The Other Woman
The Other Woman
Daniel Silva
From Daniel Silva, the No.1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a modern masterpiece of espionage, love, and betrayal.She was his best-kept secret …In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason’s name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West – a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power.Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel Allon, the legendary art restorer and assassin who serves as the chief of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. Gabriel has battled the dark forces of the new Russia before, at great personal cost. Now he and the Russians will engage in a final epic showdown, with the fate of the postwar global order hanging in the balance.
Copyright (#ulink_8a128076-4f4a-5c98-bd75-2fe2e2b2915b)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
First published in the United States of America by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover illustration by Will Staehle, Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com)
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008280918
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008280925
Version: 2018-08-17
Dedication (#u94081071-14f2-5f1c-97f4-578aaeadd7f1)
Once again, for my wife, Jamie, andmy children, Nicholas and Lily
Epigraph (#ulink_99da9ca0-f1fe-5b36-8baf-c4b122f4e1f5)
He was given a new lease on life when the Centre finally suggested that he take part in the training of a new generation of agents at the KGB spy school, a job he accepted with great enthusiasm. He proved an excellent teacher, imparting what he knew with pleasure, patience and devotion. He loved the work.
—YURI MODIN, My Five Cambridge Friends
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
—JEAN RHYS, Wide Sargasso Sea
Contents
Cover (#u3bd8d561-b967-5a9a-9045-01b3fa75a19e)
Title Page (#u251cc755-e077-5bfd-b361-ae8d333505d8)
Copyright (#ue6e83f08-12df-50cd-aef6-ed21fa0f1972)
Dedication
Epigraph (#u35e04a51-c445-5a0c-a842-5e91e27efb91)
Prologue (#uf9b6dfa8-ea28-5824-881c-0c7deedbe62f)
Moscow: 1974 (#u492f8096-cc42-5783-988b-3a2afc064c41)
Part One: Night Train to Vienna (#ua3f77d77-3304-563f-a268-9098502cff9b)
1. Budapest, Hungary (#u80aab615-5a49-5915-8495-a0089313f298)
2. Vienna (#ubb016ec5-2a7b-54bb-b400-37718e660655)
3. Vienna (#u27681d36-fefd-5d35-8406-cca1a5bd1a3b)
4. Westbahnhof, Vienna (#uefa0fc64-3341-5620-9d93-e717bbfa4377)
5. Floridsdorf, Vienna (#u6b63bafd-0c8b-5df8-badc-382fdf2b1409)
6. Vienna—Tel Aviv (#ub409301d-845e-57e0-ae3a-96621c1bb7cc)
7. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#u9a55bd65-0257-5565-8d3b-eaeef1e085dd)
8. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#ub35db698-1e35-5dcc-8f9b-e2a77cec8492)
9. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#ua3aad5e8-41dc-56c9-873d-19efd8053f7e)
10. Vienna Woods, Austria (#u871762b9-3472-54d4-8092-4a14bb850a33)
11. Andalusia, Spain (#ude57f218-bdf8-5bcd-9690-2ce25fdd6d44)
12. Belgravia, London (#u55f760ba-3f9f-55cd-9b67-b0bedc5f5d80)
13. Eaton Square, London (#u3b2f41e9-9328-52d5-8575-e0bc897c71ab)
14. Eaton Square, London (#uac1c19ae-72e9-53ea-bf62-8ebfd91efbdc)
15. British Embassy, Washington (#u438ada0f-0637-5ca7-a483-015c4466e097)
16. Belvedere Quarter, Vienna (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The Palisades, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Vienna—Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Pink Gin At the Normandie (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Hampshire, England (#litres_trial_promo)
26. Hampshire, England (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Fort Monckton, Hampshire (#litres_trial_promo)
28. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
30. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
31. Andalusia, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
32. Frankfurt—Tel Aviv—Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
33. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
34. Strasbourg, France (#litres_trial_promo)
35. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
36. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
37. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
38. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
39. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
40. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
41. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
42. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
43. Slough, Berkshire (#litres_trial_promo)
44. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
45. Dartmoor—London (#litres_trial_promo)
46. Zahara, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
47. Zahara—Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
48. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
49. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
50. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Down By the River (#litres_trial_promo)
51. Seville—London (#litres_trial_promo)
52. Bayswater Road, London (#litres_trial_promo)
53. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
54. Rue Saint-Denis, Montreal (#litres_trial_promo)
55. Montreal—Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
56. Foxhall, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
57. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
58. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
59. Warren Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
60. The Palisades, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
61. SVR Headquarters, Yasenevo (#litres_trial_promo)
62. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
63. Warren Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
64. Yuma Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
65. British Embassy, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
66. Burleith, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
67. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
68. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
69. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
70. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
71. Chesapeake Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
72. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
73. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
74. Burleith, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
75. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
76. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
77. Chesapeake Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
78. Bethesda, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
79. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
80. Capital Beltway, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
81. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
82. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
83. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four: The Woman From Andalusia (#litres_trial_promo)
84. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
85. Tel Aviv—Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
86. Eaton Square, London (#litres_trial_promo)
87. Scottish Highlands (#litres_trial_promo)
88. Zahara, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daniel Silva (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_2315762f-3054-5c46-86aa-0a5fcfc5a503)
MOSCOW: 1974 (#ulink_e0f71305-9c71-584d-a61f-3476d1b15ec2)
The car was a Zil limousine, long and black, with pleated curtains in the rear windows. It sped from Sheremetyevo Airport into the center of Moscow, along a lane reserved for members of the Politburo and the Central Committee. Night had fallen by the time they reached their destination, a square named for a Russian writer, in an old section of the city known as Patriarch’s Ponds. They walked along narrow unlit streets, the child and the two men in gray suits, until they came to an oratory surrounded by Muscovy plane trees. The apartment house was on the opposite side of an alley. They passed through a wooden doorway and squeezed into a lift, which deposited them onto a darkened foyer. A flight of stairs awaited. The child, out of habit, counted the steps. There were fifteen. On the landing was another door. This one was padded leather. A well-dressed man stood there, drink in hand. Something about the ruined face seemed familiar. Smiling, he spoke a single word in Russian. It would be many years before the child understood what the word meant.
PART ONE (#ulink_fedcc0d6-9821-5e51-8b33-7135fd3d0a47)
1 (#ulink_68b09be7-106e-5e32-a4fd-b9605ecede88)
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (#ulink_68b09be7-106e-5e32-a4fd-b9605ecede88)
None of it would have come to pass—not the desperate quest for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths—were it not for poor Heathcliff. He was their tragic figure, their broken promise. In the end, he would prove to be yet another feather in Gabriel’s cap. That said, Gabriel would have preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger. Assets like Heathcliff did not come along every day, sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice. Such was the nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament. Such was life itself.
It was not his true name, Heathcliff; it had been generated at random, or so his handlers claimed, by computer. The program deliberately chose a code name that bore no resemblance to the asset’s real name, nationality, or line of work. In this regard, it had succeeded. The man to whom Heathcliff’s name had been attached was neither a foundling nor a hopeless romantic. Nor was he bitter or vengeful or violent in nature. In truth, he had nothing in common with Brontë’s Heathcliff other than his dark complexion, for his mother was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The same republic, she was proud to point out, as Comrade Stalin, whose portrait still hung in the sitting room of her Moscow apartment.
Heathcliff spoke and read English fluently, however, and was fond of the Victorian novel. In fact, he had flirted with the idea of studying English literature before coming to his senses and enrolling at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, regarded as the second-most prestigious university in the Soviet Union. His faculty adviser was a talent-spotter for the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and upon graduation Heathcliff was invited to enter the SVR’s academy. His mother, drunk with joy, placed flowers and fresh fruit at the foot of Comrade Stalin’s portrait. “He is watching you,” she said. “One day you will be a man to be reckoned with. A man to be feared.” In his mother’s eyes, there was no finer thing for a man to be.
It was the ambition of most cadets to serve abroad in a rezidentura, an SVR station, where they would recruit and run enemy spies. It took a certain type of officer to perform such work. He had to be brash, confident, talkative, quick on his feet, a natural seducer. Heathcliff, unfortunately, was blessed with none of these qualities. Nor did he possess the physical attributes required for some of the SVR’s more unsavory tasks. What he had was a facility for languages—he spoke fluent German and Dutch as well as English—and a memory that even by the SVR’s high standards was deemed to be exceptional. He was given a choice, a rarity in the hierarchical world of the SVR. He could work at Moscow Center as a translator or serve in the field as a courier. He chose the latter, thus sealing his fate.
It was not glamorous work, but vital. With his four languages and a briefcase full of false passports, he roamed the world in service of the motherland, a clandestine delivery boy, a secret postman. He cleaned out dead drops, stuffed cash into safe-deposit boxes, and on occasion even rubbed shoulders with an actual paid agent of Moscow Center. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hundred nights a year outside Russia, leaving him unsuited for marriage or even a serious relationship. The SVR provided him with female comfort when he was in Moscow— beautiful young girls who under normal circumstances would never look at him twice—but when traveling he was prone to bouts of intense loneliness.
It was during one such episode, in a hotel bar in Hamburg, that he met his Catherine. She was drinking white wine at a table in the corner, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, light brown hair, suntanned arms and legs. Heathcliff was under orders to avoid such women while traveling. Invariably, they were hostile intelligence officers or prostitutes in their employ. But Catherine did not look the part. And when she glanced at Heathcliff over her mobile phone and smiled, he felt a jolt of electricity that surged from his heart straight to his groin.
“Care to join me?” she asked. “I do hate to drink alone.”
Her name was not Catherine, it was Astrid. At least that was the name she had whispered into his ear while running a fingernail lightly along the inside of his thigh. She was Dutch, which meant Heathcliff, who was posing as a Russian businessman, was able to address her in her native language. After several drinks together, she invited herself to Heathcliff’s room, where he felt safe. He woke the next morning with a profound hangover, which was unusual for him, and with no memory of engaging in the act of love. By then, Astrid was showered and wrapped in a toweling robe. In the light of day, her remarkable beauty was plain to see.
“Free tonight?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
He had no answer.
“You’ll take me on a proper date, though. A nice dinner. Maybe a disco afterward.”
“And then?”
She opened her robe, revealing a pair of beautifully formed breasts. Try as he might, Heathcliff could not recall caressing them.
They traded phone numbers, another forbidden act, and parted company. Heathcliff had two errands to run in Hamburg that day that required several hours of “dry cleaning” to make certain he was not under surveillance. As he was completing his second task—the routine emptying of a dead-letter box—he received a text message with the name of a trendy restaurant near the port. He arrived at the appointed hour to find a radiant Astrid already seated at their table, behind an open bottle of hideously expensive Montrachet. Heathcliff frowned; he would have to pay for the wine out of his own pocket. Moscow Center monitored his expenses carefully and berated him when he exceeded his allowance.
Astrid seemed to sense his unease. “Don’t worry, it’s my treat.”
“I thought I was supposed to take you out on a proper date.”
“Did I really say that?”
It was at that instant Heathcliff understood he had made a terrible mistake. His instincts told him to turn and run, but he knew it was no use; his bed was made. And so he stayed at the restaurant and dined with the woman who had betrayed him. Their conversation was stilted and strained—the stuff of a bad television drama—and when the check came it was Astrid who paid. In cash, of course.
Outside, a car was waiting. Heathcliff raised no objections when Astrid quietly instructed him to climb into the backseat. Nor did he protest when the car headed in the opposite direction from his hotel. The driver was quite obviously a professional; he spoke not a word while undertaking several textbook maneuvers designed to shake surveillance. Astrid passed the time sending and receiving text messages. To Heathcliff she said nothing at all.
“Did we ever—”
“Make love?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stared out the window.
“Good,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
When they finally stopped, it was at a small cottage by the sea. Inside, a man was waiting. He addressed Heathcliff in German-accented English. Said his name was Marcus. Said he worked for a Western intelligence service. Didn’t specify which one. Then he displayed for Heathcliff several highly sensitive documents Astrid had copied from his locked attaché case the previous evening while he was incapacitated by the drugs she had given him. Heathcliff was going to continue to supply such documents, said Marcus, and much more. Otherwise, Marcus and his colleagues were going to use the material they had in their possession to deceive Moscow Center into believing Heathcliff was a spy.
Unlike his namesake, Heathcliff was neither bitter nor vengeful. He returned to Moscow a half million dollars richer and awaited his next assignment. The SVR delivered a beautiful young girl to his apartment in the Sparrow Hills. He nearly fainted with fear when she introduced herself as Ekaterina. He made her an omelet and sent her away untouched.
The life expectancy for a man in Heathcliff’s position was not long. The penalty for betrayal was death. But not a quick death, an unspeakable death. Like all those who worked for the SVR, Heathcliff had heard the stories. The stories of grown men begging for a bullet to end their suffering. Eventually, it would come, the Russian way, in the nape of the neck. The SVR referred to it as vysshaya mera: the highest measure of punishment. Heathcliff resolved never to allow himself to fall into their hands. From Marcus he obtained a suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds, then it would be over.
Marcus also gave Heathcliff a covert communications device that allowed him to transmit reports via satellite with encrypted microbursts. Heathcliff used it rarely, preferring instead to brief Marcus in person during his trips abroad. Whenever possible, he allowed Marcus to photograph the contents of his attaché case, but mainly they talked. Heathcliff was a man of no importance, but he worked for important men, and transported their secrets. Moreover, he knew the locations of Russian dead drops around the world, which he carried around in his prodigious memory. Heathcliff was careful not to divulge too much, too quickly—for his own sake, and for the sake of his rapidly growing bank account. He doled out his secrets piecemeal, so as to increase their value. A half million became a million within a year. Then two. And then three.
Heathcliff’s conscience remained untroubled—he was a man without ideology or politics—but fear stalked him day and night. The fear that Moscow Center knew of his treachery and was watching his every move. The fear he had passed along one secret too many, or that one of the Center’s spies in the West would eventually betray him. On numerous occasions he pleaded with Marcus to bring him in from the cold. But Marcus, sometimes with a bit of soothing balm, sometimes with a crack of the whip, refused. Heathcliff was to continue his spying until such time as his life was truly in danger. Only then would he be allowed to defect. He was justifiably dubious about Marcus’s ability to judge the precise moment the sword was about to fall, but he had no choice but to continue. Marcus had blackmailed him into doing his bidding. And Marcus was going to wring every last secret out of him before releasing him from his bond.
But not all secrets are created equal. Some are mundane, workaday, and can be passed with little or no threat to the messenger. Others, however, are far too dangerous to betray. Heathcliff eventually found such a secret in a dead-letter box, in faraway Montreal. The letter box was actually an empty flat, used by a Russian illegal operating under deep cover in the United States. Hidden in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink was a memory stick. Heathcliff had been ordered to collect it and carry it back to Moscow Center, thus evading the mighty American National Security Agency. Before leaving the apartment, he inserted the flash drive into his laptop and found it unlocked and its contents unencrypted. Heathcliff read the documents freely. They were from several different American intelligence services, all with the highest possible level of classification.
Heathcliff didn’t dare copy the documents. Instead, he committed every detail to his flawless memory and returned to Moscow Center, where he handed over the flash drive to his control officer, along with a sternly worded rebuke of the illegal’s failure to secure it properly. The control officer, who was called Volkov, promised to address the matter. Then he offered Heathcliff a lowstress junket to friendly Budapest as recompense. “Consider it an all-expenses-paid holiday, courtesy of Moscow Center. Don’t take this the wrong way, Konstantin, but you look as though you could use some time off.”
That evening, Heathcliff used the covert communications device to inform Marcus that he had uncovered a secret of such import he had no choice but to defect. Much to his surprise, Marcus did not object. He instructed Heathcliff to dispose of the device in a way it could never be found. Heathcliff smashed it to pieces and dropped the remains down an open sewer. Even the bloodhounds of the SVR’s security directorate, he reasoned, wouldn’t look there.
A week later, after paying a final visit to his mother in her rabbit’s hutch of an apartment, with its brooding portrait of an everwatchful Comrade Stalin, Heathcliff left Russia for the last time. He arrived in Budapest in late afternoon, as snow fell gently upon the city, and took a taxi to the InterContinental Hotel. His room overlooked the Danube. He double-locked the door and engaged the safety bar. Then he sat down at the desk and waited for his mobile phone to ring. Next to it was Marcus’s suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds. Then it would be over.
2 (#ulink_97f2a5fc-76df-50ec-a81b-fab3039db759)
VIENNA (#ulink_97f2a5fc-76df-50ec-a81b-fab3039db759)
One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, a few lazy bends along the river Danube, an exhibition featuring the works of Sir Peter Paul Rubens—painter, scholar, diplomat, spy—limped toward its melancholy conclusion. The imported hordes had come and gone, and by late afternoon only a few regular patrons of the old museum moved hesitantly through its rose-colored rooms. One was a man of late middle age. He surveyed the massive canvases, with their corpulent nudes swirling amid lavish historical settings, from beneath the brim of a flat cap, which was pulled low over his brow.
A younger man stood impatiently at his back, checking the time on his wristwatch. “How much longer, boss?” he asked sotto voce in Hebrew. But the older man responded in German, and loudly enough so the drowsy guard in the corner could hear. “There’s just one more I’d like to see before I leave, thank you.”
He went into the next room and paused before Madonna and Child, oil on canvas, 137 by 111 centimeters. He knew the painting intimately; he had restored it in a cottage by the sea in West Cornwall. Crouching slightly, he examined the surface in raked lighting. His work had held up well. If only he could say the same for himself, he thought, rubbing the fiery patch of pain at the base of his spine. The two recently fractured vertebrae were the least of his physical maladies. During his long and distinguished career as an officer of Israeli intelligence, Gabriel Allon had been shot in the chest twice, attacked by an Alsatian guard dog, and thrown down several flights of stairs in the cellars of Lubyanka in Moscow. Not even Ari Shamron, his legendary mentor, could match his record of bodily injuries.
The young man trailing Gabriel through the rooms of the museum was called Oren. He was the head of Gabriel’s security detail, an unwanted fringe benefit of a recent promotion. They had been traveling for the past thirty-six hours, by plane from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then by automobile from Paris to Vienna. Now they walked through the deserted exhibition rooms to the steps of the museum. A snowstorm had commenced, big downy flakes falling straight in the windless night. An ordinary visitor to the city might have found it picturesque, the trams slithering along sugar-dusted streets lined with empty palaces and churches. But not Gabriel. Vienna always depressed him, never more so than when it snowed.
The car waited in the street, the driver behind the wheel. Gabriel pulled the collar of his old Barbour jacket around his ears and informed Oren that he intended to walk to the safe flat.
“Alone,” he added.
“I can’t let you walk around Vienna unprotected, boss.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the chief now. And if something happens—”
“You’ll say you were following orders.”
“Just like the Austrians.” In the darkness the bodyguard handed Gabriel a Jericho 9mm pistol. “At least take this.”
Gabriel slipped the Jericho into the waistband of his trousers. “I’ll be at the safe flat in thirty minutes. I’ll let King Saul Boulevard know when I’ve arrived.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Even the chief referred to it as the Office and nothing else.
“Thirty minutes,” repeated Oren.
“And not a minute more,” pledged Gabriel.
“And if you’re late?”
“It means I’ve been assassinated or kidnapped by ISIS, the Russians, Hezbollah, the Iranians, or someone else I’ve managed to offend. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for my survival.”
“What about us?”
“You’ll be fine, Oren.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t want you anywhere near the safe flat,” said Gabriel. “Keep moving until you hear from me. And remember, don’t try to follow me. That’s a direct order.”
The bodyguard stared at Gabriel in silence, an expression of concern on his face.
“What is it now, Oren?”
“Are you sure you don’t want some company, boss?”
Gabriel turned without another word and disappeared into the night.
He crossed the Burgring and set out along the footpaths of the Volksgarten. He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, but no more—and had the spare physique of a cyclist. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with wide cheekbones and a slender nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The eyes were an unnatural shade of green; the hair was dark and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and Gabriel had the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. He spoke five languages fluently, including Italian, which he had acquired before traveling to Venice in the mid-1970s to study the craft of art conservation. Afterward, he had lived as a taciturn if gifted restorer named Mario Delvecchio while simultaneously serving as an intelligence officer and assassin for the Office. Some of his finest work had been performed in Vienna. Some of his worst, too.
He skirted the edge of the Burgtheater, the German-speaking world’s most prestigious stage, and followed the Bankgasse to the Café Central, one of Vienna’s most prominent coffeehouses. There he peered through the frosted windows and in his memory glimpsed Erich Radek, colleague of Adolf Eichmann, tormentor of Gabriel’s mother, sipping an Einspänner at a table alone. Radek the murderer was hazy and indistinct, like a figure in a painting in need of restoration.
“Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”
“Perhaps.”
The image dissolved. Gabriel turned away and walked to the old Jewish Quarter. Before the Second World War it was home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. Now that community was largely a memory. He watched a few old men stepping tremulously from the discreet doorway of the Stadttempel, Vienna’s main synagogue, then made his way to a nearby square lined with restaurants. One was the Italian restaurant where he had eaten his last meal with Leah, his first wife, and Daniel, their only child.
In an adjacent street was the spot where their car had been parked. Gabriel slowed involuntarily, paralyzed by memories. He recalled struggling with the straps of his son’s car seat and the faint taste of wine on his wife’s lips as he gave her one last kiss. And he remembered the sound of the engine hesitating—like a record played at the wrong speed—because the bomb was pulling power from the battery. Too late, he had shouted at Leah not to turn the key a second time. Then, in a flash of brilliant white, she and the child were lost to him forever.
Gabriel’s heart was tolling like an iron bell. Not now, he told himself as tears blurred his vision, he had work to do. He tilted his face to the sky.
Isn’t it beautiful? The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv …
He checked the time on his wristwatch; he had ten minutes to get to the safe flat. As he hurried along empty streets, he was gripped by an overwhelming sense of impending doom. It was only the weather, he assured himself. Vienna always depressed him. Never more so than when it snowed.
3 (#ulink_3c0f0795-86ff-53c6-bb0a-96d6f679ccf0)
VIENNA (#ulink_3c0f0795-86ff-53c6-bb0a-96d6f679ccf0)
The safe flat was located across the Donaukanal, in a fine old Biedermeier apartment building in the Second District. It was a busier quarter, a real neighborhood rather than a museum. There was a little Spar market, a pharmacy, a couple of Asian restaurants, even a Buddhist temple. Cars and motorbikes came and went along the street; pedestrians moved along the pavements. It was the sort of place where no one would notice the chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service. Or a Russian defector, thought Gabriel.
He turned through a passageway, crossed a courtyard, and entered a foyer. The stairs were in darkness, and on the fourth-floor landing a door hung slightly ajar. He slipped inside, closed the door behind him, and padded quietly into the sitting room, where Eli Lavon sat behind an array of open notebook computers. Lavon looked up, saw the snow on Gabriel’s cap and shoulders, and frowned.
“Please tell me you didn’t walk.”
“The car broke down. I had no other choice.”
“That’s not the way your bodyguard tells it. You’d better let King Saul Boulevard know you’re here. Otherwise, the nature of our operation is likely to turn into a search and rescue.”
Gabriel leaned over one of the computers, typed a brief message, and shot it securely to Tel Aviv.
“Crisis averted,” said Lavon.
He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his crumpled tweed jacket, and an ascot at his throat. His hair was wispy and unkempt; the features of his face were bland and easily forgotten. It was one of his greatest assets. Eli Lavon appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest. He oversaw the Office division known as Neviot. Its operatives included surveillance artists, pickpockets, thieves, and those who specialized in planting hidden cameras and listening devices behind locked doors. His teams had been very busy that evening in Budapest.
He nodded toward one of the computers. It showed a man seated at the desk of an upscale hotel room. An unopened bag lay at the foot of the bed. Before him was a mobile phone and an ampule.
“Is that a photograph?” asked Gabriel.
“Video.”
Gabriel tapped the screen of the laptop.
“He can’t actually hear you, you know.”
“Are you sure he’s alive?”
“He’s scared to death. He hasn’t moved a muscle in five minutes.”
“What’s he so afraid of?”
“He’s Russian,” said Lavon, as if that fact alone were explanation enough.
Gabriel studied Heathcliff as though he were a figure in a painting. His real name was Konstantin Kirov, and he was one of the Office’s most valuable sources. Only a small portion of Kirov’s intelligence had concerned Israel’s security directly, but the enormous surplus had paid dividends in London and Langley, where the directors of MI6 and the CIA eagerly feasted on each batch of secrets that spilled from the Russian’s attaché case. The Anglo-Americans had not dined for free. Both services had helped to foot the bill for the operation, and the British, after much interservice arm-twisting, had agreed to grant Kirov sanctuary in the United Kingdom.
The first face the Russian would see after defecting, however, would be the face of Gabriel Allon. Gabriel’s history with the Russian intelligence service and the men in the Kremlin was long and blood-soaked. For that reason he wanted to personally conduct Kirov’s initial debriefing. Specifically, he wanted to know exactly what Kirov had discovered, and why he suddenly needed to defect. Then Gabriel would place the Russian in the hands of MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna. Gabriel was more than happy to let the British have him. Blown agents were invariably a headache, especially blown Russian agents.
At last, Kirov stirred.
“That’s a relief,” said Gabriel.
The image on the screen deteriorated into digital tile for a few seconds before returning to normal.
“It’s been like that all evening,” explained Lavon. “The team must have put the transmitter on top of some interference.”
“When did they go into the room?”
“About an hour before Heathcliff arrived. When we hacked into the hotel’s security system, we took a detour into reservations and grabbed his room number. Getting into the room itself was no problem.”
The wizards in the Office’s Technology department had developed a magic cardkey capable of opening any electronic hotel room door in the world. The first swipe stole the code. The second opened the lock.
“When did the interference start?”
“As soon as he entered the room.”
“Did anyone follow him from the airport to the hotel?”
Lavon shook his head.
“Any suspicious names on the hotel registry?”
“Most of the guests are attending the conference. The Eastern European Society of Civil Engineers,” Lavon explained. “It’s a real nerds’ ball. Lots of guys with pocket protectors.”
“You used to be one of those guys, Eli.”
“Still am.” The shot turned to a mosaic again. “Damn,” said Lavon softly.
“Has the team checked out the connection?”
“Twice.”
“And?”
“There’s no one else on the line. And even if there was, the signal is so encrypted it would take a couple of supercomputers a month to reassemble the pieces.” The shot stabilized. “That’s more like it.”
“Let me see the lobby.”
Lavon tapped the keyboard of another computer, and a shot of the lobby appeared. It was a sea of ill-fitting clothing, name tags, and receding hairlines. Gabriel scanned the faces, looking for one that appeared to be out of place. He found four—two male, two female. Using the hotel’s cameras, Lavon captured still images of each and forwarded them to Tel Aviv. On the screen of the adjacent laptop, Konstantin Kirov was checking his phone.
“How long do you intend to make him wait?” asked Lavon.
“Long enough for King Saul Boulevard to run those faces through the database.”
“If he doesn’t leave soon, he’ll miss his train.”
“Better to miss his train than be assassinated in the lobby of the InterContinental by a Moscow Center hit team.” Once again, the shot turned to tile. Annoyed, Gabriel tapped the screen.
“Don’t bother,” said Lavon. “I’ve already tried that.”
Ten minutes elapsed before the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard declared that it could find no matches for the four faces in the Office’s digital rogues’ gallery of enemy intelligence officers, known or suspected terrorists, or private mercenaries. Only then did Gabriel compose a brief text message on an encrypted BlackBerry and tap the SEND key. A moment later he watched Konstantin Kirov reach for his mobile phone. After reading Gabriel’s text, the Russian rose abruptly, pulled on his overcoat, and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He slipped the mobile phone into his pocket but kept the suicide ampule in his hand. The suitcase he left behind.
Eli Lavon tapped a few keys on the laptop as Kirov opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The hotel’s security cameras monitored his short walk to the lifts. There were no other guests or staff present, and the carriage into which the Russian stepped was empty. The lobby, however, was bedlam. No one seemed to take notice of Kirov as he made his way out of the hotel, including two leather-jacketed toughs from the Hungarian security service who were keeping watch in the street.
It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. There was time enough for Kirov to catch the night train to Vienna, but he had to keep moving. He headed south on Apáczai Csere János Street, followed by two of Eli Lavon’s watchers, and then turned onto Kossuth Lajos Street, one of central Budapest’s main thoroughfares.
“My boys say he’s clean,” said Lavon. “No Russians, no Hungarians.”
Gabriel dispatched a second message to Konstantin Kirov, instructing him to board the train as planned. He did so with four minutes to spare, accompanied by the watchers. For now, there was nothing more Gabriel and Lavon could do. As they stared at one another in silence, their thoughts were identical. The waiting. Always the waiting.
4 (#ulink_dcb48f2b-05a9-537c-bb8c-f22159a1c3c9)
WESTBAHNHOF, VIENNA (#ulink_dcb48f2b-05a9-537c-bb8c-f22159a1c3c9)
But Gabriel and Eli Lavon did not wait alone, for on that evening they had an operational partner in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, the oldest and grandest such agency in the civilized world. Six officers from its storied Vienna Station—the exact number would soon be a matter of some contention—held a tense vigil in a locked vault at the British Embassy, and a dozen more were hovering over computers and blinking telephones at Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s riverfront headquarters in London.
A final MI6 officer, a man called Christopher Keller, waited outside Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station, behind the wheel of an unremarkable Volkswagen Passat sedan. He had bright blue eyes, sun-bleached hair, square cheekbones, and a thick chin with a notch in the center. His mouth seemed permanently fixed in an ironic smile.
Having little else to do that evening other than keep watch for any stray Russian hoods, Keller had contemplated the improbable path that had led him to this place. The wasted year at Cambridge, the deep-cover operation in Northern Ireland, the friendly-fire incident during the first Gulf War that cast him into self-imposed exile on the island of Corsica. There he had acquired perfect if Corsican-accented French. He had also performed services for a certain notable Corsican crime figure that might loosely be described as murder for hire. But all that was behind him. Thanks to Gabriel Allon, Christopher Keller was a respectable officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was restored.
