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

by Daniel Silva

  The musicians Rostropovich and Rubinstein . . .

  The writers Gogol and Bulgakov . . .

  The Party giants Khrushchev and Kosygin . . .

  Kaganovich, the Stalinist monster who murdered millions during the madness of collectivization . . .

  Molotov, signer of the secret pact that condemned Europe to war and the Jews of Poland to annihilation . . .

  “There’s no place quite like this to see the striking contradictions of our history. Great beauty lies side by side with the incomprehensible. These men gave us everything, and when they were gone we were left with nothing: factories that produced goods no one wanted, an ideology that was tired and bankrupt. All of it set to beautiful words and music.”

  Gabriel looked at the bouquet of flowers in her arms. “Who are those for?”

  She stopped before a small plot with a low, unadorned stone monument. “Dmitri Sukhova, my grandfather. He was a playwright and a filmmaker. Had he lived in another time, under a different regime, he might have been great. Instead, he was drafted to make cheap Party propaganda for the masses. He made the people believe in the myth of Soviet greatness. His reward was to be buried here, among true Russian genius.”

  She crouched next to the grave and brushed pine needles from the plaque.

  “You have his name,” Gabriel said. “You’re not married?”

  She shook her head and placed the flowers gently on the grave. “I’m afraid I’ve yet to find a countryman suitable for marriage and procreation. If they have any money, the first thing they do is buy themselves a mistress. Go into any trendy sushi restaurant in Moscow and you’ll see the pretty young girls lined up at the bar, waiting for a man to sweep them off their feet. But not just any man. They want a New Russian man. A man with money and connections. A man who winters in Zermatt and Courchevel and summers in the South of France. A man who will give them jewelry and foreign cars. I prefer to spend my summers at my grandfather’s dacha. I grow radishes and carrots there. I still believe in my country. I don’t need to vacation in the exclusive playgrounds of Western Europe to be a contented, self-fulfilled New Russian woman.”

  She had been speaking to the grave. Now she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at Gabriel.

  “You must think I’m terribly foolish.”

  “Why foolish?”

  “Because I pretend to be a journalist in a country where there is no longer true journalism. Because I want democracy in a country that has never known it—and, in all likelihood, never will.”

  She stood upright and brushed the dust from her palms. “To understand Russia today, you must understand the trauma of the nineties. Everything we had, everything we had been told, was swept away. We went from superpower to basket case overnight. Our people lost their life’s savings, not just once but over and over again. Russians are a paternalistic people. They believe in the Orthodox Church, the State, the Tsar. They associate democracy with chaos. Our president and the siloviki understand this. They use words like ‘managed democracy’ and ‘State capitalism,’ but they’re just euphemisms for something more sinister: fascism. We have lurched from the ideology of Lenin to the ideology of Mussolini in a decade. We should not be surprised by this. Look around you, Mr. Golani. The history of Russia is nothing but a series of convulsions. We cannot live as normal people. We never will.”

  She looked past him, into a darkened corner of the cemetery. “They’re watching us very closely. Hold my arm, please, Mr. Golani. It is better if the FSB believes you are attracted to me.”

  He did as she asked. “Perhaps fascism is too strong a word,” he said.

  “What term would you apply to our system?”

  “A corporate state,” Gabriel replied without conviction.

  “I’m afraid that is a euphemism worthy of the Kremlin. Yes, our people are now free to make and spend money, but the State still picks the winners and the losers. Our leaders speak of regaining lost empires. They use our oil and gas to bully and intimidate our neighbors. They have all but eliminated the opposition and an independent press, and those who dare to protest are beaten openly in the streets. Our children are being coerced into joining Party youth organizations. They are taught that America and the Jews want to control the world—that America and the Jews want to steal Russia’s wealth and resources. I don’t know about you, Mr. Golani, but I get nervous when young minds are trained to hate. The inevitable comparisons to another time and place are uncomfortable, to say the least.”

  She stopped beneath a towering spruce tree and turned to face him.

