Seymour allowed a moment to pass before answering. “Suffice it to say, certain inquiries are being made.”
“Inquiries?”
He nodded.
“Have you identified a suspect?”
“Rebecca, really.” Seymour’s tone was chastising.
“I’m not some low-level desk officer, Graham. I’m your H/Washington. And I’m entitled to know whether Vauxhall Cross thinks I’ve got a traitor working in my station.”
Seymour hesitated, then shook his head slowly. Rebecca appeared relieved.
“What are we going to say to the Americans?” she asked.
“Nothing at all. It’s too dangerous.”
“And when Morris Payne informs you of his suspicion that we’re harboring a Russian spy in our midst?”
“I’ll remind him about Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And then I’ll tell him he’s mistaken.”
“He won’t accept it.”
“He’ll have no other choice.”
“Unless your unofficial inquiry uncovers a Russian mole.”
“What inquiry?” asked Seymour. “What mole?”
16
Belvedere Quarter, Vienna
The British Embassy in Vienna was located at Jauresgasse 12, not far from the Belvedere gardens, in the city’s gilded Third District. The Jordanians were across the street, the Chinese were next door, and the Iranians were just down the block. So, too, were the Russians. Consequently, Alistair Hughes, MI6’s Vienna Head of Station, had occasion to innocently pass the SVR’s largerezidenturaseveral times daily, either in his chauffeured car or on foot.
He lived on a quiet street called the Barichgasse, in a flat large enough to accommodate his wife and two sons, who visited from London at least once a month. Housekeeping snared a short-term lease on a furnished apartment in the building directly opposite. Eli Lavon moved in the morning of Graham Seymour’s visit to Washington; Christopher Keller, the day after that. He had worked with Lavon on several operations, most recently in Morocco. Even so, Keller scarcely recognized the man who unchained the door and pulled him hastily inside.
“What exactly,” asked Keller, “is the nature of our relationship?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” answered Lavon.
Keller glimpsed Alistair Hughes for the first time at half past eight that evening when he emerged from the back of an embassy sedan. And then he saw Hughes again two minutes later, on the screen of a laptop computer, when he let himself into his flat. A Neviot team had broken into the apartment that afternoon and concealed cameras and microphones in every room. They had also placed a tap on the apartment’s landline phone and its Wi-Fi network, which would allow Lavon and Keller to monitor Hughes’s activity in cyberspace, including keystrokes. MI6 regulations forbade him from conducting official business on any computer outside the station, or on any phone other than his secure BlackBerry. He was free, however, to conduct personal business on an insecure network, using a personal device. Like most declared MI6 officers, he carried a second phone. Hughes’s was an iPhone.
He passed that first evening as he would pass the subsequent nine, in the manner of a middle-aged man living alone. His arrival time varied slightly each night, which Lavon, who logged his comings and goings, put down to proper tradecraft and personal security. His meals were of the frozen microwavable variety and were generally taken while watching the news on the BBC. He drank no wine with his dinner—indeed, they observed no consumption of alcoholic beverages at all—and usually phoned his wife and sons around ten. They lived in the Shepherd’s Bush section of West London. The wife, who was called Melinda, worked for Barclays at its headquarters in Canary Wharf. The boys were fourteen and sixteen and attended St. Paul’s, one of London’s costliest schools. Money appeared not to be an issue.
Insomnia, however, was. His first recourse was a dense biography of Clement Attlee, Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister, and when that didn’t work he would reach for the bottle of tablets that remained always on his bedside table. There were two more bottles in the medicine chest of the bathroom. Hughes took those with his morning coffee. He was careful in his grooming and his dress, but not unduly so. He never failed to send a “good morning” text message to the boys and Melinda, and none of the texts or e-mails he sent or received while in the apartment were outwardly romantic or sexual in nature. Eli Lavon forwarded all the outgoing or incoming phone numbers and addresses to King Saul Boulevard, which in turn handed them over to Unit 8200, Israel’s highly capable signals and cyberintelligence service. None appeared suspicious. For good measure, Unit 8200 trolled through the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses in his contacts. All those were clean, too.
A car collected Hughes each morning around nine o’clock, sometimes a few minutes earlier, sometimes later, and took him to the embassy, at which point he disappeared from sight for several hours. The strict security measures along the Jauresgasse made it impossible for Lavon’s watchers to maintain a fixed presence there. Nor were there any parks or squares or public spaces where a surveillance artist might loiter for any length of time. It was no matter; the location services of the iPhone, which Hughes kept in his briefcase, alerted them when he left the grounds.
As the declared Head of Station in a small and reasonably friendly country, Alistair Hughes was something of a diplomat-spy, which required him to maintain a busy schedule of meetings and appointments outside the embassy. He was a frequent visitor to various Austrian ministries and to the headquarters of the BVT, and he lunched daily in Vienna’s finest restaurants with spies and diplomats and even the odd journalist—including a beautiful reporter from German television who pressed him for information on Israel’s role in the murder of Konstantin Kirov. Eli Lavon knew this because he was lunching at the next table with one of his female watchers. Lavon was also present at a diplomatic reception at the Kunsthistorisches Museum when Hughes briefly rubbed shoulders with a man from the Russian Embassy. Lavon covertly snapped a photo of the encounter and shot it to King Saul Boulevard. The Office could not attach a name to the Russian’s face, and neither could the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Graham Seymour, however, had no problem identifying him. “Vitaly Borodin,” he told Gabriel over the dedicated secure link between their offices. “He’s a deputy second secretary with no connection whatsoever with the SVR.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Alistair reported the contact the minute he returned to the station.”
That evening, the tenth of the surveillance operation, Hughes managed only two pages of the Attlee biography before reaching for the tablets on his bedside table. And in the morning, after dispatching text messages to his wife and children, he clawed a tablet from each of the two bottles in his medicine chest and washed them down with his coffee. The embassy car arrived at twelve minutes past nine o’clock, and at nine thirty Keller entered Hughes’s flat with the help of one of Lavon’s break-in artists. He made straight for the bottle on the bedside table. It had no label or markings of any kind. Neither did the bottles in the medicine cabinet. Keller took a sample from each and laid them on the bathroom counter and photographed them, top and bottom. Across the street in the observation post, he entered the prescription numbers in an Internet pill-identifier database.
“Now we know why he’s the only MI6 officer who doesn’t drink,” said Eli Lavon. “The side effects would kill him.”
