Moscow Rules (15 page)

“Did you discuss the recent murders of her colleagues?”

“The topic might have come up. I can’t remember.”

“What
do
you remember, Mr. Golani?”

“We talked about Palestine and the Middle East. We talked about the war in Iraq. We talked about

Russia.”

“What about Russia?”

“Politics, of course-the coming election.”

“What did Miss Sukhova say about the election?”

“She said Russian politics are nothing more than professional wrestling. She said the winners and

losers are chosen in advance. That the campaign itself is much sound and fury, signifying nothing. She said

the president and the Russian Unity Party will win in a landslide and claim another sweeping mandate.

The only question is, how many votes will they feel compelled to steal in order to achieve their goals.”

“The Russian Federation is a democracy. Miss Sukhova’s political commentary, while entertaining

and provocative, is slanderous and completely false.”

The interrogator turned to a fresh page of his notebook.

“Did you and Miss Sukhova spend any time alone at the party?”

“Olga said she needed a cigarette. She invited me to join her.”

“There were no cigarettes among your possessions tonight.”

“That’s hardly surprising, given the fact that I don’t smoke.”

“But you joined her in any case?”

“Yes.”

“Because you wanted to have a word alone with her in a place where no one could overhear?”

“Because I was attracted to her-and, yes, because I wanted to have a word alone with her in a place

no one else could hear.”

“Where did you go?”

“The terrace.”

“How long were you alone?”

“A minute or two, no more.”

“What did you discuss?”

“I asked if I could see her again. If she would be willing to give me a tour of Moscow.”

“Did you also tell her you were a married man?”

“We’d already discussed that.”

“At dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Whose idea was it to visit Novodevichy?”

“Hers.”

“Why did she select this place?”

“She said that to understand Russia today you had to walk among her bones.”

“Did you travel to the cemetery together?”

“No, I met her there.”

“How did you travel? By taxi?”

“I took the Metro.”

“Who arrived first?”

“Olga was waiting at the gates when I got there.”

“And you entered the cemetery together?”

“Of course.”

“Which grave did you visit first?”

“It was Chekhov’s.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“Describe it for me.”

Gabriel closed his eyes, as if trying to summon an image of the gravestone, but instead he heard the

voice of Olga whispering softly into his ear.
You mustn’t give them her name
, she was saying.
If Ivan

discovers it was Elena who betrayed him, he’ll kill her
.

19 FSB HEADQUARTERS, MOSCOW

They forged on together-for how long, Gabriel could only guess. At times, they wandered through

unexplored territory. At others, they retraced their steps over familiar ground. Trivial inconsistencies

were pounced upon as proof of treachery, minor lapses in memory as proof of deceit. There is a strange

paradox to an interrogation: it can often impart more information to the subject than to the officer posing

the questions. Gabriel had concluded that his opponent was but a small cog in a much larger machine. His

questions, like Russia ’s campaign politics, were much sound and fury signifying nothing. Gabriel’s real

enemies resided elsewhere. Since he was supposed to be dead by now, his very presence in Lubyanka

was something of an inconvenience for them. One factor would determine whether he survived the night:

Did they have the power to reach into the basement of Lubyanka and kill him?

The interrogator’s final questions were posed with the bored air of a traffic cop recording the details

of a minor accident. He jotted the responses in his notebook, then closed the cover and regarded Gabriel

through his little spectacles.

“I find it interesting that, after killing the two Chechen gangsters, you did not become ill. I take it

you’ve killed before, Mr. Golani?”

“Like all Israeli men, I had to serve in the IDF. I fought in Sinai in ’seventy-three and in Lebanon in

’eighty-two.”

“So you’ve killed many innocent Arabs?”

“Yes, many.”

“You are a Zionist oppressor of innocent Palestinians?”

“An unrepentant one.”

“You are not who you say you are, Mr. Golani. Your diplomatic passport is false, as is the name

written in it. The sooner you confess your crimes, the better.”

The interrogator placed the cap on his pen and screwed it slowly into place. It must have been a

signal, for the door flew open and the four handlers burst into the room. They took him down another

flight of stairs and placed him in a cell no larger than a broom closet. It stank of damp and feces. If there

were other prisoners nearby, he could not tell, for when the windowless door was closed, the silence,

like the darkness, was absolute.

He placed his cheek against the cold floor and closed his eyes. Olga Sukhova appeared in the form

of an icon, head tilted to one side, hands folded in prayer.
If you are fortunate enough to make it out of

Russia alive, don’t even think about trying to make contact with her. She’s surrounded by bodyguards

every minute of the day. Ivan sees everything. Ivan hears everything. Ivan is a monster
.

He was sweating one minute and shivering violently the next. His kidney throbbed with pain, and he

could not draw a proper breath because of the bruising to his ribs. During one intense period of cold, he

groped the interior of the cell to see if they had left him a blanket but found only four slick walls instead.

He closed his eyes and slept. In his dreams, he walked through the streets of his past and encountered

many of the men he had killed. They were pale and bloodless, with bullet holes in their hearts and faces.

Chiara appeared, dressed in her wedding gown, and told him it was time to come back to Umbria. Olga

mopped the sweat from his forehead and laid a bouquet of dead carnations at a grave in the Novodevichy

Cemetery. The engraving on the headstone was in Hebrew instead of Cyrillic. It read: GABRIEL

ALLON…

He woke finally to the sight of flashlights blazing in his face. The men holding them lifted him to his

feet and frog-marched him up several flights of steps. Gabriel tried to count, but soon gave up. Five? Ten?

