by Daniel Silva
Eva disconnected the chrome device and hid it in its usual place, beneath the loose carpet and floorboard in her bedroom closet. The memory stick she zipped into a compartment in her handbag. The first act was complete; she had successfully taken possession of the intelligence from the agent. Now she had to deliver it to Moscow Center in a way that the American NSA would not detect. That meant handing it off to a courier, the next link in the chain that stretched from Washington to Yasenevo. In the past, Eva had left her memory sticks beneath the kitchen sink of an empty apartment in Montreal. But Moscow Center, for reasons it had not bothered to share with Eva, had shut down the site and created a new one.
To account for her regular travel to Canada, the Center had created a legend, or cover story. It seemed she had a maternal aunt living in the Quartier Latin of Montreal—renal failure, dialysis, not good. Monday and Tuesday were Eva’s next days off, but the agent’s reports were always of the highest priority. Friday or Saturday were out of the question—Yvette would fly into a rage if Eva asked for either night off on such short notice—but Sundays were slow, especially in winter. Yvette could easily handle the door and the phone. All Eva had to do was find someone to take her nine o’clock class Sunday morning at the studio. That would be no problem. Emily, the new girl, was desperate for extra work. Such was life in the gig economy of modern America.
Eva sat before her laptop and dispatched three brief e-mails, one to Yvette, one to the manager of the yoga studio, and a third to her nonexistent maternal aunt. Then she booked an economy-class seat on the Sunday-morning United Airlines flight to Montreal and reserved a room for the night at the downtown Marriott. She earned valuable mileage and points for both. Her controller at Moscow Center encouraged Eva to apply for membership in frequent-flier and rewards programs, for it helped to defray the high price of keeping her in place in the West.
Finally, at half past one, she switched off the computer and fell exhausted into her bed. Her hair smelled of Brussels Midi, of escargot and grilled salmon with saffron sauce, and of Flemish beef stew simmered in dark beer. As always, the mundane events of the evening played out in her thoughts. It was involuntary, this private screening, an unwanted side effect of the tedious nature of her cover employment. She relived every conversation and saw every face at each of Midi’s twenty-two tables. One party she remembered more clearly than the rest—Crawford, party of four, eight o’clock. Eva had seated them at table seven. At 9:08 p.m., they were waiting for their main entrees to arrive. Three were in animated conversation. One was staring at a phone.
18
Vienna—Bern
It did not take long for Eli Lavon to notice that Alistair Hughes was hiding something. There was, for example, the small matter of his overnight bag. He left it behind at the apartment, despite the fact he was leaving for Bern on an early-afternoon flight. And then there was the car that took Hughes from the embassy to Café Central at half past ten. Ordinarily, the driver waited nearby during one of Hughes’s appointments, but this time he departed as soon as Hughes passed through the coffeehouse’s famous doorway. Inside, Hughes was met by a man who looked as though he purchased his clothing from a tailor that catered exclusively to European Union diplomats. Eli Lavon, from his outpost on the other side of the crowded dining room, was unable to definitively determine the man’s nationality, but had the distinct impression he was French.
Hughes left the café a few minutes after eleven and walked to the Burgring, where he caught a taxi, the first he had taken while under Office surveillance. It drove him to his apartment and waited curbside while he fetched the overnight bag. Lavon knew this because he was watching from the passenger seat of a dark-blue Opel Astra, piloted by the last member of his team still in Vienna. They made the eleven-mile run to the airport in record time, passing Hughes’s taxi along the way, which allowed Lavon to check in for the flight to Bern before Hughes entered the terminal. The Englishman did so with his MI6 BlackBerry pressed to his ear.
The young Austrian woman at the SkyWork counter appeared to recognize Hughes, and Hughes her. He flowed through passport control and security without delay and took a seat in a quiet corner of the departure lounge, where he sent and received several text messages on his personal iPhone. Or so it appeared to Lavon, who was huddled among the midday boozers at the bar on the other side of the concourse, picking at the sweating label of Austrian Stiegl.
