The Defector Read online

  “So why didn’t he just kill you and be done with it?”

  “I’m sure we’ll know soon enough.”

  The limousine headed onto an exit ramp and a moment later was speeding north along Highway 20. To the left lay Tel Aviv and its suburbs. To the right was a towering gray wall separating Israel from the West Bank. There were some in Israel’s defense and security establishment who referred to it as the Shamron Fence because he had spent years advocating its construction. The separation barrier had helped to drastically reduce acts of terrorism but had caused much damage to the country’s already low standing abroad. Shamron never allowed important decisions to be influenced by international opinion. He operated by a simple maxim: Do what is necessary and worry about cleaning up the mess later. Gabriel would operate by the same doctrine now.

  “Have we gone on the record with the Russians yet?”

  “We summoned the ambassador to the Foreign Ministry last night and read him the riot act. We told him that we believe Ivan Kharkov is responsible for Chiara’s disappearance and made it clear we expect her to be released immediately.”

  “How did the ambassador react?”

  “He said he was certain we were wrong but promised to look into the matter. The formal denial came this morning.”

  “Ivan had nothing to do with it, of course.”

  “Of course. But I’m afraid it gets better. The FSB has offered to help locate Chiara.”

  “Oh, really? And what would they like in return?”

  “All information pertaining to her disappearance, plus the names of everyone who took part in the operation against Ivan in Moscow last summer.”

  “That means Ivan is acting with the Kremlin’s blessing.”

  “Without question. It also means we’ll have to treat the Russian services as adversaries. Fortunately, you have friends in London and Washington. Graham Seymour says the British services will do whatever they can to help. And Adrian Carter has already sent a cable to all his stations and bases regarding Chiara’s abduction. He’ll pass along anything the CIA happens to pick up.”

  “I need complete coverage of all of Ivan’s communications.”

  “You’ve already got it. All relevant NSA intercepts will be turned over to our station chief in Washington.” Shamron paused. “The question is, what does Ivan want? And when are we going to hear from him?”

  The car exited Highway 20 and spiraled down onto a rain-swept avenue in north Tel Aviv. Shamron placed a hand on Gabriel’s arm.

  “This is not the way I wanted you to come back here, my son, but welcome home.”

  Gabriel looked out the window at a passing street sign: SDEROT SHAUL HAMELECH.

  King Saul Boulevard.

  37

  KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

  MI5 HAD the imposing graystone solemnity of Thames House. The CIA had the glass-and-steel sprawl of Langley. The Office had King Saul Boulevard.

  It was drab, featureless, and, best of all, anonymous. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own highly secure communications system. Employees carried two keys: one opened an unmarked door in the lobby, the other operated the elevator. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Gabriel had come through the lobby just once, the day after his first encounter with Shamron. From that point forward, he had only entered the building “black” through the underground garage. He did so again now, with Shamron at his side. Amos Sharret, the director, was waiting in the foyer with Uzi Navot at his side. Gabriel’s relations with Amos were cool at best, but none of that mattered now. Gabriel’s wife, an Office agent, was missing and presumed to be in the hands of a proven murderer who had sworn vengeance. After expressing his condolences, Amos made it clear the complete arsenal of the Office, both human and technical, was now at Gabriel’s disposal. Then he led Gabriel into a waiting elevator, followed by Shamron and Navot.

  “I’ve cleared an office for you on the top floor,” Amos said. “You can work from there.”

  “Where’s my team?”

  “The usual place.”

  “Then why would I work on the top floor?”

  Amos stabbed at a button on the control panel. The elevator headed down.

  FOR MANY YEARS it had been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by officers of the night staff as a place for romantic trysts. Now Room 456C, a cramped subterranean chamber three levels beneath the lobby, was known as Gabriel’s Lair. Affixed to the door was a faded paper sign: TEMPORARY COMMITTEE FOR THE STUDY OF TERROR THREATS IN WESTERN EUROPE. Gabriel tore it away, then punched the code into the electronic combination lock.

  The room they entered was littered with the debris of operations past and, some claimed, haunted by their ghosts. Seated at the communal worktables were the members of Gabriel’s team: Dina and Rimona, Yaakov and Yossi, Eli Lavon and Mikhail. They had been joined by five additional officers: a pair of all-purpose field operatives, Oded and Mordecai, and three young geniuses from Technical who specialized in covert cyberops. They were the same three men who had raided Ivan’s bank accounts in the days after his wife’s defection. For the past several days, their frightening collection of skills had been focused on the financial holdings of another Russian oligarch: Viktor Orlov.

  Gabriel stood at the head of the room and surveyed the faces before him. He saw only anger and determination. These same men and women had carried out some of the most daring and dangerous operations in Office history. At that moment, not one questioned their ability to locate Chiara and bring her home. If for some reason they failed, then tears would be shed. But not now. And not in front of Gabriel.