Keller looked at the Israeli in the passenger seat. He was tall and lanky, with bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression was one of profound boredom. The anxious drumming of his fingers on the center console, however, betrayed the true state of his mind.
Keller lit a cigarette, his fourth in twenty minutes, and blew a cloud of smoke against the windscreen.
“Must you?” protested the Israeli.
“I’ll stop smoking when you stop drumming your damn fingers.” Keller spoke with a posh West London drawl, a remnant of a privileged childhood. “You’re giving me a headache.”
The Israeli’s fingers went still. His name was Mikhail Abramov. Like Keller, he was a veteran of an elite military unit. In Mikhail’s case, it was the IDF’s Sayeret Matkal. They had operated together several times before, most recently in Morocco, where they had tracked Saladin, the leader of ISIS’s external operations division, to a remote compound in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Neither man had fired the shot that ended Saladin’s reign of terror. Gabriel had beaten them both to the target.
“What are you so nervous about anyway?” asked Keller. “We’re in the middle of dull, boring Vienna.”
“Yes,” said Mikhail distantly. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Mikhail had lived in Moscow as a child and spoke English with a faint Russian accent. His linguistic abilities and Slavic looks had allowed him to pose as a Russian in several notable Office operations.
“You’ve operated in Vienna before?” asked Keller.
“Once or twice.” Mikhail checked his weapon, a Jericho .45-caliber pistol. “Do you remember those four Hezbollah suicide bombers who were planning to attack the Stadttempel?”
“I thought EKO Cobra handled that.” EKO Cobra was Austria’s tactical police unit. “In fact, I’m quite sure I read something about it in the newspapers.”
Mikhail stared at Keller without expression.
“That was you?”
“I had help, of course.”
“Anyone I know?”
Mikhail said nothing.
“I see.”
It was approaching midnight. The street outside the modern glass facade of the station was deserted, only a couple of taxis waiting for the last fares of the night. One would collect a Russian defector and deliver him to the Best Western hotel on the Stubenring. From there he would walk the rest of the way to the safe flat. The decision on whether to admit him would be made by Mikhail, who would be following on foot. The safe flat’s location was perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the operation. If Kirov was clean, Mikhail would search him in the building’s foyer and then take him upstairs to see Gabriel. Keller was to remain downstairs in the Passat and provide perimeter security, with what, he did not know. Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, had expressly forbidden him to carry a weapon. Keller had a well-deserved reputation for violence; Hughes, for caution. He had a nice life in Vienna—a productive network, long lunches, decent relations with the local service. The last thing he wanted was a problem that would result in him being recalled to a desk at Vauxhall Cross.
Just then, Mikhail’s BlackBerry flared with an incoming message. The glow of the screen lit his pale face. “The train is in the station. Kirov is on his way out.”
“Heathcliff,” said Keller with reproof. “His name is Heathcliff until we get him inside the safe flat.”
“Here he comes.”
Mikhail returned his BlackBerry to his coat pocket as Kirov emerged from the station, preceded by one of Eli Lavon’s watchers and followed by another.
“He looks nervous,” said Keller.
“He is nervous.” Mikhail was drumming his fingers on the center console again. “He’s Russian.”
The watchers departed the station on foot; Konstantin Kirov, in one of the taxis. Keller followed at a discreet distance as the car moved eastward across the city along deserted streets. He saw nothing to suggest the Russian courier was being tailed. Mikhail concurred.
At twelve fifteen the taxi stopped outside the Best Western. Kirov climbed out but did not enter the hotel. Instead, he crossed the Donaukanal over the Schwedenbrücke, now trailed by Mikhail on foot. The bridge deposited the two men onto the Taborstrasse, and the Taborstrasse in turn delivered them to a pretty church square called the Karmeliterplatz, where Mikhail closed the distance between himself and his quarry to a few paces.
Together they crossed to an adjacent street and followed it past a parade of darkened shops and cafés, toward the Biedermeier apartment house at the end of the block. Light burned faintly in a fourth-floor window, enough so that Mikhail could make out the silhouetted figure of Gabriel standing with one hand to his chin and his head tilted slightly to one side. Mikhail sent him one final text. Kirov was clean.
It was then he heard the sound of an approaching motorcycle. His first thought was that it was not the sort of night to be piloting a vehicle with only two wheels. This was confirmed a few seconds later when he saw the bike skidding around the corner of the apartment block.
The driver wore black leather and a black helmet, with the dark visor down. He slid to a stop a few yards from Kirov, dropped a foot to the street, and drew a gun from the front of his jacket. It was fitted with a long cylindrical sound suppressor. Mikhail couldn’t discern the model of the weapon itself. A Glock, maybe an H&K. Whatever it was, it was pointed directly at Kirov’s face. Mikhail allowed the phone to fall from his grasp and reached for his Jericho, but before he could draw it, the motorcyclist’s weapon spat twin tongues of fire. Both shots found their mark. Mikhail heard the sickening crack of the rounds tearing through Kirov’s skull, and saw a flash of blood and brain matter as he collapsed to the street.
The man on the motorcycle then swung his arm a few degrees and leveled the gun at Mikhail. Two shots, both errant, drove him to the pavement, and two more sent him crawling toward the shelter of a parked car. His right hand had found the grip of the Jericho. As he drew it, the man on the motorcycle raised his foot and revved the engine.
He was thirty meters from Mikhail, no more, with the ground floor of the apartment block behind him. Mikhail had both hands on the Jericho, with his outstretched arms braced on the boot of the parked car. Still, he held his fire. Office doctrine gave field operatives wide latitude in utilizing deadly force to protect their own lives. It did not, however, allow an operative to fire a .45-caliber weapon toward a fleeing target in a residential quarter of a European city, where a stray round might easily take an innocent life.
The motorcycle was now in motion, the roar of its engine reverberating in the canyon of apartment buildings. Mikhail watched its progress over the barrel of the Jericho until it was gone. Then he clambered over to the spot where Kirov had fallen. The Russian was gone, too. There was almost nothing left of his face.
Mikhail looked up toward the figure in the fourth-floor window. Then, from behind, he heard the rising engine note of a car approaching at high speed. He feared it was the rest of the hit team coming to finish the job, but it was only Keller in the Passat. He snatched up his mobile phone and hurled himself inside. “I told you,” he said as the car shot forward. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Gabriel remained in the window longer than he should have, watching the shrinking taillight of the motorcycle, pursued by the blacked-out Passat. When the two vehicles were gone, he looked down at the man lying in the street. Snow whitened him. He was as dead as a man could be. He was dead, thought Gabriel, before he arrived in Vienna. Dead before he left Moscow.
Eli Lavon was now standing at Gabriel’s side. Another long moment passed, and still Kirov lay there alone, unattended. Finally, a car approached and drew to a stop. The driver climbed out, a young woman. She raised a hand to her mouth and looked away.
Lavon drew the blinds. “Time to leave.”
“We can’t just—”
“Did you touch anything?”
Gabriel searched his memory. “The computers.”
“Nothing else?”
“The door latch.”
“We’ll get it on the way out.”
At once, blue light filled the room. It was a light Gabriel knew well, the light of a Bundespolizei cruiser. He dialed Oren, the chief of his security detail.
“Come to the Hollandstrasse side of the building. Nice and quiet.”
Gabriel killed the connection and helped Lavon bag the computers and the phones. On the way out the door, they both gave the latch a thorough scrubbing, Gabriel first, then Lavon for good measure. As they hurried across the courtyard they could hear the first faint sound of sirens, but the Hollandstrasse was quiet, save for the low idle of a car engine. Gabriel and Lavon slid into the backseat. A moment later they were crossing the Donaukanal, leaving the Second District for the First.
“He was clean. Right, Eli?”
“As a whistle.”
“So how did the assassin know where he was going?”
“Maybe we should ask him.”
Gabriel dug his phone from his pocket and called Mikhail.
5 (#ulink_effeefcd-6b5e-55ed-9799-d4c2c27e0a72)
FLORIDSDORF, VIENNA (#ulink_effeefcd-6b5e-55ed-9799-d4c2c27e0a72)
The Passat sedan was equipped with Volkswagen’s newest version of all-wheel drive. A right turn at one hundred kilometers per hour on fresh snow, however, was far beyond its abilities. The rear tires lost traction, and for an instant Mikhail feared they were about to spin out of control. Then, somehow, the tires regained their grip on the pavement, and the car, with one last spasm of fishtailing, righted itself.
Mikhail lightened his hold on the armrest. “Have much experience driving in winter conditions?”
“A great deal,” replied Keller calmly. “You?”
“I grew up in Moscow.”
“You left when you were a kid.”
“I was sixteen, actually.”
“Did your family own a car?”
“In Moscow? Of course not. We rode the Metro like everyone else.”
“So you never actually drove a car in Russia in winter.”
Mikhail did not dispute Keller’s observation. They were back on the Taborstrasse, flashing past an industrial park and warehouse complex, about a hundred meters behind the motorcycle. Mikhail was reasonably acquainted with Vienna’s geography. He judged, correctly, that they were heading in an easterly direction. There was a border to the east. He reckoned they would need one soon.
The bike’s brake light flared red.
“He’s turning,” said Mikhail.
“I see him.”
The bike made a left and briefly disappeared from sight. Keller approached the corner without slowing. An ugly Viennese streetscape flowed sideways across the windscreen for several seconds before he was able to bring the car under control again. The motorcycle was now at least two hundred meters ahead.
“He’s good,” said Keller.
“You should see the way he handles a gun.”
“I did.”
“Thanks for the help.”
“What was I supposed to do? Distract him?”
Before them rose the Millennial Tower, a fifty-one-floor office-and-residential building standing on the western bank of the Danube. Keller’s speed approached a hundred and fifty as they crossed the river, and still the bike was slipping away. Mikhail wondered how long it would take the Bundespolizei to notice them. About as long, he reckoned, as it would take to pull a passport from the pocket of a dead Russian courier.
The bike disappeared around another corner. By the time Keller negotiated the same turn, the taillight was a prick of red in the night.
“We’re losing him.”
Keller pressed his foot to the floor and kept it there. Just then, Mikhail’s mobile pulsed. He took his eyes from the taillight long enough to read the message.
“What is it?” asked Keller.
“Gabriel wants an update.” Mikhail typed a brief response and looked up again. “Shit,” he said softly.
The taillight was gone.
It was Alois Graf, a pensioner and quiet supporter of an Austrian far-right party—not that that had anything to do with what transpired—who was ultimately to blame. Recently a widower, Graf had been having trouble sleeping of late. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had managed more than two or three hours since the death of his beloved Trudi. The same was true of Shultzie, his nine-year-old dachshund. Actually, the little beast was not really his, it was Trudi’s. Shultzie had never much cared for Graf, or Graf for Shultzie. And now they were cellmates, sleepless and depressed, comrades in grief.
The dog was well trained in the etiquette of elimination, and reasonably considerate of others. Lately, however, it had been having urges at the damnedest times. Graf was considerate, too, and he never protested when Shultzie came to him in the small hours with that desperate look in his resentful little eyes.
On that night, the summons occurred at 12:25 a.m., according to the clock on Graf’s bedside table. Shultzie’s favorite spot was the little patch of grass adjacent to the American fast-food restaurant on the Brünnerstrasse. This pleased Graf. He thought the restaurant, if you could call it that, an eyesore. But then again, Graf had never been fond of Americans. He was old enough to remember Vienna after the war, when it was a divided city of spies and misery. Graf had preferred the British to the Americans. The British, at least, were possessed of a certain low cunning.
To reach Shultzie’s little promised land required crossing the Brünnerstrasse itself. Graf, a former schoolmaster, looked right and left before stepping from the curb. It was then he saw the single headlamp of a motorcycle approaching from the direction of the city center. He paused with indecision. The bike was a long way off; there was no sound. Surely, he could reach the opposite side with time to spare. Nevertheless, he gave Shultzie’s leash a little jerk, lest the dog loiter in the middle of the street, as he was fond of doing.
Halfway across the road, Graf cast another glance toward the motorcycle. In a matter of three or four seconds, it had covered a great deal of ground. It was traveling at an extremely high rate of speed, a fact evidenced by the high, tight note of the engine, which Graf could now hear quite clearly. Shultzie could hear it, too. The dog stood still as a statue, and no amount of tugging on Graf’s part could compel him to move.
“Komm, Shultzie! Mach schnell!”
Nothing. It was as if the creature were frozen to the asphalt.
The bike was approximately a hundred meters away, about the length of the sporting field at Graf’s old school. He reached down and snatched the dog, but it was too late; the bike was upon them. It veered suddenly, passing so close to Graf’s back it seemed to pluck at the fabric of his overcoat. An instant later he heard the terrible metallic crunch of the collision and saw a figure in black soaring through the air. He might have thought the man capable of flight, he flew so far. But the next sound, the sound of his body smacking the pavement, put that lie to rest.
He somersaulted over and over again for several more meters, horribly, until finally he came to rest. Graf considered going to check on him, if only to confirm the obvious, but another vehicle, a car, was approaching at high speed from the same direction. With Shultzie in his arms, Graf stepped quickly from the road and allowed the car to pass. It slowed to inspect the wreckage of the motorcycle before stopping next to the fallen figure in black lying motionless in the street.
A passenger climbed out. He was tall and thin, and his pale face seemed to glow in the darkness. He looked down at the man in the street—more out of anger than pity, observed Graf—and removed the motorcyclist’s shattered helmet. Then he did something quite extraordinary, something Graf would never tell another living soul. He snapped a photograph of the dead man’s face with his mobile phone.
The flash startled Shultzie, and the dog erupted in a fit of barking. The man stared coldly at Graf before lowering himself into the car. In a moment, it was gone.
At once, there were sirens in the night. Alois Graf should have remained behind to tell the Bundespolizei what he had witnessed. Instead, he hurried home, with Shultzie squirming in his arms. Graf remembered Vienna after the war. Sometimes, he thought, it was better to see nothing at all.
6 (#ulink_27bedf42-fbab-5246-af73-a94c433766fc)
VIENNA—TEL AVIV (#ulink_27bedf42-fbab-5246-af73-a94c433766fc)
Two dead bodies, separated by a distance of some six kilometers. One had been shot twice at close range. The other had died in a high-speed motorcycle accident while in possession of a large-caliber handgun, an HK45 Tactical, fitted with a sound suppressor. There were no witnesses at either scene, and no CCTV cameras. It was no matter; a part of the story was written in the snow, in tire tracks and footprints, with shell casings and blood. The Austrians worked quickly, for there was heavy rain in the forecast, followed by two days of unseasonable warmth. A changing climate was conspiring against them.
The man who had been shot to death had in his possession a mobile phone, a billfold, and a Russian passport identifying him as one Oleg Gurkovsky. Further documentation found inside the billfold suggested he was a resident of Moscow and that he worked for a communications technology company. Reconstructing the final hours of his life proved easy enough. The Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Budapest. The room at the InterContinental, where, curiously, he had left his luggage. The late-night train to Vienna. Security cameras at the Westbahnhof observed him climbing into a taxi, and the driver, who was interviewed by police, recalled dropping him at the Best Western on the Stubenring. From there he had crossed the Donaukanal via the Schwedenbrücke, followed by a man on foot. Police unearthed several clips of video from storefront security systems and traffic cameras in which the pursuer’s face was partially visible. He also left a trail of footprints, especially in the Karmeliterplatz, where the snow had largely been undisturbed. The shoes were a European size forty-eight, with no distinctive tread. Crime-scene investigators found several matching prints directly next to the body.
They also found six .45-caliber shell casings and the tracks of a Metzeler Lasertec motorcycle tire. Analysis of the tread pattern would link the tracks conclusively to the mangled BMW on the Brünnerstrasse, and ballistics testing would tie the shell casings to the HK45 Tactical the driver of the bike had been carrying when he crashed into a parked car. The man had nothing else in his possession. No passport or driver’s permit, no cash or credit cards. He looked to be about thirty-five but police couldn’t be sure; substantial plastic surgery had been performed on the face. He was a professional, they concluded.
But why had an otherwise professional assassin lost control of his motorcycle on the Brünnerstrasse? And who was the man who had followed the murdered Russian from the Best Western hotel to the spot in the Second District where he had been shot twice at close range? And why had the Russian come to Vienna from Budapest in the first place? Had he been lured? Had he been summoned? If so, by whom? The questions notwithstanding, it bore all the hallmarks of a professional assassination carried out by a highly competent intelligence service.
The Bundespolizei, during the first hours of the investigation, kept such thoughts to themselves, but the media were free to speculate to their hearts’ content. By midmorning they had convinced themselves that Oleg Gurkovsky was a dissident, despite the fact no one in the Russian opposition seemed to have heard of him. But there were others in Russia, including a lawyer rumored to be a personal friend of the Tsar himself, who claimed to know him well. But not by the name Oleg Gurkovsky. His real name, they said, was Konstantin Kirov, and he was an undercover officer of the SVR, the Russian intelligence service.
It was at this point, sometime around noon in Vienna, that a steady trickle of stories, tweets, chirps, burps, blog postings, and other forms of modern discourse began to appear on news sites and social media. At first, they appeared spontaneous; in time, anything but. Nearly all the material flowed from Russia or from friendly former Soviet republics or satellites. Not one of the alleged sources had a name—at least not one that could be verified. Each entry was fragmentary, a small piece of a larger puzzle. But when assembled, the conclusion was plain as day: Konstantin Kirov, an officer of the Russian SVR, had been murdered in cold blood by the Israeli secret intelligence service, on the direct order of its chief, the well-known Russophobe Gabriel Allon.
The Kremlin declared as much at three o’clock, and at four the Russian news service Sputnik published what it claimed was a photograph of Allon leaving an apartment building near the scene of the murder, accompanied by an elfin figure whose face was rendered indistinct. The source of the photograph was never reliably established. Sputnik said it obtained the image from the Austrian Bundespolizei, though the Bundespolizei denied it. Nevertheless, the damage was done. The rented television experts in London and New York, including a few who’d had the privilege of meeting Allon personally, admitted that the man in the photo looked a great deal like him. Austria’s interior minister agreed.
Publicly, the government of Israel said nothing, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not commenting on intelligence matters. But by early evening, with pressure building, the prime minister took the unusual step of personally denying any Israeli involvement in Kirov’s death. His statement was met with skepticism, perhaps deservedly so. What’s more, much was made of the fact it was the prime minister who issued the denial and not Allon himself. His silence, said one former American spy, spoke volumes.
Truth was, Gabriel was unavailable for comment at the time; he was locked in a secure room deep inside the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, monitoring the clandestine movements of his operational team. By eight o’clock that evening, all were safely back in Tel Aviv, and Christopher Keller was home and dry in London. Gabriel slipped from the embassy unobserved and boarded an El Al flight for Tel Aviv. Not even the flight crew knew his true identity. For a second consecutive night, he did not sleep. The memory of Konstantin Kirov lying dead in the snow would not let him.
It was still dark when the plane touched down at Ben Gurion. Two bodyguards waited at the foot of the Jetway. They escorted Gabriel through the terminal to an unmarked door to the left of passport control. Behind it was a room reserved for Office personnel returning from missions abroad, thus the permanent odor of cigarettes, burnt coffee, and male tension. The walls were faux Jerusalem limestone, the chairs were modular and covered in black vinyl. In one, bathed in an unforgiving light, sat Uzi Navot. His gray suit looked slept in. The eyes behind his trendy rimless spectacles were red with fatigue.
Rising, Navot glanced at the big silver wristwatch his wife, Bella, had given him on the occasion of his last birthday. There was not an article of clothing or fashion accessory on Navot’s large, powerful body that she had not purchased or selected, including a new pair of oxfords that, in Gabriel’s opinion, were far too long in the toe for a man of Navot’s age and occupation.
“What are you doing here, Uzi? It’s three in the morning.”
“I needed a break.”
“From what?”
Navot smiled sadly and led Gabriel along a corridor with harsh fluorescent lights overhead. The corridor led to a secure door, and the door to a restricted area just off the main traffic circle outside the terminal. A motorcade rumbled in the yellow lamplight. Navot started toward the open rear passenger door of Gabriel’s SUV before abruptly stopping and walking around the back of the vehicle to the driver’s side. Navot was Gabriel’s direct predecessor as chief. In an unprecedented break with Office tradition, he had agreed to stay on as Gabriel’s deputy instead of accepting a lucrative job with a defense contractor in California, as Bella had wished. He was doubtless regretting his decision.
“In case you’re wondering,” said Gabriel as the SUV drew away, “I didn’t kill him.”
“Don’t worry, I believe you.”
“It seems you’re the only one.” Gabriel picked up the copy of Haaretz that lay on the seat between them and stared gloomily at the headline. “You know it’s bad when your hometown newspaper thinks you’re guilty.”
“We sent a back-channel message to the press making it clear we had nothing to do with Kirov’s death.”
“Obviously,” said Gabriel as he leafed through the other newspapers, “they didn’t believe you.”
Every major publication, no matter its political tilt, had declared Vienna a botched Office operation and was calling for an official inquiry. Haaretz, which leaned left, went so far as to wonder whether Gabriel Allon, a gifted field operative, was up to the job of chief. How things had changed, he thought. A few months earlier he had been fêted as the man who had eliminated Saladin, ISIS’s terror mastermind, and prevented a dirty-bomb attack outside Downing Street in London. And now this.
“I have to admit,” said Navot, “it does bear more than a passing resemblance to you.” He was scrutinizing Gabriel’s photograph on the front page of Haaretz. “And that little fellow next to you reminds me of someone else I know.”
“There must have been an SVR team in the building on the other side of the street. Judging from the camera angle, I’d say they were on the third floor.”
“The analysts say it was probably the fourth.”
“Do they?”
“In all likelihood,” Navot continued, “the Russians had another static post at the front of the building, a car, maybe another flat.”
“Which means they knew where Kirov was going.”
Navot nodded slowly. “I suppose you should consider yourself lucky they didn’t take the opportunity to kill you, too.”
“A pity they didn’t. I might have received better press coverage.”
They were approaching the end of the airport exit ramp. To the right was Jerusalem and Gabriel’s wife and children. To the left was Tel Aviv and King Saul Boulevard. Gabriel instructed the driver to take him to King Saul Boulevard.
“Are you sure?” asked Navot. “You look like you could use a few hours of sleep.”
“And what would they write about me then?”
Navot thumbed the combination locks of a stainless-steel attaché case. From it he removed a photograph, which he handed to Gabriel. It was the photograph Mikhail had snapped of Konstantin Kirov’s assassin. The eyes were not quite dead; somewhere was a faint trace of light. The rest of the face was a mess, but not from the accident. It had been stretched and pulled and stitched to such a degree it scarcely looked human.
“He looks like a rich woman I once met at an art auction,” said Gabriel. “Have you run him through the database?”
“Several times.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
Gabriel returned the photograph to Navot. “One wonders why an operative of his obvious skill and training didn’t eliminate the one and only threat to his life.”
“Mikhail?”
Gabriel nodded slowly.
“He fired four shots at him.”
“And all four missed. Even you could have hit him from that distance, Uzi.”
“You think he was ordered to miss?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Maybe they thought a dead Israeli would make their cover story less believable. Or maybe they had another reason,” said Gabriel. “They’re Russians. They usually do.”
“Why kill Kirov in Vienna in the first place? Why didn’t they bleed him dry in Moscow and then put a bullet in his neck?”
Gabriel tapped the stack of newspapers. “Maybe they wanted to use the opportunity to fatally wound me.”
“There’s a simple solution,” said Navot. “Tell the world that Konstantin Kirov was working for us.”
“At this point, it would smell like a cover story. And it would send a message to every potential asset that we are incapable of protecting those who work for us. It’s too high a price to pay.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I’m going to start by finding out who gave the Russians the address of our safe flat in Vienna.”
“In case you were wondering,” said Navot, “it wasn’t me.”
“Don’t worry, Uzi. I believe you.”
7 (#ulink_afa68786-aae6-5077-a208-c3c96c43553d)
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV (#ulink_afa68786-aae6-5077-a208-c3c96c43553d)
It had been Uzi Navot’s wish, during the final year of his term as chief, to move the headquarters of the Office from King Saul Boulevard to a flashy new complex just north of Tel Aviv, in Ramat HaSharon. Bella was said to be the driving force behind the relocation. She had never cared for the old building, even when she worked there as a Syria analyst, and found it unbecoming of an intelligence service with a global reach. She wanted an Israeli version of Langley or Vauxhall Cross, a modern monument to Israel’s intelligence prowess. She personally approved the architectural designs, lobbied the prime minister and the Knesset for the necessary funding, and even chose the location—an empty plot of land along a high-tech corridor near the Glilot Interchange, adjacent to a shopping center and multiplex called Cinema City. But Gabriel, in one of his first official acts, had with an elegant stroke of his pen swiftly shelved the plans. In matters of both intelligence and art, he was a traditionalist who believed the old ways were better than the new. And under no circumstances would he countenance moving the Office to a place known colloquially in Israel as Glilot Junction. “What on earth will we call ourselves?” he had asked Eli Lavon. “We’ll be a laughingstock.”
The old building was not without its charms and, perhaps more important, its sense of history. Yes, it was drab and featureless, but like Eli Lavon it had the advantage of anonymity. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services.
Gabriel’s office was on the uppermost floor, overlooking the sea. Its walls were hung with paintings—a few by his own hand, unsigned, and several others by his mother—and in one corner stood an old Italian easel upon which the analysts propped their photographs and diagrams when they came to brief him. Navot had taken his large glass desk to his new office on the other side of the antechamber, but he had left behind his modern video wall, with its collage of global news channels. As Gabriel entered the room, several of the screens flickered with images of Vienna, and in the panel reserved for the BBC World Service he saw his own face. He increased the volume and learned that British prime minister Jonathan Lancaster, a man who owed his career to Gabriel, was said to be “deeply concerned” over the allegations of Israeli involvement in the death of Konstantin Kirov.
Gabriel lowered the volume and went into his private bathroom to shower and shave and change into clean clothing. Returning to his office, he found Yaakov Rossman, the chief of Special Ops, waiting. Yaakov had hair like steel wool and a hard, pitted face. He held a letter-size envelope in his hand and was glaring at the BBC.
“Can you believe Lancaster?”
“He has his reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Protecting his intelligence service.”
“Duplicitous bastards,” murmured Yaakov. “We should never have granted them access to Kirov’s material.” He dropped the envelope on Gabriel’s desk.
“What’s that?”
“My letter of resignation.”
“Why would you write such a thing?”
“Because we lost Kirov.”
“Are you to blame?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gabriel picked up the envelope and fed it into his shredder. “Is anyone else thinking about tendering their resignation?”
“Rimona.”
Rimona Stern was the head of Collections. As such, she was responsible for running Office agents worldwide. Gabriel snatched up the receiver of his internal phone and dialed her office.
“Get down here. And bring Yossi.”
Gabriel rang off and a moment later Rimona came rushing through the door. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a notoriously short temper. She came by it naturally; her uncle was Ari Shamron. Gabriel had known Rimona since she was a child.
“Yaakov says you have something for me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your letter of resignation. Let me have it.”
“I haven’t written it yet.”
“Don’t bother, I won’t accept it.”
Gabriel looked at Yossi Gavish, who was now leaning in the doorway. He was tall and balding and tweedy and carried himself with a donnish detachment. He had been born in the Golders Green section of London and had earned a first-class degree at Oxford before immigrating to Israel. He still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent and received regular shipments of tea from a shop in Piccadilly.
“What about you, Yossi? Are you thinking about resigning, too?”
“Why should I get the sack? I’m only an analyst.”
Gabriel smiled briefly in spite of himself. Yossi was no mere analyst. He was the chief of the entire department, which, in the lexicon of the Office, was known as Research. Oftentimes, he did not know the identities of highly placed assets, only their code names and pseudonyms, but he was among the small circle of officers who had been granted unlimited access to Kirov’s file.
“No more talk about resignation. Do you hear me?” asked Gabriel. “Besides, if anyone’s going to lose his job, it’s me.”
“You?” asked Yossi.
“Didn’t you read the newspapers? Haven’t you been watching television?” Gabriel’s gaze drifted to the video wall. “They’re baying for my blood.”
“This too shall pass.”
“Maybe,” admitted Gabriel, “but I’d like you to increase my chances of survival.”
“How?”
“By bringing me the name of the person who signed Kirov’s death warrant.”
“It wasn’t me,” quipped Yaakov.
“I’m glad we cleared that up.” Gabriel looked at Rimona. “How about you? Did you betray Kirov to the Russians?”
Rimona frowned.
“Or maybe it was you, Yossi. You always struck me as the treacherous type.”
“Don’t look at me, I’m only an analyst.”
“Then go back to your office and start analyzing. And bring me that name.”
“It’s not something that can be done quickly. It’s going to take time.”
“Of course.” Gabriel sat down at his desk. “You have seventy-two hours.”
The rest of the day passed with a torture-chamber slowness; there seemed to be no end to it. There was always one more question for which Gabriel had no answer. He consoled himself by attempting to console others. He did so in small gatherings, for unlike the headquarters of the CIA or MI6, King Saul Boulevard had no formal auditorium. It was Shamron’s doing. He believed that spies should never congregate in their place of work, either for purposes of celebration or for mourning. Nor did he approve of American-style motivational speeches. The threats facing Israel, he said, were incentive enough.
In late afternoon, as vermilion light flooded Gabriel’s room, he received a summons from the prime minister. He cleared his desk of several routine matters, checked in on a pair of ongoing operations, and at half past eight climbed, exhausted, into his motorcade for the drive to Kaplan Street in Jerusalem. Like all visitors to the prime minister’s office, he was forced to surrender his mobile phone before entering. The anti-eavesdropping box into which he placed the device was known as the “beehive,” and the secure area beyond was the “fishbowl.” The prime minister greeted Gabriel cordially but with a distinct coolness. An inquiry involving his personal finances was threatening to unravel his premiership, the longest since David Ben-Gurion’s. The last thing he needed now was a scandal involving his intelligence service.
