Page 109 of Ransom

Gabriel shook his head. “We have to let the guest of honor sign his name first.”

“At least warn Christopher.”

It wasn’t necessary; he had already unbuttoned his suit jacket, thus making it easier to access his concealed Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter pistol. The rest of the security detail was on high alert as well. Knight, smiling, was having a quiet word with fellow billionaire Roger Gordon, unaware of the approaching Russian assassin. He was shouldering his way through the crowd that had convened around Knight and his entourage. There was no sign of the previous leg ailment. He held the ebony walking stick not in his left hand but in his right.

“Seen enough?” asked Chiara.

“More than enough,” replied Gabriel.

And so had Christopher. He raised his wrist to his lips, and the six-man SIS detail closed around Edward Knight and frog-marched him from the room, much to the astonishment of the knot of attendees gathered around him. It happened so quickly, so thoroughly, that one startled onlooker wondered aloud whether the billionaire had just met with the same fate as his wife.

Gradually the small crowd dispersed, leaving only Christopher and the Russian assassin behind. The two men eyed one another for a moment, cordially, it seemed. Then the Russian gave a small, stiff bow and joined the parade of attendees filing out of the room. His limp had returned, his ebony cane was once again in his left hand. It was, thought Gabriel, a fine end to the evening.

44

Devon–Lisbon

Sapphire’s official record, which would never see the light of day, would state that the suspected Russian assassin departed Wickham House at 9:48p.m.In point of fact it was closer to ten o’clock. By then his vehicle, a Mercedes sedan rented earlier that day at the Hertz outlet near Marble Arch in London, had been fitted with a limpet tracking device, courtesy of SIS’s Tech-Ops branch. The car reached Bristol shortly after midnight. From there it headed north to Birmingham and Liverpool, then west to Holyhead, where it rolled into the belly of an early-morning ferry bound for Dublin. Vauxhall Cross arranged for two teams of watchers to make the voyage as well, each in a separate vehicle. The four officers followed their target upstairs to one of the cafés on the main passenger deck, a trek he made without the aid of his ebony walking stick.

Because he was not a citizen of the United Kingdom or Ireland, he had been required to display a valid passport during the boarding process. In his case it was a Spanish passport bearing the name Felix Serrano, the same passport he had produced the previous day at the Gare du Nord in Paris before boarding a Eurostar train bound for London’s St. Pancras International. Exactly how he came by the passport in the first place was established with the help of Spanishintelligence officials in Madrid. It seemed a Felix Serrano from Venezuela had applied for one under a program that allowed those of Spanish descent to claim citizenship in their ancestral homeland. The desk officers at Vauxhall Cross didn’t have the heart to tell their Spanish allies that they had undoubtedly bestowed citizenship on an illegal Russian intelligence operative, thus allowing him to roam the countries of the European Union, and much of the world, at will.

Officers on SIS’s Russia operations desk, otherwise known as the Russia House, were doing some digging of their own. Namely they were attempting to determine the true identity of the holder of the Spanish and Venezuelan passports. Their task was made easier by the fact they now had his photograph. When a simple reverse-image search yielded nothing of interest, they scoured old yearbooks of known GRU training academies. They found someone who looked a good deal like “Felix Serrano” in a yearbook from the GRU’s Military-Diplomatic Academy in Moscow—and in a photograph of several Spetsnaz GRU officers taken in war-ravaged Grozny during the so-called Second Chechnya War.

Next they ran the two photos through sophisticated facial recognition software, and the software declared conclusively that they were the same man. When they added a third photograph to the mix—the one in the passport granted by the government of Spain—the results were once again beyond dispute. Felix Serrano was in truth Captain Yuri Ivanov, forty-eight years of age, formerly of the GRU’s elite 14th Brigade, now an illegal operative assigned to Unit 29155. It was the assumption of the Russia House that Ivanov was no ordinary secret foot soldier. He was, in their estimation, a very big fish indeed.

All this they determined before the ferry had reached Ireland. It did so a few minutes ahead of schedule, and at seven fifteen, having dropped his car at the Hertz outlet at Dublin Airport, Captain YuriIvanov boarded an Aer Lingus flight in Terminal 2. Three hours and five minutes later, when the plane arrived at its destination, four officers from the local station were waiting. They followed Captain Ivanov to his door, then dispatched a message to the Sapphire team at Vauxhall Cross. The big fish had landed in Lisbon.

The street was a cobbled pedestrian lane in the quarter of Lisbon known as the Alfama. At one end a woman sat at a folding table for several hours each day, selling shots of Portuguese cherry liqueur to anyone who happened by. At the opposite end, where the street turned to a flight of steps, was a trellised court with a restaurant that catered mainly to a local clientele. Captain Yuri Ivanov of the GRU dined there often, for he lived in the building next door.

His apartment was on the second floor. It had a small balcony where he took his coffee in the morning and something a little stronger in the evening, when the heat of the day finally abated and the street came alive. He took careful note of all those who passed beneath him. Those who caught his eye he photographed, always while pretending to be reading something on his mobile phone.

On his application for a Spanish passport, Ivanov had listed his occupation as “businessman.” In Lisbon, though, he conducted himself in the manner of a flaneur. He was an urban explorer of the highest order, a true connoisseur of the street, an observer of life and its many spectacles. He moved about the city on foot, never in a motorcar, and never with the aid of an ebony walking stick. He was particularly fond of Lisbon’s coffeehouses—his favorite seemed to be Paleio Café on the Rua da Madalena—and of its bookstores, especially Ler Devagar, with its towering shelves. His lunches werelong and leisurely and always included a pricey bottle of local wine. He never paid his bill with a credit card, only with cash.