  He stood before them in silence, his gaze moving slowly from wall to wall, over the faces of the dead: Khaled al-Khalifa, Ahmed Bin Shafiq, Zizi al-Bakari, Yusuf Ramadan . . . There were many more, of course, almost too many to recall. They were murderers all, and each deserved the death sentence that Gabriel had administered. He should have killed Ivan as well. Now Ivan had taken Gabriel’s wife. Regardless of the outcome, Ivan would spend the rest of his life a hunted man. So, too, would anyone remotely connected to the affair. They stood no chance of survival. Gabriel would find them all, no matter how long it took. And he would kill each and every one of them.

  For now, though, punishing the guilty would have to wait. Finding Chiara was all that mattered. They would start the search by locating the man who had planned and executed her abduction. The man who had introduced himself to Irina Bulganova as Anatoly, friend of Viktor Orlov. The man who had just made the biggest mistake of his professional career. Gabriel hung his photograph now in the gallery of the dead. And then he told his team a story.

  THERE IS a memorial not far from King Saul Boulevard. It is dedicated to those who have served, and fallen, in secret. It is fashioned from smooth sandstone and shaped like a brain because Israel’s founders believed only the brain would keep their small country safe from those who wished to destroy it. The walls of the memorial are engraved with the names of the dead and the dates on which they perished. Other details about their lives and careers are kept locked away in the File Room. More than five hundred intelligence officers from Israel’s various services are honored there. Seventy-five are Office. Two names would be added in the coming days—two good boys who died because Gabriel had tried to keep a promise. Chiara Zolli, he said, would not be the third name.

  The Italian police were now engaged in a frantic effort to find her. Gabriel, his voice calm and unemotional, said the Italian effort would not prove successful. In all likelihood, Chiara had been remov
ed from Italian soil even before the search had begun. At this moment, she could be anywhere. She might be heading eastward across the former lands of the Soviet empire that the Russians referred to as the “near abroad.” Or perhaps she was already somewhere in Russia. “Or perhaps she’s not in Russia at all,” Gabriel added. “Ivan controls one of the world’s largest shipping and air freight companies. Ivan has the capability to conceal Chiara anywhere on earth. Ivan has the capability to put her in motion and keep her in motion in perpetuity.” That meant Ivan had an unfair advantage. But they had leverage, too. Ivan had not taken Chiara simply to kill her. Surely, Ivan wanted something else. It gave them time and room to maneuver. Not much time, Gabriel said. And very little room.

  They would start by trying to find the man Ivan had used as his tool of vengeance. For now, he was but a few lines of charcoal on an otherwise blank canvas. They were going to complete the picture. He did not materialize out of thin air, this man. He had a name and a past. He had a family. He lived somewhere. He existed. Everything about him suggested he was former KGB, a man who specialized in finding people who wished not to be found. A man who could make people disappear without a trace. A man who now worked for wealthy Russians like Ivan Kharkov.

  A man like that did not exist in a vacuum. People had to know about him in order to retain his services. They were going to find such a person. And they would start their search in the city where the affair began: the Russian city sometimes referred to as London.

  38

  THOUGH GABRIEL had no way of knowing it, he was correct about at least one thing: Chiara had not remained on Italian soil for long. In fact, within hours of her abduction, she had been moved eastward across the country to a fishing village in the region known as Le Marche. There she was placed aboard a trawler and taken out to sea for what appeared to be a night of work in the Adriatic. At 2:15 a.m., as officers of the Polizia di Stato were standing watch at Italy’s border crossings, she was transferred to a private motor yacht called the Anastasia. By dawn, the yacht had returned to a sleepy port along the coast of Montenegro, the newly independent former Yugoslav Republic that was now home to thousands of Russian expatriates and an important base of operations for the Russian mafia. She would not stay in that country for long, either. By midmorning, as Gabriel’s flight was touching down at Ben-Gurion, she was being loaded onto a cargo plane at an airfield outside the Montenegrin capital. According to documents on board, the aircraft was owned by a Bahamian-based shipping company called LukoTranz. What the documents did not say was that LukoTranz was actually a corporate shell controlled by none other than Ivan Kharkov. Not that it would have mattered to the Montenegrin customs officials. The bribe they received for not inspecting the plane or its contents was more than triple their monthly government salaries.

  CHIARA KNEW none of this. Indeed, her last clear memory was of the nightmare at the gate of Villa dei Fiori. It had been dark when they arrived. Exhausted by the operation in Como, Chiara had dozed intermittently during the long drive and woke as Lior was easing up to the security gate. To open it required the correct six-digit code. Lior was entering it into the keypad when the men with black hoods emerged from the trees. Their weapons dispensed death with little more than a whisper. Motti had been hit first, Lior second. Chiara had been reaching for her Beretta when she was given a single disabling blow to the side of her head. Then she had felt a stab in her right thigh, an injection of sedative that made her head spin and turned her limbs to deadweight. The last thing she remembered was the face of a woman looking down at her. Behave and we might let you live, the woman said in Russian-accented English. Then the woman’s face turned to water, and Chiara lost consciousness.

