I considered that carefully. It was a real possibility: my father—every inch the Ministry of Defense loyalist as well as a brilliant scientist—had once told me that “London is not a monolith.” Thames House competed with, and loathed, Vauxhall Cross; MI5 and MI6 agents outplayed each other for grace and favor, ego and advancement; government undermined the military; the Foreign Office undermined everyone else. They all played their own games for their own ends—ends that sometimes, but not always, excused the means. There was no reason to expect that Moscow was any different, and every reason to suspect it wasn’t.
In the catacombs Avilov had told me that I was a hard man to help. Maybe he wasn’t the enemy. Or maybe that was the point: there were no enemies, because there were no friends. Whoever held the banknote held the cards. Perhaps Rachel knew she’d been dealt a deadman’s hand and folded. The more I looked at it, the more that hundred-dollar bill looked like aces backed with eights—with the queen of hearts in the hole. I thought of Doc’s last words to me: She’tamut. To death. It was a game that had already seen the end of a better gambler than me.
The closer we got to the hotel, the clearer it became: there was only one way to protect Baaz. Rachel had unburdened herself. It was suddenly inevitable that I’d have to do the same. We drew up alongside Independence Park, deserted in the winter night.
“Stop a minute,” I said. “I’ve something for you. Give me your hand.”
Baaz hesitated and then stretched out his palm, his fingers finally stilled. Onto it I pressed the folded banknote.
“Don’t you need it?”
“No. I’ve memorized the numbers.” Baaz raised his eyebrows as he pocketed the bill. “I’ll never work out what they mean, though—assuming there is anything to work out.” We stood close, barely more than a foot apart. “You have my pistol, at the hotel. Leave it there. And don’t, under any circumstances, fuck with Talia.” We both smiled.
“Why are you giving me this? We’re a team, right?”
“Right. And that’s why I’m trusting you. It’s why I told you everything. I doubt very much I’m going to make it up the steps to the hotel, which is why you’re going to turn around now and keep clear till dawn. Photograph both sides of the note, and then hide it. Send it to yourself encrypted, and then throw your phone in the sea. Once the Shabak has picked me up, Talia will find you and interrogate you. If you’re clean, she’ll probably just deport you.”
The alternatives to not being deported didn’t bear thinking about.
“Well, then, don’t walk up the bloody hotel steps. Problem solved.”
“Trust me, Baaz. There’s no other way.”
I was expecting an argument. This time I held out my hand. He hesitated and then took it with a force that surprised me. His eyes had filled with tears.
“How will I find you if I work out what the numbers mean? You don’t even have a phone.”
“I’ll check in with our mutual friend in Sierra Leone. If you leave a message with him, I’ll get it. Eventually.”
“Kushkismat,” he said. “Good luck.”
I turned around to take a last look at him as he was walking away. After a few paces he stopped and turned, too.
“Max,” he said, cheeks wet, but with a strong voice, “I have to know. In the hotel . . . if you hadn’t, you know, seen the numbers. Would you have killed me?”
My shoulders slumped and I squinted at him through the gloom. I knew then that he’d be OK. He was a smart kid, canny. And though he had the frame of a boy, he was wiry and lean: a man, no mistake, however unlike me in the making. I’d trusted him with everything else. There was no point lying now.
“Yes,” I said, pulling my jacket tight to my chest. “I would have.”
He held my gaze for an instant and then set off, head down, toward the city. That was the trouble with the truth: once it starts, it’s hard to stop.
* * *
—
There was no police car waiting for me, no snatch squad. And if there was a sniper watching, he was sitting tight. I made it up the stairs, pushed open the doors to the hotel and trod carefully across the marble floor. Only the night manager’s lamp lit the lobby. He was asleep in his chair, neck crooked at an impossible angle. I looked at his thorax. Breathing. I cleared my throat and he roused himself, tightening the tie under his creased white collar.
“Shalom,” I said. And then in English: “Room 101, please. Has anyone asked after me?”
