“I assume you didn’t refer to yourself as Mr. Nobody.”
“No. But I didn’t put my real name in any of the emails, either. It wasn’t necessary.”
“Because you and Mark Preston are more than friends.”
“We dated for a semester.”
“Who ended it?”
“He did, if you must know.”
“Silly boy.”
“I always thought so.”
They met at the end of Brighton Place Pier, as if by chance. At Preston’s insistence, Isabel had switched off her phone and removed the SIM card before leaving London. She gave him copies of the documents and asked him to undertake a private investigation on her behalf, for which she would pay any amount he asked. He agreed, though he refused Isabel’s offer of money.
“It seems he always regretted the way he treated me.”
“Perhaps there’s hope for him after all.”
“Not in that regard.”
A month passed before Isabel heard from him. This time they met in a little seaside town called Hastings. Preston gave her a flash drive containing a dossier of his findings. He warned her to be careful. He said Russian journalists had been murdered for less. Swiss bankers, too.
Isabel read the dossier that evening in her hotel room. Two days later she learned that Viktor Orlov had been murdered, apparently with a Russian nerve agent. She waited until Saturday evening before sending an encrypted email to Nina Antonova. She had left a new package along the bank of the river Aare, in the Old City of Bern. All the pages were blank, with one exception.I know who killed Viktor Orlov...Afterward, she performed Bach’s Cello Suite in D Major.
“Any mistakes?”
“Not a one.”
“Where’s the dossier?”
She dug it from her bag. “The flash drive and the Word document are both locked. The password is the same.”
“What is it?”
“The Haydn Group.” She looked at the Englishman and smiled. “The letter G is capitalized.”
Part Two
Menuetto & Trio
21
Zurich–Valley of Jezreel
A Gulfstream G550 of astounding comfort and murky registry departed Zurich’s Kloten Airport shortly before midnight. Eli Lavon reclined his seat and slept, but Gabriel plugged the flash drive into his laptop and with the cabin lights dimmed reread the dossier.
It was an impressive piece of digital detective work, all the more remarkable for the fact it was produced largely with open sources. An Instagram photo here, a name from a Swiss business registry there, real estate transactions, a few nuggets of gold unearthed from the Panama Papers, Moscow vehicle registrations, Russian passport records. When laid out in proper sequence—and viewed in proper context—the data had produced a name. Someone close to the Russian president. Someone from his inner circle. The secret guardian of his unfathomablewealth. The intelligence services of the West had been searching for this man for a very long time. Mark Preston, with documents provided by a gifted young cellist who worked for the world’s dirtiest bank, had found him.
The skies above Tel Aviv were blue-black with the approaching dawn when the G550 touched down at Ben Gurion Airport. Two SUVs waited on the tarmac. Lavon headed to his apartment in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem; Gabriel, to the safe house in the Valley of Jezreel. After placing his clothing in a plastic rubbish bag, he padded soundlessly upstairs and slipped into bed next to Chiara.
“Well?” she asked quietly.
“Well what?”
“What in God’s name was Sarah Bancroft doing in Viktor Orlov’s house?”