For the better part of the next week he was observed during his daily excursions by a rotating cast of watchers from the Secret Intelligence Service. He impressed them with the quality of his tradecraft. He was, they wagered, of a higher caliber than the other GRU operatives they had followed. His wanderings were not wanderings at all but carefully choreographed maneuvers designed to expose surveillance. Never once, though, did they fall into the trap he set for them, for they were of a higher caliber too.

But he seemed entirely oblivious to the fact that the three occupants of the apartment on the opposite side of the street were photographing him as well. He was to be forgiven for this lapse, for they kept their shades and windows closed, even during the blast-furnace heat of the afternoon. The two male occupants of the apartment never set foot outside the building—one had a face that would not allow it, and the other had been nose-to-nose with Captain Ivanov at a recent art auction in Devon—but their female companion roamed Lisbon at will, always with a markedly different appearance, sometimes, even, a different gender. During one outing she requested permission to pluck the phone from the breast pocket of Ivanov’s sport jacket. Her two associates, while sorely tempted, instructed her to take a pass.

They shared her desire, however, to have a closer look at Ivanov’s Lisbon pied-à-terre, but their overlords at Vauxhall Cross expressly forbade it. In their opinion, the chances of breaking into the apartment without detection were slim. Better a proverbial bird in the hand, they reasoned, than no bird at all. Better to watch and wait than to risk losing the match with a costly own goal.

And so the Lisbon game, as they had taken to calling it, entered a second week. Captain Yuri Ivanov of the GRU passed the nextthree days as he had passed the previous seven, an urban nomad, a connoisseur of everything the enchanted city had to offer. On the fourth day of that week he took his late-morning coffee at Curva on the Rua Damasceno Monteiro. As was often the case at the popular café, a number of patrons were working remotely on laptops. One, an angular-cheeked woman in her mid-thirties, was leaving as Yuri Ivanov was looking for a place to sit. After laying claim to her now empty table, he deftly collected the scrap of paper the woman had adhered to the bottom of the chair. An SIS watcher who witnessed the move thought it the best piece of old-school tradecraft he had seen in some time.

The angular-cheeked woman, after leaving the popular coffeehouse, engaged in a few basic countersurveillance moves before taking a taxi to the airport. A watcher followed her into the terminal and snapped a photo of her checking in for a flight to Belgrade—Serbia being one of the few European countries where Russians were still welcome. As a consequence, SIS’s Belgrade Station was staffed with a number of capable officers, two of whom tailed the woman from the airport to the St. Regis Hotel, where she was seen having drinks with a Russian businessman whom Vauxhall Cross had previously identified as an undercover GRU officer, thus putting to rest any lingering questions as to her real nationality and occupation.

The Lisbon game, it seemed, had borne its first fruit. They now had two birds in the hand, including an apparent courier for the GRU’s network of illegals. But they had a problem as well, a newly unearthed piece of intelligence so alarming, so sensitive, it compelled Graham Seymour to forsake his lair in London and travel clandestinely to Portugal to have a quiet word with his Lisbon team, such as it was. There was no need for the operations desk to arrange a safe house. Graham had one in his back pocket.

45

Costa de Prata

The villa stood a mile from the sea near the medieval town of Óbidos, flanked on one side by a grove of olive trees and on the other by a coppice of cork oak. Graham Seymour had acquired it as he was nearing the end of a sometimes tumultuous career at MI5. His plan, to the extent he had one, was to paint dreadful watercolors while Helen attempted to poison him with her exotic cooking. But all that fell by the wayside when Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster chose him to be the sixteenth director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service. He had now been in the post longer than anyone since Stuart Menzies, who had led SIS during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. There were some in Whitehall who thought Graham had overstayed his welcome, that it was time for him to go quietly into the night, but he was in no hurry to step from the stage. Indeed, at moments like these, he dared to think of himself as irreplaceable.

He had traveled from London to Lisbon on a discount commercial flight, with a false British passport in his pocket and two plainclothes Metropolitan Police protection officers at his side. They arrived at the villa in the glare of the early afternoon, in a rented Renault. The air inside the house was stale, unbreathed. Graham threw open thedoors and windows, then went into the kitchen in search of something to serve his guests. There were a few tins of soup, a jar of tomato sauce, and a half-drunk bottle of single malt, but otherwise the cupboard was bare. He supposed the whisky would have to do.

He took down the bottle and three cut-glass tumblers and carried them into the great room. He scarcely recognized the furnishings—or the view of the mutinous garden and the blue swimming pool, its surface covered in fallen leaves. Indeed he had the strange sensation he had wandered into someone else’s Portuguese retreat by mistake. The sound of a car crunching over the gravel drive dispelled that notion, as did the comforting sight of Christopher Keller and Gabriel Allon striding through the front door. They were accompanied by Harry Wilson, a sapling from Lisbon Station.

Christopher, seeing the expression on Graham’s face, placed a hand on Wilson’s shoulder. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce so the grown-ups can have a word in private?”

Wilson joined the two Met protection officers in the forecourt, and Graham poured two glasses of the whisky, one for himself and the other for Christopher. Then he displayed the bottle to Gabriel and said, “I don’t suppose I can interest you in a drop or two of this stuff.”