45
THE MASSIF DES MAURES, FRANCE
They adjourned to the terrace. It was small, cluttered with potted herbs and flowers, and shaded by a pair of umbrella pine. An ancient olive grove spilled into a small gorge, and on the opposite hillside stood two tiny villas that looked as though they had been rendered by the hand of Cézanne. Somewhere in the distance, a child was crying hysterically for its mother. Elena did her best to ignore it while she told Gabriel the rest of the story. Her quiet lunch with Olga Sukhova. The nightmare of Aleksandr Lubin’s murder in Courchevel. The near breakdown she had suffered after Boris Ostrovsky’s death in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“I shut myself off from the outside world. I stopped watching television. I stopped reading the newspaper. I was afraid—afraid that I would learn an airplane had been shot down, or another journalist had been murdered because of me. Eventually, as time went by, I was able to convince myself it had never actually happened. There were no missiles, I told myself. There was no delegation of warlords who had come to my home to buy weapons from my husband. There was no secret plan to divert a portion of the consignment to the terrorists of al-Qaeda. In fact, there were no terrorists at all. It had all been a bad dream. A misunderstanding of some sort. A hoax. Then I got a telephone call from my friend Alistair Leach about a painting by Mary Cassatt. And here I am.”
On the other side of the ravine, the child was still wailing. “Won’t someone help that poor thing?” She looked at Gabriel. “Do you have children, Mr. Allon?”
He hesitated, then answered truthfully. “I had a son,” he said quietly. “A terrorist put a bomb in my car. He was angry at me because I killed his brother. It exploded while my wife and son were inside.”
“And your wife?”
“She survived.” He gazed silently across the gorge for a moment. “It might have been better if she hadn’t. It took me a few seconds to get her out of the car. She was burned very badly in the fire.”
“My God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t—”
“It’s all right, Elena. It was a long time ago.”
“Did it happen in Israel?”
“No, not in Israel. It was in Vienna. Not far from the cathedral.”
On the other side of the ravine, the child fell silent. Gabriel seemed not to notice, for all his considerable concentration was now focused on the task of opening a bottle of rosé. He filled a single glass and handed it to Elena.
“Drink some. It’s important you have wine on your breath when you go home. Ivan will expect that.”
She raised the glass to her lips and watched the pine trees moving in the faint breeze.
“How did this happen? How did we end up together in this place, you and I?”
“You were brought here by a telephone you shouldn’t have answered. I was brought here by Boris Ostrovsky. I was the reason he went to Rome. He was trying to tell me about Ivan. He died in my arms before he could deliver his message. That’s why I had to go to Moscow to meet with Olga.”
“Were you with her when the assassins tried to kill her?”
He nodded his head.
“How were you able to escape that stairwell without being killed?”
“Perhaps another time, Elena. Drink some of your wine. You need to be a bit tipsy when you go home.”
She obeyed, then asked, “So, in the words of Lenin, glorious agent of the Revolution and father of the Soviet Union, what is to be done? What are we going to do about the missiles my husband has placed in the hands of murderers?”
“You’ve given us a tremendous amount of information. If we’re lucky—very lucky—we might be able to find them before the terrorists are able to carry out an attack. It will be difficult, but we’ll try.”
“Try? What do you mean? You have to stop them.”
“It’s not that easy, Elena. There’s so much we don’t know. Which country in Africa was your husband dealing with? Have the missiles been shipped? Have they already reached the hands of the terrorists? Is it already too late?”
His questions had been rhetorical but Elena reacted as though they had been directed toward her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel like such a fool.”
“Whatever for?”
“I thought that by simply telling you about the deal, you would have enough information to find the weapons before they could be used. But what have I accomplished? Two people are dead. My friend is a prisoner in her Moscow apartment. And my husband’s missiles are still out there somewhere.”
“I didn’t say it was impossible, Elena. Only that it was going to be difficult.”
“What else do you need?”
“A paper trail would help.”
“What does that mean?”
“End-user certificates. Invoices. Shipping records. Transit documents. Banking records. Wire transfers. Anything we can lay our hands on to track the sale or the flow of the merchandise.”
