The Cellist

by Daniel Silva

  “Five hundred million?” Anil was predictably appalled. “I won’t touch it for less than a billion.”

  “Of course you will, Anil. You’re practically salivating. The only question is whether you’re going to call Hamburg tonight to get approval from the Council of Ten.”

  He flicked the end of his cigarette into the river. “What Hamburg doesn’t know . . .”

  “How are you going to explain the additional five hundred million on your book?”

  “I’ll spread it around. They’ll never figure out where it came from.”

  “It’s good to know nothing’s changed since I left.” Isabel handed Anil a flash drive. “This has all the relevant accounts and routing numbers.”

  “When do you want to start?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “No problem.” Anil slipped the flash drive into the pocket of his black overcoat. “I guess those rumors about Martin Landesmann are true after all.”

  “What rumors are you referring to?”

  “That he’s no saint. And neither, it seems, are you.” He gave her a sidelong leer. “If only I’d known.”

  “You’re salivating again, Anil.”

  “Have time for a celebratory drink?”

  “I’ve got to get back to Geneva tonight.”

  “Next time you’re in town?”

  “Probably not. Don’t take this the wrong way, Anil, but you really do look like shit.”

  By the time Isabel arrived at London City Airport, Martin’s plane was fueled and cleared for departure. The Englishman looked up from his laptop computer as she entered the cabin.

  “How about that drink now?” he asked.

  “I’d kill for one.”

  “I think champagne is in order, don’t you?”

  “If you insist.”

  The Englishman entered the galley and emerged a moment later with an open bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal. He poured two glasses and handed one to Isabel.

  “What shall we drink to?” she asked.

  “Another remarkable performance on your part.”

  “I have a better idea.” Isabel raised her glass. “To the world’s dirtiest bank.”

  The Englishman smiled. “May it rest in peace.”

  42

  Quai du Mont-Blanc, Geneva

  At eleven a.m. the following morning, a Russian stockbroker named Anatoly Bershov rang his man at RhineBank-Moscow on behalf of an unidentified client and purchased several thousand shares in an American biotech company that developed and produced a widely used coronavirus testing kit. Five minutes later the same Russian stockbroker instructed his representative in Cyprus, a certain Mr. Constantinides, to sell an identical number of shares in the company to one Anil Kandar, head of RhineBank’s global markets division in London. The first transaction was conducted in rubles, the second in dollars. Mr. Constantinides immediately wired the proceeds to a correspondent Cypriot bank—it was located in the same Nicosia office building, which was owned by anonymous Russian interests—and the correspondent Cypriot bank wired it to the Caribbean, where it bounced from one shady house of finance to the next before finally making its way to Meissner PrivatBank of Liechtenstein.

  By then, the money had passed through so many flimsy corporate shells its point of origin was all but impossible to determine. For good measure, Meissner cloaked the money beneath a final layer of corporate murk before squirting it to Credit Suisse in Geneva, where it landed in an account controlled by Global Vision Investments. A fonctionnaire at Credit Suisse sent an email confirmation to a GVI executive named Isabel Brenner, who, unbeknownst to the fonctionnaire, was the hidden hand behind the entire appalling deception.

  Anatoly Bershov placed a second call to his man at RhineBank-Moscow shortly after three p.m. This time his client wished to purchase several thousand shares in a giant American food-and-beverage conglomerate. The banker from whom Anil Kandar purchased an identical number of shares in dollars was located in the Bahamas. The funds ricocheted among several dubious Bahamian banks, all located on the same Nassau street, before crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction and finding temporary lodging at Meissner PrivatBank of Liechtenstein. Credit Suisse took possession of the money at four fifteen Geneva time. Email confirmation to Isabel Brenner, Global Vision Investments.

  The transactions produced more than a hundred pages of records, including two internal GVI documents requiring both Isabel’s signature and the signature of Anatoly Bershov’s mysterious client. Fortunately, his office was located directly across the river Rhône, in the Place du Port. Isabel arrived at five p.m. and, after placing her phone in a decorative signal-blocking box, was admitted into Arkady’s inner sanctum on the seventh floor—one floor above the offices of the mysterious NevaNeft subsidiary known as the Haydn Group. Much to her surprise, Arkady personally signed the documents where indicated.

  Isabel photocopied the papers upon her return to GVI headquarters, along with the other relevant records, and placed the originals in a safe in her office. The copies she gave to a courier, who delivered them to a rented villa in the diplomatic quarter of Champel. Their arrival was cause for a brief celebration. Three months after its unlikely inception, the operation had borne its first fruit. Gabriel and the Office were now minority stakeholders in the kleptocracy known as Kremlin Inc.

  Anil Kandar suggested they tap the brakes long enough to determine whether RhineBank’s regulators at the Financial Conduct Authority had taken note of the unusual trades. Isabel could have assured her former colleague that FCA was well aware of their activities, as was Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. Instead, she agreed to a pause, so long as it was brief. Her client, she wrote in an obliquely worded email, was not by nature a patient man.