  “You are an Ashkenazi Jew?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Your family came from Russia originally?”

  “Germany,” he said. “My grandparents were from Berlin.”

  “Did they survive the war?”

  He shook his head and, once again, told her the truth. “They were murdered at Auschwitz. My mother was young enough to work and she managed to survive. She died several years ago.”

  “I wonder what your mother would have said about a leader who fills young minds with paranoid fantasies about others plotting to steal what is rightly theirs. Would she have called it the ideology of a corporate state or would she have used a more sinister term?”

  “Point taken, Miss Sukhova.”

  “Forgive my tone, Mr. Golani. I am an old-fashioned Russian woman who likes to grow radishes and carrots in the garden of her grandfather’s broken-down dacha. I believe in my Russia, and I want no more acts of evil committed in my name. Neither did Boris Ostrovsky. That is why he wanted to talk to you. And that is why he was murdered. ”

  “Why did he go to Rome, Olga? What did he want to tell me?”

  She reached up and touched his cheek with her fingertip. “Perhaps you should kiss me now, Mr. Golani. It is better if the FSB is under the impression we intend to become lovers.”

  15

  MOSCOW

  They drove to the Old Arbat in her car, an ancient pea soup green Lada with a dangling front bumper. She knew a place where they could talk: a Georgian restaurant with stone grottoes and faux streams and waiters in native dress. It was loud, she assured him. Bedlam. “The owner looks a little too much like Stalin for some people. ” She pointed out the window at another one of the Seven Sisters. “The Ukraina Hotel.”

  “World’s biggest?”

  “We cannot live as normal people.”

  She left the car in a flagrantly illegal space near Arbat Square and they walked to the restaurant through the fading late-afternoon light. She had been right about the owner—he looked like a wax figure of Stalin come to life—and about the noise as well. Gabriel had to lean across the table a few degrees to hear her speak. She was talking about an anonymous tip the Gazeta had received before the New Year. A tip from a source whose name she could never divulge . . .

  “This source told us that an arms dealer with close ties to the Kremlin and our president was about to conclude a major deal that would put some very dangerous weapons into the hands of some very dangerous people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “The kind you have been fighting your entire life, Mr. Golani. The kind who have vowed to destroy your country and the West. The kind who fly airplanes into buildings and set off bombs in crowded markets.”

  “Al-Qaeda?”

  “Or one of its affiliates.”

  “What type of weapons?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Are they conventional?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Chemical or biological?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But you can’t rule it out?”

  “We can’t rule anything out, Mr. Golani. For all we know, the weapons could be radiological or even nuclear.” She was silent for a moment, then managed a cautious smile, as if embarrassed by an awkward pause in the conversation. “Perhaps it would be better if I simply told you what I do know.”

  She was now gazing at h
im intently. Gabriel heard a commotion to his left and glanced over his shoulder. Stalin was seating a group of people at the neighboring table: two aging mobsters and their high-priced professional dates. Olga took note of them as well and continued speaking.

  “The source who provided us with the initial tip about the sale is impeccable and assured us that the information was accurate. But we couldn’t print a story based on a single source. You see, unlike many of our competitors, the Gazeta has a reputation for thoroughness and accuracy. We’ve been sued many times by people who didn’t like what we wrote about them but we’ve never lost, not even in the kangaroo courts of Russia.”

  “So you started asking questions?”

  “We’re reporters, Mr. Golani. That’s what we do. Our investigation unearthed a few intriguing bits but nothing specific and nothing we could publish. We decided to send one of our reporters to Courchevel to follow the arms dealer in question. The dealer owns a chalet there. A rather large chalet, actually.”

  “The reporter was Aleksandr Lubin?”

  She nodded her head slowly. “I assume you know the details from the news accounts. Aleksandr was murdered within a few hours of his arrival. Obviously, it was a warning to the rest of the Gazeta staff to back off. I’m afraid it had the opposite effect, though. We took Aleksandr’s murder as confirmation the story was true.”

  “And so you kept digging?”

