The Cellist

by Daniel Silva

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t.”

  “Haven’t you heard? They say it kills the coronavirus.” Sarah struck the lighter and touched the end of the cigarette to the flame. “You could have visited me, you know.”

  “The NHS forbids all patient visits with the exception of end-of-life scenarios.”

  “I was exposed to a Russian nerve agent. End of life was a distinct possibility.”

  “If you must know, I volunteered to stand guard outside your door, but Graham wouldn’t hear of it. He sends his best, by the way.”

  Christopher switched on Radio Four in time to hear the beginning of the Six O’Clock News. Viktor Orlov’s assassination had managed to displace the pandemic as the lead story. The Kremlin had denied any role in the affair, accusing British intelligence of a plot to discredit Russia. According to the BBC, British authorities had not yet identified the toxin used to murder Orlov. Nor had they determined how the substance found its way into the billionaire’s home in Cheyne Walk.

  “Surely you know more than that,” said Sarah.

  “Much more.”

  “What kind of nerve agent was it?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified, darling.”

  “So am I.”

  Christopher smiled. “It’s a substance known as Novichok. It’s—”

  “A binary weapon developed by the Soviet Union in the seventies. The scientists who created it claimed it was five to eight times more lethal than VX, which would make it the deadliest weapon ever produced.”

  “Are you quite finished?”

  “How did the Russians get the Novichok into Viktor’s office?”

  “The documents you saw on his desk were covered in ultrafine Novichok powder.”

  “What were they?”

  “They appear to be financial records of some sort.”

  “How did they get there?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Christopher. “That’s where things get interesting.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure,” asked Sarah at the conclusion of Christopher’s briefing, “that the woman who came to Viktor’s house was in fact Nina Antonova?”

  “We compared a surveillance photo of her taken at Heathrow with a recent television appearance. The facial recognition software determined it was the same woman. And Viktor’s bodyguards say he greeted her as though she was an old friend.”

  “An old friend with a batch of poisoned documents?”

  “When the Kremlin wants to kill someone, it’s usually an acquaintance or business associate who spikes the champagne. Just ask Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.”

  “No chance of that.” They entered Sloane Square. The darkened facade of the Royal Court Theatre slid past Sarah’s window. “So what’s your theory? Nina Antonova, a well-known investigative reporter and professed dissident, was recruited by Russian intelligence to murder the man who singlehandedly saved her magazine?”

  “Did I say recruited?”

  “You choose the word.”

  Christopher guided the Bentley into the King’s Road. “It is the considered opinion of both Vauxhall Cross and our brethren at Thames House that Nina Antonova is a Russian intelligence officer who burrowed her way into the Moskovskaya Gazeta years ago and has been biding her time.”

  “How do you explain the assassination attempt that forced her to leave Russia?”

  “Excellent Moscow Center tradecraft.”

  Sarah did not dismiss the theory out of hand. “There is another possibility, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She was duped into giving the poisoned documents to Viktor. In fact, given the peculiar circumstances of her escape from London, I’d say it’s the most likely explanation.”

  “There was nothing peculiar about it. She was gone before we even knew her name.”

  “Why did she check into a hotel instead of going straight to the airport? And why Amsterdam instead of Moscow?”

  “There were no direct flights to Moscow at that hour. We assume she flew there this morning on a clean passport.”

  “If she did, she’s probably dead by now. Frankly, I’m surprised she made it to Heathrow alive.”

  Christopher turned into Old Church Street and headed north into Kensington. “I thought CIA analysts were trained not to jump to conclusions.”

  “If anyone’s jumping to conclusions, it’s you and your colleagues from MI5.” Sarah contemplated the ember of her cigarette. “Viktor’s phone was off the hook when I entered the study. He must have called someone before he died.”

  “It was Nina.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “She was in her room at the Cadogan. She left the hotel a few minutes later.”

  “Was GCHQ monitoring Viktor’s phones?”

  “The British government does not eavesdrop on the communications of prominent newspaper publishers.”

