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

by Daniel Silva

  “And God help us all if we create another scandal for him.” Shamron’s gaze flickered from Navot to Gabriel and back again. “Would you boys like to handle this yourselves or would you like adult supervision? I’ve actually done this a time or two.”

  “We’d love your help,” Navot said. “But are you sure Gilah won’t mind?”

  “Gilah?” Shamron shrugged his shoulders. “I think Gilah could use a few days to herself. You might find this hard to believe, but I’m not the easiest person to live with.”

  Gabriel and Navot immediately began to laugh. Adrian Carter bit hard on the stem of his pipe in a bid to stifle the impulse to join them, but after a few seconds he was doubled over as well. “Enjoy yourselves at my expense,” Shamron murmured. “But one day you’ll be old, too.”

  49

  PARIS

  The serious planning began the following morning when Adrian Carter returned to the gated government guesthouse off the Avenue Victor Hugo. As Carter anticipated, the negotiations went smoothly, and by that evening the DST, the French internal security service, had taken formal control of the Kharkov watch. Gabriel’s troops, exhausted after nearly two weeks of constant duty, immediately departed for Paris—all but Dina Sarid, who remained at the villa in Gassin to serve as Gabriel’s eyes and ears in the south.

  It soon became clear to the DST, and to nearly everyone else in Saint-Tropez for that matter, that a pall had descended over the Villa Soleil. There were no more parties by the vast swimming pool, no more drunken day trips aboard October, and the name “Kharkov” did not grace the reservation sheets of Saint-Tropez’s exclusive restaurants. Indeed, for the first three days of the French watch Ivan and Elena were not seen at all. Only the children, Anna and Nikolai, ventured beyond the villa’s walls, once to attend a carnival on the outskirts of town and a second time to visit Pampelonne Beach, where they spent two miserable hours in the company of Sonia and their sunburned Russian bodyguards before demanding to be taken home again.

  Because the DST was operating on home soil, they were highly attuned to the gossip swirling through the bars and cafés. According to one rumor, Ivan was planning to put the villa up for sale and then put to sea to heal his wounded pride. According to another, he was planning to subject Elena to a Russian divorce and leave her begging for kopeks in the Moscow Metro. There was a rumor he had beaten her black-and-blue. A rumor he’d drugged her and shipped her off to Siberia. There was even a rumor he had killed her with his bare hands and dumped her body high in the Maritime Alps. All such speculation was put to rest, however, when Elena was spotted strolling along the rue Gambetta at sunset, absent any signs of physical or emotional trauma. Ivan did not accompany her, though a large contingent of bodyguards did. One DST watcher described the security detail as “presidential” in size and intensity.

  At the little apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, the events in the south were taken as confirmation that the phase of the operation known as “the small lie to cover the big lie” had worked to perfection. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, the flat was by then a beehive of hushed activity. There were surveillance photos and watch reports taped to the walls, a large-scale map of Moscow with flags and stickpins and routes marked in red, and a grease board covered in Gabriel’s stylish left-handed Hebrew script. Early in the preparation, Shamron seemed content to play the role of éminence grise. But as time drew short, and his patience thin, he began to assert himself in ways that might have bred resentment in men other than Gabriel and Uzi Navot. They were like sons to Shamron and were therefore accustomed to his bellicose outbursts. They listened when other officers might have covered their ears and took advice others might have discarded for no reason other than pride. But more than anything, thought Adrian Carter, they seemed to cherish the opportunity to be in the field one more time with the legend. So did Carter himself.

  For the most part, they remained prisoners of the flat, but once each day Gabriel would take Shamron outside to walk the footpaths of the Bois de Boulogne. By then, the cruelest heat of the summer had passed, and those August afternoons in Paris were soft and fine. Gabriel pleaded with Shamron not to smoke, but to no avail. Nor could he convince him to relinquish, even for a few moments, his obsession with every detail of the operation. Alone in the park, he would say things to Gabriel he dared not say in front of Navot or the other members of the team. His nagging concerns. His unanswered questions and unresolved doubts. Even his fears. On their final outing together, Shamron was moody and distracted. In the Bagatelle Gardens, he spoke words Gabriel had never heard the night before an operation, words warning of the possibility of failure.

