The Cellist by Daniel Silva

26King 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 Western intelligence 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 opened a 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 elite spetsnaz units? 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.

The same anonymous Russian businessman was thought to be the owner of the largest private dwelling in the French ski village of Courchevel, a lavish villa on the Côte d’Azur near Saint-Tropez, a mansion in the walled Moscow suburb of Rublyovka, and an apartment on Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row purchased for the astonishing price of $225 million. He owned the obligatory yacht but rarely used it, as he was prone to seasickness. His private jet was a Gulfstream, his private helicopter was an Airbus H175 VIP. He flashed about Geneva in a motorcade fit for a head of state.

His official biography contained no reference to a KGB past, only an unremarkable stint at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, a job that had taken him briefly to East Berlin. Much speculation surrounded the nature of his relationship with the Russian president. Through his lawyers he acknowledged that they had known each other when they were young boys in Leningrad, but he rejected any suggestion that he was part of the president’s inner circle. Reports regarding his sometimes-messy personal life had been harder for the lawyers to tamp down. There were two known divorces, both quiet, and a string of rumored affairs and mistresses. His newest wife was the former Oksana Mironova, a beautiful ballet dancer more than thirty years his junior.

Not surprisingly, the MoskovskayaGazeta was among Arkady’s harshest critics. The magazine had exposed his links to the presidential palace on the Black Sea and the billions he had made from the bloated construction contracts awarded for the Sochi Olympic Games. Several of the articles had been written by the missing investigative reporter Nina Antonova. Having returned to Wormwood Cottage to await permanent resettlement, she composed an illuminative twenty-thousand-word dossier of her own that contained every unproven allegation ever made against Arkady. It made for entertaining reading, as did Olga Sukhova’s retelling of a heated encounter she had had with Arkady in Moscow in 2007, after reports surfaced that his childhood friend from Leningrad was somehow worth an astonishing $40 billion.

By all accounts, the Russian president’s personal fortune had grown substantially since then. So, too, had Arkady Akimov’s, skyrocketing from a paltry $400 million in 2012 to $33.8 billion, according to the most recent estimate by Forbes magazine, making him the forty-fourth richest man in the world. Directly above him was an American hedge fund manager, and beneath him was a Chinese manufacturer of home appliances. Arkady, not without some justification, was said to have been disappointed by his ranking.

But then, Forbes had only part of the picture. Missing from its estimate of Arkady’s net worth was the money that the gnomes of the Russian Laundromat had buried anonymously in the West. Fortunately, Gabriel had gnomes of his own—the nine men and women burrowing away in a subterranean room three levels beneath the lobby of King Saul Boulevard.

In nearly every respect, they were the polar opposite of the man whose life they were pulling to pieces. They earned a government salary and lived modestly. They did not steal unless ordered to do so. They did not kill unless innocent lives were at stake. They were kind to their spouses and lovers, and cared for their children to the best of their ability while at the same time working impossible hours. They had no vices, for those with vices were never admitted to their ranks.

They managed to conduct their work with a minimum of rancor, as raised voices tended to facilitate the spread of the coronavirus. Even Rimona Stern, who possessed her famous uncle’s quick temper, managed to modulate her normally stentorian tone. Proper social distancing was not possible—not in the cramped quarters of their subterranean lair—so they disinfected their worktables frequently and were subjected to regular testing. Somehow there were no positive results.

Gabriel poked his head through the doorway of Room 456C once or twice each day to check on the team’s progress and crack the operational whip. He was anxious to return to the field as quickly as possible, lest the Swiss have a change of heart and declare Arkady off limits. It was obvious to Rimona and the others that he was tempted to give the Russian oligarch the bullet he so richly deserved and be done with it. But Arkady Akimov—trusted member of the Russian president’s inner circle, owner of a private intelligence company waging war against the West from within—was far too valuable to kill. He was the one for whom Gabriel had been searching for a very long time. He would leave nothing to chance.

But how to penetrate his court?

Usually, it was a flaw or vanity that left a man vulnerable, but Gabriel instructed the team to find Arkady Akimov’s one redeeming quality. Surely, he beseeched them, there had to be at least one reason why the Russian oligarch was taking up space on the planet. It was Dina Sarid, while reviewing NevaNeft’s otherwise pointless website, who discovered it. Through the company’s charitable arm, Arkady Akimov had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to orchestras, conservatories, and art museums in Russia and across Western Europe, oftentimes with little or no publicity.

As it turned out, Arkady was also a frequent underwriter of concerts and festivals, which allowed him to rub shoulders with some of the most prominent figures in the classical music world. A reverse-image search of social media turned up a photograph of the notoriously camera-shy Russian standing at the side of the French violinist Renaud Capuçon, a broad smile on his face. Arkady had worn the identical expression while posed next to the German violinist Julia Fischer. And with her countryman Christian Tetzlaff. And with the pianists Hélène Grimaud and Paul Lewis. And the conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Sir Simon Rattle.

Dina was dubious as to the operational value of her discovery. Nevertheless, she printed the photographs on high-quality paper and placed them on Gabriel’s desk. One hour later, during his evening visit to Room 456C, he wrote two more names on the chalkboard. One was an old enemy; the other, an old lover. Then he described for his team the opening act of the planned merger between the Office and the kleptocracy known as Kremlin Inc. It would be a seemingly chance encounter at a grand occasion, an event that Arkady Akimov would move heaven and earth to attend. Cocktails and canapés would not suffice. Gabriel required a star attraction, an international celebrity whose presence would make attendance mandatory for the moneyed elite of Swiss society. He also needed a financier to play the role of the evening’s benefactor, a paragon of corporate virtue known for his commitment to causes ranging from climate change to Third World debt relief. Just the sort of man Arkady Akimov would love to corrupt with dirty Russian money.