by Daniel Silva
As for Lucien Villard, he departed Café Remor with the briefcase at 5:17 p.m., followed by a woman who had been at the café with the tallish man. She was standing a half block from Villard on the boulevard Georges-Favon when the bomb detonated. For several minutes she lay on the pavement, unmoving, as though she were among the dead rather than the living. Then the tallish man appeared and placed her hurriedly into the backseat of the Passat sedan.
The car was of French registry, and it was to France, within minutes of leaving the scene of the explosion, that it returned. Shortly before nine p.m., it entered a parking garage in central Lyon, with much of its rear registration plate smeared by mud. Gabriel concealed the key beneath the left rear wheel well while Mikhail helped Sarah from the backseat. Her steps were unsteady as they crossed the street to the Gare de la Part Dieu.
The night’s last train to Paris was boarding. Mikhail quickly purchased three tickets in cash, and together they made their way to the platform. The carriage they entered was nearly empty. Mikhail sat alone in a rear-facing seat at the front; Gabriel and Sarah, on the train’s starboard side. Her face was ashen, her hair was damp. Mikhail had washed the blood from it with a couple of liters of Vittel before dressing her in clean clothing. Fortunately, the blood was not Sarah’s. It was the blood of Lucien Villard.
She examined her reflection in the window. “Not a mark. How do you explain that?”
“The bomb was designed to limit collateral casualties.”
“Did you see the explosion?”
Gabriel shook his head. “We only heard it.”
“I saw it. At least I think I did. All I remember is the look on Lucien Villard’s face as he was being ripped to pieces. It was like he was . . .”
“A suicide bomber?”
Sarah nodded slowly. “Have you ever seen one before?”
“A suicide bomber? I’ve lost count.”
Sarah winced suddenly. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. I think I might have broken a rib or two.”
“We’ll have a doctor take a look at you before your flight.”
“What flight?”
“The flight that’s going to take you from Paris back to New York.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Gabriel didn’t bother to respond. The face in the glass was contorted with pain.
“The evening didn’t go exactly as planned,” said Sarah. “Lucien Villard got blown to bits. And one of Reema’s kidnappers slipped through our fingers.”
“I’m afraid that sums it up rather nicely.”
“He walked straight into our arms, and we let him get away.”
“Mikhail and I were the ones who lost him, not you.”
“Maybe we should have taken him at the café.”
“Or maybe we should have put a bullet in him while he was walking along that quiet street near the movie house. A bullet tends to make even the hardest of men talkative.”
“I remember that, too.” Sarah watched an ugly banlieue slide past her window. “I guess we know how the kidnappers learned that Khalid’s daughter was enrolled at that school.”
“I doubt they needed Villard to tell them that.”
“So what did he do for them?”
“That,” said Gabriel, “would require speculation on my part.”
“It’s a long way to Paris. Speculate away.”
“Close observation of the target,” said Gabriel after a moment.
“Go on.”
“They couldn’t do it themselves because they knew the Swiss services were watching her. So they hired someone to do the job for them. Someone who was supposed to be looking after her safety.”
“Did he know who he was working for?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then why kill him?”
“I suppose they wanted to eliminate anyone who could implicate them. Or it’s possible Lucien might have done something foolish.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe he threatened them. Or maybe he asked for more money.”
“He must have thought there was money in the briefcase. Why else would he have taken it?” Sarah looked at Mikhail, who was watching them from the front of the carriage. “You should have seen his face when he thought I might be dead.”
“I did see it.”
“I know he’s in love with what’s-her-name, but he still cares about me.” She leaned her head against Gabriel’s shoulder. “What are we going to do now?”
“You’re going home, Sarah.”
“I am home,” she said, and closed her eyes.
21
Later that same evening, as a train bearing the chief of Israeli intelligence approached the Gare de Lyon in Paris, three hooded figures roused Princess Reema bint Khalid Abdulaziz Al Saud from a tormented sleep. They were clearly agitated, which surprised her. Since the incident involving the notepad, Reema’s interactions with her captors had been formal and silent but without undue rancor. All three of the hooded figures were men. In fact, it had been some time since she had seen the woman. Reema could not say for certain how long it had been. She measured the passage of the hours and days not with a clock or calendar but by the rhythm of her meals and her supervised visits to the toilet.
One of the men was holding a hairbrush and a small paddle-shaped mirror. He also had a note. He wanted Reema to improve her appearance—for what reason, he did not say. The first glimpse of the creature in the looking glass shocked her. She scarcely recognized the pale, gaunt face. Her raven hair was a tangled, filthy mess.
