“Get in,” the kid repeated. But he couldn’t keep his voice from breaking. And out of pity as much as anything else, pity and the knowledge that he could snap the kid in half, Wells stepped into the cargo compartment.
A few seconds later a gloved hand pulled down the back gate and locked him and the kid in darkness. Wells ought to have been worried but he wasn’t. The van rolled off and he wondered whether he was overconfident, setting himself up for a fall. Locked in a truck, no backup, no tracking device. Not exactly textbook tradecraft. But if he couldn’t take li’l Helmut, he deserved what he got.
The overhead light came on, a weak bulb. Helmut stood across the compartment, ten feet away, holding a pistol, a .45 ACP. Wells couldn’t be a hundred percent sure in the dim light, but the pistol looked fake.
“Take off your clothes.”
Wells shook his head. He ought to feel some fear, a twinge at least, but he could only muster annoyance.
“We must be sure you’re not wearing, you know, a microphone. A bug.”
“A bug. If you say so.” Wells had left his pistol in the hotel. He stripped, pulling off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt. He noticed again that he hadn’t managed to lose all of the weight he’d put on for his trip to Moscow. Irritating. He stacked everything in a neat pile in a corner. The compartment was cold, air rushing in from a couple of holes punched in the floor, but Wells didn’t mind.
He carefully unlaced his boots, slipped them off, his socks, his jeans, slowly, one leg at a time, Wells seeing now something he hadn’t expected, Helmut’s eyes shiny under the glasses.
“Take a good look.” Wells turning his flat Montana drawl into the clipped syllables of an African mercenary. He put his thumbs into the elastic band of his boxers and spun, a slow twist. As he did, Helmut took an involuntary step forward, his mouth half open.
Wells finished his turn and stepped forward and the kid stepped back as if Wells had threatened him, Wells understanding now. “Underwear, too?” Wells said. “Want the whole thing?”
“It’s okay.” The kid tilted his head away, then back, trying to look and not to look.
“Better check, can’t be sure, right? They have these little mikes, they tape them down there—” Wells slipped his fingers into the front of his shorts.
“Enough! Get dressed. Please.”
“Your call.” Wells had pushed this too far already. This guy was gay, and Wells would bet anything in the world that whoever was driving the truck didn’t know it. He dressed quickly. “How much longer?”
With Wells fully clothed, Helmut could meet his eyes again. “I don’t know exactly. Fifteen minutes. The city, there’s traffic.”
“Who’s driving?”
“Bernard.”
“Who’s Bernard?” Wells knew he could ask the kid anything now and get an answer.
“My father.”
Wells shook his head, this job getting weirder and weirder. The guy looking to his son for help. Amateur hour. Or maybe just extreme compartmentalization, no one else Bernard could trust. “You don’t know what this is about, do you?”
Helmut shook his head. “He asked me to bring you to the van, see if you had a wire.”
“And if I did?”
“I was supposed to knock on the front compartment.”
“Then?”
“I don’t know. He said it would be an adventure, I could use it in one of my movies.”
“You make movies.”
“I’m trying. But, you know, it’s very hard in Germany, all the real talent is in the United States, and the money, too, or even Berlin, I’d be better off there, but my father—”
Wells cut him off, not interested in this not-so-hard-luck story. “The gun’s fake, yeh?”
“Yes, from a film I made, a short, it won an award at the Hamburg festival, it’s small, but it’s something—”
And Helmut rattled on, to cover his embarrassment or his arousal or because like every other Hollywood wannabe in the world, he couldn’t shut his mouth when he had an audience. Fortunately, the ride lasted only another fifteen minutes.
When the back gate rolled up again, they were inside a warehouse, mostly empty, big wooden crates scattered around the concrete floor. A middle-aged German man stood looking up at them. He wore leather gloves and held a pistol, a Glock, and this gun was real.
Helmut’s eyes widened when he saw the pistol. He asked something, but the man waved the question away and barked at them in rapid-fire German.
“Nein,”
Helmut said when Bernard was done. He stepped forward and Wells thought for a moment of keeping him in the van, using him as a shield, but then decided to let him go. Wells still wasn’t sure how to play this, whether to let Bernard take the lead or not.
