The Silent Man Read online

  The house did have two handy pieces of equipment in its basement, a treadmill and a Nautilus machine. Wells worked out for three hours a day, aiming to lose the fifteen pounds he’d put on for the Russia trip, hoping to rid his body of any vestige of that failed mission. Every day for a week, he asked Shafer if Exley was ready to see him. Every day for a week, Shafer said no. Every night, Wells sat by the phone, willing himself not to call her. Four times, he dialed all but the last digit of her cell before hanging up, feeling as lonely and foolish as a lovesick geek aching for the prom queen.

  At night, alone in the house, he wondered if Exley would join the rest of the friends and family he’d left behind. Heather, his ex-wife, remarried now. Evan, his son, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He found himself Googling them, hoping to find scraps of their lives on the Internet, wondering if he should go back to Montana, try to see his boy. But he’d tried visiting Heather and Evan once before and the trip had ended badly. For now, anyway, Exley was all he had. If he even had her anymore.

  Meanwhile, the search for the Farzadovs went on, without success. The agency and its European cousins were working on the assumption that the Farzadovs would eventually have to surface to sell the HEU. But so far the Farzadovs had stayed out of sight. And the Kremlin was still refusing to disclose exactly what it knew about the theft.

  SO ON HIS NINTH NIGHT BACK, Wells found himself alone in a booth at the Denny’s on 66. Wondering when Exley would see him again and what they’d say to each other. Wondering what he would have to give up in himself to get her back, whether he wanted to change and if he was even capable.

  After an hour of drinking coffee, Wells had no answers, but at least he could feel his hands again. The teenagers had gone, leaving just him and Diane. Wells reached for his wallet, figuring he’d leave a couple of twenties under his cup and disappear, head back home. To the safe house. Then his cell phone buzzed. A restricted number. Maybe Exley was calling, reaching out. Maybe she missed him as much as he missed her. He answered—

  “Hello? Have I reached John Wells?” Not Exley. A man. Some kind of European accent. Wells had heard the voice before but he couldn’t place it. And then he could. The bedroom in the Hamptons, a man warning him, “You’ll pay for this, what you’ve done tonight. Even if you think you’re safe.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Pierre Kowalski.”

  Wells closed his eyes and stroked a hand across his forehead and waited.

  “I have something to discuss with you. Can you come to Zurich?”

  PART THREE

  15

  ADDISON, NEW YORK

  The Repard family had owned the house for more than a century. Then, on a rainy March morning, just outside Elmira on Route 17, Jesse Repard took a turn too fast and flipped his Ford Explorer into a ravine. He was thrown through the driver’s-side window and died instantly. His wife, Agnes, fractured her spine at the C-2 vertebra and was paralyzed from the neck down. In the back, their two-year-old son, Damon, was untouched, not even a cut.

  The Repard house was impossible to navigate in a wheelchair and too expensive for Agnes to maintain. She had no choice but to sell it and the thirty-seven acres of land around it, quick. But upstate New York’s economy was worse than lousy, and the property was too small to be farmed efficiently but too big for most families. For three months, the place sat on the market without attracting even a low-ball bid. Agnes’s agent told her she needed to chop her asking price fifteen percent, maybe more.

  Then a young couple came to see the property. He was in charge, Agnes saw that right off. He was a surgeon from Mercy Hospital, down the road in Corning. She walked a step behind him and didn’t say much. But immediately they seemed to take to the place. They liked its thick stone walls, the heavy stand of oak trees that screened the front of the property. They especially liked the big stable behind the house.

  The Repards hadn’t owned horses in decades, and the stable had been crumbling when Agnes and Jesse married. A year before the accident, Jesse had started to restore it. He’d torn out the stalls and reshingled the roof, turning the stable into a giant shed, fifty feet long by eighty feet wide with dirt floors and wooden walls. Agnes had handled the exterior, painting the walls fire-engine red.

