The Other Woman: A Novel Page 32

  83

  Cabin John, Maryland

  It was a Moscow Center–trained move, and a good one at that. A heel to the instep, an elbow to the solar plexus, a backhand to the nose, all in the blink of an eye. Too late, Gabriel seized hold of the gun and tried to tear it from Rebecca’s hands. The shot struck Eva in the Russian way, in the nape of her neck, and she crumpled to the wet earth.

  Rebecca sprayed two more rounds harmlessly into the trees as Gabriel, still clutching the SIG Sauer, drove her backward down the footpath. Together they plunged into the frigid waters of the Potomac. The gun was beneath the surface. It recoiled in Gabriel’s grasp as four tiny torpedoes streaked toward Swainson Island.

  By Gabriel’s count, three rounds remained in the magazine. Rebecca’s face was beneath the dark, rushing waters. Her eyes were open and she was screaming at him in a rage, making no effort to conserve her breath. Gabriel pushed her deeper as two more shots split the channel.

  A single round remained. It escaped the gun as the last breath escaped Rebecca’s lungs. As Gabriel lifted her from the water, he heard footfalls on the path. In his madness, he expected it was Philby come to save his daughter, but it was only Mikhail Abramov and Eli Lavon, come to save him.

  Rebecca, choking on river water, fell to her knees at the base of the sycamore. Gabriel hurled her gun into the channel and started up the path toward the car. Only later did he realize he was counting the steps. There were one hundred and twenty-two.

  Part Four

  The Woman from Andalusia

  84

  Cabin John, Maryland

  A jogger made the discovery at eleven fifteen. She called 911, and the operator called the U.S. Park Police, which had jurisdiction. The officers found three bodies, two men and a young woman, all with gunshot wounds. The men were in street clothes; the woman, in brightly colored athletic wear. She had been shot once in the back of the head, in contrast to the men, who had each been shot twice. There were no vehicles in the car park, and a preliminary search of the crime scene produced no identification. It did, however, produce two Russian-made pistols—a Tokarev and a Makarov—and, curiously, a True Value shovel.

  The blade looked new, and on the handle was a spotless price tag with the name of the store where it was purchased. One of the officers rang the manager and asked whether he had recently sold a shovel to two men or a woman in brightly colored athletic wear. No, said the manager, but he had sold one that very morning to a woman in a business suit and a tan overcoat.

  “Cash or charge?”

  “Cash.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “Fifty-something, very blue eyes. And an accent,” the manager added.

  “Russian, by any chance?”

  “English.”

  “Do you have video?”

  “What do you think?”

  The officer made the drive from the crime scene to the hardware store in four minutes flat. Along the way he made contact with his shift supervisor and expressed his opinion that something significant had occurred on the banks of the river that morning—more significant, even, than the loss of three lives—and that the FBI needed to be brought into the picture immediately. His supervisor concurred and rang Bureau headquarters, which was already on war footing.

  The first FBI agent to arrive at the crime scene was none other than Donald McManus. At 11:50 a.m. he confirmed that the dead woman was the same woman he had seen earlier that morning at the Shell station on Wisconsin Avenue. And at 12:10 p.m., after viewing the video from the hardware store, he confirmed that the woman who purchased the shovel was the same woman who called the Russian Embassy from the gas station’s pay phone.

  But who was she? McManus rushed a copy of the video back to FBI Headquarters to begin the process of trying to attach a name to the woman’s face. The chief of the National Security Branch took one look at the video, however, and told McManus not to bother. The woman was MI6’s Washington Head of Station.

  “Rebecca Manning?” asked Donald McManus, incredulous. “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “I had coffee with her last week.”

  “Did you tell her anything classified?”

  Even then, at the earliest moments of the unfolding scandal, the chief of the NSB knew better than to answer. Instead, he rang his director. And his director, in quick succession, rang the attorney general, the director of the CIA, the secretary of state, and, lastly, the White House. Protocol dictated the secretary of state contact the British ambassador, which he did at half past one.

  “I believe she’s on her way to Dulles Airport,” the ambassador replied. “If you hurry, you just might catch her.”

  It would be established that the Falcon executive jet departed Dulles International Airport at twelve minutes past one o’clock. There were six passengers on board. Three were British, three were Israeli. Only one was a woman. The staff at Signature Flight Support, the airport’s fixed-base operator, would recall that she appeared slightly disoriented and that her hair was damp. She was wearing a tracksuit and new running shoes, as was one of the men, a smallish Israeli with gray temples and very green eyes. Additionally, one of the passengers—his British passport identified him as Peter Marlowe—arrived with his arm in a sling. In short, agreed the staff, they looked as though they had been put through the wringer. And then some.

  By the time the plane touched down in London, official Washington was in an uproar. For the next twenty-four hours, however, the storm remained classified, compartmentalized, and largely contained to the secret realm. Of the three dead bodies found near the river, the FBI said little if anything at all, only that the case appeared to be a robbery gone wrong and that the three victims had yet to be identified, which wasn’t exactly true.

