The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Page 31

  At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, the news from Red Square flashed briefly across the television screens as Mikhail stepped from the Jetway, followed thirty seconds later by Gabriel. As they approached passport control, Gabriel noticed a man in a tailored suit standing next to a malnourished border policeman in a threadbare uniform. The suited man had a photograph in his hand, which he consulted twice as Mikhail drew near. Then he walked over to Mikhail and said something to him in Russian that Gabriel couldn’t understand. Mikhail smiled and shook the man’s hand before following him through an unmarked doorway. Alone, Gabriel proceeded to passport control, where an unsmiling woman scrutinized his face for an uncomfortably long moment before vehemently stamping his passport and waving him on. Welcome to Russia, he thought, as he entered the crowded arrivals hall. It was good to be back again.

  Stepping outside, Gabriel immediately inhaled a blast of tobacco smoke and diesel fumes that made his head swim. The evening skies were hard and clear; the air was serrated with cold. Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw Mikhail and his Volgatek escort settling into the warmth of a waiting Mercedes sedan. Then he joined the long queue for a taxi. The cold of the concrete ate its way through the thin soles of his Western loafers; and by the time he finally crawled into the back of a rattletrap Lada, his jaw was so frozen he was nearly incapable of speech. Asked for a destination, he replied that he wished to be taken to the Hotel Metropol, though it sounded as if he’d requested a manhole.

  After leaving the airport, the driver headed to the Leningradsky Prospekt and started the long, slow slog into the center of Moscow. It was a few minutes past seven, the tail end of the city’s murderous evening rush. Even so, their pace was glacial. The driver tried to engage Gabriel in conversation, but his English was as impenetrable as the traffic. Gabriel made thoughtful noises every now and again; mainly, he stared out the window at the crumbling Soviet-era buildings lining the dirty old prospekt. For a brief period they had been merely hideous. Now they were ruins. On every street corner, and upon every rooftop, billboards assaulted the eye with promises of luxury and copulation. It was the Communist nightmare with a new coat of capitalism, thought Gabriel. And it was crushingly depressing.

  Eventually, they crossed the Garden Ring, and the prospekt gave way to Tverskaya Street, Moscow’s version of Madison Avenue. It bore them down a long gentle hill, past Volgatek’s glittering new headquarters, to the redbrick walls of the Kremlin, where it emptied into the eight lanes of Okhotnyy Ryad Street. Turning left, they sped past the Russian Duma, the old House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. Gabriel saw none of them. He had eyes only for the floodlit yellow fortress perched atop the heights of Lubyanka Square.

  “KGB,” said the driver, pointing over the top of the wheel.

  “There is no KGB,” Gabriel replied distantly. “The KGB is a thing of the past.”

  The driver muttered something about the naïveté of foreigners and guided the taxi toward the entrance of the Metropol. The lobby had been faithfully restored to its original decor, but the middle-aged woman at the check-in counter hadn’t fared nearly as well. She greeted Gabriel with a frozen smile, made polite inquiries about the nature of his travel, and then handed him a long registration form, a copy of which would be forwarded to the relevant authorities. Gabriel completed it swiftly as Jonathan Albright of Markham Capital Advisers and was rewarded with a key to his room. A bellman offered to assist with his bag and seemed relieved when Gabriel said he could manage on his own. Nevertheless, he gave the bellman a tip for his troubles. Its size suggested he was unfamiliar with the value of Russian currency.

  His room was on the fourth floor, overlooking the ten lanes of Teatralny Prospekt. Gabriel assumed it was bugged and therefore made no effort to search it. Instead, he placed two phone calls to clients who were not really his clients and then hacked his way through the stack of e-mail that had piled up in his in-box during the flight from London. One of them was from a lawyer in New York and concerned the tax implications of a certain investment of dubious legality. Its true sender was Eli Lavon, who was staying in a room down the hall, and its true content was revealed when Gabriel keyed in the proper password. It seemed that Gennady Lazarev had taken his prospective new employee to the O2 Lounge at the Ritz for drinks and a nosh. Also in attendance were Dmitry Bershov, Pavel Zhirov, and four pieces of Russian eye candy. Surveillance photos to follow, courtesy of Yaakov and Dina, who were in a booth on the opposite side of the room.