  “You must prepare yourself for the prospect she won’t come out of that building. Give her the allotted time, plus a five-minute grace period. But if she doesn’t come out, it means she’s been caught. And if she’s caught, you can be sure Arkady Medvedev and his goons will start looking for accomplices. If, heaven forbid, she falls into their hands, there’s nothing we can do for her. Don’t even think about going into that building after her. Your first responsibility is to yourself and your team.”

  Gabriel walked in silence, hands in the pockets of his jeans, eyes on the move. Shamron talked on, his voice like the beating of distant drums. “Ivan and his allies in the FSB let you walk out of Russia alive once, but you can be sure it won’t happen again. Play by the Moscow Rules, and don’t forget the Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt not get caught, Gabriel, even if it means leaving Elena Kharkov behind. If she doesn’t come out of that building in time, you have to leave. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand.”

  Shamron stopped walking and seized Gabriel’s face in both hands with unexpected force. “I destroyed your life once, Gabriel, and I won’t allow it to happen again. If something goes wrong, get to the airport and get on that plane.”

  They walked back to the apartment in silence through the fading late-afternoon light. Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch. It was nearly five o’clock. The operation was about to commence. And not even Shamron could stop it now.

  50

  MOSCOW

  It was a few minutes after seven in Moscow when the house telephone in Svetlana Federov’s apartment on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt rattled softly. She was seated in her living room at the time, watching yet another televised speech by the Russian president, and was pleased by the interruption. She silenced him with the click of a button on her remote—God, if it were only that easy—and slowly lifted the receiver to her ear. The voice on the other end of the line was instantly familiar: Pavel, the loathsome evening concierge. It seemed she had a visitor. “A gentleman caller,” added Pavel, his voice full of insinuation.

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Calls himself Feliks.”

  “Russian?”

  “If he is, he hasn’t lived here in a long time.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Says he has a message. Says he’s a friend of your daughter.”

  I don’t have a daughter, she thought spitefully. The woman I used to call my daughter has left me to die alone in Moscow while she cavorts around Europe with her oligarch husband. She was being overly dramatic, of course, but at her age she was entitled.

  “What’s he look like?”

  “A pile of old clothes. But he has flowers and chocolates. Godiva chocolates, Svetlana. Your favorite.”

  “He’s not a mobster or a rapist, is he, Pavel?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Send him up, then.”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Wait, Pavel.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She looked down at her shabby old housecoat.

  “Ask him to wait five minutes. Then send him up.”

  She hung up the phone. Flowers and chocolates . . . He might look like a pile of discarded laundry, but apparently he was still a gentleman.

  She went into the kitchen and looked for something suitable to serve. There
were no pastries or cakes in the pantry, only a tin of English tea biscuits, a souvenir from her last dreadful trip to London to see Elena. She arranged a dozen biscuits neatly on a plate and laid the plate on the sitting-room table. In the bedroom, she quickly exchanged her housecoat for a summery frock. Standing before the mirror, she coaxed her brittle gray hair into appropriate condition and stared sadly at her face. There was nothing to be done about that. Too many years, she thought. Too much heartache.

  She was leaving her room when she heard the ping of the bell. Opening the door, she was greeted by the sight of an odd-looking little man in his early sixties, with a head of wispy hair and the small, quick eyes of a terrier. His clothing, as advertised, was rumpled, but appeared to have been chosen with considerable care. There was something old-fashioned about him. Something bygone. He looked as though he could have stepped from an old black-and-white movie, she thought, or from a St. Petersburg coffeehouse during the days of revolution. His manners were as dated as his appearance. His Russian, though fluent, sounded as if it had not been used in many years. He certainly wasn’t a Muscovite; in fact, she doubted whether he was a Russian at all. If someone were to put her on the spot, she would have said he was a Jew. Not that she had anything against the Jews. It was possible she was a little Jewish herself.

