The Silent Man Read online

  But his arrival in New York was another story. As soon as the immigration agent at JFK scanned his passport, Wells knew something was wrong. Her smile faded, then returned at higher wattage. To keep him happy until the guards arrived, he assumed. Sure enough, a door at the end of the long hallway opened and three big men in blue uniforms strode his way.

  “Can you come with us?” the lead uniform said.

  Wells didn’t argue. They frisked him, took his shoes, wallet, belt. Then they shunted him to a narrow holding cell, windowless and concrete. A guard checked him every hour, peeking through a steel panel in the door. Wells didn’t mind the holdup. He closed his eyes and napped on the narrow steel cot. He found himself in a crumbling mosque, looking through a crack in the ceiling at the blue sky above. He knelt to pray and saw beside him Omar Khadri, the terrorist whom Wells had killed in Times Square. Khadri finished his prayers and turned to Wells. You’ve lost your way, Khadri told him. You’ve lost the faith and you’ll pay. Khadri’s teeth were fangs and he—

  Wells tired of the dream. He knew he was dreaming and decided to wake and did. Instead of sleeping, he examined imperfections in the concrete, looking for patterns in the meaningless whorls.

  “Waiting for me to pass a baggie?” Wells said to the guard about six hours on. “May take a while.”

  “Someone’ll be here soon enough.” The guard clanked the panel shut.

  Two hours more passed before the door finally opened. Wells popped up. Shafer and two guards stood outside. Wells shrank into a corner. “Noo!” he yelled. The guards took a half-step back.

  “Send me to Guantánamo,” Wells said. “But don’t leave me with him.”

  “John, enough,” Shafer said.

  “This guy’s into crazy stuff. I’m serious. Cattle prods, nipple clamps—”

  “If you don’t shut up, I’m leaving you here.”

  “Fine,” Wells said sulkily.

  “This is John Wells,” Shafer said to the guards as Wells slid into his shoes. “Bet you didn’t think he’d be such a jackass.”

  NEITHER OF THEM SPOKE until they reached the New Jersey Turnpike and Shafer said, “Duto wanted to teach you a lesson, leave you in the Hotel JFK for a couple of days. I told him it wouldn’t be much of a lesson.”

  Wells didn’t respond. Shafer was right, of course. Shafer knew that ten years in the Northwest Frontier had taught him patience.

  “You stepped in it this time, John.”

  “Ellis, watch the road.” Shafer was driving a black agency Suburban, and, illegally, flashing the red lights mounted in the grille as he cut through traffic. “As far as I can see, the agency still owes me a couple of favors.”

  “I’m not talking about the agency.”

  “Please, no Exley advice, Ellis. Stick to Duto. Does he know where I was?”

  “Of course he knows.” Shafer sounded irritated at the question. “And he knows about Markov.”

  “What about the Russians? Have they fingered me?”

  “Strangely enough, no. At least they haven’t said anything to us.”

  “Markov’s staying quiet.”

  An eighteen-wheeler blasted them with its airhorn as Shafer cut in front of it.

  “You’re the worst driver I’ve ever seen. And that includes the jihadis.”

  Shafer slowed down, turned his head, stared at Wells. “I hope this little trip of yours was worth it.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “I know.” Shafer flicked on the radio, WCBS 880, the all-news station in New York, and they listened to the world’s hum. Two dead soldiers in Iraq, a big oil find off the coast of Brazil, some starlet arrested again, the Giants getting ready for the NFC finals. Last and least, a triple murder in the South Bronx, drug-related, the police said. No news on Wells’s own triple murder in Moscow, but why would there be? Every minute, people everywhere died too soon. Three dead in Moscow, two in Bangkok, four in Johannesburg, one in Newark, an endless tide of mayhem, far too much for a single radio station to track. The police would always be in business.

  “Not much happening,” Wells said aloud.

  “Maybe there is.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ll let Duto tell you.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED the Beltway, Wells thought Shafer would swing east, toward 295, the feeder road that led to central Washington and Exley. Instead he turned west, the highway to Langley. It was near midnight and the road was nearly empty and they made good time. In barely fifteen minutes they’d crossed the long flat bridge that spanned the Potomac and turned onto the Georgetown Pike.

