The Other Woman: A Novel Read online

  For Rebecca Manning, the number represented a lifeline that would pull her safely back to Moscow. For Eva, however, it was a grave threat. Rebecca would doubtless arrive to a hero’s welcome. But Eva would go straight to a debriefing room where Sasha would be waiting. She was tempted to slip the Kia into drive and leave Rebecca behind. She doubted she would get far. For all Eva knew, there were three dead men in a car on a private street in Georgetown. In addition to being an agent of a foreign intelligence service, she was now potentially an accessory to murder. She had no choice but to go with Rebecca to Moscow and hope for the best.

  Rebecca returned to the car and told Eva to head north on Wisconsin Avenue. Then she switched on the radio and changed the station to WTOP. We have breaking news this hour regarding a shooting incident in Georgetown . . . She jabbed at the power button, and the radio went silent.

  “How long?” asked Eva.

  “Two hours.”

  “Are they going to pick us up?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “They want us to get off the street and wait until the bolt-hole opens up.”

  Eva was secretly relieved. The longer she stayed out of the SVR’s hands, the better. “Where’s the bolt-hole?” she asked.

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  “Why not?”

  “They want to make sure it’s safe before they send us there.”

  “How are they going to contact us?”

  “They want us to call again in an hour.”

  Eva didn’t like it. But who was she to question the wisdom of Moscow Center?

  They were approaching the invisible border separating the District of Columbia from Maryland. Two large shopping centers confronted one another across the busy boulevard. Rebecca pointed toward the complex on the right. The garage entrance was next to a chain restaurant famous for the size of its portions and the length of its wait for a table. Eva headed down the ramp and snared a ticket from the machine. Then, following Rebecca’s instructions, she navigated to a deserted corner and backed into a space.

  And there they waited, largely in silence, the SIG Sauer on Rebecca’s lap, for the next thirty minutes. They had no phones to connect them to the world above, only the car radio. The reception was fickle but sufficient. Police were searching for a Kia Optima sedan, District plates, with two women inside. They were also searching for three men who had abandoned a bullet-riddled Nissan on Winfield Lane. According to witnesses, one of the men appeared to have been wounded in the gunfire.

  The signal swelled with static. Eva lowered the volume. “They’re looking for two women in a Kia.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  “We need to separate.”

  “We’re staying together.” Then Rebecca added contritely, “I can’t do this without your help.”

  Rebecca increased the volume on the radio and listened to a resident of Georgetown expressing shock over the shooting. Eva, however, was watching a white commercial van, Maryland plates, no markings, coming toward them through the patchy overhead lighting. The FBI, she thought, loved unmarked vans. So did the SVR.

  “We’re in trouble,” she said.

  “It’s just a delivery truck,” answered Rebecca.

  “Do the two in front look like delivery men to you?”

  “They are, actually.”

  The van pulled into the next space, the side cargo door slid open. Eva stared at the Russian face just beyond her window, trying desperately to hide her fear.

  “I thought we were driving ourselves to the bolt-hole.”

  “Change in plan,” said Rebecca. “The bolt-hole came to us.”

  76

  Forest Hills, Washington

  The wound to Christopher Keller’s clavicle was through and through. In its wake, however, the 9mm Parabellum round had left shattered bone and considerable tissue damage. Fortunately, all Israeli government buildings, even abandoned ones, maintained a store of medical supplies. Mikhail, a combat veteran, flushed the wound with antiseptic and applied protective bandages. He had nothing for the pain other than a bottle of ibuprofen. Keller washed down eight tablets with a whisky from the wet bar.

  With Mikhail’s help, he changed into fresh clothing and hung his right arm in a sling. The flight back to London promised to be long and uncomfortable, though mercifully Keller wouldn’t be flying commercial. Graham Seymour’s chartered executive jet waited at Dulles. The two men were last seen at the command post at half past nine, moving slowly down the steep, treacherous steps. Gabriel personally pressed the interior button that unlocked the iron gate. And thus the great undertaking came to an ignoble end.