  “I do hope I’m not catching you at an inconvenient time,” he said.

  “I was just watching television. The president was making an important speech.”

  “Oh, really? What was he talking about?”

  “I’m not sure. They’re all the same.”

  The visitor handed her the flowers and the chocolates. “I took the liberty. I know how you adore truffles.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Elena told me, of course. Elena has told me a great deal about you.”

  “How do you know my daughter?”

  “I’m a friend, Mrs. Federov. A trusted friend.”

  “She sent you here?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To discuss something important with you.” He lowered his voice. “Something concerning the well-being of Elena and the children.”

  “Are they in some sort of danger?”

  “It would really be better if we spoke in private, Mrs. Federov. The matter is of the utmost sensitivity.”

  She regarded him suspiciously for a long moment before finally stepping to one side. He moved past her without a sound, his footsteps silent on the tiled hall. Like he was floating, she thought with a shiver as she chained the door. Like a ghost.

  51

  GENEVA

  It is said that travelers who approach Geneva by train from Zurich are frequently so overcome by its beauty that they hurl their return tickets out the window and vow never to leave again. Arriving by car from Paris, and in the middle of a lifeless August night, Gabriel felt no such compulsion. He had always found Geneva to be a charming yet intensely boring city. Once a place of Calvinistic fervor, finance was the city’s only religion now, and the bankers and moneymen were its new priests and archbishops.

  His hotel, the Métropole, was near the lake, just across the street from the Jardin Anglais. The night manager, a diminutive man of immaculate dress and expressionless features, handed over an electronic key and informed him that his wife had already checked in and was upstairs awaiting his arrival. He found her seated in a wingback chair in the window, with her long legs propped on the sill and her gaze focused on the Jet d’Eau, the towering water fountain in the center of the lake. Her El Al uniform, crisp and starched, hung from the rod in the closet. Candlelight reflected softly in the silver-domed warmers of a room service table set for two. Gabriel lifted a bottle of frigid Chasselas from the ice bucket and poured himself a glass.

  “I expected you an hour ago.”

  “The traffic leaving Paris was miserable. What’s for dinner?”

  “Chicken Kiev,” she said without a trace of irony in her voice. Her eyes were still trained on the fountain, which was now red from the colored spotlights. “The butter’s probably congealed by now.”

  Gabriel placed his hand atop one of the warmers. “It’s fine. Can I pour you some wine?”

  “I shouldn’t. I have a four o’clock call. I’m working the morning flight from Geneva to Ben-Gurion, then the afternoon flight from Ben-Gurion to Moscow.” She looked at him for the first time. “You know, I think it’s possible El Al flight attendants might actually get less sleep than Office agents.”

  “No one gets less sleep than an Office agent.” He poured her a glass of the wine. “Have a little. They say it’s good for the heart.”

  She accepted the glass and raised it in Gabriel’s direction. “Happy anniversary, darling. We were married five months ago today.” She took a drink of the wine. “So much for our honeymoon in Italy.”

  “Five months isn’t really an anniversary, Chiara.”

  “Of course it is, you dolt.”

  She looked out at the fountain again.

  “Are you angry with me because I’m late for dinner, Chiara, or is something else bothering you?”

  “I’m angry with you because I don’t feel like going to Moscow tomorrow.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  She shot an annoyed look at him, then turned her gaze toward the lake again.

  “Ari gave you numerous opportunities to extricate yourself from this affair, but you chose to press on. Usually, it’s the other way around. Usually, Shamron’s the one doing the pushing and you’re the one digging in your heels. Why now, Gabriel? After everything you’ve been through, after all the fighting and the killing, why would you prefer to do a job like this rather than hide out in a secluded villa in Umbria with me?”

