The Cellist

by Daniel Silva

  “If anyone should be attending the inauguration, it’s your boss.”

  “It’s better he left town. The country needs to move on. And if you ever repeat that, I’ll denounce you from the highest mountaintop. Which is exactly where I’m headed.”

  “When are you leaving Langley?”

  “As soon as you tell me what really happened in France on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Someone called the Russian president from a secure phone in Washington and told him that I had placed an agent close to Arkady Akimov.”

  Payne said nothing.

  “Who knew about my operation, Morris?”

  “The people who needed to know.”

  “Was the president one of them?”

  “If he was,” said Payne before hanging up the phone, “he didn’t hear it from me.”

  Gabriel pulled on an overcoat and a scarf and headed downstairs. Masked, he walked through the frigid, sunlit morning to Capitol Hill. Agent Emily Barnes of the United States Secret Service, an athletic-looking woman in her mid-thirties with freckled cheeks, met him at the edge of the red zone.

  She handed him a set of credentials. “Are you armed?”

  “No. Are you?”

  She patted the side of her heavy jacket. “A SIG Sauer P229.”

  Gabriel hung the credentials around his neck and followed the agent to a checkpoint, where he was thoroughly searched. Inside the red zone, they made their way to the East Front of the Capitol. The outgoing vice president, no longer speaking to the man he served faithfully for four years, was just arriving.

  Agent Barnes led Gabriel through a doorway that gave on to the ground floor of the Capitol’s North Wing. “What did you think of our Beer Hall Putsch?” she asked.

  “It made me sick to my stomach.”

  “How about the guy with the Auschwitz hoodie?”

  “I wish he had been walking down a street in Tel Aviv wearing that shirt instead of through the halls of the Capitol.”

  She pointed out a doorway. “That’s the Old Supreme Court Chamber. The justices met there until 1860. Samuel Morse sent the first Morse-coded message from that room in 1844.”

  “What did it say?”

  “‘What hath God wrought?’”

  “How prophetic.”

  They climbed a flight of stairs to the second level of the Capitol. The Great Rotunda, defiled only two weeks earlier, glowed with the warm light streaming through the upper windows of the dome.

  Agent Barnes turned to the right. “You’ve been assigned a seat down on the lawn, but the president-elect asked us to give you a quick tour of the platform to put your mind at ease.”

  They emerged through a doorway onto the temporary structure abutting the West Front: one hundred and sixty thousand pounds of scaffolding, thirteen hundred sheets of plywood, a half million nails, twenty thousand pounds of grout and mortar, and twelve hundred gallons of gleaming white paint. Like the rotunda, it bore no traces of the damage inflicted just fourteen days earlier by the insurrectionists.

  The three previous presidents and their wives had arrived and were mingling with the other dignitaries. A few members of Congress were searching for their seats, including a universally loathed and poorly groomed senator from Texas who had attempted to overturn the results of the election. Agent Barnes was describing some of the extraordinary measures the Secret Service had taken to secure the event. Gabriel was gazing at the two hundred thousand American flags fluttering in the cold breeze blowing across the empty Mall.

  Shortly before eleven a.m., the president-elect’s family stepped onto the platform. “We should go downstairs to our seats,” said Agent Barnes.

  “Our seats?”

  “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

  “Poor you.”

  They entered the Capitol, descended a flight of stairs, and emerged onto the lawn that two weeks earlier had been trampled by the marauding insurrectionists. Their seats were next to the camera platform. The first female vice president in American history, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was administered the oath of office at 11:42 a.m.; the new president, at 11:48. Nine minutes before the constitutionally prescribed start of his term, he took to the podium to deliver his inaugural address to a nation ravaged by illness and death and torn by political divisions. As Gabriel rose to his feet, he scanned the platform for a Russian asset code-named Rebel.

  “Don’t worry,” said the young Secret Service agent standing at his side. “Nothing is going to happen.”

  He declared that this was America’s day, democracy’s day, a day of history and hope. The nation, he said, had been tested by a crucible for the ages. And yet its institutions, the very institutions his predecessor had spent four years trying to destroy, had risen to the challenge. He called on Americans to end their uncivil war—a war that pitted red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal—and assured them that their democracy would never fall to a mob like the one that had invaded the Capitol. Gabriel, awed by the majesty of the ceremony, hoped the president would be proven correct. The world’s oldest democracy had survived its brush with authoritarianism, but it had been a near-death experience.

  When the speech was over, a country music star sang “Amazing Grace,” and the youngest inaugural poet in American history declared that the country wasn’t broken, simply unfinished. Afterward, the new chief executive withdrew to the President’s Room, a gilded chamber on the Senate side of the Capitol, where congressional leaders looked on as he signed an Inauguration Day proclamation and several nominations to cabinet and sub-cabinet positions.

  Next they moved to the Great Rotunda for a traditional presentation of gifts, a ceremony that ordinarily takes place during the inaugural luncheon. One of the gifts, a framed photograph of the ceremony that had occurred only moments earlier, was bestowed by the House minority leader, a Californian who had repeatedly claimed that the president had not won the election. The president, intent on bridging the nation’s cavernous political divide, accepted the gift graciously.

