- -
- 100%
- +
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
First published in the United States of America by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover illustration by Will Staehle, Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008280918
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008280925
Version: 2018-08-17
Dedication
Once again, for my wife, Jamie, and my children, Nicholas and Lily
Epigraph
He was given a new lease on life when the Centre finally suggested that he take part in the training of a new generation of agents at the KGB spy school, a job he accepted with great enthusiasm. He proved an excellent teacher, imparting what he knew with pleasure, patience and devotion. He loved the work.
—YURI MODIN, My Five Cambridge Friends
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
—JEAN RHYS, Wide Sargasso Sea
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Moscow: 1974
Part One: Night Train to Vienna
1. Budapest, Hungary
2. Vienna
3. Vienna
4. Westbahnhof, Vienna
5. Floridsdorf, Vienna
6. Vienna—Tel Aviv
7. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
8. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem
9. King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
10. Vienna Woods, Austria
11. Andalusia, Spain
12. Belgravia, London
13. Eaton Square, London
14. Eaton Square, London
15. British Embassy, Washington
16. Belvedere Quarter, Vienna
17. The Palisades, Washington
18. Vienna—Bern
19. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
20. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
21. Schweizerhof Hotel, Bern
Part Two: Pink Gin At the Normandie
22. Bern
23. Bern
24. Bern
25. Hampshire, England
26. Hampshire, England
27. Fort Monckton, Hampshire
28. Vienna Woods, Austria
29. Vienna Woods, Austria
30. Vienna Woods, Austria
31. Andalusia, Spain
32. Frankfurt—Tel Aviv—Paris
33. Tenleytown, Washington
34. Strasbourg, France
35. Upper Galilee, Israel
36. Upper Galilee, Israel
37. Upper Galilee, Israel
38. Upper Galilee, Israel
39. Upper Galilee, Israel
40. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
41. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
42. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
43. Slough, Berkshire
44. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor
45. Dartmoor—London
46. Zahara, Spain
47. Zahara—Seville
48. Seville
49. Seville
50. Seville
Part Three: Down By the River
51. Seville—London
52. Bayswater Road, London
53. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem
54. Rue Saint-Denis, Montreal
55. Montreal—Washington
56. Foxhall, Washington
57. Forest Hills, Washington
58. Tenleytown, Washington
59. Warren Street, Washington
60. The Palisades, Washington
61. SVR Headquarters, Yasenevo
62. Forest Hills, Washington
63. Warren Street, Washington
64. Yuma Street, Washington
65. British Embassy, Washington
66. Burleith, Washington
67. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
68. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
69. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
70. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
71. Chesapeake Street, Washington
72. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
73. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington
74. Burleith, Washington
75. Tenleytown, Washington
76. Forest Hills, Washington
77. Chesapeake Street, Washington
78. Bethesda, Maryland
79. Cabin John, Maryland
80. Capital Beltway, Virginia
81. Cabin John, Maryland
82. Cabin John, Maryland
83. Cabin John, Maryland
Part Four: The Woman From Andalusia
84. Cabin John, Maryland
85. Tel Aviv—Jerusalem
86. Eaton Square, London
87. Scottish Highlands
88. Zahara, Spain
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Daniel Silva
About the Publisher
MOSCOW: 1974
The car was a Zil limousine, long and black, with pleated curtains in the rear windows. It sped from Sheremetyevo Airport into the center of Moscow, along a lane reserved for members of the Politburo and the Central Committee. Night had fallen by the time they reached their destination, a square named for a Russian writer, in an old section of the city known as Patriarch’s Ponds. They walked along narrow unlit streets, the child and the two men in gray suits, until they came to an oratory surrounded by Muscovy plane trees. The apartment house was on the opposite side of an alley. They passed through a wooden doorway and squeezed into a lift, which deposited them onto a darkened foyer. A flight of stairs awaited. The child, out of habit, counted the steps. There were fifteen. On the landing was another door. This one was padded leather. A well-dressed man stood there, drink in hand. Something about the ruined face seemed familiar. Smiling, he spoke a single word in Russian. It would be many years before the child understood what the word meant.