  “Viktor Orlov was no ordinary publisher.”

  “Which is why he’s dead,” said Christopher.

  “What do you suppose they talked about?”

  “If I had to guess, he was rather miffed at Nina for poisoning him.”

  Sarah frowned. “Do you really believe a man like Viktor would waste the final moments of his life berating his killer?”

  “Why else would he have called her twenty minutes after she left his house?”

  “To warn her she would be next.”

  Christopher turned into Queen’s Gate Terrace. “You’re quite good, you know.”

  “For an art dealer,” remarked Sarah.

  “An art dealer with an interesting past.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  Christopher parked the Bentley outside a Georgian house the color of clotted cream. He and Sarah shared the maisonette on the bottom two floors. The owner of the flat above was a vaguely named shell company registered in the Cayman Islands. Nearly one hundred thousand luxury British properties were held by secret owners, many in tony London districts like Kensington and Knightsbridge. Even MI6 had been unable to determine the true identity of Christopher’s absentee neighbor.

  He switched off the engine but hesitated before opening the door.

  “Something wrong?” asked Sarah.

  “There’s a light on in the kitchen.”

  “You must have forgotten to turn it off when you left this morning.”

  “I didn’t.” Christopher reached inside his suit jacket and drew a Walther PPK. “Wait here. I won’t be but a moment.”

  5

  Nahalal, Israel

  As director-general of the Office, Gabriel Allon was permitted to use safe houses largely as he saw fit. He drew an ethical line, however, at borrowing one for the purpose of getting his wife and children out of their cramped apartment on Narkiss Street in locked-down Jerusalem. At his request, Housekeeping presented him with a market-tested monthly rental rate. He promptly doubled it and ordered the government personnel office to deduct the sum from his salary. Additionally, in the spirit of full transparency, he forwarded copies of all the relevant paperwork to Kaplan Street for approval. The prime minister, who was under indictment on charges of public corruption, wondered what all the fuss was about.

  The property in question was by no means luxurious. A smallish bungalow used mainly for debriefings and storage of blown field operatives, it was located in Nahalal, an old moshav in the Valley of Jezreel, about an hour north of King Saul Boulevard. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable, and the kitchen and bathrooms were recently renovated. There were cows in the paddock, chickens in the coop, several acres of cropland, and a grassy garden shaded by eucalyptus trees. Because the moshav was protected by a crack local police force, security was of no concern.

  Chiara and the children settled in the bungalow in late March and remained there after the agreeable weather of spring had given way to the blast-furnace heat of high summer. The afternoons were unbearable, but each evening a cool wind blew from the Upper Galilee. The moshav’s communal swimming pool was c
losed by government edict, and a summer surge of infections made play dates with other young children impossible. It was no matter; Irene and Raphael were content to pass their days organizing elaborate games involving the chickens and the neighbor’s flock of goats. By the middle of June, their skin was the color of mocha. Chiara slathered them with sunblock, but somehow they grew darker still.

  “The same thing happened to the Jews who founded the moshav in 1921,” explained Gabriel. “Raphael and Irene are no longer pampered city dwellers. They’re children of the valley.”

  During the first wave of the pandemic, he had been largely absent. Armed with a new Gulfstream jet and suitcases filled with cash, he had traveled the world in search of ventilators, testing material, and protective medical clothing. He made most of his purchases on the black market and then personally ferried the cargo back to Israel, where it was dispersed to hospitals throughout the country. When word of his efforts reached the press, an influential columnist from Haaretz suggested he consider a post-Office career in politics. The reaction was so favorable that many in the chattering classes wondered whether it was a trial balloon. Gabriel, who found all the unwanted attention embarrassing, issued a formal statement forswearing any interest in elected office—which the chattering classes interpreted as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to run for the Knesset when his term expired. The only unresolved question, they said, was his party affiliation.

