by Daniel Silva
“Why do you think I asked to come here?”
“You penetrated your own bank? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I suppose I did.”
“What motivated you to take such a drastic step?”
“Mirror trades.”
“In English, please.”
“Let’s say a dirty Russian has a mountain of dirty rubles he needs to convert into dollars. The dirty Russian can’t take the dirty rubles to the local Thomas Cook, so he gives them to a brokerage firm that uses them to purchase a large quantity of blue-chip stocks at RhineBank-Moscow. A few minutes later, the brokerage firm’s representative in, say, Cyprus sells the exact same number of blue-chip stocks to RhineBank-London, which pays the Cypriot in dollars. The trades mirror each other, thus the name.”
Isabel learned of the mirror trades while she was in London, and from her new position in Zurich she was able to observe what happened when the money reached the Laundromat. Her view, however, was highly obstructed; the Laundromat was quarantined from the rest of the office. Even so, their activities required a veneer of internal compliance, especially transfers involving large sums of money—in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Each day, Lothar Brandt brought stacks of documents to Isabel’s office and loomed over her while she blindly signed where indicated. But occasionally, if he was busy with another client, the documents arrived by inner-office pouch, presenting Isabel an opportunity to review them at her leisure. One corporate entity appeared frequently, almost always in connection with massive wire transfers, stock and real estate purchases, and other investments.
“Omega Holdings,” said Gabriel.
Isabel nodded.
“Why did Omega stand out?”
“Its sheer size. Most clients of the Laundromat utilize dozens of corporate shells, but Omega had hundreds. Whenever possible, I photographed the documents on my personal phone. I also ran Omega through our databases.”
“How much money did you find?”
“Twelve billion. But I was certain I’d only scratched the surface. It was obvious the man behind Omega Holdings was very high on the Russian food chain.” She paused. “An apex predator.”
“What did you do?”
She briefly considered filing an anonymous complaint with FINMA, the Swiss regulatory agency, but decided instead to give the material to a woman she had seen on Swiss television. She was an investigative reporter from a crusading Russian newsmagazine who had a knack for ferreting out financial wrongdoing by the men of the Kremlin. On the seventeenth of February, during her lunch hour, Isabel left a parcel of documents in an athletic field in Zurich’s District 3. That evening, using the personal computer in her apartment, she sent an anonymous message to the Russian journalist’s ProtonMail address. Afterward, she played Bach’s Cello Suite in E-flat Major. All six movements. No sheet music. Not a single mistake.
In March, Isabel left a package at a marina on the western shore of the Zürichsee, and in April she made drops in Winterthur and Zug. Several times each day she checked Nina Antonova’s Twitter feed and the website of the Moskovskaya Gazeta, but there were no stories about an important oligarch or senior Kremlin official utilizing the services of RhineBank’s Russian Laundromat. She made three more drops in June—Basel, Thun, Lucerne. Nevertheless, the Gazeta remained editorially silent, leaving her no choice but to pursue the investigation herself.
She had met Mark Preston when they were students at the London School of Economics. After completing his degree, he embarked on a career as a business journalist, only to discover he detested London’s financial elite. An avid gamer and amateur hacker, he pioneered a new form of investigative journalism, one that relied on keystrokes and clicks rather than phone calls and shoe leather. His sources were never human, for humans often lied and nearly always had a vested interest. Instead, Preston searched for information captured by the cameras of smartphones—on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Street View. He also discovered that in Russia there was a thriving black market for CDs crammed with telephone directories, police reports, and even the national passport database. Yearbooks from elite military units and academies were also available.
His first major story came during the Syrian civil war, when he documented that the regime was dropping chemical barrel bombs on innocent civilians. A year later he identified the Russian officers responsible for shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine. The story cemented Preston’s reputation and earned him the enmity of the Kremlin. Fearful of Russian retaliation, he left London and went into hiding. He also joined the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit global network of reporters and news organizations headquartered in Washington.
“As you might recall, the ICIJ broke the Panama Papers story. Much of their work focuses on corruption. Mark helps the financial investigators by identifying and tracking the movements of individuals, especially individuals who are connected to Russia’s intelligence services.”
“How did you communicate with him?”
“The same way I communicated with Nina. ProtonMail.”
“I assume you didn’t refer to yourself as Mr. Nobody.”
“No. But I didn’t put my real name in any of the emails, either. It wasn’t necessary.”
“Because you and Mark Preston are more than friends.”
“We dated for a semester.”
“Who ended it?”
“He did, if you must know.”
“Silly boy.”
“I always thought so.”
They met at the end of Brighton Place Pier, as if by chance. At Preston’s insistence, Isabel had switched off her phone and removed the SIM card before leaving London. She gave him copies of the documents and asked him to undertake a private investigation on her behalf, for which she would pay any amount he asked. He agreed, though he refused Isabel’s offer of money.
“It seems he always regretted the way he treated me.”
“Perhaps there’s hope for him after all.”
“Not in that regard.”
A month passed before Isabel heard from him. This time they met in a little seaside town called Hastings. Preston gave her a flash drive containing a dossier of his findings. He warned her to be careful. He said Russian journalists had been murdered for less. Swiss bankers, too.