She was silent for a moment. Her voice, when finally she spoke, was barely audible over the sound of the wind moving in the treetops.
“I think I know where that information might be,” she said.
Gabriel looked at her. “Where, Elena?”
“In Moscow.”
“Is it somewhere we can get to it?”
“Not you. I would have to do it for you. And I would have to do it alone.”
My husband is a devout Stalinist. It is not something he generally acknowledges, even in Russia.”
Elena drank a bit of the rosé, then held it up to the fading sunlight to examine the color.
“His love of Stalin has influenced his real estate purchases. Zhukovka, the area where we now live outside Moscow, was actually a restricted dacha village once, reserved for only the most senior Party officials and a few special scientists and musicians. Ivan’s father was never senior enough in rank to earn a dacha in Zhukovka, and Ivan was always deeply resentful of this. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when it became possible for anyone with enough money to acquire property there, he bought a plot of land that had been owned by Stalin’s daughter. He also bought a large apartment in the House on the Embankment. He uses it as a pied-à-terre and keeps a private office there. I also assume he uses it as a place to take his lovers. I’ve been only a few times. It’s filled with ghosts, that building. The residents say that if you listen carefully at night, you can still hear the screaming.”
She looked at Gabriel for a moment in silence.
“Do you know the building I’m talking about, Mr. Allon? The House on the Embankment?”
“The big building on Serafimovicha Street with the Mercedes-Benz star on top. It was built for the most senior members of the nomenklatura in the early thirties. During the Great Terror, Stalin turned it into a house of horror.”
“You’ve obviously done your homework.” She peered into the wineglass. “Stalin murdered nearly eight hundred residents of that building, including the man who lived in my husband’s apartment. He was a senior official in the Foreign Ministry. Stalin’s henchmen suspected him of being a spy for the Germans, and for that he was taken to the killing fields of Butovo and shot. No one really knows how many of Stalin’s victims are buried out there. A few years ago, the government turned the property over to the Orthodox Church, and they’ve been carefully searching for the remains ever since. There is no sadder place in Russia than Butovo, Mr. Allon. Widows and orphans filing past the trenches, wondering where their husbands and fathers might lie. We mourn Stalin’s victims in Butovo while men like my husband pay millions for their flats in the House on the Embankment. Only in Russia.”
“Where’s the flat?”
“On the ninth floor, overlooking the Kremlin. He and Arkady keep a guard on duty there twenty-four hours a day. The doors to Ivan’s office have a wood veneer, but underneath they’re bombproof steel. There’s a keypad entrance with a biometric fingerprint scanner. Only three people have the code and fingerprint clearance: Ivan, Arkady, and me. Inside the office is a p
assword-protected computer. There’s also another vault, same keypad and biometric scanner, same password and procedure. All my husband’s secrets are in that vault. They’re stored on disks with KGB encryption software.”
“Are you allowed to enter his office?”
“Under normal circumstances, only when I’m with Ivan. But, in an emergency, I can enter alone.”
“What kind of an emergency?”
“The kind that could happen if Ivan ever fell out of favor with the men who sit across the river in the Kremlin. Under such a scenario, he always assumed that he and Arkady would be arrested together. It would then be up to me, he said, to make certain the files hidden in that vault never fell into the wrong hands.”
“Are you supposed to remove them?”
She shook her head. “The interior of the vault is lined with explosives. Ivan showed me where the detonator button was hidden and taught me how to arm and fire it. He assured me the explosives had been carefully calibrated: just enough to destroy the contents of the safe without causing any other damage.”
“What’s the password?”
“He uses the numeric version of Stalin’s birthday: December 21, 1879. But the password alone is useless. You need my thumb as well. And don’t think about trying to create something that will fool the scanner. The guard will never open the door to someone he doesn’t recognize. I’m the only one who can get inside that apartment, and I’m the only one who can get inside the vault.”
Gabriel stood and walked to the low stone parapet at the edge of the terrace. “There’s no way for you to take those disks without Ivan’s finding out. And if he does, he’ll kill you—just the way he killed Aleksandr Lubin and Boris Ostrovsky.”