Helmut jumped out the back of the truck and disappeared from Wells’s sight.
“Roland Albert,” Bernard said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Bernard,” he said in English. “May I see your wallet?” These Germans, always so polite. Wells fished it out of his jeans, tossed it down. “Your passport?” Wells sent that down, too. Bernard flipped through them. Apparently satisfied, he waved Wells down and tucked the pistol into his pants. A few seconds later, the van coughed to life and rolled away, leaving just Wells and Bernard and a Mercedes sedan that had been hidden behind the van.
Wells suddenly knew what to do. As the truck rumbled out of sight, he stepped forward and without a word jammed his heavy right fist into Bernard’s gut, Bernard grunting softly, “Ooh,” his mouth half-open, reaching for his Glock but not finding it. It was in Wells’s left hand. Wells hit Bernard again, doubled him over this time; Bernard, almost sixty, was not a fighter.
“What was that, man? That bloody nonsense.” Wells didn’t curse much, but Roland Albert did. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you both, you and that poof son of yours. If we didn’t have a friend in common, I would.”
Bernard tried to respond but could only manage a wheezy asthmatic cough.
“Amateur hour. This is amateur hour here. Bloody Helmut. Helmut and his fake poof gun.” Wells laughed, a choked half-snort, then cut himself off. He didn’t want to overdo the bad-guy act. “Your friends better be smarter than you. Let’s get to it, mate? You want this stuff? You sure?”
Bernard stumbled to the Mercedes, short painful steps, and propped himself against its trunk. “Yes.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred kilos.”
“How soon?”
“One week.”
“Christ almighty. Two hundred kilos of beryllium in a week. Why not ask for a couple MIGs, something easy?”
“I can pay.”
“Yeh. How much?”
“Three million euros.” About five million dollars. The guy had money from somewhere, another question Wells and the agency would have to answer.
“Ten.”
“Four.” Bernard coughed lightly. “All I have.”
“Four may not get you two hundred, then, eh. We’ll see. Now. I don’t want to know nothing more about this. Not what you’re doing with it. Not where or why. Nothing about your friends.”
“I don’t know where it’s going anyway.”
The flat denial stopped Wells. “No?”
“We’re not so stupid as you think.”
“Good then,” Wells said. “Glad to hear it. Give me your mobile number.”
Bernard did.
“I’ll call you in two days, three maybe, if it’s possible.”
“You are not certain? Then you should know there are others looking, too.”
“Serious? Got the old Easter egg hunt going, do you?”
Bernard nodded.
“That doesn’t make me happy. Best be careful. Too many on the trail, even the BND may sniff it out. Now. Two more items of business. Next time we meet in your office, yeh? And I need the saloon.”
“The saloon?”
Wells tapped the trunk of the Mercedes. “For my troubles, chum. Whether or not I get your stuff, I keep the car.”
“Nein.”
“
Nein?
Try again.”
Bernard reached into his jacket, handed over the keys. Wells threw Bernard’s Glock across the warehouse and clicked open the doors to the car, slipped in. “Nice. Heated seats?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” Wells slid the key into the ignition and rolled off, watching Bernard’s face disappear in his rearview mirror. He could no longer discount the reality of the threat he and the agency faced, but he felt an unexpected elation. For the first time in months, he’d pulled off a mission exactly as planned. Bernard wouldn’t question his bona fides again. And now Wells ought to be able to stall him for at least three days, probably more.
Meanwhile, though he preferred motorcycles, he had to admit the Mercedes was a great ride. He flicked on the wipers, flicked on the sedan’s xenon headlights, and left Bernard and the warehouse behind.
But his mood faded by the time he found his way back to downtown Hamburg. Did Bernard really not know where his friends were building the bomb? Did he have another source of beryllium, or was he lying to bluff Wells into moving quickly?
Too many unknowns, only one certainty. Somewhere, maybe just a few miles from here, maybe over the border in France or Poland, maybe on a different continent, a handful of determined men were trying to build a nuke. And though they might be wrong, they believed they were close.