Isabel read the dossier that evening in her hotel room. Two days later she learned that Viktor Orlov had been murdered, apparently with a Russian nerve agent. She waited until Saturday evening before sending an encrypted email to Nina Antonova. She had left a new package along the bank of the river Aare, in the Old City of Bern. All the pages were blank, with one exception. I know who killed Viktor Orlov . . . Afterward, she performed Bach’s Cello Suite in D Major.
“Any mistakes?”
“Not a one.”
“Where’s the dossier?”
She dug it from her bag. “The flash drive and the Word document are both locked. The password is the same.”
“What is it?”
“The Haydn Group.” She looked at the Englishman and smiled. “The letter G is capitalized.”
Part Two
Menuetto & Trio
21
Zurich–Valley of Jezreel
A Gulfstream G550 of astounding comfort and murky registry departed Zurich’s Kloten Airport shortly before midnight. Eli Lavon reclined his seat and slept, but Gabriel plugged the flash drive into his laptop and with the cabin lights dimmed reread the dossier.
It was an impressive piece of digital detective work, all the more remarkable for the fact it was produced largely with open sources. An Instagram photo here, a name from a Swiss business registry there, real estate transactions, a few nuggets of gold unearthed from the Panama Papers, Moscow vehicle registrations, Russian passport records. When laid out in proper sequence—and viewed in proper context—the data had produced a name. Someone close to the Russian president. Someone from his inner circle. The secret guardian of his unfath
omable wealth. The intelligence services of the West had been searching for this man for a very long time. Mark Preston, with documents provided by a gifted young cellist who worked for the world’s dirtiest bank, had found him.
The skies above Tel Aviv were blue-black with the approaching dawn when the G550 touched down at Ben Gurion Airport. Two SUVs waited on the tarmac. Lavon headed to his apartment in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem; Gabriel, to the safe house in the Valley of Jezreel. After placing his clothing in a plastic rubbish bag, he padded soundlessly upstairs and slipped into bed next to Chiara.
“Well?” she asked quietly.
“Well what?”
“What in God’s name was Sarah Bancroft doing in Viktor Orlov’s house?”
“She found a lost Artemisia in Julian’s storeroom. Viktor agreed to buy it.”
“Is it really an Artemisia?”
“Apparently so.”
“Any good?”
“She says it needs work.”
“That makes two of us,” whispered Chiara.
Gabriel removed her silken nightgown. At times like these, he thought, there was comfort in familiar routines.
Afterward, he plunged into a dreamless sleep and woke to find his half of the bed ablaze with the sunlight pouring through the unshaded window. The air in the room was still and heavy and perfumed with the scent of earth and bovine excrement. It was the smell of the valley. As a child, Gabriel had always hated it. He much preferred the pine-scented air of Jerusalem. Or the smell of Rome, he thought suddenly, on a chill autumn evening. Bitter coffee and garlic frying in olive oil, woodsmoke and dead leaves.
He reached for his phone and was surprised to see it was nearly one in the afternoon. Chiara had left a caffe latte on the bedside table. He drank it quickly and went into the bathroom to commence his morning labors before the looking glass. Then he dressed in his usual attire, a trim-fitting charcoal gray suit and a white shirt, and headed downstairs.
Chiara, in leggings and a sleeveless pullover, was seated before her laptop at the kitchen table. Her riotous hair was wound into a bun, and a few stray tendrils lay along the damp skin of her neck. Her caramel-colored eyes were narrowed with irritation.
“I thought you were banned from Twitter,” said Gabriel.
“I’m helping my father with an article he’s writing for Il Gazzettino.”
Chiara’s father was the chief rabbi of Venice and a historian of the Holocaust in Italy. On the rare occasions he wrote for the popular press, it was usually to issue a warning.
“What’s the topic?” asked Gabriel cautiously.
“QAnon.”
“The conspiracy theory?”
“QAnon isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a toxic, extremist ideology that borrows heavily from anti-Semitic tropes such as the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And thanks to the pandemic, it has arrived in Western Europe.”
“You forgot to mention that the FBI considers QAnon a domestic terrorism threat.”
She removed a document from the printer. It was a copy of an internal FBI memo from the bureau’s Phoenix field office warning of QAnon’s rise. “People are going to die because of this lunacy.”
“I agree. But don’t spend too much time down the rabbit hole, Chiara. You might not find your way out again.”
“Who do you suppose he is?”
“Q?”
She nodded.
“I’m Q.”
“Are you really?” She regarded Gabriel for a moment through her reading glasses. “I’m suddenly feeling quite cheap.”
“Why?”
“I allowed you to have your way with me, and now you’re fleeing the scene of the crime.”
“If I recall, you were the one who initiated the activity.” He took down a mug from the cupboard and poured coffee from the thermos flask. “Where are the children?”
“I haven’t a clue, but I’m sure I’ll hear about it later.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, Gabriel. These past few months have been wonderful for them. A part of me is sorry we can’t stay longer.”
“Why are we leaving?”
