protest and pulling to the left. Its little wipers were altogether useless against the heavy rain and road
spray, and the defroster fan was little more than a warm exhalation of breath against the glass. In order to
see, Gabriel had to lower both front windows to create a cross draft. Each passing truck hurled water
against the left side of his face.
The rain tapered, and a few rays of weak sunlight peered through a slit in the clouds near the horizon.
Gabriel kept his foot pressed to the floor and his eyes fastened to the taillights of the Mercedes. His
thoughts, however, were focused on the scene he had just witnessed at the House on the Embankment.
How had he managed it?
How had Arkady convinced her to walk into the car without a fight? Was it
with a threat or a promise? With the truth or a lie, or some combination of both? And why were they now
hurtling down the Leninsky Prospekt, into the yawning chasm of the Russian countryside?
Gabriel was pondering that final question when he felt the first impact on his rear bumper: a car,
much bigger and faster than his own, headlights doused. He responded by pressing the accelerator to the
floor but the Volga had nothing more to give. The car behind gave him one more tap, almost as a warning,
then moved in swiftly for the kill.
What followed was the classic maneuver that every good traffic policeman knows. The aggressor
initiates contact with the victim, right front bumper to left rear bumper. The aggressor then accelerates
hard and the victim is sent spinning out of control. The impact of such a tactic is magnified substantially
when there is a sharp imbalance in the weight and power of the two vehicles-for example, when one is an
S-Class Mercedes-Benz and the other is a rattletrap old Volga already being pushed to the breaking point.
How many times Gabriel’s car actually rotated, he would never know. He only knew that, when it was
over, the car was resting on its side in a field of mud at the edge of a pine forest and he was bleeding
heavily from the nose.
Two of Arkady Medvedev’s finest waded into the mud to retrieve him, though their motives were
hardly altruistic. One was a skinheaded giant with a right hand like a sledgehammer. The hammer struck
Gabrielonly once, for once was all that was necessary. He toppled backward, into the mud, and for an
instant saw upside-down pine trees. Then the trees streaked skyward toward the clouds like missiles. And
Gabriel blacked out.
At that same moment, El Al Flight 1612 was rapidly gaining altitude over the suburbs of Moscow
and banking hard toward the south. Uzi Navot was seated next to the window in the final row of first
class, hand wrapped around a glass of whiskey, eyes scanning the vast carpet of winking yellow lights
beneath him. For a few seconds, he could see it all clearly: the ring roads around the Kremlin, the
snakelike course of the river, the thunderous prospekts leading like spokes into the endless expanse of the
Russian interior. Then the plane knifed into the clouds and the lights of Moscow vanished. Navot pulled
down his window shade and lifted the whiskey to his lips.
I should have broken his arm,
he thought.
I
should have broken the little bastard’s arm.
Gabriel opened his eyes slowly.
Not eyes,
he thought.
Eye.
The left eye only. The right eye was
unresponsive. The right eye was the one that had been punched by the bald giant. It was now swollen shut
and crusted over with clotted blood.
Before attempting movement, he took careful stock of his situation. He was sprawled on the concrete
floor of what appeared to be a warehouse, with his hands cuffed at his back and his legs in something
resembling a running position, right leg lifted in front of him, left extended backward. His right shoulder
was pressing painfully against the floor, as was the right side of his face. Somewhere, a light was burning,
but his own corner of the building was in semidarkness. A few feet away stood a stack of large wooden
crates with Cyrillic markings on the sides. Gabriel struggled to make out the words but could not. The
alphabet was still like hieroglyphics to him; the crates could have been filled with tins of caviar or vials
of deadly polonium and he would have never known the difference.
He rolled onto his back and lifted his knees to his chest, then levered himself into a sitting position.
The exertion of the movement, combined with the fact that he was now upright, caused his right eye to
begin throbbing with catastrophic pain. He reckoned the blow had fractured the orbit around the eye. For
all he knew, he no longer had an eye, just an immense crater in the side of his head where once his eye
had been.
He leaned against the wooden crates and looked around him. There were other stacks of crates,
towering stacks of crates, receding into the distance like the apartment buildings of the Leninsky Prospekt.
From his limited vantage point, Gabriel could only see two rows, but he had the impression there were
many more. He doubted they were filled with caviar. Not even the gluttonous Ivan Kharkov could devour
that much caviar.
He heard the sound of footsteps approaching from a distance. Two sets. Both heavy. Both male. One
man significantly larger than the other. The big man was the bald giant who had hit him. The smaller man
was several years older, with a fringe of iron-gray hair and a skull that looked as if it been specially
designed to withstand much blunt trauma.
“Where are the children?” asked Arkady Medvedev.
“What children?” replied Gabriel.
Medvedev nodded to the giant, then stepped away as if he didn’t want his clothing to be spattered
with the blood. The sledgehammer crashed into Gabriel’s skull a second time. Same eye, same result.
Pine trees and missiles. Then nothing at all.
63 LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW
Like almost everyone else in Moscow, Colonel Grigori Bulganov of the FSB was divorced. His
marriage, like Russia itself, had been characterized by wild lurches from one extreme to the other:
glasnost one day, Great Terror the next. Thankfully, it had been short and had produced no offspring. Irina
had won the apartment and the Volkswagen; Grigori Bulganov, his freedom. Not that he had managed to
do much with it: a torrid office romance or two, the occasional afternoon in the bed of his neighbor, a
mother of three who was divorced herself.
