Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

by Brabazon, James

  I rolled my shoulders, sat up straight and looked around the office, at the file-stacked shelves and coffee-cup laden filing cabinet and at the sheets of names and dates and events pinned to the walls. A photograph of the Red Sea hung in a cheap gilt frame above the secretary’s desk; next to it a clock that I tried hard not to stare at. It didn’t look like it from where I was sitting, but the Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences was one of the best in the world – or so Baaz had told me. How or why Rachel had ended up there, I had no idea: in the years since I’d lost sight of her, I’d never once looked her up. Where she was, what she was doing, who she’d become – they were possibilities my imagination rarely got to grips with.

  In fact, until recently, I hadn’t even thought of her that often. The memory of her – any memory of her – was so powerful, so visceral, that replaying the scenes we’d lived out gave me a physical jolt. More than one cup of coffee had been spilled when a stray thought of her tripped me up, unawares. But memory is an unreliable guide to the past. Ask any group of eyewitnesses to an event exactly what they saw and you’re likely to have as many different answers as people you interrogate. My mother had told me once that when memories are remembered, they are delicate, fragile, vulnerable to being rewritten.

  ‘Every recollection could be a fabrication, Max,’ I could hear my mother say, not long after my father had said goodbye, taking off on his latest trip to Africa. ‘Be careful you don’t just end up with fantasies.’

  A fortnight later they were both dead.

  I screwed up my eyes at the thought of the lake water and concentrated instead on what Baaz had found out online in a series of encrypted internet searches – which wasn’t much. The Kolymsky School of Computer Sciences was outstanding, but its supposed crowning glory – the Azriel Jacobs fellowship – barely featured online. Professor Rachel Levy was billed as a forty-four-year-old genius who, as Baaz explained with palpable excitement, had apparently spent her entire career wrestling with something called ‘NP-complete decision problems in computational complexity theory’.

  I’d nodded along with him, in utter ignorance, trying to keep my ad hoc researcher from going down an information technology rabbit hole. The only sums I was any good at were those that helped me acquire and kill targets. I used mathematics to judge range and angle; but the wisdom of the shot? There was no algorithm that could work that out for you. Autonomous weapons systems could tell you when to open fire, but not how to live with yourself once you had. For now, at least, someone always had to pull the trigger or press the button – and computers don’t have nightmares about playing God.

  Despite international plaudits it looked like Rachel had published nothing in the four years she’d been at the university; she was camera-shy to the point of scopophobia and was, apparently, unmarried – a fact that did not pass unnoticed by Baaz. It took an effort of will to look at her faculty photograph – a low-resolution three-quarters-profile headshot – which was the only close-up image of her face we’d turned up. I’d last seen her a few days after her eighteenth birthday. She was in hospital, brought back from the brink first by me and then by Doc. The Rachel of my failing memory bore little resemblance to the confident professional staring out from that computer screen in Paris. But it was her for sure: olive skin, green eyes and a shock of black hair, shot through now with streaks of silver. I’d swallowed hard and realized my throat was dry.

  ‘You,’ Baaz had asked me in disbelief at the end of our joint investigations, ‘know her?’ I shrugged, feigning disinterest. ‘But … she’s brilliant. And she’s hot.’

  I opened my eyes again to find the faculty secretary standing over me. She was more smoking angry than smoking hot.

  ‘Koma revi’it, delet shlishit miyamin,’ she said. I frowned and she repeated tersely in English the directions to Rachel’s office as she sat down again. I stood and thanked her, wincing as the wound in my shoulder flared up. I found the stairs she’d told me to take and climbed them slowly to the fourth floor, where the last flight emerged midway along a window-lined corridor. The sunset had faded but it wasn’t dark yet. The sky was sapphire blue, punctured by white pinpricks of the brightest stars.

  Despite Colonel Ellard’s warnings to the contrary, I had done no recce, had precious little information and no means of processing what I did know into actionable intelligence. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near Rachel’s office without first establishing a fireproof pattern of life. But the longer I waited, the more likely I was to be compromised. If I could be found in the Paris catacombs, I could be found anywhere. And so could she. An encrypted phone call made by Baaz from Paris to the university told me the one thing I needed to know: that she was in Tel Aviv. Any other enquiry risked tripping a wire, the consequences of which I could no more predict than I could control.

