Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant

by Daniel Silva

  “And if he’s clean when he gets to Tre Scalini?” Lavon asked. “What happens then?”

  “I want you to have a go at him in that fluent Russian of yours. Back him into a corner and see if he breaks.”

  “And if he insists on talking to you?”

  “Then you tell him to visit one more Roman tourist attraction.”

  “Which one?”

  Lavon, after hearing Gabriel’s answer, picked at the corner of his napkin in silence for a moment. “It certainly meets your requirements for a public place, Gabriel. But I doubt that your friend His Holiness will be pleased if he ever finds out you used his church for a clandestine meeting.”

  “It’s a basilica, Eli. And His Holiness will never know a thing.”

  “Unless something goes wrong.”

  “It’s my honeymoon. What could go wrong?”

  The waiter appeared with the two plates of pasta. Lavon glanced at his wristwatch.

  “Are you sure we have time for lunch?”

  “Eat your pasta, Eli. You have a long walk ahead of you.”

  7

  ROME

  They finished their lunch at a slightly un-Roman pace and departed the ghetto aboard the Piaggio scooter. Gabriel dropped Lavon near the Excelsior and rode to the Piazza di Spagna, where he took a window table at Caffè Greco. He appeared to be engrossed in his copy of La Repubblica as Boris Ostrovsky came strolling along the Via Condotti. Lavon was trailing fifty yards behind. He was still wearing his ascot, which meant he had seen no sign of surveillance.

  Gabriel finished his coffee while checking Lavon’s tail, then paid the check and rode to the Trevi Fountain. He was standing near the figure of Neptune’s rearing seahorse when Ostrovsky shouldered his way through the crowd of tourists and stood along the balustrade. The Russian was old enough to have endured the hardships of “developed Socialism” and seemed genuinely offended by the sight of rich Westerners hurling money into a work of art commissioned by the papacy. He dipped his handkerchief into the water and used it to dab the perspiration from his forehead. Then, reluctantly, he dug a single coin from his pocket and flung it into the fountain before turning and walking away. Gabriel glimpsed Lavon as he started after him. He was still wearing his ascot.

  The third stop on the itinerary was a slightly shorter walk, but the portly Russian appeared footsore and weary by the time he finally labored up the front steps of the Pantheon. Gabriel was standing at the tomb of Raphael. He watched Ostrovsky stroll once around the interior of the rotunda, then stepped outside onto the portico, where Lavon was leaning against a column.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we’d better get him into a chair at Tre Scalini before he passes out.”

  “Is there anyone following him?”

  Lavon shook his head. “Clean as a whistle.”

  Just then Ostrovsky emerged from the rotunda and headed down the steps toward the Piazza Navona. Lavon gave him a generous head start before setting out after him. Gabriel climbed aboard the Piaggio and headed to the Vatican.

  It had been a Roman racetrack once. Indeed, the baroque structures along its elliptical perimeter were built upon the ruins of ancient grandstands. There were no more chariot races and sporting contests in the Piazza Navona, only a never-ending carnival-like atmosphere that made it one of the most popular and crowded squares in all of Rome. For his observation post, Eli Lavon had chosen the Fontana de Moro, where he was pretending to watch a cellist performing Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major. In reality, his gaze was focused on Boris Ostrovsky, who was settling into a table, fifty yards away, at Tre Scalini. The Russian ordered only a small bottle of mineral water, which the white-jacketed waiter took an eternity to deliver. Lavon took one final look around the square, then walked over and sat down in the empty seat.

  “You really should order something more than water, Boris. It’s bad manners.”

  Lavon had spoken in rapid Russian. Ostrovsky responded in the same language.

  “I’m a Russian journalist. I don’t take beverages in public unless they come with a cap on them.”

  He regarded Lavon and frowned, as though he had decided the small man in the crumpled tweed jacket could not possibly be the legendary Israeli agent whom he had read about in the newspapers.

  “Who are you?”

  “None of your business.”

  Another frown. “I did everything I was told to do. Now, where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The man I want to speak with. The man called Allon.”

  “What makes you think we would ever let you anywhere near him? No one summons Gabriel Allon. It’s always the other way around.”

