The Other Woman: A Novel Read online

  23

  Bern

  Bittel agreed to meet Gabriel at nine the following morning at a café near the headquarters of the NDB, Switzerland’s foreign intelligence and domestic security service. Gabriel arrived twenty minutes early, Bittel ten minutes late, which wasn’t like him. Tall and bald, he had the stern demeanor of a Calvinist minister and the pallor of a man with no time for outdoor pursuits. Gabriel had once spent several unpleasant hours seated across an interrogation table from Bittel. Now they were something like allies. The NDB employed fewer than three hundred people and had an annual budget of only $60 million, less than the intelligence community of the United States spent in a typical afternoon. The Office was a valuable force multiplier.

  “Nice place,” said Gabriel. He looked slowly around the interior of the sad little café, with its cracked linoleum floor and wobbly Formica tables and faded posters of Alpine vistas. The neighborhood outside was a hodgepodge of office blocks, small industrial concerns, and recycling yards. “Do you come here often, or only for special occasions?”

  “You said you wanted something off the beaten path.”

  “What path?”

  Bittel frowned. “How long have you been in the country?”

  Gabriel made an authentic show of thought. “I believe I arrived Thursday.”

  “By plane?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Zurich?”

  “Geneva, actually.”

  “We routinely review the passenger manifests of all incoming flights.” Bittel was the chief of the NDB’s counterterrorism division. Keeping unwanted foreigners out of the country was part of his job description. “I’m quite certain I never saw your name on any of the lists.”

  “With good reason.” Gabriel’s gaze wandered to the folded copy of Berner Zeitung that lay on the tabletop between them. The lead story concerned the arrest of a recent immigrant from Morocco who was plotting to carry out a truck-and-knife attack in the name of the Islamic State. “Mazel tov, Bittel. Sounds as though you dodged a bullet.”

  “Not really. We had him under round-the-clock surveillance. We waited until he rented the truck to make our move.”

  “What was his intended target?”

  “The Limmatquai in Zurich.”

  “And the original tip that led you to the suspect?” wondered Gabriel. “Where did that come from?”

  “His name was found on one of the computers taken from that compound in Morocco where Saladin was killed. One of our partners gave it to us a couple of days after the attempted dirty bomb attack in London.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Bittel smiled. “I can’t thank you enough. It would have been a bloodbath.”

  “I’m glad we were able to be of help.”

  They were speaking quietly in Hochdeutsch, or High German. Had Bittel been speaking the dialect of Swiss German particular to the valley where he was raised in Nidwalden, Gabriel would have required an interpreter.

  A waitress came over and took their order. When they were alone again, Bittel asked, “Were you the one who killed the bomber in London?”

  “Don’t be silly, Bittel. I’m the chief of Israeli intelligence, for God’s sake.”

  “And Saladin?”

  “He’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

  “But ISIS’s ideology endures, and it’s finally managed to seep into Switzerland.” Bittel fixed Gabriel with a reproachful stare. “And so I will overlook the fact you entered the country without bothering to inform the NDB, and on a false passport at that. I assume you’re not here for the skiing. It’s been terrible this year.”

  Gabriel turned over the copy of Berner Zeitung and tapped the story about the death of a British diplomat in the Bahnhofplatz.

  Bittel raised an eyebrow. “A nasty piece of work, that.”

  “They say it was an accident.”

  “Since when do you believe what you read in the newspapers?” Lowering his voice, Bittel added, “Please tell me you weren’t the one who killed him.”

  “Why would I kill a mid-level British diplomat?”

  “He was no diplomat. He was MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna.”

  “And a frequent visitor to your country.”

  “Like you,” remarked Bittel.

  “Do you happen to know why he was so fond of Bern?”

  “There were rumors he was seeing a woman here.”

  “Was he?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “The NDB never looked into it?”

