The Silent Man Page 11

  Frederica disappeared into the back. The Tiffany’s on Bahnhofstrasse didn’t do anything as déclassé as conducting business where customers might see it. Kowalski walked back to Nadia, who wrinkled her nose at him as if she didn’t know what he’d decided.

  “Pierre? Did you decide?”

  “Kitten. Even I have limits. But I spoke to Frederica and we’re getting you a very nice charm bracelet. You know, the silver.”

  Nadia’s hands fluttered up to her neck.

  “But it’s so pretty, Pierre. And you said—” She broke off. She looked like a puppy whose favorite toy had suddenly gone missing. Kowalski reached for her and squeezed her against him.

  “Of course it’s yours. You know I don’t deny you.”

  “Pierre.” She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. They stood that way, a parody of a diamond ad, the fat middle-aged man clinging to the young sylph, until Frederica came back with the receipt.

  KOWALSKI WAS IN HIS OFFICE that afternoon when Tarasov, his head of security, appeared. “May I?”

  “Come.”

  Tarasov walked in, followed by a tall, thin man in a red and blue tracksuit. The man was one of the ugliest creatures Kowalski had ever seen, with patchy blond hair and tiny deep-set eyes. “This is Dragon, the man I mentioned. Dragon, meet Monsieur Kowalski.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dragon mumbled in sixth-grade French.

  “You prefer I call you Dragon, or Monsieur Dragon?” Kowalski knew he shouldn’t mock this man, his newest employee, but he couldn’t help himself. Dragon. Had anyone ever looked less like a dragon?

  Dragon tucked his hands under his arms. “Dragon is fine,” he said. “There’s no need for formality.”

  “Dragon it is,” Kowalski said.

  “I’ve explained the terms to Dragon and he’s agreeable,” Tarasov said.

  “It will be an honor,” Dragon said.

  “Bon,” Kowalski said. “Please wait outside, Dragon. And close the door.”

  Dragon left, and Kowalski turned to Tarasov.

  “That’s him? Your famous shooter? He doesn’t look like much.” Kowalski had told Tarasov to beef up security, and not with the muscle-bound cretins who had been so useless in the Hamptons. Tarasov had come back with Dragon, supposedly the deadliest shooter anywhere between Zagreb and Athens. Not just one of the deadliest, the deadliest. Kowalski wondered how he’d gotten the title. It wasn’t as if the Serbian paramilitaries could have held a competition. Or maybe they had, back in the 1990s, during the nasty little wars that had torn up the Balkans.

  “He’s the best,” Tarasov said.

  “Didn’t you say that about Markov’s men? Let’s hope he’s more successful with Wells than they were, if it comes to that.”

  “I’ll take responsibility.”

  “Anatoly. You take responsibility for nothing but spending your salary. If I want empty words, I’ll turn on the television. Just get that Dragon some suits. I don’t want him running around like a Serb gangster. Even if that’s what he is.”

  Tarasov left, and Kowalski was alone. He stared at the Zürichsee—Lake Zurich—and the mountains that rose gently behind the lake to the south. The sun had already disappeared to the west, behind the city. Across the lake, factories and homes glowed placidly in December twilight. But the view didn’t soothe Kowalski.

  In 1980, not long after he joined his father in the firm, Kowalski had struggled to close his first major deal, with a cocky general from Suriname who’d brought his mistress along with him for the trip. The general didn’t want to negotiate, he told his father.

  “I’ve put together a package that suits his needs, but he insists it’s too expensive.”

  “Yes?”

  “The list is thirty-two million, but I’ve told him we’re flexible. We could go as low as twenty-seven and still make a profit. I don’t see why he won’t negotiate. Too busy with his mistress.”

  “Pierre, I could have handled this myself. You know why I let you?”

  “No, Father.” Kowalski had wondered himself.

  “What’s our most powerful weapon?”

  The question puzzled Kowalski. “I suppose the APCs with the mounted cannons—”

  “Pierre. I see they taught you nothing at Lazard. Our most powerful weapon is information. How big is General Pauline’s budget?”

  “The dossier said twenty-one million.”