Ordinarily, Gabriel and the prime minister adjourned to the comfortable seating area for briefings or private discussions, but on that evening the prime minister chose to remain at his desk beneath the portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of the nineteenth-century Zionist movement that led to the reconstitution of Jewish rule over a portion of historic Palestine. Under Herzl’s unremitting gaze, Gabriel relayed the facts as he knew them to be. The prime minister listened impassively, as motionless as the man in the photograph over his shoulder.
“Do you know how I spent my day?” he asked when Gabriel had finished.
“I can only imagine.”
“Eighteen of my foreign counterparts took it upon themselves to phone me directly. Eighteen! That’s the most in a single day since our last war in Gaza. And all of them asked the same question. How could I be so reckless as to permit my celebrated intelligence chief to gun down a Russian intelligence officer in the heart of Vienna?”
“You did no such thing. Nor did I.”
“I tried to explain that, and not a single one believed me.”
“I’m not sure I would have believed you, either,” admitted Gabriel.
“Even my friend in the White House was skeptical. Some nerve,” murmured the prime minister. “He’s in more trouble than I am. And that’s saying something.”
“I don’t suppose Jonathan Lancaster called.”
The prime minister shook his head. “But the chancellor of Austria kept me on the phone for almost an hour. He told me he had incontrovertible proof we were behind the Russian’s murder. He also asked me whether we wanted the body of our assassin back.”
“Did he elaborate on the evidence?”
“No. But it didn’t sound like he was bluffing. He made it clear that diplomatic sanctions are on the table.”
“How serious?”
“Expulsions. Maybe a full break in diplomatic relations. Who knows? They might issue an arrest warrant or two.” The prime minister regarded Gabriel for a moment. “I don’t want to lose a Western European embassy over this. Or the chief of my intelligence service.”
“On that,” said Gabriel, “we are in complete agreement.”
The prime minister glanced at the television, where a newscast played silently. “You’ve managed to dislodge me from the lead position. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t my intention.”
“There are serious voices calling for an independent review.”
“There’s nothing to review. We didn’t kill Konstantin Kirov.”
“It certainly looks like you did. A review might be necessary for appearances’ sake.”
“We can handle it ourselves.”
“Can you?” The prime minister’s tone was dubious.
“We’ll find out what went wrong,” said Gabriel. “And if we bear any blame, appropriate measures will be taken.”
“You’re starting to sound like a politician.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
The prime minister smiled coldly. “Not at all.”
8 (#ulink_1665a7d4-3c43-5122-bcb6-6f70db8ce5d4)
NARKISS STREET, JERUSALEM (#ulink_1665a7d4-3c43-5122-bcb6-6f70db8ce5d4)
Chiara rarely watched television in the evening. Raised in the cloistered world of Venice’s Jewish ghetto, educated at the University of Padua, she regarded herself as an ancient woman and was disdainful of modern distractions such as smartphones, social media, and fiber-optic television systems that delivered one thousand high-definition channels of largely unwatchable fare. Usually, Gabriel arrived home to find her engrossed in some weighty historical tract—she was commencing work on a PhD in the history of the Roman Empire when she was recruited by the Office—or in one of the serious literary novels she received by post from a bookseller on the Via Condotti in Rome. Lately, she had started reading pulp spy novels as well. They provided her with a connection, however tenuous and improbable, to the life she had gladly given up to become a mother.
On that evening, however, Gabriel arrived at his heavily guarded apartment in the Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem to find his wife glaring at one of the American cable news networks. A reporter was recounting, with obvious skepticism, Israel’s stated contention that it had had nothing to do with the events in Vienna. The chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service, he intoned, had just departed Kaplan Street. According to one of the prime minister’s national security aides, who wished to remain anonymous, the meeting had gone as well as could be expected.
“Is any of it true?” asked Chiara.
“I had a meeting with the prime minister. That’s about the extent of it.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“He didn’t offer me Chinese food. I took it as a bad sign.”
Chiara aimed the remote at the screen and pressed the power button. She wore a pair of stretch jeans that flattered her long slender legs, and a sweater the color of clotted cream, upon which her dark hair, with its shimmering auburn and chestnut highlights, tumbled riotously. Her eyes were the color of caramel and flecked with gold. At present, they were appraising Gabriel with thinly veiled pity. He could only imagine how he looked to her. The stress of the field had always been unkind to his appearance. His first operation, Wrath of God, had left him with gray hair at the age of twenty-five. He had gone swiftly downhill after that.
“Where are the children?” he asked.
“Out with friends. They told us not to wait up.” She raised an eyebrow provocatively. “We have the place all to ourselves. Perhaps you’d like to drag me to bed and have your way with me.”
Gabriel was sorely tempted; it had been a long time since Gabriel had made love with his beautiful young wife. There was no time for it. Chiara had two children to raise, and Gabriel a country to protect. They saw one another for a few minutes each morning and, if they were lucky, for an hour or so in the evening when Gabriel returned from work. He had use of an Office safe flat in Tel Aviv for those nights when events didn’t permit him to make the long drive to Jerusalem. He hated it, the flat. It reminded him of what his life had been like before Chiara. The Office had brought them together. And now it was conspiring to keep them apart.
“Do you think it’s possible,” he asked, “that the children slipped back into the apartment without your knowing it?”
“Anything’s possible. Why don’t you check?”
Gabriel moved silently to the door of the children’s room and entered. Before departing for Vienna, he had traded out their cribs for a pair of junior beds, which meant they were free to move nocturnally about the apartment at will. For now, though, they were sleeping soundly beneath a mural of Titianesque clouds that Gabriel had painted after a blood-soaked confrontation with the Russian secret service.
He leaned down and kissed Raphael’s forehead. The child’s face, lit by a shaft of light from the half-open door, looked shockingly like Gabriel’s. He had even been cursed with Gabriel’s green eyes. Irene, however, looked more like Gabriel’s mother, for whom she was named. Chiara was the forgotten ingredient of the children’s genetic recipe. Time would change that, thought Gabriel. A beauty like Chiara’s could not be suppressed forever.
“Is that you, Abba?”
It was Irene. Raphael could sleep through a bomb blast, but Irene, like Gabriel, was easily woken. He thought she had the makings of a perfect spy.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he whispered. “It’s me.”
“Stay for a while.”
Gabriel sat down at the edge of her bed.
“Pat my back,” she commanded, and he laid his hand gently on the warm fabric of her pajamas. “Did you have a good trip?”
“No,” he answered honestly.
“I saw you on television.”
“Did you?”
“You looked very serious.”
“Where did you learn a word like that?”
“Like what?”
“Serious.”
“From Mama.”
Such was the language of the Allon household. The children referred to Gabriel as “Abba,” the Hebrew world for father, but Chiara they called only “Mama.” They were learning Hebrew and Italian simultaneously, along with German. As a result, they spoke a language only their parents could possibly comprehend.
“Where did you go, Abba?”
“Nowhere interesting.”
“You always say that.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
The children had only the vaguest sense of what their father did for a living. They knew that his picture sometimes appeared on television, that he was recognized in public places, and that he was surrounded constantly by men with guns. So were they.
“Did you take good care of your mother while I was gone?”
“I tried, but she was sad.”
“Was she? Why?”
“Something she saw on television.”
“Be a good girl and go back to sleep.”
“Can I sleep with you and Mama?”
“Absolutely not.”
His tone was stern. Even so, Irene giggled. This was the one place where no one followed his orders. He patted the child’s back for another minute more, until her breathing grew deep and regular. Then he lifted himself cautiously from the edge of the bed and moved toward the door.
“Abba?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Can I have one last kiss?”
He kissed her more times than he could possibly count. He kissed her until, happily, she begged him to leave.
Entering the kitchen, Gabriel found a stockpot of water bubbling on the stovetop and Chiara working a lump of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese over the surface of a grater. She did so deftly and seemingly without effort, the way she did most things, including caring for the children. When she had produced the allotted amount, she traded the lump of Parmigiano-Reggiano for Pecorino and grated that, too. Gabriel quickly surveyed the other ingredients arrayed on the counter. Butter, olive oil, a tall pepper grinder: the makings of cacio e pepe. The simple Roman pasta dish was one of his favorites, especially the way Chiara prepared it.
“You know,” he said, watching her work, “there’s a very nice man in the Mahane Yehuda Market who will do that for you.”
“Or maybe I should just buy it in a jar at the supermarket.” She shook her head reproachfully. “The cheese has to be grated to the proper consistency. Otherwise, the results will be disastrous.”
He frowned at the small television at the end of the counter. “Just like Vienna.”
Chiara plucked a strand of spaghetti from the pot and after testing it poured the rest through a colander. Next she tossed it with melted butter, olive oil, the grated cheeses, and a few ounces of pasta water, and seasoned the dish with enough pepper to give it a bit of bite. They ate together at the little café table in the kitchen, the baby monitor between them, the television playing silently. Gabriel declined Chiara’s offer of Tuscan red wine; only heaven knew what the night might bring. She poured a small glass for herself and listened intently to his description of the events in Vienna.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We undertake a rapid but unsparing review to determine where the leak occurred.”
“Who knew the address of the safe flat?”
“Eli, Mikhail, the Neviot officers, the deskman from Housekeeping who rented it, and six field security men, including my bodyguards. And Uzi, of course.”
“You didn’t mention the British.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Surely, you have a suspect.”
“I wouldn’t want to prejudice the investigation in any way.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with the prime minister.”
“It’s one of the hazards of my new job.”
Chiara’s gaze wandered to the television. “Forgive me for what I’m about to say, but Uzi must be secretly enjoying this. Kirov was recruited on his watch. And now he’s dead.”
“Uzi has been nothing but supportive.”
“He has no choice. But try to imagine how this looks from his point of view. He ran the Office competently for six years. Not brilliantly,” she added, “but competently. And for his reward, he was pushed out in favor of you.”
A silence fell between them. There was only the rhythmic breathing of the children on the monitor.
“You were adorable with Irene,” said Chiara at last. “She was so excited you were coming home that she refused to go to sleep. I must say, Raphael deals with your absences rather well. He’s a stoic young boy, just like his father must have been. But Irene misses you terribly when you’re away.” She paused, then added, “Almost as much as I do.”
“If this affair turns into a full-fledged scandal, you might be seeing much more of me.”
“Nothing would make us happier. But the prime minister would never dare fire the great Gabriel Allon. You’re the most popular figure in the country.”
“Second,” said Gabriel. “That actress is much more popular than I am.”
“Don’t believe those polls, they’re never right.” Chiara smiled. “You know, Gabriel, there are worse things than being fired.”
“Like what?”
“Having your brains blown out by a Russian assassin.” She raised her wineglass to her lips. “Are you sure you won’t have a little? It’s really quite good.”
9 (#ulink_3fb4d32e-319e-51d0-8878-b4b24d32f8d7)
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV (#ulink_3fb4d32e-319e-51d0-8878-b4b24d32f8d7)
The concerns of the prime minister notwithstanding, Gabriel left the inquiry in the hands of Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern, two of his most trusted senior officers and closest friends. His reasons were personal. The Office’s last independent inquiry, conducted after a string of botched operations in the late 1990s, had hastened the recall of Ari Shamron from his restless retirement. Among his first official acts was to make his way to West Cornwall, where Gabriel had locked himself away in an isolated cottage with only his paintings and his grief for company. Shamron, as usual, had not arrived empty-handed; he had come bearing an operation. It would prove to be the first step of Gabriel’s long journey from self-imposed exile to the executive suite of King Saul Boulevard. The moral of the story, at least from Gabriel’s perspective, was that spies admitted outsiders into their midst at their peril.
The first order of business for Yossi and Rimona was to clear themselves of any suspicion over the leak. They did so by submitting to a pair of wholly unnecessary polygraph tests, which they passed with flying colors. Next they requested the assistance of an additional analyst. Reluctantly, Gabriel lent them Dina Sarid, a terrorism expert with a pile of active cases on her cluttered desk, including three involving ISIS that fell into the category of ticking time bombs. Dina knew almost nothing about the Kirov case or the Russian’s pending defection. Even so, Gabriel had her strapped to the poly. Not surprisingly, she passed. So did Eli Lavon, Mikhail Abramov, Yaakov Rossman, the Neviot team, the members of the field security unit, and the desk officer from Housekeeping.
The primary phase of the investigation, which was concluded at noon the following day, was predictable in its findings. The three analysts uncovered no evidence to suggest a leak by any Office personnel. Nor could they find fault with the execution of the operation itself. All had participated in undertakings far more complex than a garden-variety defection and exfiltration. It was, as Yossi wrote in his memorandum, “child’s play, by our standards.” Still, he acknowledged there were “knowns and unknowns.” Chief among them was the possibility the leak had come from none other than Konstantin Kirov himself.
“How?” asked Gabriel.
“You sent a total of four text messages to him that night—is that correct?”
“You have them all, Yossi. You know it’s correct.”
“The first message instructed Kirov to leave the InterContinental and walk to the train station. The second instructed him to board the last train to Vienna. Upon arrival, you told him to take a taxi to the Best Western. But a minute before he arrived there, you sent him the address of the safe flat.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“He was still in the taxi, which meant Mikhail and Keller couldn’t see him clearly.”
“Your point?”
“He could have forwarded the message.”
“To whom?”
“Moscow Center.”
“He had himself killed?”
“Maybe he was under the impression the evening would turn out differently.”
“In what way?”
“A different target, for example.”
“Who?”
Yossi shrugged. “You.”
Which heralded the second phase of the inquiry: a full review of Konstantin Kirov’s recruitment, handling, and enormous output of intelligence. With the benefit of hindsight, the three analysts weighed each of Kirov’s reports. They found no evidence of deception. Kirov, they concluded, was that rarest of birds. Despite the circumstances of his coerced recruitment, he remained as good as gold.
But the Office had not kept Kirov’s precious intelligence to itself; it had shared the bounty with the Americans and the British. Each instance of sharing was logged in Kirov’s voluminous case file: the type of material, the date, the all-important distribution list. No one in Washington or London, however, knew the true identity of the agent code-named Heathcliff, and only a handful of senior officers were aware of his intention to defect. One MI6 officer had been given the address of the Vienna safe flat in advance. He had insisted on it, claiming it was necessary to ensure the defector’s safe transfer to Vienna International Airport, where a Falcon executive jet had been waiting to fly him to London.
“We would have demanded the same thing,” said Uzi Navot. “Besides, having access to a piece of information isn’t the same as having proof he gave it to the Russians.”
“That’s true,” agreed Gabriel. “But it’s a good place to start.”
Navot raised a dainty china teacup to his lips. It contained hot water with a slice of lemon. Next to the saucer was a plate of celery sticks. They were carefully arranged so as to enhance their appeal. Clearly, Bella was unhappy with Navot’s current weight, which fluctuated like a Latin American stock exchange. Poor Uzi had spent the better part of the last decade on a diet. Food was his only weakness, especially the heavy, calorie-laden cuisine of Central and Eastern Europe.
“It’s your call,” he went on, “but if I were in your position, I’d want more than a pile of supposition before making an accusation against an officer from a friendly intelligence service. I’ve actually met him. He doesn’t strike me as the sort to betray his country.”
“I’m sure Angleton said the same thing about Kim Philby.”
Navot, with a sage nod of his head, conceded the point. “So how do you intend to play it?”
“I’m going to fly to London and have a word with our partners.”
“Care for a prediction?”
“Why not?”
“Your partners are going to reject your findings categorically. And then they’ll blame us for what happened in Vienna. That’s the way it works when there’s a disaster in our business. Everyone runs for the nearest foxhole.”
“So I should let it drop? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What I’m saying,” answered Navot, “is that pursuing the issue based on a flimsy estimate is liable to do serious damage to a valuable relationship.”
“There is no relationship between us and the British. It is suspended until further notice.”
“And I was afraid you were going to do something rash.” Lowering his voice, Navot added, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Gabriel.”
“My mother always told me that. I still don’t know what it means.”
“It means you should drop that report into your shredder.”
“Not a chance.”
“In that case,” said Navot with a sigh, “you should send someone back to Vienna to see if he can add a few more details. Someone who speaks the language like a native. Someone with a contact or two inside the local security service. Who knows? If he plays his cards right, he might be able to disabuse the Austrians of the notion we killed our own defector.”
“Know anyone who fits the bill?”
“I might.”
Gabriel smiled. “You can have a nice Wiener schnitzel while you’re in town, Uzi. I know how much you love the way they make it in Vienna.”
“And the Rindsgulasch.” Navot ran a hand absently over his ample midsection. “Just what I need. Bella’s liable to put me on punishment rations.”
“You sure you don’t mind going?”
“Someone has to do it.” Navot stared morosely at the plate of celery sticks. “It might as well be me.”
10 (#ulink_96e4c511-34d7-5b06-8391-53220615b991)
VIENNA WOODS, AUSTRIA (#ulink_96e4c511-34d7-5b06-8391-53220615b991)
Uzi Navot passed an uneventful evening with Bella at their comfortable home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, and in the morning, having risen at the hateful hour of three, he boarded the five-ten El Al flight to Warsaw, known affectionately inside the Office as the Polish Express. His overnight bag contained two changes of clothing and three changes of identity. His seatmate, a woman of thirty-three from a town in the Upper Galilee, did not recognize him. Navot was both relieved and, when he analyzed his feelings honestly, deeply resentful. For six years he had led the Office without blemish, and yet already he was forgotten. He had long ago resigned himself to the fact he would be remembered merely as a placeholder chief, the one who had kept a chair warm for the chosen one. He was an asterisk.
But he was also, at his core, a fine spy. Admittedly, he was no action figure like Gabriel. Navot was a true spy, a recruiter and runner of agents, a collector of other men’s secrets. Before his bureaucratic ascent at King Saul Boulevard, Western Europe had been his primary field of battle. Armed with an array of languages, a fatalistic charm, and a small fortune in financing, he had recruited a far-flung network of agents inside terrorist organizations, embassies, foreign ministries, and security services. One was Werner Schwarz. Navot rang him that evening from a hotel room in Prague. Werner sounded as though he’d had one or two more than was good for him. Werner was rather too fond of his drink. He was unhappily married. The alcohol was anesthesia.
“I’ve been expecting your call.”
“I really hate to be predictable.”
“A drawback in your line of work,” said Werner Schwarz. “I suppose Vienna is in your travel plans.”
“Tomorrow, actually.”
“The day after would be better.”
“I have time considerations, Werner.”
“We can’t meet in Vienna. My service is on edge.”
“Mine, too.”
“I can only imagine. How about that little wine garden in the Woods? You remember it, don’t you?”
“With considerable fondness.”
“And who will I be dining with?”
“A Monsieur Laffont.” Vincent Laffont was one of Navot’s old cover identities. He was a freelance travel writer of Breton descent who lived out of a suitcase.
“I look forward to seeing him again. Vincent was always one of my favorites,” said Werner Schwarz, and rang off.
Navot, as was his habit, arrived at the restaurant thirty minutes early, bearing a decorative box from Demel, the famous Viennese chocolatier. He had eaten most of the treats during the drive and in their place tucked five thousand euros in cash. The owner of the restaurant, a small man shaped like a Russian nesting doll, remembered him. And Navot, playing the role of Monsieur Laffont, regaled him with stories of his latest travels before settling in a quiet corner of the timbered dining room. He ordered a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, confident it would not be the last. Only three other tables were occupied, and all three parties were in the last throes of their luncheon. Soon the place would be deserted. Navot always liked a bit of ambient noise when he was doing his spying, but Werner preferred to betray his country unobserved.
He arrived at the stroke of three, dressed for the office in a dark suit and overcoat. His appearance had changed since Navot had seen him last, and not necessarily for the better. A bit thicker and grayer, a few more broken blood vessels across his cheeks. His eyes brightened as Navot filled two glasses with wine. Then the usual disappointment returned. Werner Schwarz wore it like a loud necktie. Navot had spotted it during one of his fishing trips to Vienna, and with a bit of money and pillow talk he had reeled Werner into his net. From his post inside the BVT, Austria’s capable internal security service, he had kept Navot well informed about matters of interest to the State of Israel. Navot had been forced to relinquish control of Werner during his tenure as chief. For several years they had had no contact other than the odd clandestine Christmas card and the regular cash deposits in Werner’s Zurich bank account.
“A little something for Lotte,” said Navot as he handed Werner the box.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“It was the least I could do. I know you’re a busy man.”
“Me? I have access but no real responsibility. I sit in meetings and bide my time.”
“How much longer?”
“Maybe two years.”
“We won’t forget you, Werner. You’ve been good to us.”
The Austrian waved his hand dismissively. “I’m not some girl you picked up in a bar. Once I retire, you’ll struggle to remember my name.”
Navot didn’t bother with a denial.
“And what about you, Monsieur Laffont? Still in the game, I see.”
“For a few more rounds, at least.”
“Your service treated you shabbily. You deserved better.”
“I had a good run.”
“Only to be cast aside for Allon.” In a confessional murmur, Werner Schwarz asked, “Did he really think he could get away with killing an SVR officer in the middle of Vienna?”
“We had nothing to do with it.”
“Uzi, please.”
“You have to believe me, Werner. It wasn’t us.”
“We have evidence.”
“Like what?”
“One of the members of your hit team. The tall one,” Werner Schwarz persisted. “The one who looks like a cadaver. He helped Allon with that little problem at the Stadttempel a few years ago, and Allon was foolish enough to send him back to Vienna to take care of the Russian. You would have never made a mistake like that, Uzi. You were always very cautious.”
Navot ignored Werner’s flattery. “Our officers were present that night,” he admitted, “but not for the reason you think. The Russian was working for us. He was in the process of defecting when he was killed.”
Werner Schwarz smiled. “How long did it take you and Allon to come up with that one?”
“You didn’t actually see the assassination, did you, Werner?”
“There were no cameras at that end of the street, which is why you chose it. The ballistics evidence proves conclusively the operative on the motorcycle was the one who pulled the trigger.” Werner Schwarz paused, then added, “My condolences, by the way.”
“None necessary. He wasn’t ours.”
“He’s sitting on a slab in the central morgue. Do you really intend to leave him there?”
“He’s of no concern to us. Do with him what you please.”
“Oh, we are.”
The proprietor appeared and took their order as the last of the three luncheon parties made their way noisily toward the door. Beyond the windows of the dining room the Vienna Woods were beginning to darken. It was the quiet time, the time Werner Schwarz liked best. Navot filled his wineglass. Then, with no warning or explanation, he spoke a name.
Werner Schwarz raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”
“Know him?”
“Only by reputation.”
“And what’s that?”
“A fine officer who serves his country’s interests here in Vienna professionally and in accordance with our wishes.”
“Which means he makes no attempt to target the Austrian government.”
“Or our citizenry. Therefore, we let him go about his work unmolested. For the most part,” Werner Schwarz added.
“You keep an eye on him?”
“When resources permit. We’re a small service.”
“And?”
“He’s very good at his job. But in my experience, they usually are. Deception seems to come naturally to them.”
“No crimes or misdemeanors? No personal vices?”
“The occasional affair,” said Werner Schwarz.
“Anyone in particular?”
“He got himself involved with the wife of an American consular officer a couple of years ago. It caused quite a row.”
“How was it handled?”
“The American consular officer was transferred to Copenhagen, and the wife went back to Virginia.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s been taking a lot of flights to Bern, which is interesting because Bern isn’t part of his territory.”
“You think he’s got a new girl there?”
“Or maybe something else. As you know, our authority stops at the Swiss border.” The first course arrived, a chicken liver terrine for Navot and for Werner Schwarz the smoked duck breast. “Am I allowed to ask why you’re so interested in this man?”
“It’s a housekeeping matter. Nothing more.”
“Is it connected to the Russian?”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“The timing, that’s all.”
“Two birds with one stone,” explained Navot airily.
“It’s not so easily done.” Werner Schwarz dabbed his lips with a starched napkin. “Which brings us back to the man lying in the central morgue. How long do you intend to carry on this pretense he isn’t yours?”
“Do you really think,” said Navot evenly, “that Gabriel Allon would allow you to bury a Jew in an unmarked grave in Vienna?”
“I’ll grant you that’s not Allon’s style. Not after what he’s been through in this city. But the man in the morgue isn’t Jewish. At least not ethnically Jewish.”
“How do you know?”
“When the Bundespolizei couldn’t identify him, they ordered a test of his DNA.”
“And?”
“Not a trace of the Ashkenazi gene. Nor does he have the DNA markers of a Sephardic Jew. No Arabian, North African, or Spanish blood. Not a single drop.”
“So what is he?”
“He’s Russian. One hundred percent.”
“Imagine that,” said Navot.
11 (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)
ANDALUSIA, SPAIN (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)
The villa clung to the edge of a great crag in the hills of Andalusia. The precariousness of its perch appealed to the woman; it seemed it might lose its grip on the rock at any moment and fall away. There were nights, awake in bed, when she imagined herself tumbling into the abyss, with her keepsakes and her books and her cats swirling about her in a ragged tornado of memory. She wondered how long she might lie dead on the valley floor, entombed in the debris of her solitary existence, before anyone noticed. Would the authorities give her a decent burial? Would they notify her child? She had left a few carefully concealed clues concerning the child’s identity in her personal effects, and in the beginnings of a memoir. Thus far, she had managed only eleven pages, handwritten in pencil, each page marked by the brown ring of her coffee mug. She had a title, though, which she regarded as a notable achievement, as titles were always so difficult. She called it The Other Woman.
The scant eleven pages, the sum total of her labors, she regarded less charitably, for her days were nothing if not a vast empty quarter of time. What’s more, she was a journalist, at least she had masqueraded as one in her youth. Perhaps it was the topic that blocked her path forward. Writing about the lives of others— the dictator, the freedom fighter, the man who sells olives and spice in the souk—had for her been a relatively straightforward process. The subject spoke, his words were weighed against the available facts—yes, his words, because in those days women were of no consequence—and a few hundred words would spill onto the page, hopefully with enough flair and insight as to warrant a small payment from a faraway editor in London or Paris or New York. But writing about oneself, well, that was an altogether different matter. It was like attempting to recall the details of an auto accident on a darkened road. She’d had one once, with him, in the mountains near Beirut. He’d been drunk, as usual, and abusive, which was not like him. She supposed he had a right to be angry; she had finally worked up the nerve to tell him about the baby. Even now, she wondered whether he had been trying to kill her. He’d killed a good many others. Hundreds, in fact. She knew that now. But not then.
She worked, or pretended to work, in the mornings, in the shadowed alcove beneath the stairs. She had been sleeping less and rising earlier. She supposed it was yet another unwelcome consequence of growing old. On that morning she was more prolific than usual, an entire page of polished prose with scarcely a correction or revision. Still, she had yet to complete the first chapter. Or would she call it a prologue? She’d always been dubious about prologues; she regarded them as cheap devices wielded by lesser writers. In her case, however, a prologue was justified, for she was starting her story not at the beginning but in the middle, a stifling afternoon in August 1974 when a certain Comrade Lavrov—it was a pseudonym—brought her a letter from Moscow. It bore neither the name of the sender nor the date it was composed. Even so, she knew it was from him, the English journalist she had known in Beirut. The prose betrayed him.
It was half past eleven in the morning when she set down her pencil. She knew this because the tinny alarm on her Seiko wristwatch reminded her to take her next pill. It was her heart that ailed her. She swallowed the bitter little tablet with the cold dregs of her coffee and locked the manuscript—it was a pretentious word, admittedly, but she could think of no other—in the antique Victorian strongbox beneath her writing table. The next item on her busy daily schedule, her ritual bath, consumed all of forty minutes, followed by another half hour of careful grooming and dressing, after which she left the villa and set out through the fierce early-afternoon glare toward the center of the village.
The town was white as dried bone, famously white, and balanced atop the highest point of the incisor-like crag. One hundred and fourteen normal paces along the paseo brought her to the new hotel, and another two hundred and twenty-eight steps carried her across a patch of olive and scrub oak to the edge of the centre ville, which was how, privately, she referred to it, even now, even after all her years of splendid exile. It was a game she had played with her child long ago in Paris, the counting of steps. How many steps to cross the courtyard to the street? How many steps to span the Pont de la Concorde? How many steps until a child of ten disappeared from her mother’s sight? The answer was twenty-nine.
A graffiti artist had defiled the first sugar-cube dwelling with a Spanish-language obscenity. She thought his work rather decent, a hint of color, like a throw pillow, to break the monotony of white. She wound her way higher through the town to the Calle San Juan. The shopkeepers watched her disdainfully as she passed. They had many names for her, none flattering. They called her la loca, the crazy one, or la roja, a reference to the color of her politics, which she’d made no attempt to hide, contrary to the instructions of Comrade Lavrov. In fact, there were few shops in the village where she had not had an altercation of some sort, always over money. She regarded the shopkeepers as vulture capitalists, and they thought her, justifiably, a communist and a troublemaker, and an imported one at that.
The café where she preferred to take her midday meal was in a square near the town’s summit. There was a hexagonal islet with a handsome lamp at its center and on the eastern flank a church, ocher instead of white, another respite from the sameness. The café itself was a no-nonsense affair—plastic tables and chairs, plastic tablecloths of a peculiarly Scottish pattern—but three lovely orange trees, heavy with fruit, shaded the terrace. The waiter was a friendly young Moroccan from some godforsaken hamlet in the Rif Mountains. For all she knew, he was an ISIS fanatic who was plotting to slit her throat at the earliest opportunity, but he was one of the few people in the town who treated her kindly. They addressed one another in Arabic, she in the stilted classical Arabic she had learned in Beirut, he in the Maghrebi dialect of North Africa. He was generous with the ham and the sherry, despite the fact he disapproved of both.
“Did you see the news from Palestine today?” He placed a tortilla española before her. “The Zionists have closed the Temple Mount.”
