Lavon flashed an update to King Saul Boulevard, and Gabriel broke the news to Graham Seymour in a secure phone call late that afternoon. MI6’s Vienna Head of Station was a manic-depressive who was struggling with anxiety and having trouble sleeping at night. There was a silver lining, however. Thus far, there was no evidence to suggest he was a Russian spy as well.
For three more days and nights they watched him. Or, as Eli Lavon would later describe it, and Keller would concur, they watched over him. Such was the impact of the three unmarked bottles, one for Ambien, one for Xanax, and one for Lithobid, a powerful mood stabilizer. Even Lavon, a professional voyeur who had spent a lifetime chronicling the secret lives of others—their weaknesses and vanities, their private indiscretions and infidelities—could no longer think of Alistair Hughes as only a target and a potential Russian spy. He was theirs to care for and to protect from harm. He was their patient.
He was not the first professional intelligence officer to suffer from mental illness, and he would not be the last. Some came to the game with their disorders in place; others found it was the game itself that made them sick. Hughes, however, concealed his ailments better than most. Indeed, Keller and Lavon struggled to reconcile the Ambien-addled figure who rose unsteadily from his bed each morning with the polished professional spy who emerged a few minutes later from the doorway of the apartment building, the very archetype of British sophistication and competence. Still, the watchers tightened their orbit as they followed Hughes to his daily appointments. And when he nearly stepped in front of a tram on the Kärntner Ring—he was distracted at the time by something on his BlackBerry—it was Eli Lavon who seized his elbow and in German quietly warned him to watch his step.
“And you’re sure he didn’t see you?” asked Gabriel over the secure link.
“I turned away before he looked up from the phone. He never had a clear view of my face.”
“You broke the fourth wall between watcher and quarry.” Gabriel’s tone was admonitory. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
“WhatshouldI have done?Watchwhile he gets run down by a streetcar?”
The next day was a Wednesday, gray and despondent, but warm enough so that the low clouds dispensed rain rather than snow. Hughes’s mood matched the weather. He was slow in rising from his bed, and when he swallowed the tablets from the medicine chest, the Xanax and the Lithobid, he did so as though they had been forced down his throat. Outside in the street he paused before climbing into the back of his embassy car and lifted his eyes toward the windows of the observation flat, but otherwise the day proceeded in the same manner as the previous twelve. He spent his morning inside the embassy, he lunched well with an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he had coffee at Café Sperl with a reporter from theTelegraph. He left no chalk marks, took no long walks in a Viennese park or isolated woodland, and engaged in no visible acts of impersonal communication. In short, he did nothing to suggest he was in contact with an adversarial intelligence service.
He remained at the embassy later than was typical and returned to his flat at nine fifteen. There was barely time enough for a microwave chicken curry and quick phone call to Shepherd’s Bush before climbing into his bed. There he reached not for his book but for his laptop computer, which he used to book a flight and reserve a hotel room for two nights. The flight was SkyWork 605, departing Vienna at two in the afternoon on Friday, with a scheduled arrival in Bern at half past three. The hotel was the Schweizerhof, one of Bern’s finest. He did not tell his wife of his travel plans. Nor, admitted Graham Seymour in a secure phone call with Gabriel, did he inform Vienna Station or Vauxhall Cross.
“Why not?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s not required as long as the trip is personal in nature.”
“Maybe it should be.”
“Do you know where your station chiefs are every minute of every day?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “But none of mine are spying for the Russians.”
Alistair Hughes slept soundly that night with the help of ten milligrams of Ambien, but at King Saul Boulevard the lights burned late. In the morning Mikhail Abramov flew to Zürich; Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern, to Geneva. All three eventually made their way to Bern, where they were met by Christopher Keller and several Neviot officers from the Vienna watch.
Which left only Gabriel. Early on Friday morning he rose in darkness and dressed in the clothing of a German businessman called Johannes Klemp, quietly, so as not to wake Chiara. In the next room, Raphael slept through his gentle kiss, but Irene woke with a start and fixed him with an accusatory glare.
“You look different.”
“Sometimes I have to pretend to be someone else.”
“Are you leaving again?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Not long,” he answered faithlessly.
“Where are you going this time?”
Operational security did not permit him to answer. He gave Irene one last kiss and went downstairs, where his motorcade disturbed the quiet of Narkiss Street.Where are you going this time?Switzerland, he thought. Why did it have to be Switzerland?
17
The Palisades, Washington
As Gabriel’s flight rose over the eastern Mediterranean, Eva Fernandes was wiping down the small bar at Brussels Midi, a popular Belgian bistro located on MacArthur Boulevard in Northwest Washington. The last of the evening’s guests had finally departed, and the narrow dining room was deserted, save for Ramon, who was running the vacuum rhythmically over the carpet, and Claudia, who was setting the tables for tomorrow’s lunch service. Both were recent arrivals from Honduras—Claudia was legal, Ramon was not—and neither spoke much in the way of English. The same was true of most of the kitchen staff. Fortunately, Henri, the Belgian-born owner and head chef, had enough Spanish to make his wishes known, as did Yvette, his ruthlessly efficient business partner and wife.
Yvette managed the restaurant’s day-to-day operations and jealously guarded the reservations book, but it was Eva Fernandes, trim, blond, strikingly attractive, who served as the restaurant’s public face. Its well-heeled clientele were members in good standing of Washington’s ruling elite—lawyers, lobbyists, journalists, diplomats, and intellectuals from the city’s most prominent policy shops and think tanks. Most were Democrats and leftward leaning. They were globalists, environmentalists, and supporters of reproductive rights, unrestricted immigration, universal health care, robust gun control, and a guaranteed basic income for those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Eva they adored. She greeted them when they entered the restaurant and relieved them of their overcoats and their cares. And when their tables weren’t available because Yvette had taken too many reservations, Eva soothed their anger with a dazzling smile and a complimentary glass of wine and a few soft words in her untraceable accent. “Where are you from?” they would ask, and she would tell them she was from Brazil, which was true to a point. And if they asked about the origin of her European looks, she would explain that her grandparents were from Germany, which was not true at all.
She had arrived in America seven years earlier, living first in Miami, then hopscotching her way northward, through a series of dead-end jobs and relationships, before finding herself in Washington, which had been her destination all along. She had found the job at Brussels Midi quite by accident after bumping into Yvette at the Starbucks across the street. She was overqualified for the work—she had earned a degree in molecular biology from a prestigious university—and the pay was dreadful. She supplemented her wages by teaching three classes a week at a yoga studio in Georgetown and received additional financial support from a friend who taught history at Hunter College in Manhattan. Combined, the three sources of income gave her the appearance of self-sufficiency. She lived alone in a small apartment on Reservoir Road, owned a Kia Optima sedan, and traveled frequently, mainly to Canada.
It was eleven fifteen when Ramon and Claudia departed. Eva collected her handbag from the cloakroom, engaged the restaurant’s alarm system, and went out. Her car was parked along the curb. Her apartment was less than a mile away, but Eva never walked home alone at night. There had been a string of muggings along MacArthur Boulevard that winter, and a week earlier a young woman had been dragged into the woods of Battery Kemble Park at knifepoint and raped. Eva was quite confident she could look after herself in the event of a robbery or sexual assault, but such prowess didn’t necessarily fit the profile of a hostess and part-time yoga instructor. Nor did she want to take the risk of becoming involved with the police.
