Twenty minutes into his vigil, a pair of underfed Militia officers rounded the corner, tunics glistening. Gabriel turned up the radio and nodded cordially. For a moment, he feared they might be contemplatinga shakedown. Instead, they frowned at his old Volga, as if to say he wasn’t worth their time on a rainy night. Next came a man with lank, dark hair, and an open bottle of Baltika beer in his hand. He shuffled over to Gabriel’s window and opened his coat, revealing a veritable pharmacy underneath. Gabriel motioned for him to move on, then flicked the wipers and focused his gaze on the building. Specifically, on the lights burning in the ninth-floor apartment overlooking the Kremlin.
They went dark at 7:48 P.M. The woman who emerged from the building soon after had no handbag hanging over her left shoulder. Indeed, she had no handbag at all. She was walking more swiftly than normal; Luka Osipov, bodyguard turned captor, held one arm while a colleague held another. Arkady Medvedev walked a few steps behind, head lowered against the rain, eyes up and on the move.
A Mercedes waited at the curb. The seating arrangements had clearly been determined in advance, for the boarding process was accomplished with admirable speed and efficiency: Elena in the backseat, wedged between bodyguards; Arkady Medvedev in the front passenger seat, a mobile phone now pressed to his ear. The car crept to the end of Serafimovicha Street, then disappeared in a black blur. Gabriel counted to five and slipped the Volga into gear. Forward as one.
62
MOSCOW
They roared southward out of the city on a road that bore Lenin’s name and was lined with monuments to Lenin’s folly. Apartment blocks—endless apartments blocks. The biggest apartment blocks Gabriel had ever seen. It was as if the masters of the Communist Party, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to uproot the entire population of the world’s biggest country and resettle it here, along a few wretched miles of the Leninsky Prospekt. And to think that by the end of September it would be covered beneath a blanket of snow and ice.
At that hour, the Leninsky was two different roads: inbound lanes clogged with Muscovites returning from the weekend at their dachas, outbound lanes filled with giant trucks thundering out of the capital toward the distant corners of the empire. The trucks were both his allies and enemies. One moment, they granted Gabriel a place to hide. The next, they obscured his view. Shmuel Peled had been right about the Volga—it did run decently for a twenty-year-old piece of Soviet-made junk—but it was no match for the finest automobile Bavaria had to offer. The Volga topped out at about eighty-five, and did so with much protest and pulling to the left. Its little wipers were altogether useless against the heavy rain and road spray, and the defroster fan was little more than a warm exhalation of breath against the glass. In order to see, Gabriel had to lower both front windows to create a cross draft. Each passing truck hurled water against the left side of his face.
The rain tapered, and a few rays of weak sunlight peered through a slit in the clouds near the horizon. Gabriel kept his foot pressed to the floor and his eyes fastened to the taillights of the Mercedes. His thoughts, however, were focused on the scene he had just witnessed at the House on the Embankment. How had he managed it? How had Arkady convinced her to walk into the car without a fight? Was it with a threat or a promise? With the truth or a lie, or some combination of both? And why were they now hurtling down the Leninsky Prospekt, into the yawning chasm of the Russian countryside?
Gabriel was pondering that final question when he felt the first impact on his rear bumper: a car, much bigger and faster than his own, headlights doused. He responded by pressing the accelerator to the floor but the Volga had nothing more to give. The car behind gave him one more tap, almost as a warning, then moved in swiftly for the kill.
What followed was the classic maneuver that every good traffic policeman knows. The aggressor initiates contact with the victim, right front bumper to left rear bumper. The aggressor then accelerates hard and the victim is sent spinning out of control. The impact of such a tactic is magnified substantially when there is a sharp imbalance in the weight and power of the two vehicles—for example, when one is an S-Class Mercedes-Benz and the other is a rattletrap old Volga already being pushed to the breaking point. How many times Gabriel’s car actually rotated, he would never know. He only knew that, when it was over, the car was resting on its side in a field of mud at the edge of a pine forest and he was bleeding heavily from the nose.
Two of Arkady Medvedev’s finest waded into the mud to retrieve him, though their motives were hardly altruistic. One was a skinheaded giant with a right hand like a sledgehammer. The hammer struck Gabrielonly once, for once was all that was necessary. He toppled backward, into the mud, and for an instant saw upside-down pine trees. Then the trees streaked skyward toward the clouds like missiles. And Gabriel blacked out.
