by Daniel Silva
Katerina said nothing.
“You don’t deny it?”
She folded her arms over her breasts. “What now?”
“I’m going to propose a simple deal. Twenty million dollars in exchange for one of the SVR’s most valuable agents. I’m quite confident Alexei will pay.”
“And where do you intend to hold me while you conduct the negotiations?”
“Somewhere Alexei and his goons will never find you. And in case you’re wondering,” he added, “the arrangements for your travel and indefinite confinement have already been made.” He smiled. “Alexei seems to have forgotten that I’ve done this sort of thing a time or two.”
Quinn offered Katerina her sweater, but she refused to accept it. Instead, she reached behind her back, loosened the clasp on her bra, and allowed it to fall from her body. She was perfect, thought Quinn—perfect except for the scar on the underside of her right wrist. He removed the magazine from the Makarov and switched off the light.
50
VIENNA–HAMBURG
THE MESSAGE FROM ALEXEI ROZANOV could not have been more concise. A restaurant, a city, a time. The restaurant was Die Bank, a seafood brasserie in the Neustadt section of Hamburg. The time was nine p.m. on Thursday. It meant that Gabriel would have just forty-eight hours to plan the operation and move the necessary assets into place. He commenced work immediately after returning to the Vienna safe flat with Eli Lavon—and by midnight they had obtained the lodging, cars, weaponry, and secure communications equipment required for such an undertaking. They had also acquired additional personnel from Barak, Gabriel’s fabled team of field operatives. The only item that eluded them was a second reservation at the restaurant. It seemed the Russian had secured the last available table for Thursday evening. Keller suggested hacking into the restaurant’s computer and killing off a few tables—metaphorically, of course—but Gabriel overruled him. He knew Die Bank well. There was a large noisy bar where a pair of operatives could spend an hour or two without attracting notice.
The Office was not alone in its preparations. VEVAK, defenders of the Islamic revolution, archenemy of Israel and the West, was preparing, too. The service’s secret travel department booked Reza Nazari a seat on Austrian Airlines Flight 171, which departed Vienna at five thirty p.m. and arrived in Hamburg at seven. Gabriel would have preferred a slightly earlier flight, but Nazari’s late arrival meant there would be less time for Iranian or Russian mischief. VEVAK’s choice of a hotel—a discount dump near the airport—was a problem, however. Gabriel asked Nazari to switch to the Marriott in the Neustadt instead. It was a short distance from the restaurant, and several members of the Israeli team were already booked there. Nazari requested an upgrade, and Tehran readily complied—thus making it, said Gabriel, the first joint Office-VEVAK operation in history. Reza Nazari did not find the observation humorous. That evening, when he came to Yaakov’s room at the InterContinental for a final briefing, he was sweating with nerves. Gabriel began the session by presenting the Iranian with a gold pen.
“A token of your esteem?” asked Nazari.
“I thought about getting you a tie clip, but you Iranians don’t wear ties.”
“You Israelis aren’t terribly fond of them, either.” Nazari examined the pen carefully. “What’s the range?”
“None of your business.”
“Battery life?”
“Twenty-four hours, but don’t get greedy. Turn the cap to the right when it’s time to engage the power. If we lose transmission at any point during dinner, I’m going to assume that you switched it off intentionally. And that would be bad for your health.”
Nazari made no reply.
“Keep it in the breast pocket of your suit jacket,” Gabriel continued. “The microphone is sensitive, so sit naturally. If you suddenly try to sit in Alexei’s lap, he might get the wrong impression.”
Nazari placed the pen into his coat pocket. “What else?”
“We have to go over your script for the evening.”
“Script?”
“I have no wish to interrogate Alexei Rozanov. Therefore, I’ll need you to do it for me. Politely, of course.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Quinn,” said Gabriel.
Nazari was silent. Gabriel held up a single sheet of paper.
“Memorize the questions, make them your own. But be sure to use a light touch. If you sound like a prosecuting attorney, Alexei will be suspicious.”
Gabriel offered the questions to Nazari. “Touch a match to it when you’re finished tonight. We’ll give you a refresher during the flight to Hamburg if you need one.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m a professional, Allon. Like you.”
