The Other Woman: A Novel

  The young man trailing Gabriel through the rooms of the museum was called Oren. He was the head of Gabriel’s security detail, an unwanted fringe benefit of a recent promotion. They had been traveling for the past thirty-six hours, by plane from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then by automobile from Paris to Vienna. Now they walked through the deserted exhibition rooms to the steps of the museum. A snowstorm had commenced, big downy flakes falling straight in the windless night. An ordinary visitor to the city might have found it picturesque, the trams slithering along sugar-dusted streets lined with empty palaces and churches. But not Gabriel. Vienna always depressed him, never more so than when it snowed.

  The car waited in the street, the driver behind the wheel. Gabriel pulled the collar of his old Barbour jacket around his ears and informed Oren that he intended to walk to the safe flat.

  “Alone,” he added.

  “I can’t let you walk around Vienna unprotected, boss.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re the chief now. And if something happens—”

  “You’ll say you were following orders.”

  “Just like the Austrians.” In the darkness the bodyguard handed Gabriel a Jericho 9mm pistol. “At least take this.”

  Gabriel slipped the Jericho into the waistband of his trousers. “I’ll be at the safe flat in thirty minutes. I’ll let King Saul Boulevard know when I’ve arrived.”

  King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s secret intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Even the chief referred to it as the Office and nothing else.

  “Thirty minutes,” repeated Oren.

  “And not a minute more,” pledged Gabriel.

  “And if you’re late?”

  “It means I’ve been assassinated or kidnapped by ISIS, the Russians, Hezbollah, the Iranians, or someone else I’ve managed to offend. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for my survival.”

  “What about us?”

  “You’ll be fine, Oren.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t want you anywhere near the safe flat,” said Gabriel. “Keep moving until you hear from me. And remember, don’t try to follow me. That’s a direct order.”

  The bodyguard stared at Gabriel in silence, an expression of concern on his face.

  “What is it now, Oren?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want some company, boss?”

  Gabriel turned without another word and disappeared into the night.

  He crossed the Burgring and set out along the footpaths of the Volksgarten. He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, but no more—and had the spare physique of a cyclist. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with wide cheekbones and a slender nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The eyes were an unnatural shade of green; the hair was dark and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and Gabriel had the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. He spoke five languages fluently, including Italian, which he had acquired before traveling to Venice in the mid-1970s to study the craft of art conservation. Afterward, he had lived as a taciturn if gifted restorer named Mario Delvecchio while simultaneously serving as an intelligence officer and assassin for the Office. Some of his finest work had been performed in Vienna. Some of his worst, too.

  He skirted the edge of the Burgtheater, the German-speaking world’s most prestigious stage, and followed the Bankgasse to the Café Central, one of Vienna’s most prominent coffeehouses. There he peered through the frosted windows and in his memory glimpsed Erich Radek, colleague of Adolf Eichmann, tormentor of Gabriel’s mother, sipping an Einspänner at a table alone. Radek the murderer was hazy and indistinct, like a figure in a painting in need of restoration.

  “Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  “Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The image dissolved. Gabriel turned away and walked to the old Jewish Quarter. Before the Second World War it was home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. Now that community was largely a memory. He watched a few old men stepping tremulously from the discreet doorway of the Stadttempel, Vienna’s main synagogue, then made his way to a nearby square lined with restaurants. One was the Italian restaurant where he had eaten his last meal with Leah, his first wife, and Daniel, their only child.

  In an adjacent street was the spot where their car had been parked. Gabriel slowed involuntarily, paralyzed by memories. He recalled struggling with the straps of his son’s car seat and the faint taste of wine on his wife’s lips as he gave her one last kiss. And he remembered the sound of the engine hesitating—like a record played at the wrong speed—because the bomb was pulling power from the battery. Too late, he had shouted at Leah not to turn the key a second time. Then, in a flash of brilliant white, she and the child were lost to him forever.

  Gabriel’s heart was tolling like an iron bell. Not now, he told himself as tears blurred his vision, he had work to do. He tilted his face to the sky.

  Isn’t it beautiful? The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv . . .

  He checked the time on his wristwatch; he had ten minutes to get to the safe flat. As he hurried along empty streets, he was gripped by an overwhelming sense of impending doom. It was only the weather, he assured himself. Vienna always depressed him. Never more so than when it snowed.

  3

  Vienna

  The safe flat was located across the Donaukanal, in a fine old Biedermeier apartment building in the Second District. It was a busier quarter, a real neighborhood rather than a museum. There was a little Spar market, a pharmacy, a couple of Asian restaurants, even a Buddhist temple. Cars and motorbikes came and went along the street; pedestrians moved along the pavements. It was the sort of place where no one would notice the chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service. Or a Russian defector, thought Gabriel.

  He turned through a passageway, crossed a courtyard, and entered a foyer. The stairs were in darkness, and on the fourth-floor landing a door hung slightly ajar. He slipped inside, closed the door behind him, and padded quietly into the sitting room, where Eli Lavon sat behind an array of open notebook computers. Lavon looked up, saw the snow on Gabriel’s cap and shoulders, and frowned.