  “Now?” Wells said.

  “Duto wants to see you.”

  “When did he start working so hard? When did you turn into his errand boy?” Wells wanted to see Exley, not Vinny Duto.

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  Just past midnight, they walked into Duto’s office, a square room with a heavy wooden desk and views over the Langley campus. The windows were bulletproof glass, tinted, and three layers thick for security. The furniture was generic chief executive, a mahogany desk and heavy brown leather chairs. Wells wondered whether Duto had chosen the decor in a deliberate effort to connect with the agency’s WASPy history, the Ivy League mystique that had permeated the place during the 1950s, when half the CIA seemed to have gone to Yale. Duto had actually attended the University of Minnesota, where he’d graduated in three years with a history degree. Oddly enough, Wells was the only Ivy Leaguer in the room. Shafer had gone to MIT.

  An oversized wooden bookcase across from Duto’s desk was filled with military histories, beginning with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and stretching through the millennia. The titles of the newest books, about the Iraq war, didn’t inspire confidence: Fiasco, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Generation Kill . . . The books were slightly out-of-order, as if Duto had actually read them. Wells wondered. He’d never thought of Duto as intellectually curious.

  “John.” Duto was reading a black-bordered file and didn’t rise from behind his desk, didn’t extend a hand.

  Wells sat. “Commandante Duto.” Duto didn’t smile. He scribbled a note on a yellow legal pad and flipped the file closed.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Duto said. “You’re thinking, you can drag me in here at midnight, yell at me, make me sit through this, but you can’t touch me. After what I’ve done, I’m untouchable. But you’re wrong. It’ll be ugly as hell, but I can get rid of you.” Duto’s tone was steady.

  “Vinny—” Shafer said.

  “This is between me and him, and if you don’t like it, the door’s behind you,” Duto said to Shafer, without breaking eye contact with Wells. “Understand this, John. If what happened in Moscow comes out, you’ll have to go. We’ll protect you, we’ll tell everybody you had PTSD and snapped. Maybe it’s even true. We’ll make sure you never get charged with anything. And it’ll be a real tragedy, losing John Wells, the hero of Times Square. But that’ll be that. Can’t have a guy who just murdered three Russians on the U.S. government payroll.”

  “I guess we’re skipping the small talk,” Wells said.

  “And if you’ve thought it through at all, which I’ll bet you haven’t, since thinking ahead isn’t your strong suit, you’re probably figuring that worst case, even if we fire you, you’ll get by. Because you’ve always gotten by. But ask yourself, John, if you didn’t have this, what would you do? Be a mercenary? Be a stuntman, maybe?”

  “Stuntman,” Wells said. The idea was oddly appealing.

  “How about a mercenary? You see yourself protecting some billionaire in Mexico City?”

  “Maybe I’ll move back to Montana and fish.”

  “You may think you want to stop, but you’re way past that now.”

  The intimacy of Duto’s tone irritated Wells. “When did we get to be such good friends, Vinny?”

  “Guys like you, there’s only one way out. Two ways, but they’re the same. You get too old, or you die.”

/>   “Isn’t that true for everybody?”

  “You don’t even see what we do for you. We’re the reason you can look in the mirror and say, I did it all for the good guys. Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May not be much, but it’s something. Without it, you’re just a stone-cold killer.”

  “If you’re my moral compass, I’m in worse shape than I thought.”

  “Then leave right now, go to Moscow or Beijing or wherever. Plenty of people would be glad to hire a man with your talents.” Duto waited. “No, John? I didn’t think so.”

  “You made your point,” Shafer said. “No need to rub his face in it.”

  “You think I don’t like you, John,” Duto said. “And I don’t. You’ve been twitchy ever since you came back and you’re getting worse. But lemme tell you a secret. I think I’d still rather have you playing for us.”

  A vote of confidence. Not exactly what Wells had expected to hear.

