by Daniel Silva
Lavon nodded. “He’ll have to leave as someone other than Nicholas Avedon.”
“Preferably with as few Russian hurdles to clear as possible,” added Gabriel.
“So how do we do it?”
“The same way Shamron got Eichmann out of Argentina.”
“El Al?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Naughty boy,” said Lavon.
“Yes,” replied Gabriel, smiling. “And I’m just getting started.”
Navot approved Gabriel’s plan immediately, which left the team five days until Mikhail was to give Gennady Lazarev an answer as to whether he was coming to Moscow. Five days to see to a thousand details large and small—or, as Lavon put it, five days to determine whether Mikhail’s visit to Russia would turn out better than his last. Passports, visas, identities, travel arrangements, lodgings: everything had to be procured on a crash basis. And then there were the bolt-holes, the backup plans, and the backup plans for the backup plans. Their task was made even more difficult by the fact that Gabriel could not tell them where or when the snatch of Zhirov would take place. They were going to have to improvise in a city that, throughout its long and bloody history, had never been particularly kind to freethinkers.
Gabriel drove his team hard during those long days and nights; and when his back was turned, Navot drove them even harder. There was no visible tension between the two men, no evidence that one was in ascendance and the other was headed toward the exits. Indeed, several members of the team wondered if they might be witnessing the formation of a partnership that could survive long after Gabriel assumed his rightful place as chief of the Office. Yaakov, the most fatalistic of the lot, scoffed at the notion. “It would be like the new wife deciding to let the first wife keep her old room. It will never happen.” But Eli Lavon wasn’t so sure. If there was anyone who was confident enough to allow his predecessor to stay on in some capacity, it was Gabriel Allon. After all, Lavon said, if Gabriel could make peace with Christopher Keller, he could reach an accommodation with Navot.
All talk of Gabriel’s future plans ended whenever Chiara entered the room. At first, she tried to work alongside the others, but the endless talk of Russia quickly darkened her mood. She was alive only because the members of the team had once risked their lives to save her. Now, as they struggled against the deadline, she assumed the role of their caretaker. Despite the tension inside the house, she made certain the atmosphere remained familial. Each evening they sat down to a lavish meal and, at Chiara’s insistence, spoke of anything except the operation—books they had read, films they had seen, the future of their troubled country. Then, after an hour or so, Gabriel and Navot would rise restlessly to their feet, and the work would start up again. Chiara happily saw to the dishes each night. Alone at the basin, she sang softly to herself to drown out the sound of the conversation in the next room. Later, she would confess to Gabriel that the mere sound of a Russian word produced a hollow aching in her abdomen.
The man at the center of the operation remained happily oblivious to the team’s efforts, or so it seemed to anyone who encountered Nicholas Avedon after his return to London. His demeanor was of a man who no longer cared to conceal the fact he was going places others could only dream about. Orlov doted on his protégé as though he were the son he’d never had, and with each passing day seemed to grow more dependent upon him. The pronoun we entered Orlov’s vocabulary for the first time when talking about his business, a change in tone that did not go unnoticed in the City. He informed the staff that he would be spending much of January at an undisclosed location in the Caribbean. “I need a nice long break,” he said. “And now that I have Nicholas, I can finally take one.”
With Orlov seemingly in retreat, word spread through financial circles that Nicholas Avedon was now the man to see at VOI. Most suitors had to wait a week or more for a chance to sit at his feet. But when he received a call from a Jonathan Albright of something called Markham Capital Advisers, he agreed to a meeting without delay. It took place in his office overlooking Hanover Square, though the topic had nothing to do with business or investing. At the conclusion of the meeting, he placed a call to a number in Moscow that lasted three minutes and was satisfactory in outcome. Then he walked Mr. Albright to the elevators with the contented air of a man who could do no wrong. “I’ll run it past Viktor,” he said loudly enough for everyone in close proximity to hear. “But it sounds to me as if all systems are go.”
