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

by Daniel Silva

  She shook her head. Gabriel and Bulganov led the way back to the elevator, Makarovs leveled before them. The porter was still frozen in place behind the reception desk. Bulganov gave him one final reminder to keep his mouth shut, then led Gabriel and Elena out to the car.

  “With a bit of luck, we can be across the border before dawn,” Bulganov said as he shoved his key into the ignition. “Unless you have any more errands you’d like to run.”

  “I do, actually. I need you to make one final arrest while you’re still an FSB officer.”

  “Who?”

  Gabriel told him.

  “It’s out of the question. There’s no way I can get past all that security.”

  “You’re still a colonel in the FSB, Grigori. And FSB colonels take shit from no one.”

  70

  MOSCOW

  An Orion’s Belt of lights burned on the north side of the House of Dogs; red lamps blinked in the transmission towers high atop the roof. Gabriel sat behind the wheel of Colonel Grigori Bulganov’s official car. Elena sat beside him, with Colonel Grigori Bulganov’s mobile phone in her hand. The colonel was not present. He was on the eleventh floor, arresting Olga Sukhova, crusading journalist from the formerly crusading Moskovsky Gazeta.

  “Do you think she’ll come?” Elena asked.

  “She’ll come,” said Gabriel. “She has no other choice. She knows that if she ever sets foot outside that apartment, your husband will kill her.”

  Elena reached out and touched the bandage on Gabriel’s right eye. “I did the best I could. It needs stitches. Probably more. I think that beast managed to break something.”

  “I’m sure he regretted his actions when he saw the gun in my hand.”

  “I don’t think he ever saw your gun.” She touched his hand. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “May I make a confession?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m glad you killed them. I know that must sound terrible coming from the wife of a murderer, but I’m glad you killed them the way you did. Especially Arkady.”

  “I should have waited until you were gone. I’m sorry for that, Elena.”

  “Will it ever go away?”

  “The memory? No, it will never go away.”

  She looked at the mobile phone, and checked the strength of the signal.

  “So is your name really Gabriel or was that a deception, too?”

  “It’s my real name.”

  Elena smiled.

  “Is there something humorous about my name?”

  “No, it’s a beautiful name. I was just thinking about the last words my mother said to me before I left her this afternoon: ‘May the angel of the Lord be looking over your shoulder.’ I suppose she was right after all.”

  “We can pick her up on the way out of town if you like.”

  “My mother? The last thing you want to do is drive to Ukraine with my mother in the backseat. Besides, there’s no need to bring her out right away. Not even Ivan would harm an old woman.” She scrutinized him in silence for a moment. “So are you, in fact, the angel of the Lord?”

  “Do I look like the angel of the Lord?”

  “I suppose not.” She glanced up at the façade of the building. “Is it true you don’t know where my children are?”

  He shook his head. “I was lying to Arkady. I know where they are.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not yet. I’ll tell you when we’re safely over the border.”

  “Look!” She pointed up at the building. “A light just came on. Does that mean she let him into the apartment?”

  “Probably.”

  She looked at the mobile phone. “Ring, damn it. Ring.”

  “Relax, Elena. It’s three o’clock in the morning and an FSB colonel is telling her to pack a bag. Give her a moment to digest what’s happening. ”

  “Do you think she’ll come?”

  “She’ll come.”

  Gabriel took the phone from her grasp and asked how she knew the Cassatt was a forgery.

  “It was the hands.”

  “What about the hands?”

  “The brushstrokes were too impasto.”

  “Sarah told me the same thing.”

  “You should have listened to her.”

  Just then the phone rang. Gabriel handed it to Elena.

  “Da?” she said, then: “Da, da.”

  She looked at Gabriel.

  “Flash the lights, Gabriel. She wants you to flash the headlights.”

  Gabriel flicked the headlamps twice. Elena spoke a few more words in Russian. The eleventh-floor window went dark.

