by Daniel Silva
Gabriel, however, doubted that Alistair Hughes was carrying a SRAC device. Keller and Eli Lavon had seen no evidence of one in Vienna, where Hughes had been under near-constant physical and electronic surveillance. What’s more, the very point of the system was to avoid face-to-face encounters between an agent and his controller. No, thought Gabriel, something else was taking place in the lobby of the Schweizerhof Hotel.
Finally, at 4:24, Alistair Hughes signaled for the check. A moment later Dmitri Sokolov did the same. Then the Russian hauled his considerable bulk out of his chair and, buttoning his blazer, traveled the twenty feet separating his table from the one where Alistair Hughes was affixing his signature to a room-charge bill.
The shadow of the SVR officer fell over Hughes. He looked up and, frowning, listened while Sokolov, in the manner of a headwaiter explaining the specialties of the house, delivered a short tableside homily. A brief exchange followed. Hughes spoke, Sokolov responded, Hughes spoke again. Then Sokolov smiled and shrugged his heavy shoulders and sat down. Hughes slowly folded his newspaper and placed it on the table between them.
“Bastard,” whispered Christopher Keller. “Looks like you were right about him. Looks like he’s spying for the Russians.”
Yes, thought Gabriel, watching the screen, that was exactly what it looked like.
“Excuse me, but I believe I am addressing Mr. Alistair Hughes of the British Embassy in Vienna. We met at a reception there last year. It was at one of the palaces, I can’t remember which. They have so many in Vienna. Almost as many as in St. Petersburg.”
These were the words Dmitri Antonovich Sokolov spoke while standing at Alistair Hughes’s table, as faithfully recalled by Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern. Neither could make out what was said next—not the brief exchange that occurred while Sokolov was still standing, and not the longer one that took place after he sat down—for both were conducted at a volume better suited for betrayal.
The second exchange lasted two minutes and twelve seconds. For much of that time, Sokolov was holding Hughes’s left wrist. The Russian did most of the talking, all of it through a counterfeit smile. Hughes listened impassively and made no attempt to reclaim his hand.
When Sokolov finally released his grip, he reached inside the lapel of his blazer and removed an envelope, which he slid beneath the copy of the Financial Times. Then he rose abruptly and with a curt bow took his leave. With Camera 2 they watched him climbing into the back of the Audi. Gabriel ordered Lavon’s watchers not to follow.
Inside the hotel, Boris and Natasha remained at their table. Natasha was speaking in an animated manner, but Boris wasn’t listening; he was watching Alistair Hughes, who was staring at the newspaper. At length, the Englishman gave his wristwatch a theatrical glance and rose hastily to his feet, as though he had stayed in the lounge too long. He left a banknote atop the bill. The newspaper—and the envelope tucked inside it—he took almost as an afterthought.
Leaving the lounge, he bade farewell to the hostess and made his way to the lifts. A door opened the instant he pressed the call button. Alone in the carriage, he removed Dmitri Sokolov’s envelope and, lifting the flap, peered inside. Once again, his face remained impassive, the professional spy’s blank mask.
He returned the envelope to the newspaper for the short walk down the corridor, but inside his room he opened the envelope a second time and removed its contents. He scrutinized them while standing in the window overlooking the Old City, unintentionally shielding the material from both concealed cameras.
Next he went into the bathroom and closed the door. It was no matter; there was a camera there, too. It peered judgmentally down on Hughes as he wet a bath towel and laid it along the base of the door. Then he crouched next to the commode and began burning the contents of Dmitri Sokolov’s envelope. Once again, the camera angle was such that Gabriel could not clearly see the material. He looked at Keller, who was glaring angrily at the screen.
“There’s a British Airways flight leaving Geneva tonight at nine forty,” said Gabriel. “It arrives at Heathrow at ten fifteen. With a bit of luck, you can be at Graham’s place in Eaton Square by eleven. Who knows? Maybe Helen will have some leftovers for you.”
