“A child,” said Gabriel. “She saw a child.”
“Whose child?” asked Chiara, but Gabriel didn’t hear her. He was running toward a woman, across an endless field of snow. The woman was burning. The snow was stained with blood.
47
GRAYSWOOD, SURREY
Uzi Navot, director of Israel’s secret intelligence service, arrived at the Grayswood safe house at twenty minutes past seven the next morning, as a gray December dawn was breaking over the bare trees of the Knobby Copse. The first person he encountered was Christopher Keller, who was chasing down a Ping-Pong ball that Yaakov had just flicked past him for a winner. The score in the match was eight to five, with Yaakov leading and Keller closing hard.
“Who are you?” Keller asked of the unsmiling, bespectacled figure standing in the entrance hall.
“None of your business,” replied Navot.
“Strange name. Hebrew, is it?”
Navot frowned. “You must be Keller.”
“I must be.”
“Where’s Gabriel?”
“He and Chiara went to Guildford.”
“Why?”
“Because we ate all the fish in the stock pond.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“The inmates.”
Navot smiled. “Not anymore.”
With Navot’s unorthodox arrival, the team went on war footing. It was an undeclared war, as all its conflicts were, and it would be fought in a hostile land, against an enemy of superior size and capability. The Office was regarded as one of the most capable intelligence services in the world, yet it was no match for the brotherhood of the sword and the shield. The intelligence services of the Russian Federation were heirs to a proud and murderous tradition. For more than seventy years, the KGB had ruthlessly protected Soviet communism from enemies both real and perceived and had acted as the Party’s vanguard abroad, recruiting and planting thousands of spies around the world. Its power had been almost without limit, allowing it to operate as a virtual state within a state. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the state. And Volgatek was its oil company.
It was this connection—the connection between Volgatek and the SVR—that Gabriel emphasized time and time again as the team began its work. The oil company and Russia’s intelligence service were one and the same, he said, which meant that Mikhail would be in enemy hands the minute his plane left the ground in London. His cover identity had been sound enough to fool Gennady Lazarev, but it would not survive long in the interrogation rooms of Lubyanka. And neither would Mikhail, for that matter. Lubyanka was the place where agents and operations went to die, warned Gabriel. Lubyanka was the end of the line.
For the most part, though, Gabriel’s thoughts remained focused on Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of security and the mastermind behind the operation to gain access to Britain’s North Sea oil. Within twenty-four hours of Navot’s arrival at the safe house, the Office station in Moscow had determined that Zhirov resided in a fortified apartment building in Sparrow Hills, the exclusive highlands on the banks of the Moscow River. His typical daily schedule was illustrative of the bifurcated nature of his work—mornings at Volgatek’s flashy headquarters on Tverskaya Street, afternoons at Moscow Center, the SVR’s wooded compound in Yasenevo. The Moscow surveillance team managed to snap several photographs of Zhirov climbing in and out of his chauffeured Mercedes limousine, though none showed his face clearly. Gabriel couldn’t help but admire the Russian’s professionalism. He had already proven himself to be a worthy opponent with the false flag kidnapping of Madeline Hart. Plucking him from the streets of Moscow, said Gabriel, would require an operation of matching skill.
“With two important differences,” Eli Lavon pointed out. “Moscow isn’t Corsica. And Pavel Zhirov won’t be riding a motorbike on an isolated road, wearing only a sundress.”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to figure out a way to get Mikhail into Zhirov’s car,” replied Gabriel. “With a loaded gun in his back pocket, of course.”
“How do you intend to do that?”
“Like this.”
Gabriel sat down at one of the computers and with a few quick keystrokes retrieved the recording of Gennady Lazarev’s final words to Mikhail in Denmark.
“We’ll bring you to Moscow for a few days so you can meet the rest of the team. If we both like what we see, we’ll take the next step. If not, you’ll stay with Viktor and pretend this never happened.”
“Why Moscow?”
“Are you afraid to come to Moscow, Nicolai?”
“Of course not.”
“You shouldn’t be. Pavel will take very good care of you.”
Gabriel clicked the STOP icon and looked at Lavon. “I could be wrong,” he said, “but I suspect Nicholas Avedon’s Russian homecoming isn’t going to be without problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“The kind only Pavel can solve.”
“And when Mikhail is in the car?”