  Forty-eight hours proved sufficient to put Anil’s concerns to rest, and by Friday morning, Anatoly Bershov was bullish about Microsoft. So, too, was Anil Kandar. Indeed, not five minutes after Bershov placed a multibillion-ruble bet on the conglomerate at RhineBank-Moscow, Anil purchased an identical number of shares from Mr. Constantinides of Cyprus, though Anil paid for his chips with American dollars. The money appeared in a GVI account at Credit Suisse in late morning, and the proceeds of a second mirror trade appeared in midafternoon. Arkady signed the documents that evening at NevaNeft headquarters.

  Afterward, he invited Isabel to join him for a glass of champagne. Citing a pressing matter at the office, she tried to beg off, but Arkady was insistent. Ludmilla Sorova brought a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two glasses, and for the better part of the next hour, as the last light drained from the skies above Geneva, they debated the merits of Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos. Isabel declared that the second was clearly his greatest. Arkady agreed, though he had always had a soft spot for the mighty third and was particularly fond of a recent recording by the Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov.

  The conversation left him in a reflective mood. “If only I could talk to Oksana like this,” he lamented.

  “She doesn’t like Rachmaninoff?”

  “Oksana prefers electronic dance music.” He offered Isabel a sheepish smile. “You might find this difficult to believe, but I did not marry her for her intellect.”

  “She’s very beautiful, Arkady.”

  “But childish. I was quite relieved when she behaved herself during Anna Rolfe’s recital. Not long before the pandemic, I took her to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Afterward, I swore, never again.”

  “Who was the soloist?”

  “The young Dutchwoman. Her name escapes me.”

  “Janine Jansen?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Do you know her, too?”

  “We’ve never met,” answered Isabel.

  “She’s no Anna Rolfe, but she’s quite talented.” Arkady added champagne to Isabel’s glass. “I’m sorry, but I can’t recall how it is you know Anna.”

  “We were introduced by Martin.”

  “Yes, of course. That makes sense,” said
Arkady. “Martin knows everyone.”

  While walking home through the darkened streets of the Old Town, Isabel reached the unsettling conclusion that Arkady was interested in expanding the parameters of their relationship to include a romantic or, heaven forbid, a sexual component. She shared her concerns with Gabriel on Monday evening during another carefully choreographed meeting in Martin’s apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. Next morning, over coffee at the café in Fleet Street, she informed Anil Kandar that they needed to quicken the pace of the illicit mirror trades. He responded with four large transactions that produced nearly a hundred million dollars.

  Anil engineered four more mirror trades on Wednesday and another four on Thursday. But it was Friday’s haul—six large transactions with more than two hundred million in proceeds—that put them over the top. Isabel obtained the required signatures during a late-afternoon appearance at NevaNeft headquarters and for a second time was invited to linger for a glass of champagne. The intimate nature of the conversation left little doubt that Arkady was hopelessly infatuated with the beautiful German cellist who was laundering his dirty Russian money. She was therefore relieved when, shortly after six p.m., Martin appeared on the screen of the giant wall-mounted television in Arkady’s office.

  At length, Arkady said, “You never answered my question.”

  “About my relationship with Martin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Martin and I are colleagues.” Isabel paused, then added, “As are we, Arkady.”

  He aimed a remote at the screen and increased the volume. “He’s quite good on television, isn’t he? And to think that not a single word of what he’s saying is true.”

  “It’s not all a lie. He just neglected to mention one or two pertinent details.”

  “Such as?”

  “The name of the man who’s financing his planned spending spree.”

  “There is no such man.” Arkady smiled. “He’s Mr. Nobody.”

  Isabel squeezed the stem of her champagne glass so tightly she was surprised it didn’t snap. Arkady appeared not to notice; his gaze was fixed on the television.

  “And you’re mistaken about one other matter as well,” he said after a moment. “Ludmilla Sorova is my colleague. You, Isabel, are something else entirely.”

  The host of the CNBC program upon which Martin appeared was none other than Zoe Reed. The topic concerned rumors swirling about Wall Street that Global Vision Investments was considering several deals in the United States, including in the distressed commercial real estate sector, which the firm had avoided in the past. Martin was as elusive as ever. Yes, he acknowledged, he had several irons in the American fire. Most were in the forward-looking energy and technology sectors where he had traditionally been active, but commercial real estate was not out of the question. GVI expected a sharp post-pandemic rebound in the United States once a sufficient percentage of the population had been vaccinated. The perception that the pandemic would forever change the nature of work was mistaken. Americans, declared Martin, would soon be returning to their offices.

  “But that doesn’t mean we can go back to our old ways. We have to make our places of work greener, smarter, and much more energy efficient. Remember, Zoe, there’s no vaccine for a rising sea level.”

  “Is it true you’re looking at a high-rise in downtown Chicago?”

  “We’re looking at a number of different projects.”

  “And what about America’s current political turmoil? Are you at all concerned about the stability of the market?”