“Lucky me. And what do you want me tell him?”
“That’s entirely up to you.” Gabriel watched as Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, burned one last item—the envelope with his fingerprints and the fingerprints of Dmitri Antonovich Sokolov. “He’s your problem now.”
21
Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
He had always known it would come to this, that one day they would find him out. A secret like his could not be kept forever. Truth be told, he was surprised he had managed to hide it so long. For years, no one had suspected him, even in Baghdad, where he spent ten deplorable months trying to find the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that had been used as a pretext to take his country into a disastrous war. He might have gone mad in Baghdad were it not for Rebecca. He’d had many affairs—too many, it was true—but Rebecca he had loved. She had prevailed over him in a hard-fought contest to become H/Washington. Now she was on a glide path toward becoming Six’s first female director-general. Perhaps she might use her rising influence to help him. No, he thought, not even Rebecca could save him now. He had no choice but to confess everything and hope that Graham might sweep his perfidy under the rug.
He removed the wet towel from the base of the door and flung it into the tub. It landed like a dead animal. A fog of smoke from his bonfire of lies hung reprovingly in the air. Leaving, he closed the door quickly behind him so the smoke did not escape and set off the fire alarm. What a comic masterpiece that would be, he thought. What tradecraft!
He supposed the room was wired. His apartment, too. He’d had a nagging sense for a couple of weeks he was being followed. He glanced at his watch; he was running late for his appointment. Despite his present circumstances, he felt a stab of profound guilt. They had agreed to stay late to accommodate him, but now he had no choice but to leave them in the lurch and flee Bern as quickly as possible.
There were no more flights to Vienna that day, but there was an overnight train that arrived at half past six. He could spend the rest of Saturday in his office, the very model of dedication and hard work. Like Rebecca, he thought suddenly. Rebecca never took a day off. It was why she would soon be chief. Imagine if she had agreed to marry him. He would have dragged her down, too. Now he was but a blotch on an otherwise perfect record, a regrettable indiscretion.
He punched the code into the room safe—it was Melinda’s birthdate, backward, twice—and tossed his BlackBerry and iPhone into his briefcase. The phones were no doubt compromised. In fact, they were probably staring at him now, recording his every word and misdeed. He was only glad he had left them in the room. He always did when he had tea at the Schweizerhof. The last thing he wanted during his half hour of private time was an interruption from home or, worse yet, Vauxhall Cross.
He slammed the lid on the briefcase and snapped the latches into place. The corridor smelled of Rebecca’s perfume, the stuff she used to hose herself down with to cover the odor of her wretched L&Bs. He thumbed the call button for the lift and when the carriage arrived sank gratefully to the lobby. Herr Müller the concierge spotted the bag over his shoulder and with a worried expression asked whether there was a problem with Herr Hughes’s room. There was a problem, but it was not the room. It was the pair of SVR hoods watching Herr Hughes from the lounge bar.
He passed them without a glance and went into the arcade. Night had fallen and with it had come a sudden snow. It was dropping heavily on the traffic rushing across the Bahnhofplatz. He looked over his shoulder and saw the two SVR hoods advancing toward him. And if that wasn’t enough, his phone was howling in his briefcase. The ringtone told him it was the iPhone, which meant it was probably Melinda checking up on him. Another lie to tell . . .
He had to hurry if he was going to make his train. He passed bene
ath one of the archways of the arcade and stepped into the square. He was nearly to the other side when he heard the car. He never saw the headlamps, for they were doused. Nor would he remember the pain of the initial impact or his broken-backed collision with the street. The last thing he saw was a face peering down at him. It was the face of Herr Müller the concierge. Or was it Rebecca? Rebecca whom he had loved. Tell me everything, she whispered as he lay dying. Your secrets are safe with me.