  “But can I make a request? Next time, at least give us a chance. Make killing three guys the last resort. Not the first.”

  “I get it.” Wells hated the idea of apologizing to this man. But what could he do? Duto was right. In third grade, tossing a baseball with his friends in the street in Hamilton, Wells had broken the window of a neighbor’s house. He still remembered the glistening sound of the glass shattering, how the pride he’d felt at the unexpected strength of his arm had faded into fear. I did wrong. It was an accident, but I did wrong and I have to tell. Tonight he had the same feeling. “I’m sorry, Vinny,” he said. “Three guys dead and I didn’t even get the one I came for. I apologize. Nothing else to say.”

  The apology seemed to surprise Duto as much as Duto’s endorsement had surprised Wells. “It’s all right,” Duto said finally. “You had reason.”

  “Nobody’s gonna believe this,” Shafer said. “Lions and lambs together. Though I can’t tell who’s who.” He stood, stretched his arms out toward Wells and Duto. “Group hug? Circle of trust?”

  “Quiet, Ellis,” Duto said.

  Wells wasn’t sure what came next. He’d apologized, but his visceral dislike for Duto remained. “So,” he said. “Where does that leave us? With the Russians?”

  “Smiling and lying,” Duto said. “Same as ever. So far the FSB hasn’t fingered you, at least to us.”

  “You think it’s possible they don’t know?”

  “Maybe Markov is keeping his mouth shut because he knows he can’t let on it was you without admitting that he’s behind the attack here. If you’ll leave Markov alone it all might disappear.” Duto leaned forward. “Can you live with that? If not, we’re right back where we started.”

  Wells looked away from Duto, scanning the bookcase. He’d blown his chance at Markov forever. The man wouldn’t leave Moscow for the next ten years. Anyway, Markov was just a functionary, an order-taker for Kowalski. He’d tried to kill Wells and failed. Now Wells had done the same to him.

  “Done.”

  “Simple as that,” Duto said.

  “Simple as that.”

  “What about Pierre Kowalski?”

  Wells shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Of course Duto knew. Shafer must have told him, probably by way of explanation for the reason why Wells had been so sure the killers were Russian.

  “What about him?”

  “You’ll let us take care of him, instead of going at him yourself ?”

  After the apology he’d just made, Wells didn’t see a choice. “Okay.”

  “You sure?” Duto waited.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Good. Because if you’re back on the reservation, I have something for you. What’s been keeping me here tonight.”

  Duto handed Wells a thin folder, red with a black border. Just six pages inside, but by the time Wells was done reading, he understood why Duto was still at the office.

  Weeks earlier, the Russian Ministry of Defense had warned a NATO liaison officer in Moscow that five hundred grams, just over a pound, of highly enriched uranium had disappeared from the Mayak weapons plant. The smugglers were believed to be Grigory Farzadov and Tajid Farzadov, cousins who lived in Ozersk. Photographs and basic biographical data on the cousins were attached. The Russians did not believe there was an immediate threat and asked NATO not to publicize the theft, but they urged the United States and Europe to increase security at ports and border crossings.

  As was standard operating procedure, NATO had passed the report on to the Terrorist Threat Information Center, the joint FBI-CIA working group based at Langley, for evaluation. The center had classified the report as moderate-to-high priority. Russian nuclear material regularly went missing, and five hundred grams was not nearly enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon. Further, unlike plutonium, enriched uranium was not useful for dirty bombs. Nonetheless, the fact that the Russians had reported the disappearance at all was unusual. “Is there more to this?” one agency analyst had written.

  The question had been prescient. Thirty-six hours before, the Russians had given NATO what they called an “update” on the theft at Chelyabinsk. Suddenly their estimate of the missing material had increased from five hundred grams to five kilograms—eleven pounds.

  “This what you were hinting at back in the car?” Wells said to Shafer.

  Shafer nodded. “Heard the basics this morning, but I haven’t seen the details.”

  Wells handed him the file. “What happened? Did the Russians miss a zero?”

  “We just don’t know,” Duto said. “When you were in Moscow, did you pick up any unusual vibes, anything that might have been related to this?”