  “That’s not our style. This is Switzerland. Privacy is our religion.” The waitress delivered their coffees. “You were about to tell me,” said Bittel quietly, “why the chief of Israeli intelligence is looking into the death of an MI6 officer. I can only assume it has something to do with that Russian you killed in Vienna a couple of weeks ago.”

  “I didn’t kill him, either, Bittel.”

  “The Austrians don’t see it that way. In fact, they asked us to arrest you if you happened to set foot in Switzerland, which means you’re in a rather precarious situation at the moment.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Why change now?” Bittel added sugar to his coffee and stirred it slowly. “You were saying?”

  “We’ve had our eye on Hughes for some time,” confessed Gabriel.

  “The Office?”

  “And our British partners. We followed him here from Vienna on Friday afternoon.”

  “Thanks for letting us know you were coming.”

  “We didn’t want to be a bother.”

  “How many officers did you bring into the country?”

  Gabriel lifted his gaze to the ceiling and began counting on his fingers.

  “Never mind,” muttered Bittel. “That would explain all the microphones and cameras we dug out of Hughes’s hotel room. It’s quality stuff, by the way. Much better than ours. My technicians are reverse-engineering them as we speak.” Bittel laid his spoon thoughtfully on the table. “I suppose you noticed Hughes meeting with that Russian in the lobby.”

  “Rather hard to miss.”

  “His name is—”

  “Dmitri Sokolov,” interjected Gabriel. “Moscow Center’s man in Geneva.”

  “You’re acquainted?”

  “Not personally.”

  “Dmitri doesn’t exactly play by the rules.”

  “There are no rules, Bittel. Not where Russians are concerned.”

  “In Geneva there are, but Dmitri breaks them on a regular basis.”

  “How so?”

  “Aggressive recruiting, lots of dirty tricks. He specializes in kompromat.” It was the Russian term for damaging material used to silence political opponents or to blackmail assets into doing the Kremlin’s bidding. “He’s back in Moscow, by the way. He left two nights ago.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “We’ve never managed to crack the Russians’ ciphers, but Onyx picked up a burst of traffic between the Geneva rezidentura and Moscow Center last Friday night after Hughes was killed.” Onyx was Switzerland’s signals intelligence system. “Heaven knows what they were talking about.”

  “Congratulations on a job well done.”

  “You think the Russians killed Hughes?”

  “Let’s just say they’re at the top of my list.”

  “Was Hughes on their payroll?”

  “Have you seen the hotel security video?”

  “Have you?”

  Gabriel didn’t answer.

  “Why would the Russians kill their own agent?” asked Bittel.

  “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”

  “And?”

  “If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t be sitting in this dump confessing my sins to you.”

  “You should know,” said Bittel after a moment, “the British aren’t terribly interested in a thorough inquiry. The ambassador and the Bern Head of Station are putting pressure on us to shut it down.”

  “Allow me to second that m
otion.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you want from me?”

  “I want my cameras and microphones.” Gabriel paused, then added, “And I want you to find out why Alistair Hughes was spending so much time in your fair city.”

  Bittel swallowed his coffee in a single gulp. “Where are you staying?”

  Gabriel answered truthfully.

  “What about the rest of your team?”

  “Long gone.”

  “Bodyguards?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “How do you want me to contact you if I find anything?”

  Gabriel slid a business card across the tabletop. “The number is on the back. Call it on your most secure line. And be discreet, Bittel. The Russians have an eavesdropping service, too.”

  “Which is why you shouldn’t be in Bern without a security detail. I’ll put a couple of my men on you, just to be sure.”

  “Thanks, Bittel, but I can look after myself.”

  “I’m sure Alistair Hughes thought the same thing. Do me a favor, Allon. Don’t get yourself killed on my turf.”

  Gabriel rose. “I’ll do my best.”

  24

  Bern

  Gabriel spotted the two bodyguards in the cobbled street beneath his window at midday. They were as inconspicuous as a couple of burning cars. He referred to them as Frick and Frack, but only inwardly. They were Helvetian lads, built like oxen, and not to be trifled with.

