The Defector (42 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth? I would never have gone after Grigori.”

“I was afraid you would be mad at me.”

“For what?”

“For getting pregnant.”

Gabriel collapsed into Chiara’s lap, tears flowing down his face. They were tears of guilt but also tears of rage. Though Ivan did not know it, he had managed to kill Gabriel’s child. His unborn child but his child nonetheless.

“Who gave you the shots?” he asked.

“It was the woman. I see her death every night. It’s the one memory I don’t run from.” She wiped away his tears. “I need you to make me three promises, Gabriel.”

“Anything.”

“Promise me we’ll have a baby.”

“I promise.”

“Promise me we’ll never be apart.”

“Never.”

“And promise me you’ll kill them all.”

The next day, these two human wrecks presented themselves at King Saul Boulevard. Along with Mikhail, they were subjected to rigorous physical and psychological evaluations. Uzi Navot reviewed the results that evening. Afterward, he telephoned Shamron at his home in Tiberias.

“How bad?” Shamron asked.

“Very.”

“When will he be ready to work again?”

“It’s going to be a while.”

“How long, Uzi?”

“Maybe never.”

“And Mikhail?”

“He’s a mess, Ari. They’re all a mess.”

Shamron fell silent. “The worst thing we can do is let him sit around. He needs to get back on the horse.”

“I take it you have an idea?”

“How’s the interrogation of Petrov coming along?”

“He’s putting up a good fight.”

“Go down to the Negev, Uzi. Light a fire under the interrogators.”

“What do you want?”

“I want the names. All of them.”

74

JERUSALEM

BY THEN it was late March. The cold winter rains had come and gone, and the spring weather was warm and fine. At the suggestion of the doctors, they tried to get out of the apartment at least once a day. They reveled in the mundane: a trip to the bustling Makhane Yehuda Market, a stroll through the narrow streets of the Old City, a quiet lunch in one of their favorite restaurants. At Shamron’s insistence, they were accompanied always by a pair of bodyguards, young boys with cropped hair and sunglasses who reminded them both too much of Lior and Motti. Chiara said she wanted to visit the memorial north of Tel Aviv. Seeing the bodyguards’ names engraved in stone left her so distraught Gabriel had to practically carry her back to the car. Two days later, on the Mount of Olives, it was his turn to collapse in grief. Lior and Motti had been buried only a few yards from his son.

Gabriel felt an unusually strong desire to spend time with Leah, and Chiara, unable to bear his absence, had no choice but to go with him. They would sit with Leah for hours in the garden of the hospital and listen patiently while she wandered through time, now in the present, now in the past. With each visit she grew more comfortable in Chiara’s company, and, in moments of lucidity, the two women compared notes on what it was like to live with Gabriel Allon. They talked about his idiosyncrasies and his mood swings, and his need for absolute silence while he was working. And when they were feeling generous, they talked about his incredible gifts. Then the light would go out in Leah’s eyes, and she would return once more to her own private hell. And sometimes Gabriel and Chiara would return to theirs. Leah’s doctor seemed to sense something was amiss. During a visit in early April, he pulled Gabriel and Chiara aside and quietly asked whether they needed professional help.

“You both look as if you haven’t slept in weeks.”

“We haven’t,” said Gabriel.

“Do you want to talk to someone?”

“We’re not allowed.”

“Trouble at work?”

“Something like that.”

“Can I give you something to help you sleep?”

“We have a pharmacy in our medicine cabinet.”

“I don’t want to see you back here for at least a week. Take a trip. Get some sun. You look like ghosts.”

The next morning, shadowed by bodyguards, they drove to Eilat. For three days, they managed not to speak about Russia, or Ivan, or Grigori, or the birch forest outside Moscow. They spent their time sunning themselves on the beach or snorkeling amid the coral reefs of the Red Sea. They ate too much food, drank too much wine, and made love until they were overcome by exhaustion. On their last night, they talked about the future, about the promise Gabriel had made to leave the Office, and about where they might live. For the moment, they had no choice but to remain in Israel. To leave the country and the protective cocoon of the Office was not possible so long as Ivan was still walking the face of the earth.

“And if he wasn’t?” asked Chiara.

“We can live wherever we like—within reason, of course.”

“Then I suppose you’ll just have to kill him.”