  “Carefully. But, yes, we kept digging. We were able to uncover much about the arms dealer’s operations in general, but were never able to pin down the specifics of a deal. Finally, the matter was taken out of our hands entirely. Quite unexpectedly, the owner of the Gazeta decided to sell the magazine. I’m afraid he didn’t reach the decision on his own; he was pressured into the sale by the Kremlin and the FSB. Our new owner is a man with no experience in journalism whatsoever, and his first move was to appoint a publisher with even less. The publisher announced that he was no longer interested in hard news or investigative journalism. The Gazeta was now going to focus on celebrity news, the arts, and life in the New Russia. He then held a meeting with Boris Ostrovsky to review upcoming stories. Guess which story he killed first?”

  “An investigation into a possible deal between a Russian arms trafficker and al-Qaeda.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I assume the time of the sale wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Our new owner is an associate of the arms dealer. In all likelihood, it was the arms dealer who put up all the money. Rather remarkable, don’t you think, Mr. Golani? Only in Russia.”

  She reached into her handbag and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you mind?”

  Gabriel shook his head, and glanced around the restaurant. One of the mobsters had his hand on the bare thigh of his date, but there were no signs of any watchers. Olga lit her cigarette and placed the pack and lighter on the table.

  “The sale of the magazine presented us with a terrible dilemma. We believed the story about the missile sale to be true, but we now had no place to publish it. Nor could we continue to investigate the story inside Russia. We decided on another course of action. We decided to make our findings known to the West through a trusted figure inside Israeli intelligence.”

  "Why me? Why not walk over to the U.S. Embassy and tell the CIA station chief?”

  “It is no longer wise for members of the opposition or the press to meet with American officials, especially those who also happen to work for the CIA. Besides, Boris always admired the secret intelligence service of Israel. And he was especially fond of a certain agent who recently got his picture in the paper for saving the life of the daughter of the American ambassador to London.”

  “And so he decided to leave the country and contact us in Rome?”

  “In keeping with the new mission of the Gazeta, he told our publisher he wanted to do a piece about Russians at play in the Eternal City. After he arrived in Rome, he made contact with your embassy and requested a meeting. Obviously, the arms dealer and his security service were watching. I suspect they’re watching now.”

  “Who is he? Who is the arms dealer?”

  She said a name, then picked up the wine list and opened the cover.

  “Let’s have something to drink, shall we, Mr. Golani? Do you prefer red or white?”

  Stalin brought the wine. It was Georgian, bloodred, and very rough. Gabriel’s thoughts were now elsewhere. He was thinking of the name Olga Sukhova had just spoken. It was familiar to him, of course. Everyone in the trade had heard the name Ivan Kharkov.

  “How much do you know about him, Mr. Golani?”

  “The basics. Former KGB turned Russian oligarch. Passes himself off as a legitimate investor and international businessman. Lives mainly in London and France.”

  “Those are the basics. May I give you a more thorough version of the story?”

  Gabriel nodded his head. Olga braced herself on her elbows and held the wineglass near her face with both hands. Between them, a candle flickered in a red bowl. It added blush to her pale cheeks.

  “He was a child of Soviet privilege, our Ivan. His father was high-ranking KGB. Very high-ranking. In fact, when he retired, he was the chief of the First Main Directorate, the foreign espionage division. Ivan spent a good part of his childhood abroad. He was permitted to travel, while ordinary Soviet citizens were kept prisoner in their own country. He had blue jeans and Rolling Stones records, while ordinary Soviet teenagers had Communist propaganda and Komsomol weekends in the country. In the days of shortages, when the workers were forced to eat seaweed and whale meat, he and his family had fresh veal and caviar.”

  She drank some of the wine. At the front entrance, Stalin was negotiating with two male customers over a table. One of them had been at the cemetery. Olga seemed not to notice.