1
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
None of it would have come to pass—not the desperate quest for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths—were it not for poor Heathcliff. He was their tragic figure, their broken promise. In the end, he would prove to be yet another feather in Gabriel’s cap. That said, Gabriel would have preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger. Assets like Heathcliff did not come along every day, sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice. Such was the nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament. Such was life itself.
It was not his true name, Heathcliff; it had been generated at random, or so his handlers claimed, by computer. The program deliberately chose a code name that bore no resemblance to the asset’s real name, nationality, or line of work. In this regard, it had succeeded. The man to whom Heathcliff’s name had been attached was neither a foundling nor a hopeless romantic. Nor was he bitter or vengeful or violent in nature. In truth, he had nothing in common with Brontë’s Heathcliff other than his dark complexion, for his mother was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The same republic, she was proud to point out, as Comrade Stalin, whose portrait still hung in the sitting room of her Moscow apartment.
Heathcliff spoke and read English fluently, however, and was fond of the Victorian novel. In fact, he had flirted with the idea of studying English literature before coming to his senses and enrolling at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, regarded as the second-most prestigious university in the Soviet Union. His faculty adviser was a talent-spotter for the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and upon graduation Heathcliff was invited to enter the SVR’s academy. His mother, drunk with joy, placed flowers and fresh fruit at the foot of Comrade Stalin’s portrait. “He is watching you,” she said. “One day you will be a man to be reckoned with. A man to be feared.” In his mother’s eyes, there was no finer thing for a man to be.
It was the ambition of most cadets to serve abroad in a rezidentura, an SVR station, where they would recruit and run enemy spies. It took a certain type of officer to perform such work. He had to be brash, confident, talkative, quick on his feet, a natural seducer. Heathcliff, unfortunately, was blessed with none of these qualities. Nor did he possess the physical attributes required for some of the SVR’s more unsavory tasks. What he had was a facility for languages—he spoke fluent German and Dutch as well as English—and a memory that even by the SVR’s high standards was deemed to be exceptional. He was given a choice, a rarity in the hierarchical world of the SVR. He could work at Moscow Center as a translator or serve in the field as a courier. He chose the latter, thus sealing his fate.
It was not glamorous work, but vital. With his four languages and a briefcase full of false passports, he roamed the world in service of the motherland, a clandestine delivery boy, a secret postman. He cleaned out dead drops, stuffed cash into safe-deposit boxes, and on occasion even rubbed shoulders with an actual paid agent of Moscow Center. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hundred nights a year outside Russia, leaving him unsuited for marriage or even a serious relationship. The SVR provided him with female comfort when he was in Moscow— beautiful young girls who under normal circumstances would never look at him twice—but when traveling he was prone to bouts of intense loneliness.
It was during one such episode, in a hotel bar in Hamburg, that he met his Catherine. She was drinking white wine at a table in the corner, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, light brown hair, suntanned arms and legs. Heathcliff was under orders to avoid such women while traveling. Invariably, they were hostile intelligence officers or prostitutes in their employ. But Catherine did not look the part. And when she glanced at Heathcliff over her mobile phone and smiled, he felt a jolt of electricity that surged from his heart straight to his groin.
“Care to join me?” she asked. “I do hate to drink alone.”
Her name was not Catherine, it was Astrid. At least that was the name she had whispered into his ear while running a fingernail lightly along the inside of his thigh. She was Dutch, which meant Heathcliff, who was posing as a Russian businessman, was able to address her in her native language. After several drinks together, she invited herself to Heathcliff’s room, where he felt safe. He woke the next morning with a profound hangover, which was unusual for him, and with no memory of engaging in the act of love. By then, Astrid was showered and wrapped in a toweling robe. In the light of day, her remarkable beauty was plain to see.
“Free tonight?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
He had no answer.
“You’ll take me on a proper date, though. A nice dinner. Maybe a disco afterward.”
“And then?”
She opened her robe, revealing a pair of beautifully formed breasts. Try as he might, Heathcliff could not recall caressing them.