  Gabriel rekeyed the password, and the message returned to its original text. Then he slipped on a pair of headphones and patched into a secure feed of the audio from Mikhail’s mobile phone. He heard clinking glass, laughter, and the twitter of the Russian eye candy, which sounded inane, even in a language he could not comprehend. Then he heard the familiar voice of Gennady Lazarev murmuring a confidence into Mikhail’s ear. “Make sure you get some rest tonight,” he was saying. “We have big plans for you tomorrow.”

  They remained in the lounge until eleven, when Mikhail repaired to his luxury suite at the Ritz with no company other than a raging headache. Despite Lazarev’s admonition, he did not sleep that night, for his thoughts were a swirl of operations past, strung together like a television newsreel of the century’s most catastrophic events. He craved activity, movement of any kind, but the surveillance cameras that were surely hidden within the room wouldn’t allow it. And so he lay tangled in the damp sheets of his bed with the stillness of a corpse until 7:00 a.m., when his wakeup call lifted him gratefully to his feet.

  His coffee arrived a minute later, and he drank it while watching the morning business news from London. Afterward, he headed down to the health club, where he put in an impressive workout witnessed by a watcher from one of the Russian intelligence services. Returning to his room, he subjected himself to an ice-water shower to beat some life into his weary bones. Then he dressed in his finest gray chalk-stripe suit—the one Dina had chosen for him at Anthony Sinclair of Savile Row. He saw her in the breakfast room fifteen minutes later, staring into the eyes of Christopher Keller as if they held the secret to eternal happiness. A few tables away, Yossi was in the process of sending back his scrambled eggs. “I asked for them runny,” he was saying, “but these should have been served in a glass.” The remark bounced off the waiter like a pebble thrown at a freight train. “You want your eggs in a glass?” he asked.

  At nine o’clock sharp, having read the morning papers and tidied up a few loose ends in London via e-mail, Mikhail made his way to the Ritz’s ultramodern lobby. Waiting there was the same Volgatek factotum who had plucked him from the passport control line at Sheremetyevo the previous evening. He was smiling with all the pleasantness of a broken window.

  “I trust you slept well, Mr. Avedon?”

  “Never better,” lied Mikhail cordially.

  “Our office is very close. I hope you don’t mind walking.”

  “Will we survive?”

  “The chances are good, but there are no guarantees in Moscow this time of year.”

  With that, the factotum turned and led Mikhail into Tverskaya Street. As he climbed the slope of the hill, leaning hard into the battering-ram wind, he realized that the anonymous lump of wool and fur walking two steps behind him was Eli Lavon. The lump escorted him silently to Volgatek’s front door, as if to remind Mikhail that he was not alone after all. Then it floated into the glare of the Moscow morning sun and was gone.

  If there were any misunderstandings about Volgatek’s true mission, they were put to rest by the vast metal sculpture that stood in the lobby of its Tverskaya Street headquarters. It depicted the earth, with an outsize Russia in the dominant position, pumping life-giving energy to the four corners of the planet. Standing beneath it, a tiny smiling Atlas in a handmade Italian suit, was Gennady Lazarev. “Welcome to your new home,” he called out as his hand closed around Mikhail’s. “Or should I call it your real home?”

  “One step
at a time, Gennady.”

  Lazarev squeezed Mikhail’s hand a little harder, as if to say he would not be denied, and then led him into a waiting executive elevator that shot them to the building’s uppermost floor. In the foyer was a sign that read WELCOME NICOLAI! Lazarev paused to admire it, as though he had put a great deal of effort into the wording, before conveying Mikhail into the large office that would be his to use whenever he was in town. It had a view of the Kremlin and came with a dangerously pretty secretary called Nina.

  “What do you think?” asked Lazarev earnestly.

