The Defector

Irina could see. She managed to maintain a stoic silence, but her expression had changed. Gabriel, gazing at her face in the monitor, saw it was fear. A remembered fear, he thought, like the fear of a childhood trauma. One more push, and they would have her. On cue, Mikhail produced a second photograph, an enlargement of the first. It was grainy and heavily shadowed, but left no doubt as to the identity of the woman seated nearest the car window.
    “This makes you an accessory to a very serious crime committed on British soil.”
    Irina’s eyes flickered round the room, as if searching for a way out. Mikhail calmly returned both photos to the attaché case.
    “Let us begin again, shall we? And this time you will answer my questions truthfully. You have no entrance visa for the United Kingdom, valid or otherwise, in your passport. How were you able to enter the country?”
    Her response was so soft as to be nearly inaudible. Indeed, Mikhail and Lavon were not at all sure of what they had just been told. There was no uncertainty, however, at the listening post in the library, which was receiving a crystal clear signal from a pair of ultrasensitive microphones concealed inches from Irina’s place at the table. Olga looked at Gabriel and said, “We’ve got her.” Mikhail looked at Irina and asked her to speak up.
    “I used a different passport,” she said, louder this time.
    “By that you mean it was in another name?”
    “Correct.”
    “Who gave you this passport?”
    “They said they were friends of Grigori. They said I had to use a false passport for my own protection.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me this the first time?”
    “They told me that I was never to discuss the matter with anyone. They told me they would kill me.” A single tear spilled onto her cheek. She punched away the tear, as if ashamed by her weakness. “They threatened to kill my entire family. They are not human, these people. They are animals. Please, you have to believe me.”
    It was not Mikhail who responded but the previously silent figure seated to his left. The kindly little soul with flyaway hair and a crumpled suit. The better angel who was now holding a letter in his tiny hands. The letter left by Grigori Bulganov in Oxford two weeks before his disappearance. He presented the letter to Irina now, as if handing a folded flag to the wife of a fallen soldier. Her hands trembled as she read it.
    I am afraid my desire to reunite with my former wife may have placed her in danger. If your officers in Moscow would check in on her from time to time, I would be grateful.
    “We don’t think he’s dead,” Lavon said. “Not yet. But we have to work quickly if we’re going to get him back.”
    “Who are you?”
    “We’re friends, Irina. You can trust us.”
    “What do you want from me?”
    “Tell us how they did it. Tell us how they took your husband. And whatever you do, don’t leave anything out. You’d be surprised, Irina, but sometimes the smallest details are the most important.”

27
    LAKE COMO, ITALY
    SHE REQUESTED tea and permission to smoke. Yossi and Dina saw to the tea; Lavon, a heavy smoker himself, joined her in a cigarette. Their bond cemented by shared tobacco, she turned her body a few degrees and raised a hand to the side of her face like a blinder, thus excluding Mikhail from her field of vision. As far as Irina was concerned, Mikhail no longer existed. And therefore Mikhail did not need to know that the man who deceived her into taking part in the abduction of her husband made first contact on December the nineteenth. She could recall the date with certainty because it was her birthday. A birthday she shared with Leonid Brezhnev, which, in her childhood, was a great honor in school.
    It was a Monday, she recalled, and her colleagues had insisted on taking her out for champagne and sushi at the O2 Lounge at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Given the state of the Russian economy, she had thought it rather a profligate thing to do. But they all needed an excuse to get drunk, and her birthday seemed as good a reason as any. Drunkenness was achieved by eight o’clock, and they sailed on together until ten, at which point they stumbled into Tverskaya Street and went in search of their cars, though none of them, including Irina Iosifovna Bulganova, former wife of the defector Grigori Nikolaevich Bulganov, was in any condition to drive.
    She had left her car a few blocks away in a narrow street where the Moscow City