Daniel Silva - The defector

As it turned out, there was not one presidential limousine on the plane but two, along with a trio of armored SUVs. The chief of the Secret Service detail was a woman; she escorted Gabriel to a seat near the center of the aircraft and gave him a parka to wear against the sharp cold. Much to his surprise, he was able to get a bit of badly needed sleep, though one agent would later note that he seemed to stir at the precise instant the plane crossed into Russian airspace. He woke with a start fifteen minutes before landing, and as the plane descended toward Sheremetyevo he thought of Chiara. How had she returned to Russia? Had she been bound and gagged? Had she been conscious? Had she been drugged? As the wheels touched down, he forced such questions from his mind. There was no Chiara, he told himself. There was no Ivan. There was only Aaron Davis, servant of the American president, dreamer of American dreams, who was now just minutes away from his first encounter with Russian authorities.

They were waiting on the darkened tarmac, stamping their feet against the bitter cold, as Gabriel and the Secret Service detail filed down the rear cargo ramp. Standing next to the Russian delegation was a pair of officials from the U.S. Embassy, one of whom was an undeclared CIA officer with diplomatic cover. The Russians greeted Gabriel with warm handshakes and smiles, then gave his passport a cursory glance before stamping it. In return, Gabriel gave each a small token of American goodwill: White House cuff links. Five minutes later, he was seated in the back of an embassy car, speeding down Leningradsky Prospekt toward the city center.

Size has always mattered to the Russians, and to spend any time there is to discover nearly everything is the biggest: the biggest country, the biggest bell, the biggest swimming pool. If the Leningradsky was not the biggest street in the world, it was certainly among the ugliest-a hodgepodge of crumbling apartment houses and Stalinist monstrosities, lit by countless neon signs and piss-yellow streetlamps. Capitalism and Communism had collided violently on the prospekt, and the result was an urban nightmare. The G-8 banners the Russians had so carefully hung looked more like warning flags of the fate that awaited them all if they didn’t put their financial houses in order.

Gabriel felt his stomach tighten by degrees as the car drew closer to the Kremlin. As they passed Dinamo Stadium, the CIA man handed him a satellite photograph of the dacha in the birch forest. There were three Range Rovers instead of two, and four men were clearly visible outside. Once again, Gabriel’s eye was drawn to the parallel depressions in the woods near the house. It appeared there had been a change since the last pass. At the end of one depression was a dark patch, as if the snow cover had recently been disturbed.

By the time Gabriel returned the photo to the CIA man, the car was traveling along Tverskaya Street. Directly before them rose the Kremlin’s Corner Arsenal Tower, its red star looking oddly like the symbol of a certain Dutch beer that now flowed freely in the watering holes of Moscow. The darkened offices of Galaxy Travel flashed by Gabriel’s window, then the little side street where Anatoly, friend of Viktor Orlov, had been waiting to take Irina to dinner.

A hundred yards beyond Irina’s office, Tverskaya Street emptied into the twelve lanes of Okhotny Ryad Street. They turned left and sped past the Duma, the House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. The next landmark Gabriel saw was a floodlit fortress of yellow stone looming directly ahead over Lubyanka Square-the former headquarters of the KGB, now home to its domestic successor, the FSB. In any other country, the building would have been blown to bits and its horrors exposed to the healing light of day. But not Russia. They had simply hung a new sign, and buried its terrible secrets where they couldn’t be found.

Just down the hill from Lubyanka, in Teatralnyy Prospekt, was the famed Hotel Metropol. Bag in hand, Gabriel sailed through the art deco entrance as if he owned the place, which is how Americans always seemed to enter hotels. The lobby, empty and silent, had been faithfully restored to its original décor-indeed, Gabriel could almost imagine Lenin and his disciples plotting the Red Terror over tea and cakes. The check-in counter was absent any customers; even so, Gabriel had to wait an eternity before Khrushchev’s doppelgänger beckoned him forward. After filling out the lengthy registration form, Gabriel refused a bell-man’s indifferent offer of assistance and made his way upstairs to his room alone. It was now approaching five o’clock. He stood in the window, hand to his chin, head tilted to one side, and waited for the sun to rise over Red Square.

THOUGH THE global financial crisis had caused economic pain across the industrialized world, few countries had fallen further or faster than Russia. Fueled by skyrocketing oil prices, Russia’s economy had grown at dizzying speed in the first years of the new millennium, only to come crashing back to earth again with oil’s sharp decline. Her stock market was a shambles, her banking system in ruins, and her once-docile population was now clamoring for relief. Inside the foreign ministries and intelligence services of the West, there was fear Russia’s weakening economy might provoke the Kremlin to retreat even deeper into a Cold War posture-a sentiment shared by several key European leaders, who were becoming increasingly dependent on Russia for their supplies of natural gas. It was this concern that had prompted them to hold the emergency G-8 summit in Moscow in the dead of winter. Show the bully respect, they reckoned, and he might be encouraged to change his behavior. At least, that was the hope.

Had the summit taken place in any other G-8 country, the arrival of the leaders and their delegations would scarcely have been a blip on the local media’s radar. But the summit was being held in Russia, and Russia, despite protests to the contrary, was not yet a normal country. Its media was either owned by the state or controlled by it, and its television networks went live as each presidential or prime ministerial aircraft sunk out of the iron-gray sky over Sheremetyevo. To hear the Russian reporters explain it, the Western leaders were coming to Moscow because they had been personally summoned by the Russian president. The world was in turmoil, the reporters warned, and only Russia could save it.

Inevitably, the American president suffered in comparison. The moment his plane appeared above the horizon, a number of Russian officials and commentators paraded before the cameras to denounce him and all he stood for. The global economic crisis was America’s fault, they howled. America had been brought low by greed and hubris, and she was threatening to take the rest of the world down with her. The sun was setting on America. And good riddance.

Gabriel found little disagreement in the salons and restaurants of the Hotel Metropol. By midmorning, it was overrun with reporters and bureaucrats, all proudly wearing their official G-8 credentials as if a piece of plastic dangling from a strand of nylon gave them entrée to the inner sanctums of power and prestige. Gabriel’s credentials were blue, which signified he had access mere mortals did not. They were hanging around his neck as he took a light breakfast beneath the vaulted stained-glass ceiling in the famed Metropol restaurant, wielding his BlackBerry throughout the meal like a shield. Leaving the restaurant, he was cornered by a group of French reporters who demanded to know his opinion of the new American stimulus plan. Though Gabriel evaded their questions, the French were clearly impressed by the fact he addressed them fluently in their native language.