“None is needed,” Lebed said. “Your age makes retirement automatic if you merely ask for it.”
“I have a right—”
“You have no rights, Komov. I am delivering you from what you deserve. You murdered an American and—”
“—an American spy … sir. And an accident—”
“No one was fooled by your fake hit-and-run. The lying Moscow Times—I tolerate it to keep my propaganda artists happy—says a witness saw tire tracks on Danshov’s body. And—”
Komov interrupted to say, “My people tell me that witness was a CIA woman under diplomatic—”
“Damn you, Komov! If you interrupt me one more time, I’ll have you arrested right here in my office! The American secretary of state called our foreign minister. There are protests scheduled at the university, unleashing those young shits. And the director of the FSB is threatening to resign if I don’t get rid of you. As you well know, there is a procedure for handling accused spies: questioning by trained interrogators seeking to turn him, for example. You claim to be an expert on counterintelligence. Arranging for a hit-and-run is not counterintelligence.”
“But, sir—”
“There is nothing to say. Go to your apartment and give that KGB uniform to a museum.”
“But the other Americans—”
“There are no ‘other Americans’ for you, Komov. I have instructed Lieutenant Shumeyko to shut down any operation you have ordered. He has been reporting directly to me for some time. He told me about the NSA recorder.”
“I was about—”
“You were not about to tell me. You were going to take control. You would have your ear in my office! Lieutenant Shumeyko personally removed the devilish book, and FSB technicians are examining it.”
“Your spy lies. You wanted Shumeyko to get something on me so I would be forced to resign. That was his mission, wasn’t it?”
“Get out! I want to wipe you from my memory and the memory of the FSB.”
Komov stood, and, pounding Lebed’s desk, shouted, “He deserved to die. Spies deserve death.”
“Go! Get out!”
The door flew open and two presidential guards ran into the room.
“Take this old man away,” Lebed ordered, his face reddening. “I want never to see his face again.”
47
What in hell is going on? What is she doing in Moscow? How much does Drexler know about her? How could Drexler pick an Israeli Mossad agent to be part of the operation? Why didn’t he have her vetted? Or had he? Maybe this op isn’t as secret as I thought it was. She’s on a mission for GSS and, inevitably, a mission for the Mossad. You never quit the Mossad. But punching that guy? Agents don’t make fusses and call attention to themselves. Then: Maybe very good ones do.
Falcone’s thoughts of the present were overtaken by a flashback to the night he first met her. It was an official State Department dinner for the Israeli foreign minister. Most of the guests knew each other and so did not need to follow the Washington protocol of introducing themselves by announcing their titles (those without titles were rarely on guest lists) and awaiting a similar announcement from their dinner mates.
As a general rule, Falcone refused to ride Washington’s social merry-go-round. He was at the State Department that evening because he was trying to find out more about his friend and colleague, Senator Joshua Stock, who had been murdered. Stock had been invited to the dinner, and Falcone had come in his place to see whom Joshua might have been associating with before he died.
Now, at this moment, sitting in Moscow and staring at the Kremlin, all that intrigue and tragedy fell away. At this moment, he could not remember the names of anyone at his table at that dinner. Except for a woman named Rachel, a luminously beautiful blond woman who sat on his left.
She introduced herself as Rachel Yeager of the Israeli Embassy’s “cultural affairs” department without a hint of irony about her work. What she did not announce was that she had just read the embassy’s intelligence file on him, a copy of which she later gleefully gave him. The file showed him to be a widower, Army veteran, and former prisoner of war. “While personally congenial and affable,” the profile said, “subject does not socialize often. Avoids formal banquets and dinners. Dates infrequently. Drinks moderately.” She had been ordered to find out more about him and more about the murder of a United States senator.
Falcone wanted to talk to her, but he was unnerved by her large sea-green eyes that seemed at once innocent and worldly. At the same time, he realized, with a fascination tinged by guilt, that she had an uncanny resemblance to his late wife Karen. Finally, feeling like a high-school sophomore, he asked, “May I … may I call you? Dinner?” He smiled now, remembering his tentativeness word-for-word.
They had dinner at Positano’s, a family-run Italian restaurant in Bethesda. It did not go well. Initially, they exchanged small talk. But when Falcone declared that he was fair-handed when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she erupted: “You are neutral? That means you’re for the Palestinians and against Israel.”
Falcone, stung by the charge, launched an emphatic counter-attack across the table that he was not against the Israelis and resented the implication that he was anti-Semitic. The owner of Positano’s came rushing to the table to see what was wrong because other diners were growing anxious about the rising volume level of Falcone’s and Rachel’s voices. There were other, wonderful memories rushing to the surface like a deep sea diver who was nearly out of air, but he forced his mind to abandon those recollections and focus on the present.
He finished his drink and returned to his room. He had less than an hour to shower and return to the lounge to meet … Andrea, not Rachel.
* * *
He assumed that there was a U.S. intelligence file that had a reference to his first meeting with Rachel, whom he then did not know was a Mossad operative, a “Killer Angel.” That was what some in the Mossad called its assassins ever since Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee ordered Operation Wrath of God, following the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian Black September killers during the summer Olympics in 1972 in Munich. The original Killer Angels were agents of vengeance, ordered to track down and kill the killers.