  “Like all the children of Party elite, he was automatically granted a place at an elite university. In Ivan’s case, it was Moscow State. After graduation, he was admitted directly into the ranks of the KGB. Despitehis fluency in English and German, he was not deemed suitable material for a life as a foreign spy, so he was assigned to the Fifth Main Directorate. Do you know about the Fifth Main Directorate, Mr. Golani?”

  “It was responsible for internal security functions: border control, dissidents, artists and writers.”

  “Don’t forget the refuseniks, Mr. Golani. The Fifth Directorate was also responsible for persecuting Jews. Rumor has it Ivan was very diligent in that regard.”

  Stalin was now seating the two men at a table near the center of the restaurant, well out of earshot.

  “Ivan benefited from the magic hand of his famous father and was promoted rapidly through the ranks of the directorate. Then came Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika, and overnight everything in our country changed. The Party loosened the reins on central planning and allowed young entrepreneurs—in some cases the very dissidents whom Ivan and the Fifth Directorate were monitoring—to start cooperatives and private banks. Against all odds, many of these young entrepreneurs actually started to make money. This didn’t sit well with our secret overlords at Lubyanka. They were used to picking society’s winners and losers. A free marketplace threatened to upset the old order. And, of course, if there was money to be made, they wanted what was rightly theirs. They decided they had no option but to go into business for themselves. They needed an energetic young man of their own, a young man who knew the ways of Western capitalism. A young man who had been permitted to read the forbidden books.”

  “Ivan Kharkov.”

  She raised her glass in salutation to his correct answer. “With the blessing of his masters at Lubyanka, Ivan was allowed to leave the KGB and start a bank. He was given a single dank room in an old Moscow office building, a telephone, and an American-made personal computer,something most of us had never seen. Once again, the magic hand was laid upon Ivan’s shoulder and within months his new bank was raking in millions of dollars in profit, almost all of it due to State bus
iness. Then the Soviet Union crumbled, and we entered the roaring nineties period of gangster capitalism, shock therapy, and instant privatization. When the State-owned enterprises of the Soviet Union were auctioned off to the highest bidder, Ivan gobbled up some of the most lucrative assets and factories. When Moscow real estate could be purchased for a song and a promise, Ivan snatched up some of the gems. During the period of hyperinflation, Ivan and his patrons at Lubyanka Square made fortunes in currency speculation—fortunes that inevitably found their way into secret bank accounts in Zurich and Geneva. Ivan never had any illusions about the reason for his astonishing success. He had been helped by the magic hand of the KGB, and he was very good at keeping the magic hand filled with money.”

  A waiter appeared and began laying small dishes of Georgian appetizers on the table. Olga explained the contents of each; then, when the waiter was gone, she resumed her lecture.

  “One of the State assets Ivan scooped up in the early nineties was a fleet of cargo planes and container vessels. They didn’t cost him much, since at the time most of the planes were sinking into the ground at airfields around the country and the ships were turning to rust in dry dock. Ivan bought the facilities and the personnel necessary to get the fleet up and running again, and within a few months he had one of the most valuable properties in Russia: a company capable of moving goods in and out of the country, no questions asked. Before long, Ivan’s ships and planes were filled with lucrative cargo bound for troubled foreign lands.”

  “Russian weapons,” said Gabriel.

  Olga nodded. “And not just AK-47s and RPG-7s, though they are a substantial part of his operation. Ivan deals in the big-ticket items, too: tanks, antiaircraft batteries, attack helicopters, even the occasional frigate or out-of-date MiG. He hides now behind a respectable veneer as one of Moscow’s most prominent real estate developers and investors. He owns a palace in Knightsbridge, a villa in the South of France, and the chalet in Courchevel. He buys paintings, antique furniture, and even a share of an English football team. He’s a regular at Kremlin functions and is very close to the president and the siloviki. But beneath it all, he’s nothing but a gunrunner and a thug. As our American friends like to say, he’s a full-service operation. He has inventory and the cargo ships and transport planes to deliver it. If necessary, he can even provide financing through his banking operations. He’s renowned for his ability to get weapons to their destination quickly, sometimes overnight, just like DHL and Federal Express.”