  I turned right, counted three doors along and stopped. The cedar panelling was so highly polished that I could see my own face staring back at me around Rachel’s name plaque.

  It wasn’t simply convincing her I hadn’t murdered Doc that mattered to me. I needed to persuade her I could keep her safe – that she needed to be kept safe. But I knew now they weren’t the only reasons I’d risked everything to be there. The shock of what I was about to do cleared my mind. For the first time I accepted what it meant to stand on the threshold of the last person on earth who could join my past to my present. I had come to her, not to plead my innocence, but to accept my guilt. When she had most needed me, I’d run away. Nearly three decades, a lifetime later, I’d come back to ask for absolution – not just for that act of abandonment but for all that I had become in its wake.

  I took a deep breath and knocked, but there was no reply. I twisted the handle, pushed at the open door and crossed the Rubicon.

  21

  ‘Doctor Lazarus, I presume.’

  I stepped fully into the office before I saw her. She sat facing away from me in a wide-backed chair behind a desk by the window, staring out over the city. Glossy black hair crested the headrest. A banker’s lamp next to her laptop pooled light between us, the glare plunging the corners of the room into deep shadow. I held my breath, clung on to my words. Her accent was pure Israeli. No hint of Irish remained.

  She spun the chair on its axis and faced the room. But her features were lost in the gloom above the green glass of the little lamp. It was only as I went to speak that I realized I had no idea what to say – and hadn’t, for years. My throat closed around her name and there was silence between us. I let my hands hang by my sides and peered into the darkness, as if I might find there the words I was looking for.

  But there is nothing to say to someone who thinks they are about to confront the man who murdered their father.

  She leaned forward. My heart leapt in my chest. Her face suddenly illuminated: a disembodied, floating white mask. Lit from below, her cheekbones stood out as sharp as razors. And although her eyes were lost in shadow, I could see clearly enough to know, even after all these years, that I was not staring into the face of the girl I’d fallen in love with. I was looking into the eyes of a stranger.

  But it wasn’t simply that I didn’t recognize her.

  It wasn’t her at all.

  ‘Or should I call you “Max McLean”?’ My right hand moved towards where the pistol would have sat in my belt. Her lips lifted at their corners. ‘You are looking for this?’

  She spoke clearly, slowly, and produced a white plastic bag as she did so – placing it on the desk in front of her with a metallic thud. She’d recovered the Grach from the cistern in the hotel bathroom.

  The door clicked shut behind me. I turned my head. The woman I’d assumed was the faculty secretary had followed me into the room. She gripped a Glock 19 with both hands and held it close into her body, arms bent at the elbow – relaxed, but ready. She was too far away for me to take her down. I kept my hands still and visible, fingers spread.

  ‘You can call me whatever you like,’ I said, trying to suppress a r
ising anger. I felt foolish. Embarrassed. ‘Seems you’ve got all the cards, anyway.’

  ‘Far from it,’ she replied. ‘Take a seat.’ I stayed where I was, trying and failing to size her up in the harsh light of the lamp. ‘Please,’ she said, motioning towards a leather chair to one side of the desk. ‘If we wanted you dead …’ she paused, as if trying to remember the right words, ‘you would already be buried in Père Lachaise. Ken?’

  ‘So, you’re a friend of Lukov’s?’

  ‘Lo,’ she laughed. ‘Lo, lo, lo. Lukov had no friends. Except maybe you. Please. Sit.’

  That little fucker, I thought.

  I relented and walked to the desk, drew the chair back and sat down, racking my brains to remember what – exactly what – I’d told him. Never say anything, to anyone. There were rules for a reason. Not that anyone seemed interested in playing by them any longer. The woman and I sat an arm’s length apart, facing each other. Next to what I’d assumed was my Grach she placed an open pack of Marlboros and a new book of matches.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘To which?’

  ‘As you like.’