“Because the children start school next month. Remember?”
“I have a feeling they won’t be in school long.”
“Don’t say that.”
“A rise in infection rates is inevitable, Chiara. The prime minister will have no choice but to shut down the country again.”
“For how long?”
“Until next spring, I’d say. But once we get a sufficient percentage of the population vaccinated, life will return almost to normal. I’m confident we’ll get there much faster than the rest of the developed world.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m the director-general of the Office. I know things.”
“Do you know who killed Viktor Orlov?”
“I tried to tell you last night, but I was too busy having my way with you.” Gabriel fished the flash drive from his pocket.
“What is that?”
“A portable storage device with a terabyte of memory.”
Chiara rolled her eyes. “Where did you get it?”
“A woman who works for the Zurich office of RhineBank. It contains a dossier written by an open-source investigative journalist named Mark Preston.”
“And the subject of the dossier?”
“A Russian billionaire living on the shores of Lake Geneva.”
“How nice. Does the billionaire have a name?”
“Arkady Akimov.”
“Never heard of him.”
“That’s probably not an accident.”
“How does he make his money?”
“He owns an oil trading firm called NevaNeft, among other things. NevaNeft purchases Russian oil at a steep discount and delivers it to clients in Western Europe at a windfall profit.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Preston is convinced that Arkady is the one who’s holding the bulk of the Russian president’s personal fortune.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I’m afraid it gets better.”
“How is that possible?”
“Many of Arkady’s employees are former Russian intelligence officers. Interestingly enough, they all seem to work for the same small subsidiary of his company.”
“Doing what?”
“Preston wasn’t able to determine that, but I know someone who might be able to help.” He paused, then added, “And so can you.”
“How?”
“By printing the dossier.” Gabriel inserted the flash drive into Chiara’s computer. “The password is the Haydn Group. The letter G is capitalized.”
22
Upper Galilee, Israel
There are interrogation centers scattered throughout Israel. Some are in restricted areas of the Negev Desert, others are tucked away, unnoticed, in the middle of cities. And one lies just off a road with no name that runs between Rosh Pina, one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Israel, and the mountain hamlet of Amuka. The track that leads to it is dusty and rocky and fit only for Jeeps and SUVs. There is a fence topped with concertina wire and a guard shack staffed by tough-looking youths in khaki vests. Behind the fence is a small colony of bungalows and a single building of corrugated metal where the prisoners are kept. The guards are forbidden to disclose their place of work, even to their wives and parents. The site is as black as black can be. It is the absence of color and light.
At present, the facility housed a single prisoner, a former SVR officer named Sergei Morosov. His colleagues at Moscow Center had been led to believe he was dead, the victim of a mysterious auto accident on a stretch of empty road in Alsace-Lorraine. They had even taken delivery of a set of human remains, courtesy of the French internal security service. In truth, Gabriel had abducted Morosov from an SVR safe flat in Strasbourg, stuffed him into a duffel bag, and loaded him onto a private plane. Under coerced interrogation, he had revealed the existence of a Russian mole at the pinnacle of MI6.
Gabriel had taken the mole into custody outside Washington, on the banks of the Potomac River. He had been fortunate to survive the encounter. Three SVR officers had not.
The mole now occupied a senior position at Moscow Center, and Sergei Morosov, loyal servant of the Russian state, was the lone prisoner of a secret interrogation facility hidden in the bony hills outside Rosh Pina. He had spent the first eighteen months of his stay in a cell. But after a prolonged period of agreeable behavior, Gabriel had allowed him to settle into one of the staff bungalows. It was not unlike the Allon family home in Ramat David, a little breeze-block structure with whitewashed walls and linoleum floors. The refrigerator and pantry were stocked weekly with an assortment of traditional Russian fare, including black bread and vodka. Morosov happily saw to his own cooking and cleaning. The mundane chores of daily life were a welcome diversion from the grinding monotony of his confinement.
The furnishings in the sitting room were institutional but comfortable. Many Israelis, thought Gabriel, made do with less. Everywhere there were books and piles of yellowed newspapers and magazines, including Die Welt and Der Spiegel. Morosov was a fluent speaker of KGB-accented German. He had run the final lap of his career in Frankfurt, where he had posed as a banking specialist from something called Globaltek Consulting, a Russian firm that purportedly provided assistance to companies wishing to gain access to the lucrative Russian market. In reality, Globaltek was an undeclared rezidentura of the SVR. Its main task was to identify potential assets and acquire valuable industrial technology. To that end, it had ensnared dozens of prominent German businessmen—including several senior executives from RhineBank AG—in operations involving kompromat, the Russian shorthand for compromising material.
The bungalow had no telephone or Internet service, but Gabriel had recently approved the installation of a television with a satellite connection. Morosov was watching a talk show on NTV, the once-independent Russian television network now controlled by the Kremlin-owned energy company Gazprom. The topic was the recent assassination of the dissident Russian businessman Viktor Orlov. None of the panelists appeared troubled by Viktor’s passing or the appalling manner of his death. In fact, they all seemed to think he had received the punishment he deserved.
