Daniel Silva - The defector

After that, news of the killings began to circulate among those still to die. To prevent the survivors from fleeing to Russia, the Office planted false stories that it was Ivan, not the Israelis, who was responsible. Ivan had launched a Great Terror , according to the rumors. Ivan was pruning the forest. Anyone foolish enough to set foot in Russia would be killed the Russian way, with great pain and extreme violence. And so the guilty stayed in the West, close to ground, below radar. Or so they thought. But one by one they were targeted. And one by one they died.

The driver of the Mercedes that took Irina to her “reunion” with Grigori was killed in Amsterdam in the arms of a prostitute. The driver of the van that carried Grigori on the first leg of his journey back to Russia was killed while leaving a pub in Copenhagen. The two flunkies sent to kill Olga Sukhova in Oxford were next. One died in Munich, the other in Prague.

It was then Sergei Korovin made a frantic attempt to intervene. “The SVR and FSB are getting itchy,” Korovin told Shamron. “If this continues, who knows where it might lead?” In a page taken from Ivan’s playbook, Shamron professed ignorance. Then he warned Korovin that the Russian services had better watch their step. Otherwise, they were next. By that evening, Office stations across Europe detected a notable increase in security around Russian embassies and known Russian intelligence officers. It was unnecessary, of course. Gabriel and his team had no interest in targeting the innocent. Only the guilty.

At that point, just four names remained. Four operatives who had carried out the abduction of Chiara in Umbria. Four operatives who had Office blood on their hands. They knew they were being stalked and tried not to remain in one place long. Fear made them sloppy. Fear made them easy pickings. They were killed in a series of lightning-strike operations: Warsaw, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul. While dying, they heard four words instead of two.

For Lior and Motti.

By then it was nearly August. It was time to go home again.

BUT WHAT of Ivan? For many weeks after the nightmare in the birch forest outside Moscow, he stayed out of sight. There were rumors he had been arrested. Rumors he had fled the country. Rumors, even, that he had been taken away by the FSB and killed. They were false, of course. Ivan was just observing another great Russian tradition, the tradition of internal exile. For Ivan, it was not marked by backbreaking labor or starvation rations. Ivan’s gulag was his fortresslike mansion in Zhukovka, the secret city of the oligarchs east of Moscow. And he had Yekaterina to soothe his wounds.

Though Ivan’s name was never publicly linked to the killing site in Vladimirskaya Oblast, its exposure seemed to do harm to his standing inside the Kremlin. In certain circles, much was made of the fact that Ivan’s development firm lost out on an important construction project. And that his nightclub was suddenly out of fashion with the siloviki and the other Moscow well connected. And that his luxury-car dealership saw a sudden sharp decrease in sales. These were false readings, though, more symptomatic of Russia’s troubled economy than any real decline in Ivan’s fortunes. What’s more, his arms dealings continued apace, weapons sales being one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak global financial climate. Indeed, British, American, and French intelligence all noticed a sharp spike in the number of Kharkov-owned aircraft touching down on isolated landing strips from the Middle East to Africa and beyond. And the Russian president continued to take his cut. The tsar, as Ivan liked to say, always took his cut.

NSA surveillance revealed that Ivan was aware of the systematic liquidation of Anton Petrov’s operatives and that it troubled him not at all. In Ivan’s mind, they had betrayed him and thus deserved the fate that befell them. In fact, throughout that long summer of retribution, he seemed obsessed by only two questions. Had his children been aboard the American jet that landed in Konakovo? And had they truly composed the letter of hatred handed to him by the pilot?

The children and their mother knew the answer, of course, along with the American president and a handful of his most senior officials. So, too, did the small band of Israeli intelligence officers who convened at sunset on the first Friday of August north of the ancient city of Tiberias. The occasion was Shabbat; the setting was Shamron’s honey-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The entire team was present, along with Sarah Bancroft, who had decided to spend her August holiday with Mikhail in Israel. There were spouses Gabriel had never met and children he had only seen in photographs. The presence of so many children was difficult for Chiara, especially when she saw their faces lit by the glow of the Shabbat candles. As Gilah recited the blessing, Chiara took Gabriel’s hand and held it tightly. Gabriel kissed her cheek and heard again the words she had spoken to him in Umbria. We mourn the dead and keep them in our hearts. But we live our lives.

The summer spent by the lake had done wonders for Chiara’s appearance. Her skin was deeply tanned, and her riotous dark hair was aglow with gold and auburn highlights. She smiled easily throughout the meal and even burst into laughter when Bella scolded Uzi for taking a second portion of Gilah’s famous chicken with Moroccan spice. Watching her, Gabriel could almost imagine none of it had actually happened. That it had only been a dream from which they both had finally awakened. It wasn’t true, of course, and no amount of time would ever fully heal the wounds Ivan had inflicted. Chiara was like a newly restored painting, retouched and shimmering with a fresh coat of varnish but still damaged. She would have to be handled with great care.

Gabriel had feared the gathering would be an occasion to relive the dreadful details of the affair, but it was mentioned only once, when Shamron spoke about the importance of what they had achieved. As Jews, they all had relatives whose earthly remains were turned to smoke by the crematoria or were buried in mass graves in the Baltics or the Ukraine. Their memories were kept by commemorative flames and by the index cards stored in the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem. But there were no graves to visit, no headstones upon which to shed tears. By their actions in Russia, Gabriel’s team had given such a place to the relatives of the seventy thousand murdered at the killing ground in Vladimirskaya Oblast. They had paid a terrible price, and Grigori had not survived, but with their sacrifice they had given a kind of justice, perhaps even peace, to seventy thousand restless souls.

For the remainder of the meal, Shamron regaled them with stories of the past. He was never happier than when surrounded by his family and friends, and his good mood seemed to soften the deep cracks and fissures in his aged face. But there was sadness there, too. The operation had been traumatic for all of them, but in many ways it had been hardest on Shamron. With his cool, creative thinking, he had saved all their lives. But for more than an hour that terrible morning, he had feared that three officers, two of whom he loved as children, were about to suffer a horrible death. There was an emotional price to be paid for an operation like that-and Shamron paid it, later that evening, when he invited Gabriel to join him on the terrace for a private chat. They sat together on the spot where Gabriel and Chiara were married, Shamron smoking quietly, Gabriel gazing at the blue-black sky above the Golan.

“Your wife looks radiant this evening. Almost like new.”

“Looks can be deceiving, Ari, but she does look wonderful. I suppose I have Gilah to thank. She obviously took good care of her while I was gone.”