The Cellist

by Daniel Silva

  “Another one bites the dust,” said Morosov. “Isn’t that how the song goes?”

  “Careful, Sergei. Otherwise, I might be tempted to lock you in a cage again. You remember what it was like in there, don’t you? Paper plates and plastic spoons. Blue-and-white tracksuits. And no vodka or cigarettes, either.”

  “The tracksuits were the worst.”

  Absently, Morosov ran a hand over the front of his burgundy crewneck sweater. It paired nicely with his French-blue dress shirt, gabardine trousers, and suede loafers. His graying hair was neatly trimmed, his aging face recently shaved. One might have assumed that he had been expecting a visitor, but that wasn’t the case. As usual, Gabriel had dropped in unannounced.

  He pointed the remote at the television and pressed the power button.

  Sergei Morosov grimaced. “That remote is now covered with your germs. And if you must know, I’d feel better if you were wearing a mask.” He sprayed the remote with disinfectant. “How bad is it out there?”

  “Consider yourself lucky that you live here in your little Covid-free bubble.”

  “I’d be much happier in a place of my own.”

  “I’m sure you would. But the minute our back was turned, you would head straight for the Russian Embassy, where you would spin a sad tale about how I kidnapped you and brought you here against your will.”

  “It happens to be the truth.”

  “But your old service is unlikely to believe a word of it. In fact, if by some miracle they were able to get you back to Russia, they would probably take you to a room in Lefortovo Prison and execute you.”

  “You know the Russian people very well, Allon.”

  “Unfortunately, I speak from experience.”

  “How long do you intend to keep me here?”

  “Until you’ve told me every last secret rattling around that head of yours.”

  “I already have.”

  Gabriel removed the printout of the dossier from his attaché case and handed it to Morosov. The Russian slipped on a pair of half-moon reading glasses and scanned the opening pages. His face betrayed no emotion other than grudging admiration.

  “You don’t seem terribly surprised, Sergei.”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Is it accurate?”

  “Not entirely. Arkady was never assigned to the Soviet Foreign Ministry.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

  “The KGB?”

  Morosov nodded slowly.

  “And the Haydn Group?” asked Gabriel.

  “It’s a subsidiary of Arkady’s oil trading company.”

  “Yes, I know. But what is it?”

  “The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.”

  Gabriel reclaimed the dossier. “You should have told me about Arkady a long time ago.”

  Morosov shrugged. “You never asked.”

  23

  Upper Galilee, Israel

  The guards placed two chairs in the camp’s main court, with a folding table between them. Sergei Morosov, pleased by the prospect of human interaction, even with his former tormentor, brought along a meal of pickled herring, black bread, and Russian vodka. He feigned mild offense when Gabriel declined his offer of a drink.

  “You don’t care for vodka?”

  “I’d rather drink a glass of diesel.”

  “I have a lovely Shiraz if you’d like that instead. It’s from a winemaker called Dalton.”

  Gabriel smiled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “The accent is on the second syllable.” Gabriel pointed toward the north. “And the vineyards are right over that hill.”

  “You have many fine wines here in Israel.”

  “We do our best, Sergei.”

  “Perhaps someday you would be kind enough to show me your country.”

  “On second thought, I think I’ll have that vodka after all.”

  Morosov drained his glass with the snap of his wrist and returned it to the tabletop. “You don’t much care for Russians, do you, Allon?”

  “Actually, I’m very fond of them.”

  “Name one Russian you like.”

  “Nabokov.”

  Morosov smiled in spite of himself. “I suppose you have a right to hate us. Your confrontation with Ivan Kharkov at that dacha outside Moscow was the stuff of legend. You and your wife would have died that morning if it wasn’t for Grigori Bulganov’s courage and Viktor Orlov’s money. Now Grigori and Viktor are both dead, and you are the last man standing. It is an unenviable position. I should know, Allon. I speak from experience, too.”

