Page 123 of Ransom

“About Alice Winter? Probably never.”

“Does her husband know?”

“For the moment, at least, Edward Knight believes his wife is dead.”

“Monstrous,” whispered Amanda.

“Ruthless, yes. But hardly monstrous.”

“Do you know how many laws you’ve violated?”

“None, actually. We received the necessary approval from higher authority.”

“Don’t tell me you involved the PM in this.”

“He just did,” said Christopher.

Amanda threw him a black look, then turned to Graham. “We heard a rumor that Edward Knight had retained Gabriel Allon to find his wife.”

“You heard correctly. Gabriel was the one who brought us Alice.”

Amanda glanced at Chirstopher. “That would explain why you’re here. The two of you are thick as thieves.”

“If it wasn’t for Gabriel Allon—”

Graham placed a restraining hand on Christopher’s arm and attempted to lower the temperature. The leaders had gathered a short distance away in the Pillared Room, and the prime minister was addressing the press. A nasty intramural spat between the directors of SIS and MI5 would not play well in the morning papers.

“There will be plenty of time for the usual recriminations later,” he said. “For now, it would be best if we focused on the problem at hand.”

“Agreed,” said Amanda evenly. “But if anything happens today, you can be sure that neither I nor my service will be blamed for it.”

“I would have expected nothing less.”

Amanda rose to her feet and looked at Christopher. “Where’s your friend Gabriel Allon now?”

“On his way back to Cornwall, I believe.”

“Tell him to stay there. Things tend to go off the rails whenever he’s in town.”

And with that she was gone.

“Did you just lie to the director of MI5?” asked Graham.

“It was a white lie,” said Christopher with a smile. “Told in the White Drawing Room.”

52

Zoetermeer

The headquarters of the AIVD, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, were located a few kilometers west of The Hague in the drab suburb of Zoetermeer. Like every other security professional in western Europe that morning, Anton de Graaf, AIVD’s director-general, had one eye on the Downing Street summit. A part of him was relieved it was Jonathan Lancaster who had convened the meeting and not the prime minister of the Netherlands. Russia’s intelligence services, he feared, were no longer rational actors. Anything and everything was possible.

The brutal murder of Yuri Ivanov the previous evening in Copenhagen was proof of that. The first documented use of a killer miniature drone was an alarming development, to say the least. De Graaf had already assembled an AIVD working group to determine whether anything could be done to protect Holland’s political leaders and senior government officials, short of locking them away in sealed rooms. His own opinion was that the Kremlin could now kill any leader, anywhere, at any time—unless, of course, intelligence professionals like De Graaf could provide the leaders with advance warning of an assassination plot.

The AIVD was better positioned than any other Westernintelligence service to meet the emerging threat, for it had once again managed to digitally breach the Aquarium, which was how ordinary Russians referred to the GRU’s imposing headquarters in downtown Moscow. Anton de Graaf, who no longer trusted the Americans, had shared this information only with the director of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. And yet even the British did not know the full extent to which their Dutch allies had penetrated the GRU. In the lexicon of the signals intelligence trade, the AIVD owned them. And so Anton de Graaf’s heart seemed to skip a beat when, at 12:10p.m.Central European Time, he lifted the receiver of his secure internal phone and heard the voice of Jaan Hendriks, the chief of the AIVD’s cyber division.

“You’d better get down here,” he said.

It was a walk of five full minutes from De Graaf’s top-floor suite to the underground lair inhabited by the cyberwarriors, a realm of eternal darkness where the sun neither rose nor set. Jaan Hendriks stood before the video wall, eyes on the center screen.