Nazari accepted the list.
“What language will you be speaking?” asked Gabriel.
“He made the reservation under the name Alexei Romanov, so I assume it will be Russian.”
“No winking or little hand signals,” said Gabriel. “And don’t try to slip him something under the table. We’ll have eyes on you the entire time. Don’t give me a reason to kill you. It won’t take much.”
“What happens after dinner?”
“That depends on how well you do your job.”
“You’re going to kill him, yes?”
“I’d worry about myself if I were you.”
“I am.” Nazari fell silent. “If you kill Alexei in Hamburg tomorrow night,” he said after a moment, “the Russians will suspect my involvement. And then they’ll kill me.”
“Then I suggest you lock yourself in a secure room in Tehran and never come out again.” Gabriel smiled. “Look on the bright side, Reza. You get to keep your family and your life, not to mention the two million in blood money the SVR stashed in Geneva for you. All in all, I’d say you made out quite well.”
Gabriel rose to his feet. Reza Nazari did the same and extended his hand, but Gabriel only stared at it in anger.
“Be a good boy and do your homework. Because if you blow your lines in Hamburg tomorrow night, I’m going to personally blow your brains out.” Gabriel wrapped his hand around Nazari’s and squeezed until he could feel the bones beginning to crack. “Welcome to the new world order, Reza.”
Not surprisingly, Reza Nazari did not sleep well that last night in Vienna, and neither did Gabriel. He passed it in the safe flat in the Second District, in the company of Christopher Keller and Eli Lavon. Lisbon was never far from his thoughts: the dreary little apartment in the Bairro Alto, the vines spilling from Quinn’s balcony, the attractive woman of perhaps thirty whom he followed to London’s Brompton Road. Lisbon had been a master performance staged for his benefit, and Gabriel had responded by crafting a story of his own—a story of radioactive material gone missing and of a legendary spy gone to an early grave. The final act would play out tomorrow night in Hamburg, and the star of the show would be Reza Nazari. It was a great deal of responsibility to place upon the shoulders of a mortal enemy, but Gabriel had no other choice. Nazari was the road that led to Alexei Rozanov, ally of the Russian president, patron of Eamon Quinn. The man who could make a ball of fire travel a thousand feet per second. The man who had been at a terrorist training camp in Libya with Tariq al-Hourani. No, he thought as he watched snow falling gently over Vienna, he would not sleep tonight.
The computer was his only companion. He reread the British dossier on Alexei Rozanov and reviewed the photos from Copenhagen. The Russian had arrived a few minutes late that evening, which, according to Nazari, was his custom. Two SVR bodyguards had surreptitiously followed him into the restaurant, and a third had remained with the car. It was a local acquisition, a big Mercedes sedan, Danish registration. The driver had waited on a quiet side street until Alexei Rozanov summoned him with a phone call at the end of the meal. The Russian had left the restaurant alone in order to preserve the illusion that he was not a man under full-time physical protection.
Dawn arrived late that last morning in Vienna, and it never go
t properly light outside. Gabriel and Keller left the safe flat a few minutes after eight o’clock and took a taxi to the airport. They checked in separately for the morning flight to Hamburg and upon arrival rode in a pair of taxis to the same spot on the Mönckebergstrasse, Hamburg’s main shopping street. From there they walked together from the old city to the new—and from somewhere in the depths of his memory, Gabriel recalled that Hamburg had more canals and bridges than Amsterdam and Venice combined.
“What about St. Petersburg?” asked Keller.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Gabriel with a tense smile.
The street called Hohe Bleichen stretched from the Marriott Hotel to the fringes of the busy Axel-Springer-Platz. It was part Bond Street and part Rodeo Drive; it was modern Germany at its prosperous best. Ralph Lauren occupied a wedding cake of a building at the northern end. Prada and Dibbern china stood shoulder to shoulder a little farther to the south. And next to the luxury shoemaker Ludwig Reiter was Die Bank, the marble temple of dining so beloved by Hamburg’s financial and commercial elite. Red banners with the restaurant’s scribble of an insignia hung from the facade. Sculpted pillars guarded its entrance.
