Gabriel.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Besides,” Lavon
added, “your leading man said he wouldn’t go anywhere near the Russians unless I
was watching his back.”
Gabriel looked at the tall figure standing just
behind Lavon’s tiny shoulder. His name was Mikhail Abramov. Lanky and fair with
a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel
from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special
operations unit. Once described by Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he
had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the
Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun. It was
Mikhail, working with a CIA officer named Sarah Bancroft, who had infiltrated
the personal entourage of one Ivan Kharkov, thus initiating the long and bloody
war between the Office and Ivan’s private army. Had Viktor Orlov not surrendered
Ruzoil to the Kremlin, Mikhail would have died in Russia, along with Gabriel and
Chiara. Indeed, on Mikhail’s porcelain cheekbone was a deep scar left by Ivan’s
sledgehammer fist.
“You don’t have to do this,” Gabriel said, touching
the scar now. “We can find someone else.”
“Like who?” asked Mikhail, glancing around the
room.
“Yossi can do it.”
“Yossi speaks four languages,” Mikhail said, “but
Russian doesn’t happen to be one of them. They could be talking about slitting
his throat, and he would think they were ordering chicken Kiev.”
The members of Gabriel’s fabled team had stayed in
the house before, and so they settled into their old rooms with a minimum of
bickering while Chiara headed into the kitchen to prepare an elaborate reunion
meal. The main entrée was the enormous bass, which she roasted with white wine
and herbs. Gabriel placed Keller to his right at dinner, a deliberate sign to
the others that, for now at least, the Englishman was to be treated as a member
of the family. At first the others were uneasy about his presence, but gradually
they warmed to him. For the most part, they conducted the meal in English for
his benefit. But when discussing their last operation, they reverted to
Hebrew.
“What are they talking about?” Keller asked quietly
of Gabriel.
“A new program on Israeli television.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“No.”
Their mood was more subdued than usual, for Ivan’s
shadow hung over them. They did not speak his name at dinner. Instead, they
talked about the matsav, the situation. Yossi,
deeply read in the classics and history, served as their guide. He saw a world
spinning dangerously out of control. The promises of the great Arab Awakening
had been exposed as lies, he said, and soon there would be a crescent of radical
Islam stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. America was bankrupt, tired,
and no longer able to lead. It was possible this turbulent new world disorder
would produce a twenty-first-century axis led by China, Iran, and, of course,
Russia. And standing alone, surrounded by a sea of enemies, would be Israel and
the Office.
With that, they cleared away the dishes and
repaired to the sitting room, where Gabriel finally explained why he had brought
them all to England. They knew fragments of it already. Now, standing before
them, a gas fire burning at his back, Gabriel swiftly completed the painting. He
told them everything that had transpired, beginning with the desperate search
for Madeline Hart in France and ending with the deal he had struck with Graham
Seymour the previous evening in Hampstead Heath. There was one aspect of the
affair, however, that he recounted out of sequence. It was his brief encounter
with Madeline Hart, in the hours before her death. He had given Madeline his
word he would bring her home safely. Having failed, he intended to keep that
promise by undoing what was a Russian operation from beginning to end. To
accomplish that, they were going to insert Mikhail into KGB Oil & Gas, he
said. And then they were going to find proof that Madeline Hart had been
murdered as part of a Russian plot to steal British oil from the North Sea.
“How?” asked Eli Lavon incredulously when Gabriel
had finished speaking. “How in God’s name are we going to get Mikhail inside a
Kremlin-owned oil company run by Russian intelligence?”
“We’ll find a way,” said Gabriel. “We always
do.”
The
real work began the next morning when the members of Gabriel’s team began
secretly burrowing into the state-owned Russian energy company known as Volgatek
Oil & Gas. At the outset, the bulk of their material came from open sources
such as business journals, press releases, and academic papers written by