by Daniel Silva
After providing Amelia with a suitable quote for her article, Isabel excused herself and approached the one man at the party who seemed to have no interest in meeting her. He was standing before a landscape by Claude, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.
“Better than that still life in the safe house by the lake,” she said.
“Much,” agreed Gabriel.
She looked around the room. “Friends of yours?”
“You might say that.”
“Where’s Mr. Marlowe?”
“Avoiding that woman over there.”
“She looks like someone I saw in a fashion magazine once.”
“You did.”
“Why on earth would he want to avoid her?”
“Because he’s currently living with that one over there.”
“Sarah?”
Gabriel nodded. “She’s another one of my restoration projects. So is the former fashion model.”
“And I thought my life was complicated.” Isabel regarded him carefully. “I have to say, you look rather good for someone who’s lucky to be alive.”
“You should have seen me a few months ago.”
“How bad is the scar?”
“I have two, actually.”
“Do they still hurt?”
Gabriel smiled. “Only when I laugh.”
He was the first to leave the party. Not surprisingly, no one seemed to notice he had gone. Isabel departed soon after, but the others lingered until nearly midnight, when the last of the Bollinger Special Cuvée finally ran dry. On her way out the door, Olivia Watson blew Sarah a decorous kiss with those perfect crimson lips of hers. Through a frozen smile, Sarah whispered, “Bitch.”
She supervised the caterers while they packed away the empty bottles and dirty glasses. Then, after arming the gallery’s security system, she went into Mason’s Yard. Christopher was leaning against the hood of the Bentley, an unlit Marlboro between his lips.
His Dunhill lighter flared. “How was the party?”
“Why don’t you ask Olivia?”
“She told me to ask you.”
Frowning, Sarah slid into the passenger seat. “You know,” she said as they sped westward along Piccadilly, “none of this would have happened if I hadn’t found that Artemisia.”
“Except for Viktor,” Christopher pointed out.
“Yes,” agreed Sarah. “Poor Viktor.”
She lit one of Christopher’s cigarettes and accompanied Billie Holiday as the Bentley flowed along the Brompton Road into Kensington. As they drew to a stop in Queen’s Gate Terrace, she noticed a light burning in the lower level of the maisonette.
“You must have forgotten—”
“I didn’t.” Christopher reached inside his suit jacket and drew his Walther PPK. “I won’t be but a moment.”
The door was ajar, the kitchen deserted. On the granite counter, propped against an empty bottle of Corsican rosé, was an envelope. Christopher’s name was written in stylish longhand on the front. Inside was a high-quality bordered correspondence card.
“What does it say?” asked Sarah from the open doorway.
“He’s wondering whether you and I ought to get married.”
“Truth be told, I’ve been wondering the same thing.”
“In that case . . .”
“Yes?”
Christopher returned the note card to the envelope. “Perhaps we should.”
Author’s Note
The Cellist is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visitors to Mason’s Yard in St. James’s will search in vain for Isherwood Fine Arts. They will, however, find the extraordinary Old Master gallery owned by my dear friend Patrick Matthiesen. A brilliant art historian blessed with an infallible eye, Patrick never would have allowed a misattributed work by Artemisia Gentileschi to languish in his storerooms for nearly a half century. The painting depicted in The Cellist does not exist. If it did, it would look a great deal like the one produced by Artemisia’s father, Orazio, that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Like Julian Isherwood and his new managing partner, Sarah Bancroft, the inhabitants of my version of London’s art world are wholly fictitious, as are their sometimes-questionable antics. Their midsummer drinking session at Wilton’s Restaurant would have been entirely permissible, as the landmark London eatery briefly reopened its doors before a rise in coronavirus infection rates compelled Prime Minister Boris Johnson to shut down all non-essential businesses. Wherever possible, I tried to adhere to prevailing conditions and government-mandated restrictions. But when necessary, I granted myself the license to tell my story without the crushing weight of the pandemic. I chose Switzerland as the primary setting for The Cellist because life there proceeded largely as normal until November 2020. That said, a private concert and reception at the Kunsthaus Zürich, even for a cause as worthy as democracy, likely could not have taken place in mid-October.