  PART FOUR

  THE HARVEST

  71

  VILLADEIFIORI, UMBRIA

  The vendemmia, the annual harvest of the wine grapes, commenced at the Villa dei Fiori on the final Saturday in September. It coincided with the unwelcome news that the restorer was planning to return to Umbria. Count Gasparri briefly considered making the drive from Rome to inform the staff in person. In the end, he decided a quick telephone call to Margherita would suffice.

  “When is he scheduled to arrive?” she asked, her voice heavy with dread.

  “This is unclear.”

  “But of course. Will he be alone or accompanied by Francesca?”

  “This is also unclear.”

  “Should we assume he’ll be working again?”

  “That is the hope,” Gasparri said. “But my friends at the Vatican tell me he’s been in some sort of accident. I wouldn’t expect him to be in a terribly good mood.”

  “How will we tell the difference?”

  “Be kind to him, Margherita. Apparently, the poor man’s been through quite an ordeal.”

  And with that the line went dead. Margherita hung up the phone and headed out to the vineyards.

  The poor man’s been through quite an ordeal . . .

  Yes, she thought. And now he’s going to take it out on us.

  The "return,” as it became known to the staff, occurred late that same evening. Carlos, who lived in a stone cottage on a hill above the pasture, spotted the little Passat wagon as it turned through the gate and started down the gravel road toward the villa with its headlamps doused. He quickly telephoned Isabella, who was standing on the veranda of her residence near the stables as the blacked-out car flashed by in a cloud of dust. Her observation, though brief, yielded two critical pieces of information: the car definitely contained not one but two people—the restorer and the woman they knew as Francesca—and the woman was driving. Strong circumstantial evidence, she told Carlos, that the restorer had indeed suffered an accident of some sort.

  The last member of the staff to see the couple that night was Margherita, who watched them cross the courtyard from her static post above the chapel. Like all housekeepers, Margherita was a natural watcher—and, like any good watcher, she took note of small details. She found it odd, to say the least, that the woman was leading the way. She also thought she could detect something different about the restorer’s movements. Something vaguely hesitant in his step. She saw him once more, when he appeared in the upstairs window and gazed in her direction over the courtyard. There was no soldierly nod this time; in fact, he gave no indication that he was even aware of her presence. He just peered into the gloom, as if searching for an adversary that he knew was there but could not see.

  The shutters closed with a thump and the restorer disappeared from sight. Margherita remained frozen in her window for a long time after, haunted by the image she had just seen. A man in a moonlit window with a heavy bandage over his right eye.

  Unfortunately, Count Gasparri’s predictions about the restorer’s mood turned out to be accurate. Unlike in summer, when he had been predictably aloof, his moods now fluctuated between chilling silences and flashes of alarming temper. Francesca, while apologetic, offered few clues about how he had sustained the injury, stating only that he had suffered “
a mishap” while working abroad. Naturally, the staff was left to speculate as to what had actually happened. Their theories ranged from the absurd to the mundane. They were certain of one thing: the injury had left the restorer dangerously on edge, as Anna discovered one morning when she approached him from behind while he was struggling to read the newspaper. His sudden movement gave her such a start that she vowed never to go near him again. Margherita took to singing as she went about her chores, which only seemed to annoy him more.

  At first, he did not venture beyond the Etruscan walls of the garden. There, he would spend afternoons beneath the shade of the trellis, drinking his Orvieto wine and reading until his eye became too fatigued to continue. Sometimes, when it was warm, he would wander down to the pool and wade carefully into the shallow end, making certain to keep his bandaged eye above water. Other times, he would lie on his back on the chaise and toss a tennis ball into the air, for hours on end, as if testing his vision and reactions. Each time he returned to the villa, he would pause in the drawing room and stare at the empty studio. Margherita took note of the fact that he would not stand in his usual spot, directly before the easels, but several paces away. “It’s as if he’s trying to imagine himself working again,” she told Anna. “The poor man isn’t at all sure he’ll ever lay his hands on another painting.”