  I shook a smoke out of the pack and lit it. The woman did the same, reclining in her chair as she did so, vanishing back into the darkness. Then the sulphur flared and her face quickened in the void behind the lamplight, juddering for a moment.

  The sky was black now. Beyond the windows Tel Aviv had flickered to life one street lamp at a time. The tip of her cigarette flitted across the city skyline like an orange firefly. I blew a thin cloud of smoke into the emptiness of Rachel’s office. With the exception of a television screen on one wall and an oil painting of a chestnut hunter standing alone in a field, the room was almost completely bare. The Marlboro tasted good – familiar, reassuring. I smiled at the woman’s shadow.

  ‘You haven’t killed me. And you haven’t kidnapped me. And I don’t think you’re going to. But your woman there doesn’t look like she’s keen on me leaving, either.’ I looked over my shoulder again. The guard had stepped to one side so that her superior was out of her line of fire. The Glock pointed towards me. ‘So, what do you want with me? Am I under arrest, or what?’

  ‘No, no. Not at all.’ She leaned in again so I could see her face, spreading her arms as she did so as if to encompass our situation. ‘In fact, this is quite, uh, the opposite of that. You are a free man.’ She nodded towards the operator standing guard. ‘Khaki ba’hutz.’

  I heard the door open and close behind me as she left the room. I guessed they wanted to show they trusted me. Or at least make me feel trusted. But I also guessed they’d unloaded the Grach. I would have.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’ I double-checked to make sure no one else had entered the room. ‘I mean, this is all very interesting, but …’

  ‘You came for Rachel?’ she cut across me.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I took another drag on the Marlboro.

  ‘You aren’t the only one. She is very popular, the professor. Surprisingly so.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. And this time I thought I did. ‘Russian, by any chance?’ She nodded. ‘Small guy, light on his feet,’ I added, ‘leather shoes, tan portmanteau?’ She nodded again. ‘Fancies himself a doctor?’

  ‘He is a doctor,’ she replied. ‘At least, he trained as one. Doctor Leonid Avilov. These days he is more interested in taking life than he is in saving it.’

  ‘Well, he was doing his damnedest to keep me alive, that’s for sure. What is he? Bratva? FSB?’ I thought about the options. You never knew with the Russians. ‘Both?’

  She cleared her throat. ‘He’s GRU. Sixth Directorate, specializing in cryptography. His background is classic ex-KGB. He joined military intelligence in 2016, after GRU Director Sergun, uh, died in Lebanon. He’s been in and out of Israel half a dozen times since. Apart from minor details, that is all we know.’

  Or, I thought, all you’re going to admit to knowing. ‘Well that explains why he can’t shoot straight, anyway.’ I tilted my head and dragged on the cigarette. ‘He’s a bloody desk jockey.’

  ‘So was Adolf Eichmann,’ she said. ‘Never underestimate, how do you call them, a “pen-pusher”?’

  ‘Quite. Well, did Avilov find her? Rachel, I mean.’

  ‘No. He was too late.’ She rolled her cigarette butt between her thumb and forefinger, crushing it slightly. ‘And so were we. Rachel has gone missing, Mr McLean. She was last seen more than two weeks ago. Just before the end of December. Avilov arrived the day after the last confirmed sighting of her in Israel.’ Perhaps I looked incredulous, or maybe she doubted her English. Either way she added, ‘She is not here, Mr McLean’, just to make sure I understood her loud and clear. ‘If she has left Israel – which is not certain – then she must have done so on a forged passport.’ She weighed up the probability: ‘Which we think is possible.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but first things first.’ I looked around the room. As far as I could tell we were alone, though I assumed every word was being listened to elsewhere. ‘Who’s “we”, exactly?’

  ‘My name is Talia,’ she said. ‘I’m with the Shabak.’ She smoked her cigarette.

  ‘Internal security. Of course. I bet you have a badge, too, that says, Trust me, I’m a secret agent, right?’

  ‘Right.’ She took a cell phone out of her jacket pocket and tapped in a string of digits. I heard the phone click at the other end as the call connected.