That night, a car appeared outside Mikhail’s apartment house in Maida Vale. Later, Graham Seymour would identify the man who emerged from it as a courier from the SVR’s generously staffed London rezidentura. The man took possession of Mikhail’s false passport and carried it back to the Russian Embassy in Kensington Gardens. One hour later, when he returned it, the passport had been stamped with a hastily issued Russian visa. Tucked inside was a boarding pass for a British Airways flight to Moscow, leaving Heathrow at ten the following morning.
Mikhail slipped the ticket and passport into his briefcase. Then he rang Orlov at Cheyne Walk to say he needed a few days off. “Sorry, Viktor,” he said, “but I’m burnt to a crisp. And, please, no phone calls or e-mails. I’m going off the grid.”
“For how long?”
“Wednesday. Thursday at the latest.”
“Take the week.”
“You sure about that?”
“I promise not to make a mess of things while you’re gone.”
“Thanks, Viktor. You’re a dream.”
Mikhail tried to sleep that night, but it was no good; he had never been able to sleep the night before an operation. And so shortly after four the next morning, he rose from his bed and clothed himself in the armor of Nicholas Avedon, aka Nicolai Avdonin. A car appeared outside his door at six; it ferried him to Heathrow where he passed effortlessly through security, with Christopher Keller and Dina Sarid watching his back. As he entered the departure gate, he saw a heavily altered version of Gabriel reading a copy of the Economist with what appeared to be inordinate interest. Mikhail walked past him without a glance and boarded the aircraft, but Gabriel waited until the doors were about to close before finally stumbling into the first-class cabin in a rush. After takeoff, British controllers routed the plane directly over the town of Basildon, and at half past ten precisely it passed into international airspace. Mikhail drummed his fingers nervously on the center console. He was now in the hands of his enemy. And so was the future chief of Israeli intelligence.
48
MOSCOW
The protesters trickled into Red Square in small clusters so that the Moscow City Militia and leather-jacketed thugs of the FSB wouldn’t notice—artists, writers, journalists, punk rockers, even a few old babushkas who dreamed of spending their last years on earth in a truly free country. By noon, the crowd numbered several hundred, too large to conceal its true motives. Someone unfurled a banner. Someone else produced a bullhorn and accused the Russian president of having stolen the last election, which had the advantage of being entirely true. Then he made a joke about all the other things the president had stolen from the Russian people, which the leader of the leather-jacketed FSB thugs didn’t find funny at all. With scarcely more than a nod, he unleashed the militiamen, who responded by smashing everything in sight, including several of the more important heads. The man with the bullhorn got the worst of it. When last seen, he was being hurled bloody and semiconscious into the back of a police van. Later, the Kremlin announced he would be charged with attempting to instigate a riot, an offense that carried a ten-year sentence in the neo-gulag. The subservient Russian press referred to the protesters as “hooligans,” the same label the Soviet regime applied to its opponents, and not a single commentator dared to criticize the heavy-handed tactics. They were to be forgiven for their silence. Journalists who annoyed the Kremlin these days had a funny way of ending up dead.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, the news from Red Square flashed briefly across the television screens as Mikhail
stepped from the Jetway, followed thirty seconds later by Gabriel. As they approached passport control, Gabriel noticed a man in a tailored suit standing next to a malnourished border policeman in a threadbare uniform. The suited man had a photograph in his hand, which he consulted twice as Mikhail drew near. Then he walked over to Mikhail and said something to him in Russian that Gabriel couldn’t understand. Mikhail smiled and shook the man’s hand before following him through an unmarked doorway. Alone, Gabriel proceeded to passport control, where an unsmiling woman scrutinized his face for an uncomfortably long moment before vehemently stamping his passport and waving him on. Welcome to Russia, he thought, as he entered the crowded arrivals hall. It was good to be back again.
Stepping outside, Gabriel immediately inhaled a blast of tobacco smoke and diesel fumes that made his head swim. The evening skies were hard and clear; the air was serrated with cold. Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw Mikhail and his Volgatek escort settling into the warmth of a waiting Mercedes sedan. Then he joined the long queue for a taxi. The cold of the concrete ate its way through the thin soles of his Western loafers; and by the time he finally crawled into the back of a rattletrap Lada, his jaw was so frozen he was nearly incapable of speech. Asked for a destination, he replied that he wished to be taken to the Hotel Metropol, though it sounded as if he’d requested a manhole.