  “America’s democratic institutions,” said Martin diplomatically, “are strong enough to withstand the current challenge.”

  The interview left little doubt as to Martin’s intentions. It was only a matter of when and where and how much. The wait for an answer was not long—five days, in fact—though the asset in question came as something of a surprise. Isabel obtained the necessary signatures at NevaNeft headquarters and forwarded copies of the documents to the rented villa in Champel. Kremlin Inc. was now the proud owner of a sixty-story office-and-condominium tower on Miami’s Brickell Avenue, which meant that Gabriel was now the proud owner of Arkady Akimov. The time had finally come to take on an additional partner—a partner with the financial firepower to turn Arkady’s empire to ashes. He had one small piece of unrelated business to attend to at King Saul Boulevard first.

  43

  Tel Aviv–Langley, Virginia

  Mohsen Fakhrizadeh claimed to be nothing more than a lowly professor of physics at Imam Hussein University in downtown Tehran. In point of fact, he was a senior official in the Iranian Ministry of Defense, a career officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the leader of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Four of its top scientists had died violently at the hands of Office assassins. But Fakhrizadeh, who lived in a walled compound and was surrounded always by a large detail of bodyguards, had survived several attempts on his life. His run of good fortune ended, however, on the last Friday of November 2020, on a road near the town of Absard. The operation, months in the planning, unfolded with the precision of a Haydn string quartet. By nightfall, the entire twelve-member Office hit team had slipped out of the country, and the leading light of Iran’s nuclear program was lying in his coffin, wrapped in a burial shroud.

  Gabriel presided over Fakhrizadeh’s assassination from the ops center at King Saul Boulevard. Among the first phone calls he received in the aftermath was from CIA director Morris Payne—hardly surprising, for Gabriel had neglected to inform Langley the hit was imminent. After offering his grudging congratulations, Payne wondered whether Gabriel was free to come to Washington for an operational postmortem. Payne had a hole in his schedule on Monday. The hole, he said, had Gabriel’s name on it.

  “Tuesday would be better, Morris.”

  “In that case,” replied Payne, “I’ll see you Monday morning at ten.”

  In truth, Gabriel was anxious to make the trip, for it was long overdue. He spent the weekend with Chiara and the children in Jerusalem and, late Sunday evening, boarded his plane for the twelve-hour flight to Washington. An Agency reception committee met him on the tarmac of Dulles Airport and drove him to Langley. Morris Payne, never one to stand on ceremony, received Gabriel in his seventh-floor office rather than the gleaming white lobby. Big and bluff with a face like an Easter Island statue, Payne was West Point, Ivy League law, private enterprise, and a deeply conservative former member of Congress from one of the Dakotas. A devout Christian, he possessed a volcanic temper and a remarkable mastery of profanity, which he displayed for Gabriel while berating him over the Fakhrizadeh assassination. In Payne’s version of events, Gabriel had committed a betrayal of biblical proportions by failing to warn him in advance of the operation. Eager to resolve the matter, Gabriel admitted wrongdoing and asked for absolution.

  Payne’s anger eventually subsided. They were, after all, close allies who had accomplished much together during the president’s four years in office. Payne was one of the so-called adults in the room who had attempted to constrain the president’s worst impulses. Unlike the other grown-ups—the decorated generals and the experienced foreign policy hands—he had managed to stay in the president’s good graces, mainly through constant flattery of his fragile ego. There was talk he intended to take up the president’s populist mantle and make a run for the White House in the next election cycle. For now, he was the leader of an agency his boss loathed. Each day, he dutifully signed off on the intelligence to be included in the President’s Daily Brief. He admitted to Gabriel that he carefully curated the material to keep America’s most sensitive secrets out of the hands of the commander in chief.

  “Has he noticed?”

  “He hasn’t even bothered to read the PDB in months. For all intents and purposes, the national security apparatus of the world’s most powerful nation is on autopilot.”

  “How much longer does he intend to contest the results of the elections?”

  “I’m afraid
it’s a fight to the death. It’s the only way he knows how to play the game. Just ask his ex-wives.” Payne glanced at his watch. “The chief of the Persia House would like to join us, if you don’t mind.”

  “In a minute, Morris. There’s something I need to discuss with you in private first. It concerns an operation we launched after Viktor Orlov’s assassination in London.”

  “How did you get mixed up in the Orlov business?”

  “It’s a long story, Morris.”

  “Where is this operation of yours taking place?”

  “Geneva.”

  With his expression, Payne made it clear that Geneva, a city of culture and international diplomacy, was not to his liking. “The target?” he asked.

  “Arkady Akimov. He runs a company called—”

  “I know who Arkady Akimov is.”

  “Did you know that he’s smuggling the Tsar’s money out of Russia and hiding it in the West? Or that he’s running a private intelligence service known as the Haydn Group from his office in the Place du Port?”

  “We’ve heard rumors to that effect.”

  “Why haven’t you done anything about it?”

  “Because the president is allergic to operations against Russian financial interests. He turns purple if I even mention the word Russia.”