  A waiter sauntered over to the table; Lavon, in respectable Italian, ordered two coffees and a plate of tartufo. Then he looked again at Ostrovsky. The Russian was perspiring freely now and glancing nervously around the piazza. The front of his shirt was damp and beneath each arm was a dark blossom of sweat.

  “Something bothering you, Boris?”

  “Something is always bothering me. It’s how I stay alive.”

  “Who are you afraid of?”

  “The siloviki,” he said.

  “The siloviki? I’m afraid my Russian isn’t that good, Boris.”

  “Your Russian is very good, my friend, and I’m a bit surprised you haven’t heard the word before. It’s how we refer to the former KGB men who are now running my country. They do not take kindly to dissent, and that’s putting it mildly. If you cross them, they will kill you. They kill in Moscow. They kill in London. And they wouldn’t hesitate to kill here”—Ostrovsky looked around the lively piazza—“in the historic center of Rome.”

  “Relax, Boris. You’re clean. No one followed you here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’re good at what we do.”

  “They’re better, my friend. They’ve had a lot of practice. They’ve been at it since the Revolution.”

  “All the more reason why you’re not going anywhere near the man you wish to speak to. Give me the message, Boris, and I’ll give it to Allon. It’s much safer that way for everyone. It’s the way we do things.”

  “The message I have to deliver is of the utmost gravity. I speak to him and only him.”

  The waiter appeared with the coffee and chocolate. Lavon waited until he was gone before speaking again.

  “I am a good friend of the man in question. I’ve known him for a long time. If you give me the message, you can be sure it will reach his ears.”

  “I meet with Allon or I go back to Moscow in the morning and meet with no one at all. The choice is yours.” Greeted by silence, the Russian pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “I risked my life coming here. Many of my fellow journalists have been murdered for far less.”

  “Sit down,” Lavon said calmly. “You’re making a scene.”

  Ostrovsky remained standing.

  “I said sit down, Boris.”

  This time, Ostrovsky obeyed. He was a Russian. He was used to taking orders.

  “Is this your first time in Rome?” Lavon asked.

  Ostrovsky nodded his head.

  “Allow me to give you some advice on your next destination.”

  Lavon leaned forward across the table, as did Ostrovsky. Two minutes later, the Russian journalist was on his feet again, this time heading eastward across the piazza toward the Tiber. Lavon remained at Tre Scalini long enough to make a brief call on his mobile phone. Then he paid the check and started after him.

  At the heart of St. Peter’s Square, flanked by Bernini’s colossal Tuscan Colonnade, stands the Egyptian Obelisk. Brought to Rome from Egypt by Emperor Caligula in the year 37, it was moved to its current location in 1586 and raised in a monumental feat of engineering involving one hundred forty horses and forty-seven winches. To protect the Obelisk from terrorists and other modern threats, it is now surrounded by a circle of stubby brown barriers of reinforced concrete. Gabriel sat atop one, wraparound sunglas
ses in place, as Boris Ostrovsky appeared at the outer edge of the piazza. He watched the Russian’s approach, then turned and headed toward the row of magnetometers located near the front of the Basilica. After enduring a brief wait, he passed through them without so much as a ping and started up the sunlit steps toward the Portico.

  Of the Basilica’s five doors, only the Filarete Door was open. Gabriel allowed himself to be swallowed up by a large band of cheerful Polish pilgrims and was propelled by them into the Atrium. He paused there to exchange his wraparound sunglasses for a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, then struck out up the center of the vast nave. He was standing before the Papal Altar as Boris Ostrovsky came in from the Portico.

  The Russian walked over to the Chapel of the Pietà. After spending just thirty seconds pretending to marvel at Michelangelo’s masterpiece, he continued up the right side of the nave and paused again, this time before the Monument to Pope Pius XII. Because of the statue’s position, the Russian was temporarily shielded from Gabriel’s view. Gabriel looked toward the opposite side of the nave and saw Lavon standing near the entrance of the Vatican Grottoes. Their eyes met briefly; Lavon nodded once. Gabriel took one final look at the soaring Dome, then set off toward the spot where the Russian was waiting for him.