  Its final minutes were bitter and uncharacteristically rancorous. Mikhail clashed with Gabriel, and Gabriel with his old friend and comrade-in-arms Graham Seymour. He implored Seymour to phone the Americans and instruct them to seal Washington. And when Seymour refused, Gabriel threatened to call the Americans himself. He even started to dial Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters before Seymour snatched the phone from his grasp. “It’s my scandal, not yours. And if anyone’s going to tell the Americans I planted Kim Philby’s daughter in their midst, it’s going to be me.”

  But Seymour made no such admission to the Americans that morning, and Gabriel, though he was sorely tempted, did not do it for him. And in the span of a few minutes, a relationship of historic importance crumbled. For more than a decade, Gabriel and Graham had worked hand in glove against the Russians, the Iranians, and the global jihadist movement. And in the process, they had managed to undo decades of animosity between their services, even their countries. All that was ashes. But then, Eli Lavon would later remark, that had been part of Sasha’s plan from the beginning, to drive a wedge between the Office and MI6 and break the bond Gabriel and Graham Seymour had forged. In that, if nothing else, Sasha had succeeded.

  Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern left next. One of the watchers plucked the camera from the communal green garden on Warren Street and then made for the train station. The other watchers soon followed, and by 9:45 a.m. only Gabriel, Mikhail, and Eli Lavon remained at the command post. A single car waited curbside. Oren, Gabriel’s chief bodyguard, stood watch inside the gate, against what, no one knew.

  In the haste of their departure, the team had left the interior of the house a ruin, which was how they had found it. A single laptop remained on the trestle table. Gabriel was watching the recording of Rebecca Manning inside Starbucks when his BlackBerry shivered with an incoming message. It was from Adrian Carter.

  What the hell is going on?

  With nothing left to lose, Gabriel typed out a reply and sent it.

  You tell me.

  Carter called him ten seconds later and did just that.

  It seemed a certain Donald McManus, a veteran FBI special agent attached to the Bureau’s Washington headquarters, had stopped for gas at the Shell station at Wisconsin Avenue and Ellicott Street at around twenty minutes past eight. And McManus, being naturally vigilant and aware of his surroundings, had noticed a well-dressed woman using the station’s grubby old public phone, which he found odd. In his experience, the only people who used pay phones these days were illegal immigrants, drug dealers, and cheating spouses. The woman didn’t appear to fall into any of those categories, though McManus was struck by the fact she kept her hand inside her shoulder bag throughout the entire conversation. After hanging up, she climbed into the passenger seat of a Kia Optima with District plates. McManus caught the number as it turned onto Wisconsin and headed north. The driver was younger than the woman who had used the phone, and prettier. McManus thought she looked a bit scared.

  While heading south on Wisconsin, McManus switched from CNN on the satellite service to WTOP over the airwaves, and heard one of the station’s first bulletins regarding a shooting that had just occurred in Georgetown. It sounded like road rage to McManus, and he thought nothing of it. But by the time he hit downtown, the police had released a description of the suspect vehicle. Kia Optima, District plates, two women insi
de. He passed the tag number of the car he had seen at the gas station to the Metropolitan Police and, while he was at it, ran the number through the Bureau’s database. It was registered to an Eva Fernandes, a green-carder from Brazil, which was funny because McManus made her for an Eastern European.

  About this same time, a surveillance team from the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division spotted several cars leaving the back entrance of the Russian Embassy, all containing known or suspected members of the SVR rezidentura. It looked to the team as though the rezident had a crisis on his hands, an observation they shared with Headquarters. Special Agent McManus, who worked counterterrorism, caught wind of the Russian personnel movements and told the duty officer at CI about the woman he had seen using a pay phone. The duty officer passed it up the line to the deputy, and the deputy in turn passed it to the division chief himself.