I offer my profound apologies to the renowned Janine Jansen for the unflattering comparison to Anna Rolfe. Ms. Jansen is rightly regarded as one of her generation’s finest violinists, and Anna, of course, exists only in my imagination. She was introduced in the second Gabriel Allon novel, The English Assassin, along with Christopher Keller. Martin Landesmann, my committed if deeply flawed Swiss financier, made his debut in The Rembrandt Affair. The story of Gabriel’s blood-soaked duel with the Russian arms dealer Ivan Kharkov is told in Moscow Rules and its sequel, The Defector.
Devotees of F. Scott Fitzgerald undoubtedly spotted the luminous line from The Great Gatsby that appears in chapter 32 of The Cellist. For the record, I am well aware that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is no safe house in the historic moshav of Nahalal—at least not one that I am aware of—and Gabriel and his family do not live on Narkiss Street in West Jerusalem. Occasionally, however, they can be spotted at Focaccia on Rabbi Akiva Street, one of my favorite restaurants in Jerusalem.
It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy.
Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three Russian companies named in a sprawling indictment handed down by the Justice Department in February 2018 that detailed the scope and sophistication of the Russian interference. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the Russian cyber operatives stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political and religious activists on social media, and used divisive issues such as race and immigration to inflame an already divided electorate—all in support of their preferred candidate, the realit
y television star and real estate developer Donald Trump. Russian operatives even traveled to the United States to gather intelligence. They focused their efforts on key battleground states and, remarkably, covertly coordinated with members of the Trump campaign in August 2016 to organize rallies in Florida.
The Russian interference also included a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in a politically devastating leak of thousands of emails that threw the Democratic convention in Philadelphia into turmoil. In his final report, released in redacted form in April 2019, Robert Mueller said that Moscow’s efforts were part of a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to assist Donald Trump and weaken his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though the report noted that key witnesses used encrypted communications, engaged in obstructive behavior, gave false or misleading testimony, or chose not to testify at all. Perhaps most damning was the special counsel’s conclusion that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from the information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
An exhaustive five-volume report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in August 2020 went even further, portraying senior Trump advisers as eager to obtain assistance from America’s primary global adversary. The report, the culmination of a three-year investigation, detailed a complex web of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians linked to the Kremlin and the Russian intelligence services. It said “the single most direct” connection was Paul Manafort, the veteran Republican operative with a taste for high living—his vast wardrobe of expensive clothing included a $15,000 ostrich jacket—who briefly served as the campaign’s manager. Manafort, suggested the committee, was compromised by the fact he had earned tens of millions of dollars representing pro-Kremlin political candidates in Ukraine. He was also deeply indebted to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whom the committee characterized as a “proxy” for the Kremlin and Russia’s intelligence services.
But even Oleg Deripaska must have been taken aback when, in the early-morning hours of November 9, 2016, Donald Trump appeared before stunned supporters in a Manhattan hotel ballroom as the president-elect of the most powerful nation in the world. After settling into the job, Trump heaped praise on authoritarian thugs, entertained antidemocratic European populists at the White House, rolled back US efforts to promote democracy around the world, and disrupted relations with traditional allies such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Canada. And once, during an Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, Trump divulged highly classified intelligence supplied by a close ally in the Middle East—intelligence that was so sensitive it was not shared widely within the US government. That Middle Eastern ally was Israel, and the breach reportedly put at risk an operation that had given Israeli intelligence a window on the inner workings of the Islamic State in Syria.
But perhaps most unsettling was Trump’s determination to withdraw the United States from NATO, a bedrock of the postwar global order. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly is reported to have said that “one of the most difficult tasks he faced” was trying to stop Trump from pulling out of the alliance. John Bolton, after resigning his post as national security adviser, wrote that he was convinced Trump would withdraw from NATO if elected to a second term.
Trump’s obsession with undermining NATO, and his peculiar fealty toward Vladimir Putin, raised uncomfortable questions about his loyalty, as did his performance at a highly anticipated summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. With the Russian leader standing at his side, Trump challenged the conclusion of his own intelligence community that Moscow had meddled in the election. Even fellow Republicans condemned him, with the late senator John McCain of Arizona calling the remarks “the most disgraceful” by an American president in memory. That evening, a once-unfathomable sentence, composed by columnist Thomas L. Friedman, appeared in the New York Times: “There is overwhelming evidence that our president, for the first time in our history, is deliberately or through gross negligence or because of his own twisted personality engaged in treasonous behavior.”