Mossad talent scouts—ever alert to promising young talent—spotted her during her compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces, when, on border duty questioning Palestinians, she easily shifted from one Arabic dialect to another. She was a brilliant linguist, an aggressive soccer player, and had Killer Angel potential, according to a psychiatric evaluation. Easily recruited, she quickly developed into an outstanding operative. On a mission into Iran, she made her first kill—execution was the approved word. She was sent into Iran to track down a field agent, a kiton, turned rogue. She allowed him to think he had lured her into his hotel room, where she strangled him with her scarf. She said that she enjoyed looking into his eyes as he was dying.
A Mossad psychiatrist, in a routine post-mission interview, found her to be free of post-traumatic stress disorder. “PTSD develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm,” his report said. “This subject, who recounted the incident calmly, showed absolutely no negative reaction. She seems to be immune to fear, and has no hesitation to kill.”
* * *
Initially, Falcone believed that Rachel had murdered Joshua, who had served with Falcone on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Joshua had had his throat slit during a night of drugs and sexual odyssey. In fact, Rachel had been on the trail of Joshua’s killer and had saved Falcone’s life when he was attacked one night in the garage of his apartment building. She agreed to work with Falcone, and, together, they found the murderer. Still, her career as an assassin deeply troubled Falcone. When he asked her how she could defend murder, she had said, “It is Israel’s fate always to be under attack by her enemies. And my gift to Israel is that I can eliminate some of those enemies wherever they can be
found. This is not murder, but justice for my country.”
In their quest for Stock’s killer, trust—and then peril—had pulled them together. Falcone soon realized that he was falling in love with an assassin. And though Falcone had resigned himself to a solitary life, convinced that it would be a final betrayal to his deceased wife, he was defenseless against Rachel’s allure. The attraction was irresistible. They made love on an island in Maine and again in Jerusalem, where they had thwarted a plot by the Russians to blow up the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Their romance ended abruptly with both of them knowing that there was no room for love in Rachel’s world. Or in Falcone’s.
Falcone had moved on, from Senate to law firm to Oxley’s national security adviser—and now to an “off the books” covert operative. Taking advantage of his top-security clearance, he continued to go through the CIA files on Rachel. They were full of gaps because the Mossad plays a very tight game. He found little more than some of her other names—Sarah, Miya, Elena, and countless more. There were reports of professional killings—wet jobs, as they were called. There were sometimes sightings of her around the time or place of killings. Then, suddenly, she disappeared from the files.
Early in Oxley’s first term she had reemerged. The occasion was a formal State Dinner, honoring Israeli Prime Minister Avi Weisman. For his meeting with Oxley, Weisman had demanded that he receive all the protocol honors rendered to a head of state, and the glittering White House dinner was one of the honors. Rachel had just been named Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. She was also Weisman’s mistress, according to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Falcone was out of the country on a mission as national security adviser and did not see Rachel during her brief visit. But they soon met again. Once more they worked together to aid their homelands, tracking down the extremist group in the United States that had conspired to set off a nuclear bomb in Iran, but had instead destroyed the city of Savannah, Georgia. After that, her brief tenure as an ambassador—and mistress—had ended. She was too much of an unbridled force of nature for either occupation. She returned to Israel, ostensibly to resign from the Foreign Ministry and become CEO of one of Israel’s many software firms. But, as Rachel had just vividly demonstrated, she was still a force to be reckoned with. Provocateur beware.
48
The maître d’ met them at the entrance of what looked like a pre-Revolution Russian mansion illumined by gaslight. Rachel chatted with him for a moment before he led them up a curving, dimly lit stairway that led to a third-floor room whose walls were lined with bookshelves. As they were taken to their table, Falcone heard more snatches of English than Russian coming from the other tables.
“It’s what you Americans call a tourist trap,” Rachel said. “We’re in a reproduction of a nineteenth-century aristocrat’s library, complete with the real books that you would find there. This place is a time machine taking you back to the days of the czar.”
“Reminds me of a library I know in Virginia,” Falcone said, watching for her reaction.
“In a house where George Washington slept?” Rachel asked, smiling.
“Yes. I’m surprised you’ve been there. Just as I’m surprised you’re here for … the conference.”
Lively balalaika music wafted up from the floor below. The sommelier appeared and Rachel conferred with him in Russian, then turned back to Falcone.
“Why surprised, Sean? It sounds like an interesting conference. Cyber security. Isn’t that what we all want? Security?”
“I’m not, of course, talking about the conference,” Falcone replied.
“Of course. But I try not to mix business with pleasure.”
“And this is no place to talk about business?”
A waiter approached. His gray tunic was torn and wrinkled. There was a patch on a leg of his black trousers. His black boots were mud-splattered. He presented a bottle for inspection to Rachel, who sipped and nodded. He then handed a frayed menu, in English, to Falcone, who gave it to Rachel. She spoke in Russian, then told Falcone, “We are, of course, getting borsch and pirogi, which is better, I’m sure, than you get at the Mari Vanna.” Falcone recognized the name of a Russian restaurant in Washington. “And our wine, Mukuzani, is from Georgia, one of the oldest wine regions on Earth.”
