The Other Woman: A Novel Page 35
It is true that Philby devoted only five paragraphs to his time in Beirut in his unreliable autobiography, My Silent War. He fled the city in January 1963 after admitting to his old friend Nicholas Elliott he was a Soviet spy. It is unlikely he would have told a mistress the truth about his past before boarding the Dolmatova. According to Yuri Modin, Philby’s KGB controller, he never told any of his wives or lovers the truth about his secret work for Russian intelligence. “We never had a single problem on this score,” Modin recalled in his memoir, My Cambridge Friends.
In Moscow, Philby married a fourth time and after several years in the wilderness happily undertook several projects for the KGB. Much of the work was analytical and instructional, but according to Modin, some of it was operational in nature, such as “identifying agents from photographs shown to him.” There is no evidence to suggest he was involved in preparing an agent of penetration, a mole. But then there is no evidence to suggest he did not. In my experience, it is wise to read the memoirs of spies with a jaundiced eye.
In the summer of 2007, while researching the novel that would come to be titled Moscow Rules, I visited the KGB’s private museum in its looming old headquarters in Lubyanka Square. And there, in a protective glass case, I saw a tiny shrine to the Cambridge Five—or the Magnificent Five, as the KGB referred to them. They were recruited, beginning with Philby, just sixteen years after the birth of the Soviet Union, a time of great paranoia in Moscow when Stalin and his henchmen sought to defend their nascent revolution, in part, by waging political warfare against their adversaries in the West. The NKVD, precursor of the KGB, referred to this program as “active measures.” They ranged from disinformation campaigns in the Western media to political violence and assassinations, and their goal was to weaken and eventually destroy the capitalist West.
There are striking parallels between then and now. Russia under Vladimir Putin is both revanchist and paranoid, a dangerous combination. Economically and demographically weak, Putin uses his powerful intelligence services and cyberwarriors as a force multiplier. When Putin sows political chaos in Western Europe and seeks to disrupt and discredit an American election, he is reaching deep into the KGB’s old playbook. He is engaging in “active measures.”
Like the tsars and Party chairmen who came before him, Vladimir Putin readily uses murder as a tool of statecraft. Witness the case of Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer and MI6 asset who was poisoned at his home in Salisbury, England, on March 4, 2018, with a military-grade Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok. At the time of this writing, Skripal remained hospitalized in serious condition. His thirty-three-year-old daughter, Yulia, also sickened by the toxin, was unconscious for three weeks. Forty-eight other people reported symptoms, including a police officer who spent time in a critical-care unit.
The attack on Sergei Skripal came twelve years after Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of Putin living in London, was murdered with a cup of polonium-laced tea. In 2006 Britain’s official reaction to the use of a radioactive weapon on its soil was limited to a single extradition request, which the Kremlin gleefully ignored. Following the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, however, Prime Minister Theresa May expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats. The United States, Canada, and fourteen members of the European Union followed suit. In addition, the United States imposed economic sanctions on seven of Russia’s richest men and seventeen top government officials, in part over Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Vladimir Putin, regarded by many observers to be the richest man in the world, was not on the list.
Security analysts estimate that two-thirds of the “diplomats” stationed at a typical Russian embassy in Western Europe are actually intelligence officers. Therefore, it is unlikely a modest round of tit-for-tat sanctions will deter Putin from his present path. And why should it? Putin and Putinism are on the march. The strongman and the “corporate state”—by another name, fascism—are all the rage. Western-style democracy and the global institutions that created an unprecedented period of peace in Europe are suddenly out of vogue.
“Probe with bayonets,” advised Lenin. “If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” Thus far, Putin has encountered only mush. In the 1930s, when the world witnessed a similar simultaneous rise of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, a calamitous world war ensued, leaving more than sixty million dead. It is wishful thinking to assume the twenty-first century’s flirtation with neofascism will proceed without conflict.
Look no farther than Syria, where an axis of Russia, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan have propped up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Kremlin’s closest friend in the Middle East. Assad has repeatedly and flagrantly used chemical weapons against his own people, presumably with Moscow’s blessing, perhaps even with Moscow’s help. Thus far, an estimated four hundred thousand people have perished in Syria’s civil war, and there is no end to the conflict in sight. Putin is probing with bayonets. Only steel will stop him.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my wife, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the themes and plot twists of The Other Woman and then expertly trimmed one hundred pages from the pile of paper I euphemistically refer to as my first draft. My debt to her is immeasurable, as is my love.
My dear friend Louis Toscano, author of Triple Cross and Mary Bloom, made countless improvements to the novel, large and small, and my eagle-eyed personal copy editor, Kathy Crosby, made certain it was free of typographical and grammatical errors. Any mistakes that slipped through their formidable defenses are mine, not theirs.
I am forever indebted to David Bull, who is truly one of the world’s finest art restorers, and the great Patrick Matthiesen, of the Matthiesen Gallery in London, whose wit and charm animated the Allon series from the beginning.
To write a novel about a spy who plied his trade in the middle of the twentieth century required enormous research—indeed, my bookshelf resembles Charlotte Bettencourt’s in Zahara. I am indebted to the memories and scholarship of Yuri Modin, Rufina Philby, Richard Beeston, Phillip Knightley, Anthony Boyle, Tom Bower, Ben Macintyre, Anthony Cave Brown, and Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville.
A special thanks to my Los Angeles superlawyer, Michael Gendler. Also, to the many friends and family members who provide much-needed laughter at critical times during the writing year, especially Nancy Dubuc and Michael Kizilbash, Andy and Betsy Lack, Jeff Zucker, Elsa Walsh and Bob Woodward, Ron Meyer, and Elena Nachmanoff.
Finally, I wish to thank my children, Lily and Nicholas, who are a constant source of love and inspiration. Recent college graduates, they have embarked on careers of their own. Perhaps not surprisingly, given what they witnessed as young children, neither has chosen to become a writer.
About the Author
Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, The English Spy, The Black Widow, House of Spies, and The Other Woman (2018). He is best known for his long-running thriller series starring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Silva’s books are critically acclaimed bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than thirty languages. He resides in Florida with his wife, television journalist Jamie Gangel, and their twins, Lily and Nicholas. For more information, visit www.danielsilvabooks.com.
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Also by Daniel Silva
House of Spies
The Black Widow
The English Spy
The Heist
The English Girl
The Fallen Angel
Portrait of a Spy
Th
e Rembrandt Affair
The Defector
Moscow Rules
The Secret Servant
The Messenger
Prince of Fire
A Death in Vienna
The Confessor
The English Assassin
The Kill Artist
The Marching Season
The Mark of the Assassin
The Unlikely Spy
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
the other woman. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Silva. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Art by Will Staehle
Cover design and illustration by Will Staehle
Cover photograph © Alexander Voskresensky/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-283488-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283482-9
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