  “Please tell me you didn’t walk.”

  “The car broke down. I had no other choice.”

  “That’s not the way your bodyguard tells it. You’d better let King Saul Boulevard know you’re here. Otherwise, the nature of our operation is likely to turn into a search and rescue.”

  Gabriel leaned over one of the computers, typed a brief message, and shot it securely to Tel Aviv.

  “Crisis averted,” said Lavon.

  He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his crumpled tweed jacket, and an ascot at his throat. His hair was wispy and unkempt; the features of his face were bland and easily forgotten. It was one of his greatest assets. Eli Lavon appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest. He oversaw the Office division known as Neviot. Its operatives included surveillance artists, pickpockets, thieves, and those who specialized in planting hidden cameras and listening devices behind locked doors. His teams had been very busy that evening in Budapest.

  He nodded toward one of the computers. It showed a man seated at the desk of an upscale hotel room. An unopened bag lay at the foot of the bed. Before him was a mobile phone and an ampule.

  “Is that a photograph?” asked Gabriel.

  “Video.”

  Gabriel tapped the screen of the laptop.

  “He can’t actually hear you, you know.”

  “Are you sure he’s alive?”

>   “He’s scared to death. He hasn’t moved a muscle in five minutes.”

  “What’s he so afraid of?”

  “He’s Russian,” said Lavon, as if that fact alone were explanation enough.

  Gabriel studied Heathcliff as though he were a figure in a painting. His real name was Konstantin Kirov, and he was one of the Office’s most valuable sources. Only a small portion of Kirov’s intelligence had concerned Israel’s security directly, but the enormous surplus had paid dividends in London and Langley, where the directors of MI6 and the CIA eagerly feasted on each batch of secrets that spilled from the Russian’s attaché case. The Anglo-Americans had not dined for free. Both services had helped to foot the bill for the operation, and the British, after much inter-service arm-twisting, had agreed to grant Kirov sanctuary in the United Kingdom.

  The first face the Russian would see after defecting, however, would be the face of Gabriel Allon. Gabriel’s history with the Russian intelligence service and the men in the Kremlin was long and blood-soaked. For that reason he wanted to personally conduct Kirov’s initial debriefing. Specifically, he wanted to know exactly what Kirov had discovered, and why he suddenly needed to defect. Then Gabriel would place the Russian in the hands of MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna. Gabriel was more than happy to let the British have him. Blown agents were invariably a headache, especially blown Russian agents.

  At last, Kirov stirred.

  “That’s a relief,” said Gabriel.

  The image on the screen deteriorated into digital tile for a few seconds before returning to normal.

  “It’s been like that all evening,” explained Lavon. “The team must have put the transmitter on top of some interference.”

  “When did they go into the room?”

  “About an hour before Heathcliff arrived. When we hacked into the hotel’s security system, we took a detour into reservations and grabbed his room number. Getting into the room itself was no problem.”

  The wizards in the Office’s Technology department had developed a magic cardkey capable of opening any electronic hotel room door in the world. The first swipe stole the code. The second opened the lock.

  “When did the interference start?”

  “As soon as he entered the room.”

  “Did anyone follow him from the airport to the hotel?”

  Lavon shook his head.

  “Any suspicious names on the hotel registry?”

  “Most of the guests are attending the conference. The Eastern European Society of Civil Engineers,” Lavon explained. “It’s a real nerds’ ball. Lots of guys with pocket protectors.”

  “You used to be one of those guys, Eli.”

  “Still am.” The shot turned to a mosaic again. “Damn,” said Lavon softly.

  “Has the team checked out the connection?”

  “Twice.”

  “And?”

  “There’s no one else on the line. And even if there was, the signal is so encrypted it would take a couple of supercomputers a month to reassemble the pieces.” The shot stabilized. “That’s more like it.”

  “Let me see the lobby.”

  Lavon tapped the keyboard of another computer, and a shot of the lobby appeared. It was a sea of ill-fitting clothing, name tags, and receding hairlines. Gabriel scanned the faces, looking for one that appeared to be out of place. He found four—two male, two female. Using the hotel’s cameras, Lavon captured still images of each and forwarded them to Tel Aviv. On the screen of the adjacent laptop, Konstantin Kirov was checking his phone.

  “How long do you intend to make him wait?” asked Lavon.

  “Long enough for King Saul Boulevard to run those faces through the database.”

  “If he doesn’t leave soon, he’ll miss his train.”

  “Better to miss his train than be assassinated in the lobby of the InterContinental by a Moscow Center hit team.” Once again, the shot turned to tile. Annoyed, Gabriel tapped the screen.

  “Don’t bother,” said Lavon. “I’ve already tried that.”

  Ten minutes elapsed before the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard declared that it could find no matches for the four faces in the Office’s digital rogues’ gallery of enemy intelligence officers, known or suspected terrorists, or private mercenaries. Only then did Gabriel compose a brief text message on an encrypted BlackBerry and tap the send key. A moment later he watched Konstantin Kirov reach for his mobile phone. After reading Gabriel’s text, the Russian rose abruptly, pulled on his overcoat, and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He slipped the mobile phone into his pocket but kept the suicide ampule in his hand. The suitcase he left behind.