Twenty? He couldn’t be sure. Using his head as a battering ram, they burst through a doorway, into the

cold night air. For a moment, he was blinded by the sudden darkness. He feared they were about to hurl

him from the roof-Lubyanka had a long history of such unfortunate
accidents
-but then his eyes adjusted

and he could see they were only in the courtyard instead.

Sergei the interrogator was standing next to a black van, dressed in a fresh gray suit. He opened the

rear doors, and, with a few terse words in Russian, ordered the handlers to put Gabriel inside. His hands

were freed briefly, only to be restrained again a few seconds later to a steel loop in the ceiling. Then the

doors closed with a deafening thud and the van lurched forward over the cobblestones.

Where now?
he thought. Exile or death?

He was alone again. He reckoned it was before midnight because Moscow ’s traffic was still

moving at a fever pitch. He heard no sirens to indicate they were under escort, and the driver appeared to

be obeying traffic rules, such as they were. At one long stop, he heard the sound of laughter, and he

thought of Solzhenitsyn.
The
vans…
That was how the KGB had moved the inhabitants of the Gulag

Archipelago-at night, in ordinary-looking vans, invisible to the souls around them, trapped in a parallel

world of the damned.

Sheremetyevo 2 Airport lay north of the city center, a journey of about forty-five minutes when the

traffic was at its most reasonable. Gabriel had allowed himself to hope it was their destination, but that

hope dissolved after an hour in the back of the van. The quality of the roads, deplorable even in Moscow,

deteriorated by degrees the farther they moved away from Lubyanka. Each pothole sent shock waves of

pain through his bruised body, and he had to cling to the steel loop to avoid being thrown from his bench.

It was impossible to guess in which direction they were traveling. He could not tell whether they were

heading west, toward civilization and enlightenment, or east, into the cruel heart of the Russian interior.

Twice the van stopped and twice Gabriel could hear Russian voices raised in anger. He supposed even

an unmarked FSB van had trouble moving through the countryside without being shaken down by
banditi

and traffic cops looking for bribes.

The third time the van stopped, the doors swung open and a handler entered the compartment. He

unlocked the handcuffs and motioned for Gabriel to get out. A car had pulled up behind them; the

interrogator was standing in the glow of the parking lamps, stroking his little beard as though deciding on

a suitable place to carry out an execution. Then Gabriel noticed his suitcase lying in a puddle of mud, next

to the ziplock bag containing his possessions. The interrogator nudged the bag toward Gabriel with the toe

of his shoe and pointed toward a smudge of yellow light on the horizon.

“The Ukrainian border. They’re expecting you.”

“Where’s Olga?”

“I suggest you get moving before we change our minds, Mr.
Allon
. And don’t come back to Russia

again. If you do, we will kill you. And we won’t rely on a pair of Chechen idiots to do the job for us.”

Gabriel collected his belongings and started toward the border. He waited for the crack of a pistol

and the bullet in his spine, but he heard nothing but the sound of the cars turning around and starting back

to Moscow. With their headlights gone, the heavy darkness swallowed him. He kept his eyes focused on

the yellow light and walked on. And, for a moment, Olga was walking beside him.
Her life is now in your

hands
, she reminded him.
Ivan kills anyone who gets in his way. And if he ever finds out his own wife

was my source, he won’t hesitate to kill her, too.

PART TWO. THE RECRUITMENT

20 BEN-GURION AIRPORT, ISRAEL

Wake up, Mr. Golani. You’re almost home.”

Gabriel opened his eyes slowly and gazed out the window of the first-class cabin. The lights of the

Coastal Plain lay in a glittering arc along the edge of the Mediterranean, like a strand of jewels painted by

the hand of Van Dyck.

He turned his head a few degrees and looked at the man who had awakened him. He was twenty

years younger than Gabriel, with eyes the color of granite and a fine-boned, bloodless face. The

diplomatic passport in his blazer pocket identified him as Baruch Goldstein of the Israeli Ministry of

Foreign Affairs. His real name was Mikhail Abramov. Bodyguard jobs were not exactly Mikhail’s

specialty. A former member of the Sayeret Metkal special forces, he had joined the Office after

assassinating the top terrorist masterminds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He had one other attribute that

had made him the perfect candidate to escort Gabriel out of Eastern Europe and back to Israel. Mikhail

had been born in Moscow to a pair of dissident scientists and spoke fluent Russian.

They had been traveling together for the better part of a day. After crossing the border, Gabriel had

surrendered himself to a waiting team of Ukrainian SBU officers. The SBU men had taken him to Kiev

and handed him over to Mikhail and two other Office security men. From Kiev, they had driven to

Warsaw and boarded the El Al flight. Even on the plane, Shamron had taken no chances with Gabriel’s

safety. Half of the first-class cabin crew were Office agents, and, before takeoff, the entire aircraft had

been carefully searched for radioactive material and other toxins. Gabriel’s food and drink had been kept

in a separate sealed container. The meal had been prepared by Shamron’s wife, Gilah. “It’s the Office

version of glatt kosher,” Mikhail had said. “Sanctified under Jewish law and guaranteed to be free of