  “Nice,” said Mikhail.

  “Come,” said Lazarev, taking Mikhail by the elbow. “Everyone is anxious to meet you.”

  It turned out that Lazarev was not exaggerating when he said “everyone.” Indeed, during the next two and a half hours, it seemed that Mikhail shook the hand of every employee in the company, and perhaps a few others for good measure. There were a dozen vice presidents of varying shapes, sizes, and responsibilities, and a cadaverous figure called Mentov who did something with risk analysis that Mikhail couldn’t even pretend to comprehend. Next he was introduced to Volgatek’s scientific team—the geologists who were searching for new sources of oil and gas around the world, the engineers who were devising inventive new ways of extracting it. Then he headed down to the lower floors to meet the little people—the young account executives who dreamed of being in his shoes one day, the walking dead who were clinging to their desks and their red Volgatek coffee cups. He couldn’t help but wonder what happened to an employee who was terminated by a company owned and operated by the successor of the KGB. Perhaps he received a gold watch and a pension, but Mikhail doubted it.

  Finally, they returned to the top floor and entered Lazarev’s large atrium-like office, where he spoke at length about his vision for Volgatek’s future and the role he wanted Mikhail to play in it. His starting position at the firm would be chief of Volgatek UK, the subsidiary that would be formed to run the Western Isles project. Once the oil was flowing, Mikhail would assume greater responsibilities, primarily in Western Europe and North America.

  “Would that be enough to keep you interested?” asked Lazarev.

  “It might be.”

  “What would it take to convince you to leave Viktor and come to me?”

  “Money, Gennady. Lots of money.”

  “I can assure you, Nicolai, money isn’t an issue.”

  “Then you have my full attention.”

  Lazarev opened a leather folio and removed a single sheet of paper. “Your compensation package will include apartments in Aberdeen, London, and Moscow,” he began. “You will fly private, of course, and you will have use of a Volgatek villa that we keep in the south of France. In addition to your base salary, you will receive bonuses and incentives that will bring your total compensation to something like this.”

  Lazarev placed the sheet of paper in front of Mikhail and pointed to the figure near the bottom of the page. Mikhail looked at it for a moment, scratched his hairless head, and frowned.

  “Well?” asked Lazarev.

  “Not even close.”

  Lazarev smiled. “I thought that would be your answer,” he said, delving into the folio again, “so I took the liberty of preparing a second offer.” He placed it in front of Mikhail and asked, “Any better?”

  “Warmer,” said Mikhail, returning Lazarev’s smile. “Definitely warmer.”

  49

  RED SQUARE, MOSCOW

  By four that afternoon, they had the broad outlines of an agreement. Lazarev drew up a one-page deal memo, booked a private room at Café Pushkin for the celebration, and sent Mikhail back to the Ritz for a few hours of rest. He made the short walk with no escort other than Gabriel, who was shadowing him along the opposite pavement, his coat collar around his ears, a flat cap pulled low over his brow. He watched Mikhail turn into the hotel’s grand entrance and then continued along Tverskaya Street to Revolution Square. There he paused briefly to watch a Lenin impersonator exhorting a group of bewildered Japanese tourists to seize the means of production from their bourgeoisie overlords. Then he slipped beneath the archway of Resurrection Gate and entered Red Square.

  Darkness had fallen and the wind had decided to give the city a reprieve to go about its evening business in peace. Head down, shoulders hunched, Gabriel looked like just another jaded Muscovite as he hurried along the northern wall of the Kremlin, past the blank stares of the frozen guards standing watch outside the Lenin Mausoleum. Directly ahead, awash in white light, rose the swirling candy-cane domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Gabriel glanced at the clock in the Savior Tower and then made his way to the spot along the Kremlin wall where Stalin, the murderer of millions, slumbered peacefully in a place of honor. Eli Lavon joined him a moment later.

  “What do you think?” asked Gabriel in German.

  “I think they should have buried him in an unmarked grave in a field,” Lavon responded. “But that’s just one man’s opinion.”