  They followed him through the galleries of the Kunstmuseum, and to the café in the Kramgasse where he took his lunch, and to the Israeli Embassy on the Alpenstrasse, where he learned his service was humming along satisfactorily without his hand on the tiller. His family, too. Secretly, this pleased him. He had never wished to be indispensable.

  That night, as he labored over his laptop in his room at the Savoy, Frick and Frack were replaced by a car containing two uniformed officers from the Kantonspolizei Bern. They remained there until morning, when Frick and Frack returned. Gabriel led them on a merry chase for much of that afternoon, and once, if only to see whether he still had it in him, he dropped them like rocks while crossing the Nydeggbrücke, which connected the Old City of Bern to the new.

  Free of surveillance, he took afternoon tea at the Schweizerhof, in the same chair where Alistair Hughes had sat during the final minutes of his life. Gabriel imagined Dmitri Sokolov seated across from him. Dmitri who did not play by Geneva rules. Dmitri who specialized in kompromat. Gabriel remembered the way Sokolov had been clutching Alistair Hughes’s wrist—right hand Dmitri, left wrist Alistair. He supposed something could have passed between them, a flash drive or a message in code, but he doubted it. He had watched the video a hundred times at least. The transaction had been one way, Dmitri Sokolov to Alistair Hughes. It was the envelope Sokolov had slid beneath the copy of the Financial Times. Hughes had burned the contents of the envelope upstairs in his room. Perhaps they were instructions for his exfiltration to Moscow, perhaps they were something else. Four minutes and thirteen seconds later he was dead.

  When Gabriel returned to the Savoy, Frick and Frack were licking their wounds in the street. They all three had drinks together that night in the hotel’s bar. Frick’s real name was Kurt. He was from Wassen, a village of four hundred souls in Canton Uri. Frack was called Matthias. He was a Catholic kid from Fribourg and a former member of the Vatican Swiss Guards. Gabriel realized that they had met once before, when Gabriel was restoring Caravaggio’s Deposition of Christ in the lab of the Vatican Museum.

  “Bittel’s getting close,” he informed Gabriel. “He says he might have something for you.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, maybe sooner.”

  “Sooner would be better.”

  “If you wanted a miracle, you should have gone to your friend the Holy Father.”

  Gabriel smiled. “Did Bittel say what it was?”

  “A woman,” said Matthias into his glass of beer.

  “In Bern?”

  “Münchenbuchsee. It’s—”

  “A little town just north of here.”

  “How do you know Münchenbuchsee?”

  “Paul Klee was born there.”

  Gabriel did not sleep that night, and in the morning he headed straight to the Israeli Embassy, followed by two uniformed officers from the Kantonspolizei Bern. And there he passed one of the longest days of his life, nibbling at a container of stale Viennese butter cookies left over from the days when Uzi Navot was chief and the stations used to keep snacks on hand in case he dropped in unannounced.

  By six that evening, there was still no word. Gabriel considered calling Bittel but decided forbearance was the better course of action. He was rewarded at half past eight, when Bittel finally rang. He did so from a secure line at NDB headquarters.

  “It turns out the rumors were true. He did have a woman here.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Klara Brünner.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s a psychiatrist,” said Bittel, “at the Privatklinik Schloss in Münchenbuchsee.”

  Privatklinik Schloss . . .

  Yes, thought Gabriel, that would explain everything.

  25

  Hampshire, England

  Destruction of Alistair Hughes’s mortal remains took place at a crematorium in south London; interment, at an ancient cemetery in the rolling chalk hills of Hampshire. The graveside ceremony was a private affair and dampened by rain. “I am the resurrection and the life,” recited the papery vicar as umbrellas sprouted like mushrooms against a sudden downpour. “And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” It was an epitaph, thought Graham Seymour, for a spy.