After leaving the airport, the driver headed to the Leningradsky Prospekt and started the long, slow slog into the center of Moscow. It was a few minutes past seven, the tail end of the city’s murderous evening rush. Even so, their pace was glacial. The driver tried to engage Gabriel in conversation, but his English was as impenetrable as the traffic. Gabriel made thoughtful noises every now and again; mainly, he stared out the window at the crumbling Soviet-era buildings lining the dirty old prospekt. For a brief period they had been merely hideous. Now they were ruins. On every street corner, and upon every rooftop, billboards assaulted the eye with promises of luxury and copulation. It was the Communist nightmare with a new coat of capitalism, thought Gabriel. And it was crushingly depressing.
Eventually, they crossed the Garden Ring, and the prospekt gave way to Tverskaya Street, Moscow’s version of Madison Avenue. It bore them down a long gentle hill, past Volgatek’s glittering new headquarters, to the redbrick walls of the Kremlin, where it emptied into the eight lanes of Okhotnyy Ryad Street. Turning left, they sped past the Russian Duma, the old House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. Gabriel saw none of them. He had eyes only for the floodlit yellow fortress perched atop the heights of Lubyanka Square.
“KGB,” said the driver, pointing over the top of the wheel.
“There is no KGB,” Gabriel replied distantly. “The KGB is a thing of the past.”
The driver muttered something about the naïveté of foreigners and guided the taxi toward the entrance of the Metropol. The lobby had been faithfully restored to its original decor, but the middle-aged woman at the check-in counter hadn’t fared nearly as well. She greeted Gabriel with a frozen smile, made polite inquiries about the nature of his travel, and then handed him a long registration form, a copy of which would be forwarded to the relevant authorities. Gabriel completed it swiftly as Jonathan Albright of Markham Capital Advisers and was rewarded with a key to his room. A bellman offered to assist with his bag and seemed relieved when Gabriel said he could manage on his own. Nevertheless, he gave the bellman a tip for his troubles. Its size suggested he was unfamiliar with the value of Russian currency.
His room was on the fourth floor, overlooking the ten lanes of Teatralny Prospekt. Gabriel assumed it was bugged and therefore made no effort to search it. Instead, he placed two phone calls to clients who were not really his clients and then hacked his way through the stack of e-mail that had piled up in his in-box during the flight from London. One of them was from a lawyer in New York and concerned the tax implications of a certain investment of dubious legality. Its true sender was Eli Lavon, who was staying in a room down the hall, and its true content was revealed when Gabriel keyed in the proper password. It seemed that Gennady Lazarev had taken his prospective new employee to the O2 Lounge at the Ritz for drinks and a nosh. Also in attendance were Dmitry Bershov, Pavel Zhirov, and four pieces of Russian eye candy. Surveillance photos to follow, courtesy of Yaakov and Dina, who were in a booth on the opposite side of the room.
Gabriel rekeyed the password, and the message returned to its original text. Then he slipped on a pair of headphones and patched into a secure feed of the audio from Mikhail’s mobile phone. He heard clinking glass, laughter, and the twitter of the Russian eye candy, which sounded inane, even in a language he could not comprehend. Then he heard the familiar voice of Gennady Lazarev murmuring a confidence into Mikhail’s ear. “Make sure you get some rest tonight,” he was saying. “We have big plans for you tomorrow.”
They remained in the lounge until eleven, when Mikhail repaired to his luxury suite at the Ritz with no company other than a raging headache. Despite Lazarev’s admonition, he did not sleep that night, for his thoughts were a swirl of operations past, strung together like a television newsreel of the century’s most catastrophic events. He craved activity, movement of any kind, but the surveillance cameras that were surely hidden within the room wouldn’t allow it. And so he lay tangled in the damp sheets of his bed with the stillness of a corpse until 7:00 a.m., when his wakeup call lifted him gratefully to his feet.
