Daniel Silva - The defector

“How much do they know about what happened to their father?”

“They know he had some trouble with his business. And they know he divorced me in order to marry his friend, Yekaterina. As for the arms trafficking and the killings…” Her voice trailed off. “They’re far too young to understand. I’ll wait until they’re a bit older before telling them the truth. Then they can come to their own conclusions.”

“Surely they must be curious.”

“Of course they are. They haven’t seen or spoken to Ivan for six months. It’s been hard on Nikolai. He idolizes his father. I’m sure he blames me for his absence.”

“How do you explain the fact that you live in isolation surrounded by bodyguards?”

“That part is actually not so hard. Anna and Nikolai are the children of a Russian oligarch. They spent their entire lives surrounded by men with guns and radios, so it seems perfectly natural to them. As for the isolation, I tell them it’s only temporary. Someday soon, they’ll be allowed to have friends and go to school like normal American children. For now, they have a lovely tutor from the CIA. She works with them from nine until three. Then I make sure they go outside and play, regardless of the weather. We have several thousand acres, two lakes, and a river. There’s plenty for the children to do. It’s heaven. But I would never have been able to afford it if not for you and your helpers.”

Elena was referring to the team of Office cyberspecialists who, in the days after her defection, had raided Ivan’s bank accounts in Moscow and Zurich and made off with more than twenty million dollars in cash. The “unauthorized wire transfers,” as they were euphemistically referred to at King Saul Boulevard, were one of many actions connected to the affair that skirted the edge of legality. In the aftermath, Ivan had been in no position to quibble over the missing money or to question the sequence of events that led to the loss of custody of his two children. He was dealing with charges in the West that he had sold some of Russia’s deadliest antiaircraft missiles to the terrorists of al-Qaeda, a sale concluded with the blessing of the Kremlin and the Russian president himself.

“Adrian tells me the CIA agreed to provide protection for you and the children for only two years,” Gabriel said.

“You obviously don’t think that’s long enough.”

“No, I don’t.”

“The American taxpayer can’t pay the bill forever. When the CIA men leave, I’ll hire my own bodyguards.”

“What happens when the money runs out?”

“I suppose I could always sell that painting you forged for me.” She smiled. “Would you like to see it?”

She led him into the great room and stopped before a precise copy of Two Children on a Beach by Mary Cassatt. It was the second version of the painting Gabriel had produced. The first had been sold to Ivan Kharkov for two and a half million dollars and was now in the possession of French prosecutors.

“I’m not sure it matches the Adirondack décor.”

“I don’t care. I’m keeping it right where it is.”

He placed his hand to his chin and tilted his head to one side. “I think it’s better than the first one, don’t you?”

“Your brushstrokes were a bit too impasto in the first version. This one is perfect.” She looked at him. “But I don’t suppose you came all this way to talk about my children or to hear me criticize your work.”

Gabriel was silent. Elena gazed at the painting.

“You know, Gabriel, you really should have been an artist. You could have been great. And with a bit of luck, you would have never had the misfortune of meeting my husband.”

MORE THAN a hundred intelligence professionals from four countries had been involved in the Kharkov affair, and most were still vexed by a single question: Why had Elena Varlamova, the beautiful and cultured daughter of a Communist Party economic planner from Leningrad, ever married a hood like Ivan in the first place?

He had been working for the notorious Fifth Directorate of the KGB at the time of their wedding and seemed destined for a glittering career. But in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union lay wheezing on its deathbed, his fortunes took a sudden and unexpected turn. In a desperate bid to breathe life into the moribund Soviet economy, Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced economic reforms that allowed the limited formation of investment capital. With the encouragement of his superiors, Ivan left the KGB and created one of Russia’s first privately owned banks. Aided by the hidden hand of his old colleagues, it was soon wildly profitable, and when the Soviet Union finally breathed its last, Ivan was uniquely positioned to snatch up some of its most valuable assets. Among them was a fleet of transport ships and aircraft, which he converted into one of the largest freight-forwarding companies in the world. Before long, Ivan’s boats and planes were bound for destinations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, laden with one of the few products the Russians made well: weapons.

Ivan liked to boast he could lay his hands on anything and ship it anywhere, in some cases overnight. He cared nothing about morality, only money. He would sell to anyone, as long as they could pay. And if they couldn’t, he offered to arrange financing through his banking arm. He sold his weapons to dictators and he sold them to rebels. He sold to freedom fighters with legitimate grievances and to genocidal maniacs who slaughtered women and children. He specialized in providing weapons to regimes so beyond the pale they were unable to obtain arms from legal sources. He perfected the practice of selling weapons to both sides of a conflict, judiciously moderating the flow of arms in order to prolong the killing and maximize his profits. He destroyed countries. He destroyed peoples. And he became filthy rich in the process. For years, he had managed to keep his network of death carefully concealed. To the rest of the world, Ivan Kharkov was the very symbol of the New Russia-a shrewd investor and businessman who easily straddled East and West, collecting expensive homes, luxury yachts, and beautiful mistresses. Elena would later admit to Gabriel that she had been an enabler of Ivan’s grand deception. She had turned a blind eye to his romantic dalliances, just as she had shrouded herself in a willful ignorance when it came to the true source of his immense wealth.

But lives are sometimes upended in an instant. Gabriel’s had changed one evening in Vienna, in the time it took a detonator to ignite a charge of plastic explosive placed beneath his car. For Elena Kharkov, it was the night she overhead a telephone conversation between her husband and his chief of security, Arkady Medvedev. Confronted with the possibility that thousands of innocent people might die because of her husband’s greed, she chose to betray him rather than remain silent. Her actions led her to an isolated villa in the hills above Saint-Tropez, where she offered to help Gabriel steal Ivan’s secrets. The operation that followed had nearly ended both of their lives. One image would hang forever in Gabriel’s terrible gallery of memory: the image of Elena Kharkov, tied to a chair in her husband’s warehouse, with Arkady Medvedev’s pistol pressed to the side of her head. Arkady wanted Gabriel to reveal the location of Anna and Nikolai. Elena was prepared to die rather than answer.

You’d better pull the trigger, Arkady. Because Ivan is never getting those children.

Now, seated before a fire in the great room of the Adirondack lodge, Gabriel broke the news that Ivan had succeeded in kidnapping Grigori Bulganov, the man who had saved their lives that night. And that Olga Sukhova, Elena’s old friend from Leningrad State, had been the target of an assassination attempt in Oxford. Elena took the news calmly, as though she had been informed of a long-expected death. Then she accepted a photograph: a man standing in the arrivals hall of Heathrow Airport. The sudden darkening of her expression instantly told Gabriel his journey had not been in vain.