three at once.
When they were done, she wrapped her arms around him and whispered, “Tomorrow.”
She was nervous, Bashir thought. Understandable. “My love,” he said. “I wish this weren’t all happening so fast. If we had time, I would have sent you home. But it’ll be safer for you to stay here. You’ll just have to tell the Americans when they come that you didn’t know what we were doing, that we kept it secret from you—”