At twelve forty the overhead speakers blared; boarding for the Bern flight was about to commence. Lavon drank enough of the beer to satisfy the curiosity of any watching SVR countersurveillance officer and then wandered over to the gate, followed a moment later by Alistair Hughes. The plane was a Saab 2000, a fifty-seat turboprop. Lavon boarded first and was dutifully tucking his carry-on beneath the seat in front of him when Alistair Hughes came through the cabin door.
Hughes’s seatmate appeared a moment later, a brightly made-up woman of perhaps forty-five, attractive, professionally attired, who was speaking Swiss German into a mobile phone. Out of an abundance of caution, Lavon surreptitiously took her photograph and then watched while she and Hughes fell into easy conversation. Lavon’s own seatmate was not the talkative sort. He was a Balkan-looking man, a Serb, a Bulgarian perhaps, who had downed three bottles of lager at the bar before the flight. As the aircraft shuddered into a low-hanging cloud, Lavon wondered whether the man’s face, with its five days’ worth of stubble, would be the last he ever saw.
The clouds thinned over Salzburg, providing the passengers with a stunning view of the snowbound Alps. Lavon, however, had eyes only for Alistair Hughes and the attractive German-speaking woman seated next to him. She was drinking white wine. Hughes, as usual, was nipping at a glass of sparkling mineral water. The drone of the turboprop engines made it impossible for Lavon to hear their conversation, but it was obvious the woman was intrigued by whatever the handsome, urbane Englishman was saying. It was hardly surprising; as an MI6 officer, Alistair Hughes was a trained seducer. It was possible, however, that Lavon was watching something other than a chance encounter between a man and a woman on an airplane. Perhaps Hughes and the woman were already lovers. Or perhaps she was Hughes’s SVR control officer.
Forty-five minutes into the flight, Hughes removed a copy of the Economist from his briefcase and read it until the Saab 2000 plopped onto the runway of Bern’s small airport. He exchanged a few last words with the woman while the plane taxied toward the terminal, but as he crossed the windswept tarmac he was speaking on his personal iPhone. The woman was walking a few steps behind him, and Lavon was a few steps behind the woman. He, too, was on his phone. It was connected to Gabriel.
“Seat 4B,” said Lavon quietly. “Female, Swiss German, maybe forty. Find her name on the manifest and run it through the databases so I can sleep tonight.”
The terminal building was the size of a typical municipal airport, low and gray, with a control tower at one end. A handful of Lavon’s fellow passengers convened around the baggage-claim carousel, but most hurried toward the exit, including Alistair Hughes and the woman. Outside, she climbed into the passenger seat of a mud-spattered Volvo estate car and kissed the man behind the wheel. Then she kissed the two young children in back.
A line of taxis waited on the opposite side of the road. Hughes climbed into the first; Lavon, the third. Bern was a few kilometers to the northeast. The noble Schweizerhof Hotel overlooked the Bahnhofplatz. As Lavon’s taxi passed the entrance, he glimpsed Alistair Hughes trying to fend off the advances of an overeager bellman.
As requested, Lavon’s driver dropped him on the opposite side of the busy square. His real destination, however, was the Hotel Savoy, which was located around an elegant corner, on a pedestrian lane called the Neuengasse. Mikhail Abramov was drinking coffee in the lobby. Gabriel and Christopher Keller were in a room upstairs.
Several laptops lay on the writing desk. On one was an overhead shot of the Schweizerhof’s check-in counter, courtesy of the hotel’s internal network of security
cameras. Alistair Hughes was in the process of handing over his passport, a requirement at all Swiss hotels. A needless one in the case of Hughes, thought Lavon, for he and the clerk seemed well acquainted.
Room key in hand, Hughes made for the lifts, leaving the screen of one computer and walking onto the next. Two more hotel cameras monitored his journey along the fourth-floor corridor, to the door of his junior suite overlooking the spires of the Old City. Inside the room, however, the cameras were of the concealed variety, with heavily encrypted signals that easily made the short hop between the Schweizerhof and the Savoy. There were four cameras in all—two in the main room, one in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom—and microphones as well, including on the room phones. As long as Alistair Hughes was in Bern, a city beyond the boundaries of his territory, a city where he was not supposed to be, he would be granted no zone of immunity. For the time being, at least, the Office owned him.