“He won’t be able to kill me if he can’t find me. And he won’t be able to find me if you and your friends do a good job of hiding me away.” She paused for a moment to allow her words to have their full impact. “And the children, of course. You would have to think of some way to get my children away from Ivan.”
Gabriel turned slowly around. “Do you understand what you’re saying?”
“I believe that during the Cold War we referred to such operations as defections.”
“Your life as you know it will be over, Elena. You’ll lose the houses. You’ll lose the money. You’ll lose your Cassatts. No more winters in Courchevel. No more summers in Saint-Tropez. No more endless shopping excursions in Knightsbridge. You’ll never be able to set foot in Russia again. And you’ll spend the rest of your life hiding from Ivan. Think carefully, Elena. Are you really willing to give up everything in order to help us?”’
“What am I giving up, exactly? I’m married to a man who has sold a cache of missiles to al-Qaeda and has killed two journalists in order to keep it a secret. A man who holds me in such contempt that he thinks nothing of bringing his mistress into my home. My life is a lie. All I have are my children. I’ll get you those disks and defect to the West. All you have to do is get my children away from Ivan. Just promise me that nothing will happen to them.”
She reached out and took hold of his wrist. His skin was ablaze, as though he were suffering from a fever.
“Surely a man who can forge a painting by Mary Cassatt, or arrange a meeting like this, can think of some way of getting my children away from their father.”
“You were able to see through my forgery.”
“That’s because I’m good.”
“You’ll have to be more than good to fool Ivan. You’ll have to be perfect. And if you’re not, you could end up dead.”
“I’m a Leningrad girl. I grew up in a Party family. I know how to beat them at their own game. I know the rules.” She squeezed his wrist and looked directly into his eyes. “You just have to think of some way to get me back to Moscow that won’t make Ivan suspicious.”
“And then we have to get you out again. And get the children.”
“That, too.”
He added more wine to her glass and sat down next to her.
“I hear your mother hasn’t been well.”
“How did you hear that?”
“Because we’ve been listening to your telephone conversations. All of them.”
“She had a dizzy spell last week. She’s been begging me to come to see her.”
“Perhaps you should. After all, it seems to me a woman in your position might actually want to spend some time with your mother, given everything your husband has put you through.”
“Yes, I think I might.”
“Can your mother be trusted?”
“She absolutely loathes Ivan. Nothing would make her happier than for me to leave him.”
“She’s in Moscow now?”
Elena nodded. “We brought her there after my father died. Ivan bought her a lovely apartment in a new building on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, which she resents terribly.”
Gabriel placed a hand thoughtfully against his chin and tilted his head slightly to one side.
“I’m going to need a letter. It will have to be in your own hand. It will also have to contain enough personal information about you and your family to let your mother know for certain that you wrote it.”
“And then?”
“Mikhail is going to take you home to your husband. And you’re going to do your best to forget this conversation ever happened.”
At that same moment, in a darkened operations room at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv, Ari Shamron removed a pair of headphones and cast a lethal glance at Uzi Navot.
“Tell me something, Uzi. When did I authorize a defection?”
“I’m not sure you ever did, boss.”
“Send the lad a message. Tell him to be in Paris by tomorrow night. Tell him I’d like a word.”
46
THE MASSIF DES MAURES, FRANCE
What did you think of him?"”
The voice had spoken to her in Russian. Elena turned around quickly and saw Mikhail standing in the open French doors, hands in his pockets, sunglasses propped on his forehead.
“He’s remarkable,” she said. “Where did he go?”
Mikhail acted as though he had not heard the question.
“You can trust him, Elena. You can trust him with your life. And with the lives of your children.” He held out his hand. “I need to show you a few things before we leave.”
Elena followed him back into the villa. In her absence, the rustic wooden table had been laid with a lovers’ banquet. Mikhail’s voice, when he spoke, had a bedroom intimacy.
“We had lunch, Elena. It was waiting on the table just like this when we arrived. Remember it, Elena. Remember exactly how it looked.”