Part Two
Pink Gin at the Normandie
22
Bern
The story appeared shortly after midnight on the Web site of Berner Zeitung, the Swiss capital’s largest daily newspaper. Frugal in detail, it stated only that a British diplomat named Alistair Hughes had been struck by a motorcar and killed while attempting to make an illegal crossing of the Bahnhofplatz during the evening rush. The car had fled the scene; all subsequent attempts to locate it had failed. The incident was being investigated, said a spokesman for the Kantonspolizei Bern, as a hit-and-run accident.
The British Foreign Office waited until morning before issuing a brief statement declaring that Alistair Hughes was an officer of the British Embassy in Vienna. The savvier reporters—the ones who knew how to read between the lines of official Whitehall drivel—detected a telltale vagueness of tone that suggested the involvement of the secretive organization based in the hideous riverfront complex known as Vauxhall Cross. Those who tried to confirm their suspicions by contacting MI6’s underworked press officer were met with a thunderous silence. As far as Her Majesty’s Government was concerned, Alistair Hughes was a diplomat of minor consequence who had died while tending to a private matter.
Elsewhere, however, reporters were not constrained by tradition and draconian laws regarding the activities of the secret services. One was the Vienna correspondent for the German television network ZDF. She claimed to have lunched with Alistair Hughes ten days prior to his death, with the full understanding that he was the Head of Station for MI6. Other reporters followed suit, including one from the Washington Post who said she used Hughes as a source for a story regarding the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In London the Foreign Office begged to differ. Alistair Hughes was a diplomat, insisted a spokesman, and no amount of wishful thinking would change that fact.
The one place where no one seemed to care what Alistair Hughes did for a living was the place where he died. As far as the Swiss press was concerned, Hughes was “di cheibe Usländer”—a damned foreigner—who would still be alive if he had had the sense to obey traffic laws. The Kantonspolizei took its cues from the British Embassy, which did not look favorably on a detailed probe. The police searched for the offending vehicle—thankfully, it was of German registry rather than Swiss—but Alistair Hughes they left largely in peace.
There was at least one man in Bern, however, who was not prepared to accept the official version of the story. His inquiry was private and largely invisible, even to those who witnessed it. It was conducted primarily in his room at the Hotel Savoy, where he had remained, much to the dismay of his prime minister and his wife, after ordering his underlings to engage in a hasty evacuation from the country. The management of the Savoy believed him to be Herr Johannes Klemp, a German citizen from the city of Munich. His real name, however, was Gabriel Allon.
By rights, it should have been a time for at least a quiet celebration, though, truth be told, it had never really been his style. Still, he was entitled to a certain amount of private revelry. After all, he was the one who had insisted there was a Russian mole inside MI6. And he was the one who had convinced the director-general of MI6 that Alistair Hughes, the Vienna Head of Station, was the likely culprit. He had placed Alistair Hughes under surveillance and followed him to Bern, where Hughes had met with Dmitri Sokolov of the SVR in the lounge bar of the Schweizerhof Hotel. Gabriel had witnessed the meeting in real time, as had several of his most trusted officers. It had happened, there was no denying it. Dmitri Sokolov had given Hughes an envelope, Hughes had accepted it. Upstairs in his room, he had burned the contents, along with the envelope itself. Four minutes and thirteen seconds later, he was lying dead in the Bahnhofplatz.
A part of Gabriel did not mourn Hughes’s passing, for it appeared he had met with the end he richly deserved. But why had Alistair Hughes died? It was possible it was an accident, that Hughes had simply rushed into the street, into the path of an oncoming car. Possible, thought Gabriel, but unlikely. Gabriel did not believe in accidents; he made accidents happen. So did the Russians.
But if Alistair Hughes’s death was not an accident, if it was an act of intentional murder, why had it been ordered? To answer that question, Gabriel first had to determine the true nature of the encounter he had witnessed and recorded in the lounge bar of the famed Schweizerhof Hotel in Bern.