  But by early June the Office was once again engaged in more traditional pursuits. Alarmed by new intelligence regarding Tehran’s determination to build a nuclear weapon, Gabriel slipped a large bomb into a centrifuge factory in Natanz. Six weeks later, in a daring operation carried out at the behest of the Americans, an Office hit team killed a senior al-Qaeda operative in downtown Tehran. Gabriel leaked details of the assassination to a friendly reporter at the New York Times, if only to remind the Iranians that he could enter their country whenever he pleased and strike at will.

  Despite the summer’s brisk operational tempo, he often arrived in Nahalal in time for dinner. Chiara would set a table outside in the cool of the garden, and Irene and Raphael would happily recount the details of their day, which invariably were identical to the particulars of the previous day. Afterward, Gabriel would take them for a walk along the dusty farm roads of the valley and tell them stories of his childhood in the young state of Israel.

  He was born in the neighboring kibbutz of Ramat David. There were no computers or mobile phones, of course, and no television, either; it didn’t arrive in Israel until 1966. Even then, his mother would not permit one in the house, fearing it would interfere with her work. Gabriel explained to the children how he used to sit at her feet while she painted, imitating her brushstrokes on a canvas of his own. He did not mention the numbers tattooed on her left arm. Or the candles that burned in their home for the family members who had not survived the camps. Or the screams he used to hear from the other bungalows in Ramat David, late at night, when the demons came.

  Gradually, he told them more about himself—a thread here, a fragment there, bits of truth mixed with subtle evasion, the occasional outright lie, if only to protect them from the horrors of the life he had led. Yes, he said, he had been a soldier, but not a very good one. When he left the IDF, he entered the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and began his formal training as a painter. But in the autumn of 1972, after a terrorist attack at the Olympic Games in Munich, Ari Shamron, whom the children referred to as their saba, asked him to take part in an undertaking known as Operation Wrath of God. He did not tell the children that he personally killed six members of the PLO faction responsible for the attack, or that whenever possible he shot them eleven times. He implied, however, that his experiences had robbed him of the ability to produce satisfactory original paintings. Rather than allow his talents to go to waste, he learned to speak Italian and then traveled to Venice, where he trained to be an art restorer.

  But children, especially the children of intelligence officers, are not easily misled, and Irene and Raphael sensed intuitively that their father’s account of his life was far from complete. They probed with care and with guidance from their mother, who thought a familial exhumation of Gabriel’s skeletons was overdue. The children already knew, for example, that he had been married once before and that the face of his dead son peered at them nightly from the clouds he had painted on the wall of their bedroom. But how had it happened? Gabriel answered with a heavily redacted version of the truth, knowing full well it would open Pandora’s box.

  “Is that why you always look under our car before we get in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love Dani more than you love us?”

  “Of course not. But we must never forget him.”

  “Where’s Leah?”

  “She lives in a special hospital not far from us in Jerusalem.”

  “Has she ever met us?”

  “Only Raphael.”

  “Why?”

  Because God, in his infinite wisdom, had created in Raphael a duplicate of Gabriel’s dead son. This, too, he withheld from his children, for their sake and his. That night, as Chiara slept contentedly at his side, he relived the bombing in Vienna in his dreams and awoke to find his half of the bed drenched with sweat. It was perhaps fitting, then, that when he reached for the phone on the bedside table, he learned that an old friend had been murdered in London.

  He dressed in darkness and climbed into his SUV for the drive to King Saul Boulevard. After submitting to a temperature check and a rapid Covid test, he rode in his private elevator to his sanitized office on the top floor. Two hours later, after watching the British prime minister’s evasive appearance before reporters outside Number Ten, he rang Graham Seymour on the secure hotline. Graham volunteered no additional information about the murder, save for the identity of the woman who had stumbled upon the body. Gabriel responded with the same question the prime minister had posed the previous evening.

  “What in God’s name was she doing in Viktor Orlov’s house?”

  If there was a bright spot in Gabriel’s post-Covid existence, it was the Gulfstream jet. A G550 of astounding comfort and murky registry, it touched down at London City Airport at half past four that afternoon. The passport Gabriel displayed to the immigration authorities was Israeli, diplomatic, and pseudonymous. It fooled no one.

