The Other Woman: A Novel Page 9

  “Inquiries?”

  He nodded.

  “Have you identified a suspect?”

  “Rebecca, really.” Seymour’s tone was chastising.

  “I’m not some low-level desk officer, Graham. I’m your H/Washington. And I’m entitled to know whether Vauxhall Cross thinks I’ve got a traitor working in my station.”

  Seymour hesitated, then shook his head slowly. Rebecca appeared relieved.

  “What are we going to say to the Americans?” she asked.

  “Nothing at all. It’s too dangerous.”

  “And when Morris Payne informs you of his suspicion that we’re harboring a Russian spy in our midst?”

  “I’ll remind him about Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And then I’ll tell him he’s mistaken.”

  “He won’t accept it.”

  “He’ll have no other choice.”

  “Unless your unofficial inquiry uncovers a Russian mole.”

  “What inquiry?” asked Seymour. “What mole?”

  16

  Belvedere Quarter, Vienna

  The British Embassy in Vienna was located at Jauresgasse 12, not far from the Belvedere gardens, in the city’s gilded Third District. The Jordanians were across the street, the Chinese were next door, and the Iranians were just down the block. So, too, were the Russians. Consequently, Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, had occasion to innocently pass the SVR’s large rezidentura several times daily, either in his chauffeured car or on foot.

  He lived on a quiet street called the Barichgasse, in a flat large enough to accommodate his wife and two sons, who visited from London at least once a month. Housekeeping snared a short-term lease on a furnished apartment in the building directly opposite. Eli Lavon moved in the morning of Graham Seymour’s visit to Washington; Christopher Keller, the day after that. He had worked with Lavon on several operations, most recently in Morocco. Even so, Keller scarcely recognized the man who unchained the door and pulled him hastily inside.

  “What exactly,” asked Keller, “is the nature of our relationship?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” answered Lavon.

  Keller glimpsed Alistair Hughes for the first time at half past eight that evening when he emerged from the back of an embassy sedan. And then he saw Hughes again two minutes later, on the screen of a laptop computer, when he let himself into his flat. A Neviot team had broken into the apartment that afternoon and concealed cameras and microphones in every room. They had also placed a tap on the apartment’s landline phone and its Wi-Fi network, which would allow Lavon and Keller to monitor Hughes’s activity in cyberspace, including keystrokes. MI6 regulations forbade him from conducting official business on any computer outside the station, or on any phone other than his secure BlackBerry. He was free, however, to conduct personal business on an insecure network, using a personal device. Like most declared MI6 officers, he carried a second phone. Hughes’s was an iPhone.

  He passed that first evening as he would pass the subsequent nine, in the manner of a middle-aged man living alone. His arrival time varied slightly each night, which Lavon, who logged his comings and goings, put down to proper tradecraft and personal security. His meals were of the frozen microwavable variety and were generally taken while watching the news on the BBC. He drank no wine with his dinner—indeed, they observed no consumption of alcoholic beverages at all—and usually phoned his wife and sons around ten. They lived in the Shepherd’s Bush section of West London. The wife, who was called Melinda, worked for Barclays at its headquarters in Canary Wharf. The boys were fourteen and sixteen and attended St. Paul’s, one of London’s costliest schools. Money appeared not to be an issue.

  Insomnia, however, was. His first recourse was a dense biography of Clement Attlee, Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister, and when that didn’t work he would reach for the bottle of tablets that remained always on his bedside table. There were two more bottles in the medicine chest of the bathroom. Hughes took those with his morning coffee. He was careful in his grooming and his dress, but not unduly so. He never failed to send a “good morning” text message to the boys and Melinda, and none of the texts or e-mails he sent or received while in the apartment were outwardly romantic or sexual in nature. Eli Lavon forwarded all the outgoing or incoming phone numbers and addresses to King Saul Boulevard, which in turn handed them over to Unit 8200, Israel’s highly capable signals and cyberintelligence service. None appeared suspicious. For good measure, Unit 8200 trolled through the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses in his contacts. All those were clean, too.