The man withdrew while Reema, holding the mirror before her, forced the brush through the thicket of her hair. He returned a moment later with a copy of a London newspaper and a bright red instant camera. It looked like a toy, not something a ruthless criminal might wield. He handed Reema the newspaper—it was that morning’s edition of the Telegraph—and with crude hand gestures instructed her to hold it beneath her chin. For her photograph she adopted a juhaymin, the traditional “angry face” of the Arabian Bedouin. With her eyes, however, she pleaded with her father to end her suffering.
The camera flashed and a few seconds later ejected the photograph. Then the man took a second photo, which he preferred to the first. He kept both as he and the other two men prepared to take their leave.
“May I have it?”
The eyes behind the mask gazed at her quizzically.
“The one you’re not going to send to my father to prove I’m still alive.”
The eyes appeared to weigh her request carefully. Then the unwanted photo came spinning through the air, curving gently before landing on the cot next to Reema. The door closed, the deadbolts snapped. The light in the ceiling burned on.
Reema picked up the snapshot. It was, she thought, quite good. She looked older than twelve, slightly drunk or drugged, a little sexy, like the models in Vogue and Glamour. She doubted her father would see it the same way.
She stretched her body on her cot, supine, and stared into the eyes of the girl in the photograph. “You’re dead,” she whispered. “Dead, dead, dead.”
22
Paris–London
The safe flat was located in a small apartment building at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Mikhail and Sarah each claimed a bedroom, leaving the davenport in the sitting room—the bed of nails, as it was known inside the Office—to Gabriel. Consequently, like Princess Reema, he did not sleep well that night.
He rose early, dressed, and went into the cold, nickeled light of morning. A two-man security team from the embassy waited curbside in a Renault sedan with diplomatic plates. They drove along quiet streets to the Gare du Nord, where Gabriel boarded an eight fifteen Eurostar bound for London. His seat was in business class. Surrounded by merchants and financiers, he read the morning papers. They were filled with misleading accounts of the mysterious bombing in Geneva involving the former head of security from an elite private school for the children of diplomats.
As the train approached t
he Channel Tunnel, Gabriel dispatched an encrypted text message, informing the recipient of his imminent arrival in the British capital. The reply was a long time in coming and inhospitable in tone. It contained no greeting or salutation, only an address. Gabriel assumed it was the address of a safe house. Or perhaps not. The British didn’t have any safe houses, he thought. At least none Moscow Center didn’t know about.
It was half past nine when the train drew into London’s St. Pancras International. Gabriel expected to be met on arrival, but as he crossed the gleaming ticket hall he saw no evidence of a British reception committee. He should have immediately called London Station and requested a driver and escort. Instead, he spent the next two hours wandering the streets of the West End, searching for evidence he was being followed. It was a violation of Office protocol but in Gabriel’s case not without precedent. The last time he ventured into public alone he had encountered Rebecca Manning, MI6’s traitorous Washington Head of Station, and a heavily armed Russian extraction team. The Russians had not survived. Rebecca Manning, for better or worse, had lived.
The Russian Embassy in London, with its generously staffed SVR rezidentura, occupied a valuable plot of land near Kensington Palace. Gabriel walked past it along Bayswater Road and made his way to Notting Hill. St. Luke’s Mews lay at the northern fringe of the fashionable neighborhood, near the Westway. Number 7, like all the other cottages along the street, was a converted garage. The exterior was a gray scale—light gray for the brickwork, dark gray for the trim and the door. The knocker was a large silver ring. Gabriel banged it twice. And when he received no answer, he banged it again.
At length, the door opened and Nigel Whitcombe admitted him. Whitcombe had recently turned forty, but he still looked like an adolescent who had been stretched and molded into manhood. Gabriel had known him since he was a probationer at MI5. Now he was the personal aide-de-camp and primary runner of off-the-record errands for the director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.
“I’m well,” said Gabriel pointedly after Whitcombe had closed the door. “How are you, Nigel?”
“Davies,” he answered. “We don’t use real names in safe flats, only work names.”
“And who am I today?”
“Mudd,” said Whitcombe.
“Catchy.”
“You should have heard the one we rejected.”
“I can only imagine.” Gabriel looked around the interior of the tiny house. It was recently renovated and freshly painted, but largely unfurnished.
“We took possession of it only last week,” explained Whitcombe. “You’re the first guest.”
“I’m honored.”
“Trust me, that wasn’t our intention. We’re in the process of liquidating our entire inventory of safe houses. And not just in London. Worldwide.”
“But I wasn’t the one who betrayed them to the Russians. Rebecca Manning did that.”
A moment passed. Then Whitcombe said, “We go back a long way, Mr. Mudd.”
“If you call me that again—”
“All the way back to the Kharkov operation. And you know I have nothing but the utmost respect for you.”
“But?”
“It would have been better if you’d let her defect.”
“Nothing would have changed, Nigel. There still would have been a scandal, and you still would have been forced to dump all your safe houses.”
