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

by Daniel Silva

  Elena Kharkov learned of her husband’s predicament when she telephoned Villa Soleil to wish Ivan and the children a pleasant morning. Confronted with Ivan’s rage, she made a few soothing comments and assured him it had to be a misunderstanding of some sort. She then had a brief conversation with Sonia, during which she instructed the nanny to take the children to the beach. When Sonia asked whether Elena needed to speak to Ivan again, Elena hesitated, then said that, yes, she did need to speak to him. When Ivan came back on the line, she told him that she loved him very much and was looking forward to seeing him that night. But Ivan was still carrying on about his airplane and the incompetence of the French. Elena murmured, “Dos vidanya, Ivan,” and severed the connection.

  Gabriel was a man of unnatural patience, but now, during the final tedious hours before their assault on Ivan’s vault of secrets, his patience abandoned him. It was fear, he thought. The kind of fear only Moscow can produce. The fear that someone was always watching. Always listening. The fear that he might find himself in Lubyanka once again and that this time he might not come out alive. The fear that others might join him there and suffer the same fate.

  He attempted to suppress his fear with activity. He walked streets he loathed, ordered an elaborate lunch he barely touched, and, in the glittering GUM shopping mall near Red Square, purchased souvenirs he would leave behind. He performed these tasks alone; apparently, the FSB had no interest in Martin Stonehill, naturalized American citizen of Hamburg, Germany.

  Finally, at 2:30 P.M., he returned to his room at the Ritz-Carlton and dressed for combat. His only weapons were a miniature radio and a PDA. At precisely 3:03 P.M., he boarded an elevator and rode down to the lobby. He paused briefly at the concierge’s desk to collect a handful of brochures and maps, then came whirling out the revolving door into Tverskaya Street. After walking a half block, he stopped and thrust his hand toward the street, as if hailing a taxi. A silver Volga sedan immediately pulled to the curb. Gabriel climbed inside and closed the door.

  “Shalom,” said the man behind the wheel.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Gabriel looked at his watch as the car shot forward: 3:06 . . .

  Time for one last good-bye, Elena. Time to get in the car.

  Elena Kharkov slipped quietly into the guest bedroom and began to pack. The mere act of folding her clothing and placing it into her bag did much to calm her raw nerves and so she performed this chore with far more care than was warranted. At 3:20, she dialed the number of Sonia’s mobile phone. Receiving no answer, she was nearly overcome by a wave of panic. She dialed the number a second time— slowly, deliberately—and this time Sonia answered after three rings. In the most placid voice Elena could summon, she informed Sonia the children had had enough sun and that it was time to leave the beach. Sonia offered mild protest—the children, she said, were the happiest they had been in many days—but Elena insisted. When the call was over, she switched on the device that looked like an ordinary MP3 player and placed it in the outer compartment of her overnight bag. Then she dialed Sonia’s number again. This time, the call wouldn’t go through.

  She finished packing and slipped into her mother’s bedroom. The money was where she had left it, in the bottom of the dresser, concealed beneath a heavy woolen sweater. She closed the drawer silently and went into the sitting room. Her mother looked at Elena and attempted to smile. They had nothing more to say—they had said it all last night—and no more tears to cry.

  “You’ll have some tea before you leave?”

  “No, Mama. There isn’t time.”

  “Go, then,” she said. “And may the angel of the Lord be looking over your shoulder.”

  A bodyguard, a former Alpha Group operative named Luka Osipo, was waiting for Elena outside in the corridor. He carried her suitcase downstairs and placed it in the trunk of a waiting limousine. As the car pulled away from the curb, Elena announced calmly that she needed to make a brief stop at the House on the Embankment to collect some papers from her husband’s office. “I’ll just be a moment or two,” she said. “We’ll still have plenty of time to get to Sheremetyevo in time for my flight.”

  As Elena Kharkov’s limousine sped along the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a second car was following carefully after it. Behind the wheel was a man named Anton Ulyanov. A former government surveillance specialist, he now worked for Arkady Medvedev, chief of Ivan Kharkov’s private security service. Ulyanov had performed countless jobs for Medvedev, most of questionable ethics, but never had he been ordered to watch the wife of the man who paid his salary. He did not know why he had been given this assignment, only that it was important. Follow her all the way to the airport, Medvedev had told him. And don’t lose sight of her. If you do, you’ll wish you’d never been born.

  Ulyanov settled fifty yards behind the limousine and switched on some music. Nothing to do now but make himself comfortable and take a nice, boring drive to Sheremetyevo. Those were the kind of jobs he liked best: the boring jobs. Leave the excitement to the heroes, he was fond of saying. One tended to live longer that way.

  As it turned out, the journey would be neither long nor boring. Indeed, it would end at the Ukraina Hotel. The offending car came from Ulyanov’s right, though later he would be forced to admit he never saw it. He was able to recall the moment of impact, though: a violent collision of buckling steel and shattering glass that sent his air bag exploding into his face. How long he was unconscious was never clear to him. He reckoned it was only a few seconds, because his first memory of the aftermath was the vision of a well-dressed man yelling through a blown-out window in a language he did not understand.

