The Defector (34 page)

With the children’s plane now bound for Russia, Gabriel felt his nerves turn to piano wire. He tried to slow his racing heart, but his body refused his commands. He tried to close his eyes, but saw only satellite photos of the little dacha in the birch forest. And the room where Chiara and Grigori were surely being kept chained and bound. And the four streams that converged in a great marshland. And the parallel depressions in the woods.

My husband is a devout Stalinist . . . His love of Stalin has influenced his real estate purchases.

The secure PDA helped pass the time. It told him that Navot, Yaakov, and Oded were proceeding to the target. It told him that the concealed camera had detected no change at the dacha or in the disposition of Ivan’s forces. It told him that God had granted them a heavy ground fog over the marshes to help conceal their approach. And finally, at 1:48 a.m., it told him that it was nearly time to leave.

Gabriel had dressed long ago and was sweating beneath layer upon layer of protective clothing. He forced himself to remain in the room a few minutes longer, then switched off the lights and slipped quietly into the corridor. As the clock in the lobby tolled 2 a.m., he stepped from the elevator and passed Khrushchev’s doppelgänger with a curt nod. The Range Rover was waiting in Teatralnyy Prospekt, engine running. Mikhail drummed his fingers nervously as they swept up the hill toward FSB Headquarters.

“You okay, Mikhail?”

“I’m fine, boss.”

“You’re not nervous, are you?”

“Why would I be nervous? I love being around Lubyanka. The KGB kept my father in there for six months when I was a kid. Did I ever tell you that, Gabriel?”

He had.

“Do you have the guns?”

“Plenty.”

“Radios?”

“Of course.”

“Sat phone?”

“Gabriel, please.”

“Coffee?”

“Two thermoses. One for us, one for them.”

“What about the bolt cutters?”

“A pair for each of us. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“One of us goes down.”

“Nobody’s going down except Ivan’s guards.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Mikhail resumed his tapping.

“You’re not going to do that all the way?”

“I’ll try not to.”

“That’s good. Because you’re giving me a headache.”

MOSCOW REFUSED to relinquish its grip on them without a fight. It took thirty minutes just to get from Lubyanka to the MKAD outer ring road: thirty minutes of traffic jams, broken signal lights, sinkholes, crime scenes, and unexplained militia roadblocks. “And it’s two in the morning,” Mikhail said in exasperation. “Imagine what it’s like during the evening rush, when half of Moscow is trying to get home at the same time.”

“If it continues like this, we won’t have to imagine.”

Once beyond the city, the massive apartment houses began to gradually disappear only to be replaced by mile after mile of smoking rail yards and factories. They were, of course, the biggest factories Gabriel had ever seen—behemoths with towering smokestacks and scarcely a light burning anywhere. A freight train rattled by heading in the opposite direction. It seemed to take an eternity to pass. It was five miles long, thought Gabriel. Or perhaps it was a hundred. Surely it was the world’s longest.

They were driving on the M7. It ran eastward into Russia’s vast middle, all the way through Tatarstan. And if you were feeling really adventurous, Mikhail explained, you could hit the Trans-Siberian in Ufa and drive to Mongolia and China. “China, Gabriel! Can you imagine driving to China?”

Actually, Gabriel could. The sheer scale of the place made anything possible: the endless black sky filled with hard white stars, the vast frozen plains dotted with slumbering towns and villages, the unbearable cold. In some of the villages he could see onion domes shining in the bright moonlight. Ivan’s hero had been hard on the churches of Russia. He’d ordered Kaganovich to dynamite Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1931—supposedly because it blocked the view from the windows of his Kremlin apartment—and in the countryside he’d turned the churches into barns and grain silos. Some were now being restored. Others, like the villages they once served, were in ruins. It was Russia’s dirty little secret. The glitz and glamour of Moscow was matched only by the poverty and deprivation of the countryside. Moscow got the money, the villages got absentee governors and the occasional visit from some Kremlin flunky. They were the places you left behind to make your fortune in the big city. They were for the losers. In the villages, you did nothing but drink and curse the rich bastards in Moscow.