  And it was there, at 9:35 a.m., on the chief’s immaculate desk, that all three elements—the shooting in Georgetown, the hurried exodus from the Russian Embassy, and the two women in the Kia sedan—came together with all the makings of a rolling disaster in progress. When no one was looking, McManus ran a quick check on the pay phone and found that the call the woman had placed was to a number inside the Russian Embassy. And thus the rolling disaster became a full-blown international crisis that threatened to ignite World War III. Or so it seemed to Special Agent Donald McManus, who had just happened to stop for gas at the Shell station at Wisconsin Avenue and Ellicott Street at around twenty minutes past eight.

  It was at this point the chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division rang his counterpart at the CIA to ask whether the Agency was running an op the Bureau didn’t know about. The CIA man swore he wasn’t, which happened to be true, but he thought it wise to run it past Adrian Carter, who was preparing for his daily ten o’clock with Morris Payne. Carter played dumb, his default response to uncomfortable questions from colleagues, superiors, and members of congressional oversight committees. Then, from the quiet of his seventh-floor office, he shot a quick text to his old friend Gabriel Allon, who just happened to be in town. The text was full of double or even triple meaning, and Gabriel, who knew Carter was on to him, responded in kind. Which was how they ended up on the telephone together, at 9:48, on an otherwise normal Thursday morning in Washington.

  “Who were the three men?” asked Carter when he had finished briefing Gabriel.

  “Which three men?”

  “The three men,” said Carter deliberately, “who took heavy fire on Winfield Lane in Georgetown.”

  “How should I know?”

  “They say one of them was wounded.”

  “I hope it wasn’t serious.”

  “Apparently, a car picked them up on Thirty-Fifth. No one’s seen them since.”

  “What about the two women?” probed Gabriel gently.

  “No sign of them, either.”

  “And they were last seen heading north on Wisconsin Avenue? You’re sure it was north?”

  “Forget about the direction,” snapped Carter. “Just tell me who they are.”

  “According to the FBI agent,” replied Gabriel, “one of them is a Brazilian national named Eva Fernandes.”

  “And the other?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Any idea why she might be calling a number inside the Russian Embassy from a pay phone?”

  “Maybe you should ask one of those SVR officers who were spotted leaving the embassy in such a hurry.”

  “The Bureau is looking for them, too. Any help from you,” said Carter, “would be held in the strictest confidence. So why don’t we start from the beginning? Who were the three men?”

  “What three men?”

  “And the women?”

  “Sorry, Adrian, but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  Carter exhaled heavily. “When are you planning to leave town?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Any chance you could make it sooner?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Too bad,” said Carter, and the call went dead.

  77

  Chesapeake Street, Washington

  Mikhail Abramov and Eli Lavon departed the command post at five minutes past ten o’clock in the back of an Israeli Embassy van. Their plan was to fly from Dulles to Toronto, and from Toronto to Ben Gurion. Mikhail left the Barak .45 with Gabriel, who pledged to lock it in the residence’s safe before leaving for the airport himself.

  Alone, he adjusted the time code on the computer and once again watched the two women walking out of Starbucks, Eva leading the way, Rebecca a step behind, gripping the SIG Sauer 9mm hidden in her handbag. Gabriel now knew that she had called the Russian Embassy from a Shell station on Wisconsin Avenue before heading north toward the Maryland suburbs. And, in all likelihood, straight into the arms of an SVR exfiltration team.

  The speed of the Russian response suggested the rezidentura had a well-oiled escape plan in place. Which meant the chances of finding Rebecca were close to zero. The SVR was a highly capable and ruthless intelligence service, the successor of the mighty KGB. Smuggling her out of the United States would not be a problem. She would appear next in Moscow, just as her father had in 1963.

  Unless Gabriel could somehow stop her before she left Metropolitan Washington. He could not ask the Americans for help; he had made a promise to Graham Seymour, and if he broke it the recriminations would hang over the rest of his tenure as chief. No, he would have to find Rebecca Manning alone. Not entirely alone, he thought. He had Charlotte Bettencourt to help him.