  “It’s not fair to put it in those terms, Chiara.”

  “Of course it is. You told me it was going to be a simple job. You were going to meet with a Russian journalist in Rome, listen to what he had to say, and that was going to be the end of it.”

  “It would have been the end of it, if he hadn’t been murdered.”

  “So you’re doing this for Boris Ostrovsky? You’re risking your life, and Elena’s, because you feel guilty over his death?”

  “I’m doing this because we need to find those missiles.”

  “You’re doing this, Gabriel, because you want to destroy Ivan.”

  “Of course I want to destroy Ivan.”

  “Well, at least you’re being honest. Just make sure you don’t destroy yourself in the process. If you take his wife and children, he’s going to pursue them to the ends of the earth. And us, too. If we’re very lucky, this operation might be over in forty-eight hours. But your war with Ivan will just be getting started.”

  “We should eat, Chiara. After all, it’s our anniversary.”

  She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s too late to eat. That butter will go straight to my hips.”

  “I was planning a similar maneuver myself.”

  “Promises, promises.” She drank some more of the wine. “Did you enjoy working with Sarah again?”

  “You’re not going to start that again, are you?”

  “Let the record show, your honor, that the witness refused to answer the question.”

  “Yes, Chiara, I did enjoy working with Sarah again. She performed her job admirably and with great professionalism.”

  “And does she still adore you?”

  “Sarah knows I’m unavailable. And the only person she adores more than me is you.”

  “So you admit it?”

  “Admit what?”

  “That she adores you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Yes, Sarah had feelings for me once, feelings that surfaced in the middle of a very dangerous operation. I don’t happen to share those feelings because I’m quite madly in love with you. I proved that to you, I hope, by marrying you—in spectacular fashion, I might add. If memory serves, Sarah was in attendance.”

  “She was probably h
oping you were going to leave me stranded at the chuppah.”

  “Chiara.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her mouth. Her lips were cool and tasted of the Chasselas. “This will all be over in forty-eight hours. Then we can go back to Italy, and no one, not even Ivan, will be able to find us there.”

  “No one but Shamron.” She kissed him again. “I thought you were planning a maneuver that had something to do with my hips.”

  “You have a very long day tomorrow.”

  “Put the table outside in the hall, Gabriel. I can’t make love in a room that smells like Chicken Kiev.”

  Afterward, she slept in his arms, her body restless, her mind troubled by dreams. Gabriel did not sleep; Gabriel never slept the night before an operation. At 3:59, he called the front desk to say a wake-up call would not be necessary, and gently woke Chiara with kisses on the back of her neck. She made love to him one final time, pleading with him throughout to send someone else to Moscow in his place. At five o’clock, she left the room in her crisp El Al uniform and headed downstairs to the lobby, where Rimona and Yaakov were waiting along with the rest of the crew. Gabriel watched from his window as they climbed into a shuttle bus for the ride to the airport and remained there long after they had gone. His gaze was focused on the storm clouds gathering over the distant mountain peaks. His thoughts, however, were elsewhere. He was thinking of an old woman in a Moscow apartment reaching for a telephone, with Eli Lavon, the man she knew only as Feliks, calmly reminding her of her lines.

  52

  VILLA SOLEIL, FRANCE

  They had arrived at an uneasy truce. It had taken seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours of screaming. Seventy-two hours of threats of malicious divorce. Seventy-two hours of on-and-off interrogation. Like all those who have been betrayed, he demanded to be told the details. She had resisted at first, but under Ivan’s withering assault she had eventually surrendered. She paid the information out slowly, inch by inch. The drive into the hills. The lunch that had been waiting on the table. The wine. The little bedroom with its tacky Monet prints. Her baptismal shower. Ivan had demanded to know how many times they had made love. “Twice,” she confessed. “He wanted to do it a third time but I told him I had to be going.”