The Cellist by Daniel Silva

23Upper Galilee, Israel

The guards placed two chairs in the camp’s main court, with a folding table between them. Sergei Morosov, pleased by the prospect of human interaction, even with his former tormentor, brought along a meal of pickled herring, black bread, and Russian vodka. He feigned mild offense when Gabriel declined his offer of a drink.

“You don’t care for vodka?”

“I’d rather drink a glass of diesel.”

“I have a lovely Shiraz if you’d like that instead. It’s from a winemaker called Dalton.”

Gabriel smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“The accent is on the second syllable.” Gabriel pointed toward the north. “And the vineyards are right over that hill.”

“You have many fine wines here in Israel.”

“We do our best, Sergei.”

“Perhaps someday you would be kind enough to show me your country.”

“On second thought, I think I’ll have that vodka after all.”

Morosov drained his glass with the snap of his wrist and returned it to the tabletop. “You don’t much care for Russians, do you, Allon?”

“Actually, I’m very fond of them.”

“Name one Russian you like.”

“Nabokov.”

Morosov smiled in spite of himself. “I suppose you have a right to hate us. Your confrontation with Ivan Kharkov at that dacha outside Moscow was the stuff of legend. You and your wife would have died that morning if it wasn’t for Grigori Bulganov’s courage and Viktor Orlov’s money. Now Grigori and Viktor are both dead, and you are the last man standing. It is an unenviable position. I should know, Allon. I speak from experience, too.”

Morosov then reminded Gabriel of his impeccable lineage. He was, to borrow the term coined by the Russian philosopher and writer Zinoviev, a true Homo Sovieticus—a Soviet Man. His mother had served as a personal secretary to KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. His father, a brilliant Marxist theoretician, had worked for Gosplan, the agency that oversaw the Soviet Union’s command economy. As party members, they lived a life far beyond the reach of ordinary Russians. A comfortable apartment in Moscow. A dacha in the country. Access to special stores stocked with food and clothing. They even owned an automobile, a cherry-red Lada that on occasion actually performed the function for which it was designed and assembled.

“We weren’t elites, mind you. But we had it quite good. That wasn’t the case for Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he added, using the Russian president’s given name and patronymic. “Vladimir Vladimirovich was a member of the proletariat. The son of a factory worker. A true man of the people.”

He was raised, Morosov continued, in a tumbledown apartment building at 12 Baskov Lane in Leningrad. Two other families, one devoutly Russian Orthodox, the other observantly Jewish, shared the same cramped flat. There was no hot water, no bathtub, no heat other than a wood-burning stove, and no kitchen save for a single gas ring and a sink in a windowless hallway. Young Vladimir Vladimirovich spent most of his time downstairs in the rubbish-strewn courtyard. Short in stature, slight of build, he was often bullied. He took boxing lessons and later studied judo and sambo, the Soviet martial arts discipline. Incorrigible and quick tempered, he sought out opportunities on the mean streets of Leningrad to put his fighting skills to the test. Whenever words or sinister looks were exchanged, it was invariably Vladimir Vladimirovich who threw the first punch.

Occasionally, he looked after neighborhood boys who could not fend for themselves—including a boy named Arkady Akimov, who lived at 14 Baskov Lane. One day Vladimir Vladimirovich saw two older boys menacing Arkady in the fetid passageway that connected the courtyards of their buildings. Arkady was a frail child who suffered from chronic respiratory illnesses. Worse still, at least in the eyes of Baskov Lane’s thugs, he was a promising pianist who was protective of his hands. Vladimir Vladimirovich fought the fight for him, beating both boys to a pulp. And thus was born a friendship that would change the course of Russian history.

The boys attended School No. 193, where Vladimir Vladimirovich got into trouble and Arkady excelled. It was his dream to study music at the Leningrad Conservatory, but at seventeen he was informed he had been denied admission. Heartbroken, he followed his childhood friend to Leningrad State University, and upon graduation they were recruited by the KGB. After intensive language instruction and a stay at the Red Banner Institute spy school, they were sent off to East Germany as newly minted Soviet intelligence officers. Sergei Morosov was working there at the time.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich was assigned to the backwater of Dresden, but Arkady joined me at the main rezidentura in East Berlin. I was a traditional PR Line officer. I recruited and ran agents. Arkady was in a different line of work entirely.”

“Active measures?”

“The KGB’s stock-in-trade,” said Morosov with a nod.

“What sort of active measures?”