  Morosov then reminded Gabriel of his impeccable lineage. He was, to borrow the term coined by the Russian philosopher and writer Zinoviev, a true Homo Sovieticus—a Soviet Man. His mother had served as a personal secretary to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. His father, a brilliant Marxist theoretician, had worked for Gosplan, the agency that oversaw the Soviet Union’s command economy. As party members, they lived a life far beyond the reach of ordinary Russians. A comfortable apartment in Moscow. A dacha in the country. Access to special stores stocked with food and clothing. They even owned an automobile, a cherry-red Lada that on occasion actually performed the function for which it was designed and assembled.

  “We weren’t elites, mind you. But we had it quite good. That wasn’t the case for Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he added, using the Russian president’s given name and patronymic. “Vladimir Vladimirovich was a member of the proletariat. The son of a factory worker. A true man of the people.”

  He was raised, Morosov continued, in a tumbledown apartment building at 12 Baskov Lane in Leningrad. Two other families, one devoutly Russian Orthodox, the other observantly Jewish, shared the same cramped flat. There was no hot water, no bathtub, no heat other than a wood-burning stove, and no kitchen save for a single gas ring and a sink in a windowless hallway. Young Vladimir Vladimirovich spent most of his time downstairs in the rubbish-strewn courtyard. Short in stature, slight of build, he was often bullied. He took boxing lessons and later studied judo and sambo, the Soviet martial arts discipline. Incorrigible and quick tempered, he sought out opportunities on the mean streets of Leningrad to put his fighting skills to the test. Whenever words or sinister looks were exchanged, it was invariably Vladimir Vladimirovich who threw the first punch.

  Occasionally, he looked after neighborhood boys who could not fend for themselves—including a boy named Arkady Akimov, who lived at 14 Baskov Lane. One day Vladimir Vladimirovich saw two older boys menacing Arkady in the fetid passageway that connected the courtyards of their buildings. Arkady was a frail child who suffered from chronic respiratory illnesses. Worse still, at least in the eyes of Baskov Lane’s thugs, he was a promising pianist who was protective of his hands. Vladimir Vladimirovich fought the fight for him, beating both boys to a pulp. And thus was born a friendship that would change the course of Russian history.

  The boys attended School No. 193, where Vladimir Vladimirovich got into trouble and Arkady excelled. It was his dream to study music at the Leningrad Conservatory, but at seventeen he was informed he had been denied admission. Heartbroken, he followed his childhood friend to Leningrad State University, and upon graduation they were recruited by the KGB. After intensive language instruction and a stay at the Red Banner Institute spy school, they were sent off to East Germany as newly minted Soviet intelligence officers. Sergei Morosov was working there at the time.

  “Vladimir Vladimirovich was assigned to the backwater of Dresden, but Arkady joined me at the main rezidentura in East Berlin. I was a traditional PR Line officer. I recruited and ran agents. Arkady was in a different line of work entirely.”

  “Active measures?”

  “The KGB’s stock-in-trade,” said Morosov with a nod.

  “What sort of active measures?”

  The usual, answered Morosov. Propaganda, political warfare, disinformation, subversion, influence operations, support for anti-
establishment forces on both the far left and far right—all of it designed to tear at the fabric of Western society. Arkady and his counterparts in the Stasi also armed and funded Arab terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  “Do you remember the La Belle discotheque bombing in West Berlin in April 1986? Sure, Gaddafi and the Libyans were involved. But where do you think the bombers got the plastic explosive and the detonator in the first place? Arkady’s fingerprints were all over that attack. He was damn lucky his role wasn’t exposed when the Stasi files were made public after the Wall came down.”