They traded phone numbers, another forbidden act, and parted company. Heathcliff had two errands to run in Hamburg that day that required several hours of “dry cleaning” to make certain he was not under surveillance. As he was completing his second task—the routine emptying of a dead-letter box—he received a text message with the name of a trendy restaurant near the port. He arrived at the appointed hour to find a radiant Astrid already seated at their table, behind an open bottle of hideously expensive Montrachet. Heathcliff frowned; he would have to pay for the wine out of his own pocket. Moscow Center monitored his expenses carefully and berated him when he exceeded his allowance.
Astrid seemed to sense his unease. “Don’t worry, it’s my treat.”
“I thought I was supposed to take you out on a proper date.”
“Did I really say that?”
It was at that instant Heathcliff understood he had made a terrible mistake. His instincts told him to turn and run, but he knew it was no use; his bed was made. And so he stayed at the restaurant and dined with the woman who had betrayed him. Their conversation was stilted and strained—the stuff of a bad television drama—and when the check came it was Astrid who paid. In cash, of course.
Outside, a car was waiting. Heathcliff raised no objections when Astrid quietly instructed him to climb into the backseat. Nor did he protest when the car headed in the opposite direction from his hotel. The driver was quite obviously a professional; he spoke not a word while undertaking several textbook maneuvers designed to shake surveillance. Astrid passed the time sending and receiving text messages. To Heathcliff she said nothing at all.
“Did we ever—”
“Make love?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stared out the window.
“Good,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
When they finally stopped, it was at a small cottage by the sea. Inside, a man was waiting. He addressed Heathcliff in German-accented English. Said his name was Marcus. Said he worked for a Western intelligence service. Didn’t specify which one. Then he displayed for Heathcliff several highly sensitive documents Astrid had copied from his locked attaché case the previous evening while he was incapacitated by the drugs she had given him. Heathcliff was going to continue to supply such documents, said Marcus, and much more. Otherwise, Marcus and his colleagues were going to use the material they had in their possession to deceive Moscow Center into believing Heathcliff was a spy.
Unlike his namesake, Heathcliff was neither bitter nor vengeful. He returned to Moscow a half million dollars richer and awaited his next assignment. The SVR delivered a beautiful young girl to his apartment in the Sparrow Hills. He nearly fainted with fear when she introduced herself as Ekaterina. He made her an omelet and sent her away untouched.
The life expectancy for a man in Heathcliff’s position was not long. The penalty for betrayal was death. But not a quick death, an unspeakable death. Like all those who worked for the SVR, Heathcliff had heard the stories. The stories of grown men begging for a bullet to end their suffering. Eventually, it would come, the Russian way, in the nape of the neck. The SVR referred to it as vysshaya mera: the highest measure of punishment. Heathcliff resolved never to allow himself to fall into their hands. From Marcus he obtained a suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds, then it would be over.
Marcus also gave Heathcliff a covert communications device that allowed him to transmit reports via satellite with encrypted microbursts. Heathcliff used it rarely, preferring instead to brief Marcus in person during his trips abroad. Whenever possible, he allowed Marcus to photograph the contents of his attaché case, but mainly they talked. Heathcliff was a man of no importance, but he worked for important men, and transported their secrets. Moreover, he knew the locations of Russian dead drops around the world, which he carried around in his prodigious memory. Heathcliff was careful not to divulge too much, too quickly—for his own sake, and for the sake of his rapidly growing bank account. He doled out his secrets piecemeal, so as to increase their value. A half million became a million within a year. Then two. And then three.
Heathcliff’s conscience remained untroubled—he was a man without ideology or politics—but fear stalked him day and night. The fear that Moscow Center knew of his treachery and was watching his every move. The fear he had passed along one secret too many, or that one of the Center’s spies in the West would eventually betray him. On numerous occasions he pleaded with Marcus to bring him in from the cold. But Marcus, sometimes with a bit of soothing balm, sometimes with a crack of the whip, refused. Heathcliff was to continue his spying until such time as his life was truly in danger. Only then would he be allowed to defect. He was justifiably dubious about Marcus’s ability to judge the precise moment the sword was about to fall, but he had no choice but to continue. Marcus had blackmailed him into doing his bidding. And Marcus was going to wring every last secret out of him before releasing him from his bond.
