The Defector (8 page)

Gabriel found the explanation dubious at best. He entered the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Scattered among the various lotions, creams, and grooming devices were three bottles of prescription medication: one for sleep, one for anxiety, and one for migraine headaches.

“Who prescribed these?”

“A doctor who works for us.”

“Grigori never struck me as the anxious type.”

“He said it was the pressure of writing a book on deadline.”

Gabriel removed a bottle of indigestion medication and turned the label toward Seymour.

“He had a fickle stomach,” Seymour said.

“He should have eaten something other than salted herring and pasta sauce.”

Gabriel closed the cabinet and lifted the lid of the hamper. It was empty.

“Where’s his dirty laundry?”

“He dropped it off the afternoon he vanished.”

“That’s exactly what I would do if I were preparing to redefect.”

Gabriel switched off the bathroom lights and followed Seymour down a flight of steps to the sitting room. The coffee table was scattered with newspapers, a few from London, the rest from Russia: Izvestia, Kommersant, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moskovskaya Gazeta. On one corner of the table stood a Russian-style tea glass, its contents long evaporated. Next to the glass was another ashtray filled with cigarette butts. Gabriel picked through them with the tip of a pen. They were all the same: Sobranie White Russians. Just then, he heard the sound of laughter outside in the mews. Parting the blinds in the front window, he watched a pair of lovers pass arm in arm beneath his feet.

“I assume you have a camera somewhere in the courtyard?”

Seymour pointed to a downspout near the passageway.

“Any Russians dropping by for a peek?”

“No one that we’ve been able to link to the local rezidentura.”

Rezidentura was the word used by the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, to describe their operations inside local embassies. The rezident was the station chief, the rezidentura the station itself. It was a holdover from the days of the KGB. Most things about the SVR were.

“What happens when someone comes into the mews?”

“If they live here, nothing happens. If we don’t recognize them, they get a tail and a background check. Thus far, everyone’s checked out.”

“And no one’s tried to enter the cottage itself ?”

Seymour shook his head. Gabriel released the blinds and walked over to Grigori’s cluttered desk. In the center was a darkened notebook computer. Next to the computer was a telephone with a built-in answering machine. A red message light blinked softly.

“Those must be new,” Seymour said.

“Do you mind?”

Without waiting for a response, Gabriel reached down and pressed the PLAYBACK button. A high-pitched tone sounded, then a robotic male voice announced there were three new messages. The first was from Sparkle Clean Laundry and Dry-Cleaning, requesting that Mr. Bulganov collect his belongings. The second was from a producer at the BBC’s Panorama program who wished to book Mr. Bulganov for an upcoming documentary on the resurgence of Russia.

The last message was from a woman who spoke with a pronounced Russian accent. Her voice had the quality of a minor scale. C minor, thought Gabriel. Key of concentration in solemnity. Key of philosophical introspection. The woman said she had just finished reading the newest pages of the manuscript and wished to discuss them at Grigori’s convenience. She left no call-back number, nor did she mention her name. For Gabriel, it wasn’t necessary. The sound of her voice had been echoing in his memory from the moment of their first encounter. How do you do, she had said that evening in Moscow. My name is Olga Sukhova.

“I suppose we now know who wrote those notes in Grigori’s manuscript.”

“I suppose we do.”

“I want to see her, Graham.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” Seymour switched off the answering machine. “Rome has spoken. The case is closed.”

13

MAIDA VALE, LONDON

THE BLOCKS of council flats looming over Delamere Terrace looked like something the Soviets might have thrown up during the halcyon days of “developed Socialism.” Artlessly designed and poorly constructed, each building bore a very English-sounding name suggesting a peaceful countryside existence within, along with a yellow sign warning that the area was under continuous surveillance. Grigori had walked past the flats a few minutes before his disappearance. Gabriel, retracing the Russian’s steps, did so now. Though he hated to admit it, Seymour’s briefing had shaken his absolute faith in Grigori’s innocence. Did he redefect? Or was he abducted? Gabriel was certain the answer could be found here, on the streets of Maida Vale.

Show me how they did it, Grigori. Show me how they got you into that car.