They left Eilat the next morning and set out for Jerusalem. While crossing the Negev, Gabriel decided quite spontaneously to make a brief detour near Beersheba. His destination was a prison and interrogation center, located in the center of a restricted military zone. It housed only a handful of inmates, the so-called worst of the worst. Included in this select group was Prisoner 6754, also known as Anton Petrov, the man Ivan had hired to kidnap Grigori and Chiara. The commander of the facility arranged for Petrov to be brought to the exercise yard so Gabriel and Chiara could see him. He wore a blue-and-white tracksuit. His muscle was gone, along with most of his hair. He walked with a heavy limp.

“Too bad you didn’t kill him,” Chiara said.

“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind.”

“How long will we keep him?”

“As long as we need to.”

“And then?”

“The Americans would like a word with him.”

“Someone needs to make sure he has an accident.”

“We’ll see.”

It was dark when they arrived in Narkiss Street. Gabriel could tell by the abundance of bodyguards they had a visitor waiting upstairs in the apartment. Uzi Navot was seated in the living room. He had a dossier. He had names. Eleven names. All former KGB. All living well in Western Europe on Ivan’s money. Navot left the folder with Gabriel and said he would wait to hear from him. Gabriel allowed Chiara to make the decision.

“Kill them all,” she said.

“It’s going to take time.”

“Take as much time as you need.”

“You won’t be able to come.”

“I know.”

“You’ll go to Tiberias. Gilah will look after you.”

THEY CONVENED the next morning in Room 456C of King Saul Boulevard: Yaakov and Yossi, Dina and Rimona, Oded and Mordecai, Mikhail and Eli Lavon. Gabriel arrived last and tacked eleven photographs to the bulletin board at the front of the room. Eleven photographs of eleven Russians. Eleven Russians who would not survive the summer. The meeting did not take long. The order of death was established, the assignments were made. Travel saw to the flights, Identity to the passports and visas. Housekeeping opened many doors. Banking gave them a blank check.

They left Tel Aviv in waves, traveled in pairs, and reconvened two weeks later in Barcelona. There, on a quiet street in the Gothic Quarter, Gabriel and Mikhail killed the man who had been walking behind Grigori on Harrow Road the evening of his abduction. For his sins he was shot at close range with .22 caliber Berettas. As he lay dying in the gutter, Gabriel whispered two words into his ear.

For Grigori . . .

A week later, in the Bairro Alto of Lisbon, he whispered the same two words to the woman who had been walking toward Grigori, the woman who had carried no umbrella and had been hatless in the rain. Two weeks after that, in Biarritz, it was the turn of her partner, the man who had been walking next to her on Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge. He heard the two words while taking a midnight stroll along La Grande Plage. They were spoken to his back. When he turned, he saw Gabriel and Mikhail, arms extended, guns in their hands.

For Grigori . . .

After that, news of the killings began to circulate among those still to die. To prevent the survivors from fleeing to Russia, the Office planted false stories that it was Ivan, not the Israelis, who was responsible. Ivan had launched a Great Terror, according to the rumors. Ivan was pruning the forest. Anyone foolish enough to set foot in Russia would be killed the Russian way, with great pain and extreme violence. And so the guilty stayed in the West, close to ground, below radar. Or so they thought. But one by one they were targeted. And one by one they died.

The driver of the Mercedes that took Irina to her “reunion” with Grigori was killed in Amsterdam in the arms of a prostitute. The driver of the van that carried Grigori on the first leg of his journey back to Russia was killed while leaving a pub in Copenhagen. The two flunkies sent to kill Olga Sukhova in Oxford were next. One died in Munich, the other in Prague.

It was then Sergei Korovin made a frantic attempt to intervene. “The SVR and FSB are getting itchy,” Korovin told Shamron. “If this continues, who knows where it might lead?” In a page taken from Ivan’s playbook, Shamron professed ignorance. Then he warned Korovin that the Russian services had better watch their step. Otherwise, they were next. By that evening, Office stations across Europe detected a notable increase in security around Russian embassies and known Russian intelligence officers. It was unnecessary, of course. Gabriel and his team had no interest in targeting the innocent. Only the guilty.