He composed himself and leaned forward, looking at me, through me. His mouth opened, but the reply came from behind.
“No, they haven’t.” The harsh syllables rang with a seductive edge. I splayed my fingers out, hands wide of my sides, and turned: black hair, pale face, cheekbones like knives.
“Hello, Talia.”
“Good morning, Mr. McLean. Quite the holiday you’re having.”
“It’s been enlightening, shall we say?” She stood staring at me, right hand in her coat pocket. Left hand holding a cell phone. “Nine millimeter,” I said, “in the back of my jeans. Just so there are no misunderstandings.”
She nodded, and I extracted the Jericho with my thumb and forefinger from my Levi’s. I crouched and put it on the floor at arm’s length and then stood up straight again. The night manager circled around me, Glock 19 at the ready. They had the place locked down. She told me to kick the Jericho to him and I did. He picked it up and moved behind me again, out of sight.
“I guess it’s over between us, then.”
Her lips lifted into a half smile. “On the contrary. It’s not me I’m worried about getting shot. This is just—how shall we say?—an insurance policy.”
“Sure. How is Moshe, by the way?”
“Dead. We found him this afternoon. Shot through the heart with a police pistol.”
She turned and held the street door open for me. That he’d been killed was not surprising; how he’d been killed was profoundly alarming.
“I see,” I said, trying not to take the bait. “Tell me, why the Traitor? He served you well in Lebanon.”
“Why? I will tell you why. The Palestinians. The Iranians. Even the Russians. They are our enemies.” She stood close to me. I could feel her breath on my lips, smell the musk of a long day clinging to her clothes. “They want Israel to fall. All this”—she looked around the lobby as if it encompassed the extent of her aspirations—“gone.” She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “But an enemy is just an enemy. A traitor was once a friend. Even so, don’t blame us, Mr. McLean. Moshe Mendel Katz had many enemies of his own.”
I brushed past her onto the steps outside. A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled up—tinted windows, diplomatic plates, off-road tires.
“It’s no longer safe for you to stay in Israel, Mr. McLean. I made a promise to our mutual friend. But questions are being asked. Questions I cannot avoid any longer. No one will miss Avraham Landau. But the girl, Sveta? That was, uh, unfortunate.” The rear nearside passenger door opened.
“But I didn’t . . .”
“Please, Mr. McLean.”
“OK,” I said. “But go easy on Baaz. He’s an innocent. Just send him home.”
“Of course.”
I scanned the rooftops as best I could, but it was pointless. If I ran, I was dead—if not right there, then eventually. It had ever been thus.
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
I turned my back to her and walked toward the Chevy, bent slightly at the waist, straining my eyes to no avail to make out any detail in the darkness inside. I stepped up on the running board and turned around.
“Tell me, were you and Ezra in the field together?”
“No. We weren’t.” She moved back into the doorway. “Ezra Black was my husband.” I swung myself into the SUV. “Please, Mr. McLean. If you find Rachel, bring her home.”
�
�Which home is that, Talia?”
I gave her a mock salute. She smiled and disappeared into the lobby, and I was alone in the back of the car with only the driver up front for company. I pulled the door to. He hit the gas and together we sped into the city.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
He looked over his shoulder, eyes wrapped with Ray-Bans despite the dimness of the sodium-lit streets outside.
“Moscow.”
30
The cold bit like a knife.
Minus eight. Air dry as steel. Skies gray as lead. It must have been snowing—fresh drifts of powder set solid as the temperature dived. It was a hard, unforgiving cold, offering no mercy to the city frozen in its grip. I thrust my hands into my pockets and kept my head down, and waited in line impatiently for the taxi that would take me into town.
I needed to get into cover. Fast. Every second I was in the open, in public, risked detection. The express train was too exposed. Moscow was littered with CCTV cameras that, MI6 had briefed us at Raven Hill before I went AWOL, were linked to an increasingly sophisticated facial recognition system. A taxi at least kept me off the streets. Talia had loaded a black day sack for me with winter clothes, a wash bag, a few rubles, a wad of dollars—and a fake Russian passport.