  A car collected Hughes each morning around nine o’clock, sometimes a few minutes earlier, sometimes later, and took him to the embassy, at which point he disappeared from sight for several hours. The strict security measures along the Jauresgasse made it impossible for Lavon’s watchers to maintain a fixed presence there. Nor were there any parks or squares or public spaces where a surveillance artist might loiter for any length of time. It was no matter; the location services of the iPhone, which Hughes kept in his briefcase, alerted them when he left the grounds.

  As the declared Head of Station in a small and reasonably friendly country, Alistair Hughes was something of a diplomat-spy, which required him to maintain a busy schedule of meetings and appointments outside the embassy. He was a frequent visitor to various Austrian ministries and to the headquarters of the BVT, and he lunched daily in Vienna’s finest restaurants with spies and diplomats and even the odd journalist—including a beautiful reporter from German television who pressed him for information on Israel’s role in the murder of Konstantin Kirov. Eli Lavon knew this because he was lunching at the next table with one of his female watchers. Lavon was also present at a diplomatic reception at the Kunsthistorisches Museum when Hughes briefly rubbed shoulders with a man from the Russian Embassy. Lavon covertly snapped a photo of the encounter and shot it to King Saul Boulevard. The Office could not attach a name to the Russian’s face, and neither could the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Graham Seymour, however, had no problem identifying him. “Vitaly Borodin,” he told Gabriel over the dedicated secure link between their offices. “He’s a deputy second secretary with no connection whatsoever with the SVR.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Alistair reported the contact the minute he returned to the station.”

  That evening, the tenth of the surveillance operation, Hughes managed only two pages of the Attlee biography before reaching for the tablets on his bedside table. And in the morning, after dispatching text messages to his wife and children, he clawed a tablet from each of the two bottles in his medicine chest and washed them down with his coffee. The embassy car arrived at twelve minutes past nine o’clock, and at nine thirty Keller entered Hughes’s flat with the help of one of Lavon’s break-in artists. He made straight for the bottle on the bedside table. It had no label or markings of any kind. Neither did the bottles in the medicine cabinet. Keller took a sample from each and laid them on the bathroom counter and photographed them, top and bottom. Across the street in the observation post, he entered the prescription numbers in an Internet pill-identifier database.

  “Now we know why he’s the only MI6 officer who doesn’t drink,” said Eli Lavon. “The side effects would kill him.”

  Lavon flashed an update to King Saul Boulevard, and Gabriel broke the news to Graham Seymour in a secure phone call late that afternoon. MI6’s Vienna Head of Station was a manic-depressive who was struggling with anxiety and having trouble sleeping at night. There was a silver lining, however. Thus far, there was no evidence to suggest he was a Russian spy as well.

  For three more days and nights they watched him. Or, as Eli Lavon would later describe it, and Keller would concur, they watched over him. Such was the impact of the three unmarked bottles, one for Ambien, one for Xanax, and one for Lithobid, a powerful mood stabilizer. Even Lavon, a professional voyeur who had spent a lifetime chronicling the secret lives of others—their weaknesses
and vanities, their private indiscretions and infidelities—could no longer think of Alistair Hughes as only a target and a potential Russian spy. He was theirs to care for and to protect from harm. He was their patient.

  He was not the first professional intelligence officer to suffer from mental illness, and he would not be the last. Some came to the game with their disorders in place; others found it was the game itself that made them sick. Hughes, however, concealed his ailments better than most. Indeed, Keller and Lavon struggled to reconcile the Ambien-addled figure who rose unsteadily from his bed each morning with the polished professional spy who emerged a few minutes later from the doorway of the apartment building, the very archetype of British sophistication and competence. Still, the watchers tightened their orbit as they followed Hughes to his daily appointments. And when he nearly stepped in front of a tram on the Kärntner Ring—he was distracted at the time by something on his BlackBerry—it was Eli Lavon who seized his elbow and in German quietly warned him to watch his step.