  “Chose the colors myself,” Agnes told the surgeon from Corning. “I figured we’d have lots of kids and one day we’d have horses for them. They’d grow up here and one of them would take over the house from us, keep it in the family.” She knew she shouldn’t talk so much but she couldn’t help herself, as if by telling him her plans she’d bring them back to life.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  But he didn’t seem interested, much less interested than he’d been when he pulled a tape measure from his pocket and wrote the stable’s dimensions on a memo pad. Or later, when he stood on the porch of the house and scanned the grass and the trees and the hills with binoculars.

  “You can see,” Agnes said. “I mean you can’t see anything, you can see that. It’s nice and quiet. Private.” She was nervous now. She needed a good price for the place, enough money for Damon to have a decent childhood. Damn you, Jesse, for your speeding and not wearing your seat belt. For leaving me, and for leaving me like this. She hoped she wouldn’t start crying, the more so since she couldn’t even wipe away the tears herself.

  “Yes,” he said. “I like privacy. Americans have a saying, the home is the castle, and I agree with that.”

  He was a handsome man, tall and slightly heavy, with a soft lilting accent. He was from the Middle East, she wasn’t sure where and she didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to take the chance of offending him. His name was Bashir, she thought he’d said. His wife wore the headscarf the Muslims liked and a brown dress that covered her from neck to toes. It was a hot June day, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. Agnes supposed she was used to the heat.

  Bashir visited again the next day, without his agent or his wife, but with his tape measure. He must have liked the measurements because two days after that her agent called back and said Bashir had offered to buy the place. At the asking price, and for cash.

  “Said they’re looking to have kids and they thought it would be perfect,” the agent said. “They even want the furniture, the rugs, all of it. They want to move right in, and they’ll pay another forty thousand for all your stuff. It’s like hitting the lottery, this kind of offer. It never happens like this.”

  Agnes agreed that the deal seemed too good to be true, especially since the furniture in the house was a little bit raggedy and not worth anything like $40,000. She kept waiting for the catch. But there wasn’t one. The papers were signed in under a month. Her first bit of luck since that day on the road. She moved into a first-floor apartment in Ithaca with Damon and tried to forget the house and everything else that had been her life before the accident. She never went back to the place. She did see it again, though, on television. And when the reporters started calling, one after the next, to ask about it, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

  Not when she thought of Bashir on her porch, scanning the hills with binoculars.

  THE STABLE behind the Repard house still had the cheery red paint job. Inside, however, the place looked more like a high-end machine shop.

  The strangest-looking piece of equipment sat in the very center of the stable, a black block four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet long. Handles and valves jutted from its sides, and a burnished door of inch-thick steel capped it. It looked like a washing machine built by the devil. It was a vacuum furnace, a masterpiece of engineering, able to heat metal ingots to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in an oxygen-free vacuum.

  Beside the furnace was a metal lathe. Beside that, an open gas-fired furnace, where Bashir heated and shaped the molds that would be used to cast the uranium at the heart of the bomb. Against the back wall, a liquid nitrogen plant, essentially a powerful refrigerator that produced five liters per hour of super-cold liquid. Next to the nitrogen plant, a
rranged on hooks and metal shelves, Bashir’s work clothes and other personal equipment: a fire-resistant coat, long rubber boots and gloves, a plastic face shield and goggles. A respirator mask. Heavy steel tongs and clamps for picking up buckets of molten metal. Three fire extinguishers. A horror movie’s worth of saws: a table saw, a chain saw, a diamond-studded rotating saw capable of cutting steel or uranium. Outside and behind, a Caterpillar generator, so that Bashir wouldn’t have to draw electricity from the power grid to run the equipment.

  Bashir had bought most of the stuff on eBay and from machinery supply companies across the Northeast. He’d taken care never to approach the same dealer twice. No special licenses or permits were required for any of the tools, but Bashir didn’t want anyone to ask why he was putting together a factory in his backyard.