  The sculpture of Pius XII is a curious one. The right hand is raised in blessing, but the head is turned a few degrees to the right, a somewhat defensive pose that makes it appear as if the wartime pontiff is attempting to ward off a blow. Even more curious, however, was the scene Gabriel encountered as he entered the enclave where the statue is located. Boris Ostrovsky was on his knees before the pedestal, with his face lifted sharply toward the ceiling and his hands raised to his neck. A few feet away, three African nuns were conversing softly in French, as though there was nothing unusual about the sight of a man kneeling in fervent veneration before the statue of so great a pope.

  Gabriel slipped past the nuns and moved quickly to Ostrovsky’s side. His eyes were bulging and frozen in terror, and his hands were locked around his own throat, as though he were attempting to strangle himself. He wasn’t, of course; he was only trying to breathe. Ostrovsky’s affliction wasn’t natural. In fact, Gabriel was quite certain the Russian had been poisoned. Somehow, somewhere, an assassin had managed to get to him, despite all their precautions.

  Gabriel eased Ostrovsky to the floor and spoke quietly into his ear while attempting to pry loose his hands. The nuns gathered round and began to pray, along with a crowd of curious bystanders. Within thirty seconds, the first officers of the Vigilanza, the Vatican’s police force, arrived to investigate. By then, Gabriel was no longer there. He was walking calmly down the steps of the Basilica, with his sunglasses on his face and Eli Lavon at his side. “He was clean,” Lavon was saying. “I’m telling you, Gabriel, he was clean.”

  8

  VATICAN CITY

  It took just one hour for the death in St. Peter’s to reach the airwaves of Italy and another hour for the first report to appear in a roundup of European news on the BBC. By eight o’clock, the corpse had a name; by nine, an occupation.

  At 9:30 P.M. Rome time, global interest in Ostrovsky’s death increased dramatically when a spokesman for the Vatican Press Office issued a terse statement suggesting the Russian journalist appeared to have died as a result of foul play. The announcement ignited a frenzy of activity in newsrooms around the world, it being an otherwise rather slow day, and by midnight there were satellite broadcast trucks lining the Via della Conciliazione from the Tiber to St. Peter’s Square. Experts were brought in to analyze every possible angle, real or imagined: experts on the police and security forces of the Vatican; experts on the perils facing Russian journalists; experts on the Basilica itself, which had been sealed off and declared a crime scene. An American cable channel even interviewed the author of a book about Pius XII, before whose statue Ostrovsky had died. The scholar was engaged in idle speculation about a possible link between the dead Russian journalist and the controversial pope as Gabriel parked his motorbike on a quiet side street near the Vatican walls and made his way toward St. Anne’s Gate.

  A young priest was standing just inside the gate, chatting with a Swiss Guard dressed in a simple blue night uniform. The priest greeted Gabriel with a nod, then turned and escorted him silently up the Via Belvedere. They entered the Apostolic Palace through the San Damaso Courtyard and stepped into a waiting elevator that bore them slowly up to the third floor. Monsignor Luigi Donati, private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, was waiting in the frescoed loggia. He was six inches taller than Gabriel and blessed with the dark good looks of an Italian film star. His handmade black cassock hung gracefully from his slender frame, and his gold wristwatch glinted in the restrained light as he banished the young priest with a curt wave.

  “Please tell me you didn’t actually kill a man in my Basilica,” Donati murmured after the young priest had receded into the shadows.

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Luigi.”

  The monsignor frowned, then handed Gabriel a manila file folder stamped with the insignia of the Vigilanza. Gabriel lifted the cover and saw himself, cradling the dying figure of Boris Ostrovsky. There were other photos beneath: Gabriel walking away as the onlookers gathered round; Gabriel slipping out the Filarete Door; Gabriel at the side of Eli Lavon as they hurried together across St. Peter’s Square. He closed the file and held it out toward Donati like an offertory.

  “They’re yours to keep, Gabriel. Think of them as a souvenir of your visit to the Vatican.”

  “I assume the Vigilanza has another set?”

  Donati gave a slow nod of his head.