“The waiter looked a little worse for wear,” Falcone remarked.
“A costume. The place is supposed to take you back to the days just before the Revolution. Remember, these are the people who invented the Potemkin village. Things here are not always what they look like.”
“I still can’t get over that you’re living in Russia. When did that happen?”
“I moved my company from Berlin to St. Petersburg two years ago.”
“At the suggestion of your investors?”
“I do not have any investors. I’m the owner and CEO. I enjoy St. Petersburg. Ballet. Opera. Venice of the North, not like tired old Moscow. I love the White Nights, those days of summer that take so long to turn to night.”
“And it’s where Lebed once was mayor. Is that part of the draw, too? Getting useful information about Lebed’s past?” Falcone ruefully remembered what Meir Amit had said once when he was Mossad’s chief: “Sex is a woman’s weapon.… It is not just sleeping with the enemy. It is to obtain information.” Falcone often wondered if he had been, at least initially, set up to be honey-trapped.
“It’s beautiful and a good place for business. What more could I ask for?”
“Any trouble for an Israeli to go into business here?”
“Not if you know the right people,” Rachel said, her tone suddenly coquettish.
“In Israel or Russia?”
“Both,” she said, flashing a smile that vanished as quickly as it had come.
Falcone realized he was sounding like a lawyer taking a deposition. “Nice wine,” he said, holding up a glass to hers. “Remember the special house Chianti at Positano’s?”
“My God! You have a fabulous memory! Yes, I remember Positano’s. But I don’t remember the kind of wine we drank.”
“Luigi and Angela came rushing over to our table asking us, as politely as they could, to hold down the noise.”
“Oh, I remember that,” Rachel said, refilling her glass. “And I suppose we could pick up on that argument again.”
“After seeing what you did to that guy at the bar, I don’t want to get in any argument with you.”
“Him? Just one of the FSB thugs who hang around the hotel, getting vodka free.”
“Aren’t you concerned … decking a member of Russia’s Federal Security Service … just before—”
“You mean, blowing my cover? No, I’m not concerned. The big men know who I am, and the big men want to keep good relations with my country.”
“But—”
“I know what you’re going to say, Sean. Yes, I do some work for Drexler. And don’t worry about it, okay? I know you. You know me. We’re together on this.”
Falcone appraised Rachel carefully, unsure of just how much she knew. “You know why this has to be done?”
“Yes. Asteroid USA. Twenty years from now, maybe it hits Earth.”
Falcone looked startled, not quite knowing what to say.
“Don’t worry,” Rachel said. “This place is safe. No secret microphones at the tables. Only standard surveillance cameras in hallways, public spaces, and restrooms. And, you’ll notice that the nearest table is two meters away, beyond the range of average hearing. You can add to the cover by grinning once in a while and staring into my eyes.”
“I’m already doing that. Didn’t you notice? But … I have to be cautious, thinking about that FSB guy in the bar.”
“They’re notorious crooks, like their country’s big boss. They get money for ‘protecting’ places and for catching petty crooks—like thieving bartenders—and then … Americans have a name for what they do.”
“Shakedown?”
“Yes. Shakedown. But som
etimes they push the owners of restaurants or hotels too hard. They forget that some of the owners have better connections than the FSB has with the siloviki.”
“So do you have power connections, too? Is that why you feel … safe?”
“Safe?” Rachel asked, surprised that Falcone had uttered the word. “Are you serious, Sean? Can anyone feel safe? We live in a dangerous world,” she said condescendingly.
Falcone looked at Rachel intently before responding. “Indeed. And I assume you know about what happened to your Domino predecessor.”
She shrugged and said, “C’est la guerre. And I look both ways when I cross a street.”
Neither spoke for almost a minute. Falcone broke the silence: “I’m sorry that I’m sounding like the Grand Inquisitor, Rachel. I don’t want to spoil the evening, spoil our reunion. But how can you work undercover here for Israel and for Drexler?”
“From what I know of your government career, you were well aware that intelligence work is—what was it that Angleton called it?”
“‘A wilderness of mirrors,’” Falcone replied. “That’s the way it looked to Angleton when he was the CIA’s counterintelligence chief. Actually, he probably took the phrase from a poem by T. S. Eliot.”
“Yes. It deserves poetry. But let me tell you a story, a spy story. Have you heard the name Felix Gerhardt?”
“No,” Falcone said, lifting his glass to sip the vodka Rachel had ordered for him.
“I’m not surprised. He was a far-from-famous spy. He was a high-ranking officer in the South African Navy. Recruited by the Soviets in the 1960s. The Mossad knew this, somehow—and, playing the long game, as you will see, put him under surveillance. Agents noted his supposedly secret visits to Moscow. They even saw him and his wife at the Bolshoi Ballet, in seats reserved for privileged people. I don’t know all the mirrors involved, but Israel developed a relationship with South Africa. And in 1979 there was a joint South African–Israel nuclear-weapon test on a sub-Antarctic island that belonged to South Africa.”
Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel Page 21