“Outrageous. If the fools don’t open it soon, it will be the ruin of them.”
“Inshallah.”
“Yes,” she agreed as she sipped a pale Manzanilla. “Inshallah, indeed.”
Over coffee she scratched a few lines into her Moleskine notebook, memories of that August afternoon so long ago in Paris, impressions. Diligently, she tried to segregate what she knew then from what she knew now, to place herself, and the reader, in the moment, without the bias of time. When the bill appeared, she left twice the requested amount and went into the square. For some reason the church beckoned. She climbed its steps—there were four—and heaved on the studded wooden door. Cool air rushed out at her like an exhalation of breath. Instinctively, she stretched a hand toward the font and dipped the tips of her fingers into the holy water, but stopped before performing the ritual self-blessing. Surely, she thought, the earth would tremble and the curtain in the temple would tear itself in two.
The nave was in semidarkness and deserted. She took a few hesitant steps up the center aisle and inhaled the familiar scents of incense and candle smoke and beeswax. She’d always loved the smell of churches but thought the rest of it was for the birds. As usual, God on his Roman instrument of execution did not speak to her or stir her to rapture, but a statue of the Madonna and Child, hovering above a stand of votive candles, moved her quite unexpectedly to tears.
She shoved a few coins through the slot of the box and stumbled into the sunlight. It had turned cold without warning, the way it did in the mountains of Andalusia in winter. She hurried toward the base of the town, counting her steps, wondering why at her age it was harder to walk downhill than up. The little El Castillo supermarket had awakened from its siesta. From the orderly shelves she plucked a few items for her supper and carried them in a plastic sack across the wasteland of oak and olive, past the new hotel, and finally into the prison of her villa.
The cold followed her inside like a stray animal. She lit a fire in the grate and poured herself a whisky to take the chill out of her bones. The savor of smoke and charred wood made her think, involuntarily, of him. His kisses always tasted of whisky.
She carried the glass to her alcove beneath the stairs. Above the writing desk, books lined a single shelf. Her eyes moved left to right across the cracked and faded spines. Knightley, Seale, Boyle, Wright, Brown, Modin, Macintyre, Beeston … There was also a paperback edition of his dishonest memoir. Her name appeared in none of the volumes. She was his best-kept secret. No, she thought suddenly, his second best.
She opened the Victorian strongbox and removed a leatherbound scrapbook, so old it smelled only of dust. Inside, carefully pasted to its pages, was the meager ration of photographs, clippings, and letters Comrade Lavrov had allowed her to take from her old apartment in Paris—and a few more she had managed to keep without his knowledge. She had only eight yellowed snapshots of her child, the last one taken, clandestinely, on Jesus Lane in Cambridge. There were many more of him. The long boozy lunches at the St. Georges and the Normandie, the picnics in the hills, the drunken afternoons in the bathing hut at Khalde Beach. And then there were the photos she had taken in the privacy of her apartment when his defenses were down. They had never met in his large flat on the rue Kantari, only in hers. Somehow, Eleanor had never found them out. She supposed deception came naturally to them both. And to their offspring.
She returned the scrapbook to the Victorian strongbox and in the sitting room switched on her outmoded television. The evening news had just begun on La 1. After several minutes of the usual fare—a labor strike, a football riot, more unrest in neighboring Catalonia—there was a story about the assassination of a Russian agent in Vienna, and about the Israeli spymaster alleged to be responsible. She hated the Israeli, if for no other reason than the fact he existed, but at that moment she actually felt a bit sorry for him. The poor fool, she thought. He had no idea what he was up against.
12 (#ulink_858122c7-1cc7-50d9-a2d0-310219e9479f)
BELGRAVIA, LONDON (#ulink_858122c7-1cc7-50d9-a2d0-310219e9479f)
Official protocol dictated that Gabriel inform “C,” the director-general of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, of his intention to visit London. He would be met by a reception committee at Heathrow Airport, shepherded around passport control, and whisked to Vauxhall Cross in a motorcade worthy of a prime minister, a president, or a potentate from some corner of an empire lost. Nearly everyone who mattered in official and secret London would know of his presence. In short, it would be a disaster.
Which explained why Gabriel flew to Paris on a false passport instead and then stole quietly into London on a midday Eurostar train. For his accommodations he chose the Grand Hotel Berkshire on the West Cromwell Road. He paid for a two-night stay in cash—it was that sort of place—and climbed the stairs to his room because the lift was out of order. It was that sort of place, too.
He hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the latch and engaged the safety bar before lifting the receiver of the room phone. It smelled of the last occupant’s aftershave. He started to dial but stopped himself. The call would be monitored by GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence service, and almost certainly by the American NSA, both of which knew the sound of his voice in multiple languages.
He replaced the receiver and opened a text-to-speech application on his mobile phone. After typing the message and selecting the language in which he wanted it read, he lifted the foul-smelling receiver a second time and dialed the number to completion.
A male voice answered, cool and distant, as though annoyed by an unwanted interruption. Gabriel held the speaker of the mobile to the mouthpiece of the room phone and pressed the PLAY icon. The software’s automated voice stressed all the wrong words and syllables but managed to convey his wishes. He wanted a word with “C” in private, far from Vauxhall Cross and without the knowledge of anyone else inside MI6. He could be reached at the Grand Hotel Berkshire, room 304. He did not have long to wait.
When the playback of the message was complete, Gabriel rang off and watched the rush-hour traffic hurtling along the road. Twenty minutes elapsed before the room phone finally rattled with an incoming call. The voice that spoke to Gabriel was human. “Fifty-six Eaton Square, seven o’clock. Business casual.” Then there was a click, and the call went dead.
Gabriel had expected to be sent to a dreary MI6 safe house in a place like Stockwell or Stepney or Maida Vale, and so the address in tony Belgravia came as something of a surprise. It corresponded to a large Georgian dwelling overlooking the square’s southwestern quadrant. The house, like its neighbors along the terrace, had a snow-white stucco exterior on the ground floor, with tan brick on the upper four. A light burned brightly between the pillars of the portico, and the bell push, when thumbed by Gabriel, produced a sonorous tolling within. While awaiting a response, he surveyed the other houses along the square. Most were darkened, evidence that one of London’s most sought-after addresses was the preserve of wealthy absentee owners from Arabia and China and, of course, Russia.
At last, there were footfalls, the crack of high heels on a marble floor. Then the door withdrew, revealing a tall woman of perhaps sixty-five, in fashionable black pants and a jacket with a pattern that looked like Gabriel’s palette after a long day’s work. She had resisted the siren’s song of plastic surgery or collagen implants and thus had retained an elegant, dignified beauty. Her right hand was holding the latch, her left a glass of white wine. Gabriel smiled. It promised to be an interesting evening.
She returned his smile. “My God, it’s really you.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Hurry inside before someone takes a shot at you or tries to blow you up. I’m Helen, by the way. Helen Seymour,” she added as the door closed with a solid thump. “Surely, Graham’s mentioned me.”
“He never stops talking about you.”
She made a face. “Graham warned me about your dark sense of humor.”
“I’ll do my best to keep it in check.”
“Please don’t. All our other friends are so bloody dull.” She led him along a checkerboard hall, to a vast kitchen that smelled wonderfully of chicken and rice and saffron. “I’m making paella. Graham said you wouldn’t mind.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The chorizo and the shellfish,” she explained. “He assured me you weren’t kosher.”
“I’m not, though I generally avoid the forbidden meats.”
“You can eat around them. That’s what the Arabs do when I make it for them.”
“They come often?” probed Gabriel.
Helen Seymour rolled her eyes.
“Anyone in particular?”
“That Jordanian chap was just here. The one who wears Savile Row suits and speaks like one of us.”
“Fareed Barakat.”
“He’s quite fond of himself. And you, too,” she added.
“We’re on the same side, Fareed and I.”
“And what side is that?”
“Stability.”
“There’s no such thing, my dear. Not anymore.”
Gabriel gave Helen Seymour the room-temperature bottle of Sancerre he had purchased from Sainsbury’s in Berkeley Street. She placed it directly in the freezer.
“I saw your picture in the Times the other day,” she said, closing the door. “Or was it the Telegraph?”
“Both, I’m afraid.”
“It wasn’t one of your better ones. Perhaps this will help.” She poured a large glass of Albariño. “Graham’s waiting for you upstairs. He says you two have something to discuss before dinner. I suppose it has to do with Vienna. I’m not allowed to know.”
“Consider yourself fortunate.”
Gabriel climbed the wide staircase to the second floor. Light spilled from the open doorway of the stately book-lined study where Graham Seymour, the successor of Cumming, Menzies, White, and Oldfield, waited in splendid isolation. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and pewter necktie that matched the color of his plentiful locks. His right hand cradled a cut-glass tumbler filled with a clear distilled beverage. His eyes were fixed on the television screen, where his prime minister was responding to a reporter’s question about Brexit. For his part, Gabriel was glad for the change of subject.
“Please tell Lancaster how much his unwavering support meant to me in the days after Vienna. Let him know he can call anytime he needs a favor.”
“Don’t blame Lancaster,” replied Seymour. “It wasn’t his idea.”
“Whose was it?”
“Mine.”
“Why not keep your mouth shut? Why hang me out to dry?”
“Because you and your team ran a bad operation, and I didn’t want it to rub off on my service or prime minister.” Seymour glanced disapprovingly at Gabriel’s wine and then wandered over to the trolley and refreshed his drink. “Can I interest you in something a bit stronger?”
“An acetone on the rocks, please.”
“Olives or a twist?” With a careful smile, Seymour declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. “You should have let me know you were coming. You’re lucky you didn’t miss me. I’m flying to Washington in the morning.”
“The cherry blossoms aren’t in bloom for at least another three months.”
“Thank God.”
“What’s on the agenda?”
“A routine meeting at Langley to review current joint operations and set future priorities.”
“My invitation must have been lost in the mail.”
“There are some things we do without your knowledge. We’re family, after all.”
“Distant family,” said Gabriel.
“And getting more distant by the day.”
“The alliance has been under strain before.”
“Strain, yes, but this is different. We are facing the very real prospect of the collapse of the international order. The same order, I might add, that gave birth to your country.”
“We can look after ourselves.”
“Can you really?” asked Seymour seriously. “For how long? Against how many enemies at once?”
“Let’s talk about something pleasant.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Like Vienna.”
“It was a simple operation,” said Seymour after a moment. “Bring the agent in from the cold, have a word with him in private, put him on a plane to a new life. We do it all the time.”
“So do we,” replied Gabriel. “But this operation was made more complicated by the fact my agent was blown long before he left Moscow.”
“Our agent,” said Seymour pointedly. “We were the ones who agreed to take him in.”
“Which is why,” said Gabriel, “he’s now dead.”
Seymour was squeezing the tumbler so tightly his fingertips had gone white.
“Careful, Graham. You’re liable to break that.”
He placed the glass on the trolley. “Let us stipulate,” he said calmly, “that the available evidence suggests Kirov was blown.”
“Yes, let’s.”
“But let us also stipulate it was your responsibility to bring him in, regardless of the circumstances. You should have spotted the SVR surveillance teams in Vienna and waved him off.”
“We couldn’t spot them, Graham, because there weren’t any. They weren’t necessary. They knew where Kirov was going and that I would be waiting there. That’s how they got the photograph of me leaving the building. That’s how they used their bots, trolls, message boards, and news services to create the impression we were the ones behind Kirov’s killing.”
“Where was the leak?”
“It didn’t come from our service. Which means,” said Gabriel, “it came from yours.”
“I’ve got a Russian spy on my payroll?” asked Seymour. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Gabriel went to the window and gazed at the darkened houses on the opposite side of the square. “Any chance you could put a Harry James record on the gramophone and turn the volume up very loud?”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Seymour, rising. “Come with me.”
13 (#ulink_e2d0141b-cbb4-5a9f-b937-cda062ad7f4d)
EATON SQUARE, LONDON (#ulink_e2d0141b-cbb4-5a9f-b937-cda062ad7f4d)
The door, while outwardly normal in appearance, was mounted within an invisible high-strength steel frame. Graham Seymour opened it by entering the correct eight numerical digits into the keypad on the wall. The chamber beyond was small and cramped, and raised several inches from the floor. There were two chairs, a telephone, and a screen for secure videoconferences.
“An in-home safe-speech room,” said Gabriel. “What will they think of next?”
Seymour lowered himself into one of the chairs and gestured Gabriel into the second. Their knees were touching, like passengers sharing a compartment on a train. The overhead lighting played havoc with Seymour’s handsome features. He looked suddenly like a man Gabriel had never met.
“It’s all rather convenient, isn’t it? And entirely predictable.”
“What’s that?” asked Gabriel.
“You’re looking for a scapegoat to explain your failure.”
“I’d be careful about tossing around the word scapegoat. It makes people like me uneasy.”
Somehow, Seymour managed to maintain a mask of British reserve. “Don’t you dare play that card with me. We go back too far for that.”
“We do indeed. Which is why I thought you might be interested to know that your Head of Station in Vienna is a Russian spy.”
“Alistair Hughes? He’s a fine officer.”
“I’m sure his controllers at Moscow Center feel the same way.” The chamber’s ventilation system roared like an open freezer. “Will you at least give me a hearing?”
“No.”
“In that case, I have no choice but to suspend our relationship.”
Seymour only smiled. “You’re not much of a poker player, are you?”
“I’ve never had much time for trivial pursuits.”
“There’s that card again.”
“Our relationship is like a marriage, Graham. It’s based on trust.”
“In my opinion, most marriages are based either on money or the fear of being alone. And if you divorce me, you won’t have a friend in the world.”
“I can’t operate with you or share intelligence if your Vienna Head is on the Russian payroll. And I’m quite sure the Americans will feel the same way.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Watch me. In fact, I think I’ll tell my good friend Morris Payne about all this in time for your little meeting tomorrow.” Payne was the director of the CIA. “That should liven things up considerably.”
Seymour made no response.
Gabriel glanced at the camera lens above the video screen. “That thing isn’t on, is it?”
Seymour shook his head.
“And no one knows we’re in here?”
“No one but Helen. She adores him, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Alistair Hughes. She thinks he’s dishy.”
“So did the wife of an American diplomat who used to work in Vienna.”
Seymour’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”
“A little bird told me. The same little bird that told me about Alistair Hughes demanding to know the address of the safe flat where I was planning to debrief Kirov.”
“London Control wanted the address, not Alistair.”
“Why?”
“Because it was our responsibility to get Kirov out of Vienna and onto a plane safely. It’s not like ordering a car from Uber. You can’t press a button at the last minute. We had to plan the primary route and put in place a backup in case the Russians intervened. And for that, we needed the address.”
“How many people knew it?”
“In London?” Seymour glanced at the ceiling. “Eight or nine. And another six or seven in Vienna.”
“What about the Vienna Boys’ Choir?” Greeted by silence, Gabriel asked, “How much did the Americans know?”
“Our Head of Station in Washington informed them that Heathcliff was coming out and that we had agreed to grant him defector status. She didn’t tell them any of the operational details.”
“Not the location?”
“City only.”
“Did they know I would be there?”
“They might have.” Seymour made a show of thought. “I’m sorry, but I’m getting a bit confused. Are you accusing the Americans of leaking the information to the Russians, or us?”
“I’m accusing dishy Alistair Hughes.”
“What about the fourteen other MI6 officers who knew the address of your safe flat? How do you know it wasn’t one of them?”
“Because we’re sitting in this room. You brought me here,” said Gabriel, “because you’re afraid I might be right.”
14 (#ulink_56f9f345-4960-5399-a294-d3b7883d88ea)
EATON SQUARE, LONDON (#ulink_56f9f345-4960-5399-a294-d3b7883d88ea)
Graham Seymour sat for a long moment in a contemplative silence, his gaze averted, as though watching the countryside marching past the window of Gabriel’s imaginary train carriage. At last, he quietly spoke a name, a Russian name, that Gabriel struggled to make out over the howling of the ventilation system.
“Gribkov,” Seymour repeated. “Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov. We called him VeeVee for short. He masqueraded as a press attaché at the Russian diplomatic mission in New York. Rather badly, I might add. In reality, he was an SVR officer who trolled for spies at the United Nations. Moscow Center has a massive rezidentura in New York. Our station is much smaller, and yours is smaller still. One man, actually. We know his identity, as do the Americans.”
But that, added Seymour, was neither here nor there. What mattered was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov, during an otherwise tedious diplomatic cocktail party at a posh Manhattan hotel, approached MI6’s man in New York and intimated he wished to discuss something of a highly sensitive nature. The MI6 officer, whom Seymour did not identify, duly reported the contact to London Control. “Because, as any MI6 field officer knows, the surest route to the career ash heap is to conduct an unauthorized heart-to-heart with an SVR hood.” London Control formally blessed the encounter, and three weeks after the initial contact—enough time, said Seymour, to allow Gribkov to come to his senses—the two officers agreed to meet at a remote location east of New York, on Long Island.
“Actually, it was on a smaller island off the coast, a place called Shelter Island. There’s no bridge, only car ferries. Much of the island is a nature preserve, with miles of walking trails where it’s possible to never bump into another living soul. In short, it was the perfect place for an officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service to meet with a Russian who was thinking about betraying his country.”
Gribkov wasted little time on preliminaries or professional niceties. He said he had become disillusioned with the SVR and with Russia under the rule of the Tsar. It was his wish to defect to England along with his wife and two children, who were living with him in New York at the Russian diplomatic compound in the Bronx. He said he could provide MI6 with a treasure trove of intelligence, including one piece of information that would make him the most valuable defector in history. Therefore, he wanted to be well compensated in return.
“How much?” asked Gabriel.
“Ten million pounds in cash and a house in the English countryside.”
“One of those,” said Gabriel contemptuously.
“Yes,” agreed Seymour.
“And the piece of information that made him worthy of such riches?”
“The name of a Russian mole working at the pinnacle of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.”
“Did he specify which service or which side of the divide?”
Seymour shook his head.
“What was your reaction?”
“Caution bordering on skepticism, which is our default opening position. We assumed he was telling us a tall tale, or that he was an agent provocateur sent by Moscow Center to mislead us into carrying out a self-destructive witch hunt for a traitor in our midst.”
“So you told him you weren’t interested?”
“The opposite, actually. We told him we were very interested but that we needed a few weeks to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, we checked his references. Gribkov was no probationer. He was a veteran SVR officer who’d served in several rezidenturas in the West, most recently in Vienna, where he’d had numerous contacts with my Head of Station.”
“Dishy Alistair Hughes.”
Seymour said nothing.
“What was the nature of the contacts?”
“The usual,” said Seymour. “What’s important is that Alistair reported each and every one of them, as he’s required to do. They were all logged in his file, with cross-references in Gribkov’s.”
“So you brought Hughes to Vauxhall Cross to get his impressions of Gribkov and what he was selling.”
“Exactly.”
“And?”
“Alistair was even more skeptical than London Control.”
“Was he really? I’m shocked to hear that.”
Seymour frowned. “By this point,” he said, “six weeks had passed since Gribkov’s initial offer of defection, and he was starting to get nervous. He made two highly inadvisable phone calls to my man in New York. And then he did something truly reckless.”
“What’s that?”
“He reached out to the Americans. As you might expect, Langley was furious at the way we’d handled the case. They put pressure on us to take Gribkov as quickly as possible. They even offered to pay a portion of the ten million. When we resisted, it turned into a full-blown family feud.”
“Who won?”
“Moscow Center,” said Seymour. “While we were bickering with our American cousins, we failed to notice when Gribkov was ordered home for urgent consultations. His wife and children returned to Russia a few days later, and the following month the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations announced the appointment of a new press attaché. Needless to say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov has never been seen or heard from since.”
“Why wasn’t I told about any of this?”
“It didn’t concern you.”
“It concerned me,” said Gabriel evenly, “the minute you let Alistair Hughes within a mile of my operation in Vienna.”
“It didn’t cross our mind not to let him work on the operation.”
“Why not?”
“Because our internal inquiry cleared him of any role in Gribkov’s demise.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. But how exactly did the Russians learn Gribkov was trying to defect?”
“We concluded he must have tipped them off with his behavior. The Americans agreed with our assessment.”
“Thus ending a potentially destabilizing fight among friends. But now you have another dead Russian defector on your hands. And the one common denominator is your Head of Station in Vienna, a man who carried on an extramarital affair with the wife of an American consular officer.”
“Her husband wasn’t a consular officer, he was Agency. And if marital infidelity were an accurate indicator of treason, we wouldn’t have a service. Neither would you.”
“He’s been spending a lot of time across the border in Switzerland.”
“Did your little bird tell you that, too, or have you been watching him?”
“I would never watch one of your officers without telling you, Graham. Friends don’t do that to one another. They don’t keep each other in the dark. Not when lives are at stake.”
Seymour offered no response. He looked suddenly exhausted and weary of the quarrel. Gabriel did not envy his friend’s predicament. A spymaster never won in a situation like this. It was only a question of how badly he lost.
“At the risk of putting my nose somewhere it doesn’t belong,” said Gabriel, “it seems to me you have two choices.”
“Do I?”
“The most logical course of action would be to open an internal investigation into whether Alistair Hughes is flogging your secrets to the Russians. You’ll be obligated to tell the Americans about the inquiry, which will send your relationship into the deep freeze. What’s more, you’ll have to bring your rivals at MI5 into the picture, which is the last thing you want.”
“And the second option?” asked Seymour.
“Let us watch Hughes for you.”
“Surely, you jest.”
“Sometimes. But not now.”
“It’s without precedent.”
“Not entirely,” replied Gabriel. “And it’s not without its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“Hughes knows your surveillance techniques and, perhaps more important, your personnel. If you try to watch him, there’s a good chance he’ll spot you. But if we do it—”
“You’ll have license to rummage into the private affairs of one of my officers.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, Gabriel made it clear that such license was his already, with or without Seymour’s acquiescence. “He won’t be able to hide it from us, Graham, not if he’s under round-the-clock surveillance. If he’s in contact with the Russians, we’ll see it.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll hand the evidence over to you, and you can do with it as you see fit.”
“Or as you see fit.”
Gabriel did not rise to the bait; the contest was nearly over. Seymour lifted his eyes irritably toward the grate in the ceiling. The air was Siberian cold.
“I can’t let you watch my Vienna Head without someone from our side looking over your shoulder,” he said at last. “I want one of my officers on the surveillance team.”
“That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, Graham.” Greeted by silence, Gabriel said, “Given the current circumstances, there’s only one MI6 officer I’d accept.”
“Have you forgotten that he and Alistair know each other?”
“No,” replied Gabriel, “that important fact has not suddenly slipped my mind. But don’t worry, we won’t let them within a mile of each other.”
“Not a word to the Americans,” demanded Seymour.
Gabriel raised his right hand, as though swearing a solemn oath.
“And no access whatsoever to any MI6 files or the inner workings of Vienna station,” Seymour insisted. “Your operation will be limited to physical surveillance only.”
“But his apartment is fair game,” countered Gabriel. “Eyes and ears.”
Seymour made a show of deliberation. “Agreed,” he said finally. “But do try to show a little discretion with your cameras and microphones. A man is entitled to a zone of immunity.”
“Unless he’s spying for the Russians. Then he’s entitled to vysshaya mera.”
“Is that Hebrew?”
“Russian, actually.”
“What does it mean?”
Gabriel punched the eight-digit numerical code into the internal keypad, and the locks opened with a snap.
Seymour frowned. “I’ll have that changed first thing in the morning.”
“Do,” said Gabriel.
Seymour was distracted during dinner, and so it fell to Helen, the perfect service wife, to guide the conversation. She did so with admirable discretion. Gabriel was no stranger to the London press, yet never once did she raise the unpleasant topic of his past exploits on British soil. Only later, as he was preparing to take his leave, did he realize they had spoken of nothing at all.
He had hoped to walk back to his hotel, but a Jaguar limousine waited curbside. Christopher Keller was sitting in the backseat, reading something on his MI6 BlackBerry. “I’d get in if I were you,” he said. “A good friend of the Tsar lives on the other side of the square.”
Gabriel ducked into the car and closed the door. The limousine moved away from the curb with a lurch and a moment later was speeding along the King’s Road through Chelsea.
“How was dinner?” asked Keller warily.
“Almost as bad as Vienna.”
“I hear we’re going back.”
“Not me.”
“Too bad.” Keller stared out the window. “I know how much you love the place.”
15 (#ulink_6a4fc0d7-5f82-5178-b58c-d46329130612)
BRITISH EMBASSY, WASHINGTON (#ulink_6a4fc0d7-5f82-5178-b58c-d46329130612)
The director-general of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had no private aircraft of his own—only the prime minister had such a perquisite—and so Graham Seymour crossed the Atlantic the next morning aboard a chartered Falcon executive jet. He was met on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport by a CIA reception team and driven at high speed through the sprawl of suburban Northern Virginia, to the British Embassy compound on Massachusetts Avenue. Upon arrival, he was shown upstairs for the obligatory meeting with the ambassador, a man he had known nearly all his life. Their fathers had served together in Beirut in the early 1960s. The ambassador’s father had worked for the Foreign Office, Seymour’s for MI6.
“Dinner tonight?” asked the ambassador as he showed Seymour to the door.
“Back to London, I’m afraid.”
“Pity.”
“Quite.”
Seymour’s next stop was the MI6 station, which lay behind a bank vault of a door, a secret kingdom, separate and apart from the rest of the embassy. It was MI6’s largest station by far, and without question its most important. By standing agreement, its officers made no attempt to collect intelligence on American soil. They served merely as liaisons to the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, where they were regarded as valued customers. MI6 had helped to build America’s espionage capability during World War II, and now, decades later, it was still reaping the rewards. The close familial relationship allowed the United Kingdom, a hollowed-out former imperial power with a small military, to play an outsize role on the world stage, and thus maintain the illusion it was a global power to be reckoned with.
Rebecca Manning, the Washington Head of Station, was waiting for Seymour on the other side of the security barrier. She had been beautiful once—far too beautiful to be an intelligence officer, in the opinion of one long-forgotten service recruiter—but now, in the prime of her professional life, she was merely formidably attractive. A stray lock of dark hair fell over a cobalt-blue eye. She moved it aside with one hand and extended the other toward Seymour. “Welcome to Washington,” she intoned, as though the city and all it represented were hers exclusively. “I trust the flight wasn’t too terrible.”
“It gave me a chance to read your briefing materials.”
“There are one or two more points I’d like to review before we leave for Langley. There’s coffee in the conference room.”
She released her grip on Seymour’s hand and led him along the station’s central corridor. Her stylish jacket and skirt smelled faintly of tobacco; she had no doubt stepped into the garden for a quick L&B before Seymour’s arrival. Rebecca Manning was an unrepentant and wholly unapologetic smoker. She had acquired the habit at Cambridge, and it had worsened considerably during a posting in Baghdad. She had also served in Brussels, Paris, Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman, where she had been the Head of Station. It was Seymour, early in his tenure as chief, who had given her the job as H/Washington, as it was known in the lexicon of the service. In doing so, he had virtually anointed her as his successor. Washington would be Rebecca’s final overseas station; there was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere but a final lap at Vauxhall Cross so that she might be formally introduced to the barons of Whitehall. Her appointment would be historic, and long overdue. MI5 had already had two female chiefs—including Amanda Wallace, the current director-general—but Six had never entrusted the reins of power to a woman. It was a legacy Seymour would be proud to leave.
Family ties aside, Washington Station observed the same security procedures as any other post in the world, especially when it came to sensitive conversations between senior officers. The conference room was impervious to electronic eavesdropping. A leather-bound briefing book had been left at Seymour’s place at the table. Inside was the agenda for the meeting with CIA director Morris Payne, along with summaries of current policies, future goals, and ongoing operations. It was one of the most valuable documents in the world of global intelligence. Moscow Center would surely have killed for it.
“Cream?” asked Rebecca Manning.
“Black.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Doctor’s orders.”
“Nothing serious, I trust.”
“My cholesterol is a bit too high. So is my blood pressure. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the job.”
“I gave up worrying about my health a long time ago. If I can survive Baghdad, I can survive anything.” She handed Seymour his coffee. Then she prepared one for herself and frowned. “Coffee without a fag. What’s the point?”
“You really should quit, you know. If I can do it, anyone can.”
“Morris tells me the same thing.”
“I didn’t realize you were on a Christian-name basis.”
“He’s not so bad, Graham.”
“He’s ideological, which makes me nervous. A spy should believe in nothing.” He paused, then added, “Like you, Rebecca.”
“Morris Payne isn’t a spy, he’s the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s an enormous difference.” She opened her copy of the briefing book. “Shall we begin?”
Seymour had never doubted the wisdom of Rebecca Manning’s appointment to Washington, never less so than in the forty-five minutes of her briefing. She moved through the agenda swiftly and sure-footedly—North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the global effort against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Her command of the policy issues was complete, as was her exposure to American covert operations. As MI6’s Head of Station in Washington, Rebecca Manning knew far more about the secret workings of the American intelligence community than most members of the Senate. Her thinking was subtle and sophisticated, and not given to hyperbole or rashness. For Rebecca, the world was not a dangerous place spinning rapidly out of control; it was a problem to be managed by men and women of competence and training.
The last item on the agenda was Russia. It was inherently treacherous ground. The new American president had made no secret of his admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader and expressed a desire for better relations with Moscow. Now he was embroiled in an investigation into whether the Kremlin had provided covert assistance that helped him prevail in a close election against his Democratic opponent. Seymour and MI6 had concluded it was so, as had Morris Payne’s predecessor at the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Daniel Silva
From Daniel Silva, the No.1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a modern masterpiece of espionage, love, and betrayal.She was his best-kept secret …In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason’s name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West – a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power.Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel Allon, the legendary art restorer and assassin who serves as the chief of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. Gabriel has battled the dark forces of the new Russia before, at great personal cost. Now he and the Russians will engage in a final epic showdown, with the fate of the postwar global order hanging in the balance.