  Nevertheless, after passing yet another rapid Covid test, he was granted provisional admittance to the United Kingdom. A waiting embassy sedan delivered him to 18 Queen’s Gate Terrace in Kensington. According to the list of names on the intercom panel, the occupant of the lower maisonette was someone called Peter Marlowe. The bell rang unanswered, so Gabriel descended a flight of wrought-iron steps to the lower entrance and drew the thin metal tool he carried habitually in his jacket pocket. Neither of the two high-quality locks put up much of a fight.

  Inside, an alarm chirped in protest. Gabriel entered the correct eight-digit code into the keypad and switched on the overhead lights, illuminating a large designer kitchen. The stonework was Corsican, as was the bottle of rosé he unearthed from the well-provisioned Sub-Zero refrigerator. He removed the cork and switched on the Bose radio resting on the granite countertop.

  The Russian government has denied any role in Mr. Orlov’s death . . .

  The BBC news presenter made an awkward transition from Orlov’s assassination to the latest pandemic news. Gabriel switched off the radio and drank some of the Corsican wine. Finally, at twenty minutes past six, a Bentley Continental pulled up in the street, and a well-dressed man emerged. A moment later he was standing in the open door of the kitchen, a Walther PPK in his outstretched hands.

  “Hello, Christopher,” said Gabriel as he raised the wineglass in greeting. “Do me a favor and put down that damn gun. Otherwise, one of us might get hurt.”

  6

  Queen’s Gate Terrace, Kensington

  Christopher Keller was a member of an exceedingly small club—the brotherhood of
terrorists, assassins, spies, arms dealers, art thieves, and fallen priests who had undertaken to kill Gabriel Allon and were still walking the face of the earth. Christopher’s motives for accepting the challenge had been financial rather than political. He was employed at the time by a certain Don Anton Orsati, leader of a Corsican crime family that specialized in murder for hire. Unlike many of the fools who had gone before him, Christopher was an altogether worthy opponent, a former member of the elite SAS who had served under deep cover in Northern Ireland during one of the nastier periods of the Troubles. Gabriel had survived the contract only because Christopher, out of professional courtesy, declined to pull the trigger when presented with the shot. Some years later Gabriel repaid the favor by convincing Graham Seymour to give Christopher a job at MI6.

  As part of his repatriation agreement, Christopher had been allowed to keep the substantial fortune he had amassed while working for Don Orsati. He had invested a portion of the money—eight million pounds, to be precise—in the maisonette in Queen’s Gate Terrace. When Gabriel last dropped in unannounced, the rooms had been largely unfurnished. Now they were tastefully decorated in patterned silk and chintz, and there was a faint but unmistakable whiff of fresh paint in the air. Clearly, Christopher had given Sarah free rein and unlimited resources. Gabriel had reluctantly blessed their relationship, secure in his belief it would be both brief and disastrous. He had even arranged for Sarah to work at Julian’s gallery despite concerns about her security. He had to admit, the exposure to a Russian nerve agent notwithstanding, she looked happier than she had in many years. If anyone had earned the right to be happy, thought Gabriel, it was Sarah Bancroft.

  Barefoot, she was draped across an overstuffed armchair in the upstairs drawing room, wineglass in hand. Her blue eyes were fixed on Christopher, who occupied a matching chair to her right. Gabriel had settled in a distant corner where he was safe from their microbes and they from his. Sarah had greeted him with pleasant surprise but without so much as a kiss on the cheek or a fleeting embrace. Such were the social customs of the brave new Covid world; everyone was an untouchable. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, Sarah was merely trying to keep him at arm’s length. She had never made any secret of the fact she was desperately in love with him, even when asking for his approval of her decision to leave New York and move to London. It seemed that Christopher had finally broken the spell. Gabriel suspected he had intruded on an intimate moment. He had one or two things he wanted to clear up before taking his leave.