LITMIR.BIZ

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      Gabriel tapped the screen of the laptop.

      “He can’t actually hear you, you know.”

      “Are you sure he’s alive?”

      “He’s scared to death. He hasn’t moved a muscle in five minutes.”

      “What’s he so afraid of?”

      “He’s Russian,” said Lavon, as if that fact alone were explanation enough.

      Gabriel studied Heathcliff as though he were a figure in a painting. His real name was Konstantin Kirov, and he was one of the Office’s most valuable sources. Only a small portion of Kirov’s intelligence had concerned Israel’s security directly, but the enormous surplus had paid dividends in London and Langley, where the directors of MI6 and the CIA eagerly feasted on each batch of secrets that spilled from the Russian’s attaché case. The Anglo-Americans had not dined for free. Both services had helped to foot the bill for the operation, and the British, after much interservice arm-twisting, had agreed to grant Kirov sanctuary in the United Kingdom.

      The first face the Russian would see after defecting, however, would be the face of Gabriel Allon. Gabriel’s history with the Russian intelligence service and the men in the Kremlin was long and blood-soaked. For that reason he wanted to personally conduct Kirov’s initial debriefing. Specifically, he wanted to know exactly what Kirov had discovered, and why he suddenly needed to defect. Then Gabriel would place the Russian in the hands of MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna. Gabriel was more than happy to let the British have him. Blown agents were invariably a headache, especially blown Russian agents.

      At last, Kirov stirred.

      “That’s a relief,” said Gabriel.

      The image on the screen deteriorated into digital tile for a few seconds before returning to normal.

      “It’s been like that all evening,” explained Lavon. “The team must have put the transmitter on top of some interference.”

      “When did they go into the room?”

      “About an hour before Heathcliff arrived. When we hacked into the hotel’s security system, we took a detour into reservations and grabbed his room number. Getting into the room itself was no problem.”

      The wizards in the Office’s Technology department had developed a magic cardkey capable of opening any electronic hotel room door in the world. The first swipe stole the code. The second opened the lock.

      “When did the interference start?”

      “As soon as he entered the room.”

      “Did anyone follow him from the airport to the hotel?”

      Lavon shook his head.

      “Any suspicious names on the hotel registry?”

      “Most of the guests are attending the conference. The Eastern European Society of Civil Engineers,” Lavon explained. “It’s a real nerds’ ball. Lots of guys with pocket protectors.”

      “You used to be one of those guys, Eli.”

      “Still am.” The shot turned to a mosaic again. “Damn,” said Lavon softly.

      “Has the team checked out the connection?”

      “Twice.”

      “And?”

      “There’s no one else on the line. And even if there was, the signal is so encrypted it would take a couple of supercomputers a month to reassemble the pieces.” The shot stabilized. “That’s more like it.”

      “Let me see the lobby.”

      Lavon tapped the keyboard of another computer, and a shot of the lobby appeared. It was a sea of ill-fitting clothing, name tags, and receding hairlines. Gabriel scanned the faces, looking for one that appeared to be out of place. He found four—two male, two female. Using the hotel’s cameras, Lavon captured still images of each and forwarded them to Tel Aviv. On the screen of the adjacent laptop, Konstantin Kirov was checking his phone.

      “How long do you intend to make him wait?” asked Lavon.

      “Long enough for King Saul Boulevard to run those faces through the database.”

      “If he doesn’t leave soon, he’ll miss his train.”

      “Better to miss his train than be assassinated in the lobby of the InterContinental by a Moscow Center hit team.” Once again, the shot turned to tile. Annoyed, Gabriel tapped the screen.

      “Don’t bother,” said Lavon. “I’ve already tried that.”

      Ten minutes elapsed before the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard declared that it could find no matches for the four faces in the Office’s digital rogues’ gallery of enemy intelligence officers, known or suspected terrorists, or private mercenaries. Only then did Gabriel compose a brief text message on an encrypted BlackBerry and tap the SEND key. A moment later he watched Konstantin Kirov reach for his mobile phone. After reading Gabriel’s text, the Russian rose abruptly, pulled on his overcoat, and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He slipped the mobile phone into his pocket but kept the suicide ampule in his hand. The suitcase he left behind.

      Eli Lavon tapped a few keys on the laptop as Kirov opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The hotel’s security cameras monitored his short walk to the lifts. There were no other guests or staff present, and the carriage into which the Russian stepped was empty. The lobby, however, was bedlam. No one seemed to take notice of Kirov as he made his way out of the hotel, including two leather-jacketed toughs from the Hungarian security service who were keeping watch in the street.

      It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. There was time enough for Kirov to catch the night train to Vienna, but he had to keep moving. He headed south on Apáczai Csere János Street, followed by two of Eli Lavon’s watchers, and then turned onto Kossuth Lajos Street, one of central Budapest’s main thoroughfares.

      “My boys say he’s clean,” said Lavon. “No Russians, no Hungarians.”

      Gabriel dispatched a second message to Konstantin Kirov, instructing him to board the train as planned. He did so with four minutes to spare, accompanied by the watchers. For now, there was nothing more Gabriel and Lavon could do. As they stared at one another in silence, their thoughts were identical. The waiting. Always the waiting.

       4

       WESTBAHNHOF, VIENNA

      But Gabriel and Eli Lavon did not wait alone, for on that evening they had an operational partner in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, the oldest and grandest such agency in the civilized world. Six officers from its storied Vienna Station—the exact number would soon be a matter of some contention—held a tense vigil in a locked vault at the British Embassy, and a dozen more were hovering over computers and blinking telephones at Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s riverfront headquarters in London.

      A final MI6 officer, a man called Christopher Keller, waited outside Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station, behind the wheel of an unremarkable Volkswagen Passat sedan. He had bright blue eyes, sun-bleached hair, square cheekbones, and a thick chin with a notch in the center. His mouth seemed permanently fixed in an ironic smile.

      Having little else to do that evening other than keep watch for any stray Russian hoods, Keller had contemplated the improbable path that had led him to this place. The wasted year at Cambridge, the deep-cover operation in Northern Ireland, the friendly-fire incident during the first Gulf War that cast him into self-imposed exile on the island of Corsica. There he had acquired perfect if Corsican-accented French. He had also performed services for a certain notable Corsican crime figure that might loosely be described as murder for hire. But all

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