At that same moment, El Al Flight 1612 was rapidly gaining altitude over the suburbs of Moscow and banking hard toward the south. Uzi Navot was seated next to the window in the final row of first class, hand wrapped around a glass of whiskey, eyes scanning the vast carpet of winking yellow lights beneath him. For a few seconds, he could see it all clearly: the ring roads around the Kremlin, the snakelike course of the river, the thunderous prospekts leading like spokes into the endless expanse of the Russian interior. Then the plane knifed into the clouds and the lights of Moscow vanished. Navot pulled down his window shade and lifted the whiskey to his lips. I should have broken his arm, he thought. I should have broken the little bastard’s arm.
Gabriel opened his eyes slowly. Not eyes, he thought. Eye. The left eye only. The right eye was unresponsive. The right eye was the one that had been punched by the bald giant. It was now swollen shut and crusted over with clotted blood.
Before attempting movement, he took careful stock of his situation. He was sprawled on the concrete floor of what appeared to be a warehouse, with his hands cuffed at his back and his legs in something resembling a running position, right leg lifted in front of him, left extended backward. His right shoulder was pressing painfully against the floor, as was the right side of his face. Somewhere, a light was burning, but his own corner of the building was in semidarkness. A few feet away stood a stack of large wooden crates with Cyrillic markings on the sides. Gabriel struggled to make out the words but could not. The alphabet was still like hieroglyphics to him; the crates could have been filled with tins of caviar or vials of deadly polonium and he would have never known the difference.
He rolled onto his back and lifted his knees to his chest, then levered himself into a sitting position. The exertion of the movement, combined with the fact that he was now upright, caused his right eye to begin throbbing with catastrophic pain. He reckoned the blow had fractured the orbit around the eye. For all he knew, he no longer had an eye, just an immense crater in the side of his head where once his eye had been.
He leaned against the wooden crates and looked around him. There were other stacks of crates, towering stacks of crates, receding into the distance like the apartment buildings of the Leninsky Prospekt. From his limited vantage point, Gabriel could only see two rows, but he had the impression there were many more. He doubted they were filled with caviar. Not even the gluttonous Ivan Kharkov could devour that much caviar.
He heard the sound of footsteps approaching from a distance. Two sets. Both heavy. Both male. One man significantly larger than the other. The big man was the bald giant who had hit him. The smaller man was several years older, with a fringe of iron-gray hair and a skull that looked as if it been specially designed to withstand much blunt trauma.
“Where are the children?” asked Arkady Medvedev.
“What children?” replied Gabriel.
Medvedev nodded to the giant, then stepped away as if he didn’t want his clothing to be spattered with the blood. The sledgehammer crashed into Gabriel’s skull a second time. Same eye, same result. Pine trees and missiles. Then nothing at all.
63
LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW
Like al
most everyone else in Moscow, Colonel Grigori Bulganov of the FSB was divorced. His marriage, like Russia itself, had been characterized by wild lurches from one extreme to the other: glasnost one day, Great Terror the next. Thankfully, it had been short and had produced no offspring. Irina had won the apartment and the Volkswagen; Grigori Bulganov, his freedom. Not that he had managed to do much with it: a torrid office romance or two, the occasional afternoon in the bed of his neighbor, a mother of three who was divorced herself.
For the most part, Grigori Bulganov worked. He worked early in the morning. He worked late into the evening. He worked Saturdays. He worked Sundays. And sometimes, like now, he could even be found at his desk late on a Sunday night. His brief was counterespionage. More to the point, it was Bulganov’s job to neutralize attempts by foreign intelligence services to spy on the Russian government and State-owned Russian enterprises. His assignment had been made more difficult by the activities of the FSB’s sister service, the SVR. Espionage by the SVR had reached levels not seen since the height of the Cold War, which had prompted Russia’s adversaries to respond in kind. Grigori Bulganov could hardly blame them. The new Russian president was fond of rattling his saber, and foreign leaders needed to know whether it had an edge to it or had turned to rust in its scabbard.
Like many FSB officers, Bulganov supplemented his government salary by selling his expertise, along with knowledge gained through his work itself, to private industry. In Bulganov’s case, he served as a paid informant for a man named Arkady Medvedev, the chief of security for Russian oligarch Ivan Kharkov. Bulganov fed Medvedev a steady stream of reports dealing with potential threats to his businesses, legal and illicit. Medvedev rewarded him by keeping a secret bank account in Bulganov’s name filled with cash. As a consequence of the arrangement, Grigori Bulganov had been able to penetrate Ivan Kharkov’s operations in a way no other outsider ever had. In fact, Bulganov was quite confident he knew more about Ivan’s arms-trafficking activities than any other intelligence officer in the world. In Russia, such knowledge could be dangerous. Sometimes, it could even be fatal, which explained why Bulganov was careful to stay on Arkady Medvedev’s good side. And why, when Medvedev called his cell at 11:15 P.M. on a Sunday night, he didn’t dare consider not answering it.