  The final event before his departure took place on the steps of the East Front. There the president reviewed a parade of troops from every branch of the armed forces, a ceremony dating back to George Washington’s first inauguration that symbolized the transfer of power to a new, duly elected civilian leader. Power had indeed been transferred, thought Gabriel, watching the ritual from the East Plaza, but it had not been peaceful.

  At the conclusion of the ceremony, the largest motorcade Gabriel had ever seen assembled at the base of the steps, and the new president settled into the back of his limousine. By two fifteen he was headed down Independence Avenue toward Arlington Cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  “I told you nothing would happen,” said Agent Barnes.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” replied Gabriel.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You live in an extraordinary country. Take good care of it.”

  “Why do you think I work for the Secret Service?” She offered Gabriel her elbow in farewell. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Director Allon. I have to say, you’re not what I expected.”

  “Really? How so?”

  She smiled. “I thought you’d be taller.”

  The razor wire sparkled in the brilliant winter sunlight as Gabriel walked down the gentle slope of Constitution Avenue. He crossed the empty boulevard at New Jersey Avenue and headed north, past the grassy plateau known as Lower Senate Park. In the deep silence of the locked-down city, he could hear footfalls behind him, muted, the occasional chirp of rubber against concrete. Female, he reckoned. Perhaps fifty kilograms, slightly out of breath. The footfalls drew closer as he approached the intersection of Louisiana Avenue. He slowed, as though to take his bearings, and turned around.

  Caucasian female, mid-forties, five foot one or two, solidly built, professionally attired, visibly agitated. No, thought Gabriel suddenly. She was spun up out of he
r mind. In her right hand was a gun, a compact Glock 32 .357. It was a lot of firepower for so petite a woman. Fortunately, it was pointed toward the sidewalk. At least, for the moment.

  Gabriel smiled and addressed the woman in a voice he reserved for those of unsound mind.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Gabriel Allon?”

  “I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”

  “You drink their blood, eat their flesh.”

  “Who?”

  “The children.”

  Dear God, no. She was down the rabbit hole. A terrorist Gabriel might have been able to reason with, but not this one. Unprotected and unarmed, he had no choice but to try.

  “You’ve been deceived,” he said in the same placid tone. “There’s no cabal. No one’s drinking the blood of children. The Storm will never happen. It’s all a lie.”

  “The Storm will begin after I kill you.”

  “The only thing that will happen is that you will destroy your life. Now place the gun gently on the sidewalk and walk away. I promise not to tell anyone.”

  “Pedophile,” she whispered. “Bloodsucker.”

  Gabriel stood with the stillness of a figure in a painting. Twenty-five thousand National Guard troops, another twenty thousand police officers and security personnel, and not one had noticed the professionally attired QAnon adherent standing on New Jersey Avenue with a loaded .357 in her hand.

  Three meters separated them, no more. For now, the gun was still pointed at the ground. If he waited until she started to raise it, he would have no chance to disarm her. He had to make the first move and hope she wasn’t law enforcement or ex-military. If she was, his life would doubtless end at the corner of New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues in Northeast Washington.

  Her lips were moving, like a suicide bomber reciting a final prayer. “Trust the plan,” she was whispering. “Enjoy the show.”

  Too late, Gabriel rushed forward, shouting like a madman, as the woman’s right arm levered into firing position. The powerful .357 round tore through him like an artillery shell. As death’s darkness fell over him, he heard two more shots, the double tap of a trained professional. Then there was nothing at all, only a voice calling to him from across the green fields of the Valley of Jezreel. It was the voice of his mother, begging him not to die.

  Part Five

  Encore

  65

  Washington

  Twelve interminable minutes elapsed before the first ambulance was able to make its way through the military checkpoints. The EMTs were confronted with two gunshot victims, one female, the other male. The female, a compact woman wearing a woolen overcoat, had been shot twice in the back and was unresponsive. The male, moderate height and build, perhaps early sixties, was bleeding heavily from a cavernous through-and-through wound a few centimeters beneath his left clavicle. He was no longer conscious. He had a pulse, but barely.

  He was still alive when the ambulance reached George Washington University Hospital, but he died in the level-one trauma center at 2:47 p.m. Resuscitated, he died a second time while undergoing surgery, but once again doctors were able to restart his heart. Shortly after six that evening, he was stable enough to be moved to the critical care unit. The hospital listed his condition as grave, which was optimistic. He was alive, but barely.

  The doctors were not told the name of the patient whose life they were desperately trying to save, but the phalanx of Secret Service agents and Metropolitan Police officers standing watch outside the trauma center’s doors suggested he was a man of some importance. So, too, did the arrival of several officials from the Israeli Embassy, including the ambassador. He confirmed that the patient was a senior official of the Israeli government involved in security and intelligence. It was essential, he said, that his identity, even his presence in the hospital, remain a secret—and that he survive.

  “Please,” begged the ambassador, his eyes damp with tears, “do not let this man die. Not like this.”