They flashed through a string of towns, each more desolate than the last: Lakinsk, Demidovo, Vorsha. Ahead lay Vladimir, capital of the oblast. Its five-domed Cathedral of the Assumption had been the model for all the cathedrals of Russia—the cathedrals Stalin had destroyed or turned into pigpens. Mikhail explained that people had been living in and around Vladimir for twenty-five thousand years, an impressive statistic even for a boy from the Valley of Jezreel. Twenty-five thousand years, Gabriel thought, gazing out at the broken factories on the city’s western outskirts. Why had they come? Why had they stayed?

Reclining his seat, he saw an image of his last late-night drive through the Russian countryside: Olga and Elena sleeping in the backseat, Grigori behind the wheel. Promise me one thing, Gabriel . . . At least then they had been driving out of Russia, not directly into the belly of the beast. Mikhail found a news bulletin on the radio and provided simultaneous translation while he drove. The first day of the G-8 summit had gone well, at least from the point of view of the Russian president, which was the only one that mattered. Then, by some miracle of atmospheric conditions, Mikhail found a BBC bulletin in English. There had been an important political development in Zimbabwe. A fatal plane crash in South Korea. And in Afghanistan, Taliban forces had carried out a major raid in Kabul. With Ivan’s guns, no doubt.

“Is it possible to drive to Afghanistan from here?”

“Sure,” said Mikhail. He then proceeded to recite the road numbers and the distances while Vladimir, center of human habitation for twenty-five millennia, receded once more into the darkness.

They listened to the BBC until the signal became too faint to hear. Then Mikhail switched off the radio and again began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Something bothering you, Mikhail?”

“Maybe we should talk about it. I’d feel better if we ran through it a couple of hundred times.”

“That’s not like you. I need you to be confident.”

“It’s your wife in there, Gabriel. I’d hate to think that something I did—”

“You’re going to be just fine. But if you want to run through it a couple of hundred times . . .” Gabriel’s voice trailed off as he looked out at the limitless frozen landscape. “It’s not as if we have anything better to do.”

Mikhail’s voice dropped in pitch slightly as he began to speak about the operation. The key to everything, he said, would be speed. They had to overwhelm them quickly. A sentry will always hesitate for an instant, even when confronted with someone he doesn’t know. That instant would be their opening. They would take it swiftly and decisively. “And no gunfights,” Mikhail said. “Gunfights are for cowboys and gangsters.”

Mikhail was neither. He was Sayeret Matkal, the most elite unit on earth. The Sayeret had pulled off operations other units could only dream of. It had done Entebbe and Sabena and jobs much harder that no one would ever read about. Mikhail had dispensed death to the terror masterminds of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade. He had even crossed into Lebanon and killed members of Hezbollah. They had been hellish operations, carried out in crowded cities and refugee camps. Not one had failed. Not a single terrorist targeted by Mikhail was still walking the earth. A dacha in a birch forest was nothing for a man like him. Ivan’s guards were special forces themselves: Alpha Group and OMON. Even so, Mikhail spoke of them only in the past tense. As far as he was concerned, they were already dead. Silence, speed, and timing would be the key.

Silence, speed, timing . . . Shamron’s holy trinity.

Unlike Mikhail, Gabriel had never carried out assassinations in the West Bank or Gaza, and, for the most part, had managed to avoid operating in Arab countries. One notable exception was Abu Jihad, the nom de guerre of Khalil al-Wazir, the second-highest-ranking figure in the PLO after Yasir Arafat. Like all Sayeret recruits, Mikhail had studied every aspect of the operation during his training, but he had never asked Gabriel about that night. He did so now as they thundered along the deserted highway. And Gabriel obliged him, though he would regret it later.

Abu Jihad . . . Even now, the sound of his name put ice at the back of Gabriel’s neck. In April of 1988, this symbol of Palestinian suffering was living in splendid exile in Tunis, in a large villa near the beach. Gabriel had personally surveilled the house and the surrounding district and had overseen the construction of a duplicate in the Negev, where they had rehearsed for several weeks prior to the operation. On the night of the hit, he had come ashore in a rubber boat and climbed into a waiting van. In a matter of minutes, it was over. There had been a guard outside the house, dozing behind the wheel of a Mercedes. Gabriel had shot him through the ear with a silenced Beretta. Then, with the help of his Sayeret escorts, he had blown the front door off the hinges with a special explosive that emitted little more sound than a handclap. After killing a second guard in the front entrance hall, Gabriel had crept quietly up the stairs to Abu Jihad’s study. So silent was Gabriel’s approach that the PLO mastermind never heard a thing. He died at his desk while watching a videotape of the intifada.