  “There was a lot of security in central Moscow. I got stopped a bunch. I put it down to my beard and my coloring. But maybe it was this. And one of the guys who stopped me had a radiation detector, one of those clip-on ones that look like a pager.” Wells paused. “Who else knows?”

  “All the European agencies. For two days we and they checked every trace, every wire, every humint”—human intelligence sources, also known as informants—“every message board, every bank account in our databases. Nobody’s found anything. Anywhere. No references to nuclear material, no unusual transactions, no hints that anything’s coming.”

  “Reminds me of Khadri,” Wells said. “He kept his mouth shut too.”

  Shafer finished reading and handed the file back to Duto. “That’s the whole report? Nothing scrubbed?”

  “That’s it,” Duto said.

  “Then how come there’s no figure for the enrichment? Was it eighty percent? Ninety percent? Ninety-five?”

  “The Russians haven’t told us.”

  “Have we asked?” Shafer said.

  “Of course. This is all they’ll give us. Op sec”—operational security—“or so they say. They think the Farzadov cousins aren’t in Russia anymore, and they’re probably right. Once the FSB is on you, there aren’t too many places to hide over there.”

  “These guys have terrorist ties? Russian mafia?”

  “The FSB won’t say.”

  “Religion?”

  “Tajid is a practicing Muslim, but Grigory seems to be secular.” Duto looked at Wells. “How about you, John? Anything you want to know?”

  “Is what’s missing enough for a bomb?”

  “Not according to Los Alamos,” Duto said. “They say the minimum amount of HEU necessary to make a bomb is fifteen to twenty kilos. And that’s with some very sophisticated tools. Terrorists would need even more.”

  “That’s slightly reassuring,” Wells said. “Unless these guys stole fifty kilograms instead of five. Do we think the Kremlin would tell us if the threat was imminent?”

  “We hope,” Duto said. He didn’t look hopeful.

  “So what now?” Wells said. “For Ellis and me, I mean.”

  “I don’t have anything specific for you. Stay ready, that’s all.”

  “We aim to please,” Shafer said.

  “John—” Duto stopped. “I already know the answer to this.
But you know these guys as well as anyone. If they got one, would they use it?”

  Wells thought back to the hate of the United States he’d seen during his years in the mountains. Hate, fueled by religion, and by the bitter truth that Americans had so much and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan so little. The anger had only increased since the United States invaded Iraq. So many jihadis, so eager to die, to strap bombs to their chests and tear themselves to pieces. They killed by the ones and twos, and when they were lucky, by the dozens.

  “Suicide’s the tough part,” Wells said. “Once you decide to cross that bridge, why not take as many friends along as you can?” Wells almost laughed but didn’t. “Would they use it? Like you said, you already know the answer.”

  SO WELLS had it backward. The meeting with Duto turned out to be relatively painless. But talking with Exley was impossible. When they left Langley that night, Wells figured Shafer would take him home. Instead, Shafer turned toward his house.

  “Appreciate the offer, Ellis, but I’d rather sleep with Jenny.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “If you won’t take me, I’ll get a cab.”

  “Give it time, John. She begged you not to go, not to leave her, and you went anyway.” Shafer paused. “I know what you want to do, run home, tell her you love her, everything’s going to be all right. But trust me, whatever you say will seem meaningless to her right now. What she wants is for you to prove that you can listen to her.”

  “I do—”

  “Then listen. She’d rather you stay away.”

  “But—” Wells snapped his mouth shut. He couldn’t argue with Shafer’s logic. “How long?”

  “I think it’ll be easier once she’s out of rehab,” Shafer said. “I’ll talk to her in a day or two. Believe me. This is better.”

  So Wells slept in Shafer’s basement for a night before moving to an anonymous safe house in Vienna, Virginia. Like all safe houses, the place was entirely without personality, white walls and cheap wooden chairs and generic Manet posters in black frames, the real-estate equivalent of purgatory. Shafer asked if he wanted guards, but Wells refused. He’d had enough security for a while, enough guys with guns around.