Copyright (#ulink_8a128076-4f4a-5c98-bd75-2fe2e2b2915b)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
First published in the United States of America by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover illustration by Will Staehle, Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com)
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008280918
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008280925
Version: 2018-08-17
Dedication (#u94081071-14f2-5f1c-97f4-578aaeadd7f1)
Once again, for my wife, Jamie, andmy children, Nicholas and Lily
Epigraph (#ulink_99da9ca0-f1fe-5b36-8baf-c4b122f4e1f5)
He was given a new lease on life when the Centre finally suggested that he take part in the training of a new generation of agents at the KGB spy school, a job he accepted with great enthusiasm. He proved an excellent teacher, imparting what he knew with pleasure, patience and devotion. He loved the work.
—YURI MODIN, My Five Cambridge Friends
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
—JEAN RHYS, Wide Sargasso Sea
Contents
Cover (#u3bd8d561-b967-5a9a-9045-01b3fa75a19e)
Title Page (#u251cc755-e077-5bfd-b361-ae8d333505d8)
Copyright (#ue6e83f08-12df-50cd-aef6-ed21fa0f1972)
Dedication
Epigraph (#u35e04a51-c445-5a0c-a842-5e91e27efb91)
Prologue (#uf9b6dfa8-ea28-5824-881c-0c7deedbe62f)
Moscow: 1974 (#u492f8096-cc42-5783-988b-3a2afc064c41)
Part One: Night Train to Vienna (#ua3f77d77-3304-563f-a268-9098502cff9b)
1. Budapest, Hungary (#u80aab615-5a49-5915-8495-a0089313f298)
2. Vienna (#ubb016ec5-2a7b-54bb-b400-37718e660655)
3. Vienna (#u27681d36-fefd-5d35-8406-cca1a5bd1a3b)
4. Westbahnhof, Vienna (#uefa0fc64-3341-5620-9d93-e717bbfa4377)
5. Floridsdorf, Vienna (#u6b63bafd-0c8b-5df8-badc-382fdf2b1409)
6. Vienna—Tel Aviv (#ub409301d-845e-57e0-ae3a-96621c1bb7cc)
7. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#u9a55bd65-0257-5565-8d3b-eaeef1e085dd)
8. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#ub35db698-1e35-5dcc-8f9b-e2a77cec8492)
9. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv (#ua3aad5e8-41dc-56c9-873d-19efd8053f7e)
10. Vienna Woods, Austria (#u871762b9-3472-54d4-8092-4a14bb850a33)
11. Andalusia, Spain (#ude57f218-bdf8-5bcd-9690-2ce25fdd6d44)
12. Belgravia, London (#u55f760ba-3f9f-55cd-9b67-b0bedc5f5d80)
13. Eaton Square, London (#u3b2f41e9-9328-52d5-8575-e0bc897c71ab)
14. Eaton Square, London (#uac1c19ae-72e9-53ea-bf62-8ebfd91efbdc)
15. British Embassy, Washington (#u438ada0f-0637-5ca7-a483-015c4466e097)
16. Belvedere Quarter, Vienna (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The Palisades, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Vienna—Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: Pink Gin At the Normandie (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Bern (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Hampshire, England (#litres_trial_promo)
26. Hampshire, England (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Fort Monckton, Hampshire (#litres_trial_promo)
28. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
30. Vienna Woods, Austria (#litres_trial_promo)
31. Andalusia, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
32. Frankfurt—Tel Aviv—Paris (#litres_trial_promo)
33. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
34. Strasbourg, France (#litres_trial_promo)
35. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
36. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
37. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
38. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
39. Upper Galilee, Israel (#litres_trial_promo)
40. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
41. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
42. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
43. Slough, Berkshire (#litres_trial_promo)
44. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor (#litres_trial_promo)
45. Dartmoor—London (#litres_trial_promo)
46. Zahara, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
47. Zahara—Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
48. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
49. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
50. Seville (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Down By the River (#litres_trial_promo)
51. Seville—London (#litres_trial_promo)
52. Bayswater Road, London (#litres_trial_promo)
53. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
54. Rue Saint-Denis, Montreal (#litres_trial_promo)
55. Montreal—Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
56. Foxhall, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
57. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
58. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
59. Warren Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
60. The Palisades, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
61. SVR Headquarters, Yasenevo (#litres_trial_promo)
62. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
63. Warren Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
64. Yuma Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
65. British Embassy, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
66. Burleith, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
67. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
68. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
69. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
70. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
71. Chesapeake Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
72. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
73. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
74. Burleith, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
75. Tenleytown, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
76. Forest Hills, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
77. Chesapeake Street, Washington (#litres_trial_promo)
78. Bethesda, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
79. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
80. Capital Beltway, Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)
81. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
82. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
83. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four: The Woman From Andalusia (#litres_trial_promo)
84. Cabin John, Maryland (#litres_trial_promo)
85. Tel Aviv—Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
86. Eaton Square, London (#litres_trial_promo)
87. Scottish Highlands (#litres_trial_promo)
88. Zahara, Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daniel Silva (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_2315762f-3054-5c46-86aa-0a5fcfc5a503)
MOSCOW: 1974 (#ulink_e0f71305-9c71-584d-a61f-3476d1b15ec2)
The car was a Zil limousine, long and black, with pleated curtains in the rear windows. It sped from Sheremetyevo Airport into the center of Moscow, along a lane reserved for members of the Politburo and the Central Committee. Night had fallen by the time they reached their destination, a square named for a Russian writer, in an old section of the city known as Patriarch’s Ponds. They walked along narrow unlit streets, the child and the two men in gray suits, until they came to an oratory surrounded by Muscovy plane trees. The apartment house was on the opposite side of an alley. They passed through a wooden doorway and squeezed into a lift, which deposited them onto a darkened foyer. A flight of stairs awaited. The child, out of habit, counted the steps. There were fifteen. On the landing was another door. This one was padded leather. A well-dressed man stood there, drink in hand. Something about the ruined face seemed familiar. Smiling, he spoke a single word in Russian. It would be many years before the child understood what the word meant.
PART ONE (#ulink_fedcc0d6-9821-5e51-8b33-7135fd3d0a47)
1 (#ulink_68b09be7-106e-5e32-a4fd-b9605ecede88)
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (#ulink_68b09be7-106e-5e32-a4fd-b9605ecede88)
None of it would have come to pass—not the desperate quest for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths—were it not for poor Heathcliff. He was their tragic figure, their broken promise. In the end, he would prove to be yet another feather in Gabriel’s cap. That said, Gabriel would have preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger. Assets like Heathcliff did not come along every day, sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice. Such was the nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament. Such was life itself.
It was not his true name, Heathcliff; it had been generated at random, or so his handlers claimed, by computer. The program deliberately chose a code name that bore no resemblance to the asset’s real name, nationality, or line of work. In this regard, it had succeeded. The man to whom Heathcliff’s name had been attached was neither a foundling nor a hopeless romantic. Nor was he bitter or vengeful or violent in nature. In truth, he had nothing in common with Brontë’s Heathcliff other than his dark complexion, for his mother was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The same republic, she was proud to point out, as Comrade Stalin, whose portrait still hung in the sitting room of her Moscow apartment.
Heathcliff spoke and read English fluently, however, and was fond of the Victorian novel. In fact, he had flirted with the idea of studying English literature before coming to his senses and enrolling at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, regarded as the second-most prestigious university in the Soviet Union. His faculty adviser was a talent-spotter for the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and upon graduation Heathcliff was invited to enter the SVR’s academy. His mother, drunk with joy, placed flowers and fresh fruit at the foot of Comrade Stalin’s portrait. “He is watching you,” she said. “One day you will be a man to be reckoned with. A man to be feared.” In his mother’s eyes, there was no finer thing for a man to be.
It was the ambition of most cadets to serve abroad in a rezidentura, an SVR station, where they would recruit and run enemy spies. It took a certain type of officer to perform such work. He had to be brash, confident, talkative, quick on his feet, a natural seducer. Heathcliff, unfortunately, was blessed with none of these qualities. Nor did he possess the physical attributes required for some of the SVR’s more unsavory tasks. What he had was a facility for languages—he spoke fluent German and Dutch as well as English—and a memory that even by the SVR’s high standards was deemed to be exceptional. He was given a choice, a rarity in the hierarchical world of the SVR. He could work at Moscow Center as a translator or serve in the field as a courier. He chose the latter, thus sealing his fate.
It was not glamorous work, but vital. With his four languages and a briefcase full of false passports, he roamed the world in service of the motherland, a clandestine delivery boy, a secret postman. He cleaned out dead drops, stuffed cash into safe-deposit boxes, and on occasion even rubbed shoulders with an actual paid agent of Moscow Center. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hundred nights a year outside Russia, leaving him unsuited for marriage or even a serious relationship. The SVR provided him with female comfort when he was in Moscow— beautiful young girls who under normal circumstances would never look at him twice—but when traveling he was prone to bouts of intense loneliness.
It was during one such episode, in a hotel bar in Hamburg, that he met his Catherine. She was drinking white wine at a table in the corner, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, light brown hair, suntanned arms and legs. Heathcliff was under orders to avoid such women while traveling. Invariably, they were hostile intelligence officers or prostitutes in their employ. But Catherine did not look the part. And when she glanced at Heathcliff over her mobile phone and smiled, he felt a jolt of electricity that surged from his heart straight to his groin.
“Care to join me?” she asked. “I do hate to drink alone.”
Her name was not Catherine, it was Astrid. At least that was the name she had whispered into his ear while running a fingernail lightly along the inside of his thigh. She was Dutch, which meant Heathcliff, who was posing as a Russian businessman, was able to address her in her native language. After several drinks together, she invited herself to Heathcliff’s room, where he felt safe. He woke the next morning with a profound hangover, which was unusual for him, and with no memory of engaging in the act of love. By then, Astrid was showered and wrapped in a toweling robe. In the light of day, her remarkable beauty was plain to see.
“Free tonight?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
He had no answer.
“You’ll take me on a proper date, though. A nice dinner. Maybe a disco afterward.”
“And then?”
She opened her robe, revealing a pair of beautifully formed breasts. Try as he might, Heathcliff could not recall caressing them.
They traded phone numbers, another forbidden act, and parted company. Heathcliff had two errands to run in Hamburg that day that required several hours of “dry cleaning” to make certain he was not under surveillance. As he was completing his second task—the routine emptying of a dead-letter box—he received a text message with the name of a trendy restaurant near the port. He arrived at the appointed hour to find a radiant Astrid already seated at their table, behind an open bottle of hideously expensive Montrachet. Heathcliff frowned; he would have to pay for the wine out of his own pocket. Moscow Center monitored his expenses carefully and berated him when he exceeded his allowance.
Astrid seemed to sense his unease. “Don’t worry, it’s my treat.”
“I thought I was supposed to take you out on a proper date.”
“Did I really say that?”
It was at that instant Heathcliff understood he had made a terrible mistake. His instincts told him to turn and run, but he knew it was no use; his bed was made. And so he stayed at the restaurant and dined with the woman who had betrayed him. Their conversation was stilted and strained—the stuff of a bad television drama—and when the check came it was Astrid who paid. In cash, of course.
Outside, a car was waiting. Heathcliff raised no objections when Astrid quietly instructed him to climb into the backseat. Nor did he protest when the car headed in the opposite direction from his hotel. The driver was quite obviously a professional; he spoke not a word while undertaking several textbook maneuvers designed to shake surveillance. Astrid passed the time sending and receiving text messages. To Heathcliff she said nothing at all.
“Did we ever—”
“Make love?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stared out the window.
“Good,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
When they finally stopped, it was at a small cottage by the sea. Inside, a man was waiting. He addressed Heathcliff in German-accented English. Said his name was Marcus. Said he worked for a Western intelligence service. Didn’t specify which one. Then he displayed for Heathcliff several highly sensitive documents Astrid had copied from his locked attaché case the previous evening while he was incapacitated by the drugs she had given him. Heathcliff was going to continue to supply such documents, said Marcus, and much more. Otherwise, Marcus and his colleagues were going to use the material they had in their possession to deceive Moscow Center into believing Heathcliff was a spy.
Unlike his namesake, Heathcliff was neither bitter nor vengeful. He returned to Moscow a half million dollars richer and awaited his next assignment. The SVR delivered a beautiful young girl to his apartment in the Sparrow Hills. He nearly fainted with fear when she introduced herself as Ekaterina. He made her an omelet and sent her away untouched.
The life expectancy for a man in Heathcliff’s position was not long. The penalty for betrayal was death. But not a quick death, an unspeakable death. Like all those who worked for the SVR, Heathcliff had heard the stories. The stories of grown men begging for a bullet to end their suffering. Eventually, it would come, the Russian way, in the nape of the neck. The SVR referred to it as vysshaya mera: the highest measure of punishment. Heathcliff resolved never to allow himself to fall into their hands. From Marcus he obtained a suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds, then it would be over.
Marcus also gave Heathcliff a covert communications device that allowed him to transmit reports via satellite with encrypted microbursts. Heathcliff used it rarely, preferring instead to brief Marcus in person during his trips abroad. Whenever possible, he allowed Marcus to photograph the contents of his attaché case, but mainly they talked. Heathcliff was a man of no importance, but he worked for important men, and transported their secrets. Moreover, he knew the locations of Russian dead drops around the world, which he carried around in his prodigious memory. Heathcliff was careful not to divulge too much, too quickly—for his own sake, and for the sake of his rapidly growing bank account. He doled out his secrets piecemeal, so as to increase their value. A half million became a million within a year. Then two. And then three.
Heathcliff’s conscience remained untroubled—he was a man without ideology or politics—but fear stalked him day and night. The fear that Moscow Center knew of his treachery and was watching his every move. The fear he had passed along one secret too many, or that one of the Center’s spies in the West would eventually betray him. On numerous occasions he pleaded with Marcus to bring him in from the cold. But Marcus, sometimes with a bit of soothing balm, sometimes with a crack of the whip, refused. Heathcliff was to continue his spying until such time as his life was truly in danger. Only then would he be allowed to defect. He was justifiably dubious about Marcus’s ability to judge the precise moment the sword was about to fall, but he had no choice but to continue. Marcus had blackmailed him into doing his bidding. And Marcus was going to wring every last secret out of him before releasing him from his bond.
But not all secrets are created equal. Some are mundane, workaday, and can be passed with little or no threat to the messenger. Others, however, are far too dangerous to betray. Heathcliff eventually found such a secret in a dead-letter box, in faraway Montreal. The letter box was actually an empty flat, used by a Russian illegal operating under deep cover in the United States. Hidden in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink was a memory stick. Heathcliff had been ordered to collect it and carry it back to Moscow Center, thus evading the mighty American National Security Agency. Before leaving the apartment, he inserted the flash drive into his laptop and found it unlocked and its contents unencrypted. Heathcliff read the documents freely. They were from several different American intelligence services, all with the highest possible level of classification.
Heathcliff didn’t dare copy the documents. Instead, he committed every detail to his flawless memory and returned to Moscow Center, where he handed over the flash drive to his control officer, along with a sternly worded rebuke of the illegal’s failure to secure it properly. The control officer, who was called Volkov, promised to address the matter. Then he offered Heathcliff a lowstress junket to friendly Budapest as recompense. “Consider it an all-expenses-paid holiday, courtesy of Moscow Center. Don’t take this the wrong way, Konstantin, but you look as though you could use some time off.”
That evening, Heathcliff used the covert communications device to inform Marcus that he had uncovered a secret of such import he had no choice but to defect. Much to his surprise, Marcus did not object. He instructed Heathcliff to dispose of the device in a way it could never be found. Heathcliff smashed it to pieces and dropped the remains down an open sewer. Even the bloodhounds of the SVR’s security directorate, he reasoned, wouldn’t look there.
A week later, after paying a final visit to his mother in her rabbit’s hutch of an apartment, with its brooding portrait of an everwatchful Comrade Stalin, Heathcliff left Russia for the last time. He arrived in Budapest in late afternoon, as snow fell gently upon the city, and took a taxi to the InterContinental Hotel. His room overlooked the Danube. He double-locked the door and engaged the safety bar. Then he sat down at the desk and waited for his mobile phone to ring. Next to it was Marcus’s suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds. Then it would be over.
2 (#ulink_97f2a5fc-76df-50ec-a81b-fab3039db759)
VIENNA (#ulink_97f2a5fc-76df-50ec-a81b-fab3039db759)
One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, a few lazy bends along the river Danube, an exhibition featuring the works of Sir Peter Paul Rubens—painter, scholar, diplomat, spy—limped toward its melancholy conclusion. The imported hordes had come and gone, and by late afternoon only a few regular patrons of the old museum moved hesitantly through its rose-colored rooms. One was a man of late middle age. He surveyed the massive canvases, with their corpulent nudes swirling amid lavish historical settings, from beneath the brim of a flat cap, which was pulled low over his brow.
A younger man stood impatiently at his back, checking the time on his wristwatch. “How much longer, boss?” he asked sotto voce in Hebrew. But the older man responded in German, and loudly enough so the drowsy guard in the corner could hear. “There’s just one more I’d like to see before I leave, thank you.”
He went into the next room and paused before Madonna and Child, oil on canvas, 137 by 111 centimeters. He knew the painting intimately; he had restored it in a cottage by the sea in West Cornwall. Crouching slightly, he examined the surface in raked lighting. His work had held up well. If only he could say the same for himself, he thought, rubbing the fiery patch of pain at the base of his spine. The two recently fractured vertebrae were the least of his physical maladies. During his long and distinguished career as an officer of Israeli intelligence, Gabriel Allon had been shot in the chest twice, attacked by an Alsatian guard dog, and thrown down several flights of stairs in the cellars of Lubyanka in Moscow. Not even Ari Shamron, his legendary mentor, could match his record of bodily injuries.
The young man trailing Gabriel through the rooms of the museum was called Oren. He was the head of Gabriel’s security detail, an unwanted fringe benefit of a recent promotion. They had been traveling for the past thirty-six hours, by plane from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then by automobile from Paris to Vienna. Now they walked through the deserted exhibition rooms to the steps of the museum. A snowstorm had commenced, big downy flakes falling straight in the windless night. An ordinary visitor to the city might have found it picturesque, the trams slithering along sugar-dusted streets lined with empty palaces and churches. But not Gabriel. Vienna always depressed him, never more so than when it snowed.
The car waited in the street, the driver behind the wheel. Gabriel pulled the collar of his old Barbour jacket around his ears and informed Oren that he intended to walk to the safe flat.
“Alone,” he added.
“I can’t let you walk around Vienna unprotected, boss.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the chief now. And if something happens—”
“You’ll say you were following orders.”
“Just like the Austrians.” In the darkness the bodyguard handed Gabriel a Jericho 9mm pistol. “At least take this.”
Gabriel slipped the Jericho into the waistband of his trousers. “I’ll be at the safe flat in thirty minutes. I’ll let King Saul Boulevard know when I’ve arrived.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Even the chief referred to it as the Office and nothing else.
“Thirty minutes,” repeated Oren.
“And not a minute more,” pledged Gabriel.
“And if you’re late?”
“It means I’ve been assassinated or kidnapped by ISIS, the Russians, Hezbollah, the Iranians, or someone else I’ve managed to offend. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for my survival.”
“What about us?”
“You’ll be fine, Oren.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t want you anywhere near the safe flat,” said Gabriel. “Keep moving until you hear from me. And remember, don’t try to follow me. That’s a direct order.”
The bodyguard stared at Gabriel in silence, an expression of concern on his face.
“What is it now, Oren?”
“Are you sure you don’t want some company, boss?”
Gabriel turned without another word and disappeared into the night.
He crossed the Burgring and set out along the footpaths of the Volksgarten. He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, but no more—and had the spare physique of a cyclist. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with wide cheekbones and a slender nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The eyes were an unnatural shade of green; the hair was dark and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and Gabriel had the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. He spoke five languages fluently, including Italian, which he had acquired before traveling to Venice in the mid-1970s to study the craft of art conservation. Afterward, he had lived as a taciturn if gifted restorer named Mario Delvecchio while simultaneously serving as an intelligence officer and assassin for the Office. Some of his finest work had been performed in Vienna. Some of his worst, too.
He skirted the edge of the Burgtheater, the German-speaking world’s most prestigious stage, and followed the Bankgasse to the Café Central, one of Vienna’s most prominent coffeehouses. There he peered through the frosted windows and in his memory glimpsed Erich Radek, colleague of Adolf Eichmann, tormentor of Gabriel’s mother, sipping an Einspänner at a table alone. Radek the murderer was hazy and indistinct, like a figure in a painting in need of restoration.
“Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”
“Perhaps.”
The image dissolved. Gabriel turned away and walked to the old Jewish Quarter. Before the Second World War it was home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. Now that community was largely a memory. He watched a few old men stepping tremulously from the discreet doorway of the Stadttempel, Vienna’s main synagogue, then made his way to a nearby square lined with restaurants. One was the Italian restaurant where he had eaten his last meal with Leah, his first wife, and Daniel, their only child.
In an adjacent street was the spot where their car had been parked. Gabriel slowed involuntarily, paralyzed by memories. He recalled struggling with the straps of his son’s car seat and the faint taste of wine on his wife’s lips as he gave her one last kiss. And he remembered the sound of the engine hesitating—like a record played at the wrong speed—because the bomb was pulling power from the battery. Too late, he had shouted at Leah not to turn the key a second time. Then, in a flash of brilliant white, she and the child were lost to him forever.
Gabriel’s heart was tolling like an iron bell. Not now, he told himself as tears blurred his vision, he had work to do. He tilted his face to the sky.
Isn’t it beautiful? The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv …
He checked the time on his wristwatch; he had ten minutes to get to the safe flat. As he hurried along empty streets, he was gripped by an overwhelming sense of impending doom. It was only the weather, he assured himself. Vienna always depressed him. Never more so than when it snowed.
3 (#ulink_3c0f0795-86ff-53c6-bb0a-96d6f679ccf0)
VIENNA (#ulink_3c0f0795-86ff-53c6-bb0a-96d6f679ccf0)
The safe flat was located across the Donaukanal, in a fine old Biedermeier apartment building in the Second District. It was a busier quarter, a real neighborhood rather than a museum. There was a little Spar market, a pharmacy, a couple of Asian restaurants, even a Buddhist temple. Cars and motorbikes came and went along the street; pedestrians moved along the pavements. It was the sort of place where no one would notice the chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service. Or a Russian defector, thought Gabriel.
He turned through a passageway, crossed a courtyard, and entered a foyer. The stairs were in darkness, and on the fourth-floor landing a door hung slightly ajar. He slipped inside, closed the door behind him, and padded quietly into the sitting room, where Eli Lavon sat behind an array of open notebook computers. Lavon looked up, saw the snow on Gabriel’s cap and shoulders, and frowned.
“Please tell me you didn’t walk.”
“The car broke down. I had no other choice.”
“That’s not the way your bodyguard tells it. You’d better let King Saul Boulevard know you’re here. Otherwise, the nature of our operation is likely to turn into a search and rescue.”
Gabriel leaned over one of the computers, typed a brief message, and shot it securely to Tel Aviv.
“Crisis averted,” said Lavon.
He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his crumpled tweed jacket, and an ascot at his throat. His hair was wispy and unkempt; the features of his face were bland and easily forgotten. It was one of his greatest assets. Eli Lavon appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest. He oversaw the Office division known as Neviot. Its operatives included surveillance artists, pickpockets, thieves, and those who specialized in planting hidden cameras and listening devices behind locked doors. His teams had been very busy that evening in Budapest.
He nodded toward one of the computers. It showed a man seated at the desk of an upscale hotel room. An unopened bag lay at the foot of the bed. Before him was a mobile phone and an ampule.
“Is that a photograph?” asked Gabriel.
“Video.”
Gabriel tapped the screen of the laptop.
“He can’t actually hear you, you know.”
“Are you sure he’s alive?”
“He’s scared to death. He hasn’t moved a muscle in five minutes.”
“What’s he so afraid of?”
“He’s Russian,” said Lavon, as if that fact alone were explanation enough.
Gabriel studied Heathcliff as though he were a figure in a painting. His real name was Konstantin Kirov, and he was one of the Office’s most valuable sources. Only a small portion of Kirov’s intelligence had concerned Israel’s security directly, but the enormous surplus had paid dividends in London and Langley, where the directors of MI6 and the CIA eagerly feasted on each batch of secrets that spilled from the Russian’s attaché case. The Anglo-Americans had not dined for free. Both services had helped to foot the bill for the operation, and the British, after much interservice arm-twisting, had agreed to grant Kirov sanctuary in the United Kingdom.
The first face the Russian would see after defecting, however, would be the face of Gabriel Allon. Gabriel’s history with the Russian intelligence service and the men in the Kremlin was long and blood-soaked. For that reason he wanted to personally conduct Kirov’s initial debriefing. Specifically, he wanted to know exactly what Kirov had discovered, and why he suddenly needed to defect. Then Gabriel would place the Russian in the hands of MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna. Gabriel was more than happy to let the British have him. Blown agents were invariably a headache, especially blown Russian agents.
At last, Kirov stirred.
“That’s a relief,” said Gabriel.
The image on the screen deteriorated into digital tile for a few seconds before returning to normal.
“It’s been like that all evening,” explained Lavon. “The team must have put the transmitter on top of some interference.”
“When did they go into the room?”
“About an hour before Heathcliff arrived. When we hacked into the hotel’s security system, we took a detour into reservations and grabbed his room number. Getting into the room itself was no problem.”
The wizards in the Office’s Technology department had developed a magic cardkey capable of opening any electronic hotel room door in the world. The first swipe stole the code. The second opened the lock.
“When did the interference start?”
“As soon as he entered the room.”
“Did anyone follow him from the airport to the hotel?”
Lavon shook his head.
“Any suspicious names on the hotel registry?”
“Most of the guests are attending the conference. The Eastern European Society of Civil Engineers,” Lavon explained. “It’s a real nerds’ ball. Lots of guys with pocket protectors.”
“You used to be one of those guys, Eli.”
“Still am.” The shot turned to a mosaic again. “Damn,” said Lavon softly.
“Has the team checked out the connection?”
“Twice.”
“And?”
“There’s no one else on the line. And even if there was, the signal is so encrypted it would take a couple of supercomputers a month to reassemble the pieces.” The shot stabilized. “That’s more like it.”
“Let me see the lobby.”
Lavon tapped the keyboard of another computer, and a shot of the lobby appeared. It was a sea of ill-fitting clothing, name tags, and receding hairlines. Gabriel scanned the faces, looking for one that appeared to be out of place. He found four—two male, two female. Using the hotel’s cameras, Lavon captured still images of each and forwarded them to Tel Aviv. On the screen of the adjacent laptop, Konstantin Kirov was checking his phone.
“How long do you intend to make him wait?” asked Lavon.
“Long enough for King Saul Boulevard to run those faces through the database.”
“If he doesn’t leave soon, he’ll miss his train.”
“Better to miss his train than be assassinated in the lobby of the InterContinental by a Moscow Center hit team.” Once again, the shot turned to tile. Annoyed, Gabriel tapped the screen.
“Don’t bother,” said Lavon. “I’ve already tried that.”
Ten minutes elapsed before the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard declared that it could find no matches for the four faces in the Office’s digital rogues’ gallery of enemy intelligence officers, known or suspected terrorists, or private mercenaries. Only then did Gabriel compose a brief text message on an encrypted BlackBerry and tap the SEND key. A moment later he watched Konstantin Kirov reach for his mobile phone. After reading Gabriel’s text, the Russian rose abruptly, pulled on his overcoat, and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He slipped the mobile phone into his pocket but kept the suicide ampule in his hand. The suitcase he left behind.
Eli Lavon tapped a few keys on the laptop as Kirov opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The hotel’s security cameras monitored his short walk to the lifts. There were no other guests or staff present, and the carriage into which the Russian stepped was empty. The lobby, however, was bedlam. No one seemed to take notice of Kirov as he made his way out of the hotel, including two leather-jacketed toughs from the Hungarian security service who were keeping watch in the street.
It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. There was time enough for Kirov to catch the night train to Vienna, but he had to keep moving. He headed south on Apáczai Csere János Street, followed by two of Eli Lavon’s watchers, and then turned onto Kossuth Lajos Street, one of central Budapest’s main thoroughfares.
“My boys say he’s clean,” said Lavon. “No Russians, no Hungarians.”
Gabriel dispatched a second message to Konstantin Kirov, instructing him to board the train as planned. He did so with four minutes to spare, accompanied by the watchers. For now, there was nothing more Gabriel and Lavon could do. As they stared at one another in silence, their thoughts were identical. The waiting. Always the waiting.
4 (#ulink_dcb48f2b-05a9-537c-bb8c-f22159a1c3c9)
WESTBAHNHOF, VIENNA (#ulink_dcb48f2b-05a9-537c-bb8c-f22159a1c3c9)
But Gabriel and Eli Lavon did not wait alone, for on that evening they had an operational partner in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, the oldest and grandest such agency in the civilized world. Six officers from its storied Vienna Station—the exact number would soon be a matter of some contention—held a tense vigil in a locked vault at the British Embassy, and a dozen more were hovering over computers and blinking telephones at Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s riverfront headquarters in London.
A final MI6 officer, a man called Christopher Keller, waited outside Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station, behind the wheel of an unremarkable Volkswagen Passat sedan. He had bright blue eyes, sun-bleached hair, square cheekbones, and a thick chin with a notch in the center. His mouth seemed permanently fixed in an ironic smile.
Having little else to do that evening other than keep watch for any stray Russian hoods, Keller had contemplated the improbable path that had led him to this place. The wasted year at Cambridge, the deep-cover operation in Northern Ireland, the friendly-fire incident during the first Gulf War that cast him into self-imposed exile on the island of Corsica. There he had acquired perfect if Corsican-accented French. He had also performed services for a certain notable Corsican crime figure that might loosely be described as murder for hire. But all that was behind him. Thanks to Gabriel Allon, Christopher Keller was a respectable officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was restored.
