“How long were you alone?”
“A minute or two, no more.”
“What did you discuss?”
“I asked if I could see her again. If she would be willing to give me a tour of Moscow.”
“Did you also tell her you were a married man?”
“We’d already discussed that.”
“At dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was it to visit Novodevichy?”
“Hers.”
“Why did she select this place?”
“She said that to understand Russia today you had to walk among her bones.”
“Did you travel to the cemetery together?”
“No, I met her there.”
“How did you travel? By taxi?”
“I took the Metro.”
“Who arrived first?”
“Olga was waiting at the gates when I got there.”
“And you entered the cemetery together?”
“Of course.”
“Which grave did you visit first?”
“It was Chekhov’s.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Describe it for me.”
Gabriel closed his eyes, as if trying to summon an image of the gravestone, but instead he heard the voice of Olga whispering softly into his ear.
19 FSB HEADQUARTERS, MOSCOW
They forged on together-for how long, Gabriel could only guess. At times, they wandered through unexplored territory. At others, they retraced their steps over familiar ground. Trivial inconsistencies were pounced upon as proof of treachery, minor lapses in memory as proof of deceit. There is a strange paradox to an interrogation: it can often impart more information to the subject than to the officer posing the questions. Gabriel had concluded that his opponent was but a small cog in a much larger machine. His questions, like Russia ’s campaign politics, were much sound and fury signifying nothing. Gabriel’s real enemies resided elsewhere. Since he was supposed to be dead by now, his very presence in Lubyanka was something of an inconvenience for them. One factor would determine whether he survived the night: Did they have the power to reach into the basement of Lubyanka and kill him?
The interrogator’s final questions were posed with the bored air of a traffic cop recording the details of a minor accident. He jotted the responses in his notebook, then closed the cover and regarded Gabriel through his little spectacles.
“I find it interesting that, after killing the two Chechen gangsters, you did not become ill. I take it you’ve killed before, Mr. Golani?”
“Like all Israeli men, I had to serve in the IDF. I fought in Sinai in ’seventy-three and in Lebanon in ’eighty- two.”
“So you’ve killed many innocent Arabs?”
“Yes, many.”
“You are a Zionist oppressor of innocent Palestinians?”
“An unrepentant one.”
“You are not who you say you are, Mr. Golani. Your diplomatic passport is false, as is the name written in it. The sooner you confess your crimes, the better.”
The interrogator placed the cap on his pen and screwed it slowly into place. It must have been a signal, for the door flew open and the four handlers burst into the room. They took him down another flight of stairs and placed him in a cell no larger than a broom closet. It stank of damp and feces. If there were other prisoners nearby, he could not tell, for when the windowless door was closed, the silence, like the darkness, was absolute.
He placed his cheek against the cold floor and closed his eyes. Olga Sukhova appeared in the form of an icon, head tilted to one side, hands folded in prayer.
He was sweating one minute and shivering violently the next. His kidney throbbed with pain, and he could not draw a proper breath because of the bruising to his ribs. During one intense period of cold, he groped the interior of the cell to see if they had left him a blanket but found only four slick walls instead.
He closed his eyes and slept. In his dreams, he walked through the streets of his past and encountered many of the men he had killed. They were pale and bloodless, with bullet holes in their hearts and faces. Chiara appeared, dressed in her wedding gown, and told him it was time to come back to Umbria. Olga mopped the sweat from his forehead and laid a bouquet of dead carnations at a grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery. The engraving on the headstone was in Hebrew instead of Cyrillic. It read: GABRIEL ALLON…
He woke finally to the sight of flashlights blazing in his face. The men holding them lifted him to his feet and frog-marched him up several flights of steps. Gabriel tried to count, but soon gave up. Five? Ten? Twenty? He couldn’t be sure. Using his head as a battering ram, they burst through a doorway, into the cold night air. For a moment, he was blinded by the sudden darkness. He feared they were about to hurl him from the roof-Lubyanka had a long history of such unfortunate
Sergei the interrogator was standing next to a black van, dressed in a fresh gray suit. He opened the rear doors, and, with a few terse words in Russian, ordered the handlers to put Gabriel inside. His hands were freed briefly, only to be restrained again a few seconds later to a steel loop in the ceiling. Then the doors closed with a deafening thud and the van lurched forward over the cobblestones.
He was alone again. He reckoned it was before midnight because Moscow ’s traffic was still moving at a fever pitch. He heard no sirens to indicate they were under escort, and the driver appeared to be obeying traffic rules, such as they were. At one long stop, he heard the sound of laughter, and he thought of Solzhenitsyn.
Sheremetyevo 2 Airport lay north of the city center, a journey of about forty-five minutes when the traffic was at its most reasonable. Gabriel had allowed himself to hope it was their destination, but that hope dissolved after an hour in the back of the van. The quality of the roads, deplorable even in Moscow, deteriorated by degrees the farther they moved away from Lubyanka. Each pothole sent shock waves of pain through his bruised body, and he had to cling to the steel loop to avoid being thrown from his bench. It was impossible to guess in which direction they were traveling. He could not tell whether they were heading west, toward civilization and enlightenment, or east, into the cruel heart of the Russian interior. Twice the van stopped and twice Gabriel could hear Russian voices raised in anger. He supposed even an unmarked FSB van had trouble moving through the countryside without being shaken down by
The third time the van stopped, the doors swung open and a handler entered the compartment. He unlocked