He walked to Browning’s Pool and stood outside the Waterside Café, now closed and shuttered. In his mind, he replayed the video. At precisely 18:03:37, it appeared Grigori had taken note of a couple crossing Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge from Blom field Road. The man was wearing a belted raincoat and a waxed hat and holding an open umbrella in his left hand. The woman was pressed affectionately to his shoulder. She wore a woolen coat with a fur collar and was reading something—a street map, thought Gabriel, or perhaps a guidebook of some sort.

Gabriel turned now, as Grigori had turned, and walked along the edge of Browning’s Pool to the steps leading to Warwick Crescent. At the top of the steps he paused, as Grigori had paused, though he lit no cigarette. Instead, he made his way to Harrow Road, where Grigori had seen something—or someone—that made him quicken his pace. Gabriel did the same and continued on along the empty pavements for another two hundred meters.

Despite the hour, traffic along the busy four-lane thorough-fare was still thunderous. He stopped briefly near St. Mary’s Church, walked a few paces farther, and stopped again. It was here, he thought. This was the spot where Grigori had become too frightened to continue. The spot where he had frozen in his tracks and turned impulsively toward the oncoming traffic. In the recording, it had appeared as if Grigori had briefly considered attempting to cross the busy road. Then, as now, it almost certainly would have meant death by other means.

Gabriel looked to his left and saw a brick wall, six feet tall and covered in graffiti. Then he looked to his right and saw the river of steel and glass flowing along Harrow Road. Why did he stop here? And why, when a car appeared without being summoned, did he get in without hesitation? Was it a prearranged bolt-hole? Or a perfectly sprung trap?

Help me, Grigori. Did they send an old enemy to frighten you into coming home? Or did they send a friend to take you gently by the hand?

Gabriel gazed into the glare of the oncoming headlamps. And for an instant he glimpsed a small, well-dressed figure advancing toward him along the pavement, tapping his umbrella. Then he saw the woman. A woman in a car-length leather coat who carried no umbrella. A woman who was hatless in the rain. She brushed past him now, as if late for an appointment, and hurried off along Harrow Road. Gabriel tried to recall the features of her face but could not. They were ghostlike and fragmentary, like the first faint lines of an unfinished sketch. And so he stood there alone, London’s rush hour roaring in his ears, and watched her disappear into the darkness.

14

WEST LONDON

IT HAD BEEN more than thirty-six hours since Gabriel had slept, and he was bone-weary with exhaustion. Under normal circumstances, he would have contacted the local station and requested use of a safe flat. That was not an option, since assets from the local station were probably engaged in a frantic search for him at that very moment. He would have to stay in a hotel. And not a nice hotel with computerized registration that could be searched by sophisticated data-mining software. It would have to be the sort of hotel that accepted cash and laughed at requests for amenities like room service, telephones that functioned, and clean towels.

The Grand Hotel Berkshire was just such a place. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Crom well Road. The night manager, a tired man in a tired gray sweater, expressed little surprise when Gabriel said he had no reservation and even less when he announced he would pay the bill for his stay—three nights, perhaps two if his business went well—entirely in cash. He then handed the manager a pair of crisp twenty-pound notes and said he was expecting no visitors of any kind, nor did he want to be disturbed by telephone calls or maid service. The night manager slipped the money into his pocket and promised Gabriel’s stay would be both private and secure. Gabriel bade him a pleasant evening and saw himself upstairs to his room.

Located on the third floor overlooking the busy street, it stank of loneliness and the last occupant’s appalling cologne. Closing the door behind him, Gabriel found himself overcome by a sudden wave of depression. How many nights had he spent in rooms just like it? Perhaps Chiara was right. Perhaps it was time to finally leave the Office and allow the fighting to be done by other men. He would take to the hills of Umbria and give his new wife the child she so desperately wanted, the child Gabriel had denied himself because of what had happened on a snowy night in Vienna in another lifetime. He had not chosen that life. It had been chosen for him by others. It had been chosen by Yasir Arafat and a band of Palestinian terrorists known as Black September. And it had been chosen by Ari Shamron.

