by Daniel Silva
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
Floridsdorf, Vienna
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-reside
ntial 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
Vienna—Tel Aviv
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 h
ad 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.