  But behind the scenes, the investigation was advancing at a rapid clip, and with alarming results. Ballistics analysis determined that the two men had been killed by a .45-caliber weapon—fired by a gunman of considerable skill—and that the woman known as Eva Fernandes had died as the result of a single 9mm shot dispatched at close range. Analysts from the Bureau’s National Security Branch dug deeply into the woman’s green card application, along with her travel history and her rather dubious claim to Brazilian nationality. In short order, they concluded she was in all likelihood an illegal agent of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. The two men, the FBI determined, were similarly employed, though both were holders of Russian diplomatic passports. One was called Vitaly Petrov, the other was Stanislav Zelenko. Both men held low-level diplomatic cover jobs, Petrov at the Washington embassy, Zelenko in New York.

  Which made Russia’s official silence all the more puzzling. The embassy in Washington made no inquiry on behalf of the two dead men and voiced no protest. Nor did the National Security Agency detect any increase in encrypted communications flowing between the embassy and Moscow Center. It was obvious the Russians were hiding something. Something more valuable than an illegal Brazilian bagwoman and a couple of muscle operatives. Something like Rebecca Manning.

  Langley did not imitate Russia’s posture of silence. Indeed, if Russian eavesdroppers were listening, which they certainly were, they might very well have noticed a sharp spike in secure phone calls between the seventh floor of CIA Headquarters and Vauxhall Cross. And if the Russians had been able to break the unbreakable levels of encryption, they would have doubtless been pleased by what they heard. For in the days following Rebecca Manning’s escape, relations between the CIA and MI6 plunged to a depth not seen since 1963, when a certain Kim Philby flew the coop in Beirut and landed in Moscow.

  Once again, the Americans pounded their fists in indignation and demanded answers. Why had Rebecca Manning contacted the Russian Embassy? Was she a Russian spy? If so, for how long? How much had she betrayed? Was she responsible for the three dead bodies found along the banks of the Potomac near Swainson Island? What was the Israeli connection? And why, pray tell, had she purchased a shovel from the True Value hardware stor
e at the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and Goldsboro Road?

  There was no hiding from what had transpired, and to Graham Seymour’s credit—at least in the eyes of his few remaining supporters within the American intelligence community—he did not try. He muddied the waters, it was true, but never once did he tell the Americans an outright lie, for had he done so, the marriage might have ended on the spot. Mainly, he played for time and pleaded with Langley to keep Rebecca’s name out of the press. A public scandal, he said, would do none of them any good. What’s more, it would hand yet another propaganda victory to the Tsar, who had been rather on a roll of late. Better to assess the damage in private and set about repairing the relationship.

  “There is no relationship,” CIA director Morris Payne told Seymour by secure phone four days after Rebecca returned to London. “Not until we’re confident the leak has been plugged and your service is no longer taking on Russian water.”

  “You’ve had your problems in the past, and we never threatened to withhold cooperation.”

  “That’s because you need us more than we need you.”

  “How tactful of you, Morris. How diplomatic.”

  “To hell with tact! Where the hell is she, by the way?”

  “I’d rather not say over this line.”

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “That,” said Seymour with lawyerly precision, “is a matter of great interest to us.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that.” Payne swore loudly and with great effect. “Cathy and I treated her like family, Graham. We let her into our home. And how did she repay me? She stole my secrets and stabbed me in the back. I feel like . . .”

  “Like what, Morris?”

  “I feel the way James Angleton must have felt when his good friend Kim Philby defected to Moscow.”

  And there it might have ended, with the Russians silent and the cousins feuding, were it not for a story that appeared in the Washington Post a week to the day after Rebecca Manning’s hasty departure from America. It was the work of a reporter who had written authoritatively on national security matters in the past, and as usual her sources were carefully camouflaged. The most likely origin of the leak, though, was the FBI, which had never been comfortable with the idea of sweeping Rebecca Manning and three dead Russian agents under the rug.

  The leak was selective. Even so, the story was a bombshell. It stated that the three people found dead along the banks of the Potomac were not victims of a robbery but officers of the SVR. Two had diplomatic cover, one was an illegal posing as a Brazilian. How they were killed, and why, was not yet known, but the FBI was said to be investigating the involvement of at least two foreign intelligence services.

  The story had one important consequence: Russia could remain silent no more. The Kremlin reacted with fury and accused the United States of a cold-blooded assassination, a charge the administration vigorously and repeatedly denied. The next three days witnessed a rapid cycle of leak and counterleak, until finally it spilled onto the front page of the New York Times. At least a part of it did. The experts on cable television universally declared it the worst case of espionage since the Kim Philby disaster. In that, if nothing else, they were entirely correct.

  There were many questions still to be answered regarding Rebecca Manning’s recruitment as a Russian agent. There were questions, too, regarding the role played by one Gabriel Allon, who was reportedly on board the aircraft that spirited Rebecca Manning to Britain. From London, there was only silence. From Tel Aviv, too.