Keller looked at the Israeli in the passenger seat. He was tall and lanky, with bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression was one of profound boredom. The anxious drumming of his fingers on the center console, however, betrayed the true state of his mind.
Keller lit a cigarette, his fourth in twenty minutes, and blew a cloud of smoke against the windscreen.
“Must you?” protested the Israeli.
“I’ll stop smoking when you stop drumming your damn fingers.” Keller spoke with a posh West London drawl, a remnant of a privileged childhood. “You’re giving me a headache.”
The Israeli’s fingers went still. His name was Mikhail Abramov. Like Keller, he was a veteran of an elite military unit. In Mikhail’s case, it was the IDF’s Sayeret Matkal. They had operated together several times before, most recently in Morocco, where they had tracked Saladin, the leader of ISIS’s external operations division, to a remote compound in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Neither man had fired the shot that ended Saladin’s reign of terror. Gabriel had beaten them both to the target.
“What are you so nervous about anyway?” asked Keller. “We’re in the middle of dull, boring Vienna.”
“Yes,” said Mikhail distantly. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Mikhail had lived in Moscow as a child and spoke English with a faint Russian accent. His linguistic abilities and Slavic looks had allowed him to pose as a Russian in several notable Office operations.
“You’ve operated in Vienna before?” asked Keller.
“Once or twice.” Mikhail checked his weapon, a Jericho .45-caliber pistol. “Do you remember those four Hezbollah suicide bombers who were planning to attack the Stadttempel?”
“I thought EKO Cobra handled that.” EKO Cobra was Austria’s tactical police unit. “In fact, I’m quite sure I read something about it in the newspapers.”
Mikhail stared at Keller without expression.
“That was you?”
“I had help, of course.”
“Anyone I know?”
Mikhail said nothing.
“I see.”
It was approaching midnight. The street outside the modern glass facade of the station was deserted, only a couple of taxis waiting for the last fares of the night. One would collect a Russian defector and deliver him to the Best Western hotel on the Stubenring. From there he would walk the rest of the way to the safe flat. The decision on whether to admit him would be made by Mikhail, who would be following on foot. The safe flat’s location was perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the operation. If Kirov was clean, Mikhail would search him in the building’s foyer and then take him upstairs to see Gabriel. Keller was to remain downstairs in the Passat and provide perimeter security, with what, he did not know. Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, had expressly forbidden him to carry a weapon. Keller had a well-deserved reputation for violence; Hughes, for caution. He had a nice life in Vienna—a productive network, long lunches, decent relations with the local service. The last thing he wanted was a problem that would result in him being recalled to a desk at Vauxhall Cross.
Just then, Mikhail’s BlackBerry flared with an incoming message. The glow of the screen lit his pale face. “The train is in the station. Kirov is on his way out.”
“Heathcliff,” said Keller with reproof. “His name is Heathcliff until we get him inside the safe flat.”
“Here he comes.”
Mikhail returned his BlackBerry to his coat pocket as Kirov emerged from the station, preceded by one of Eli Lavon’s watchers and followed by another.
“He looks nervous,” said Keller.
“He is nervous.” Mikhail was drumming his fingers on the center console again. “He’s Russian.”
The watchers departed the station on foot; Konstantin Kirov, in one of the taxis. Keller followed at a discreet distance as the car moved eastward across the city along deserted streets. He saw nothing to suggest the Russian courier was being tailed. Mikhail concurred.
At twelve fifteen the taxi stopped outside the Best Western. Kirov climbed out but did not enter the hotel. Instead, he crossed the Donaukanal over the Schwedenbrücke, now trailed by Mikhail on foot. The bridge deposited the two men onto the Taborstrasse, and the Taborstrasse in turn delivered them to a pretty church square called the Karmeliterplatz, where Mikhail closed the distance between himself and his quarry to a few paces.
Together they crossed to an adjacent street and followed it past a parade of darkened shops and cafés, toward the Biedermeier apartment house at the end of the block. Light burned faintly in a fourth-floor window, enough so that Mikhail could make out the silhouetted figure of Gabriel standing with one hand to his chin and his head tilted slightly to one side. Mikhail sent him one final text. Kirov was clean.
It was then he heard the sound of an approaching motorcycle. His first thought was that it was not the sort of night to be piloting a vehicle with only two wheels. This was confirmed a few seconds later when he saw the bike skidding around the corner of the apartment block.
The driver wore black leather and a black helmet, with the dark visor down. He slid to a stop a few yards from Kirov, dropped a foot to the street, and drew a gun from the front of his jacket. It was fitted with a long cylindrical sound suppressor. Mikhail couldn’t discern the model of the weapon itself. A Glock, maybe an H&K. Whatever it was, it was pointed directly at Kirov’s face. Mikhail allowed the phone to fall from his grasp and reached for his Jericho, but before he could draw it, the motorcyclist’s weapon spat twin tongues of fire. Both shots found their mark. Mikhail heard the sickening crack of the rounds tearing through Kirov’s skull, and saw a flash of blood and brain matter as he collapsed to the street.
The man on the motorcycle then swung his arm a few degrees and leveled the gun at Mikhail. Two shots, both errant, drove him to the pavement, and two more sent him crawling toward the shelter of a parked car. His right hand had found the grip of the Jericho. As he drew it, the man on the motorcycle raised his foot and revved the engine.
He was thirty meters from Mikhail, no more, with the ground floor of the apartment block behind him. Mikhail had both hands on the Jericho, with his outstretched arms braced on the boot of the parked car. Still, he held his fire. Office doctrine gave field operatives wide latitude in utilizing deadly force to protect their own lives. It did not, however, allow an operative to fire a .45-caliber weapon toward a fleeing target in a residential quarter of a European city, where a stray round might easily take an innocent life.
The motorcycle was now in motion, the roar of its engine reverberating in the canyon of apartment buildings. Mikhail watched its progress over the barrel of the Jericho until it was gone. Then he clambered over to the spot where Kirov had fallen. The Russian was gone, too. There was almost nothing left of his face.
Mikhail looked up toward the figure in the fourth-floor window. Then, from behind, he heard the rising engine note of a car approaching at high speed. He feared it was the rest of the hit team coming to finish the job, but it was only Keller in the Passat. He snatched up his mobile phone and hurled himself inside. “I told you,” he said as the car shot forward. “Nothing ever happens here.”
Gabriel remained in the window longer than he should have, watching the shrinking taillight of the motorcycle, pursued by the blacked-out Passat. When the two vehicles were gone, he looked down at the man lying in the street. Snow whitened him. He was as dead as a man could be. He was dead, thought Gabriel, before he arrived in Vienna. Dead before he left Moscow.
Eli Lavon was now standing at Gabriel’s side. Another long moment passed, and still Kirov lay there alone, unattended. Finally, a car approached and drew to a stop. The driver climbed out, a young woman. She raised a hand to her mouth and looked away.
Lavon drew the blinds. “Time to leave.”
“We can’t just—”
“Did you touch anything?”
Gabriel searched his memory. “The computers.”
“Nothing else?”
“The door latch.”
“We’ll get it on the way out.”
At once, blue light filled the room. It was a light Gabriel knew well, the light of a Bundespolizei cruiser. He dialed Oren, the chief of his security detail.
“Come to the Hollandstrasse side of the building. Nice and quiet.”
Gabriel killed the connection and helped Lavon bag the computers and the phones. On the way out the door, they both gave the latch a thorough scrubbing, Gabriel first, then Lavon for good measure. As they hurried across the courtyard they could hear the first faint sound of sirens, but the Hollandstrasse was quiet, save for the low idle of a car engine. Gabriel and Lavon slid into the backseat. A moment later they were crossing the Donaukanal, leaving the Second District for the First.
“He was clean. Right, Eli?”
“As a whistle.”
“So how did the assassin know where he was going?”
“Maybe we should ask him.”
Gabriel dug his phone from his pocket and called Mikhail.
5 (#ulink_effeefcd-6b5e-55ed-9799-d4c2c27e0a72)
FLORIDSDORF, VIENNA (#ulink_effeefcd-6b5e-55ed-9799-d4c2c27e0a72)
The Passat sedan was equipped with Volkswagen’s newest version of all-wheel drive. A right turn at one hundred kilometers per hour on fresh snow, however, was far beyond its abilities. The rear tires lost traction, and for an instant Mikhail feared they were about to spin out of control. Then, somehow, the tires regained their grip on the pavement, and the car, with one last spasm of fishtailing, righted itself.
Mikhail lightened his hold on the armrest. “Have much experience driving in winter conditions?”
“A great deal,” replied Keller calmly. “You?”
“I grew up in Moscow.”
“You left when you were a kid.”
“I was sixteen, actually.”
“Did your family own a car?”
“In Moscow? Of course not. We rode the Metro like everyone else.”
“So you never actually drove a car in Russia in winter.”
Mikhail did not dispute Keller’s observation. They were back on the Taborstrasse, flashing past an industrial park and warehouse complex, about a hundred meters behind the motorcycle. Mikhail was reasonably acquainted with Vienna’s geography. He judged, correctly, that they were heading in an easterly direction. There was a border to the east. He reckoned they would need one soon.
The bike’s brake light flared red.
“He’s turning,” said Mikhail.
“I see him.”
The bike made a left and briefly disappeared from sight. Keller approached the corner without slowing. An ugly Viennese streetscape flowed sideways across the windscreen for several seconds before he was able to bring the car under control again. The motorcycle was now at least two hundred meters ahead.
“He’s good,” said Keller.
“You should see the way he handles a gun.”
“I did.”
“Thanks for the help.”
“What was I supposed to do? Distract him?”
Before them rose the Millennial Tower, a fifty-one-floor office-and-residential building standing on the western bank of the Danube. Keller’s speed approached a hundred and fifty as they crossed the river, and still the bike was slipping away. Mikhail wondered how long it would take the Bundespolizei to notice them. About as long, he reckoned, as it would take to pull a passport from the pocket of a dead Russian courier.
The bike disappeared around another corner. By the time Keller negotiated the same turn, the taillight was a prick of red in the night.
“We’re losing him.”
Keller pressed his foot to the floor and kept it there. Just then, Mikhail’s mobile pulsed. He took his eyes from the taillight long enough to read the message.
“What is it?” asked Keller.
“Gabriel wants an update.” Mikhail typed a brief response and looked up again. “Shit,” he said softly.
The taillight was gone.
It was Alois Graf, a pensioner and quiet supporter of an Austrian far-right party—not that that had anything to do with what transpired—who was ultimately to blame. Recently a widower, Graf had been having trouble sleeping of late. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had managed more than two or three hours since the death of his beloved Trudi. The same was true of Shultzie, his nine-year-old dachshund. Actually, the little beast was not really his, it was Trudi’s. Shultzie had never much cared for Graf, or Graf for Shultzie. And now they were cellmates, sleepless and depressed, comrades in grief.
The dog was well trained in the etiquette of elimination, and reasonably considerate of others. Lately, however, it had been having urges at the damnedest times. Graf was considerate, too, and he never protested when Shultzie came to him in the small hours with that desperate look in his resentful little eyes.
On that night, the summons occurred at 12:25 a.m., according to the clock on Graf’s bedside table. Shultzie’s favorite spot was the little patch of grass adjacent to the American fast-food restaurant on the Brünnerstrasse. This pleased Graf. He thought the restaurant, if you could call it that, an eyesore. But then again, Graf had never been fond of Americans. He was old enough to remember Vienna after the war, when it was a divided city of spies and misery. Graf had preferred the British to the Americans. The British, at least, were possessed of a certain low cunning.
To reach Shultzie’s little promised land required crossing the Brünnerstrasse itself. Graf, a former schoolmaster, looked right and left before stepping from the curb. It was then he saw the single headlamp of a motorcycle approaching from the direction of the city center. He paused with indecision. The bike was a long way off; there was no sound. Surely, he could reach the opposite side with time to spare. Nevertheless, he gave Shultzie’s leash a little jerk, lest the dog loiter in the middle of the street, as he was fond of doing.
Halfway across the road, Graf cast another glance toward the motorcycle. In a matter of three or four seconds, it had covered a great deal of ground. It was traveling at an extremely high rate of speed, a fact evidenced by the high, tight note of the engine, which Graf could now hear quite clearly. Shultzie could hear it, too. The dog stood still as a statue, and no amount of tugging on Graf’s part could compel him to move.
“Komm, Shultzie! Mach schnell!”
Nothing. It was as if the creature were frozen to the asphalt.
The bike was approximately a hundred meters away, about the length of the sporting field at Graf’s old school. He reached down and snatched the dog, but it was too late; the bike was upon them. It veered suddenly, passing so close to Graf’s back it seemed to pluck at the fabric of his overcoat. An instant later he heard the terrible metallic crunch of the collision and saw a figure in black soaring through the air. He might have thought the man capable of flight, he flew so far. But the next sound, the sound of his body smacking the pavement, put that lie to rest.
He somersaulted over and over again for several more meters, horribly, until finally he came to rest. Graf considered going to check on him, if only to confirm the obvious, but another vehicle, a car, was approaching at high speed from the same direction. With Shultzie in his arms, Graf stepped quickly from the road and allowed the car to pass. It slowed to inspect the wreckage of the motorcycle before stopping next to the fallen figure in black lying motionless in the street.
A passenger climbed out. He was tall and thin, and his pale face seemed to glow in the darkness. He looked down at the man in the street—more out of anger than pity, observed Graf—and removed the motorcyclist’s shattered helmet. Then he did something quite extraordinary, something Graf would never tell another living soul. He snapped a photograph of the dead man’s face with his mobile phone.
The flash startled Shultzie, and the dog erupted in a fit of barking. The man stared coldly at Graf before lowering himself into the car. In a moment, it was gone.
At once, there were sirens in the night. Alois Graf should have remained behind to tell the Bundespolizei what he had witnessed. Instead, he hurried home, with Shultzie squirming in his arms. Graf remembered Vienna after the war. Sometimes, he thought, it was better to see nothing at all.
6 (#ulink_27bedf42-fbab-5246-af73-a94c433766fc)
VIENNA—TEL AVIV (#ulink_27bedf42-fbab-5246-af73-a94c433766fc)
Two dead bodies, separated by a distance of some six kilometers. One had been shot twice at close range. The other had died in a high-speed motorcycle accident while in possession of a large-caliber handgun, an HK45 Tactical, fitted with a sound suppressor. There were no witnesses at either scene, and no CCTV cameras. It was no matter; a part of the story was written in the snow, in tire tracks and footprints, with shell casings and blood. The Austrians worked quickly, for there was heavy rain in the forecast, followed by two days of unseasonable warmth. A changing climate was conspiring against them.
The man who had been shot to death had in his possession a mobile phone, a billfold, and a Russian passport identifying him as one Oleg Gurkovsky. Further documentation found inside the billfold suggested he was a resident of Moscow and that he worked for a communications technology company. Reconstructing the final hours of his life proved easy enough. The Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Budapest. The room at the InterContinental, where, curiously, he had left his luggage. The late-night train to Vienna. Security cameras at the Westbahnhof observed him climbing into a taxi, and the driver, who was interviewed by police, recalled dropping him at the Best Western on the Stubenring. From there he had crossed the Donaukanal via the Schwedenbrücke, followed by a man on foot. Police unearthed several clips of video from storefront security systems and traffic cameras in which the pursuer’s face was partially visible. He also left a trail of footprints, especially in the Karmeliterplatz, where the snow had largely been undisturbed. The shoes were a European size forty-eight, with no distinctive tread. Crime-scene investigators found several matching prints directly next to the body.
They also found six .45-caliber shell casings and the tracks of a Metzeler Lasertec motorcycle tire. Analysis of the tread pattern would link the tracks conclusively to the mangled BMW on the Brünnerstrasse, and ballistics testing would tie the shell casings to the HK45 Tactical the driver of the bike had been carrying when he crashed into a parked car. The man had nothing else in his possession. No passport or driver’s permit, no cash or credit cards. He looked to be about thirty-five but police couldn’t be sure; substantial plastic surgery had been performed on the face. He was a professional, they concluded.
But why had an otherwise professional assassin lost control of his motorcycle on the Brünnerstrasse? And who was the man who had followed the murdered Russian from the Best Western hotel to the spot in the Second District where he had been shot twice at close range? And why had the Russian come to Vienna from Budapest in the first place? Had he been lured? Had he been summoned? If so, by whom? The questions notwithstanding, it bore all the hallmarks of a professional assassination carried out by a highly competent intelligence service.
The Bundespolizei, during the first hours of the investigation, kept such thoughts to themselves, but the media were free to speculate to their hearts’ content. By midmorning they had convinced themselves that Oleg Gurkovsky was a dissident, despite the fact no one in the Russian opposition seemed to have heard of him. But there were others in Russia, including a lawyer rumored to be a personal friend of the Tsar himself, who claimed to know him well. But not by the name Oleg Gurkovsky. His real name, they said, was Konstantin Kirov, and he was an undercover officer of the SVR, the Russian intelligence service.
It was at this point, sometime around noon in Vienna, that a steady trickle of stories, tweets, chirps, burps, blog postings, and other forms of modern discourse began to appear on news sites and social media. At first, they appeared spontaneous; in time, anything but. Nearly all the material flowed from Russia or from friendly former Soviet republics or satellites. Not one of the alleged sources had a name—at least not one that could be verified. Each entry was fragmentary, a small piece of a larger puzzle. But when assembled, the conclusion was plain as day: Konstantin Kirov, an officer of the Russian SVR, had been murdered in cold blood by the Israeli secret intelligence service, on the direct order of its chief, the well-known Russophobe Gabriel Allon.
The Kremlin declared as much at three o’clock, and at four the Russian news service Sputnik published what it claimed was a photograph of Allon leaving an apartment building near the scene of the murder, accompanied by an elfin figure whose face was rendered indistinct. The source of the photograph was never reliably established. Sputnik said it obtained the image from the Austrian Bundespolizei, though the Bundespolizei denied it. Nevertheless, the damage was done. The rented television experts in London and New York, including a few who’d had the privilege of meeting Allon personally, admitted that the man in the photo looked a great deal like him. Austria’s interior minister agreed.
Publicly, the government of Israel said nothing, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not commenting on intelligence matters. But by early evening, with pressure building, the prime minister took the unusual step of personally denying any Israeli involvement in Kirov’s death. His statement was met with skepticism, perhaps deservedly so. What’s more, much was made of the fact it was the prime minister who issued the denial and not Allon himself. His silence, said one former American spy, spoke volumes.
Truth was, Gabriel was unavailable for comment at the time; he was locked in a secure room deep inside the Israeli Embassy in Berlin, monitoring the clandestine movements of his operational team. By eight o’clock that evening, all were safely back in Tel Aviv, and Christopher Keller was home and dry in London. Gabriel slipped from the embassy unobserved and boarded an El Al flight for Tel Aviv. Not even the flight crew knew his true identity. For a second consecutive night, he did not sleep. The memory of Konstantin Kirov lying dead in the snow would not let him.
It was still dark when the plane touched down at Ben Gurion. Two bodyguards waited at the foot of the Jetway. They escorted Gabriel through the terminal to an unmarked door to the left of passport control. Behind it was a room reserved for Office personnel returning from missions abroad, thus the permanent odor of cigarettes, burnt coffee, and male tension. The walls were faux Jerusalem limestone, the chairs were modular and covered in black vinyl. In one, bathed in an unforgiving light, sat Uzi Navot. His gray suit looked slept in. The eyes behind his trendy rimless spectacles were red with fatigue.
Rising, Navot glanced at the big silver wristwatch his wife, Bella, had given him on the occasion of his last birthday. There was not an article of clothing or fashion accessory on Navot’s large, powerful body that she had not purchased or selected, including a new pair of oxfords that, in Gabriel’s opinion, were far too long in the toe for a man of Navot’s age and occupation.
“What are you doing here, Uzi? It’s three in the morning.”
“I needed a break.”
“From what?”
Navot smiled sadly and led Gabriel along a corridor with harsh fluorescent lights overhead. The corridor led to a secure door, and the door to a restricted area just off the main traffic circle outside the terminal. A motorcade rumbled in the yellow lamplight. Navot started toward the open rear passenger door of Gabriel’s SUV before abruptly stopping and walking around the back of the vehicle to the driver’s side. Navot was Gabriel’s direct predecessor as chief. In an unprecedented break with Office tradition, he had agreed to stay on as Gabriel’s deputy instead of accepting a lucrative job with a defense contractor in California, as Bella had wished. He was doubtless regretting his decision.
“In case you’re wondering,” said Gabriel as the SUV drew away, “I didn’t kill him.”
“Don’t worry, I believe you.”
“It seems you’re the only one.” Gabriel picked up the copy of Haaretz that lay on the seat between them and stared gloomily at the headline. “You know it’s bad when your hometown newspaper thinks you’re guilty.”
“We sent a back-channel message to the press making it clear we had nothing to do with Kirov’s death.”
“Obviously,” said Gabriel as he leafed through the other newspapers, “they didn’t believe you.”
Every major publication, no matter its political tilt, had declared Vienna a botched Office operation and was calling for an official inquiry. Haaretz, which leaned left, went so far as to wonder whether Gabriel Allon, a gifted field operative, was up to the job of chief. How things had changed, he thought. A few months earlier he had been fêted as the man who had eliminated Saladin, ISIS’s terror mastermind, and prevented a dirty-bomb attack outside Downing Street in London. And now this.
“I have to admit,” said Navot, “it does bear more than a passing resemblance to you.” He was scrutinizing Gabriel’s photograph on the front page of Haaretz. “And that little fellow next to you reminds me of someone else I know.”
“There must have been an SVR team in the building on the other side of the street. Judging from the camera angle, I’d say they were on the third floor.”
“The analysts say it was probably the fourth.”
“Do they?”
“In all likelihood,” Navot continued, “the Russians had another static post at the front of the building, a car, maybe another flat.”
“Which means they knew where Kirov was going.”
Navot nodded slowly. “I suppose you should consider yourself lucky they didn’t take the opportunity to kill you, too.”
“A pity they didn’t. I might have received better press coverage.”
They were approaching the end of the airport exit ramp. To the right was Jerusalem and Gabriel’s wife and children. To the left was Tel Aviv and King Saul Boulevard. Gabriel instructed the driver to take him to King Saul Boulevard.
“Are you sure?” asked Navot. “You look like you could use a few hours of sleep.”
“And what would they write about me then?”
Navot thumbed the combination locks of a stainless-steel attaché case. From it he removed a photograph, which he handed to Gabriel. It was the photograph Mikhail had snapped of Konstantin Kirov’s assassin. The eyes were not quite dead; somewhere was a faint trace of light. The rest of the face was a mess, but not from the accident. It had been stretched and pulled and stitched to such a degree it scarcely looked human.
“He looks like a rich woman I once met at an art auction,” said Gabriel. “Have you run him through the database?”
“Several times.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
Gabriel returned the photograph to Navot. “One wonders why an operative of his obvious skill and training didn’t eliminate the one and only threat to his life.”
“Mikhail?”
Gabriel nodded slowly.
“He fired four shots at him.”
“And all four missed. Even you could have hit him from that distance, Uzi.”
“You think he was ordered to miss?”
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Maybe they thought a dead Israeli would make their cover story less believable. Or maybe they had another reason,” said Gabriel. “They’re Russians. They usually do.”
“Why kill Kirov in Vienna in the first place? Why didn’t they bleed him dry in Moscow and then put a bullet in his neck?”
Gabriel tapped the stack of newspapers. “Maybe they wanted to use the opportunity to fatally wound me.”
“There’s a simple solution,” said Navot. “Tell the world that Konstantin Kirov was working for us.”
“At this point, it would smell like a cover story. And it would send a message to every potential asset that we are incapable of protecting those who work for us. It’s too high a price to pay.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I’m going to start by finding out who gave the Russians the address of our safe flat in Vienna.”
“In case you were wondering,” said Navot, “it wasn’t me.”
“Don’t worry, Uzi. I believe you.”
7 (#ulink_afa68786-aae6-5077-a208-c3c96c43553d)
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV (#ulink_afa68786-aae6-5077-a208-c3c96c43553d)
It had been Uzi Navot’s wish, during the final year of his term as chief, to move the headquarters of the Office from King Saul Boulevard to a flashy new complex just north of Tel Aviv, in Ramat HaSharon. Bella was said to be the driving force behind the relocation. She had never cared for the old building, even when she worked there as a Syria analyst, and found it unbecoming of an intelligence service with a global reach. She wanted an Israeli version of Langley or Vauxhall Cross, a modern monument to Israel’s intelligence prowess. She personally approved the architectural designs, lobbied the prime minister and the Knesset for the necessary funding, and even chose the location—an empty plot of land along a high-tech corridor near the Glilot Interchange, adjacent to a shopping center and multiplex called Cinema City. But Gabriel, in one of his first official acts, had with an elegant stroke of his pen swiftly shelved the plans. In matters of both intelligence and art, he was a traditionalist who believed the old ways were better than the new. And under no circumstances would he countenance moving the Office to a place known colloquially in Israel as Glilot Junction. “What on earth will we call ourselves?” he had asked Eli Lavon. “We’ll be a laughingstock.”
The old building was not without its charms and, perhaps more important, its sense of history. Yes, it was drab and featureless, but like Eli Lavon it had the advantage of anonymity. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services.
Gabriel’s office was on the uppermost floor, overlooking the sea. Its walls were hung with paintings—a few by his own hand, unsigned, and several others by his mother—and in one corner stood an old Italian easel upon which the analysts propped their photographs and diagrams when they came to brief him. Navot had taken his large glass desk to his new office on the other side of the antechamber, but he had left behind his modern video wall, with its collage of global news channels. As Gabriel entered the room, several of the screens flickered with images of Vienna, and in the panel reserved for the BBC World Service he saw his own face. He increased the volume and learned that British prime minister Jonathan Lancaster, a man who owed his career to Gabriel, was said to be “deeply concerned” over the allegations of Israeli involvement in the death of Konstantin Kirov.
Gabriel lowered the volume and went into his private bathroom to shower and shave and change into clean clothing. Returning to his office, he found Yaakov Rossman, the chief of Special Ops, waiting. Yaakov had hair like steel wool and a hard, pitted face. He held a letter-size envelope in his hand and was glaring at the BBC.
“Can you believe Lancaster?”
“He has his reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Protecting his intelligence service.”
“Duplicitous bastards,” murmured Yaakov. “We should never have granted them access to Kirov’s material.” He dropped the envelope on Gabriel’s desk.
“What’s that?”
“My letter of resignation.”
“Why would you write such a thing?”
“Because we lost Kirov.”
“Are you to blame?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gabriel picked up the envelope and fed it into his shredder. “Is anyone else thinking about tendering their resignation?”
“Rimona.”
Rimona Stern was the head of Collections. As such, she was responsible for running Office agents worldwide. Gabriel snatched up the receiver of his internal phone and dialed her office.
“Get down here. And bring Yossi.”
Gabriel rang off and a moment later Rimona came rushing through the door. She had sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and a notoriously short temper. She came by it naturally; her uncle was Ari Shamron. Gabriel had known Rimona since she was a child.
“Yaakov says you have something for me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your letter of resignation. Let me have it.”
“I haven’t written it yet.”
“Don’t bother, I won’t accept it.”
Gabriel looked at Yossi Gavish, who was now leaning in the doorway. He was tall and balding and tweedy and carried himself with a donnish detachment. He had been born in the Golders Green section of London and had earned a first-class degree at Oxford before immigrating to Israel. He still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent and received regular shipments of tea from a shop in Piccadilly.
“What about you, Yossi? Are you thinking about resigning, too?”
“Why should I get the sack? I’m only an analyst.”
Gabriel smiled briefly in spite of himself. Yossi was no mere analyst. He was the chief of the entire department, which, in the lexicon of the Office, was known as Research. Oftentimes, he did not know the identities of highly placed assets, only their code names and pseudonyms, but he was among the small circle of officers who had been granted unlimited access to Kirov’s file.
“No more talk about resignation. Do you hear me?” asked Gabriel. “Besides, if anyone’s going to lose his job, it’s me.”
“You?” asked Yossi.
“Didn’t you read the newspapers? Haven’t you been watching television?” Gabriel’s gaze drifted to the video wall. “They’re baying for my blood.”
“This too shall pass.”
“Maybe,” admitted Gabriel, “but I’d like you to increase my chances of survival.”
“How?”
“By bringing me the name of the person who signed Kirov’s death warrant.”
“It wasn’t me,” quipped Yaakov.
“I’m glad we cleared that up.” Gabriel looked at Rimona. “How about you? Did you betray Kirov to the Russians?”
Rimona frowned.
“Or maybe it was you, Yossi. You always struck me as the treacherous type.”
“Don’t look at me, I’m only an analyst.”
“Then go back to your office and start analyzing. And bring me that name.”
“It’s not something that can be done quickly. It’s going to take time.”
“Of course.” Gabriel sat down at his desk. “You have seventy-two hours.”
The rest of the day passed with a torture-chamber slowness; there seemed to be no end to it. There was always one more question for which Gabriel had no answer. He consoled himself by attempting to console others. He did so in small gatherings, for unlike the headquarters of the CIA or MI6, King Saul Boulevard had no formal auditorium. It was Shamron’s doing. He believed that spies should never congregate in their place of work, either for purposes of celebration or for mourning. Nor did he approve of American-style motivational speeches. The threats facing Israel, he said, were incentive enough.
In late afternoon, as vermilion light flooded Gabriel’s room, he received a summons from the prime minister. He cleared his desk of several routine matters, checked in on a pair of ongoing operations, and at half past eight climbed, exhausted, into his motorcade for the drive to Kaplan Street in Jerusalem. Like all visitors to the prime minister’s office, he was forced to surrender his mobile phone before entering. The anti-eavesdropping box into which he placed the device was known as the “beehive,” and the secure area beyond was the “fishbowl.” The prime minister greeted Gabriel cordially but with a distinct coolness. An inquiry involving his personal finances was threatening to unravel his premiership, the longest since David Ben-Gurion’s. The last thing he needed now was a scandal involving his intelligence service.
