Rue Saint-Denis, Montreal
Three far-flung events, all seemingly unrelated, portended that the quest for the Russian mole had entered its final and climactic phase. The first occurred in the sometimes-French, sometimes-German city of Strasbourg, where French authorities handed over a set of badly burned remains to a representative of the Russian government. The remains were purported to be those of a Russian business consultant from Frankfurt. They were not. And the representative of the Russian government who took possession of them was actually an officer of the SVR. Those who witnessed the transfer described the atmosphere as notably chilly. Little about the exercise, conducted on a rain-slickened tarmac of Strasbourg Airport, suggested the matter would end there.
The second event transpired later that same morning in thepueblo blancoof Zahara in the south of Spain, where an elderly Frenchwoman known asla locaorla roja, a reference to the color of her politics, returned to her villa after a brief visit to Seville. Uncharacteristically, she was not alone. Two other people, a woman of perhaps thirty-five who spoke French and a bullet-shaped man who might have spoken no language at all, settled into the villa with her. Additionally, two of their associates took up residence at the hotel located one hundred and fourteen paces along the paseo. In early afternoon, the woman was seen quarreling with a shopkeeper in the Calle San Juan. She took her lunch amid the orange trees at Bar Mirador and afterward paid a call on Father Diego at the church of Santa María de la Mesa. Father Diego gave her his blessing—or perhaps it was his absolution—and then sent her on her way.
The last of the three events took place not in Western Europe but in Montreal, where at 10:15 a.m. local time, as the elderly Frenchwoman was exchanging a few cross words with the checkout girl at the El Castillo supermarket, Eli Lavon alighted from a taxi on the rue Saint-Dominique. He then walked several blocks, pausing occasionally, apparently to take his bearings, to an address on the rue Saint-Denis. It corresponded to a former townhouse that had been converted, like most of its neighbors, into flats. A flight of stairs climbed from the pavement to the unit on the second floor, which Housekeeping, its budgets strained, had acquired on a sublet for a period of three months.
The door opened with a sharp crack, as though a seal had been broken, and Lavon slipped inside. Morosely, he surveyed the stained, cigarette-burned furnishings before parting the gauzy curtains and peering out. At approximately forty-five degrees to Lavon’s right, on the opposite side of the street, was a patch of empty asphalt where, if the gods of intelligence were smiling upon them, a dark gray Ford Explorer would soon appear.
If the gods of intelligence were smiling upon them...
Lavon released the curtains. Another safe flat, another city, another watch. How long would it be this time? The great undertaking had become the great wait.
Christopher Keller arrived at midday; Mikhail Abramov, a few minutes before one. He was carrying a nylon duffel bag emblazoned with the name of a popular brand of ski equipment. Inside was a tripod-mounted camera with a telephoto night-vision lens, a long-range phased-array microphone, transmitters, two Jericho 9mm pistols, and two Office laptops with secure links to King Saul Boulevard. Keller had no operational paraphernalia other than his MI6 BlackBerry, which Gabriel had expressly forbidden him to use. Rebecca Manning had worked for MI6 during the critical transition from analogue to digital technology. She had no doubt given her first mobile phone to the Russians for analysis, and every one since. Eventually, MI6 would have to rewrite its software. For now, however, in order to maintain the illusion that all was normal, MI6’s officers around the globe were chattering and texting away on phones the Russians had cracked. But not Keller. Keller alone had gone dark.
His task now was to sit in a fleabag flat in Montreal with two Israelis and keep watch on a few meters of asphalt along the rue Saint-Denis. They assumed the Russians were watching it, too—perhaps not continuously, but enough to know whether the site was secure. Thus, the three veteran operatives did more than simply wait for a dark-gray Ford Explorer to appear. They watched their new neighbors as well, along with the many pedestrians that passed beneath their window. With the aid of the microphone, they listened to snatches of conversations for any trace of operational banter or a Russian accent. Those who appeared too regularly or lingered too long were photographed, and the photos were dispatched to King Saul Boulevard for analysis. None produced positive results, which gave the three veteran operatives precious cold comfort.
The traffic they monitored as well, especially in the small hours, when it thinned to a trickle. On the fourth night, the same Honda sedan—a 2016 Civic with ordinary Canadian license plates—appeared three times between midnight and one in the morning. Twice it passed from left to right, or southeast to northwest, but the third time it came from the opposite direction, and at a much slower speed. Mikhail captured a decent image of the driver with the long-lens camera and forwarded it to Gabriel at King Saul Boulevard. Gabriel in turn bounced it to his station chief in Ottawa, who identified the man behind the wheel as an SVR hood attached to the Russian consulate in Montreal. The drop site was most definitely in play.
