The next guests came not from inside the hotel but from the street, a man and a woman, late thirties or early forties, Central European or Scandinavian in appearance. Both were attractive and expensively dressed—the man in a dark suit and neon-blue shirt, the woman in a sleek pantsuit—and both were quite obviously in robust physical condition, the woman especially. The hostess escorted them to a table near the bar, but the man objected and pointed toward one that offered him line-of-sight coverage of both the hotel’s entrance and the table where MI6’s Vienna Head of Station was reading theFinancial Times. They ordered drinks rather than tea and never once looked at their phones. The man sat with his right hand on his knee and his left forearm braced on the tabletop. The woman spent several minutes tending to her flawless face.
“Who do you suppose they are?” asked Gabriel.
“Boris and Natasha,” murmured Eli Lavon.
“Moscow Center?”
“No question.”
“Mind if we get a second opinion?”
“If you insist.”
With Camera 7, Lavon captured a close-up of the man’s face. Camera 12 gave him the best look at the woman’s. He copied both images into a file and fired it securely to Tel Aviv.
“Now let me see the exterior of the hotel.”
Lavon called up the shot from Camera 2. It was mounted above the hotel’s entrance and pointed outward, toward the arches of the arcade. At present, two bellmen were hauling a cache of costly luggage from the boot of an S-Class Mercedes. Behind them, late-afternoon traffic hurtled across the Bahnhofplatz.
“Rewind it,” said Gabriel. “I want to see their arrival.”
Lavon moved the time-code bar backward five minutes, to the point where Boris and Natasha entered the lounge bar. Then he backed it up two more minutes and clicked theplayicon. A few seconds later Boris and Natasha strode into the shot.
Lavon clickedpause. “The happy couple,” he said acidly. “They arrived at the hotel on foot so we wouldn’t be able to grab the registration of the car.”
Lavon quickly switched to Camera 9, the widest-angled shot of the lounge bar. A new patron had arrived, a large, well-dressed man with a glistening marble jaw and pale hair combed closely to his scalp. He requested a table at the front of the lounge and settled into the chair facing Alistair Hughes. The MI6 officer scrutinized him briefly over the top of theFinancial Times, without expression, and then resumed reading.
“Who’s that one?” asked Gabriel.
“Igor,” answered Lavon. “And Boris has him covered, front and back.”
“Let’s have a closer look.”
Once again, Camera 12 provided the best shot. His features were decidedly Slavic. Lavon magnified the image and produced several stills, which he sent to King Saul Boulevard on a flash priority basis.
“How did he get here?” asked Gabriel.
Lavon switched to Camera 2, the exterior shot, and wound it backward long enough to see the man they called Igor climbing out of an Audi A8 sedan. The car was still outside the hotel, one man behind the wheel, another in the backseat.
“Looks like Igor doesn’t enjoy walking,” said Lavon. “Even for the sake of his cover.”
“Maybe he should,” said Keller. “He looks like he could lose a few pounds.”
Just then, the secure link flashed with an incoming message from Tel Aviv.
“Well?” asked Gabriel.
“I was wrong,” answered Lavon. “His name isn’t Igor, it’s Dmitri.”
“Better than Igor. What’s his family name?”
“Sokolov.”
“Patronymic?”
“Antonovich. Dmitri Antonovich Sokolov.”
“And what does Dmitri do for a living?”