By then, it was a few minutes after one p.m., and the running battle of the lunch rush was at its most pitched. Gabriel entered alone and found a place at the gold-plated bar. He forced himself to drink a glass of rosé while he reacquainted himself with the sight lines of the restaurant’s interior. Then he paid his bill in cash and went into the street again. It was narrow, with only a handful of parking spaces. The traffic flow was north to south. Directly opposite the restaurant was a tiny triangular esplanade where Keller sat on the edge of a concrete planter. Gabriel joined him.
“Well?” he asked.
“Nice place,” answered Keller.
“For what?”
“Anything you decide.” Keller looked up the length of the street. “These exclusive shops all close early. At nine o’clock this place will be very quiet. At eleven it’ll be dead.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “No pun intended.”
Gabriel was silent.
“It’s five steps from the entrance of the restaurant to the curb,” said Keller. “I could put him down from right here and be gone before his body hit the concrete.”
“So could I,” answered Gabriel. “But it’s possible I might need to go over a couple of small points with him first.”
“Quinn?”
Gabriel rose without another word and led Keller southward across the Neustadt to St. Michael’s Church. In the shadow of its soaring clock tower was a green park surrounded by stubby apartment houses. They entered one, a modern building with a smoked-glass atrium, and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Gabriel knocked lightly on the door of 4D, and a tall academic-looking man named Yossi Gavish admitted them. Rimona Stern and Dina Sarid were peering into the screens of laptop computers at the dining room table, and in the sitting room Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose field hands, were leaning over a large-scale map of Hamburg. Dina looked up and smiled, but otherwise no one acknowledged Gabriel’s presence as he entered. He removed his coat and went to the window. The clock tower of St. Michael’s told him it was ten minutes past two o’clock. It was good to be home again, he thought. It was good to be alive.
51
PICCADILLY, LONDON
IN LONDON IT WAS TEN minutes past one, and Yuri Volkov was running a few minutes behind schedule. Officially, Volkov held a low-level post in the consular section of the Russian Embassy. In reality, he was a senior operative at the SVR’s London rezidentura, second only to the rezident himself, Dmitry Ulyanin. British intelligence knew the true nature of his work, and he was the target of regular physical surveillance by MI5. For the better part of an hour, Volkov had been attempting to shake a two-person team from A4, a man and a woman posing as husband and wife. Now, as he moved along the crowded pavements of Piccadilly, he was confident he was finally alone.
The Russian crossed Regent Street and ducked into the Piccadilly Circus Underground station. The station sat astride both the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines. Volkov fed a prepaid fare card through the scanner and made his way down the escalator to the Bakerloo platform. And there he spotted the asset, a weak-chinned balding man in his late forties wearing a department-store suit and a mackintosh coat. He was the sort of man that young women instinctively avoided on the Underground. And with good reason, thought Volkov, for young girls were his vice. The SVR had found one for him, a child of thirteen from some shithole in Siberia, and they’d fed her to him on a plate. And now they owned him. He was a mere cog in the vast machine of intelligence, but important matters routinely crossed his desk. He had requested a crash meeting, which meant that in all likelihood he had an important piece of intelligence to pass along.
An overhead sign flashed to indicate the approach of a northbound train. The man in the mackintosh moved to the edge of the platform and Volkov, ten paces to the left, did the same. They stared straight ahead, each into a private space, as the train eased into the station and expelled a crowd of passengers. Then both men entered the same carriage through different doors. The man in the mackintosh sat, but Volkov remained standing. He moved to within five feet of the man, an appropriate distance for secure transmission, and seized hold of a handrail. As the train lurched forward, the man in the mackintosh removed a smart phone, thumbed the touchscreen a few times, and then returned the phone to his pocket. Ten seconds later the device in Volkov’s breast pocket pulsated three times, which meant the information had been transmitted successfully. And then it was done. No dead drops, no face-to-face meetings, and it was all entirely secure. Even if MI5 managed to capture the spy’s phone, there would be no trace of the activity.