As is often the case, the surveillance operation unwittingly exposed the secret lives of those who, through no fault of their own, lived within close proximity of the target. There was the handsome jazz musician across the street who entertained a married woman for an hour each afternoon and then sent her happily on her way. And there was the jazz musician’s shut-in of a neighbor who subsisted on a diet of microwave lasagna and Internet pornography. And the man of perhaps thirty who passed his evenings watching beheading videos on his laptop computer. Mikhail entered the man’s apartment during an absence and discovered stacks of jihadist propaganda, a printout of a crude bomb design, and the black banner of ISIS hanging on the bedroom wall. He also found a Tunisian passport, a photograph of which he sent to King Saul Boulevard.
Which presented Gabriel with an operational dilemma. He was obligated to tell the Canadians—and the Americans—about the potential threat residing on the rue Saint-Denis in Montreal. Were he to do so, however, he would unleash a chain of events that would almost certainly prompt the Russians to move their dead drop. And so he reluctantly decided to keep the intelligence to himself until such time as it could be passed to his allies without collateral damage. He was confident the situation could be contained. Three of the most experienced counterterrorism operatives in the world were residing in a safe flat across the street.
Fortunately, their dual watch would not last long, because three nights later the Honda Civic returned. It passed the safe flat left to right—southeast to northwest—at 2:34 a.m., as Keller kept a solitary vigil behind the threadbare curtain. It made a second pass from the same direction at 2:47, though by then Keller had been joined by Eli Lavon and Mikhail. The third pass occurred at 3:11, right to left, which exposed the driver to the long lens of the camera. It was the same SVR hood from the Russian consulate in Montreal.
It would be another two and a half hours before they saw him again. This time, he was driving not the Honda Civic but a Ford Explorer, Canadian registration, dark gray. He parked along an empty stretch of curb, killed the headlights, and switched off the engine. Through the lens of the camera, Keller watched the Russian open and close the glove box. Then he climbed out and locked the door with a remote key and walked away—right to left, northwest to southeast, a phone to his ear. Mikhail tracked him with the long-range phased-array microphone.
“What’s he saying?” asked Keller.
“If you shut up, maybe I can hear.”
Keller counted slowly to five. “Well?” he asked.
Mikhail answered him in Russian.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Eli Lavon, “that we’re all going to be leaving for Washington soon.”
The Russian rounded the next corner and was gone. Mikhail fired a flash message to King Saul Boulevard, setting in motion a rapid movement of Office personnel and resources from their fail-safe points to Washington. Keller stared at one of the windows across the street, the one that was lit by the faint glow of a computer.
“There’s something we should take care of before we leave.”
“Might not be a good idea,” said Lavon.
“Maybe,” replied Keller. “Or it might be the best idea I’ve had in a long time.”
55
Montreal—Washington
At eight fifteen that morning, Eva Fernandes was drinking coffee in her room at the Sheraton on the boulevard René-Lévesque, in downtown Montreal. During her last visit, she had stayed up the street at the Queen Elizabeth, which she preferred, but Sasha had ordered her to vary her routine when visiting her phantom sick relative. He had also instructed her to hold down her expenses. The room-service coffee was a minor infraction. Sasha was from another time, a time of war and famine and communist austerity. He did not tolerate his illegals living as oligarchs—unless, of course, it was called for by their cover. Eva was confident her next transmission from Moscow Center would contain a reprimand for her profligate ways.
She was showered, her suitcase was packed, her clothing for that day was laid out neatly on the bed. The remote for the Ford Explorer was in her handbag. So, too, was the flash drive. On it was the material Eva had received from Sasha’s mole during the last wireless drop, the one that had taken place on M Street in Washington, at 7:36 on a cold but sunny morning.
Eva had been inside the yoga studio at the time, preparing for her 7:45 class, and the mole had been across the street at Dean & DeLuca, surrounded by several of Eva’s regular students. She recognized the mole from other wireless drops and from Brussels Midi, where she dined frequently, usually in the company of British diplomats. Eva had actually exchanged a few words with her once regarding a reservation that had been made under someone else’s name. The woman was cool and assured and quite obviously intelligent. Eva suspected she was a member of MI6’s large Washington station, perhaps even its Head. If the woman were ever arrested, Eva would probably be arrested, too. As an illegal, she had no diplomatic protection. She could be charged, tried, and sentenced to a long prison term. The idea of spending several years locked in a cage in a place like Kentucky or Kansas held little appeal. Eva had vowed long ago she would never allow it to come to that.
At nine o’clock she dressed and went downstairs to the lobby to check out. She left her suitcase behind with the bellman and walked a short distance along the boulevard to an entrance for the Underground City, the vast labyrinth of shopping malls, restaurants, and performing-arts venues buried beneath downtown Montreal. It was an ideal place to do a bit of “dry cleaning,” especially early on a Tuesday morning when the crowds were sparse. Eva performed this task diligently, as she had been trained to do, first by her instructors at the Red Banner Institute and later by Sasha himself. Complacency, he had warned her, was an illegal’s greatest enemy, the belief that he or she was invisible to the opposition. Eva was the most vital link in the chain that stretched between the mole and Moscow Center. If she made a single mistake, the mole would be lost and Sasha’s endeavor would turn to dust.