  He soon felt strong enough to resume his walks. In the beginning, they were not long, nor were they conducted at a rapid pace. He wore wraparound sunglasses to cover his eyes and a cotton bucket hat pulled down to the bridge of his nose. Some days, the woman accompanied him, but usually he walked alone, with only the dogs for company. Isabella greeted him pleasantly each time he passed the stables, even though she usually received only a taciturn nod in return. His mood improved with exercise, though, and once he actually stopped for a few minutes to chat about the horses. Isabella offered to give him riding lessons when his eye had healed, but he made no response other than to turn his gaze skyward to watch a jetliner on final approach to Fiumicino Airport. “Are you afraid?” Isabella asked him. Yes, he admitted as the plane disappeared behind a khaki-colored hill. He was very afraid.

  With each passing day, he walked a little farther, and by the middle of October he was able to hike to the gate and back each morning. He even began venturing into the woods again. It was during one such outing, on the first chilly day of the season, that the Villa dei Fiori echoed with a single crack of a small-caliber weapon. The restorer emerged from the trees a few moments later with a sweater knotted casually round his neck and the dogs howling with bloodlust. He informed Carlos that he had been charged by a wild boar and that the boar, unfortunately, had not survived the encounter. When Carlos looked for evidence of a gun, the restorer seemed to smile. Then he turned and set out down the gravel road toward the villa. Carlos found the animal a few minutes later. Between its eyes was a bloodless hole. Small and neat. Almost as if it had been painted with a brush.

  The next morning, the Villa dei Fiori, along with the rest of Europe, awoke to the stunning news that a disaster of unimaginable proportions had been narrowly averted. The story broke first in London, where the BBC reported that Scotland Yard was conducting “major terrorism-related raids” in East London and in neighborhoods near Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Later that morning, a sober-looking British prime minister went before the cameras at Downing Street to inform the nation that the security services had disrupted a major terrorist plot aimed at simultaneously destroying several airliners in British airspace. It was not the first time a plot such as this had been uncovered in Britain. What set this one apart, though, were the weapons involved: SA-18 shoulder-launch antiaircraft missiles. British police had found twelve of the sophisticated weapons during their early-morning raids and, according to the prime minister, were frantically searching for more. He refused to say where the terrorists had obtained the missiles but pointedly reminded reporters of the name of the country where the weapons were manufactured: Russia. Finally, in a chilling endnote, the prime minister stated that the plot had been “global in scope” and warned reporters that they had a long day ahead.

  Ten minutes later, in Paris, the French president strode before the cameras at the Élysée Palace and announced that a similar round of police raids had been carried out that same morning in the suburbs of Paris and in the South of France. Twenty missiles had been found thus far, ten in an apartment near Charles de Gaulle Airport and ten more on a fishing boat in Marseilles’s bustling old port. Unlike the British prime minister, who had been circumspect about the origin of the missiles, the French president said it was clear to him that the weapons had been supplied to the terrorists, directly or indirectly, by a Russian source. He also suggested that the French security and intelligence services had played “a major role in foiling the plot.”

  Similar scenes played out in rapid succession in Madrid, Rome, Athens, Zurich, Copenhagen, and, finally, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Washington, D.C. Flanked by his senior national security staff, the president told the American people that eight SA-18 missiles had been discovered aboard a motor yacht bound for Miami from the Bahamas and six more had been found in the trunk of a car attempting to enter the United States from Canada. Four suspected terrorists had been detained and were now undergoing interrogation. Based on what had been gleaned thus far, both by American and European investigators, it appeared the plot had been timed to coincide with the Christmas holidays. American and Israeli aircraft were the primary targets of the terrorists, who were hoping to maximize casualties among “the Crusaders and the Jews.” The president assured the American people that the plot had been fully disrupted and that it was safe to fly. The traveling public apparently did not agree. Within hours of the announcement, hundreds of flights were delayed or rescheduled due to an unprecedented wave of passenger cancellations. Airline analysts predicted the news would cause severe financial damage to an already-troubled industry.