Ordinarily, Gabriel and the prime minister adjourned to the comfortable seating area for briefings or private discussions, but on that evening the prime minister chose to remain at his desk beneath the portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of the nineteenth-century Zionist movement that led to the reconstitution of Jewish rule over a portion of historic Palestine. Under Herzl’s unremitting gaze, Gabriel relayed the facts as he knew them to be. The prime minister listened impassively, as motionless as the man in the photograph over his shoulder.
“Do you know how I spent my day?” he asked when Gabriel had finished.
“I can only imagine.”
“Eighteen of my foreign counterparts took it upon themselves to phone me directly. Eighteen! That’s the most in a single day since our last war in Gaza. And all of them asked the same question. How could I be so reckless as to permit my celebrated intelligence chief to gun down a Russian intelligence officer in the heart of Vienna?”
“You did no such thing. Nor did I.”
“I tried to explain that, and not a single one believed me.”
“I’m not sure I would have believed you, either,” admitted Gabriel.
“Even my friend in the White House was skeptical. Some nerve,” murmured the prime minister. “He’s in more trouble than I am. And that’s saying something.”
“I don’t suppose Jonathan Lancaster called.”
The prime minister shook his head. “But the chancellor of Austria kept me on the phone for almost an hour. He told me he had incontrovertible proof we were behind the Russian’s murder. He also asked me whether we wanted the body of our assassin back.”
“Did he elaborate on the evidence?”
“No. But it didn’t sound like he was bluffing. He made it clear that diplomatic sanctions are on the table.”
“How serious?”
“Expulsions. Maybe a full break in diplomatic relations. Who knows? They might issue an arrest warrant or two.” The prime minister regarded Gabriel for a moment. “I don’t want to lose a Western European embassy over this. Or the chief of my intelligence service.”
“On that,” said Gabriel, “we are in complete agreement.”
The prime minister glanced at the television, where a newscast played silently. “You’ve managed to dislodge me from the lead position. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t my intention.”
“There are serious voices calling for an independent review.”
“There’s nothing to review. We didn’t kill Konstantin Kirov.”
“It certainly looks like you did. A review might be necessary for appearances’ sake.”
“We can handle it ourselves.”
“Can you?” The prime minister’s tone was dubious.
“We’ll find out what went wrong,” said Gabriel. “And if we bear any blame, appropriate measures will be taken.”
“You’re starting to sound like a politician.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
The prime minister smiled coldly. “Not at all.”
8 (#ulink_1665a7d4-3c43-5122-bcb6-6f70db8ce5d4)
NARKISS STREET, JERUSALEM (#ulink_1665a7d4-3c43-5122-bcb6-6f70db8ce5d4)
Chiara rarely watched television in the evening. Raised in the cloistered world of Venice’s Jewish ghetto, educated at the University of Padua, she regarded herself as an ancient woman and was disdainful of modern distractions such as smartphones, social media, and fiber-optic television systems that delivered one thousand high-definition channels of largely unwatchable fare. Usually, Gabriel arrived home to find her engrossed in some weighty historical tract—she was commencing work on a PhD in the history of the Roman Empire when she was recruited by the Office—or in one of the serious literary novels she received by post from a bookseller on the Via Condotti in Rome. Lately, she had started reading pulp spy novels as well. They provided her with a connection, however tenuous and improbable, to the life she had gladly given up to become a mother.
On that evening, however, Gabriel arrived at his heavily guarded apartment in the Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem to find his wife glaring at one of the American cable news networks. A reporter was recounting, with obvious skepticism, Israel’s stated contention that it had had nothing to do with the events in Vienna. The chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service, he intoned, had just departed Kaplan Street. According to one of the prime minister’s national security aides, who wished to remain anonymous, the meeting had gone as well as could be expected.
“Is any of it true?” asked Chiara.
“I had a meeting with the prime minister. That’s about the extent of it.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“He didn’t offer me Chinese food. I took it as a bad sign.”
Chiara aimed the remote at the screen and pressed the power button. She wore a pair of stretch jeans that flattered her long slender legs, and a sweater the color of clotted cream, upon which her dark hair, with its shimmering auburn and chestnut highlights, tumbled riotously. Her eyes were the color of caramel and flecked with gold. At present, they were appraising Gabriel with thinly veiled pity. He could only imagine how he looked to her. The stress of the field had always been unkind to his appearance. His first operation, Wrath of God, had left him with gray hair at the age of twenty-five. He had gone swiftly downhill after that.
“Where are the children?” he asked.
“Out with friends. They told us not to wait up.” She raised an eyebrow provocatively. “We have the place all to ourselves. Perhaps you’d like to drag me to bed and have your way with me.”
Gabriel was sorely tempted; it had been a long time since Gabriel had made love with his beautiful young wife. There was no time for it. Chiara had two children to raise, and Gabriel a country to protect. They saw one another for a few minutes each morning and, if they were lucky, for an hour or so in the evening when Gabriel returned from work. He had use of an Office safe flat in Tel Aviv for those nights when events didn’t permit him to make the long drive to Jerusalem. He hated it, the flat. It reminded him of what his life had been like before Chiara. The Office had brought them together. And now it was conspiring to keep them apart.
“Do you think it’s possible,” he asked, “that the children slipped back into the apartment without your knowing it?”
“Anything’s possible. Why don’t you check?”
Gabriel moved silently to the door of the children’s room and entered. Before departing for Vienna, he had traded out their cribs for a pair of junior beds, which meant they were free to move nocturnally about the apartment at will. For now, though, they were sleeping soundly beneath a mural of Titianesque clouds that Gabriel had painted after a blood-soaked confrontation with the Russian secret service.
He leaned down and kissed Raphael’s forehead. The child’s face, lit by a shaft of light from the half-open door, looked shockingly like Gabriel’s. He had even been cursed with Gabriel’s green eyes. Irene, however, looked more like Gabriel’s mother, for whom she was named. Chiara was the forgotten ingredient of the children’s genetic recipe. Time would change that, thought Gabriel. A beauty like Chiara’s could not be suppressed forever.
“Is that you, Abba?”
It was Irene. Raphael could sleep through a bomb blast, but Irene, like Gabriel, was easily woken. He thought she had the makings of a perfect spy.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he whispered. “It’s me.”
“Stay for a while.”
Gabriel sat down at the edge of her bed.
“Pat my back,” she commanded, and he laid his hand gently on the warm fabric of her pajamas. “Did you have a good trip?”
“No,” he answered honestly.
“I saw you on television.”
“Did you?”
“You looked very serious.”
“Where did you learn a word like that?”
“Like what?”
“Serious.”
“From Mama.”
Such was the language of the Allon household. The children referred to Gabriel as “Abba,” the Hebrew world for father, but Chiara they called only “Mama.” They were learning Hebrew and Italian simultaneously, along with German. As a result, they spoke a language only their parents could possibly comprehend.
“Where did you go, Abba?”
“Nowhere interesting.”
“You always say that.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
The children had only the vaguest sense of what their father did for a living. They knew that his picture sometimes appeared on television, that he was recognized in public places, and that he was surrounded constantly by men with guns. So were they.
“Did you take good care of your mother while I was gone?”
“I tried, but she was sad.”
“Was she? Why?”
“Something she saw on television.”
“Be a good girl and go back to sleep.”
“Can I sleep with you and Mama?”
“Absolutely not.”
His tone was stern. Even so, Irene giggled. This was the one place where no one followed his orders. He patted the child’s back for another minute more, until her breathing grew deep and regular. Then he lifted himself cautiously from the edge of the bed and moved toward the door.
“Abba?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Can I have one last kiss?”
He kissed her more times than he could possibly count. He kissed her until, happily, she begged him to leave.
Entering the kitchen, Gabriel found a stockpot of water bubbling on the stovetop and Chiara working a lump of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese over the surface of a grater. She did so deftly and seemingly without effort, the way she did most things, including caring for the children. When she had produced the allotted amount, she traded the lump of Parmigiano-Reggiano for Pecorino and grated that, too. Gabriel quickly surveyed the other ingredients arrayed on the counter. Butter, olive oil, a tall pepper grinder: the makings of cacio e pepe. The simple Roman pasta dish was one of his favorites, especially the way Chiara prepared it.
“You know,” he said, watching her work, “there’s a very nice man in the Mahane Yehuda Market who will do that for you.”
“Or maybe I should just buy it in a jar at the supermarket.” She shook her head reproachfully. “The cheese has to be grated to the proper consistency. Otherwise, the results will be disastrous.”
He frowned at the small television at the end of the counter. “Just like Vienna.”
Chiara plucked a strand of spaghetti from the pot and after testing it poured the rest through a colander. Next she tossed it with melted butter, olive oil, the grated cheeses, and a few ounces of pasta water, and seasoned the dish with enough pepper to give it a bit of bite. They ate together at the little café table in the kitchen, the baby monitor between them, the television playing silently. Gabriel declined Chiara’s offer of Tuscan red wine; only heaven knew what the night might bring. She poured a small glass for herself and listened intently to his description of the events in Vienna.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We undertake a rapid but unsparing review to determine where the leak occurred.”
“Who knew the address of the safe flat?”
“Eli, Mikhail, the Neviot officers, the deskman from Housekeeping who rented it, and six field security men, including my bodyguards. And Uzi, of course.”
“You didn’t mention the British.”
“Didn’t I?”
“Surely, you have a suspect.”
“I wouldn’t want to prejudice the investigation in any way.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with the prime minister.”
“It’s one of the hazards of my new job.”
Chiara’s gaze wandered to the television. “Forgive me for what I’m about to say, but Uzi must be secretly enjoying this. Kirov was recruited on his watch. And now he’s dead.”
“Uzi has been nothing but supportive.”
“He has no choice. But try to imagine how this looks from his point of view. He ran the Office competently for six years. Not brilliantly,” she added, “but competently. And for his reward, he was pushed out in favor of you.”
A silence fell between them. There was only the rhythmic breathing of the children on the monitor.
“You were adorable with Irene,” said Chiara at last. “She was so excited you were coming home that she refused to go to sleep. I must say, Raphael deals with your absences rather well. He’s a stoic young boy, just like his father must have been. But Irene misses you terribly when you’re away.” She paused, then added, “Almost as much as I do.”
“If this affair turns into a full-fledged scandal, you might be seeing much more of me.”
“Nothing would make us happier. But the prime minister would never dare fire the great Gabriel Allon. You’re the most popular figure in the country.”
“Second,” said Gabriel. “That actress is much more popular than I am.”
“Don’t believe those polls, they’re never right.” Chiara smiled. “You know, Gabriel, there are worse things than being fired.”
“Like what?”
“Having your brains blown out by a Russian assassin.” She raised her wineglass to her lips. “Are you sure you won’t have a little? It’s really quite good.”
9 (#ulink_3fb4d32e-319e-51d0-8878-b4b24d32f8d7)
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV (#ulink_3fb4d32e-319e-51d0-8878-b4b24d32f8d7)
The concerns of the prime minister notwithstanding, Gabriel left the inquiry in the hands of Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern, two of his most trusted senior officers and closest friends. His reasons were personal. The Office’s last independent inquiry, conducted after a string of botched operations in the late 1990s, had hastened the recall of Ari Shamron from his restless retirement. Among his first official acts was to make his way to West Cornwall, where Gabriel had locked himself away in an isolated cottage with only his paintings and his grief for company. Shamron, as usual, had not arrived empty-handed; he had come bearing an operation. It would prove to be the first step of Gabriel’s long journey from self-imposed exile to the executive suite of King Saul Boulevard. The moral of the story, at least from Gabriel’s perspective, was that spies admitted outsiders into their midst at their peril.
The first order of business for Yossi and Rimona was to clear themselves of any suspicion over the leak. They did so by submitting to a pair of wholly unnecessary polygraph tests, which they passed with flying colors. Next they requested the assistance of an additional analyst. Reluctantly, Gabriel lent them Dina Sarid, a terrorism expert with a pile of active cases on her cluttered desk, including three involving ISIS that fell into the category of ticking time bombs. Dina knew almost nothing about the Kirov case or the Russian’s pending defection. Even so, Gabriel had her strapped to the poly. Not surprisingly, she passed. So did Eli Lavon, Mikhail Abramov, Yaakov Rossman, the Neviot team, the members of the field security unit, and the desk officer from Housekeeping.
The primary phase of the investigation, which was concluded at noon the following day, was predictable in its findings. The three analysts uncovered no evidence to suggest a leak by any Office personnel. Nor could they find fault with the execution of the operation itself. All had participated in undertakings far more complex than a garden-variety defection and exfiltration. It was, as Yossi wrote in his memorandum, “child’s play, by our standards.” Still, he acknowledged there were “knowns and unknowns.” Chief among them was the possibility the leak had come from none other than Konstantin Kirov himself.
“How?” asked Gabriel.
“You sent a total of four text messages to him that night—is that correct?”
“You have them all, Yossi. You know it’s correct.”
“The first message instructed Kirov to leave the InterContinental and walk to the train station. The second instructed him to board the last train to Vienna. Upon arrival, you told him to take a taxi to the Best Western. But a minute before he arrived there, you sent him the address of the safe flat.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“He was still in the taxi, which meant Mikhail and Keller couldn’t see him clearly.”
“Your point?”
“He could have forwarded the message.”
“To whom?”
“Moscow Center.”
“He had himself killed?”
“Maybe he was under the impression the evening would turn out differently.”
“In what way?”
“A different target, for example.”
“Who?”
Yossi shrugged. “You.”
Which heralded the second phase of the inquiry: a full review of Konstantin Kirov’s recruitment, handling, and enormous output of intelligence. With the benefit of hindsight, the three analysts weighed each of Kirov’s reports. They found no evidence of deception. Kirov, they concluded, was that rarest of birds. Despite the circumstances of his coerced recruitment, he remained as good as gold.
But the Office had not kept Kirov’s precious intelligence to itself; it had shared the bounty with the Americans and the British. Each instance of sharing was logged in Kirov’s voluminous case file: the type of material, the date, the all-important distribution list. No one in Washington or London, however, knew the true identity of the agent code-named Heathcliff, and only a handful of senior officers were aware of his intention to defect. One MI6 officer had been given the address of the Vienna safe flat in advance. He had insisted on it, claiming it was necessary to ensure the defector’s safe transfer to Vienna International Airport, where a Falcon executive jet had been waiting to fly him to London.
“We would have demanded the same thing,” said Uzi Navot. “Besides, having access to a piece of information isn’t the same as having proof he gave it to the Russians.”
“That’s true,” agreed Gabriel. “But it’s a good place to start.”
Navot raised a dainty china teacup to his lips. It contained hot water with a slice of lemon. Next to the saucer was a plate of celery sticks. They were carefully arranged so as to enhance their appeal. Clearly, Bella was unhappy with Navot’s current weight, which fluctuated like a Latin American stock exchange. Poor Uzi had spent the better part of the last decade on a diet. Food was his only weakness, especially the heavy, calorie-laden cuisine of Central and Eastern Europe.
“It’s your call,” he went on, “but if I were in your position, I’d want more than a pile of supposition before making an accusation against an officer from a friendly intelligence service. I’ve actually met him. He doesn’t strike me as the sort to betray his country.”
“I’m sure Angleton said the same thing about Kim Philby.”
Navot, with a sage nod of his head, conceded the point. “So how do you intend to play it?”
“I’m going to fly to London and have a word with our partners.”
“Care for a prediction?”
“Why not?”
“Your partners are going to reject your findings categorically. And then they’ll blame us for what happened in Vienna. That’s the way it works when there’s a disaster in our business. Everyone runs for the nearest foxhole.”
“So I should let it drop? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What I’m saying,” answered Navot, “is that pursuing the issue based on a flimsy estimate is liable to do serious damage to a valuable relationship.”
“There is no relationship between us and the British. It is suspended until further notice.”
“And I was afraid you were going to do something rash.” Lowering his voice, Navot added, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, Gabriel.”
“My mother always told me that. I still don’t know what it means.”
“It means you should drop that report into your shredder.”
“Not a chance.”
“In that case,” said Navot with a sigh, “you should send someone back to Vienna to see if he can add a few more details. Someone who speaks the language like a native. Someone with a contact or two inside the local security service. Who knows? If he plays his cards right, he might be able to disabuse the Austrians of the notion we killed our own defector.”
“Know anyone who fits the bill?”
“I might.”
Gabriel smiled. “You can have a nice Wiener schnitzel while you’re in town, Uzi. I know how much you love the way they make it in Vienna.”
“And the Rindsgulasch.” Navot ran a hand absently over his ample midsection. “Just what I need. Bella’s liable to put me on punishment rations.”
“You sure you don’t mind going?”
“Someone has to do it.” Navot stared morosely at the plate of celery sticks. “It might as well be me.”
10 (#ulink_96e4c511-34d7-5b06-8391-53220615b991)
VIENNA WOODS, AUSTRIA (#ulink_96e4c511-34d7-5b06-8391-53220615b991)
Uzi Navot passed an uneventful evening with Bella at their comfortable home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva, and in the morning, having risen at the hateful hour of three, he boarded the five-ten El Al flight to Warsaw, known affectionately inside the Office as the Polish Express. His overnight bag contained two changes of clothing and three changes of identity. His seatmate, a woman of thirty-three from a town in the Upper Galilee, did not recognize him. Navot was both relieved and, when he analyzed his feelings honestly, deeply resentful. For six years he had led the Office without blemish, and yet already he was forgotten. He had long ago resigned himself to the fact he would be remembered merely as a placeholder chief, the one who had kept a chair warm for the chosen one. He was an asterisk.
But he was also, at his core, a fine spy. Admittedly, he was no action figure like Gabriel. Navot was a true spy, a recruiter and runner of agents, a collector of other men’s secrets. Before his bureaucratic ascent at King Saul Boulevard, Western Europe had been his primary field of battle. Armed with an array of languages, a fatalistic charm, and a small fortune in financing, he had recruited a far-flung network of agents inside terrorist organizations, embassies, foreign ministries, and security services. One was Werner Schwarz. Navot rang him that evening from a hotel room in Prague. Werner sounded as though he’d had one or two more than was good for him. Werner was rather too fond of his drink. He was unhappily married. The alcohol was anesthesia.
“I’ve been expecting your call.”
“I really hate to be predictable.”
“A drawback in your line of work,” said Werner Schwarz. “I suppose Vienna is in your travel plans.”
“Tomorrow, actually.”
“The day after would be better.”
“I have time considerations, Werner.”
“We can’t meet in Vienna. My service is on edge.”
“Mine, too.”
“I can only imagine. How about that little wine garden in the Woods? You remember it, don’t you?”
“With considerable fondness.”
“And who will I be dining with?”
“A Monsieur Laffont.” Vincent Laffont was one of Navot’s old cover identities. He was a freelance travel writer of Breton descent who lived out of a suitcase.
“I look forward to seeing him again. Vincent was always one of my favorites,” said Werner Schwarz, and rang off.
Navot, as was his habit, arrived at the restaurant thirty minutes early, bearing a decorative box from Demel, the famous Viennese chocolatier. He had eaten most of the treats during the drive and in their place tucked five thousand euros in cash. The owner of the restaurant, a small man shaped like a Russian nesting doll, remembered him. And Navot, playing the role of Monsieur Laffont, regaled him with stories of his latest travels before settling in a quiet corner of the timbered dining room. He ordered a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, confident it would not be the last. Only three other tables were occupied, and all three parties were in the last throes of their luncheon. Soon the place would be deserted. Navot always liked a bit of ambient noise when he was doing his spying, but Werner preferred to betray his country unobserved.
He arrived at the stroke of three, dressed for the office in a dark suit and overcoat. His appearance had changed since Navot had seen him last, and not necessarily for the better. A bit thicker and grayer, a few more broken blood vessels across his cheeks. His eyes brightened as Navot filled two glasses with wine. Then the usual disappointment returned. Werner Schwarz wore it like a loud necktie. Navot had spotted it during one of his fishing trips to Vienna, and with a bit of money and pillow talk he had reeled Werner into his net. From his post inside the BVT, Austria’s capable internal security service, he had kept Navot well informed about matters of interest to the State of Israel. Navot had been forced to relinquish control of Werner during his tenure as chief. For several years they had had no contact other than the odd clandestine Christmas card and the regular cash deposits in Werner’s Zurich bank account.
“A little something for Lotte,” said Navot as he handed Werner the box.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“It was the least I could do. I know you’re a busy man.”
“Me? I have access but no real responsibility. I sit in meetings and bide my time.”
“How much longer?”
“Maybe two years.”
“We won’t forget you, Werner. You’ve been good to us.”
The Austrian waved his hand dismissively. “I’m not some girl you picked up in a bar. Once I retire, you’ll struggle to remember my name.”
Navot didn’t bother with a denial.
“And what about you, Monsieur Laffont? Still in the game, I see.”
“For a few more rounds, at least.”
“Your service treated you shabbily. You deserved better.”
“I had a good run.”
“Only to be cast aside for Allon.” In a confessional murmur, Werner Schwarz asked, “Did he really think he could get away with killing an SVR officer in the middle of Vienna?”
“We had nothing to do with it.”
“Uzi, please.”
“You have to believe me, Werner. It wasn’t us.”
“We have evidence.”
“Like what?”
“One of the members of your hit team. The tall one,” Werner Schwarz persisted. “The one who looks like a cadaver. He helped Allon with that little problem at the Stadttempel a few years ago, and Allon was foolish enough to send him back to Vienna to take care of the Russian. You would have never made a mistake like that, Uzi. You were always very cautious.”
Navot ignored Werner’s flattery. “Our officers were present that night,” he admitted, “but not for the reason you think. The Russian was working for us. He was in the process of defecting when he was killed.”
Werner Schwarz smiled. “How long did it take you and Allon to come up with that one?”
“You didn’t actually see the assassination, did you, Werner?”
“There were no cameras at that end of the street, which is why you chose it. The ballistics evidence proves conclusively the operative on the motorcycle was the one who pulled the trigger.” Werner Schwarz paused, then added, “My condolences, by the way.”
“None necessary. He wasn’t ours.”
“He’s sitting on a slab in the central morgue. Do you really intend to leave him there?”
“He’s of no concern to us. Do with him what you please.”
“Oh, we are.”
The proprietor appeared and took their order as the last of the three luncheon parties made their way noisily toward the door. Beyond the windows of the dining room the Vienna Woods were beginning to darken. It was the quiet time, the time Werner Schwarz liked best. Navot filled his wineglass. Then, with no warning or explanation, he spoke a name.
Werner Schwarz raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”
“Know him?”
“Only by reputation.”
“And what’s that?”
“A fine officer who serves his country’s interests here in Vienna professionally and in accordance with our wishes.”
“Which means he makes no attempt to target the Austrian government.”
“Or our citizenry. Therefore, we let him go about his work unmolested. For the most part,” Werner Schwarz added.
“You keep an eye on him?”
“When resources permit. We’re a small service.”
“And?”
“He’s very good at his job. But in my experience, they usually are. Deception seems to come naturally to them.”
“No crimes or misdemeanors? No personal vices?”
“The occasional affair,” said Werner Schwarz.
“Anyone in particular?”
“He got himself involved with the wife of an American consular officer a couple of years ago. It caused quite a row.”
“How was it handled?”
“The American consular officer was transferred to Copenhagen, and the wife went back to Virginia.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s been taking a lot of flights to Bern, which is interesting because Bern isn’t part of his territory.”
“You think he’s got a new girl there?”
“Or maybe something else. As you know, our authority stops at the Swiss border.” The first course arrived, a chicken liver terrine for Navot and for Werner Schwarz the smoked duck breast. “Am I allowed to ask why you’re so interested in this man?”
“It’s a housekeeping matter. Nothing more.”
“Is it connected to the Russian?”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“The timing, that’s all.”
“Two birds with one stone,” explained Navot airily.
“It’s not so easily done.” Werner Schwarz dabbed his lips with a starched napkin. “Which brings us back to the man lying in the central morgue. How long do you intend to carry on this pretense he isn’t yours?”
“Do you really think,” said Navot evenly, “that Gabriel Allon would allow you to bury a Jew in an unmarked grave in Vienna?”
“I’ll grant you that’s not Allon’s style. Not after what he’s been through in this city. But the man in the morgue isn’t Jewish. At least not ethnically Jewish.”
“How do you know?”
“When the Bundespolizei couldn’t identify him, they ordered a test of his DNA.”
“And?”
“Not a trace of the Ashkenazi gene. Nor does he have the DNA markers of a Sephardic Jew. No Arabian, North African, or Spanish blood. Not a single drop.”
“So what is he?”
“He’s Russian. One hundred percent.”
“Imagine that,” said Navot.
11 (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)
ANDALUSIA, SPAIN (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)
The villa clung to the edge of a great crag in the hills of Andalusia. The precariousness of its perch appealed to the woman; it seemed it might lose its grip on the rock at any moment and fall away. There were nights, awake in bed, when she imagined herself tumbling into the abyss, with her keepsakes and her books and her cats swirling about her in a ragged tornado of memory. She wondered how long she might lie dead on the valley floor, entombed in the debris of her solitary existence, before anyone noticed. Would the authorities give her a decent burial? Would they notify her child? She had left a few carefully concealed clues concerning the child’s identity in her personal effects, and in the beginnings of a memoir. Thus far, she had managed only eleven pages, handwritten in pencil, each page marked by the brown ring of her coffee mug. She had a title, though, which she regarded as a notable achievement, as titles were always so difficult. She called it The Other Woman.
The scant eleven pages, the sum total of her labors, she regarded less charitably, for her days were nothing if not a vast empty quarter of time. What’s more, she was a journalist, at least she had masqueraded as one in her youth. Perhaps it was the topic that blocked her path forward. Writing about the lives of others— the dictator, the freedom fighter, the man who sells olives and spice in the souk—had for her been a relatively straightforward process. The subject spoke, his words were weighed against the available facts—yes, his words, because in those days women were of no consequence—and a few hundred words would spill onto the page, hopefully with enough flair and insight as to warrant a small payment from a faraway editor in London or Paris or New York. But writing about oneself, well, that was an altogether different matter. It was like attempting to recall the details of an auto accident on a darkened road. She’d had one once, with him, in the mountains near Beirut. He’d been drunk, as usual, and abusive, which was not like him. She supposed he had a right to be angry; she had finally worked up the nerve to tell him about the baby. Even now, she wondered whether he had been trying to kill her. He’d killed a good many others. Hundreds, in fact. She knew that now. But not then.
She worked, or pretended to work, in the mornings, in the shadowed alcove beneath the stairs. She had been sleeping less and rising earlier. She supposed it was yet another unwelcome consequence of growing old. On that morning she was more prolific than usual, an entire page of polished prose with scarcely a correction or revision. Still, she had yet to complete the first chapter. Or would she call it a prologue? She’d always been dubious about prologues; she regarded them as cheap devices wielded by lesser writers. In her case, however, a prologue was justified, for she was starting her story not at the beginning but in the middle, a stifling afternoon in August 1974 when a certain Comrade Lavrov—it was a pseudonym—brought her a letter from Moscow. It bore neither the name of the sender nor the date it was composed. Even so, she knew it was from him, the English journalist she had known in Beirut. The prose betrayed him.
It was half past eleven in the morning when she set down her pencil. She knew this because the tinny alarm on her Seiko wristwatch reminded her to take her next pill. It was her heart that ailed her. She swallowed the bitter little tablet with the cold dregs of her coffee and locked the manuscript—it was a pretentious word, admittedly, but she could think of no other—in the antique Victorian strongbox beneath her writing table. The next item on her busy daily schedule, her ritual bath, consumed all of forty minutes, followed by another half hour of careful grooming and dressing, after which she left the villa and set out through the fierce early-afternoon glare toward the center of the village.
The town was white as dried bone, famously white, and balanced atop the highest point of the incisor-like crag. One hundred and fourteen normal paces along the paseo brought her to the new hotel, and another two hundred and twenty-eight steps carried her across a patch of olive and scrub oak to the edge of the centre ville, which was how, privately, she referred to it, even now, even after all her years of splendid exile. It was a game she had played with her child long ago in Paris, the counting of steps. How many steps to cross the courtyard to the street? How many steps to span the Pont de la Concorde? How many steps until a child of ten disappeared from her mother’s sight? The answer was twenty-nine.
A graffiti artist had defiled the first sugar-cube dwelling with a Spanish-language obscenity. She thought his work rather decent, a hint of color, like a throw pillow, to break the monotony of white. She wound her way higher through the town to the Calle San Juan. The shopkeepers watched her disdainfully as she passed. They had many names for her, none flattering. They called her la loca, the crazy one, or la roja, a reference to the color of her politics, which she’d made no attempt to hide, contrary to the instructions of Comrade Lavrov. In fact, there were few shops in the village where she had not had an altercation of some sort, always over money. She regarded the shopkeepers as vulture capitalists, and they thought her, justifiably, a communist and a troublemaker, and an imported one at that.
The café where she preferred to take her midday meal was in a square near the town’s summit. There was a hexagonal islet with a handsome lamp at its center and on the eastern flank a church, ocher instead of white, another respite from the sameness. The café itself was a no-nonsense affair—plastic tables and chairs, plastic tablecloths of a peculiarly Scottish pattern—but three lovely orange trees, heavy with fruit, shaded the terrace. The waiter was a friendly young Moroccan from some godforsaken hamlet in the Rif Mountains. For all she knew, he was an ISIS fanatic who was plotting to slit her throat at the earliest opportunity, but he was one of the few people in the town who treated her kindly. They addressed one another in Arabic, she in the stilted classical Arabic she had learned in Beirut, he in the Maghrebi dialect of North Africa. He was generous with the ham and the sherry, despite the fact he disapproved of both.
“Did you see the news from Palestine today?” He placed a tortilla española before her. “The Zionists have closed the Temple Mount.”