  Buying the vacuum furnace was more complicated. It was more than $50,000, and mainly used in steel mills and high-end university labs. After talking with Sayyid Nasiji, Bashir decided that the best way to get the furnace without attracting attention was to import it from China. American laws strictly regulated the export of equipment with possible military applications. That policy had been useful decades before, when the United States, Germany, and Japan had been the only countries that could produce high-end machines like vacuum furnaces.

  But the laws said nothing about the import of advanced equipment. No one had considered the possibility that terrorists working on American soil might look outside the United States for the equipment they needed. After a few hours of Internet research and four phone calls to China, Bashir ordered the vacuum furnace online. It arrived two months later at a warehouse in Elmira, no questions asked.

  BY DAY, Bashir was a general surgeon in Corning, a town of eleven thousand in upstate New York, 250 miles northwest of New York City. He was Egyptian, the only son of an upper-middle-class family in Cairo. He’d gotten stellar grades at Cairo University, graduated in three years at twenty-one, and come to the United States for medical school and residency, both at Ohio State. At twenty-eight, his residency complete, he returned to Egypt to find a bride. He stayed just a few months in Cairo before coming back to Corning—and buying the Repard house.

  That bare-bones résumé, though accurate, left out some facts that surely would have interested the CIA. When Bashir was eleven, his father died. With money tight, his mother sent him to live with her half sister Noor. Noor’s husband, Ayman Is’mail, owned a trucking company—and secretly was a devout member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that favored turning Egypt into a strict Islamic state. Ayman and Noor, who had no children, raised Bashir as their own, inculcating him with the Muslim Brotherhood’s beliefs.

  Ayman especially hated Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. “A pharaoh,” he told Bashir. “With his imperial court and his crumbling empire. Look at how he treats his people. How he locks up anyone who opposes him. And do you know who’s behind it all?”

  “No, uncle.”

  “You do. You’ve heard me give this speech a hundred times. Tell me.”

  “The Americans.”

  Ayman nodded. “The Americans. They say they want democracy for everyone. But if we Egyptians demand leaders who will stand up to them, they put us down. Who do you think pays for the prisons and the Mukhabarat?”

  “The Americans?”

  “Just so.”

  Ayman was careful to avoid associating with the Brotherhood in public. But when Bashir was eighteen and just about to enter Cairo University, the Mukhabarat arrested Ayman in a raid on a Brotherhood meeting in Cairo. For two weeks, Bashir and Noor did not know what had happened to him. Finally they learned that the police had sent him to the notorious Tora prison complex, fifteen miles south of Cairo. Even after they found out, another week passed before the lawyer they’d hired convinced the Mukhabarat to let Bashir visit the prison.

  The concrete-walled meeting room at Tora where Bashir waited for Ayman was windowless and stifling, more than a hundred degrees. The stench of sewage soaked the air, so heavy that after a few minutes Bashir found himself pinching his nose and breathing through his mouth. Outside the room, men shouted at one another endlessly, a cacophony of voices that rose and fell as erratically as wind whistling across the Sahara. About an hour into his wait, Bashir heard, or thought he heard, a high eerie voice screaming like a teakettle’s whistle. But after a few seconds, the scream stopped. It never did return, and eventually Bashir wondered if he’d imagined it.

  Bashir waited two hours for the guards to bring Ayman in. When they finally did, Bashir almost wished he’d had to wait longer. The three weeks Ayman spent in jail had not been kind to him. He limped into the concrete-walled meeting room, hands cuffed behind his back, stomach poking sadly out of a cheap white T-shirt a size too small. Ayman, who had taken such care of his appearance. His skin had the grayish pallor of a plate of hummus that had sat too long in the sun. Pushed along by a guard, he shuffled to the narrow wooden bench where Bashir sat and straddled it uncomfortably.

  “Won’t you uncuff him? Please?” Bashir said to the guard. In response, the man pointed to a hand-lettered Arabic sign taped awkwardly to the wall: Prisoners are restrained at all times in the meeting area.

  “Look at him. He’s no threat.”

  “Even so, removing the handcuffs is complicated.” Complicated. A code word for a bribe.