  Even the officers of the Berlin rezidentura were caught off guard by the speed of East Germany’s collapse. They put in place stay-behind networks, burned their files, and headed home to an uncertain future—Sergei Morosov to Moscow, Arkady and Vladimir Vladimirovich to their hometown of Leningrad. The country had deteriorated during their absence. The lines were longer, the shelves emptier. And in December 1991, four months after an abortive coup led by KGB hard-liners, the Soviet Union was no more. The once-mighty KGB soon passed into history as well, leaving two services in its wake. The FSB, headquartered at Lubyanka Square, handled internal security and counterintelligence, while the SVR, from its wooded compound in Yasenevo, conducted traditional espionage abroad.

  Sergei Morosov decided to stay on with the SVR, though for six months he received no salary. By then, Arkady Akimov and Vladimir Vladimirovich had already begun the second acts of their career. Arkady went into the oil business. And Vladimir Vladimirovich, after declaring himself to be a committed democrat, went to work for the mayor of Leningrad, which had reverted to its historic name, St. Petersburg. As head of the Committee for External Relations, it was his job to attract foreign investment to a city where crime was rampant. During the long winter of 1991, with Russia facing the threat of widespread hunger, he supervised a series of international barter deals, trading plentiful Russian commodities such as timber, petroleum, and minerals for badly needed staples such as fresh meat, sugar, and cooking oil. Few of the promised goods ever arrived, and the immense profits derived from the sale of the Russian commodities abroad were never properly accounted for. An investigation would later determine that much of the money ended up in the pocket of Arkady Akimov.

  Suddenly wealthy, Arkady hired a small army of former KGB officers and spetsnaz special operatives and waged a bloody turf war with the Tambov crime family for control of St. Petersburg’s port. Before long, he was Russia’s dominant oil trader. With a portion of his rapidly growing fortune, he purchased a plot of lakefront land and constructed a colony of dachas. He gave one to Vladimir Vladimirovich and the others to men such as himself, former KGB officers turned successful businessmen. They gathered at the retreat each weekend with their wives and children and plotted the future. They were going to seize control of Russia and return it to superpower status. And in the process, they were going to make themselves rich. Rich as tsars. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to punish the Americans and Western Europeans for destroying the Soviet Union. Rich enough to exact revenge.

  “You don’t believe that nonsense about Volodya being an accidental president, do you, Allon? It was a straight KGB operation from beginning to end. Nothing was left to chance.”

  Their chosen candidate arrived at the Kremlin in June 1996 and took up a post in an obscure directorate that managed government-owned properties abroad. With the help of Arkady Akimov and his cadre of former KGB men, a series of rapid promotions ensued. Deputy chief of the presidential staff. Director of the FSB. And, in August 1999, prime minister of the Russian Federation. His path to the presidency seemed all but certain.

  “But remember, Allon—nothing was left to chance.”

  The first bomb, said Morosov, exploded on September 5 in the republic of Dagestan. The target was an apartment building that housed mainly Russian soldiers and their families. Four days later, it was another apartment building, this one on Guryanova Street in Moscow. The combined death toll was 158, with hundreds more wounded. Chechen separatists were blamed.

  When two more bombs exploded the following week—one in Moscow, the other in the southern city of Volgodonsk—hysteria swept the country. The new prime minister, on an official visit to Kazakhstan, assured his traumatized people that his response would be swift and merciless.

  “That was when he issued his infamous threat about wasting Chechen terrorists in the outhouse. Only a thug from Baskov Lane would say such a thing. It was also a lie. The Chechen separatists had nothing to do with those bombings. They were planned by Arkady Akimov and carried out by the FSB. They were active measures aimed not at a foreign adversary but the Russian people.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “One does not prove such things in Russia, Allon. One simply knows them to be true.”

  The manufactured crisis, Sergei Morosov continued, had its intended effect. After escalating the war in Chechnya, Vladimir Vladimirovich saw his approval ratings soar. In December, an ailing and alcohol-addled President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation and appointed a little-known functionary as his successor. Four months later, he faced Russia’s voters for the first time. The result was never in doubt. Nothing was left to chance.