The train entered Regent’s Park station, took on and disgorged a few more passengers, and started moving again. Two minutes later it arrived at Baker Street, where the man in the mackintosh departed. Yuri Volkov remained on the train until Paddington Station. From there it was a short walk back to the Russian Embassy.
It stood at the northern edge of Kensington Palace Gardens, behind a cordon of British security. Volkov entered the building and made his way down to the rezidentura, where he slipped into the secure communications vault. He removed the device from his coat pocket. It was about three inches by five, the size of an average external hard drive. He plugged it into a computer and typed in the necessary password. Instantly, the device began to whir, and the file it contained flowed into the computer. Fifteen seconds elapsed while the material was decrypted. Then it appeared en clair on the screen. “My God,” was all Volkov said. Then he printed out a copy of the message and went in search of Dmitry Ulyanin.
Ulyanin was in his office, a phone to his ear, when Volkov entered without knocking and dropped the message on the desk. The rezident stared at it for a moment in disbelief before absently hanging up.
“I thought you saw Shamron at Vauxhall Cross.”
“I did.”
“What about the coffin they put on that plane?”
“It must have been empty.”
Ulyanin slammed his fist onto the desktop, spilling his afternoon tea. He held up the printout and asked, “Do you know what’s going to happen when this arrives in Moscow?”
“Alexei Rozanov is going to be very angry.”
“Alexei’s not the one I’m worried about.” Ulyanin flicked the printout across his desk. “Cable Yasenevo right away. It was Alexei’s operation, not mine. Let him clean up the mess.”
Volkov returned to the communications vault and drafted the cable. He showed the draft to Ulyanin for approval, and after a brief argument it was Ulyanin who pushed the button that fired the news securely to Moscow Center. He returned to his office while Volkov waited for confirmation that the cable had been received. It took fifteen minutes to arrive.
“What did he say?” asked Ulyanin.
“Nothing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Alexei’s not i
n Moscow.”
“Where is he?”
“On an airplane bound for Hamburg.”
“Why Hamburg?”
“A meeting. Something big, apparently.”
“Let’s just hope he checks his messages soon, because Gabriel Allon didn’t fake his death for no reason.” Ulyanin looked down at the sodden papers on his desk and shook his head slowly. “This is what happens when you send an Irishman to do a Russian’s job.”
52
FLEETWOOD, ENGLAND
QUINN OPENED ONE EYE SLOWLY, then the other. He saw his bare arm draped over the breasts of a woman, and his hand wrapped around the grip of a Makarov pistol, a finger resting alertly on the trigger guard. The room was in semidarkness; an open window admitted the sharp smell of the sea. In the instant between sleep and consciousness, Quinn struggled to place his whereabouts. Was he in his villa on Margarita Island? Or perhaps he was back at Ras al Helal, the seaside terror training camp in Libya. He recalled his time at the camp with fondness. He had made a friend there, a Palestinian bomb maker. Quinn had helped the Palestinian overcome a simple problem he was having with his design. In return, he had given Quinn an expensive Swiss wristwatch, paid for by Yasir Arafat himself. The engraving read NO MORE TIMER FAILURES . . .
Quinn raised the watch to his eyes now and saw that it was half past four in the afternoon. Through the open window came the sound of two men conversing in a Lancashire accent. He was not on Margarita Island or at the camp on the Libyan coast. He was in Fleetwood, England, in a hotel along the Esplanade, and the woman sleeping beneath his arm was Katerina. It was not an embrace of affection. Quinn had held her tightly against his body so he could get some much-needed rest. He had slept more than six hours, enough to see him through to the next phase of the operation.
Quinn lifted his arm and slipped from the bed, gently, so as not to wake Katerina. A complimentary coffee-and-tea service stood on a table near the window. Quinn filled the electric kettle, dropped a bag of Twinings into the aluminum pot, and peered out the window. The Renault was parked in the street. A duffel bag containing the weapons was still in the storage compartment. Quinn thought it better to leave the bag in the car rather than bring it into the hotel. It meant there would be fewer firearms within reach of the SVR’s top female assassin.