  “And you’re sure he didn’t see you?” asked Gabriel over the secure link.

  “I turned away before he looked up from the phone. He never had a clear view of my face.”

  “You broke the fourth wall between watcher and quarry.” Gabriel’s tone was admonitory. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “What should I have done? Watch while he gets run down by a streetcar?”

  The next day was a Wednesday, gray and despondent, but warm enough so that the low clouds dispensed rain rather than snow. Hughes’s mood matched the weather. He was slow in rising from his bed, and when he swallowed the tablets from the medicine chest, the Xanax and the Lithobid, he did so as though they had been forced down his throat. Outside in the street he paused before climbing into the back of his embassy car and lifted his eyes toward the windows of the observation flat, but otherwise the day proceeded in the same manner as the previous twelve. He spent his morning inside the embassy, he lunched well with an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he had coffee at Café Sperl with a reporter from the Telegraph. He left no chalk marks, took no long walks in a Viennese park or isolated woodland, and engaged in no visible acts of impersonal communication. In short, he did nothing to suggest he was in contact with an adversarial intelligence service.

  He remained at the embassy later than was typical and returned to his flat at nine fifteen. There was barely time enough for a microwave chicken curry and quick phone call to Shepherd’s Bush before climbing into his bed. There he reached not for his book but for his laptop computer, which he used to book a flight and reserve a hotel room for two nights. The flight was SkyWork 605, departing Vienna at two in the afternoon on Friday, with a scheduled arrival in Bern at half past three. The hotel was the Schweizerhof, one of Bern’s finest. He did not tell his wife of his travel plans. Nor, admitted Graham Seymour in a secure phone call with Gabriel, did he inform Vienna Station or Vauxhall Cross.

  “Why not?” asked Gabriel.

  “It’s not required as long as the trip is personal in nature.”

  “Maybe it should be.”

  “Do you know where your station chiefs are every minute of every day?”

  “No,” said Gabriel. “But none of mine are spying for the Russians.”

  Alistair Hughes slept soundly that night with the help of ten milligrams of Ambien, but at King Saul Boulevard the lights burned late. In the morning Mikhail Abramov flew to Zürich; Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern, to Geneva. All three eventually made their way to Bern, where they were met by Christopher Keller and several Neviot officers from the Vienna watch.

  Which left only Gabriel. Early on Friday morning he rose in darkness and dressed in the clothing of a German businessman called Johannes Klemp, quietly, so as not to wake Chiara. In the next room, Raphael slept through his gentle kiss, but Irene woke with a start and fixed him with an accusatory glare.

  “You look different.”

  “Sometimes I have to pretend to be someone else.”

  “Are you leaving again?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Not long,” he answered faithlessly.

  “Where are you going this time?”

  Operational security did not permit him to answer. He gave Irene one last kiss and went downstairs, where his motorcade disturbed the quiet of Narkiss Street. Where are you going this time? Switzerland, he thought. Why did it have to be Switzerland?

  17

  The Palisades, Washington

  As Gabriel’s flight rose over the eastern Mediterranean, Eva Fernandes was wiping down the small bar at Brussels Midi, a popular Belgian bistro located on MacArthur Boulevard in Northwest Washington. The last of the evening’s guests had finally departed, and the narrow dining room was deserted, save for Ramon, who was running the vacuum rhythmically over the carpet, and Claudia, who was setting the tables for tomorrow’s lunch service. Both were recent arrivals from Honduras—Claudia was legal, Ramon was not—and neither spoke much in the way of English. The same was true of most of the kitchen staff. Fortunately, Henri, the Belgian-born owner and head chef, had enough Spanish to make his wishes known, as did Yvette, his ruthlessly efficient business partner and wife.