  ‘Hal-lo? Ken, rega.’

  She handed me the phone. I pressed it to my ear, and listened.

  ‘Hi, buddy.’ It was Ezra. Clear as a bell.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Trust me. This lady will keep you alive. She’s on the side of the angels.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. And why are you messing around with that bullshit Grach, eh? Ask her for something proper. That pistol’s gonna get you fucked up.’ He pronounced ‘bullshit’ bool-sheet which made him sound simultaneously sinister and slightly absurd. It was no coincidence he got on with the Glaswegian Jack Nazzar so well. Everything each of them said sounded like either a joke or a threat. I pitied the fool who couldn’t work out which.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘Tov. I have another surprise for you as well. It’s a really good one. I promise you’ll like it.’

  ‘Oh … What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll find out. Take care, buddy.’

  The line went dead. I handed the phone back to my interlocutor.

  ‘How exactly did Rachel go missing?’

  ‘She vanished.’ Talia took the phone from me and our fingers touched briefly. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I called the faculty,’ I said, ‘and there was a newspaper report. She was quoted by Haaretz three days ago.’ As soon as I’d said it, I realized how naive I sounded. Her face remained impassive. ‘Ah,’ the penny dropped. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m guessing that was an Israeli in Paris, too. He cut quite a dash in that police uniform. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Or maybe Mossad went for the AKs and keffiyehs, so you could blame it on your neighbours?’

  ‘What the other departments do,’ she said, tilting her head, ‘or who they get to do it, is their affair.’

  We sat in silence – breathing in the grey smoke, wondering if, when, to breathe out secrets. I counted a full minute and stubbed out the Marlboro in the heavy glass ashtray between us.

  ‘Well, this is awkward.’

  ‘But forgivable. You would not be the first operator to get in trouble for, uh, personal reasons. It happens.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘It’s not awkward for me. Not at all. Unfortunate, maybe. But not awkward.’ I drew another cigarette from the pack. ‘For you, though, this is a Grade A disaster.’ I tore another match free of the little booklet, folded the yellow cover back on itself, pinched the matchhead between the cardboard and the strike
r and withdrew it smartly. It flared at my fingertips. ‘A top Israeli scientist goes missing. Her father is assassinated. And the Shabak, the “Invisible Shield”, the defender of the nation, is reduced to fishing, casting clickbait blind into the media?’ I lit the tobacco, pulled down the smoke, and dropped the still-burning match into the ashtray. ‘And all you’ve managed to catch is one pissed-off Paddy. That’s awkward. No?’

  She drew her lips tight across her teeth and then lit another cigarette herself.

  ‘I thought you were the fisherman, Mr McLean,’ she replied through the haze of smoke, ‘with the hundred-dollar hook?’ I shrugged. ‘Lo,’ she waved her hand in front of her – dispersing both the smoke, and with it any suggestion the Israelis might be compromised. ‘Lo. What is, uh, awkward, is that the day before Professor Levy disappeared she sent her colleague – her closest, most trusted colleague – on an errand.’ She paused to gauge my reaction. ‘A routine errand that took him from Tel Aviv to Russia. But then, and most definitely on a forged passport, he travelled from Russia to the United Kingdom, where he arrived on the thirtieth of December.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ I smiled at her. ‘But really, now, wouldn’t you say that was also your problem?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t.’ She unlocked the cell phone I’d used to speak to Ezra and slid it back across the table towards me. ‘I would say it was one hundred per cent our problem.’

  I rested my cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and picked up the phone. A single photograph filled the screen. It was a mid-shot of a smiling man and woman, standing arms entwined, each holding in their free hand a slice of what looked like an apple. I separated my thumb and forefinger across the screen and zoomed in. Rachel stood on the left, eyes downcast above her smile, trying to avoid the lens. A length of black, silver-striped hair had fallen against her cheek. In the background, the unmistakable entrance to the building I was sitting in. The balding man on Rachel’s right grinned at the camera, leaning forward as if sharing a joke with the photographer. Six-four, a hundred and seventy pounds and in good shape for his age. I recognized him immediately.