Friedman was not alone in his concerns over the president’s conduct. According to legendary reporter Bob Woodward, Dan Coats, the former conservative Republican senator from Indiana who served as Trump’s first director of national intelligence, feared the president of the United States was acting as a Russian asset. Coats, wrote Woodward in his 2020 masterpiece Rage, “continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.”
Coats was no doubt alarmed by the lengths to which Trump went to conceal details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin. On one occasion, after a meeting in Hamburg, Trump reportedly took the extraordinary step of seizing his interpreter’s handwritten notes. According to the Washington Post, there is no detailed record, anywhere within the files of the US government, of five meetings between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The US intelligence community concluded that Putin, determined to help keep Trump in office, authorized a second Russian intervention during the 2020 presidential campaign. Historically unpopular, damaged by his inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump nevertheless became the first incumbent president since George H. W. Bush to be denied reelection by the American people. He received 232 electoral votes, far short of the 270 required, and lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes, a margin of 4.4 percent. Since 1960, five elections have been closer. And yet none of the other losing candidates—Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Al Gore, and John Kerry—refused to concede defeat, disrupted the formal transition of power, or incited a violent insurrection. But then, no other presidential candidate in American history ever solicited, accepted, and exploited the assistance of a hostile foreign power. That distinction is Donald Trump’s alone.
Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election has left America dangerously divided. It has also served to further radicalize the Republican Party. Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has concluded that Trump’s GOP is now an authoritarian populist party that is “willing to undermine democratic principles in pursuit of power,” much like the far-right Alternative for Germany, Austria’s Freedom Party, and the Hungarian Civic Alliance led by strongman Viktor Orbán.
Recent polling would appear to support Professor Norris’s conclusion. A large swath of Republican voters no longer believes in democracy. Even more alarming, a survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that 39 percent of Republicans support the use of violence to achieve their political goals. Many speak openly of civil war. The party’s congressional delegation now includes two members—Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia—who have expressed support for elements of the far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Before winning her deep-red Georgia district, Greene also expressed online support for executing FBI agents and Democratic members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Another Republican member of the 2020 freshman class, Mary Miller, quoted Adolf Hitler favorably during a fiery prepared speech delivered on the day before the Capitol insurrection. And yet the gentlelady from southeastern Illinois remains a member in good standing of the House Republican Conference.
All of which Vladimir Putin surely finds to his liking. Yes, Donald Trump ultimately disappointed him by failing to deliver an American withdrawal from NATO, but the domestic damage Trump has left in his wake will pay dividends for years to come. The Capitol siege alone was worth Russia’s investment. Those white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and QAnon conspiracy theorists who sacked the temple of American democracy on Donald Trump’s behalf were also doing Putin’s bidding. So, too, were the talk radio and cable news hosts who stoked the insurrectionists’ rage with baseless fanta
sies of a stolen election. A politically divided and destabilized America—an America drifting toward white nationalism, authoritarianism, and isolationism—will pose no challenge to Putin at home or in the lands where he aims to extend Russia’s malign influence. As far as Vladimir Putin is concerned, it was money well spent.
Acknowledgments
Needless to say, I did not set out, in the late summer of 2020, to write a novel that featured an insurrection inspired by an American president and an inauguration conducted under the threat of an armed assault by US citizens. But in the days following the Capitol siege, I resolved to include the near death of American democracy in my story of Russia’s relentless war on the West. I jettisoned my existing ending and rewrote much of my manuscript in a span of six weeks. Such an undertaking would not have been possible without the editorial and emotional support of my wife, CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel, who was reporting on the very events about which I was writing. She reviewed my final substantive changes while sitting on the set of the network’s Washington studios, waiting to go on the air. My debt to her is immeasurable, as is my love.
I spoke with several intelligence officers and Russia analysts while writing The Cellist, and I thank them now in anonymity, which is how they would prefer it. My frequent conversations with Republican members of Congress and senior administration officials during the four turbulent years of the Trump presidency provided me with a unique view of a White House, and a federal government, in disarray. My depiction of the CIA director withholding Russia-related intelligence from the President’s Daily Brief is based on information given to me by an unimpeachable source.
Anthony Scaramucci, founder of the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, gave me a thoughtful tutorial on the brazenness of Russian money laundering that shaped my operation against Kremlin Inc. Obviously, the mistakes and dramatic license are mine, not his. Bob Woodward was a source of both information and inspiration. His matchless reporting and writing on the final, chaotic year of the Trump presidency undoubtedly changed the course of history.