The Silent Man

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FOLLOWING THE GPS’S chirped orders, Gaffan turned right onto the Mount Nittany Expressway, Route 322, the east-west highway that ran along the northern edge of town. At Waddle Road, less than a mile from the apartment, Gaffan pulled off. Wells tapped his shoulder. “Pull over.” Wells hopped out, told the trooper what had happened.

“I gotta call the State College cops,” the trooper said.

“Sit tight for five minutes. We’ll go in first, no sirens.”

“But what about evacuating—”

“There’s no evacuating from this,” Wells said. “Let us go in first.”

AT 4:25, THE NEWS CRAWL on CNN began to promise a major announcement from the White House at 5 p.m. Then the crawl reported that the FBI would hold a briefing following the White House announcement. Nasiji didn’t need to see more.

“We’re going,” he said to Yusuf and Thalia. “Now.”

WELLS AND GAFFAN rolled down Oakwood Avenue. The GPS informed them that Vairo Boulevard was ahead on their right. They reached a stop sign, turned right onto Vairo. The apartment complex was across the road, dozens of brown-and-white buildings around a long cul-de-sac.

Gaffan started to swing in. “No,” Wells said. “Next one.”

He pointed to the sign in front: “Phase 1—Units 1-100.” Wells lowered the window of the Expedition and cradled his M-4. His mouth was dry, his fingers gnarled. If his hunch was wrong, he might be about to shoot an innocent college student. And if it was right.

They reached the next block: “Phase 2—Units 201–300.” Gaffan swung in. They rolled slowly down the street, which was really just a big parking lot for the complex. The buildings were identical, each two stories, white and brown, laid out roughly in a rectangle that extended several hundred feet around the parking lot. They were moving up the longer side of the rectangle, north from Vairo Boulevard, as the parking lot divided into four rows.

“We know what kind of car we’re looking for?”

“Something big,” Wells said.

And Wells saw it. A black Suburban at the far end of the complex, moving south away from them, toward the exit. He touched Gaffan’s shoulder.

“Let’s see what building they came out of.”

They swung right, down the northern edge of the complex, the top of the rectangle, as the Suburban rolled away. Number 239 lay at the northeastern flank of the complex, where Wells had first seen the Suburban. Gaffan slowed down. “We going in?”

“No.”

NASIJI LAY ON THE FLOOR of the Suburban, the uranium pit tucked between his legs. On the ride down from Addison, the position had left him vaguely carsick, but it allowed him to load and fire the Spear in seconds. Inshallah. How silly to worry about a bit of stomach pain when he was about to give his body to a nuclear fireball. He wasn’t afraid. Or perhaps he was. Anyone would be. But he had chosen this course, and unlike that coward Bashir, he would see it through. His father, his mother, they hadn’t asked to die either. He and Yusuf and even Thalia would join Mohammed Atta and the other martyrs who had given themselves to liberate Islam.

Nasiji clutched the pit tight and closed his eyes. They stopped, waiting for traffic to clear so they could join the traffic on Vairo Boulevard. Soon they would be on the highway, just another anonymous black SUV traveling through the Pennsylvania night, burning the gasoline that the Americans had invaded Iraq to steal. In half an hour, he would hear what the president had to say and then he would decide where to take their precious cargo.

THE SUBURBAN STOPPED at the intersection of the parking lot and Vairo Boulevard, stuck behind a car that was waiting to make a left turn.

“Ram them,” Wells said. “Hard.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Gaffan stamped the gas pedal and the Expedition surged, its big engine roaring—

CRASH. The Expedition’s massive grille buckled the rear of the Suburban, shattering the back windows. The collision threw Wells forward but his seat belt caught and airbags popped from all over, front and side. He didn’t even drop his M-4. He juddered back into his seat and even before the steam started to rise from the Expedition’s crumpled radiator, he’d unbuckled his seat belt. For a moment, he couldn’t open his door, but he put his shoulder to it and popped it out. Through the Suburban’s broken windows, Wells saw a man in the back of the truck, crawling toward what looked like a big rocket-propelled grenade tube, a Spear, maybe. A strange ball was attached to the muzzle of the Spear.

“Stop!” Wells yelled in Arabic. He stepped out of the Ford and dropped the safety on the M-4, wondering if he really was about to start shooting, without warning, at three people in an SUV he’d never seen before. The man in the Suburban didn’t look back. He inched forward and stretched out his right arm for the barrel of the Spear.

THE COLLISION TOSSED Nasiji backward, throwing him into the Suburban’s rear doors. Shards of glass covered him and he dropped the pit. No. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine how, but they’d been tracked. Only one choice left. This stupid place wasn’t Washington or New York, but it would have to do. He reached around and found the pit and inched forward. Outside the car, a man yelled “Stop” in Arabic, and Nasiji remembered the American soldiers in Iraq, always giving orders. He pushed himself forward. If he could just load the pit.

THE SUBURBAN LURCHED FORWARD, metal tearing metal, pulling apart the grille of the Expedition. In a moment, it would be free. Wells stepped forward and propelled himself onto the hood of the Expedition and began to shoot, first at the man in the back, tearing him open, three in the chest and then two in the head to be sure, and switched to full auto and tore up the driver and passenger seats until blood and brains splattered the front windshield and the Suburban was still.

AND THEN WELLS leaned back against the hood of the Ford and looked at what he’d done. A hand squeezed his shoulder and a voice, Gaffan’s, said his name. But Wells only shook his head and sat in the cold, shivering, as the police arrived in ones and twos and then by the dozens, and Vairo Village turned into a mad clanking, flashing carnival, with him the main attraction, its mute and beating heart.

EPILOGUE

The bomb would have worked.

So the engineers at Los Alamos calculated after oh-so-carefully taking it apart and simulating its explosion on their supercomputers. They calculated an 87 percent chance of a Hiroshima-sized 10- to 15-kiloton explosion, a 4 percent chance of a 2- to 10-kiloton explosion, and a 9 percent chance of a fizzle.

To avoid panicking the public, the results of the simulation were never released. The White House and FBI publicly said only that the weapon found in the back of the Suburban was an “improvised radiological device,” never calling it a nuclear weapon. Wells’s role in finding the bomb was also kept secret. Reporters were told only that he and Gaffan were “U.S. government employees,” a statement that was true enough as far as it went.