“It’s just a delivery truck,” answered Rebecca.
“Do the two in front look like delivery men to you?”
“They are, actually.”
The van pulled into the next space, the side cargo door slid open. Eva stared at the Russian face just beyond her window, trying desperately to hide her fear.
“I thought we were driving ourselves to the bolt-hole.”
“Change in plan,” said Rebecca. “The bolt-hole came to us.”
76
Forest Hills, Washington
The wound to Christopher Keller’s clavicle was through and through. In its wake, however, the 9mm Parabellum round had left shattered bone and considerable tissue damage. Fortunately, all Israeli government buildings, even abandoned ones, maintained a store of medical supplies. Mikhail, a combat veteran, flushed the wound with antiseptic and applied protective bandages. He had nothing for the pain other than a bottle of ibuprofen. Keller washed down eight tablets with a whisky from the wet bar.
With Mikhail’s help, he changed into fresh clothing and hung his right arm in a sling. The flight back to London promised to be long and uncomfortable, though mercifully Keller wouldn’t be flying commercial. Graham Seymour’s chartered executive jet waited at Dulles. The two men were last seen at the command post at half past nine, moving slowly down the steep, treacherous steps. Gabriel personally pressed the interior button that unlocked the iron gate. And thus the great undertaking came to an ignoble end.
Its final minutes were bitter and uncharacteristically rancorous. Mikhail clashed with Gabriel, and Gabriel with his old friend and comrade-in-arms Graham Seymour. He implored Seymour to phone the Americans and instruct them to seal Washington. And when Seymour refused, Gabriel threatened to call the Americans himself. He even started to dial Adrian Carter at CIA Headquarters before Seymour snatched the phone from his grasp. “It’s my scandal, not yours. And if anyone’s going to tell the Americans I planted Kim Philby’s daughter in their midst, it’s going to be me.”
But Seymour made no such admission to the Americans that morning, and Gabriel, though he was sorely tempted, did not do it for him. And in the span of a few minutes, a relationship of historic importance crumbled. For more than a decade, Gabriel and Graham had worked hand in glove against the Russians, the Iranians, and the global jihadist movement. And in the process, they had managed to undo decades of animosity between their services, even their countries. All that was ashes. But then, Eli Lavon would later remark, that had been part of Sasha’s plan from the beginning, to drive a wedge between the Office and MI6 and break the bond Gabriel and Graham Seymour had forged. In that, if nothing else, Sasha had succeeded.
Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern left next. One of the watchers plucked the camera from the communal green garden on Warren Street and then made for the train station. The other watchers soon followed, and by 9:45 a.m. only Gabriel, Mikhail, and Eli Lavon remained at the command post. A single car waited curbside. Oren, Gabriel’s chief bodyguard, stood watch inside the gate, against what, no one knew.
In the haste of their departure, the team had left the interior of the house a ruin, which was how they had found it. A single laptop remained on the trestle table. Gabriel was watching the recording of Rebecca Manning inside Starbucks when his BlackBerry shivered with an incoming message. It was from Adrian Carter.
What the hell is going on?
With nothing left to lose, Gabriel typed out a reply and sent it.
You tell me.
Carter called him ten seconds later and did just that.
It seemed a certain Donald McManus, a veteran FBI special agent attached to the Bureau’s Washington headquarters, had stopped for gas at the Shell station at Wisconsin Avenue and Ellicott Street at around twenty minutes past eight. And McManus, being naturally vigilant and aware of his surroundings, had noticed a well-dressed woman using the station’s grubby old public phone, which he found odd. In his experience, the only people who used pay phones these days were illegal immigrants, drug dealers, and cheating spouses. The woman didn’t appear to fall into any of those categories, though McManus was struck by the fact she kept her hand inside her shoulder bag throughout the entire conversation. After hanging up, she climbed into the passenger seat of a Kia Optima with District plates. McManus caught the number as it turned onto Wisconsin and headed north. The driver was younger than the woman who had used the phone, and prettier. McManus thought she looked a bit scared.
While heading south on Wisconsin, McManus switched from CNN on the satellite service to WTOP over the airwaves, and heard one of the station’s first bulletins regarding a shooting that had just occurred in Georgetown. It sounded like road rage to McManus, and he thought nothing of it. But by the time he hit downtown, the police had released a description of the suspect vehicle. Kia Optima, District plates, two women inside. He passed the tag number of the car he had seen at the gas station to the Metropolitan Police and, while he was at it, ran the number through the Bureau’s database. It was registered to an Eva Fernandes, a green-carder from Brazil, which was funny because McManus made her for an Eastern European.
About this same time, a surveillance team from the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division spotted several cars leaving the back entrance of the Russian Embassy, all containing known or suspected members of the SVRrezidentura. It looked to the team as though therezidenthad a crisis on his hands, an observation they shared with Headquarters. Special Agent McManus, who worked counterterrorism, caught wind of the Russian personnel movements and told the duty officer at CI about the woman he had seen using a pay phone. The duty officer passed it up the line to the deputy, and the deputy in turn passed it to the division chief himself.
And it was there, at 9:35 a.m., on the chief’s immaculate desk, that all three elements—the shooting in Georgetown, the hurried exodus from the Russian Embassy, and the two women in the Kia sedan—came together with all the makings of a rolling disaster in progress. When no one was looking, McManus ran a quick check on the pay phone and found that the call the woman had placed was to a number inside the Russian Embassy. And thus the rolling disaster became a full-blown international crisis that threatened to ignite World War III. Or so it seemed to Special Agent Donald McManus, who had just happened to stop for gas at the Shell station at Wisconsin Avenue and Ellicott Street at around twenty minutes past eight.
It was at this point the chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division rang his counterpart at the CIA to ask whether the Agency was running an op the Bureau didn’t know about. The CIA man swore he wasn’t, which happened to be true, but he thought it wise to run it past Adrian Carter, who was preparing for his daily ten o’clock with Morris Payne. Carter played dumb, his default response to uncomfortable questions from colleagues, superiors, and members of congressional oversight committees. Then, from the quiet of his seventh-floor office, he shot a quick text to his old friend Gabriel Allon, who just happened to be in town. The text was full of double or even triple meaning, and Gabriel, who knew Carter was on to him, responded in kind. Which was how they ended up on the telephone together, at 9:48, on an otherwise normal Thursday morning in Washington.
“Who were the three men?” asked Carter when he had finished briefing Gabriel.
“Which three men?”
“The three men,” said Carter deliberately, “who took heavy fire on Winfield Lane in Georgetown.”
“How should I know?”
“They say one of them was wounded.”
“I hope it wasn’t serious.”
“Apparently, a car picked them up on Thirty-Fifth. No one’s seen them since.”