His coffee arrived a minute later, and he drank it while watching the morning business news from London. Afterward, he headed down to the health club, where he put in an impressive workout witnessed by a watcher from one of the Russian intelligence services. Returning to his room, he subjected himself to an ice-water shower to beat some life into his weary bones. Then he dressed in his finest gray chalk-stripe suit—the one Dina had chosen for him at Anthony Sinclair of Savile Row. He saw her in the breakfast room fifteen minutes later, staring into the eyes of Christopher Keller as if they held the secret to eternal happiness. A few tables away, Yossi was in the process of sending back his scrambled eggs. “I asked for them runny,” he was saying, “but these should have been served in a glass.” The remark bounced off the waiter like a pebble thrown at a freight train. “You want your eggs in a glass?” he asked.
At nine o’clock sharp, having read the morning papers and tidied up a few loose ends in London via e-mail, Mikhail made his way to the Ritz’s ultramodern lobby. Waiting there was the same Volgatek factotum who had plucked him from the passport control line at Sheremetyevo the previous evening. He was smiling with all the pleasantness of a broken window.
“I trust you slept well, Mr. Avedon?”
“Never better,” lied Mikhail cordially.
“Our office is very close. I hope you don’t mind walking.”
“Will we survive?”
“The chances are good, but there are no guarantees in Moscow this time of year.”
With that, the factotum turned and led Mikhail into Tverskaya Street. As he climbed the slope of the hill, leaning hard into the battering-ram wind, he realized that the anonymous lump of wool and fur walking two steps behind him was Eli Lavon. The lump escorted him silently to Volgatek’s front door, as if to remind Mikhail that he was not alone after all. Then it floated into the glare of the Moscow morning sun and was gone.
If there were any misunderstandings about Volgatek’s true mission, they were put to rest by the vast metal sculpture that stood in the lobby of its Tverskaya Street headquarters. It depicted the earth, with an outsize Russia in the dominant position, pumping life-giving energy to the four corners of the planet. Standing beneath it, a tiny smiling Atlas in a handmade Italian suit, was Gennady Lazarev. “Welcome to your new home,” he called out as his hand closed around Mikhail’s. “Or should I call it your real home?”
“One step at a time, Gennady.”
Lazarev squeezed Mikhail’s hand a little harder, as if to say he would not be denied, and then led him into a waiting executive elevator that shot
them to the building’s uppermost floor. In the foyer was a sign that read WELCOME NICOLAI! Lazarev paused to admire it, as though he had put a great deal of effort into the wording, before conveying Mikhail into the large office that would be his to use whenever he was in town. It had a view of the Kremlin and came with a dangerously pretty secretary called Nina.
“What do you think?” asked Lazarev earnestly.
“Nice,” said Mikhail.
“Come,” said Lazarev, taking Mikhail by the elbow. “Everyone is anxious to meet you.”
It turned out that Lazarev was not exaggerating when he said “everyone.” Indeed, during the next two and a half hours, it seemed that Mikhail shook the hand of every employee in the company, and perhaps a few others for good measure. There were a dozen vice presidents of varying shapes, sizes, and responsibilities, and a cadaverous figure called Mentov who did something with risk analysis that Mikhail couldn’t even pretend to comprehend. Next he was introduced to Volgatek’s scientific team—the geologists who were searching for new sources of oil and gas around the world, the engineers who were devising inventive new ways of extracting it. Then he headed down to the lower floors to meet the little people—the young account executives who dreamed of being in his shoes one day, the walking dead who were clinging to their desks and their red Volgatek coffee cups. He couldn’t help but wonder what happened to an employee who was terminated by a company owned and operated by the successor of the KGB. Perhaps he received a gold watch and a pension, but Mikhail doubted it.
Finally, they returned to the top floor and entered Lazarev’s large atrium-like office, where he spoke at length about his vision for Volgatek’s future and the role he wanted Mikhail to play in it. His starting position at the firm would be chief of Volgatek UK, the subsidiary that would be formed to run the Western Isles project. Once the oil was flowing, Mikhail would assume greater responsibilities, primarily in Western Europe and North America.
