“You did,” replied Shamron.
“How did you get in the building?”
“I tunneled in.”
Shamron twirled the old lighter in his fingertips. Two turns to the right, two turns to the left.
“You have a lot of nerve showing your face around here,” Navot said.
“This isn’t the time or the place, Uzi.”
“I know it isn’t,” Navot said. “But you still have a lot of nerve.”
Two turns to the right, two turns to the left . . .
“Would it be possible to turn up the volume on the audio feed from Mikhail’s phone?” Shamron asked. “My hearing isn’t what it once was.”
“Your hearing isn’t the only thing.”
Navot caught the eye of one of the technicians and gestured for him to increase the volume.
“What’s that song he’s singing?” Shamron asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Answer the question, Uzi.”
“It’s ‘Penny Lane.’ ”
“The Beatles?”
“Yes, the Beatles.”
“Why do you suppose he chose that song?”
“Maybe he likes it.”
“Maybe,” said Shamron.
Navot glanced at the clock. It was 7:42 in Moscow, 6:42 in Tel Aviv. Shamron crushed out his cigarette and immediately lit another.
Two turns to the right, two turns to the left . . .
Mikhail was still singing to himself as he departed his hotel room, dressed for dinner. The gift bag was in his right hand as he entered the elevator, though it was absent when he came out of the lobby men’s room three minutes after that. The team in the Ops Center saw him for the first time at 7:51 as he passed within range of Dina’s camera and started toward the hotel entrance. Waiting there, his arm raised as though he were signaling a rescue aircraft, was Gennady Lazarev. The hand seized Mikhail by the shoulder and drew him into the back of a waiting Maybach limousine. “I hope you managed to get a little rest,” Lazarev said as the car eased gracefully away from the curb, “because tonight you’re going to get a taste of the real Russia.”
50
CAFé PUSHKIN, MOSCOW
In the
aftermath, when they were tidying up their files and writing their after-action
reports, there would be a heated debate over the true meaning of Gennady
Lazarev’s words. One camp saw them as a harmless expression of goodwill; the
other as a clear warning that Gabriel, a chief in waiting, would have been wise
to heed. As usual, it was Shamron who settled the dispute. Lazarev’s words were
without consequence, he declared, for Mikhail’s fate had been sealed the instant
he climbed into the car.
The setting for what transpired next, Moscow’s
renowned Café Pushkin, could not have appeared any more inviting, especially on
a December evening, with the air brittle and snow dancing on a Siberian wind. It
was located at the corner of Tverskaya Street and the Boulevard Ring, in a
stately old eighteenth-century house that looked as though it had been imported
from Renaissance Italy. Beyond its pretty French doors ran three lanes of
traffic; and beyond the traffic was a small square where Napoleon’s soldiers had
once pitched their tents and burned the lime trees for warmth. Muscovites
hurried home along the gravel footpaths, and a few brave mothers sat on the
benches in the lamplight, watching their overbundled children playing on the
snow-whitened lawns. Mordecai and Rimona sat silently among them, Mordecai
watching the entrance of Café Pushkin, Rimona the children. Keller and Yossi had
found a parking space fifty yards short of the restaurant. Yaakov and Oded, also
in a Land Rover, were fifty yards beyond it.
The dinner had been called for eight, but owing to
the heavier than normal traffic in Moscow that evening, Lazarev and Mikhail did
not arrive until twelve minutes past. Mordecai made a note of the time, as did
the teams in the Land Rovers. So did Gabriel, who quickly flashed a message to
the Op Center at King Saul Boulevard. The message was unnecessary, of course,
because Navot and Shamron were closely monitoring the live audio feed from
Mikhail’s phone. Therefore, they heard his heavy footfalls over the unpolished
floorboards in Pushkin’s entrance. And the rattle of the old elevator that bore
him to the second floor. And the round of throaty Russian applause that greeted
him as he entered the private room that had been set aside for his
coronation.
A place had been reserved for Mikhail at the head
of the table, with Lazarev to his right and Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of
security, to his left. Zhirov alone seemed to take no joy in the acquisition of
Viktor Orlov’s protégé. Throughout the evening, he wore the blank expression of
an experienced gambler who was losing badly at roulette. His gaze, narrow and
dark, never strayed long from Mikhail’s face. He seemed to be calculating his
losses and deciding whether he had the stomach for another turn of the
wheel.
If Zhirov’s brooding presence made Mikhail uneasy,