  “Correct. And our source told us that was a strict limit. So why are you offering a package for thirty-two million?”

  “The Sikorskys I recommended suit his needs better than—”

  “He can’t afford them. And when you press him, you make him feel poor. Now call him, before he leaves Zurich. Get him what he needs at twenty-one million.”

  “But the Sikorskys—”

  “Don’t pretend you can tell the difference between a Sikorsky and a mosquito. You may know all the specs, but you’re not a soldier. Always remember that.”

  Until the end of his life, Kowalski’s father could make him feel like a misbehaving child.

  “And even if you could tell the difference, do you think General Pauline could? He’s not fighting the American marines. He’s chasing rebels around the jungle until both sides are too bored to keep fighting. Most of what we sell sits in hangars until it’s rusted out. It’s there to make the generals and the defense ministers and presidents feel better about themselves, to puff up their chests. This man has come all the way to Zurich to make a deal. Not to be embarrassed in front of his woman. Let’s use the knowledge we have to accommodate him.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Kowalski had never forgotten that lesson. He spent millions of francs a year to cultivate informers in armies and intelligence services all over the world. But at this most crucial moment, his sources in the United States had proven useless. The Americans had kept any information about their investigation into the attack from leaking, not just to the press but to the ex-CIA agents and retired army officers who were Kowalski’s sources in Washington. Had the agency learned of Markov’s involvement? Publicly, the men had been identified only as “foreign nationals,” not Russians. They had been traced to the hotel where they’d been staying, but no further. But was the United States actually further along? And what about Wells? Had he guessed Kowalski’s role in the attack? Too many questions without answers. Damn Markov and his men for their bungling. For his part, Markov had told Kowalski that he wasn’t worried. Easy for him to say. He was holed up in Moscow, untouchable as long as the Kremlin didn’t turn on him.

  Markov had the Kremlin. Kowalski had the Dragon, another overpaid Eastern European eating his food and taking up space under his roof. His own fault. He’d made this mess.

  His landline trilled. Thérèse, his secretary.

  “Monsieur,” Thérèse said. “A call from Andrei Pavlov. Shall I take a message?”

  Pavlov was a deputy director at Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. Two years before, he and Kowalski had sold the Iranian government centrifuges to enrich uranium, a highly profitable deal.

  “Put him through.”

  The line fell silent. Then: “Pierre, my old comrade.”

  “Andrei.”

  For fifteen minutes Pavlov blathered about a new Rosatom power plant and the money he’d made trading oil futures. “Of course it would be nothing to you, Pierre, or to the Abramoviches of the world, but for a man like me it’s a real fortune.” Finally, just as Kowalski was about to lose all patience, Pavlov said casually, “So. I don’t suppose you heard about our missing material?”

  Missing material? Rosatom would only worry about one kind of missing material. And the fact that Pavlov had waited so long to mention it, and then mentioned it so casually, signaled that Rosatom must be very worried indeed.

  “Just the rumors,” Kowalski said.

  “A minor matter. A kilo or two of low-grade stuff. Maybe three.”

  “Yes, of course.” Kowalski stretched his bluff. “But I heard it was H
EU.” Highly enriched uranium, suitable for a nuclear weapon, not the less-enriched kind used to generate electricity in power plants.

  “No, not HEU. Somewhere in the middle. But whoever has it may be bragging, saying it’s the good stuff, enough for a bomb. And you know, the Americans will make a stink if someone finds it before we do. And sometimes you hear about things.” Pavlov cleared his throat. “Anyhow, if you hear anything, if you could see your way clear to let us know, we wouldn’t forget it.”

  Kowalski decided to push for information. “This stuff, when did it get lost? And where?”

  “Last seen in Mayak a couple of weeks back.”

  Mayak. The biggest nuclear weapons plant in the world. Another sign this was more serious that Pavlov was letting on. But Kowalski didn’t want to ask any more questions. Pavlov had probably said more than he’d meant to already.

  “I’ll ask some people,” Kowalski said. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you. And promise you’ll come to Zurich soon. Nadia and I must take you to dinner. She misses her countrymen.”