  By nightfall, all eyes were on Moscow, where the Kremlin had maintained a Soviet-like silence as the story unfolded. Shortly after 11 P.M., a spokesman for the Russian president finally issued a terse statement categorically denying any link between the terrorist plot and legitimate arms sales by Russia to its clients in the Middle East. If the missiles had indeed come from a Russian source, said the spokesman, then it was almost certainly a criminal act—one that would be investigated to the fullest extent possible by Russian authorities. Within a few hours, however, the veracity of the Russian statement was called into question by a dramatic newspaper report in London. It was written by someone the men of the Kremlin knew well: Olga Sukhova, the former editor in chief of Moskovsky Gazeta.

  It was among the most intriguing aspects of the entire affair. Kept under virtual house arrest in her Moscow apartment for much of the summer, Olga Sukhova had managed to slip out of Russia undetected, purportedly with the help of an FSB colonel named Grigori Bulganov. After crossing the Ukrainian border by car, the two were spirited to a safe house in England, where they had worked closely with U.S. and British intelligence officers involved in the search for the SA-18 missiles. In exchange for her cooperation, Olga had been granted “a period of exclusivity” regarding certain details of the affair—details she published, in spectacular fashion, in London’s Telegraph newspaper.

  According to her front-page story, the missiles seized by European and American officials had originally been sold to the Democratic Republic of East Africa by Russian businessman and arms trafficker Ivan Kharkov. Kharkov had reportedly concluded the sale with the full knowledge that the weapons were to be transferred to an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Horn of Africa. The article also implicated Kharkov and his now-deceased chief of security, Arkady Medvedev, in the murders of Gazeta journalists Aleksandr Lubin and Boris Ostrovsky.

  For the next several days, Olga Sukhova was a fixture on European and American television. So, too, was the man credited with facilitating her escape: Colonel Grigori Bulganov of the FSB. He told tales of rampant corru
ption inside his old service and warned that the new masters of the Kremlin were nothing but KGB thugs who planned to confront the West at every turn.

  By the end of the week, he and Olga Sukhova had both signed lucrative book deals. As for the man at the center of the storm, he was nowhere to be found. Ivan Borisovich Kharkov, real estate developer, venture capitalist, and international arms trafficker, had apparently vanished into thin air.

  His assets were quickly seized; his bank accounts quickly frozen. For a time, his grand palaces were surrounded day and night by reporters and cameramen. Finally, when it became clear Ivan was never coming back, the reporters moved on in search of other prey.

  The list of countries where Ivan was suddenly wanted for arrest or questioning was long and somewhat ludicrous. There was irony in the situation, of course; even the most jaundiced observer had to admit it. For years, Ivan had callously fueled the deadly civil wars and conflicts of the Third World with little or no interference from the West. But only when he crossed some moral line—when he dared to sell his wares directly to the forces of global Islamic extremism—did the governments of the civilized world sit up and take notice. Even if al-Qaeda had managed to carry out its attack as planned, said one respected commentator, the death toll would have been but a tiny fraction of those killed by Ivan’s guns and bullets in Africa alone.

  It was assumed by all that he had taken refuge somewhere inside Russia. How he had managed to get there from France, where he was last seen, was a matter of considerable contention. French aviation officials acknowledged that Ivan’s private jet had departed Côte d’Azur International Airport on the morning of August twenty-sixth, though they refused repeated requests to release a flight plan or complete manifest.The press demanded to know whether French authorities had been aware of Ivan’s activities at the time of the flight. If so, they asked, why had he and his party been allowed to depart?

  Confronted with a gathering media storm, French authorities were finally forced to admit that they were indeed aware of Ivan’s involvement in the missile sale at the time of the flight in question, but “certain operational exigencies” required that Ivan be allowed to leave French soil. Those operational exigencies notwithstanding, French prosecutors now wanted Ivan back, as did their counterparts in Britain, where he faced a slew of criminal charges ranging from money laundering to involvement in a plot to commit an act of mass murder. A Kremlin spokesman dismissed the charges as “Western lies and propaganda” and pointed out that it was not possible under Russian law to extradite Mr. Kharkov to face criminal charges. The spokesman went on to say that Russian authorities were completely unaware of Mr. Kharkov’s whereabouts and had no record he was even in the country.