Grigori Bulganov did not speak for the next three minutes. Instead, he tore a sheet of notepaper into a hundred pieces while he listened to the account of what had taken place in Moscow that afternoon. He was glad Medvedev had called him. He only wished he had done it on a secure line.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Bulganov asked.
“No question.”
“How did he get back into the country?”
“With an American passport and a crude disguise.”
“Where is he now?”
Medvedev told him the location.
“What about Ivan’s wife?”
“She’s here, too.”
“What are your plans, Arkady?”
“I’m going to give him one more chance to answer a few questions. Then I’m going to drop him in a hole somewhere.” A pause. “Unless you’d like to do that for me, Grigori?”
“Actually, I might enjoy that. After all, he did disobey a direct order.”
“How quickly can you get down here?”
“Give me an hour. I’d like to have a word with the woman, too.”
“A word, Grigori. This matter doesn’t concern you.”
“I’ll be brief. Just make sure she’s there when I arrive.”
“She’ll be here.”
“How many men do you have there?”
“Five.”
“That’s a lot of witnesses.”
“Don’t worry, Grigori. They’re not the talkative sort.”
64
KALUZHSKAYA O BLAST, RUSSIA
When Gabriel woke next, it was to the sensation of a dressing being applied to his wounded eye. He opened the one that still functioned and saw the task was being performed by none other than Arkady Medvedev. The Russian was working with a single hand. The other held a gun. A Stechkin, thought Gabriel, but he couldn’t be sure. He had never cared much for Russian guns.
“Feeling sorry for me, Arkady?”
“It wouldn’t stop bleeding. We were afraid you were going to die on us.”
“Aren’t you going to kill me anyway?”
“Of course we are, Allon. We just need a little bit of information from you first.”
“And who said former KGB hoods didn’t have any manners?”
Medvedev finished applying the bandage and regarded Gabriel in silence. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I know your real name?” he asked finally.
“I assume you could have got it from your friends at the FSB. Or, it’s possible you saved yourself a phone call by simply beating it out of Elena Kharkov. You strike me as the type who enjoys hitting women.”
“Keep that up and I’ll bring Dmitri back for another go at you. You’re not some kid anymore, Allon. One or two blows from Dmitri and you might not come to again.”
“He has a lot of wasted motion in his punch. Why don’t you let me give him a couple of pointers?”
“Are you serious or is that just your Jewish sense of humor talking?”
“Our sense of humor came from living with Russians as neighbors. It helps to have a sense of humor during a pogrom. It takes the sting out of having your village burned down.”
“You have a choice, Allon. You can lie there and tell jokes all night or you can start talking.” The Russian removed a cigarette from a silver case and ignited it with a matching silver lighter. “You don’t need this shit and neither do I. Let’s just settle this like professionals.”
“By professional, I suppose you mean I should tell you everything I know, so then you can kill me.”
“Something like that.” The Russian held the cigarette case toward Gabriel. “Would you like one?”
“They’re bad for your health.”
Medvedev closed the case. “Are you up for a little walk, Allon? I think you might find this place quite interesting.”
“Any chance of taking off these handcuffs?”
“None whatsoever.”
“I thought you would say that. Help me up, will you? Just try not to pull my shoulders out of their sockets.”
Medvedev hoisted him effortlessly to his feet. Gabriel felt the room spin and for an instant thought he might topple over. Medvedev must have been thinking the same thing because he placed a steadying hand on his elbow.
“You sure you’re up for this, Allon?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re not going to pass out on me again, are you?”
“I’ll be fine, Arkady.”
Medvedev dropped his cigarette and crushed it carefully with the toe of an expensive-looking Italian loafer. Everything Medvedev was wearing looked expensive: the French suit, the English raincoat, the Swiss wristwatch. But none of it could conceal the fact that, underneath it all, he was still just a cheap KGB hood. Just like the regime, thought Gabriel: KGB in nice clothing.
They set out together between the crates. There were more than Gabriel could have imagined. They seemed to go on forever, like the warehouse itself. Hardly surprising, he thought. This was Russia, after all. World’s largest country. World’s largest hotel. World’s largest swimming pool. World’s largest warehouse.
“What’s in the boxes?”
“Food.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Medvedev pointed toward a skyscraper of wooden crates. “That’s canned tuna. Over there are canned carrots. A little farther on is the canned beef. We even have chicken soup.”
“That’s very impressive. Fifteen years ago, Russia was living on American handouts. Now you’re feeding the world.”