  “Delightful.” Pavlov hung up and Kowalski considered for a minute, remembering a phone call he’d received a few months before, one of the few offers he’d ever turned down flat. He wondered if he could afford to spare Tarasov with Wells on the loose. On the other hand . . . he had to know if Pavlov’s call meant what he suspected.

  He called Tarasov. “Anatoly. Get your passport. You’re going to Moscow.”

  10

  HAMBURG

  On the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s legendary nightlife strip, the hookers were having a slow night. They stood in their usual spot, in front of a small public courtyard between kebob stands and novelty shops specializing in fake pistols and dull knives. They shuffled in their boots, a dozen miserable women, each an even ten feet from the next. Even whores couldn’t escape the German passion for order.

  Hamburg’s true red-light district was a few blocks south, on Herbertstrasse, a single street sixty yards long where the prostitutes sat in shop windows as they did in Amsterdam. Only adult men were allowed on Herbertstrasse, and high wooden fences on both ends kept out women and children. Despite the ugliness of the trade, the street possessed a certain hard glamour. The prostitutes posed on their stools in lace bras and panties, watching men swirl on the pavement beneath them. Police monitored Herbertstrasse, and the prostitutes there registered with the city and were tested regularly for HIV. But the discount hookers on the Reeperbahn had no glamour at all. They wore puffy down jackets and tight jeans, and their faces were young and unformed, yet already worn. They looked like high school juniors who had fallen asleep in their beds and woken up in hell.

  A steady stream of tourists and sailors and locals walked by the courtyard. The women gave them all the same treatment, a whispered invitation, half-coo, half-hiss. Any man foolish enough to stop found himself in a whispered tête-à-tête with a hand on his arm. But it was only 10 p.m. and a drizzle dampened the air, and the men were still mostly sober and mostly saying no. So the women smoked and stamped their feet to stay warm and ran their hands through their bleached blond hair and waited for business to improve.

  NEAR THE BACK of the courtyard, Sayyid Nasiji watched the whores’ dance. He’d never understood the German attitude toward these women. A police station stood only a couple of blocks away. Why did the German cops tolerate this dismal scene? How had these women fallen so low? Where were their families?

  Nasiji didn’t delude himself. Muslim nations had prostitutes, too. But at least Muslims were ashamed of the flesh trade and tried to stop it. The Germans seemed almost proud that women were selling themselves in public. They jammed the Reeperbahn. And the crowd wasn’t just sailors or ugly old men with no choice. Students and office workers came here to dance at the clubs speckled among the strip parlors.

  Yet Nasiji liked Germany. He’d attended college at the Technical University of Munich, five hundred miles south of here. He’d initially planned to specialize in nuclear physics. But he was Iraqi, and his professors warned him that most nuclear power plants probably wouldn’t hire him. So he stuck to chemical engineering. Still, he spent most of his free time in the university’s nuclear labs.

  Nasiji had grown up in Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad. His father, Khalid, was a brigadier general in Saddam’s Republican Guard. Khalid had risen far enough in the ranks to build a two-story concrete house and buy a used BMW 735i, his pride. But he had cannily avoided trying to reach the top of the Guard, dodging the bloody purges that swept away his bosses every few years.

  Nasiji was the second-oldest of five kids, the favorite of his parents. His intelligence was obvious from his first days in school. After he graduated first in his high school class, Khalid encouraged him to study in Europe, getting him a visa to Germany and permission to leave Iraq.

  Nasiji’s family was moderately religious, and Nasiji had grown up praying each week at the big Mother of All Battles Mosque in Ghazaliya. In Munich, he kept his faith, praying five times daily, never eating pork or drinking.

  But Nasiji was hardly a fanatic. By the spring of 2001, his last year in Munich, his friends had grown outspoken about their hate for Europe and the United States. A couple even talked about quitting school and joining the jihadis training in Afghanistan. Nasiji wasn’t interested. He preferred to spend his time studying. And though he never argued with his friends, he thought that complaining about the West was a waste of breath. He was a visitor to Germany, after all. He would follow its customs and laws, and hope for the same respect from the Germans if they visited Iraq.