“Outrageous. If the fools don’t open it soon, it will be the ruin of them.”
“Inshallah.”
“Yes,” she agreed as she sipped a pale Manzanilla. “Inshallah, indeed.”
Over coffee she scratched a few lines into her Moleskine notebook, memories of that August afternoon so long ago in Paris, impressions. Diligently, she tried to segregate what she knew then from what she knew now, to place herself, and the reader, in the moment, without the bias of time. When the bill appeared, she left twice the requested amount and went into the square. For some reason the church beckoned. She climbed its steps—there were four—and heaved on the studded wooden door. Cool air rushed out at her like an exhalation of breath. Instinctively, she stretched a hand toward the font and dipped the tips of her fingers into the holy water, but stopped before performing the ritual self-blessing. Surely, she thought, the earth would tremble and the curtain in the temple would tear itself in two.
The nave was in semidarkness and deserted. She took a few hesitant steps up the center aisle and inhaled the familiar scents of incense and candle smoke and beeswax. She’d always loved the smell of churches but thought the rest of it was for the birds. As usual, God on his Roman instrument of execution did not speak to her or stir her to rapture, but a statue of the Madonna and Child, hovering above a stand of votive candles, moved her quite unexpectedly to tears.
She shoved a few coins through the slot of the box and stumbled into the sunlight. It had turned cold without warning, the way it did in the mountains of Andalusia in winter. She hurried toward the base of the town, counting her steps, wondering why at her age it was harder to walk downhill than up. The little El Castillo supermarket had awakened from its siesta. From the orderly shelves she plucked a few items for her supper and carried them in a plastic sack across the wasteland of oak and olive, past the new hotel, and finally into the prison of her villa.
The cold followed her inside like a stray animal. She lit a fire in the grate and poured herself a whisky to take the chill out of her bones. The savor of smoke and charred wood made her think, involuntarily, of him. His kisses always tasted of whisky.
She carried the glass to her alcove beneath the stairs. Above the writing desk, books lined a single shelf. Her eyes moved left to right across the cracked and faded spines. Knightley, Seale, Boyle, Wright, Brown, Modin, Macintyre, Beeston … There was also a paperback edition of his dishonest memoir. Her name appeared in none of the volumes. She was his best-kept secret. No, she thought suddenly, his second best.
She opened the Victorian strongbox and removed a leatherbound scrapbook, so old it smelled only of dust. Inside, carefully pasted to its pages, was the meager ration of photographs, clippings, and letters Comrade Lavrov had allowed her to take from her old apartment in Paris—and a few more she had managed to keep without his knowledge. She had only eight yellowed snapshots of her child, the last one taken, clandestinely, on Jesus Lane in Cambridge. There were many more of him. The long boozy lunches at the St. Georges and the Normandie, the picnics in the hills, the drunken afternoons in the bathing hut at Khalde Beach. And then there were the photos she had taken in the privacy of her apartment when his defenses were down. They had never met in his large flat on the rue Kantari, only in hers. Somehow, Eleanor had never found them out. She supposed deception came naturally to them both. And to their offspring.
She returned the scrapbook to the Victorian strongbox and in the sitting room switched on her outmoded television. The evening news had just begun on La 1. After several minutes of the usual fare—a labor strike, a football riot, more unrest in neighboring Catalonia—there was a story about the assassination of a Russian agent in Vienna, and about the Israeli spymaster alleged to be responsible. She hated the Israeli, if for no other reason than the fact he existed, but at that moment she actually felt a bit sorry for him. The poor fool, she thought. He had no idea what he was up against.
12 (#ulink_858122c7-1cc7-50d9-a2d0-310219e9479f)
BELGRAVIA, LONDON (#ulink_858122c7-1cc7-50d9-a2d0-310219e9479f)
Official protocol dictated that Gabriel inform “C,” the director-general of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, of his intention to visit London. He would be met by a reception committee at Heathrow Airport, shepherded around passport control, and whisked to Vauxhall Cross in a motorcade worthy of a prime minister, a president, or a potentate from some corner of an empire lost. Nearly everyone who mattered in official and secret London would know of his presence. In short, it would be a disaster.
Which explained why Gabriel flew to Paris on a false passport instead and then stole quietly into London on a midday Eurostar train. For his accommodations he chose the Grand Hotel Berkshire on the West Cromwell Road. He paid for a two-night stay in cash—it was that sort of place—and climbed the stairs to his room because the lift was out of order. It was that sort of place, too.
He hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the latch and engaged the safety bar before lifting the receiver of the room phone. It smelled of the last occupant’s aftershave. He started to dial but stopped himself. The call would be monitored by GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence service, and almost certainly by the American NSA, both of which knew the sound of his voice in multiple languages.
He replaced the receiver and opened a text-to-speech application on his mobile phone. After typing the message and selecting the language in which he wanted it read, he lifted the foul-smelling receiver a second time and dialed the number to completion.
A male voice answered, cool and distant, as though annoyed by an unwanted interruption. Gabriel held the speaker of the mobile to the mouthpiece of the room phone and pressed the PLAY icon. The software’s automated voice stressed all the wrong words and syllables but managed to convey his wishes. He wanted a word with “C” in private, far from Vauxhall Cross and without the knowledge of anyone else inside MI6. He could be reached at the Grand Hotel Berkshire, room 304. He did not have long to wait.
When the playback of the message was complete, Gabriel rang off and watched the rush-hour traffic hurtling along the road. Twenty minutes elapsed before the room phone finally rattled with an incoming call. The voice that spoke to Gabriel was human. “Fifty-six Eaton Square, seven o’clock. Business casual.” Then there was a click, and the call went dead.
Gabriel had expected to be sent to a dreary MI6 safe house in a place like Stockwell or Stepney or Maida Vale, and so the address in tony Belgravia came as something of a surprise. It corresponded to a large Georgian dwelling overlooking the square’s southwestern quadrant. The house, like its neighbors along the terrace, had a snow-white stucco exterior on the ground floor, with tan brick on the upper four. A light burned brightly between the pillars of the portico, and the bell push, when thumbed by Gabriel, produced a sonorous tolling within. While awaiting a response, he surveyed the other houses along the square. Most were darkened, evidence that one of London’s most sought-after addresses was the preserve of wealthy absentee owners from Arabia and China and, of course, Russia.
At last, there were footfalls, the crack of high heels on a marble floor. Then the door withdrew, revealing a tall woman of perhaps sixty-five, in fashionable black pants and a jacket with a pattern that looked like Gabriel’s palette after a long day’s work. She had resisted the siren’s song of plastic surgery or collagen implants and thus had retained an elegant, dignified beauty. Her right hand was holding the latch, her left a glass of white wine. Gabriel smiled. It promised to be an interesting evening.
She returned his smile. “My God, it’s really you.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Hurry inside before someone takes a shot at you or tries to blow you up. I’m Helen, by the way. Helen Seymour,” she added as the door closed with a solid thump. “Surely, Graham’s mentioned me.”
“He never stops talking about you.”
She made a face. “Graham warned me about your dark sense of humor.”
“I’ll do my best to keep it in check.”
“Please don’t. All our other friends are so bloody dull.” She led him along a checkerboard hall, to a vast kitchen that smelled wonderfully of chicken and rice and saffron. “I’m making paella. Graham said you wouldn’t mind.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The chorizo and the shellfish,” she explained. “He assured me you weren’t kosher.”
“I’m not, though I generally avoid the forbidden meats.”
“You can eat around them. That’s what the Arabs do when I make it for them.”
“They come often?” probed Gabriel.
Helen Seymour rolled her eyes.
“Anyone in particular?”
“That Jordanian chap was just here. The one who wears Savile Row suits and speaks like one of us.”
“Fareed Barakat.”
“He’s quite fond of himself. And you, too,” she added.
“We’re on the same side, Fareed and I.”
“And what side is that?”
“Stability.”
“There’s no such thing, my dear. Not anymore.”
Gabriel gave Helen Seymour the room-temperature bottle of Sancerre he had purchased from Sainsbury’s in Berkeley Street. She placed it directly in the freezer.
“I saw your picture in the Times the other day,” she said, closing the door. “Or was it the Telegraph?”
“Both, I’m afraid.”
“It wasn’t one of your better ones. Perhaps this will help.” She poured a large glass of Albariño. “Graham’s waiting for you upstairs. He says you two have something to discuss before dinner. I suppose it has to do with Vienna. I’m not allowed to know.”
“Consider yourself fortunate.”
Gabriel climbed the wide staircase to the second floor. Light spilled from the open doorway of the stately book-lined study where Graham Seymour, the successor of Cumming, Menzies, White, and Oldfield, waited in splendid isolation. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and pewter necktie that matched the color of his plentiful locks. His right hand cradled a cut-glass tumbler filled with a clear distilled beverage. His eyes were fixed on the television screen, where his prime minister was responding to a reporter’s question about Brexit. For his part, Gabriel was glad for the change of subject.
“Please tell Lancaster how much his unwavering support meant to me in the days after Vienna. Let him know he can call anytime he needs a favor.”
“Don’t blame Lancaster,” replied Seymour. “It wasn’t his idea.”
“Whose was it?”
“Mine.”
“Why not keep your mouth shut? Why hang me out to dry?”
“Because you and your team ran a bad operation, and I didn’t want it to rub off on my service or prime minister.” Seymour glanced disapprovingly at Gabriel’s wine and then wandered over to the trolley and refreshed his drink. “Can I interest you in something a bit stronger?”
“An acetone on the rocks, please.”
“Olives or a twist?” With a careful smile, Seymour declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. “You should have let me know you were coming. You’re lucky you didn’t miss me. I’m flying to Washington in the morning.”
“The cherry blossoms aren’t in bloom for at least another three months.”
“Thank God.”
“What’s on the agenda?”
“A routine meeting at Langley to review current joint operations and set future priorities.”
“My invitation must have been lost in the mail.”
“There are some things we do without your knowledge. We’re family, after all.”
“Distant family,” said Gabriel.
“And getting more distant by the day.”
“The alliance has been under strain before.”
“Strain, yes, but this is different. We are facing the very real prospect of the collapse of the international order. The same order, I might add, that gave birth to your country.”
“We can look after ourselves.”
“Can you really?” asked Seymour seriously. “For how long? Against how many enemies at once?”
“Let’s talk about something pleasant.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Like Vienna.”
“It was a simple operation,” said Seymour after a moment. “Bring the agent in from the cold, have a word with him in private, put him on a plane to a new life. We do it all the time.”
“So do we,” replied Gabriel. “But this operation was made more complicated by the fact my agent was blown long before he left Moscow.”
“Our agent,” said Seymour pointedly. “We were the ones who agreed to take him in.”
“Which is why,” said Gabriel, “he’s now dead.”
Seymour was squeezing the tumbler so tightly his fingertips had gone white.
“Careful, Graham. You’re liable to break that.”
He placed the glass on the trolley. “Let us stipulate,” he said calmly, “that the available evidence suggests Kirov was blown.”
“Yes, let’s.”
“But let us also stipulate it was your responsibility to bring him in, regardless of the circumstances. You should have spotted the SVR surveillance teams in Vienna and waved him off.”
“We couldn’t spot them, Graham, because there weren’t any. They weren’t necessary. They knew where Kirov was going and that I would be waiting there. That’s how they got the photograph of me leaving the building. That’s how they used their bots, trolls, message boards, and news services to create the impression we were the ones behind Kirov’s killing.”
“Where was the leak?”
“It didn’t come from our service. Which means,” said Gabriel, “it came from yours.”
“I’ve got a Russian spy on my payroll?” asked Seymour. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Gabriel went to the window and gazed at the darkened houses on the opposite side of the square. “Any chance you could put a Harry James record on the gramophone and turn the volume up very loud?”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Seymour, rising. “Come with me.”
13 (#ulink_e2d0141b-cbb4-5a9f-b937-cda062ad7f4d)
EATON SQUARE, LONDON (#ulink_e2d0141b-cbb4-5a9f-b937-cda062ad7f4d)
The door, while outwardly normal in appearance, was mounted within an invisible high-strength steel frame. Graham Seymour opened it by entering the correct eight numerical digits into the keypad on the wall. The chamber beyond was small and cramped, and raised several inches from the floor. There were two chairs, a telephone, and a screen for secure videoconferences.
“An in-home safe-speech room,” said Gabriel. “What will they think of next?”
Seymour lowered himself into one of the chairs and gestured Gabriel into the second. Their knees were touching, like passengers sharing a compartment on a train. The overhead lighting played havoc with Seymour’s handsome features. He looked suddenly like a man Gabriel had never met.
“It’s all rather convenient, isn’t it? And entirely predictable.”
“What’s that?” asked Gabriel.
“You’re looking for a scapegoat to explain your failure.”
“I’d be careful about tossing around the word scapegoat. It makes people like me uneasy.”
Somehow, Seymour managed to maintain a mask of British reserve. “Don’t you dare play that card with me. We go back too far for that.”
“We do indeed. Which is why I thought you might be interested to know that your Head of Station in Vienna is a Russian spy.”
“Alistair Hughes? He’s a fine officer.”
“I’m sure his controllers at Moscow Center feel the same way.” The chamber’s ventilation system roared like an open freezer. “Will you at least give me a hearing?”
“No.”
“In that case, I have no choice but to suspend our relationship.”
Seymour only smiled. “You’re not much of a poker player, are you?”
“I’ve never had much time for trivial pursuits.”
“There’s that card again.”
“Our relationship is like a marriage, Graham. It’s based on trust.”
“In my opinion, most marriages are based either on money or the fear of being alone. And if you divorce me, you won’t have a friend in the world.”
“I can’t operate with you or share intelligence if your Vienna Head is on the Russian payroll. And I’m quite sure the Americans will feel the same way.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Watch me. In fact, I think I’ll tell my good friend Morris Payne about all this in time for your little meeting tomorrow.” Payne was the director of the CIA. “That should liven things up considerably.”
Seymour made no response.
Gabriel glanced at the camera lens above the video screen. “That thing isn’t on, is it?”
Seymour shook his head.
“And no one knows we’re in here?”
“No one but Helen. She adores him, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Alistair Hughes. She thinks he’s dishy.”
“So did the wife of an American diplomat who used to work in Vienna.”
Seymour’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know about that?”
“A little bird told me. The same little bird that told me about Alistair Hughes demanding to know the address of the safe flat where I was planning to debrief Kirov.”
“London Control wanted the address, not Alistair.”
“Why?”
“Because it was our responsibility to get Kirov out of Vienna and onto a plane safely. It’s not like ordering a car from Uber. You can’t press a button at the last minute. We had to plan the primary route and put in place a backup in case the Russians intervened. And for that, we needed the address.”
“How many people knew it?”
“In London?” Seymour glanced at the ceiling. “Eight or nine. And another six or seven in Vienna.”
“What about the Vienna Boys’ Choir?” Greeted by silence, Gabriel asked, “How much did the Americans know?”
“Our Head of Station in Washington informed them that Heathcliff was coming out and that we had agreed to grant him defector status. She didn’t tell them any of the operational details.”
“Not the location?”
“City only.”
“Did they know I would be there?”
“They might have.” Seymour made a show of thought. “I’m sorry, but I’m getting a bit confused. Are you accusing the Americans of leaking the information to the Russians, or us?”
“I’m accusing dishy Alistair Hughes.”
“What about the fourteen other MI6 officers who knew the address of your safe flat? How do you know it wasn’t one of them?”
“Because we’re sitting in this room. You brought me here,” said Gabriel, “because you’re afraid I might be right.”
14 (#ulink_56f9f345-4960-5399-a294-d3b7883d88ea)
EATON SQUARE, LONDON (#ulink_56f9f345-4960-5399-a294-d3b7883d88ea)
Graham Seymour sat for a long moment in a contemplative silence, his gaze averted, as though watching the countryside marching past the window of Gabriel’s imaginary train carriage. At last, he quietly spoke a name, a Russian name, that Gabriel struggled to make out over the howling of the ventilation system.
“Gribkov,” Seymour repeated. “Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov. We called him VeeVee for short. He masqueraded as a press attaché at the Russian diplomatic mission in New York. Rather badly, I might add. In reality, he was an SVR officer who trolled for spies at the United Nations. Moscow Center has a massive rezidentura in New York. Our station is much smaller, and yours is smaller still. One man, actually. We know his identity, as do the Americans.”
But that, added Seymour, was neither here nor there. What mattered was that Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov, during an otherwise tedious diplomatic cocktail party at a posh Manhattan hotel, approached MI6’s man in New York and intimated he wished to discuss something of a highly sensitive nature. The MI6 officer, whom Seymour did not identify, duly reported the contact to London Control. “Because, as any MI6 field officer knows, the surest route to the career ash heap is to conduct an unauthorized heart-to-heart with an SVR hood.” London Control formally blessed the encounter, and three weeks after the initial contact—enough time, said Seymour, to allow Gribkov to come to his senses—the two officers agreed to meet at a remote location east of New York, on Long Island.
“Actually, it was on a smaller island off the coast, a place called Shelter Island. There’s no bridge, only car ferries. Much of the island is a nature preserve, with miles of walking trails where it’s possible to never bump into another living soul. In short, it was the perfect place for an officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service to meet with a Russian who was thinking about betraying his country.”
Gribkov wasted little time on preliminaries or professional niceties. He said he had become disillusioned with the SVR and with Russia under the rule of the Tsar. It was his wish to defect to England along with his wife and two children, who were living with him in New York at the Russian diplomatic compound in the Bronx. He said he could provide MI6 with a treasure trove of intelligence, including one piece of information that would make him the most valuable defector in history. Therefore, he wanted to be well compensated in return.
“How much?” asked Gabriel.
“Ten million pounds in cash and a house in the English countryside.”
“One of those,” said Gabriel contemptuously.
“Yes,” agreed Seymour.
“And the piece of information that made him worthy of such riches?”
“The name of a Russian mole working at the pinnacle of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.”
“Did he specify which service or which side of the divide?”
Seymour shook his head.
“What was your reaction?”
“Caution bordering on skepticism, which is our default opening position. We assumed he was telling us a tall tale, or that he was an agent provocateur sent by Moscow Center to mislead us into carrying out a self-destructive witch hunt for a traitor in our midst.”
“So you told him you weren’t interested?”
“The opposite, actually. We told him we were very interested but that we needed a few weeks to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, we checked his references. Gribkov was no probationer. He was a veteran SVR officer who’d served in several rezidenturas in the West, most recently in Vienna, where he’d had numerous contacts with my Head of Station.”
“Dishy Alistair Hughes.”
Seymour said nothing.
“What was the nature of the contacts?”
“The usual,” said Seymour. “What’s important is that Alistair reported each and every one of them, as he’s required to do. They were all logged in his file, with cross-references in Gribkov’s.”
“So you brought Hughes to Vauxhall Cross to get his impressions of Gribkov and what he was selling.”
“Exactly.”
“And?”
“Alistair was even more skeptical than London Control.”
“Was he really? I’m shocked to hear that.”
Seymour frowned. “By this point,” he said, “six weeks had passed since Gribkov’s initial offer of defection, and he was starting to get nervous. He made two highly inadvisable phone calls to my man in New York. And then he did something truly reckless.”
“What’s that?”
“He reached out to the Americans. As you might expect, Langley was furious at the way we’d handled the case. They put pressure on us to take Gribkov as quickly as possible. They even offered to pay a portion of the ten million. When we resisted, it turned into a full-blown family feud.”
“Who won?”
“Moscow Center,” said Seymour. “While we were bickering with our American cousins, we failed to notice when Gribkov was ordered home for urgent consultations. His wife and children returned to Russia a few days later, and the following month the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations announced the appointment of a new press attaché. Needless to say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov has never been seen or heard from since.”
“Why wasn’t I told about any of this?”
“It didn’t concern you.”
“It concerned me,” said Gabriel evenly, “the minute you let Alistair Hughes within a mile of my operation in Vienna.”
“It didn’t cross our mind not to let him work on the operation.”
“Why not?”
“Because our internal inquiry cleared him of any role in Gribkov’s demise.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. But how exactly did the Russians learn Gribkov was trying to defect?”
“We concluded he must have tipped them off with his behavior. The Americans agreed with our assessment.”
“Thus ending a potentially destabilizing fight among friends. But now you have another dead Russian defector on your hands. And the one common denominator is your Head of Station in Vienna, a man who carried on an extramarital affair with the wife of an American consular officer.”
“Her husband wasn’t a consular officer, he was Agency. And if marital infidelity were an accurate indicator of treason, we wouldn’t have a service. Neither would you.”
“He’s been spending a lot of time across the border in Switzerland.”
“Did your little bird tell you that, too, or have you been watching him?”
“I would never watch one of your officers without telling you, Graham. Friends don’t do that to one another. They don’t keep each other in the dark. Not when lives are at stake.”
Seymour offered no response. He looked suddenly exhausted and weary of the quarrel. Gabriel did not envy his friend’s predicament. A spymaster never won in a situation like this. It was only a question of how badly he lost.
“At the risk of putting my nose somewhere it doesn’t belong,” said Gabriel, “it seems to me you have two choices.”
“Do I?”
“The most logical course of action would be to open an internal investigation into whether Alistair Hughes is flogging your secrets to the Russians. You’ll be obligated to tell the Americans about the inquiry, which will send your relationship into the deep freeze. What’s more, you’ll have to bring your rivals at MI5 into the picture, which is the last thing you want.”
“And the second option?” asked Seymour.
“Let us watch Hughes for you.”
“Surely, you jest.”
“Sometimes. But not now.”
“It’s without precedent.”
“Not entirely,” replied Gabriel. “And it’s not without its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“Hughes knows your surveillance techniques and, perhaps more important, your personnel. If you try to watch him, there’s a good chance he’ll spot you. But if we do it—”
“You’ll have license to rummage into the private affairs of one of my officers.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, Gabriel made it clear that such license was his already, with or without Seymour’s acquiescence. “He won’t be able to hide it from us, Graham, not if he’s under round-the-clock surveillance. If he’s in contact with the Russians, we’ll see it.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll hand the evidence over to you, and you can do with it as you see fit.”
“Or as you see fit.”
Gabriel did not rise to the bait; the contest was nearly over. Seymour lifted his eyes irritably toward the grate in the ceiling. The air was Siberian cold.
“I can’t let you watch my Vienna Head without someone from our side looking over your shoulder,” he said at last. “I want one of my officers on the surveillance team.”
“That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, Graham.” Greeted by silence, Gabriel said, “Given the current circumstances, there’s only one MI6 officer I’d accept.”
“Have you forgotten that he and Alistair know each other?”
“No,” replied Gabriel, “that important fact has not suddenly slipped my mind. But don’t worry, we won’t let them within a mile of each other.”
“Not a word to the Americans,” demanded Seymour.
Gabriel raised his right hand, as though swearing a solemn oath.
“And no access whatsoever to any MI6 files or the inner workings of Vienna station,” Seymour insisted. “Your operation will be limited to physical surveillance only.”
“But his apartment is fair game,” countered Gabriel. “Eyes and ears.”
Seymour made a show of deliberation. “Agreed,” he said finally. “But do try to show a little discretion with your cameras and microphones. A man is entitled to a zone of immunity.”
“Unless he’s spying for the Russians. Then he’s entitled to vysshaya mera.”
“Is that Hebrew?”
“Russian, actually.”
“What does it mean?”
Gabriel punched the eight-digit numerical code into the internal keypad, and the locks opened with a snap.
Seymour frowned. “I’ll have that changed first thing in the morning.”
“Do,” said Gabriel.
Seymour was distracted during dinner, and so it fell to Helen, the perfect service wife, to guide the conversation. She did so with admirable discretion. Gabriel was no stranger to the London press, yet never once did she raise the unpleasant topic of his past exploits on British soil. Only later, as he was preparing to take his leave, did he realize they had spoken of nothing at all.
He had hoped to walk back to his hotel, but a Jaguar limousine waited curbside. Christopher Keller was sitting in the backseat, reading something on his MI6 BlackBerry. “I’d get in if I were you,” he said. “A good friend of the Tsar lives on the other side of the square.”
Gabriel ducked into the car and closed the door. The limousine moved away from the curb with a lurch and a moment later was speeding along the King’s Road through Chelsea.
“How was dinner?” asked Keller warily.
“Almost as bad as Vienna.”
“I hear we’re going back.”
“Not me.”
“Too bad.” Keller stared out the window. “I know how much you love the place.”
15 (#ulink_6a4fc0d7-5f82-5178-b58c-d46329130612)
BRITISH EMBASSY, WASHINGTON (#ulink_6a4fc0d7-5f82-5178-b58c-d46329130612)
The director-general of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had no private aircraft of his own—only the prime minister had such a perquisite—and so Graham Seymour crossed the Atlantic the next morning aboard a chartered Falcon executive jet. He was met on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport by a CIA reception team and driven at high speed through the sprawl of suburban Northern Virginia, to the British Embassy compound on Massachusetts Avenue. Upon arrival, he was shown upstairs for the obligatory meeting with the ambassador, a man he had known nearly all his life. Their fathers had served together in Beirut in the early 1960s. The ambassador’s father had worked for the Foreign Office, Seymour’s for MI6.
“Dinner tonight?” asked the ambassador as he showed Seymour to the door.
“Back to London, I’m afraid.”
“Pity.”
“Quite.”
Seymour’s next stop was the MI6 station, which lay behind a bank vault of a door, a secret kingdom, separate and apart from the rest of the embassy. It was MI6’s largest station by far, and without question its most important. By standing agreement, its officers made no attempt to collect intelligence on American soil. They served merely as liaisons to the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, where they were regarded as valued customers. MI6 had helped to build America’s espionage capability during World War II, and now, decades later, it was still reaping the rewards. The close familial relationship allowed the United Kingdom, a hollowed-out former imperial power with a small military, to play an outsize role on the world stage, and thus maintain the illusion it was a global power to be reckoned with.
Rebecca Manning, the Washington Head of Station, was waiting for Seymour on the other side of the security barrier. She had been beautiful once—far too beautiful to be an intelligence officer, in the opinion of one long-forgotten service recruiter—but now, in the prime of her professional life, she was merely formidably attractive. A stray lock of dark hair fell over a cobalt-blue eye. She moved it aside with one hand and extended the other toward Seymour. “Welcome to Washington,” she intoned, as though the city and all it represented were hers exclusively. “I trust the flight wasn’t too terrible.”
“It gave me a chance to read your briefing materials.”
“There are one or two more points I’d like to review before we leave for Langley. There’s coffee in the conference room.”
She released her grip on Seymour’s hand and led him along the station’s central corridor. Her stylish jacket and skirt smelled faintly of tobacco; she had no doubt stepped into the garden for a quick L&B before Seymour’s arrival. Rebecca Manning was an unrepentant and wholly unapologetic smoker. She had acquired the habit at Cambridge, and it had worsened considerably during a posting in Baghdad. She had also served in Brussels, Paris, Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman, where she had been the Head of Station. It was Seymour, early in his tenure as chief, who had given her the job as H/Washington, as it was known in the lexicon of the service. In doing so, he had virtually anointed her as his successor. Washington would be Rebecca’s final overseas station; there was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere but a final lap at Vauxhall Cross so that she might be formally introduced to the barons of Whitehall. Her appointment would be historic, and long overdue. MI5 had already had two female chiefs—including Amanda Wallace, the current director-general—but Six had never entrusted the reins of power to a woman. It was a legacy Seymour would be proud to leave.
Family ties aside, Washington Station observed the same security procedures as any other post in the world, especially when it came to sensitive conversations between senior officers. The conference room was impervious to electronic eavesdropping. A leather-bound briefing book had been left at Seymour’s place at the table. Inside was the agenda for the meeting with CIA director Morris Payne, along with summaries of current policies, future goals, and ongoing operations. It was one of the most valuable documents in the world of global intelligence. Moscow Center would surely have killed for it.
“Cream?” asked Rebecca Manning.
“Black.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Doctor’s orders.”
“Nothing serious, I trust.”
“My cholesterol is a bit too high. So is my blood pressure. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the job.”
“I gave up worrying about my health a long time ago. If I can survive Baghdad, I can survive anything.” She handed Seymour his coffee. Then she prepared one for herself and frowned. “Coffee without a fag. What’s the point?”
“You really should quit, you know. If I can do it, anyone can.”
“Morris tells me the same thing.”
“I didn’t realize you were on a Christian-name basis.”
“He’s not so bad, Graham.”
“He’s ideological, which makes me nervous. A spy should believe in nothing.” He paused, then added, “Like you, Rebecca.”
“Morris Payne isn’t a spy, he’s the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s an enormous difference.” She opened her copy of the briefing book. “Shall we begin?”
Seymour had never doubted the wisdom of Rebecca Manning’s appointment to Washington, never less so than in the forty-five minutes of her briefing. She moved through the agenda swiftly and sure-footedly—North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the global effort against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Her command of the policy issues was complete, as was her exposure to American covert operations. As MI6’s Head of Station in Washington, Rebecca Manning knew far more about the secret workings of the American intelligence community than most members of the Senate. Her thinking was subtle and sophisticated, and not given to hyperbole or rashness. For Rebecca, the world was not a dangerous place spinning rapidly out of control; it was a problem to be managed by men and women of competence and training.
The last item on the agenda was Russia. It was inherently treacherous ground. The new American president had made no secret of his admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader and expressed a desire for better relations with Moscow. Now he was embroiled in an investigation into whether the Kremlin had provided covert assistance that helped him prevail in a close election against his Democratic opponent. Seymour and MI6 had concluded it was so, as had Morris Payne’s predecessor at the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Daniel Silva
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From Daniel Silva, the No.1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a modern masterpiece of espionage, love, and betrayal.She was his best-kept secret …In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason’s name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West – a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power.Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel Allon, the legendary art restorer and assassin who serves as the chief of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. Gabriel has battled the dark forces of the new Russia before, at great personal cost. Now he and the Russians will engage in a final epic showdown, with the fate of the postwar global order hanging in the balance.