At that point, just four names remained. Four operatives who had carried out the abduction of Chiara in Umbria. Four operatives who had Office blood on their hands. They knew they were being stalked and tried not to remain in one place long. Fear made them sloppy. Fear made them easy pickings. They were killed in a series of lightning-strike operations: Warsaw, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul. While dying, they heard four words instead of two.

For Lior and Motti.

By then it was nearly August. It was time to go home again.

75

TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

BUT WHAT of Ivan? For many weeks after the nightmare in the birch forest outside Moscow, he stayed out of sight. There were rumors he had been arrested. Rumors he had fled the country. Rumors, even, that he had been taken away by the FSB and killed. They were false, of course. Ivan was just observing another great Russian tradition, the tradition of internal exile. For Ivan, it was not marked by backbreaking labor or starvation rations. Ivan’s gulag was his fortresslike mansion in Zhukovka, the secret city of the oligarchs east of Moscow. And he had Yekaterina to soothe his wounds.

Though Ivan’s name was never publicly linked to the killing site in Vladimirskaya Oblast, its exposure seemed to do harm to his standing inside the Kremlin. In certain circles, much was made of the fact that Ivan’s development firm lost out on an important construction project. And that his nightclub was suddenly out of fashion with the siloviki and the other Moscow well connected. And that his luxury-car dealership saw a sudden sharp decrease in sales. These were false readings, though, more symptomatic of Russia’s troubled economy than any real decline in Ivan’s fortunes. What’s more, his arms dealings continued apace, weapons sales being one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak global financial climate. Indeed, British, American, and French intelligence all noticed a sharp spike in the number of Kharkov-owned aircraft touching down on isolated landing strips from the Middle East to Africa and beyond. And the Russian president continued to take his cut. The tsar, as Ivan liked to say, always took his cut.

NSA surveillance revealed that Ivan was aware of the systematic liquidation of Anton Petrov’s operatives and that it troubled him not at all. In Ivan’s mind, they had betrayed him and thus deserved the fate that befell them. In fact, throughout that long summer of retribution, he seemed obsessed by only two questions. Had his children been aboard the American jet that landed in Konakovo? And had they truly composed the letter of hatred handed to him by the pilot?

The children and their mother knew the answer, of course, along with the American president and a handful of his most senior officials. So, too, did the small band of Israeli intelligence officers who convened at sunset on the first Friday of August north of the ancient city of Tiberias. The occasion was Shabbat; the setting was Shamron’s honey-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The entire team was present, along with Sarah Bancroft, who had decided to spend her August holiday with Mikhail in Israel. There were spouses Gabriel had never met and children he had only seen in photographs. The presence of so many children was difficult for Chiara, especially when she saw their faces lit by the glow of the Shabbat candles. As Gilah recited the blessing, Chiara took Gabriel’s hand and held it tightly. Gabriel kissed her cheek and heard again the words she had spoken to him in Umbria. We mourn the dead and keep them in our hearts. But we live our lives.

The summer spent by the lake had done wonders for Chiara’s appearance. Her skin was deeply tanned, and her riotous dark hair was aglow with gold and auburn highlights. She smiled easily throughout the meal and even burst into laughter when Bella scolded Uzi for taking a second portion of Gilah’s famous chicken with Moroccan spice. Watching her, Gabriel could almost imagine none of it had actually happened. That it had only been a dream from which they both had finally awakened. It wasn’t true, of course, and no amount of time would ever fully heal the wounds Ivan had inflicted. Chiara was like a newly restored painting, retouched and shimmering with a fresh coat of varnish but still damaged. She would have to be handled with great care.

Gabriel had feared the gathering would be an occasion to relive the dreadful details of the affair, but it was mentioned only once, when Shamron spoke about the importance of what they had achieved. As Jews, they all had relatives whose earthly remains were turned to smoke by the crematoria or were buried in mass graves in the Baltics or the Ukraine. Their memories were kept by commemorative flames and by the index cards stored in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem. But there were no graves to visit, no headstones upon which to shed tears. By their actions in Russia, Gabriel’s team had given such a place to the relatives of the seventy thousand murdered at the killing ground in Vladimirskaya Oblast. They had paid a terrible price, and Grigori had not survived, but with their sacrifice they had given a kind of justice, perhaps even peace, to seventy thousand restless souls.