The Defector

in the gallery of the dead. And then he told his team a story.

    THERE IS a memorial not far from King Saul Boulevard. It is dedicated to those who have served, and fallen, in secret. It is fashioned from smooth sandstone and shaped like a brain because Israel’s founders believed only the brain would keep their small country safe from those who wished to destroy it. The walls of the memorial are engraved with the names of the dead and the dates on which they perished. Other details about their lives and careers are kept locked away in the File Room. More than five hundred intelligence officers from Israel’s various services are honored there. Seventy-five are Office. Two names would be added in the coming days—two good boys who died because Gabriel had tried to keep a promise. Chiara Zolli, he said, would not be the third name.
    The Italian police were now engaged in a frantic effort to find her. Gabriel, his voice calm and unemotional, said the Italian effort would not prove successful. In all likelihood, Chiara had been removed from Italian soil even before the search had begun. At this moment, she could be anywhere. She might be heading eastward across the former lands of the Soviet empire that the Russians referred to as the “near abroad.” Or perhaps she was already somewhere in Russia. “Or perhaps she’s not in Russia at all,” Gabriel added. “Ivan controls one of the world’s largest shipping and air freight companies. Ivan has the capability to conceal Chiara anywhere on earth. Ivan has the capability to put her in motion and keep her in motion in perpetuity.” That meant Ivan had an unfair advantage. But they had leverage, too. Ivan had not taken Chiara simply to kill her. Surely, Ivan wanted something else. It gave them time and room to maneuver. Not much time, Gabriel said. And very little room.
    They would start by trying to find the man Ivan had used as his tool of vengeance. For now, he was but a few lines of charcoal on an otherwise blank canvas. They were going to complete the picture. He did not materialize out of thin air, this man. He had a name and a past. He had a family. He lived somewhere. He existed. Everything about him suggested he was former KGB, a man who specialized in finding people who wished not to be found. A man who could make people disappear without a trace. A man who now worked for wealthy Russians like Ivan Kharkov.
    A man like that did not exist in a vacuum. People had to know about him in order to retain his services. They were going to find such a person. And they would start their search in the city where the affair began: the Russian city sometimes referred to as London.

38
    THOUGH GABRIEL had no way of knowing it, he was correct about at least one thing: Chiara had not remained on Italian soil for long. In fact, within hours of her abduction, she had been moved eastward across the country to a fishing village in the region known as Le Marche. There she was placed aboard a trawler and taken out to sea for what appeared to be a night of work in the Adriatic. At 2:15 a.m., as officers of the Polizia di Stato were standing watch at Italy’s border crossings, she was transferred to a private motor yacht called the Anastasia . By dawn, the yacht had returned to a sleepy port along the coast of Montenegro, the newly independent former Yugoslav Republic that was now home to thousands of Russian expatriates and an important base of operations for the Russian mafia. She would not stay in that country for long, either. By midmorning, as Gabriel’s flight was touching down at Ben-Gurion, she was being loaded onto a cargo plane at an airfield outside the Montenegrin capital. According to documents on board, the aircraft was owned by a Bahamian-based shipping company called LukoTranz. What the documents did not say was that LukoTranz was actually a corporate shell controlled by none other than Ivan Kharkov. Not that it would have mattered to the Montenegrin customs officials. The bribe they received for not inspecting the plane or its contents was more than triple their monthly government salaries.

    CHIARA KNEW none of this. Indeed, her last clear memory was of the nightmare at the gate of Villa dei Fiori. It had been dark when they arrived. Exhausted by the operation in Como, Chiara had dozed intermittently during the long drive and woke as Lior was easing up to the security gate. To open it required the correct six-digit code. Lior was entering it into the keypad