  “A hundred pounds,” Ayman said under his breath.

  Bashir had known he would need to pay bribes to get into Tora, even with the official approval from Mukhabarat headquarters. He’d come prepared with 400 Egyptian pounds, about $75. But he had foolishly spent the last of his money for the chance to bring a bottle of Ayman’s blood pressure medicine into the waiting room. He had nothing left for this guard. He shook his head. The guard walked out, slamming the door behind him.

  “Are you all right, uncle?”

  “I miss my cigarettes. And my pills.”

  “No cigarettes, but the pills I have. What happened to your leg?”

  Ayman laughed. “I banged it on a door. So they tell me.”

  “They’re hurting you.” Rough treatment was common at Tora, but Bashir was surprised that the guards would hurt his uncle. Though he wasn’t well-connected politically, Ayman had plenty of money. And he wasn’t a terrorist. He believed the government should be replaced, but peacefully, through elections.

  “They’re afraid, these guards,” Ayman said. “Afraid of their masters, afraid they’ll wind up in here with us if they treat us like humans and not animals.” He checked over his shoulder to be sure the guard wasn’t lurking outside the door, then leaned forward, toward Bashir. “I want you to promise me something.”

  “Of course.”

  “If I don’t get out of here, you won’t forget what I’ve told you. About Mubarak and especially the Americans. The Americans are behind it all.”

  “What do you mean, if you don’t get out?” Bashir hoped his voice didn’t betray his panic. He called Ayman his uncle, but in truth the man was more like a father to him.

  “I’ll be fine. But I want you to promise, just in case.”

  “All right. I promise.”

  “Good. Now tell me about your auntie.”

  “She misses you terribly.” Bashir began to fill him in about Noor, but after a few minutes the guard reappeared.

  “Time’s up.”

  Bashir couldn’t help himself. “Time’s up! We’re supposed to have an hour. It’s hardly been five minutes.”

  “Time’s up.”

  “You can’t—I won’t—”

  “Don’t argue,” Ayman said under his breath. “You’ll just make it worse.”

  The guard pulled Ayman up as Bashir fumbled in his pocket for the bottle of pills he’d brought. “Uncle, here,” he said. He reached out to tuck the bottle into Ayman’s T-shirt pocket, but the guard—Bashir never did find out his name—grabbed the bottle.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s only medicine,” Ayman said. “For my hear
t.”

  “It’s contraband,” the guard said. “Illegal.”

  Bashir couldn’t believe the man was serious. Did he really think these pills were contraband? The guard shook the bottle sideways, rattling the pills inside, squinting at the words on the label. He can’t read, Bashir realized. He can’t read and he won’t admit it.

  “Please,” Ayman said. “I swear to Allah—”

  “Illegal,” the guard said again. He twisted the cap open and spilled the pills down and ground them into the concrete with his cheap black shoes. “You’re lucky I don’t arrest you,” he said to Bashir. He reached behind Ayman’s back and dragged him toward the door.

  “I’ll get you your medicine,” Bashir shouted to his uncle. “Tomorrow.”

  But Bashir couldn’t keep his promise. Every day for a week, he fought through Cairo’s traffic jams to return to the prison. But the guards wouldn’t let him meet Ayman no matter how much money he offered. On the eighth morning, as he was finishing his breakfast and preparing to leave, the phone rang. Noor picked it up and listened. Without saying a word, she dropped the phone and fell to her knees and began to scream and beat her head against the yellow linoleum floor of the kitchen. Bashir knew immediately. On the day that his father died, his mother had screamed the same way.

  The Mukhabarat officers said Ayman had been found dead in his cell. A heart attack. Nothing anyone could have done. He was unwell, as anyone could see. They offered honest and heartfelt sorrows, a thousand condolences, an endless epic in true Egyptian style, and every word emptier than the next. They’d murdered him. Whether they’d actually beaten him to death or killed him by withholding his medicine was irrelevant. They’d murdered him.