  Yvette managed the restaurant’s day-to-day operations and jealously guarded the reservations book, but it was Eva Fernandes, trim, blond, strikingly attractive, who served as the restaurant’s public face. Its well-heeled clientele were members in good standing of Washington’s ruling elite—lawyers, lobbyists, journalists, diplomats, and intellectuals from the city’s most prominent policy shops and think tanks. Most were Democrats and leftward leaning. They were globalists, environmentalists, and supporters of reproductive rights, unrestricted immigration, universal health care, robust gun control, and a guaranteed basic income for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Eva they adored. She greeted them when they entered the restaurant and relieved them of their overcoats and their cares. And when their tables weren’t available because Yvette had taken too many reservations, Eva soothed their anger with a dazzling smile and a complimentary glass of wine and a few soft words in her untraceable accent. “Where are you from?” they would ask, and she would tell them she was from Brazil, which was true to a point. And if they asked about the origin of her European looks, she would explain that her grandparents were from Germany, which was not true at all.

  She had arrived in America seven years earlier, living first in Miami, then hopscotching her way northward, through a series of dead-end jobs and relationships, before finding herself in Washington, which had been her destination all along. She had found the job at Brussels Midi quite by accident after bumping into Yvette at the Starbucks across the street. She was overqualified for the work—she had earned a degree in molecular biology from a prestigious university—and the pay was dreadful. She supplemented her wages by teaching three classes a week at a yoga studio in Georgetown and received additional financial support from a friend who taught history at Hunter College in Manhattan. Combined, the three sources of income gave her the appearance of self-sufficiency. She lived alone in a small apartment on Reservoir Road, owned a Kia Optima sedan, and traveled frequently, mainly to Canada.

  It was eleven fifteen when Ramon and Claudia departed. Eva collected her handbag from the cloakroom, engaged the restaurant’s alarm system, and went out. Her car was parked along the curb. Her apartment was less than a mile away, but Eva never walked home alone at night. There had been a string of muggings along MacArthur Boulevard that winter, and a week earlier a young woman had been dragged into the woods of Battery Kemble Park at knifepoint and raped. Eva was quite confident she could look after herself in the event of a robbery or sexual assault, but such prowess didn’t necessarily fit the profile of a hostess and part-time yoga instructor. Nor did she want to take the risk of becoming involved with the police.

  She unlocked the doors of the Kia using the remote and slipped quickly inside. The han
dbag she placed carefully on the passenger seat. It was heavier than usual, for it contained a polished chrome object, electronic, about the size of an average paperback novel. Eva had been ordered to turn on the device that evening—for fifteen minutes only, beginning at 9:00 p.m.—to allow an agent of Moscow Center to electronically hand over documents. The device had a range of about one hundred feet in all directions. It was possible the agent had transmitted the documents from the sidewalk or from a passing car, but Eva doubted it. In all likelihood, the exchange had taken place inside Brussels Midi. For reasons of security, Eva did not know the identity of the agent, but she had a suspect. She noticed things most people did not, little things. Her survival depended on it.

  MacArthur Boulevard was deserted and wet with night rain. Eva drove east, minding her speed because of the cameras. Her small redbrick apartment building overlooked the reservoir. She parked the Kia about a hundred yards away and checked the parked cars as she walked along the damp pavement. Most she recognized, but one, an SUV with Virginia plates, she had never seen before. She committed the license number to memory—she did so not in English or Portuguese, the language of her cover identity, but in Russian—and went inside.

  In the foyer she found her mailbox stuffed to capacity. She dropped the catalogues and the other junk into the recycle bin and carried a couple of bills upstairs to her apartment. There, at the kitchen table, with the lights dimmed and the shades drawn, she connected the chrome device to her laptop computer and entered the correct 27-character password in the dialogue box that appeared on the screen.

  She inserted an unused memory stick and when prompted tapped the mousepad. The files on the device moved automatically to the memory stick, but it was Eva’s responsibility to lock the stick and encrypt its contents. Now, as always, she performed this step slowly and meticulously. To make certain of her work, she ejected the memory stick and reinserted it into the USB port, then clicked on the icon that appeared. She was refused entry without the proper 27-character password. The memory stick was locked tight.