  “I would be eternally grateful if you would be so kind as to drop those prints in the nearest pontifical shredder.”

  “I will,” Donati said icily. “After you tell me everything you know about what transpired here this afternoon.”

  “I know very little, actually.”

  “Why don’t we start with something simple, then? For example, what in God’s name were you doing there?”

  Donati removed a cigarette from his elegant gold case, tapped it impatiently against the cover, then ignited it with an executive gold lighter. There was little clerical in his demeanor; not for the first time, Gabriel had to remind himself that the tall, cassocked figure standing before him was actually a priest. Brilliant, uncompromising, and notoriously short of temper, Donati was one of the most powerful private secretaries in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. He ran the Vatican like a prime minister or CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a management style that had won him few friends behind the walls of the Vatican. The Vatican press corps called him a clerical Rasputin, the true power behind the papal throne, while his legion of enemies in the Roman Curia often referred to him as “the Black Pope,” an unflattering reference to Donati’s Jesuit past. Their loathing of Donati had diminished some during the past year. After all, there were few men who could say they had actually stepped in front of a bullet meant for the Supreme Pontiff.

  “It might be in your interests, Monsignor Donati, to limit your exposure to certain facts surrounding the circumstances of Ostrovsky’s death.” Gabriel’s tone was lawyerly. “Otherwise, you might find yourself in a ticklish situation when the investigators start asking questions.”

  “I’ve been in ticklish situations before.” Donati blew a stream of smoke toward the high ceiling and gave Gabriel a sideways glance. “We both have. Just tell me everything you know and let me worry about how to handle the questions from the investigators.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to confession, Luigi.”

  “Try it,” Donati said. “It’s good for the soul.”

  Gabriel may have harbored serious doubts about the benefits of confession, but he had none when it came to the trustworthiness of Luigi Donati. Their bond had been forged in secrecy and was drenched in blood, some of it their own. The former Jesuit knew how to keep a secret. He was also skilled at telling the occasion
al untruth, as long as it was in the service of a noble cause. And so, as they walked the silent halls of the Apostolic Palace together, Gabriel told him everything, beginning with his summons to Assisi and ending with Ostrovsky’s death.

  “Do I have to remind you that we had an agreement? We asked the Italian authorities to allow you to reside in the country under a false identity. We gave you work and accommodations—very pleasant accommodations, I might add. In exchange for this, we asked only that you refrain from any and all work for your former employer.”

  Gabriel offered an uninspired version of the “Navot defense”—that it was not really an operation, only a conversation. Donati dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

  “You gave us your word, Gabriel, and you broke it.”

  “We had no choice. Ostrovsky said he would only talk to me.”

  “Then you should have picked somewhere else to meet him other than my Basilica. You’ve laid a potential scandal on our doorstep and that’s the last thing we need right now.”

  “The difficult questions will be directed toward Moscow, not the Vatican.”

  “Let’s hope you’re correct. I’m obviously no expert, but it appears Ostrovsky was poisoned by someone.” Donati paused. “Someone who apparently didn’t want him talking to you.”

  “I concur.”

  “Because he’s a Russian, and because the Russians have a history of this sort of thing, there’s bound to be speculation about a Kremlin connection.”

  “It’s already begun, Luigi. A hundred reporters are camped at the edge of St. Peter’s Square saying that very thing.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Ostrovsky told us he was afraid of the siloviki. It’s the word Russians use to describe the gang of former KGB men who’ve set up shop inside the Kremlin. He also told us that the information he had concerned a grave threat to the West and to Israel.”

  “What sort of threat?”

  “He didn’t get a chance to tell us that.”

  Donati clasped his hands behind his back thoughtfully and looked down at the marble floor. “For the moment, Ostrovsky’s death is a matter for the police and security services of the Vatican, but it is unlikely to remain so. I anticipate pressure will build rather quickly for us to grant the Italian authorities primacy in the investigation. Fortunately, murder is not a common occurrence at the Vatican—except when you come to town, of course. We simply don’t have the technical expertise necessary to carry out an inquiry of this complexity, especially if sophisticated poisons or toxins are involved.”