  He rewound the recording and once again watched Rebecca following Eva from the coffee shop. It was fourteen steps, he noticed. Fourteen steps from the stairwell to Wisconsin Avenue. Gabriel wondered whether Rebecca, somewhere inside, was counting them, or whether she even remembered the game she used to play with her mother in Paris. Gabriel doubted it. Surely, Philby and Sasha would have purged such counterrevolutionary impulses.

  Gabriel watched Rebecca Manning walk from the screen of his computer. And then he remembered something Charlotte Bettencourt had told him that night in Seville, very late, when they were alone together because neither could sleep. “She’s more like her father than she realizes,” she said. “She does things exactly the same way, and she doesn’t know why.”

  Charlotte Bettencourt had told Gabriel something else that night. Something that sounded trivial at the time. Something only two other people in the world knew. “Who’s to say whether it’s still there,” she said as her eyes closed with exhaustion. “But perhaps, if you have a free moment, you might want to have a look.”

  Yes, thought Gabriel. He might indeed.

  It was ten fifteen when Gabriel slipped the Barak .45 into the waistband of his jeans and headed down the steep steps. Oren unlocked the iron gate and started toward the waiting car, a rented Ford Fusion. Gabriel, however, ordered him to remain behind.

  “Not again,” said Oren.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Thirty minutes, boss.”

  “And not a minute more,” promised Gabriel.

  “And if you’re late?”

  “It means I’ve been kidnapped by a Russian exfiltration team and taken to Moscow for trial and imprisonment.” He smiled in spite of himself. “I wouldn’t hold out much hope for my survival.”

  “You sure you don’t want some company?”

  Without another word, Gabriel climbed into the car. A few minutes later he was racing past the large, tan colonial house on the corner of Nebraska Avenue and Forty-Second Street. In his thoughts he saw a desperate man climbing into a very old automobile, clutching a paper sack. The man was Kim Philby. And in the sack was a miniature KGB camera, several rolls of film, and a hand trowel.

  78

  Bethesda, Maryland

  The two Russians in the van were called Petrov and Zelenko. Petrov was from the Washington rezidentura, but Zelenko had made a crash trip down from Manhattan the previous night after Sasha had opened
the bolt-hole. Both operatives had logged extensive prior experience in English-speaking countries before being assigned to America, which was still the SVR’s “main adversary” and therefore the big leagues. Petrov had worked in Australia and New Zealand; Zelenko, in Britain and Canada. Zelenko was the larger of the two men and held black belts in three different martial arts disciplines. Petrov was good with a gun. Neither man intended to allow anything to happen to their precious cargo. To deliver both a mole and an illegal safely to Moscow would make them legends. To fail was unthinkable. Indeed, they had both agreed it would be better to die in America than return empty-handed to Yasenevo.

  The van was a Chevrolet Express Cargo, owned by a Northern Virginia–based contracting company, which was in turn owned by a Ukrainian-born asset of Moscow Center. The plan was to drive south on I-95 to Florence, South Carolina, where they would acquire a second clean vehicle for the rest of the trip to South Florida. Moscow Center had access to numerous safe properties in the Miami area, including the dump in Hialeah where they would spend the next six days—six days being the length of time it would take the Russian-flag container vessel Archangel to reach the Florida Straits. Petrov, who had served in the Russian navy before joining the SVR, would handle the trip out in a fifty-foot sport fishing boat.

  They were well provisioned for the journey, and heavily armed. Petrov had two weapons in his possession—a Tokarev and a Makarov—and Rebecca Manning still had her SIG Sauer. It was lying on the floor of the cargo hold, next to a phone she had borrowed from Zelenko. She was seated with her back against the driver’s side panel, her legs stretched before her, still dressed for the office in her dark pantsuit and Burberry mackintosh. Eva was similarly situated on the opposite side of the hold, but slightly to the rear. They had spoken little since leaving the parking garage. Rebecca had thanked Eva for her skill and bravery and promised to sing her praises to Sasha when they arrived in Moscow. Eva did not believe a word of it.