22
MOSCOW
T
he barricades at the Kutafya Tower rose and the long black Cadillac wheeled slowly up the ramp to the Kremlin, passing a handful of tourists braving the cold. Behind bulletproof glass, Walt Purdy, the American ambassador, watched as the high brick walls loomed closer until they were all he could see. Whenever Purdy came up this ramp, he felt like Luke Skywalker approaching the Death Star and finding that he’d left his light saber back with Yoda.
For the whole of his twenty-five years at the State Department, Purdy had wanted to be ambassador to Russia. He’d found the country fascinating ever since he’d happened onto a Russian literature class his sophomore year at the University of Virginia. The assignments he’d taken in Belarus and Kazakhstan, the meetings where he’d swallowed his tongue and watched his bosses take credit for memos he’d written, the hours he’d spent perfecting his Russian, the fights he’d had with his wife when he insisted she learn the language, too, they’d all been in the service of getting this job.
And he’d gotten it. The big donors had wanted cushier posts, in London and Paris and Tokyo and Buenos Aires. So the secretary of state had been able to go inside the foreign service and make the pick that the department’s career officers wanted. Walter Mark Purdy. He’d been so thrilled when the call came that he hadn’t slept for two days. Finally, he’d gotten his doctor to prescribe him some Ambien.
Be careful what you wish for.
These days Purdy was sorry he’d ever gotten the job. He was a dog who’d been chasing a car for twenty-five years, and finally caught it, only to find . . . that he was a dog with his jaws clamped around a car’s back bumper.
The Russians had never been easy. Now they were impossible. They were still seething about the nineties, when planeloads of well-meaning Ivy League political scientists and World Bank economists had come to Moscow to tell them how stupid and poor they were, how they needed to listen to their betters in Washington and London. In public, they were surly. In private, they were worse, deliberately nasty to anyone less senior than the secretary of state.
And Purdy knew now that he was the wrong man for the job. Dealing with the Russians successfully meant screaming back, making sure they knew they didn’t have carte blanche. Walking out of meetings if necessary. But by nature and training, Purdy was a diplomat, not a screamer. He knew the burden that history had put on Russia, how for centuries the tsars and nobles had grown fat while the peasants starved. How in 1919 the people had destroyed their masters, only to see them replaced with a new set.
Purdy wanted to give the hard men across the table the benefit of the doubt. He wanted them to know that he’d visited all of Tolstoy’s museums and read every word the man had ever written. Pushkin and Chekhov, too. He wanted them to see that he loved Russia, that he, and by extension the country he represented, were ready for a relationship based on mutual respect.
They couldn’t have cared less.
He tried to change his tactics, toughen up, yell when they yelled. But his heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t afraid of them, not exactly. He just hated these manufactured confrontations. But he knew each time he let them bully him in private, he was reinforcing their worst tendencies, goading them to believe that the United States could be bullied, too.
Purdy had always been level-headed, easygoing, reasonably happy, but after two years as ambassador he was more and more depressed. A political appointee, some billionaire Silicon Valley mogul with an ego to match his bankroll, would have made a better representative for the United States than he did. Even if the mogul didn’t speak a word of Russian. Impossible but true. A political appointee would never have let himself get steamrolled. He would have screamed back. Then the Russians would have pulled out a bottle or ten of vodka and both sides would have drunk themselves silly and hugged each other good night.
He’d worked for this job his whole life, he’d gotten it, and now he’d found out he was wrong for it. It was a cosmic joke. The kind of irony that Tolstoy would have appreciated. Chekhov, anyway. Tolstoy wasn’t much of an ironist.
And this assignment today. Another disaster waiting to happen. The Russians did
not
like to be questioned about the security of their nuclear arsenal. Not at all. The problems at Russian nuclear weapons depots were one of the issues that the geniuses of the 1990s had harped on the most. Even back then the generals in charge of Russia’s strategic weapons had not enjoyed being told how to do their jobs. They were affronted by the American attitude that Russia was just another third-world country that couldn’t be trusted with nukes. After all, Russia had successfully maintained its nuclear stockpile for more than fifty years, nearly as long as the United States.