“It’s not just the safe properties. It’s everything. Our networks, our station heads, our ciphers and encryption. For all intents and purposes, we are no longer in the business of espionage.”
“That’s what happens when the Russians plant a mole at the highest level of an intelligence service. But at least you get new safe houses,” said Gabriel. “This is much better than that dump in Stockwell.”
“That’s gone, too. We’re selling and acquiring properties so quickly we’ve actually had an impact on the London real estate market.”
“I have a lovely flat in Bayswater I’m looking to unload.”
“That place overlooking the park? Everyone in the business knows it’s an Office safe flat.” Whitcombe smiled for the first time. “Forgive me, the last few months have been a nightmare. Rebecca must be enjoying the show from her new office in Moscow Center.”
“How’s ‘C’ holding up?”
“I’ll let him answer that.”
Through the front window Gabriel glimpsed Graham Seymour hauling himself from the backseat of a Jaguar limousine. He seemed out of place in the trendy little mews, like a wealthy older man calling on his young bohemian mistress. Seymour always had that air about him. With his camera-ready features and plentiful pewter-colored locks, he looked like one of those male models one saw in advertisements for costly trinkets like fountain pens and Swiss watches. Entering the cottage, he surveyed the sitting room as though he were trying to hide his enthusiasm from an estate agent.
“How much did we pay for this place?” he asked Whitcombe.
“Almost two million, chief.”
“I remember the days when a bedsit in Chiswick would do. Have the housekeepers stocked the pantry?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“There’s a Tesco around the corner. Tea and milk and a tin of biscuits. And take your time, Nigel.” The front door opened and closed. Seymour removed his Crombie overcoat and tossed it over the back of a chair. It looked as though it had come from Ikea. “I suppose there wasn’t much left over for decoration. Not with a two-million-pound price tag.”
“It’s better not to cram too much furniture into small places like these.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Seymour lived in a grand Georgian house in Eaton Square with a wife named Helen who cooked enthusiastically but quite badly. The money came from Helen’s family. Seymour’s father had been a legendary MI6 officer who had plied his trade mainly in the Middle East. “I hear you’ve been a busy boy.”
“Have I?”
Seymour smiled without parting his lips. “GCHQ picked up an unusual burst of radio and telephone traffic in Tehran a few nights ago.” GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, was Britain’s signals intelligence service. “Frankly, it sounded as though the place was going up in flames.”
“What was it?”
“Someone broke into a warehouse and stole a couple of tons of files and computer disks. Apparently, these documents represent the entire archives of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
“Imagine that.”
Another smile, longer than the last. “As your partner in numerous operations against the Iranian nuclear program, including one code-named Masterpiece, we would like to see those documents.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“Before you show them to the Americans.”
“How do you know we haven’t already shared them with Langley?”
“Because you haven’t had enough time to analyze a treasure trove like that. And if you’d given any of the material to the Americans, they would have given it to me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The Americans have the same concerns about your service as we do. And with good reason. After all, Rebecca spent the final months of her MI6 career stealing every American secret she could lay her hands on.”
Seymour’s expression darkened, as though a shadow had fallen across his face. “Rebecca is gone.”
“No, she isn’t, Graham. She’s working in the United Kingdom Department at Moscow Center. And you’re dead in the water because you’re not sure whether she has another agent inside MI6.”
“Which is why I need a nice, juicy secret to prove I’m still in the game.”
“Then perhaps you should go out and steal one.”
“We’re too busy tearing ourselves to pieces to commit an act of honest-to-goodness espionage. We’re totally paralyzed.”
“Just like you were after—”
“Yes,” said Seymour, cutting Gabriel off. “The parallels between then and now are striking. It took
years for us to get back on our feet after Philby brought us down. I’m determined not to let that happen again.”
“And you’d like my help.”
Seymour said nothing.
“How can I be sure the Iranian documents won’t end up on Rebecca’s desk at Moscow Center?”
“They won’t,” intoned Seymour gravely.
“And if I give them to you? What do I get in return?”
“A truce in our internecine conflict and a gradual return to business as usual.”
“How about something more tangible?”
“All right,” said Seymour. “If you give me those documents, I’ll help you find KBM’s daughter before he’s forced to abdicate.”
“How did you find out?”
Seymour shrugged. “Sources and methods.”
“Do the Americans know?”
“I spoke to Morris Payne last night on another matter.” Payne was the CIA director. “He knows Khalid’s daughter has been kidnapped, but he seems unaware of your involvement.” Seymour added suddenly, “He’s in town, you know.”
“Morris?”
“Khalid. He flew into London yesterday afternoon.” Seymour regarded Gabriel carefully. “I’m surprised, given the closeness of your newfound relationship, he didn’t tell you he was coming.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“And you’re not tracking that mobile phone of his?”
“It went dark. We assume he got a new one.”
“GCHQ concur.”