Shamron had come for him on a brilliant afternoon in Jerusalem in September 1972. Gabriel was a promising young painter who had forsaken a post in an elite military unit to pursue his formal training at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Shamron had just been given command of Operation Wrath of God, the secret Israeli intelligence operation to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. He required an instrument of vengeance, and Gabriel was exactly the sort of young man for whom he was searching: brash but intelligent, loyal but independent, emotionally cold but inherently decent. He also spoke fluent German with the Berlin accent of his mother and had traveled extensively in Europe as a child.

After a month of intense training, Shamron dispatched him to Rome, where he killed a man named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter in the foyer of an apartment building in the Piazza Annibaliano. He and his team of operatives then spent the next three years stalking their prey across Western Europe, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that, at any moment, they would be arrested by European police and charged as murderers.

When finally Gabriel returned home again, his temples were the color of ash and his face was that of a man twenty years his senior. Leah, whom he had married shortly before leaving Israel, scarcely recognized him when he entered their apartment. A gifted artist in her own right, she asked him to sit for a portrait. Rendered in the style of Egon Schiele, it showed a haunted young man, aged prematurely by the shadow of death. The canvas was among the finest Leah ever produced. Gabriel had always hated it, for it portrayed with brutal honesty the toll Wrath of God had taken on him.

Physically exhausted and stripped of his desire to paint, he sought refuge in Venice, where he studied the craft of restoration under the renowned Umberto Conti. When his apprenticeship was complete, Shamron summoned him back to active duty. Working undercover as a professional art restorer, Gabriel eliminated Israel’s most dangerous foes and carried out a series of quiet investigations that earned him important friends in Washington, the Vatican, and London. But he had powerful adversaries as well. He could not walk a street without the nagging fear that he was being stalked by one of his enemies. Nor could he sleep in a hotel room without first barricading the door with a chair, which he did now.

He loaded the disk of the CCTV footage into the in-room DVD player, then, after removing only his shoes, climbed into the bed. For the next several hours he watched the surveillance video over and over, trying to blend what he could see on the screen with what he had experienced on the streets of Maida Vale. Unable to find the connection, he switched off the television. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the images of Grigori’s final moments appeared like photographs on an overhead projector. Grigori entering a car on Harrow Road. A well-dressed man with an umbrella. A woman in a leather coat, hatless in the rain. The last image dissolved into a painting, darkened by a layer of dirty varnish. Gabriel closed his eyes, dipped a swab in solvent, and twirled it gently against the surface.

THE ANSWER came to him an hour before dawn. He groped in the gloom for the remote and pointed it at the screen. A few seconds later, it flickered to life. It was 17:47 last Tuesday. Grigori Bulganov was standing in the passageway of Bristol Mews. At 17:48, he dropped his cigarette and started walking.

H E FOLLOWED the now-familiar route to the Waterside Café. At 18:03:37, the young couple appeared precisely on schedule, belted raincoat for the man, woolen coat with fur collar for the woman. Gabriel reversed the image and watched the scene again, then a third time. Then he pressed PAUSE. According to the time code, it was 18:04:25 when the couple reached the end of the Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge. If the operation had been well planned—and all evidence suggested it had—there was plenty of time.

Gabriel advanced the video to the final thirty seconds and watched one last time as Grigori entered the back of the Mercedes. As the car slid from view, a small, well-dressed man entered from the left. Then, a few seconds later, came the woman in the car-length leather coat. No umbrella. Hatless in the rain.

Gabriel froze the image and looked at her shoes.

15

WESTMINSTER, LONDON

IT WAS BITTERLY COLD in Parliament Square, but not cold enough to keep the protesters at bay. There was the inevitable demonstration against the crimes of Israel, another calling for the Americans to leave Iraq, and still another that predicted the south of England would soon be turned to desert by global warming. Gabriel walked to the other side of the square and sat on an empty bench, opposite the North Tower of Westminster Abbey. It was the same bench where he had once waited for the daughter of the American ambassador to be delivered to the abbey by two jihadist suicide bombers. He wondered whether Graham Seymour had chosen the spot intentionally or if the unpleasantness of that morning had simply slipped his mind.