Daniel Silva - The defector

GABRIEL PLACED a wager, one he was confident would pay handsomely. He wagered that Ivan Kharkov could not possibly come all the way to the Côte d’Azur and resist the gravitational pull of Villa Romana, a restaurant where he had once had a regular table. He would take reasonable precautions, perhaps even wear a crude disguise of some sort, but he would come. And Gabriel would be waiting. Whether he pulled the trigger would be contingent on two factors. He would shed no innocent blood, other than that of armed bodyguards, and he would not sink to Ivan’s level by killing him in front of his young wife. Lavon came up with a plan of action. They called it fun with phones.

It was a night to remember, and, just as Gabriel predicted, Ivan was unable to resist attending the party. The techno-pop music was deafening, the women were barely clad, and the champagne flowed like a swollen river. Ivan kept a low profile, though he wore no disguise since not one of the invited guests would have dared to report his presence. As for the possibility he might have been in any physical danger, this, too, seemed to have been discounted. The two bodyguards that Mad Maxim had brought along for protection were standing like doormen outside Villa Romana’s entrance. And if either one of them so much as twitched, they would die there at two a.m. Two a.m., because Ivan’s defenses would be weakened by fatigue and alcohol. Two a.m., because that is the hour the Chemin des Conquettes finally goes quiet on a warm summer night. Two a.m., because that is when Ivan would receive the telephone call that would draw him into the street. The call that would signal that the end was finally near.

For their staging point, Gabriel and Mikhail chose the edge of a small playground at the northern end of the Chemin des Conquettes. They did this because they thought it was just and because the entrance of Villa Romana was only fifty yards away. They sat astride their motorbikes in a dark patch between the streetlamps and listened to the voices in their miniature earpieces. No one gave them a second look. Sitting idly on a motorbike at two in the morning is what one does on a warm summer night in Saint-Tropez, especially when the first crack of autumn thunder is only days away.

It was not thunder that caused them to start their engines but a quiet voice. It told them the call had just gone through to Ivan’s phone. It told them the time was nearly at hand. Gabriel touched the.45 caliber Glock at the small of his back-the Glock loaded with highly destructive hollow-tipped rounds-and made a slight modification in its position. Then he lowered the visor on his helmet and waited for the signal.

IT WAS Oleg Rudenko calling from Moscow-at least, that’s what Ivan was led to believe. He couldn’t quite be certain. He never would be. The connection was too tenuous, the music too loud. Ivan knew three things: the caller spoke Russian, had the direct number for his mobile, and said it was extremely urgent. That was enough to put him on his feet and send him marching into the quiet of the street, phone to one ear, hand over the other. If Ivan heard the approaching motorbikes, he gave no sign of it. In fact, he was shouting in Russian, his back turned, at the instant Gabriel brought his motorbike to a stop. The bodyguards at the front door immediately sensed trouble and foolishly reached into their blazers. Mikhail shot each through the heart before they managed to touch their weapons. Seeing the guards go down, Ivan whirled around in terror, only to find himself staring down the suppressor at the end of the Glock. Gabriel lifted the visor of his helmet and smiled. Then he pulled the trigger, and Ivan’s face vanished. For Grigori , he thought, as he drove off into the darkness. For Chiara .

THE DEFECTOR is a work of entertainment. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Siberian oil giant Ruzoil does not exist, nor does the Moskovskaya Gazeta or Galaxy Travel of Tverskaya Street. Viktor Orlov, Olga Sukhova, and Grigori Bulganov are in no way meant to be construed as fictitious renderings of real people.

The headquarters of the Israeli secret service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there in part because I have always liked the name. I have tinkered with airline schedules to make them fit my story. Anyone trying to reach London from Moscow will search in vain for Aeroflot Flight 247. There is no private bank in Zurich called Becker & Puhl. Its internal operating procedures were invented by the author. The Office of Presidential Advance has been accurately portrayed, but, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been used to provide cover for an Israeli spy.

There is no airfield at Konakovo, at least not one I am aware of; nor is there a division of the FSB known as the Department of Coordination. A chess club does indeed meet on Tuesday evenings in the Lower Vestry House of St. George’s Church in Bloomsbury. It is called the Greater London Chess Club, not the Central London Chess Club, and its members are charming and gracious to a fault. Deepest apologies to the management of Villa Romana in Saint-Tropez for carrying out an assassination on their doorstep, but I’m afraid it had to be done. Also, apologies to the residents of the lovely Bristol Mews in Maida Vale for placing a Russian defector in their midst. Were the author ever to go into hiding in London, it would certainly be there. Readers should not go looking for Gabriel Allon at No. 16 Narkiss Street in Jerusalem or for Viktor Orlov at No. 43 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Nor should they read too much into my use of a poison-dispensing ring, though I suspect the KGB and its successors probably have one.

The Great Terror killing ground discovered at the climax of The Defector is fictitious, but, sadly, the historical circumstances that could have created such a place are not. Precisely how many people were shot to death during the brutal repressions lasting from 1936 to 1938 may never be known. Estimates range from approximately seven hundred thousand to well over a million. Suffice it to say the number of those executed is but one measure of the suffering Stalin inflicted on Russia during the time of the Great Terror. Historian Robert Conquest estimates that the purges and Stalin-induced famines probably claimed between eleven million and thirteen million lives. Other historians place the number even higher. And still opinion polls consistently find that Stalin remains highly popular among Russians to this day.

One of the few sites where Russians can mourn Stalin’s victims is Butovo, just south of Moscow. There, from August 1937 to October 1938, an estimated twenty thousand people were shot in the back of the head and buried in long mass graves. I visited the recently opened memorial at Butovo with my family in the summer of 2007 while researching Moscow Rules, and in large measure it inspired The Defector. One question haunted me as I walked slowly past the burial trenches, accompanied by weeping Russian citizens. Why are there not more places like this? Places where ordinary Russians can see evidence of Stalin’s unimaginable crimes with their own eyes. The answer, of course, is that the rulers of the New Russia are not terribly interested in exposing the sins of the Soviet past. On the contrary, they are engaged in a carefully orchestrated endeavor to airbrush away its most repulsive aspects while celebrating its achievements. One can understand their motives. The NKVD, which carried out the Great Terror at Stalin’s behest, was the forerunner of the KGB. And former officers of the KGB, including Vladimir Putin himself, are now running Russia.