Entering the room, Hughes placed his overcoat and suitcase on the bed, and his briefcase on the writing desk. His personal iPhone was now compromised in every way possible: voice calls, Internet browser, text messages and e-mails, the camera and microphone. Hughes used it to send greetings to his wife and sons in London. Then he placed a call on his MI6 BlackBerry.
True to Gabriel’s agreement with Graham Seymour, the Office had made no attempt to attack the device. Therefore, only Hughes’s end of the conversation was audible. His tone was that of superior to subordinate. He said his luncheon meeting—in truth, he had skipped lunch—had run longer than expected and that he intended to get an early start on the weekend. He said he had no plans other than to catch up on a bit of reading and would be reachable by phone and e-mail in the event of a crisis, which was unlikely, given the fact his territory was Vienna. There was a silence of several seconds, presumably while the subordinate spoke. Then Hughes said, “Sounds like something that can wait until Monday,” and rang off.
Hughes checked the time; it was 3:47 p.m. He locked his BlackBerry, iPhone, and passport in the room safe, and inserted his billfold into the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he washed down two tablets of pain reliever with a complimentary bottle of Swiss mineral water and went out.
19
Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
The stately Schweizerhof Hotel has long been beloved by British travelers and spies, in part for its afternoon tea service, which takes place daily in the lounge bar. Alistair Hughes was clearly a regular. The hostess greeted him warmly before offering him a table beneath a reproduction portrait of some long-dead Swiss nobleman. Hughes chose the spy’s seat, the one facing the hotel’s front entrance, and for protection wielded a copy of the Financial Times, compliments of Herr Müller, the joyless concierge.
Six hotel security cameras peered down upon the lounge, but because Alistair Hughes had left his iPhone in his room, there was no audio coverage. Gabriel quickly messaged Yossi and Rimona, who were booked at the hotel under false identities, and ordered them downstairs. They arrived in less than ninety seconds and, feigning marital disharmony, settled into the table behind Hughes’s. There was no chance of the MI6 man recognizing them as agents of the Office. Yossi and Rimona had played no role in the failed defection of Konstantin Kirov—other than to identify Alistair Hughes as a potential source of the fatal leak—and at no point in their illustrious careers had they worked with Hughes on a joint Office-MI6 operation.
The next guests came not from inside the hotel but from the street, a man and a woman, late thirties or early forties, Central European or Scandinavian in appearance. Both were attractive and expensively dressed—the man in a dark suit and neon-blue shirt, the woman in a sleek pantsuit—and both were quite obviously in robust physical condition, the woman especially. The hostess escorted them to a table near the bar, but the man objected and pointed toward one that offered him line-of-sight coverage of both the hotel’s entrance and the table where MI6’s Vienna Head of Station was reading the Financial Times. They ordered drinks rather than tea and never once looked at their phones. The man sat with his right hand on his knee and his left forearm braced on the tabletop. The woman spent several minutes tending to her flawless face.
“Who do you suppose they are?” asked Gabriel.
“Boris and Natasha,” murmured Eli Lavon.
“Moscow Center?”
“No question.”
“Mind if we get a second opinion?”
“If you insist.”
With Camera 7, Lavon captured a close-up of the man’s face. Camera 12 gave him the best look at the woman’s. He copied both images into a file and fired it securely to Tel Aviv.
“Now let me see the exterior of the hotel.”
Lavon called up the shot from Camera 2. It was mounted above the hotel’s entrance and pointed outward, toward the arches of the arcade. At present, two bellmen were hauling a cache of costly luggage from the boot of an S-Class Mercedes. Behind them, late-afternoon traffic hurtled across the Bahnhofplatz.
“Rewind it,” said Gabriel. “I want to see their arrival.”