“Sorry,” the Israeli driver had said with a grin as I’d surrendered the Greek papers I’d gotten from Lukov. “The boss doesn’t trust Bulgarians.”
For the first time in my life I’d entered Russia as a Russian citizen—on an Aeroflot flight from Ben Gurion direct to Sheremetyevo International. The Shabak had taken care of formalities in Israel. Speaking with what I hoped was a Russian accent unmuddied by growing up in the West, I’d been propelled through immigration in less than fifteen minutes. Maybe I’d gotten lucky. Maybe Avilov and the GRU were running their own show, outside the scope of internal security. Or maybe they were watching to see what I’d do next—namely, buy a sandwich and a Sharpie and change some dollars to rubles.
In the arrivals hall the cashier had examined the hundred-dollar bills carefully and passed them under an ultraviolet scanner. It had crossed my mind for a moment that Talia might have equipped me with a stash of Moshe’s interpretations. I’d craned my neck to see what happened when the notes passed under the light, but the only thing obvious was that the plastic strip beside Benjamin Franklin’s face glowed pink. The woman behind the window had seemed happy enough, and passed me a stack of crisp local notes.
Then I’d found a bathroom and locked myself in a stall. From the wad of leftover dollars I’d extracted a C-note and on the reverse written Архангел in thick black Cyrillic letters. I’d folded it up and put it in my jeans ticket pocket and emerged into the first Russian winter I’d experienced in five years.
Just as a cab was within touching distance a babushka with sharp elbows and aging furs barged me out of the way from behind and bundled herself into the backseat. The cabbie emerged, shrugging his shoulders as he opened the boot for her bags.
“Dobro pozhalovat v Moskvu!” he said. Welcome to Moscow. Damned straight. In the politeness stakes the Russians gave even the Israelis a run for their money.
Another car pulled up behind and I climbed in. I had no hold luggage, just Talia’s day sack, in which I had also discovered a guidebook—designed, I supposed, to make me look like a tourist out to have fun and not a spook on the run. I’d changed my wound dressing, had breakfast in departures and a shave thirty thousand feet over the Black Sea. I felt good.
“K Bolshomy,” I said. To the Bolshoi. From there I’d easily pick up another cab. And another. Eventually ending up in the Kuzminki area, a messy, down-at-heel neighborhood in the southeast of Moscow, which was about as far away in feel as it was possible to get from the slick city center. From there I’d plan my next move. The driver was sealed off from the rear passenger seats by a glass screen—an innovation since my last visit. An intercom allowed us to speak.
“Just like New York,” I said in Russian, tapping the partition. From behind the wheel his eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror.
“Da.” He nodded, and carried on his conversation through a hands-free rig with someone I guessed was either his wife or his girlfriend.
I also had a phone. Talia had left me a burner with a clean Russian SIM and one number in the address book: hers. As soon as we’d gotten airborne, I’d switched it off and taken the battery out. Carrying it at all was like being tethered to a personal locator beacon. But so far Talia had been good to Ezra’s word: I was still alive.
But sending me to Moscow wasn’t just a cute way of getting me out of her hair. Her personal imperatives notwithstanding, either I’d manage to unravel what had happened to the Israelis’ disappeared scientist or Russian intelligence would take grateful delivery of their number one suspect. Whatever the case, Talia would emerge smelling of roses. Less so me. Once the GRU found out I’d sent its money man to meet his maker, then Talia’s motives would be the least of my concerns.
I thought about Moshe, and about Avi’s girl, Sveta. Despite the drugs and the fear, she’d have to be able to identify me and had probably listened to her sugar daddy spilling the beans. Even if I’d become an increasingly reluctant executioner, someone was taking care of business behind me. But who? The signature heart shot that had done for Moshe was chilling. If the same assassin had dispatched Sveta, too, then I wasn’t a day ahead of anyone: he’d had the drop on me all along.