To that end, he spent the better part of the next three days hunched over a laptop computer, watching the same thirty minutes of video over and over again. Alistair Hughes arriving at the Schweizerhof Hotel after an uneventful flight from Vienna. Alistair Hughes, in his compromised room, misleading his station about his whereabouts and plans for the weekend. Alistair Hughes locking his phones in his room safe before going downstairs, presumably so they could not be used to monitor his meeting with Dmitri Sokolov of the SVR. For better or worse, Gabriel had no video of Alistair Hughes’s death in the Bahnhofplatz. The view from Camera 2 of the Schweizerhof’s security system was blocked by the arches of the arcade.
The maids at the Savoy thought Gabriel a novelist and were quiet in the corridor. He allowed them to enter the room each afternoon when he left the hotel to walk in the Old City, always with the laptop in a smart-looking shoulder bag. Had anyone tried to follow him, they might have noticed that twice he slipped into the Israeli Embassy on the Alpenstrasse. They might also have noticed that for three consecutive afternoons, he took tea and savories in the lobby lounge of the Savoy’s main competitor, the Schweizerhof.
On the first day, he sat at Herr Hughes’s table. The day after that it was Herr Sokolov’s. And, finally, on the third, he requested the table where Boris and Natasha had been sitting. He chose Boris’s seat, the gunner’s view of the room, and took careful note of the angles and the placement of the various security cameras. None of it, he thought, had happened by accident. Everything had been chosen with care.
Returning to his room at the Savoy, he took up a sheet of hotel stationery and, with a backing of glass from the coffee table to conceal his impressions, wrote out two possible scenarios to explain why Alistair Hughes had died in Bern.
The first was that the meeting in the lounge bar, while casual in tradecraft, was of the crash variety. Sokolov had warned Hughes he was under suspicion, and under surveillance, and that his arrest was imminent. He had offered Hughes a lifeline in the form of the envelope. It contained instructions for his exfiltration to Moscow. Hughes disposed of the instructions after reading them and hurried from the hotel to begin the first leg of his journey into permanent exile. Presumably, he had been told a car was waiting somewhere near the Bahnhofplatz, a car that would take him to a friendly airport somewhere behind the old Iron Curtain where he could use a Russian passport to board an airplane. In his haste, and in the grips of a full-blown panic, he had tried to cross the square illegally and had been killed, thus depriving Moscow Center of its prize.
It was, thought Gabriel, entirely plausible, with one glaring hole. Alistair Hughes worked for MI6, a service renowned for the quality of its tradecraft and its officers. What’s more, if Hughes was also a spy for Moscow Center, he had been walking a tightrope for many years. He would not have panicked when told he had been exposed; he would have faded quietly into the shadows and disappeared. For that reason, Gabriel rejected the first scenario outright.
The second explanation was that Dmitri Sokolov came to the Schweizerhof Hotel with another intention, to kill the mole before the mole could be arrested and interrogated by his service, thus denying MI6 the
opportunity to estimate the extent of the mole’s treachery. Under that scenario, Hughes was dead long before he arrived in Bern, just as Konstantin Kirov had been dead before he arrived in Vienna. Hughes, however, recognized his fate, which explained his panicked dash from the hotel. The murder weapon was waiting outside in the square, and the driver had taken the opportunity presented to him. Case closed. No more mole.
Gabriel preferred the second scenario to the first, but again he was dubious. Hughes could have provided valuable help to the SVR for many years to come from the safety of a Moscow apartment. He could also have been used as a valuable propaganda tool, like Edward Snowden and the Cambridge spies of the Cold War—Burgess, Maclean, and Kim Philby. The Tsar loved nothing more than showing off the prowess of his spies. No, thought Gabriel, the Russians would not have let their prize slip so easily through their fingers.
Which led Gabriel, late that same night, as the Hotel Savoy dozed around him and cats prowled the cobbled street beneath his window, to consider one more possibility, that he himself was to blame for the death of Alistair Hughes. It was for that reason he reluctantly picked up the phone on his bedside table and called Christoph Bittel.