  The comment was a reference to the identity of the woman who was allegedly responsible for the patient’s grave condition: Michelle Lambert Wright, a four-term Republican congresswoman from Indiana. According to the FBI, which had assumed responsibility for the investigation, Congresswoman Wright had followed the Israeli from the East Plaza of the Capitol to the corner of New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues, where, after a brief conversation, she shot him once with her personal .357 Glock firearm before being shot twice herself. The FBI did not identify the person who killed the congresswoman, only that the individual was an agent of the Secret Service.

  At the request of the Israeli government, the FBI also withheld the name of the senior Israeli official who was lying close to death in the critical care unit. But late that evening the Washington Post identified him as Gabriel Allon, the director-general of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. The Post also revealed the contents of two troubling manifestos, discovered in the dead congresswoman’s Capitol Hill apartment, that suggested she was a mentally unstable adherent of the sprawling conspiracy theory known as QAnon. The first manifesto detailed her motives for assassinating the forty-sixth president of the United States on the day of his inauguration. An updated manifesto, composed the day before the ceremony, explained why she had targeted Allon instead.

  The White House press secretary revealed additional shocking details during an extraordinary briefing the following afternoon. Allon, she said, had traveled to Delaware on Monday, January 18, to warn the then president-elect about a threat to his life on Inauguration Day. The plot, according to Allon, was Russian in origin and involved a figure inside the US government who held extremist views. Subsequent forensic examination of Congresswoman Wright’s phones and computers revealed that she had been in contact with someone claiming to be the shadowy Q. He had ordered the congresswoman to assassinate the new president in order to unleash the prophesized Storm and bring about the Great Awakening. But on the morning of Tuesday, January 19, he had given her a new assignment.

  It was not surprising, given America’s fractured politics, that the revelations only served to widen the partisan divide. A far-right Republican congressman from Florida dismissed the so-called manifestos as clever forgeries planted by operatives of the “deep state.” His colleague from Ohio went further, suggesting that it was Congresswoman Wright, not Gabriel Allon, who had been targeted for assassination. When confronted with closed-circuit video showing the congresswoman clearly shooting Allon first, the Ohioan held his shaky ground. The video, he declared, was a deep-state fake, too.

  The battle on cable news and online was even more fierce, as rival networks and purveyors of opinion waged a holy war over the terrible incident that had stained Inauguration Day in blood. There was talk of violence in the streets, of civil war and secession, even another attack on the Capitol. Those who remained faithful to the discredited prophecies of QAnon saw evidence that the forecast Storm was brewing, with one noted Q influencer predicting it would begin the instant of Allon’s death. But those who had clawed their way out of the rabbit hole and back to reality saw something more dangerous—proof that QAnon, once dismissed as a harmless conspiracy theory, had turned lethal. They called on the remaining community of believers to switch off their social media accounts and seek professional help before it was too late.

  Nearly lost in the rancor was the fact that Gabriel Allon, by inadvertently making himself the target of the Russian assassination plot, might well have saved the republic. Unconscious and on numerous means of life support, he was oblivious to the events swirling around him. Finally, three interminable days after the shooting, he opened his eyes for the first time. When asked by his doctors if he knew where he was and what had happened, he indicated that he did. He was alive, but barely.

  The CIA gave Chiara and the children the run of an old safe house on N Street in Georgetown. Barred from the hospital by Covid restrictions, they anxiously awaited each update on Gabriel’s condition. Forty-
eight hours after regaining consciousness, he showed signs of marked improvement. And when another two days passed with no further complications, the doctors expressed guarded confidence the worst was behind him. That evening Chiara traveled from Georgetown to Foggy Bottom in an embassy car, just to be nearer to him. When told of her proximity, he smiled for the first time.

  They spoke briefly by video call the following morning. Chiara told Gabriel that he looked wonderful, which wasn’t at all true. Drawn and gaunt, his face etched with pain, he looked positively dreadful, scarcely like himself. Nevertheless, the doctors assured her he was continuing to make good progress. The .357 round, they explained, had left a tunnel of destruction in its wake—torn blood vessels, soft tissue damage, shattered bones. His recovery, they warned, would be lengthy and difficult.

  As if to prove them wrong, he rose from his bed and took a few hesitant steps along the corridor. He walked a little farther the following day, and by the end of the week he was able to make a complete circuit of the critical care unit. This earned him the privilege of a room with a window overlooking Twenty-Third Street. Chiara and the children waved to him from the sidewalk, watched over by a team of embassy security guards in khaki vests.

  The new president telephoned that evening. He said he had been receiving daily updates and was pleased by Gabriel’s progress. He asked whether there was anything he could do.

  “Impose crushing sanctions on Russia,” answered Gabriel.

  “I’m announcing them tomorrow along with the seizure of several billion dollars’ worth of looted assets hidden here in the United States. We’ll hit them with another round of sanctions once the intelligence community determines to their satisfaction that the Kremlin was behind the attempt on your life.”

  “Better mine than yours, Mr. President. I only hope you can forgive me for ruining your inauguration by getting myself shot.”