  Now she was adrift in a world that was part dream, part memory. For hours she wandered lost through the streets of her native Venice as the floodwaters of the acqua alta swirled round her knees. In a church in Cannaregio she found Gabriel seated atop a work platform, conversing softly with Saint Christopher and Saint Jerome. She took him to a canal house near the old Jewish ghetto and made love to him in sheets soaked with blood, while Leah, his wife, watched from her wheelchair in the shadows. A parade of other images filed past, some nightmarish in their depiction, others rendered accurately. She relived the day Gabriel told her he could never marry her. And the day, not two years later, when he threw her a surprise wedding on Shamron’s terrace overlooking the Sea of Galilee. She walked with Gabriel through the snow-covered killing grounds of Treblinka and knelt over his broken body in a sodden English pasture, pleading with him not to die.

  Finally, she saw Gabriel in a garden in Umbria, surrounded by walls of Etruscan stone. He was playing with a child—not the child he had lost in Vienna but the child Chiara had given to him. The child now growing inside her. She had been a fool to lie to Gabriel. If only she had told him the truth, he would have never gone to London to keep his promise to Grigori Bulganov. And Chiara would not be the prisoner of a Russian woman.

  A woman who was now standing over her. Syringe in hand. She had milk-white skin and eyes of translucent blue, and appeared to be having difficulty maintaining her balance. This was neither dream nor hallucination. At that moment, Chiara and the woman were caught in a sudden squall in the middle of the Adriatic. Chiara did not know this, of course. She only knew that the woman nearly toppled while giving her an injection of sedative, inserting the needle with far more force than was necessary. Slipping once more into unconsciousness, Chiara returned again to the garden in Umbria. Gabriel was bidding farewell to the child. It wandered into a field of sunflowers and disappeared.

  CHIARA WOKE once more during the journey, this time by the drone of an aircraft in flight and the stench of her own vomit. The woman was standing over her again, another loaded syringe in hand. Chiara promised to behave, but the woman shook her head and inserted the needle. As the drug took effect, Chiara found herself wandering frantically through the field of sunflowers, searching for the child. Then night fell like a curtain, and she was weeping hysterically with no one to console her.

  When next she regained consciousness, it was to the sensation of intense cold. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination. Then she realized she was on her feet and somehow walking through snow. Her hands were cuffed and secured to her body by nylon tape, her ankles shackled. The chains of the shackles abbreviated her stride to little more than a shuffle. The two men holding her arms seemed not to mind. They seemed to have all the time in the world. So did the woman with milk-white skin.

  She was walking a few paces ahead, toward a small cottage surrounded by birch trees. Parked outside were a pair of Mercedes sedans. Judging from their low profile, they had armor plating and bulletproof windows. Leaning against the hood of one was a man: black leather coat, silver hair, head like a tank turret. Chiara had never met him in person but had seen the face many times in surveillance photographs. His powerful aftershave hung like an invisible fog on the brittle air. Sandalwood and smoke. The smell of power. The smell of the devil.

  The devil smiled seductively and touched her face. Chiara recoiled, instantly nauseated. At the devil’s command, the two men led her into the cottage and down a flight of narrow wooden stairs. At the bottom was a heavy metal door with a thick horizontal latch. Behind it was a small room with a concrete floor and whitewashed walls. They forced her inside and slammed the door. Chiara lay motionless, weeping softly, shivering with the unbearable cold. A moment later, when her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she realized she was not alone. Propped in one corner, hands and feet bound, was a man. Despite the poor light, Chiara could see he had not shaved in many days. She could also see he had been beaten savagely.

  “I’m so sorry to see you,” he said softly. “You must be Gabriel’s wife.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Grigori Bulganov. Don’t say another word. Ivan is listening.”

  39

  KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

  THE OFFICE prided itself on its
ability to respond quickly in times of crisis, but even battle-hardened veterans of the service would later shake their heads in wonder at the speed with which Gabriel’s team sprang into action. They berated the analysts of Research to have another look at their files and hounded the gathering officers of Collections to squeeze their sources for the smallest threads of information. They robbed Banking of a quarter million euros and put Housekeeping on notice that secure accommodations would be required with little or no advance warning. And finally they pre-positioned enough electronics and weaponry in Europe to start a small war. But then, that was their intention.

  Fortunately for Gabriel, he would not go to war alone. He had two powerful allies with great influence and global reach, one in Washington, the other in London. From Adrian Carter, he borrowed a single asset, a female officer who had recently been sent to Europe on temporary duty. Of Graham Seymour he requested a night raid. The target would be an individual, a man who once boasted he knew more about what was taking place inside Russia than the Russian president himself. Seymour would handle the legwork and logistics. Olga Sukhova would serve as the sharp end of the sword.

  It was a role long reserved for Shamron. Now he had no task other than to pace the floors with worry or to make a general nuisance of himself. He looked over shoulders, whispered into ears, and, on several occasions, pulled Uzi and Gabriel into the hall and jabbed at them with his stubby forefinger. Time and again, he heard the same response. Yes, Ari, we know. We’ve thought of that. And, truth be told, they had thought of it. Because Shamron had trained them. Because they were the best of the best. Because they were like his sons. And because they could now do this job without the help of an old man.