  Despite the invitation-only nature of the service, it was an impressive turnout. Much of Vauxhall Cross was present, along with a better part of Vienna Station. The Americans sent a delegation from Nine Elms, and Rebecca Manning had flown in from Washington, bearing a personal note from CIA director Morris Payne.

  At the conclusion of the service, Seymour approached Melinda Hughes to offer his condolences. “A word in private?” she asked. “I think we have a few things to discuss.”

  They walked among the headstones, Seymour holding the umbrella, Melinda Hughes holding his arm. The composure she had shown at the graveside while clutching her two boys had abandoned her, and she was weeping softly. Seymour wished he could summon the words to comfort her. Truth was, he had never been much good at it. He blamed his father, the great Arthur Seymour, an MI6 legend, for his inability to show even a trace of genuine empathy. He could recall only one period of affection between them. It had occurred during an extended visit to Beirut, when Seymour was a boy. But even then, his father was distracted. It was because of Philby, the greatest traitor of them all.

  Philby . . .

  But why, wondered Seymour, was he thinking about his father and Kim Philby at a time like this? Perhaps it was because he was walking through a graveyard with the wife of a Russian spy on his arm. Suspected spy, he reminded himself. Nothing had been proven yet.

  Melinda Hughes blew her nose loudly. “How very American of me. Alistair would be mortified if he could see me now.”

  The tears had left tracks in her makeup. Even so, she was very beautiful. And successful, too, thought Seymour—in monetary terms, at least, much more successful than her government-salaried husband. Seymour could only wonder why Alistair had betrayed her time and time again. Perhaps betrayal came easily to him. Or perhaps he thought it was a perquisite of the job, like the ability to skip the long lines at passport control when arriving at Heathrow Airport.

  “Do you think he can?” Melinda Hughes asked suddenly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “See us. Do you think Alistair is up there”—she lifted her eyes to the slate-gray sky—“with Christ and the apostles and the angels and saints? Or is he a few ounces of pulverized bone in the cold ground of Hampshire?”

  “Which answer would you prefer?”


  “The truth.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you what’s on the mind of the Russian president, let alone answer the question of eternal life.”

  “Are you a believer?”

  “I am not,” admitted Seymour.

  “Nor am I,” replied Melinda Hughes. “But at this moment, I wish I were. Is this how it ends? Is there really nothing more?”

  “You have Alistair’s children. Perhaps we live on through them.” And again, involuntarily, Seymour thought of his father—and of Philby, reading his mail in the bar of the Hotel Normandie.

  “I’m Kim. Who are you?”

  “Graham.”

  “Graham what?”

  “Seymour. My father is—”

  “I know who your father is. Everyone does. Pink gin?”

  “I’m twelve.”

  “Don’t worry, it will be our little secret.”

  A tug at Seymour’s arm hauled him back to the present; Melinda Hughes had stepped in a shallow depression and nearly fallen. She was talking about Barclays, how she was looking forward to going back to work now that Alistair was finally home and buried.

  “Is there anything more you need from us?”

  “Personnel has been very helpful, and surprisingly kind. Alistair always loathed them, by the way.”

  “We all do, but I’m afraid they’re part of the job.”

  “They’re offering me a rather large sum of money.”

  “You’re entitled to it.”

  “I don’t want your money. What I want,” she said with a sudden vehemence, “is the truth.”

  They had reached the farthest end of the cemetery. The mourners had largely dispersed, but a few remained graveside, smiling awkwardly and shaking hands, using the occasion of a colleague’s burial to form useful alliances. One of Rebecca Manning’s Americans was lighting the cigarette that had found its way to her lips. She was feigning intense interest in whatever it was he was saying, but her gaze was fixed on Seymour and Alistair Hughes’s grieving widow.

  “Do you really expect me to believe,” Melinda Hughes was saying, “that a highly trained MI6 officer was killed while crossing the street?”