  Eli Lavon tapped a few keys on the laptop as Kirov opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The hotel’s security cameras monitored his short walk to the lifts. There were no other guests or staff present, and the carriage into which the Russian stepped was empty. The lobby, however, was bedlam. No one seemed to take notice of Kirov as he made his way out of the hotel, including two leather-jacketed toughs from the Hungarian security service who were keeping watch in the street.

  It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. There was time enough for Kirov to catch the night train to Vienna, but he had to keep moving. He headed south on Apáczai Csere János Street, followed by two of Eli Lavon’s watchers, and then turned onto Kossuth Lajos Street, one of central Budapest’s main thoroughfares.

  “My boys say he’s clean,” said Lavon. “No Russians, no Hungarians.”

  Gabriel dispatched a second message to Konstantin Kirov, instructing him to board the train as planned. He did so with four minutes to spare, accompanied by the watchers. For now, there was nothing more Gabriel and Lavon could do. As they stared at one another in silence, their thoughts were identical. The waiting. Always the waiting.

  4

  Westbahnhof, Vienna

  But Gabriel and Eli Lavon did not wait alone, for on that evening they had an operational partner in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, the oldest and grandest such agency in the civilized world. Six officers from its storied Vienna Station—the exact number would soon be a matter of some contention—held a tense vigil in a locked vault at the British Embassy, and a dozen more were hovering over computers and blinking telephones at Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s riverfront headquarters in London.

  A final MI6 officer, a man called Christopher Keller, waited outside Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station, behind the wheel of an unremarkable Volkswagen Passat sedan. He had bright blue eyes, sun-bleached hair, square cheekbones, and a thick chin with a notch in the center. His mouth seemed permanently fixed in an ironic smile.

  Having little else to do that evening other than keep watch for any stray Russian hoods, Keller had contemplated the improbable path that had led him to this place. The wasted year at Cambridge, the deep-cover operation in Northern Ireland, the friendly-fire incident during the first Gulf War that cast him into self-imposed exile on the island of Corsica. There he had acquired perfect if Corsican-accented French. He had also performed services for a certain notable Corsican crime figure that might loosely be described as murder for hire. But all that was behind him. Thanks to Gabriel Allon, Christopher Keller was a respectable officer of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. He was restored.

  Keller looked at the Israeli in the passenger seat. He was tall and lanky, with bloodless skin and eyes the color of glacial ice. His expression was one of profound boredom. The anxious drumming of his fingers on the center console, however, betrayed the true state of his mind.

  Keller lit a cigarette, his fourth in twenty minutes, and blew a cloud of smoke against the windscreen.

  “Must you?” protested the Israeli.

  “I’ll stop smoking when you stop drumming your damn fingers.” Keller spoke with a posh West London drawl, a remnant of a privileged childhood. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  The Israeli’s fingers went still. His name was Mikhail Abramov. Like Keller, he was a veteran o
f an elite military unit. In Mikhail’s case, it was the IDF’s Sayeret Matkal. They had operated together several times before, most recently in Morocco, where they had tracked Saladin, the leader of ISIS’s external operations division, to a remote compound in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Neither man had fired the shot that ended Saladin’s reign of terror. Gabriel had beaten them both to the target.

  “What are you so nervous about anyway?” asked Keller. “We’re in the middle of dull, boring Vienna.”

  “Yes,” said Mikhail distantly. “Nothing ever happens here.”

  Mikhail had lived in Moscow as a child and spoke English with a faint Russian accent. His linguistic abilities and Slavic looks had allowed him to pose as a Russian in several notable Office operations.

  “You’ve operated in Vienna before?” asked Keller.

  “Once or twice.” Mikhail checked his weapon, a Jericho .45-caliber pistol. “Do you remember those four Hezbollah suicide bombers who were planning to attack the Stadttempel?”

  “I thought EKO Cobra handled that.” EKO Cobra was Austria’s tactical police unit. “In fact, I’m quite sure I read something about it in the newspapers.”

  Mikhail stared at Keller without expression.

  “That was you?”

  “I had help, of course.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Mikhail said nothing.

  “I see.”

  It was approaching midnight. The street outside the modern glass facade of the station was deserted, only a couple of taxis waiting for the last fares of the night. One would collect a Russian defector and deliver him to the Best Western hotel on the Stubenring. From there he would walk the rest of the way to the safe flat. The decision on whether to admit him would be made by Mikhail, who would be following on foot. The safe flat’s location was perhaps the most closely guarded secret of the operation. If Kirov was clean, Mikhail would search him in the building’s foyer and then take him upstairs to see Gabriel. Keller was to remain downstairs in the Passat and provide perimeter security, with what, he did not know. Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, had expressly forbidden him to carry a weapon. Keller had a well-deserved reputation for violence; Hughes, for caution. He had a nice life in Vienna—a productive network, long lunches, decent relations with the local service. The last thing he wanted was a problem that would result in him being recalled to a desk at Vauxhall Cross.