For the most part, Grigori Bulganov worked. He worked early in the morning. He worked late into
the evening. He worked Saturdays. He worked Sundays. And sometimes, like now, he could even be
found at his desk late on a Sunday night. His brief was counterespionage. More to the point, it was
Bulganov’s job to neutralize attempts by foreign intelligence services to spy on the Russian government
and State-owned Russian enterprises. His assignment had been made more difficult by the activities of the
FSB’s sister service, the SVR. Espionage by the SVR had reached levels not seen since the height of the
Cold War, which had prompted Russia ’s adversaries to respond in kind. Grigori Bulganov could hardly
blame them. The new Russian president was fond of rattling his saber, and foreign leaders needed to
know whether it had an edge to it or had turned to rust in its scabbard.
Like many FSB officers, Bulganov supplemented his government salary by selling his expertise,
along with knowledge gained through his work itself, to private industry. In Bulganov’s case, he served as
a paid informant for a man named Arkady Medvedev, the chief of security for Russian oligarch Ivan
Kharkov. Bulganov fed Medvedev a steady stream of reports dealing with potential threats to his
businesses, legal and illicit. Medvedev rewarded him by keeping a secret bank account in Bulganov’s
name filled with cash. As a consequence of the arrangement, Grigori Bulganov had been able to penetrate
Ivan Kharkov’s operations in a way no other outsider ever had. In fact, Bulganov was quite confident he
knew more about Ivan’s arms-trafficking activities than any other intelligence officer in the world. In
Russia, such knowledge could be dangerous. Sometimes, it could even be fatal, which explained why
Bulganov was careful to stay on Arkady Medvedev’s good side. And why, when Medvedev called his
cell at 11:15 P.M. on a Sunday night, he didn’t dare consider not answering it.
Grigori Bulganov did not speak for the next three minutes. Instead, he tore a sheet of notepaper into a
hundred pieces while he listened to the account of what had taken place in Moscow that afternoon. He
was glad Medvedev had called him. He only wished he had done it on a secure line.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Bulganov asked.
“No question.”
“How did he get back into the country?”
“With an American passport and a crude disguise.”
“Where is he now?”
Medvedev told him the location.
“What about Ivan’s wife?”
“She’s here, too.”
“What are your plans, Arkady?”
“I’m going to give him one more chance to answer a few questions. Then I’m going to drop him in a
hole somewhere.” A pause. “Unless you’d like to do that for me, Grigori?”
“Actually, I might enjoy that. After all, he did disobey a direct order.”
“How quickly can you get down here?”
“Give me an hour. I’d like to have a word with the woman, too.”
“A
word,
Grigori. This matter doesn’t concern you.”
“I’ll be brief. Just make sure she’s there when I arrive.”
“She’ll be here.”
“How many men do you have there?”
“Five.”
“That’s a lot of witnesses.”
“Don’t worry, Grigori. They’re not the talkative sort.”
64 KALUZHSKAYA O BLAST, RUSSIA
When Gabriel woke next, it was to the sensation of a dressing being applied to his wounded eye. He
opened the one that still functioned and saw the task was being performed by none other than Arkady
Medvedev. The Russian was working with a single hand. The other held a gun. A Stechkin, thought
Gabriel, but he couldn’t be sure. He had never cared much for Russian guns.
“Feeling sorry for me, Arkady?”
“It wouldn’t stop bleeding. We were afraid you were going to die on us.”
“Aren’t you going to kill me anyway?”
“Of course we are, Allon. We just need a little bit of information from you first.”
“And who said former KGB hoods didn’t have any manners?”
Medvedev finished applying the bandage and regarded Gabriel in silence. “Aren’t you going to ask
me how I know your real name?” he asked finally.
“I assume you could have got it from your friends at the FSB. Or, it’s possible you saved yourself a
phone call by simply beating it out of Elena Kharkov. You strike me as the type who enjoys hitting
women.”
“Keep that up and I’ll bring Dmitri back for another go at you. You’re not some kid anymore, Allon.
One or two blows from Dmitri and you might not come to again.”
“He has a lot of wasted motion in his punch. Why don’t you let me give him a couple of pointers?”
“Are you serious or is that just your Jewish sense of humor talking?”
“Our sense of humor came from living with Russians as neighbors. It helps to have a sense of humor
during a pogrom. It takes the sting out of having your village burned down.”
“You have a choice, Allon. You can lie there and tell jokes all night or you can start talking.” The
Russian removed a cigarette from a silver case and ignited it with a matching silver lighter. “You don’t
need this shit and neither do I. Let’s just settle this like professionals.”
“By professional, I suppose you mean I should tell you everything I know, so then you can kill me.”
“Something like that.” The Russian held the cigarette case toward Gabriel. “Would you like one?”
“They’re bad for your health.”
Medvedev closed the case. “Are you up for a little walk, Allon? I think you might find this place
quite interesting.”
“Any chance of taking off these handcuffs?”
“None whatsoever.”
“I thought you would say that. Help me up, will you? Just try not to pull my shoulders out of their
sockets.”
Medvedev hoisted him effortlessly to his feet. Gabriel felt the room spin and for an instant thought he
might topple over. Medvedev must have been thinking the same thing because he placed a steadying hand
on his elbow.
“You sure you’re up for this, Allon?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re not going to pass out on me again, are you?”
“I’ll be fine, Arkady.”
Medvedev dropped his cigarette and crushed it carefully with the toe of an expensive-looking Italian
loafer. Everything Medvedev was wearing looked expensive: the French suit, the English raincoat, the
Swiss wristwatch. But none of it could conceal the fact that, underneath it all, he was still just a cheap
KGB hood.
Just like the regime,
thought Gabriel:
KGB in nice clothing.
They set out together between the crates. There were more than Gabriel could have imagined. They
seemed to go on forever, like the warehouse itself. Hardly surprising, he thought. This was Russia, after