Silence, speed, timing . . . Shamron’s holy trinity.

“And afterward?” Mikhail asked softly.

Afterward . . . A scene from Gabriel’s nightmares.

Leaving the study, he had run straight into Abu Jihad’s wife. She was clutching a small boy to her breast in terror and clinging to the arm of her teenage daughter. Gabriel looked at the woman and in Arabic shouted: “Go back to your room!” Then he had said calmly to the girl: “Go and take care of your mother.”

Go and take care of your mother . . .

There were few nights when he did not see the face of that child. And he saw it now, as they turned off the highway and headed into the northernmost reaches of the oblast. Sometimes, Gabriel wondered whether he would have pulled the trigger had he known the girl was standing at his back. And sometimes, in his darker moments, he wondered whether everything that had befallen him since was not God’s punishment for killing a man in front of his family. Now, as he had done countless times before, he nudged the child gently from his thoughts and watched as Mikhail made another turn, this time into a dense stand of pine and fir. The headlamps went dark, the engine silent.

“How far is the property?”

“Two miles.”

“How long to make the drive?”

“Five minutes. We’ll take it nice and slow.”

“You’re sure, Mikhail? Timing is everything.”

“I’ve done it twice. I’m sure.”

Mikhail began drumming his fingers on the console. Gabriel ignored him and looked at the clock: 6:25. The waiting . . . Waiting for the sun to rise before a morning of killing. Waiting to hold Chiara in his arms. Waiting for the child of Abu Jihad to forgive him. He poured himself a cup of coffee and loaded his weapons.

6:26 . . . 6:27 . . . 6:28 . . .

THE SUN set fire to the snowbank. Chiara did not know whether it was sunrise or sunset. But as the light fell upon Grigori’s sleeping face, she had a premonition of death, so clear that it seemed a stone had been laid over her heart. She heard the sound of the latch and watched as the woman with milk-white skin and translucent eyes entered the cell. The woman had food: stale bread, cold sausage, tea in paper cups. Whether it was breakfast or dinner, Chiara was not certain. The woman withdrew, locking the door behind her. Chiara held her tea between shackled hands and looked at the burning snowbank. As usual, the light remained only a few minutes. Then the fire was extinguished, and the room plunged once more into pitch-blackness.

61

KONAKOVO, RUSSIA

LIKE RUSSIA ITSELF, the airfield at Konakovo had been a two-time loser. Abandoned by the air force shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was allowed to crumble into a state of ruin before finally being taken over by a consortium of businessmen and civic leaders. For a brief period, it experienced modest success as a commercial cargo facility, only to see its fortunes plummet a second time with the price of Russian crude. The airfield now handled fewer than a dozen flights a week and was used mainly as a rest home for decaying Antonovs, Ilyushins, and Tupolevs. But its runway, at twelve thousand feet, was still one of the longest in the region, and its landing lights and radar systems functioned well by Russian standards, which is to say they worked most of the time.

All systems were in good working order that Friday morning, and great effort had been made to plow and treat the runway and tarmac. And with good reason. The control tower had been informed by the Kremlin that an American Air Force C-32 would be landing at Konakovo at 9 a.m. sharp. What’s more, a delegation of hotshots from the Foreign Ministry and customs would be on hand to greet the aircraft and expedite arrival procedures. Airport authorities had not been told the identity of the arriving passengers, and they knew far better than to press the matter. One didn’t ask too many questions when the Kremlin was involved. Not unless one wanted the FSB knocking on one’s door.

The Moscow delegation arrived shortly after eight and was waiting at the edge of the windswept tarmac when a string of lights appeared against the overcast sky to the south. A few of the officials initially mistook the lights for the American plane, which was not possible since the C-32 was still a hundred miles out and would be landing from the west, not the southeast. As the lights drew closer, the brittle air was filled with the beating of rotors. There were three helicopters in all, and even from a long way off it was clear they were not of Russian manufacture. Someone in the control tower identified them as custom-fitted Bell 427s. Someone in the delegation said that would make sense. Ivan Kharkov might be willing to put a load of weapons on a Russian rust bucket, but when it came to his family he only flew American.