  The first phase of the operation was complete. Arkady Akimov and his cadre of KGB officers had succeeded in placing one of their own in the Grand Kremlin Palace. The second phase was about to commence. They were going to make themselves rich. Rich as tsars. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to exact revenge.

  24

  Upper Galilee, Israel

  But first, said Sergei Morosov, the oligarchs had to be brought to heel. Khodorkovsky, owner of the energy behemoth Yukos, was the richest. But Gusinsky, by dint of his Media-Most broadcast empire, was perhaps the most influential. Police raided his offices in downtown Moscow just four days after the inauguration. Khodorkovsky survived three years before tasting the Kremlin’s wrath. Dragged off his private jet during a refueling stop in Siberia, he would spend the next decade in prison, much of it in a labor camp near the Chinese border, where he passed his days making mittens and his nights in solitary confinement.

  “Viktor got off easy by comparison. A luxury townhouse in Cheyne Walk, an estate in Somerset, a villa by the sea in Antibes. One wonders why he would risk it all by getting involved with a traitor like Grigori Bulganov.” Sergei Morosov paused. “Or with you, Allon.”

  “Viktor believed Russia could be a democracy.”

  “Do you subscribe to this fantasy as well?”

  “I was cautiously pessimistic.”

  “Russia will never be a democracy again, Allon. We cannot live as normal people.”

  “A very wise woman once told me the same thing.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Go on, Sergei.”

  Once the original oligarchs had been put in their place, he said, the looting began—a wild orgy of self-dealing, kickback schemes, siphoning, embezzlement, protection rackets, tax fraud, and outright theft that enriched the men around the new president. They saw themselves as a new Russian nobility. They erected palaces, commissioned coats of arms, and traveled the country by a network of private roads. Most became billionaires many times over, but none was richer than Arkady Akimov. His oil trading firm, NevaNeft, was Russia’s largest. So was his commercial construction company, which was awarded endless government projects, always with bloated contracts.

  “Such as?”

  “The presidential palace on the Black Sea. It started out as a modest villa, about a thousand square meters. But by the time Volodya and Arkady were finished, the price tag was more than a billion dollars.”

  That was pocket change, Morosov continued, when compared to the money Arkady earned from the Olympic Games in Sochi. The cost to the Russian taxpayer for the extravaganza on the shores of the Black Sea was more than $50 billion, nearly five times the original estimate. Arkady’s construction firm was
awarded the largest slice of the pie, a forty-eight-kilometer highway and rail line running from the Olympic Park to the ski venues in the mountains. The contract was worth $9.4 billion.

  “It was one of the greatest grifts in history. The Americans sent a probe to Mars for a fraction of that. Arkady could have paved the road in gold for less.”

  “How much do you suppose Vladimir Vladimirovich let him keep for himself?”

  “You know the old Russian proverb, Allon. What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”

  “Translation?”

  “Volodya effectively controls the entire Russian economy. It’s all his. He’s the one who chooses the winners and losers. And the winners remain winners only if he allows it.”

  “He takes a cut of everything?”

  Morosov nodded. “Everything.”

  “Is he the richest man in the world?”

  “Second, I’d say.”

  “How much is there?”

  “North of a hundred billion, but south of two.”

  “How far south?”

  “Not much.”

  “Is any of it in his name?”

  “He might have a billion or two stashed away in MosBank under his real name, but the rest of the money is held by trusted members of his inner circle like Arkady. He’s doing quite well for himself, is Arkady. NevaNeft is now the third-largest oil trading firm in the world. He owns a fleet of oil tankers, and he’s invested billions in pipelines, refineries, storage facilities, and terminals in Western Europe. About five years ago he moved his business to Geneva and established a Swiss-registered company called NevaNeft Trading SA. There’s also NevaNeft Holdings SA, which includes the rest of his empire.”

  “Why Geneva?”

  “It recently replaced London as the oil trading capital of the world. All the big Russian firms have offices there. It’s also located conveniently close to Zurich.”