  85

  Tel Aviv—Jerusalem

  He was spotted that same day arriving at the prime minister’s office for the weekly meeting of Israel’s fractious cabinet, dressed in a crisp blue suit and white shirt and looking none the worse for wear. When a reporter asked for a comment on Rebecca Manning’s unmasking as a Russian spy, he smiled and said nothing at all. Inside the cabinet room, he doodled in his notebook while the ministers bickered, all the while wondering how the Israeli people managed to thrive in spite of their dreadful politicians. When his turn came to speak, he briefed the cabinet on a recent raid that elements of the Office and the IDF had conducted against Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula, with the tacit blessing of the new Pharaoh. He did not mention the fact the operation had occurred while he was airborne over the Atlantic, attempting to conduct the first interrogation of Rebecca Manning. Graham Seymour had curtly put an end to it. In London, they had parted with scarcely a word of farewell.

  At King Saul Boulevard, the work of protecting the country from its myriad threats went on as normal, as though nothing had happened. At the Monday-morning senior staff meeting, there were the usual shouting matches over resources and priorities, but Rebecca Manning’s name was not spoken. The Office had other pressing business. The secret strikes in the Sinai were only one facet of Israel’s new strategy of working closely with the Sunni regimes of the Middle East against their common enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. America’s retreat from the region had created a vacuum that the Iranians and the Russians were rapidly filling. Israel was acting as a bulwark against the rising Iranian threat, with Gabriel and the Office serving as the tip of the spear. What’s more, America’s unpredictable president had declared his intention to scrap the agreement that had temporarily delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Gabriel fully expected the Iranians to ramp up the weapons program in response, and he was putting in place a new program of intelligence-gathering and sabotage to stop it.

  He also expected the Russians to retaliate for the loss of Rebecca Manning. And so he was not surprised by the news, later that week, that Werner Schwarz had died in Vienna after falling from the window of his apartment. It was the same window Werner had used to signal Moscow Center when he wanted to meet. No suicide note was found, though the Bundespolizei did find several hundred thousand euros stashed in a private bank account. The Austrian press wondered whether the death was somehow related to the assassination of Konstantin Kirov. The Austrian interior ministry wondered the same thing.

  Internally, there was an official case history to write and a protective legal defense to prepare, but Gabriel found any number of excuses to avoid the debriefers and the Office’s in-house lawyers. Namely, they wanted to know precisely what had transpired on the banks of the Potomac River in Maryland. Who had killed the two Russian field hands, Petrov and Zelenko? And what about the illegal who had agreed to entrap Rebecca Manning in exchange for sanctuary in Israel? Uzi Navot tried to pry it out of Mikhail and Eli Lavon, but both answered truthfully that they had come upon the scene after the three Russians were dead. Therefore, they could not say for certain how they had ended up that way.

  “And you never asked him what happened?”

  “We tried,” said Lavon.

  “And Rebecca?”

  “Not a peep. It was one of the worst flights of my life, and I’ve had some bad ones.”

  They were in Lavon’s little hutch of an office. It was filled with shards of pottery and ancient coins and tools. In his spare time, Lavon was one of Israel’s most prominent archaeologists.

  “Let us assume,” said Navot, “that Gabriel was the one who killed the two hoods.”

  “Let’s,” agreed Lavon.

  “So how did the girl end up dead? And how did Gabriel know that Rebecca was going to be there? And why in God’s name did she stop for a shovel?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “You’re an archaeologist.”

  “All I know,” said Lavon, “is that the chief of the Office is lucky to be alive. If it had been you . . .”

  “They’d be carving my name on a memorial wall.”

  If anyone deserved to have their name on a wall, thought Lavon, it was the man who had found Rebecca Manning, but he would accept no accolades. His only reward was the odd evening at home with his wife and two young children, but even they sensed something was troubling him. Late one night Irene interrogated him at length as he sat at the edge of her bed. He
lied so poorly, not even the child believed him. “Stay with me, Abba,” she commanded in her peculiar mix of Italian and Hebrew when Gabriel tried to leave. Then she said, “Please never let me go.”

  Gabriel remained in the nursery until Irene was sleeping soundly. In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of Galilean shiraz and sat at the little café table glumly watching the news from London while Chiara prepared their supper. On the screen, Graham Seymour was slouched in the back of a limousine leaving Downing Street, where he had offered to resign over the scandal that had befallen the Secret Intelligence Service on his watch. Prime Minister Lancaster had refused to accept it—at least for the moment, according to one anonymously quoted Downing Street aide. There were calls for the obligatory parliamentary investigation and, worse yet, an independent inquiry of the sort conducted into MI6’s faulty intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And what about Alistair Hughes? howled the media. Was his death in sleepy Bern somehow linked to Rebecca Manning’s treachery? Was he a Russian spy, too? Was there a Third Man lurking? In short, it was exactly the sort of public spectacle Seymour had hoped to avoid.

  “How long can he keep it secret?” asked Chiara.

  “Which part?”

  “The identity of Rebecca Manning’s father.”

  “I suppose that depends on how many people inside MI6 know she refers to herself as Rebecca Philby.”

  Chiara placed a bowl of spaghetti al pomodoro before Gabriel. He whitened it with grated cheese but hesitated before taking a first bite. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said at last, “about what happened that morning along the banks of the river.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Do you?”

  “You were somewhere you ought not to have been, alone, with no backup or bodyguards. Fortunately, you had the sense to slip a gun into your pocket on your way out the safe house door.”