“By way of deception,” said Gabriel, reciting the first four words of the Office’s motto.
Shamron crushed out his cigarette. “That leaves Arkady.”
“I’m thinking about going into business with him.”
“What kind of business?”
“Money laundering, Ari. What else?”
“I thought Arkady did his laundry at RhineBank.”
“He does.”
“So why would he need you?”
“I’m still working on that.”
“Thereisa rather simple solution, you know.”
“What’s that?”
Shamron lit a fresh cigarette. “Close the Russian Laundromat.”
26
King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Three levels beneath the lobby of King Saul Boulevard was a doorway marked 456C. The room on the other side had once been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by the night staff as a clandestine meeting place for romantic trysts. The keyless cipher lock was set to the numeric version of Gabriel’s date of birth, reputedly the Office’s most closely guarded secret. At ten the following morning, he punched the code into the keypad and went inside.
Rimona Stern, chief of the Office division known as Collections, niece of Ari Shamron, quickly put on her mask. “I hear you paid a visit to Tiberias last night.”
“Is that all you heard?”
“My aunt says you’re too thin.”
“Your aunt always says that before stuffing me with food.”
“How is she holding up?”
“She’s been locked in a house with your uncle for nearly six months. How do you think she’s holding up?”
Just then, the door opened and Yossi Gavish entered the room. Born in London, educated at Oxford, he still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent. Yossi was the head of Research, the Office’s analytical division, but his training as a Shakespearean actor had made him a valuable field asset as well. There was a beachside café in Saint Barthélemy where the waitresses thought him a dream and a hotel in Geneva where the concierge had taken a private vow to shoot him on sight.
He was followed a moment later by Yaakov Rossman and a pair of all-purpose field operatives named Mordecai and Oded. Eli Lavon arrived next, trailed by Dina Sarid, the Office’s top terrorism analyst and a first-class researcher who often spotted connections others missed. Petite and dark-haired, Dina walked with a slight limp, the result of a serious wound she had suffered when a Hamas suicide bomber detonated himself aboard a Number 5 bus in Tel Aviv in October 1994. Her mother and two of her sisters were among the twenty-one people killed in the attack.
Mikhail Abramov loped through the door a moment later. Tall and lanky, with pale, bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice, he had long ago replaced Gabriel as the Office’s primary practitioner of targeted killings, though his enormous talents were not limited to the gun. Born in Moscow to a pair of dissident scientists, he had immigrated to Israel as a teenager. He was accompanied by his wife, Natalie Mizrahi. A French-born Algerian Jew who spoke fluent Arabic, she was the only Westernintelligence officer to have ever penetrated the insular ranks of the Islamic State.
Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the nine men and women gathered in the subterranean room were known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their uncanny ability to gather and strike quickly. They were a service within a service, a team of operatives without equal or fear who had fought together, and bled together, on a chain of secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Four were now powerful division chiefs. And if Gabriel had his way, one would soon make history as the first female director-general of the Office.
Rimona watched him intently as he approached the chalkboard—the last chalkboard in all of King Saul Boulevard—and with a few deft swipes of his left hand wrote a name: Arkady Akimov, childhood friend of the Russian president, former officer of the KGB specializing in active measures, owner of a private intelligence company known as the Haydn Group that was attempting to undermine the West from within.
The Office, Gabriel told his team, was going to undermine Arkady Akimov instead. They were going to dislodge him from his prominent perch in the West, destroy the Haydn Group, and seize as much of his dirty money as possible, including money he happened to be holding for the president of the Russian Federation. RhineBank AG would be granted no quarter. Nor, for that matter, would any other financial services firm—Swiss, German, British, or American—that might be caught up in the affair.
An attack of that magnitude, he cautioned, could not be mounted from the outside, only from within. Isabel Brenner, a compliance officer at RhineBank’s Zurich office, had openeda doorway into Arkady’s well-defended citadel. Now the Office was going to walk through it. They were going to forge a business relationship with Arkady, become a partner in the kleptocracy known as Kremlin Inc. Extraordinary care would be taken at every step of their merger. Nothing, said Gabriel, would be left to chance.
But how to penetrate the court of a man who assumed that every phone he used was tapped, every room he entered was bugged, and every stranger who crossed his path was out to destroy him? A man who never spoke to the press, who rarely left his protective Russian bubble, and was always surrounded by bodyguards drawn from elitespetsnazunits? Even the location of his office in Geneva’s Place du Port was a carefully guarded secret. Housekeeping acquired office space in the building opposite, and two of Eli Lavon’s surveillance artists set up shop the next day. They snapped photographs of all those who came and went from Arkady’s opaque front door and forwarded the images to King Saul Boulevard, where the team attempted to put names to faces. One photo depicted a trim, silver-haired man stepping from the back of a Mercedes-Maybach saloon car. Yossi Gavish’s caption was a masterpiece of bureaucratic brevity: Akimov, Arkady. Chairman of NevaNeft Holdings, NevaNeft Trading, and the Haydn Group.
Arkady was even more circumspect when it came to the location of his residence. For several years he had lived quietly in the moneyed enclave of Cologny. But in the summer of 2016, he pulled up stakes and settled into a custom-built palace in Véchy valued at more than one hundred million Swiss francs.The massive construction project enraged his new neighbors, including an English pop star who went to the press with his complaints. The identity of the new villa’s owner was never made public, only that he was thought to be a Russian businessman, perhaps with connections to the Kremlin.