  Anton Ulyanov did not try to communicate with the man. Instead, he began a desperate search for his mobile phone. He found it a moment later, wedged between the passenger seat and the crumpled door. The first call he made was to the Sparrow Hills apartment of Arkady Medvedev.

  Upon his arrival at Côte d’Azur International Airport, Ivan Kharkov was escorted into a windowless conference room with a rectangular table and photographs of French-built aircraft on the wall. The man who had summoned him, François Boisson, was nowhere to be seen; indeed, a full thirty minutes would elapse before Boisson finally appeared. A slender man in his fifties with small eyeglasses and a bald head, he carried himself, like all French bureaucrats, with an air of condescending authority. Offering neither explanation nor apology for his tardiness, he placed a thick file at the head of the conference table and settled himself behind it. He sat there for an uncomfortably long period, fingertips pressed thoughtfully together, before finally bringing the proceedings to order.

  “Two days ago, after your aircraft was refused permission to take off from this airport, we began a careful review of your flight records and passenger manifests. Unfortunately, in the process we have discovered some serious discrepancies.”

  “What sort of discrepancies?”

  “It is our conclusion, Monsieur Kharkov, that you have been operating your aircraft as an illegal charter service. Unless you can prove to us that is not the case—and, I must stress, in France the burden of proof in such matters is entirely on you—then I’m afraid your aircraft will be confiscated immediately.”

  “Your accusation is complete nonsense,” Ivan countered.

  Boisson sighed and slowly lifted the cover of his impressive file. The first item he produced was a photograph of a Boeing Business Jet. “For the record, Monsieur Kharkov, is this your aircraft?” He pointed to the registration number on the aircraft’s tail. “N7287IK?”

  “Of course it’s my plane.”

  Boisson touched the first character of the tail number: the N. “Your aircraft carries American registry,” he pointed out. “When was the last time it was in the United States?”

  “I couldn’t say for certain. Three years at least.”

  “Do you not find that odd, Monsieur Kharkov?”

  “No, I do not find it the least bit odd. As you well know, Monsieur Boisson, aircraft owne
rs carry American registry because American registry ensures a high resale value.”

  “But according to your own records, Monsieur, you are not the owner of N7287IK.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your own aircraft registration lists the owner of N7287IK as a Delaware-based firm called, oddly enough, N7287 LLC. Obviously, N7287 LLC is a corporate shell maintained for no other reason than to give your plane the illusion of American ownership. Technically, you have no relationship with this company. The president of N7287 LLC is a man named Charles Hamilton. Monsieur Hamilton is an attorney in Wilmington, Delaware. He is also the owner by proxy of the aircraft you claim is yours. Monsieur Hamilton actually leases the plane to you. Isn’t that correct, Monsieur Kharkov?”

  “Technically,” snapped Ivan, “that is correct, but these sorts of arrangements are common in private aviation.”

  “Common, perhaps, but not entirely honest. Before we continue with this inquiry, I must insist you prove that you are the actual owner of the Boeing Business Jet with the tail number N7287IK. Perhaps the easiest way for you to do that would be to telephone your attorney and put him on the phone with me?”

  “But it’s Sunday morning in America.”

  “Then I suspect he’ll be at home.”

  Ivan swore in Russian and picked up his mobile phone. The call failed to go through. After two more futile attempts, he looked at Boisson in frustration.

  “I sometimes have trouble in this part of the building myself,” the Frenchman said apologetically. He pointed toward the telephone at the opposite end of the conference table. “Feel free to use ours. I’m sure it’s working just fine.”

  Arkady Medvedev received the call from an obviously dazed Anton Ulyanov while he was relaxing in the study of his apartment in the Sparrow Hills. After hanging up, he immediately dialed the number for Elena’s driver and received no answer. After a second unsuccessful attempt, he twice tried to reach Luka Osipov, the head of Elena’s small security detail, but with the same result. He slammed down the receiver in frustration and stared glumly out the window toward central Moscow. A summons to appear at Nice airport . . . a crash on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt . . . and now Elena’s bodyguards weren’t answering their phones . . . It wasn’t a coincidence. Something was going on. But for the moment, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  The departure of the Kharkov children from Pampelonne Beach did not go according to schedule, which surely would come as no surprise to any parent of small children. First there were the demands for a final swim. Then there was the struggle to get two sand-covered seven-year-olds into dry clothing suitable for the journey home. And finally there were the obligatory histrionics during the long walk to the cars. For Sonia Cherkasov, the Kharkov’s long-suffering nanny, the task was not made any easier by the fact that she was accompanied by four armed bodyguards. Experience had taught her that, at times like these, the bodyguards were usually more trouble than the children themselves.

  As a result of the delays, it was 1:45 P.M. before the Kharkov party had boarded their cars. They followed their usual course: inland on the Route des Tamaris, then south along the D93 toward the Baie de Cavalaire. As they emerged from the traffic circle east of Ramatuelle, a gendarme stepped suddenly into the roadway ahead of them and raised a white-gloved hand. The driver of the lead car briefly considered ignoring the command, but when the gendarme gave two fierce blasts on his whistle, the driver thought better of it and pulled onto the shoulder, followed by the second car.