  After graduation, Nasiji came back to Baghdad. He was home on September 11 when Khalid called with word of the attack. Nasiji and his brothers ran to the television and watched as the Trade Center towers burned. Amir, the oldest and most anti-American of Nasiji’s brothers, shouted gleefully when the first skyscraper went down.

  “This makes you happy?” Nasiji asked Amir.

  “Should I weep? Poor America. Did you forget what they did to us in 1991, Sayyid? All those years in Germany made you soft? They deserve what they get, the Americans. No jobs, empty stores—they’re to blame. These stupid sanctions. Beggars on the streets. There were never beggars before.”

  Nasiji couldn’t disagree. After the Gulf War in 1991, the United States and United Nations had imposed sanctions that had crippled Iraq’s economy. Nasiji hadn’t found a job since coming home, though the Technical University was among the top schools in Europe. Even so, he knew he couldn’t let his brother’s words go unchallenged. “So our economy stinks. Killing those people, ordinary men going to work, what good does that do for anyone?”

  “Remember five, six years ago, before you stopped brawling? Back in school, when every afternoon we looked around for Shia to beat? You know what you said to me then?”

  “That was a long time ago, Amir.” Nasiji preferred to forget his days as a fighter.

  “You loved it. And then one day you just stopped. You never did tell us why.”

  “Forget it. What did I say?”

  “That sometimes it’s necessary to tell the world you exist. And the best way is with a closed fist.”

  “I was sixteen, Amir.”

  “Even so. When the Americans bombed us ten years ago, they killed plenty of ordinary people. I don’t remember seeing them shed any tears. Now they understand how we feel. We’ve told them we exist.”

  “I had American professors in Munich. They were always fair.”

  “You’re so naive. Look at Egypt. They use Arabs against Arabs. Muslims against Muslims. And the way they help Israel. One Yid is worth a million of us. You watch. They’ll find some way to turn this against us. They’ll come and steal our oil.”

  AMIR’S WORDS SEEMED eerily prophetic to Nasiji in the months that followed, as the United States geared up to attack Iraq. The protests, the United Nations votes, nothing made any difference. The American tanks came to Kuwait and then over the border.

  For the Nasiji family, the inv
asion was a disaster. Khalid lost his job as a general when the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army. As a high-ranking Baathist, he was barred from working for the new government. Some of Khalid’s fellow Republican Guard officers began organizing resistance to the occupation. Khalid refused. “Let’s see what happens,” he told his family. “Maybe it’s for the best.” Then the violence started. In November 2003, a cousin of Nasiji’s was killed at an American checkpoint. Another died in a suicide bombing.

  The next month, Amir joined a cell of Sunni insurgents. Sayyid tried to stop him, but Amir insisted. “They’ll kill us all if we let them,” he said. He lasted four months. In April 2004, an American sniper shot him at 3 a.m. as he planted a bomb on the highway that connected Baghdad and Fallujah.

  Fouad, the youngest of the brothers, died next. After Amir’s death, Fouad joined a local militia to fight the Shia who were taking over Ghazaliya block by block. Three months later, Fouad disappeared. A week later, kids found his body in a soccer field, his fingers hacked off, his face covered with cigarette burns.

  In Muslim tradition, the family held Fouad’s funeral as quickly as possible, just one day after his body was found, at a mosque in Khudra, a Sunni neighborhood just south of Ghazaliya. Around the coffin, the women of the family screeched and moaned, an unearthly, terrifying lament of loss that seemed to demand a response from the blue sky overhead. Khalid wore his Republican Guard uniform to the funeral, a pointless gesture of defiance against the Shia who had killed his son. Once he had filled out the green uniform proudly. Now it hung loose on his shoulders and one of the sideboards had come askew. He mumbled the same words to all the men who greeted him at the funeral. “Too soon for this. Too soon.” He had turned old, Nasiji saw.

  The ceremony took less than an hour, and afterward the family piled into Khalid’s BMW to head back to Ghazaliya. As they were about to leave, Nasiji hopped out, deciding to ride home with his cousin Alaa instead. The choice saved his life.