I recalled what old Colonel Ellard had said at Raven Hill once, after a job had unraveled on me: “There’s no use worrying about things over which you have no control.” I stretched the flight out of my legs and tried to relax. Cars crept past the tinted passenger windows. Long gone were the old Volgas and Ladas—now it was all SUVs and foreign imports. A smart new Range Rover inched past: Moscow mafia chic. Few traces, if any, of my mother’s city remained. Although the roads were clear of snow, progress was slow. We ground on southeast down the M-11, crossing the Moscow Canal and then over the sprawling intersection with the Central Ring Road toward the Marfino District, before dropping due south, bound for the city center.
And then what?
There was, as usual, no plan and very few possibilities. Cut off, and without comms to London, I had no way of contacting anyone in the GRU, except for the receptionist at its headquarters on Grizodubovoi Street. And walking into the Akvarium was as good an idea as jumping into the Moscow River. But the GRU’s operators would track me down, all right. The trick was making sure the crisis was forced at the place and time of my choosing. It was high risk. I just hoped that whatever Rachel’s project meant to them was heady enough to trip them up in its pursuit. And I prayed, too, that wherever Rachel had ended up, she thought it had been worth it all—because, as far as I could see, its most significant outcome for her had been to lay her father in his grave.
We passed the Dmitrovskaya metro station. The traffic slowed even further as we hit Sushchevskiy Val Street.
“Detour,” the taxi driver said in Russian through the intercom. “Too much traffic.” His accent was hard to place. From Georgia, maybe. I was about to ask him where, exactly, but he was trying to reconnect a dropped call, fiddling about with the hands-free set that was draped around an icon on the dashboard. We headed west. And then after a couple of klicks swung onto the junction with Leningradsky Avenue. But instead of heading southeast again, the driver stayed in the outside lane and took the slip road northwest.
“Hey.” I leaned forward and tapped the glass. “Wrong way. The Bolshoi Theatre, remember?”
“Shortcut,” he grunted. “Faster.”
Larger fare, more like. I looked at the meter. It was still set to zero. I went to rap on the glass again but stopped myself, and thanked him instead.
Something wasn’t right.
We passed the Dinamo metro station and then came off the main highway, driving parallel to the bare trees rising up
out of the frozen white ground of Petrovsky Park. Then we cut across the busy road we’d just left, over a wide bridge that formed a junction for cars turning left. We came to a stop in the middle of the filter lane. Another taxi pulled up to our left. The woman in the back was chatting away to the driver. She leaned forward to show him something on her phone. There was no security screen. No partition. I saw my driver’s eyes dart back to mine in the mirror. He cut the intercom and began speaking rapidly into his cell phone.
I looked right: another cab—again, with no screen. I tried to get my bearings. We were in the Aeroport District, close to the inner-city Khodynka airfield.
Shit.
In my mind I brought back into as sharp a focus as I could manage a set of intelligence maps we’d been shown of Moscow in 2009. We’d been given them for good reason: to help familiarize ourselves with the location and construction of a brick-and-glass monstrosity that was an almost straight rip-off of the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames. Not two kilometers from where we sat waiting at a red light was the one building in Moscow I wanted most to avoid. Rising up on the south side of the airfield—and home to all manner of spies and sharks—was the now fully operational headquarters of the GRU. There was no doubt about it. We were heading straight for the Akvarium.
I was sitting on the right side of the vehicle. I curled my fingers around the door release but to no avail. I looked at the safety screen more closely. Half-inch bullet-resistant Plexiglas recessed into the chassis. I looked at the passenger windows, too: also reinforced. I was trapped. I guessed I’d enter the Akvarium the same way I was always taken into Vauxhall Cross: via an underground tunnel that emerged in a secure area. I would have no opportunity to run—because there would be nowhere to run to.
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