  The gendarme, a veteran of the Saint-Tropez post, knew it was pointless to address the Russian in French. In heavily accented English, he informed the driver that he had been traveling well in excess of the posted speed limit. The driver’s response—that everyone speeds in the South of France in summer—did not sit well with the gendarme, who immediately demanded to see the driver’s operating permit, along with the passports of every occupant of the two vehicles.

  “We didn’t bring the passports.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we were at the beach.”

  “As visitors to France, you are required to carry your passports with you at all times.”

  “Why don’t you follow us home? We can show you our passports and be done with this nonsense.”

  The gendarme peered into the backseat.

  “Are these your children, Monsieur?”

  “No, they are the children of Ivan Kharkov.”

  The gendarme made a face to indicate the name was not familiar to him.

  “And who are you?”

  “I work for Mr. Kharkov. So do my colleagues in the second car.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “Security.”

  “Am I to assume that you are carrying weapons?”

  The Russian driver nodded his head.

  “May I see your permits, please?”

  “We don’t have the permits with us. They’re with the passports at Mr. Kharkov’s villa.”

  “And where is this villa?”

  The gendarme, upon hearing the answer, walked back to his car and lifted his radio to his lips. A second vehicle, a Renault minivan, had already arrived on the scene and shortly thereafter was joined by what appeared to be most of the Saint-Tropez force. The Russian driver, watching this scene in his rearview mirror, sensed the situation was deteriorating rapidly. He drew a mobile phone from his pocket and tried to call the chief of Ivan’s detail, but the call failed to go through. After three more attempts, he gave up in frustration and looked out the window. The gendarme was now standing there, with the flap of his holster undone and his hand wrapped around the grip of his sidearm.

  “Where is your weapon, Monsieur?”

  The driver reached down and silently patted his hip.

  “Please remove it and place it carefully on the dash of the car.” He looked at the bodyguard in the passenger seat. “You, too, Monsieur. Gun on the dash. Then I’d like you both to step out of the car very slowly and place your hands on the roof.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “I’m afraid we have no choice but to detain you until we can sort out the matter of your passports and weapons permits. The children and their nanny can travel together in one car. You and your three colleagues will be driven separately. We can do this in a civilized manner or, if you prefer, we can do it in handcuffs. The choice is yours, Messieurs.”

  57

  MOSCOW

  On the western side of the House on the Embankment was a small park with a pretty red church in the center. It was not popular under normal circumstances, and now, with the clouds low and heavy with rain, it was largely deserted. A few yards from the church was a coppice of trees, and amid the trees was a bench with much Russian obscenity carved into its wood. Gabriel sat at one end; Shmuel Peled, embassy driver and clandestine officer of Israeli intelligence, sat at the other. Shmuel was chattering away in fluent Russian. Gabriel was not listening. He was focused instead on the voices emanating from his miniature earpiece. The voice of Yaakov Rossman, who reported that Elena Kharkov’s car was now free of opposition surveillance. The voice of Eli Lavon, who reported that Elena Kharkov’s car was now approaching the House on the Embankment at high speed. The voice of Uzi Navot, who reported that Elena Kharkov was now leaving her car and proceeding into the building with Luka Osipov at her shoulder. Gabriel marked the time on his wristwatch: 3:54 . . . They were already nine minutes behind schedule.

  Better hurry, Elena. We all have a plane to catch.

  Word of Elena Kharkov’s arrival reached London ten seconds later, not by voice but by a terse message that flashed across the billboard-sized video screen at the front of the room. Adrian Carter had been anxiously awaiting the alert and had the handset of a dedicated line to Langley pressed tightly to his ear. “She’s heading into the building,” he said calmly. “Take down the phones. Everything from the Moscow River south to the Garden Ring.”

  She crossed the lobby wit
h Luka Osipov at her heels and entered a small foyer with a single elevator. He attempted to follow her into the waiting car but she froze him with a wave of her hand. “Wait here,” she ordered, inserting a security keycard into the slot. She removed the card and pressed the button for the ninth floor. Luka Osipov stood motionless for several seconds, watching the elevator’s ascent play out on the red lights of the control panel. Then he opened his mobile and tried to call the driver outside. Hearing nothing, he snapped the phone shut and swore softly. The whole Moscow network must have crashed, he thought. We Russians can’t do anything right.

  When the doors opened on the ninth floor, another bodyguard was waiting in the vestibule. His name was Pyotr Luzhkov and, like Luka Osipov, he was a former member of the elite Alpha Group. The expression on his pasty, dull face was one of surprise. Because of the cell phone jammer concealed in Elena’s luggage, her security detail had been unable to alert him that she would be stopping by. Elena greeted him absently, then pushed past him into the entrance hall without offering any explanation for her presence. When the securityman reflexively placed his hand on her arm, Elena whirled around, eyes wide with anger.