But not all secrets are created equal. Some are mundane, workaday, and can be passed with little or no threat to the messenger. Others, however, are far too dangerous to betray. Heathcliff eventually found such a secret in a dead-letter box, in faraway Montreal. The letter box was actually an empty flat, used by a Russian illegal operating under deep cover in the United States. Hidden in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink was a memory stick. Heathcliff had been ordered to collect it and carry it back to Moscow Center, thus evading the mighty American National Security Agency. Before leaving the apartment, he inserted the flash drive into his laptop and found it unlocked and its contents unencrypted. Heathcliff read the documents freely. They were from several different American intelligence services, all with the highest possible level of classification.
Heathcliff didn’t dare copy the documents. Instead, he committed every detail to his flawless memory and returned to Moscow Center, where he handed over the flash drive to his control officer, along with a sternly worded rebuke of the illegal’s failure to secure it properly. The control officer, who was called Volkov, promised to address the matter. Then he offered Heathcliff a lowstress junket to friendly Budapest as recompense. “Consider it an all-expenses-paid holiday, courtesy of Moscow Center. Don’t take this the wrong way, Konstantin, but you look as though you could use some time off.”
That evening, Heathcliff used the covert communications device to inform Marcus that he had uncovered a secret of such import he had no choice but to defect. Much to his surprise, Marcus did not object. He instructed Heathcliff to dispose of the device in a way it could never be found. Heathcliff smashed it to pieces and dropped the remains down an open sewer. Even the bloodhounds of the SVR’s security directorate, he reasoned, wouldn’t look there.
A week later, after paying a final visit to his mother in her rabbit’s hutch of an apartment, with its brooding portrait of an everwatchful Comrade Stalin, Heathcliff left Russia for the last time. He arrived in Budapest in late afternoon, as snow fell gently upon the city, and took a taxi to the InterContinental Hotel. His room overlooked the Danube. He double-locked the door and engaged the safety bar. Then he sat down at the desk and waited for his mobile phone to ring. Next to it was Marcus’s suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds. Then it would be over.
2
VIENNA
One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, a few lazy bends along the river Danube, an exhibition featuring the works of Sir Peter Paul Rubens—painter, scholar, diplomat, spy—limped toward its melancholy conclusion. The imported hordes had come and gone, and by late afternoon only a few regular patrons of the old museum moved hesitantly through its rose-colored rooms. One was a man of late middle age. He surveyed the massive canvases, with their corpulent nudes swirling amid lavish historical settings, from beneath the brim of a flat cap, which was pulled low over his brow.
A younger man stood impatiently at his back, checking the time on his wristwatch. “How much longer, boss?” he asked sotto voce in Hebrew. But the older man responded in German, and loudly enough so the drowsy guard in the corner could hear. “There’s just one more I’d like to see before I leave, thank you.”
He went into the next room and paused before Madonna and Child, oil on canvas, 137 by 111 centimeters. He knew the painting intimately; he had restored it in a cottage by the sea in West Cornwall. Crouching slightly, he examined the surface in raked lighting. His work had held up well. If only he could say the same for himself, he thought, rubbing the fiery patch of pain at the base of his spine. The two recently fractured vertebrae were the least of his physical maladies. During his long and distinguished career as an officer of Israeli intelligence, Gabriel Allon had been shot in the chest twice, attacked by an Alsatian guard dog, and thrown down several flights of stairs in the cellars of Lubyanka in Moscow. Not even Ari Shamron, his legendary mentor, could match his record of bodily injuries.
The young man trailing Gabriel through the rooms of the museum was called Oren. He was the head of Gabriel’s security detail, an unwanted fringe benefit of a recent promotion. They had been traveling for the past thirty-six hours, by plane from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then by automobile from Paris to Vienna. Now they walked through the deserted exhibition rooms to the steps of the museum. A snowstorm had commenced, big downy flakes falling straight in the windless night. An ordinary visitor to the city might have found it picturesque, the trams slithering along sugar-dusted streets lined with empty palaces and churches. But not Gabriel. Vienna always depressed him, never more so than when it snowed.
The car waited in the street, the driver behind the wheel. Gabriel pulled the collar of his old Barbour jacket around his ears and informed Oren that he intended to walk to the safe flat.
“Alone,” he added.
“I can’t let you walk around Vienna unprotected, boss.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the chief now. And if something happens—”