  “Are we clean?”

  “As clean as we can be in a place like Moscow.”

  Gabriel turned without a word and led Lavon across the square to the entrance of GUM. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, it had been the only department store in the country where Russians could reliably find a winter coat or a pair of shoes. Now it was a Western-style shopping mall stuffed with all the useless trinkets capitalism had to offer. The soaring glass roof reverberated with the chatter of the evening shoppers. Lavon stared at his BlackBerry as he walked at Gabriel’s side. These days, it was a very Russian thing to do.

  “Gennady Lazarev’s secretary just sent an e-mail to his senior staff about tonight’s dinner at Café Pushkin,” Lavon said. “Pavel Zhirov was on the invitation list.”

  “I never heard his voice when Mikhail was inside Volgatek today.”

  “That’s because he wasn’t there,” Lavon replied, still gazing at his BlackBerry. “After leaving his apartment in Sparrow Hills, he went straight to Yasenevo.”

  “Why today of all days? Why wasn’t he at Volgatek to meet the new boy?”

  “Maybe he had other business to attend to.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe there was someone else who needed to be kidnapped.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  Gabriel paused in the window of a jewelry store and gazed at a display of glittering Swiss watches. Next door was a Soviet-style cafeteria where plump women in white aprons joylessly spooned cheap Russian food onto gray Brezhnev-era plates. Even now, more than twenty years after the fall of communism, there were still Russians who clung to the nostalgia of their totalitarian past.

  “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” Lavon asked.

  “It’s December in Moscow, Eli. It’s impossible not to.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “I’d like the hotel to give Nicholas Avedon his special amenity a little earlier than planned.”

  “Amenities like that are frowned upon at Café Pushkin.”

  “Anyone who’s anyone carries a gun at Pushkin, Eli.”

  “It’s risky.”

  “Not as risky as the alternative.”

  “Why don’t we skip dinner and go straight to dessert?”

  “I’d love to,” said Gabriel, “but the rush-hour traffic won’t allow it. We have to wait until after ten o’clock. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to get him out of town. We’ll be dead in the water.”

  “A poor choice of words.”

  “Send the message, Eli.”

  Lavon typed a few characters into his BlackBerry and led Gabriel outside, into Il’inka Street. The wind was getting up again, and the temperature had plummeted. Tears flowed freely from Gabriel’s eyes as they walked past the Easter-egg facades of the heavy imperial buildings. In his earpiece he could hear Nicholas Avedon humming
softly to himself as he ran a bath in his room at the Ritz.

  “I want full coverage on him the entire time,” Gabriel said. “We take him to dinner, we sit with him at dinner, and then we take him back to his hotel. That’s when the fun begins.”

  “Only if Pavel agrees to ride to Mikhail’s rescue.”

  “He’s the chief of Volgatek security. If Volgatek’s newest executive believes his life is in danger, Pavel will come running. And then we’ll make him very sorry that he did.”

  “I’d feel better if we could take him to another country.”

  “Which one, Eli? Ukraine? Belarus? Or how about Kazakhstan?”

  “Actually, I was thinking about Mongolia.”

  “Bad food.”

  “Terrible food,” agreed Lavon, “but at least it isn’t Russia.”

  At the end of the street, they turned to the left and climbed the hill toward Lubyanka Square.

  “Do you think it’s ever been done before?” asked Lavon.

  “What’s that?”

  “Kidnapping a KGB officer inside Russia.”

  “There is no KGB, Eli. The KGB is a thing of the past.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s called the FSB now. And it occupies that big ugly building directly ahead of us. And they’re going to be rather upset when they find out one of their brethren is missing.”

  “If we get him cleanly, they won’t have time to do anything about it.”

  “If we get him cleanly,” Lavon agreed.

  Gabriel was silent.

  “Do me a favor tonight, Gabriel. If you don’t have the shot, don’t take it.” He paused, then added, “I’d hate to miss out on the opportunity of working for you when you become the chief.”