The usual, answered Morosov. Propaganda, political warfare, disinformation, subversion, influence operations, support for anti-establishment forces on both the far left and far right—all of it designed to tear at the fabric of Western society. Arkady and his counterparts in the Stasi also armed and funded Arab terrorist groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“Do you remember the La Belle discotheque bombing in West Berlin in April 1986? Sure, Gaddafi and the Libyans were involved. But where do you think the bombers got the plastic explosive and the detonator in the first place? Arkady’s fingerprints were all over that attack. He was damn lucky his role wasn’t exposed when the Stasi files were made public after the Wall came down.”

Even the officers of the Berlin rezidentura were caught off guard by the speed of East Germany’s collapse. They put in place stay-behind networks, burned their files, and headed home to an uncertain future—Sergei Morosov to Moscow, Arkady and Vladimir Vladimirovich to their hometown of Leningrad. The country had deteriorated during their absence. The lines were longer, the shelves emptier. And in December 1991, four months after an abortive coup led by KGB hard-liners, the Soviet Union was no more. The once-mighty KGB soon passed into history as well, leaving two services in its wake. The FSB, headquartered at Lubyanka Square, handled internal security and counterintelligence, while the SVR, from its wooded compound in Yasenevo, conducted traditional espionage abroad.

Sergei Morosov decided to stay on with the SVR, though for six months he received no salary. By then, Arkady Akimov and Vladimir Vladimirovich had already begun the second acts of their career. Arkady went into the oil business. And Vladimir Vladimirovich, after declaring himself to be a committed democrat, went to work for the mayor of Leningrad, which had reverted to its historic name, St. Petersburg. As head of the Committee for External Relations, it was his job to attract foreign investment to a city where crime was rampant. During the long winter of 1991, with Russia facing the threat of widespread hunger, he supervised a series of international barter deals, trading plentiful Russian commodities such as timber, petroleum, and minerals for badly needed staples such as fresh meat, sugar, and cooking oil. Few of the promised goods ever arrived, and the immense profits derived from the sale of the Russian commodities abroad were never properly accounted for. An investigation would later determine that much of the money ended up in the pocket of Arkady Akimov.

Suddenly wealthy, Arkady hired a small army of former KGB officers and spetsnaz special operatives and waged a bloody turf war with the Tambov crime family for control of St. Petersburg’s port. Before long, he was Russia’s dominant oil trader. With a portion of his rapidly growing fortune, he purchased a plot of lakefront land and constructed a colony of dachas. He gave one to Vladimir Vladimirovich and the others to men such as himself, former KGB officers turned successful businessmen. They gathered at the retreat each weekend with their wives and children and plotted the future. They were going to seize control of Russia and return it to superpower status. And in the process, they were going to make themselves rich. Rich as tsars. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to punish the Americans and Western Europeans for destroying the Soviet Union. Rich enough to exact revenge.

“You don’t believe that nonsense about Volodya being an accidental president, do you, Allon? It was a straight KGB operation from beginning to end. Nothing was left to chance.”

Their chosen candidate arrived at the Kremlin in June 1996 and took up a post in an obscure directorate that managed government-owned properties abroad. With the help of Arkady Akimov and his cadre of former KGB men, a series of rapid promotions ensued. Deputy chief of the presidential staff. Director of the FSB. And, in August 1999, prime minister of the Russian Federation. His path to the presidency seemed all but certain.

“But remember, Allon—nothing was left to chance.”

The first bomb, said Morosov, exploded on September 5 in the republic of Dagestan. The target was an apartment building that housed mainly Russian soldiers and their families. Four days later, it was another apartment building, this one on Guryanova Street in Moscow. The combined death toll was 158, with hundreds more wounded. Chechen separatists were blamed.

When two more bombs exploded the following week—one in Moscow, the other in the southern city of Volgodonsk—hysteria swept the country. The new prime minister, on an official visit to Kazakhstan, assured his traumatized people that his response would be swift and merciless.

“That was when he issued his infamous threat about wasting Chechen terrorists in the outhouse. Only a thug from Baskov Lane would say such a thing. It was also a lie. The Chechen separatists had nothing to do with those bombings. They were planned by Arkady Akimov and carried out by the FSB. They were active measures aimed not at a foreign adversary but the Russian people.”

“Can you prove it?”

“One does not prove such things in Russia, Allon. One simply knows them to be true.”

The manufactured crisis, Sergei Morosov continued, had its intended effect. After escalating the war in Chechnya, Vladimir Vladimirovich saw his approval ratings soar. In December, an ailing and alcohol-addled President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation and appointed a little-known functionary as his successor. Four months later, he faced Russia’s voters for the first time. The result was never in doubt. Nothing was left to chance.

The first phase of the operation was complete. Arkady Akimov and his cadre of KGB officers had succeeded in placing one of their own in the Grand Kremlin Palace. The second phase was about to commence. They were going to make themselves rich. Rich as tsars. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to exact revenge.