Lavon moved the time-code bar backward five minutes, to the point where Boris and Natasha entered the lounge bar. Then he backed it up two more minutes and clicked the play icon. A few seconds later Boris and Natasha strode into the shot.
Lavon clicked pause. “The happy couple,” he said acidly. “They arrived at the hotel on foot so we wouldn’t be able to grab the registration of the car.”
Lavon quickly switched to Camera 9, the widest-angled shot of the lounge bar. A new patron had arrived, a large, well-dressed man with a glistening marble jaw and pale hair combed closely to his scalp. He requested a table at the front of the lounge and settled into the chair facing Alistair Hughes. The MI6 officer scrutinized him briefly over the top of the Financial Times, without expression, and then resumed reading.
“Who’s that one?” asked Gabriel.
“Igor,” answered Lavon. “And Boris has him covered, front and back.”
“Let’s have a closer look.”
Once again, Camera 12 provided the best shot. His features were decidedly Slavic. Lavon magnified the image and produced several stills, which he sent to King Saul Boulevard on a flash priority basis.
“How did he get here?” asked Gabriel.
Lavon switched to Camera 2, the exterior shot, and wound it backward long enough to see the man they called Igor climbing out of an Audi A8 sedan. The car was still outside the hotel, one man behind the wheel, another in the backseat.
“Looks like Igor doesn’t enjoy walking,” said Lavon. “Even for the sake of his cover.”
“Maybe he should,” said Keller. “He looks like he could lose a few pounds.”
Just then, the secure link flashed with an incoming message from Tel Aviv.
“Well?” asked Gabriel.
“I was wrong,” answered Lavon. “His name isn’t Igor, it’s Dmitri.”
“Better than Igor. What’s his family name?”
“Sokolov.”
“Patronymic?”
“Antonovich. Dmitri Antonovich Sokolov.”
“And what does Dmitri do for a living?”
“He’s a nobody at the Russian Federation’s permanent mission in Geneva.”
“Interesting. What does he really do?”
“He’s a Moscow Center hood.”
Gabriel stared at the screen. “What’s a Moscow Center hood doing in the lounge bar of the Schweizerhof Hotel, twenty feet from MI6’s Vienna Head of Station?”
Lavon switched the shot to Camera 9, the widest in his arsenal.
“I don’t know. But we’re about to find out.”
20
Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
There are numerous methods for a paid or coerced asset of an intelligence service to communicate with his controllers. He can leave coded messages or film at a drop site or in a dead-letter box. He can surreptitiously hand over intelligence in choreographed encounters known as “brush contacts,” send messages over the Inter
net using encrypted e-mail, via satellite using a miniature transmitter, or by ordinary post using tried-and-true methods of secret writing. He can even leave them in ordinary-looking false objects like rocks, logs, or coins. All of the methods have drawbacks and none is foolproof. And when something goes wrong, as it did in Vienna on the night of Konstantin Kirov’s attempted defection, it is the asset rather than the controller who almost always pays the ultimate price.
But when asset and controller are both known or declared officers of their respective services, and when both are holders of diplomatic passports, there is a far less perilous option of communication known as the casual contact. It can occur at a cocktail party, or a reception, or the opera, or a restaurant, or in the lobby of a luxury hotel in sleepy Bern. A certain amount of impersonal communication might be involved in the foreplay—a newspaper, for example, or the color of a necktie. And if the controller were so inclined, he might bring along a pair of bodyguards for protection. For even the lobby bar of a Swiss hotel can be a dangerous place when the secrets of nations are changing hands.
For the better part of the next five minutes, no one seemed to move. They were like figures in a painting—or actors on a darkened stage, thought Gabriel, waiting for the first burst of light to animate them. Only Eli Lavon’s watchers stirred, but they were in the wings. Two were sitting in a parked Škoda in the Bahnhofplatz, and two more, a man and a woman, were sheltering beneath the arcades. The two in the car would follow Dmitri Sokolov. The ones beneath the arcades would see to Boris and Natasha.