The Cellist by Daniel Silva

5Nahalal, Israel

As director-general of the Office, Gabriel Allon was permitted to use safe houses largely as he saw fit. He drew an ethical line, however, at borrowing one for the purpose of getting his wife and children out of their cramped apartment on Narkiss Street in locked-down Jerusalem. At his request, Housekeeping presented him with a market-tested monthly rental rate. He promptly doubled it and ordered the government personnel office to deduct the sum from his salary. Additionally, in the spirit of full transparency, he forwarded copies of all the relevant paperwork to Kaplan Street for approval. The prime minister, who was under indictment on charges of public corruption, wondered what all the fuss was about.

The property in question was by no means luxurious. A smallish bungalow used mainly for debriefings and storage of blown field operatives, it was located in Nahalal, an old moshav in the Valley of Jezreel, about an hour north of King Saul Boulevard. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable, and the kitchen and bathrooms were recently renovated. There were cows in the paddock, chickens in the coop, several acres of cropland, and a grassy garden shaded by eucalyptus trees. Because the moshav was protected by a crack local police force, security was of no concern.

Chiara and the children settled in the bungalow in late March and remained there after the agreeable weather of spring had given way to the blast-furnace heat of high summer. The afternoons were unbearable, but each evening a cool wind blew from the Upper Galilee. The moshav’s communal swimming pool was closed by government edict, and a summer surge of infections made play dates with other young children impossible. It was no matter; Irene and Raphael were content to pass their days organizing elaborate games involving the chickens and the neighbor’s flock of goats. By the middle of June, their skin was the color of mocha. Chiara slathered them with sunblock, but somehow they grew darker still.

“The same thing happened to the Jews who founded the moshav in 1921,” explained Gabriel. “Raphael and Irene are no longer pampered city dwellers. They’re children of the valley.”

During the first wave of the pandemic, he had been largely absent. Armed with a new Gulfstream jet and suitcases filled with cash, he had traveled the world in search of ventilators, testing material, and protective medical clothing. He made most of his purchases on the black market and then personally ferried the cargo back to Israel, where it was dispersed to hospitals throughout the country. When word of his efforts reached the press, an influential columnist from Haaretz suggested he consider a post-Office career in politics. The reaction was so favorable that many in the chattering classes wondered whether it was a trial balloon. Gabriel, who found all the unwanted attention embarrassing, issued a formal statement forswearing any interest in elected office—which the chattering classes interpreted as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to run for the Knesset when his term expired. The only unresolved question, they said, was his party affiliation.

But by early June the Office was once again engaged in more traditional pursuits. Alarmed by new intelligence regarding Tehran’s determination to build a nuclear weapon, Gabriel slipped a large bomb into a centrifuge factory in Natanz. Six weeks later, in a daring operation carried out at the behest of the Americans, an Office hit team killed a senior al-Qaeda operative in downtown Tehran. Gabriel leaked details of the assassination to a friendly reporter at the New York Times, if only to remind the Iranians that he could enter their country whenever he pleased and strike at will.

Despite the summer’s brisk operational tempo, he often arrived in Nahalal in time for dinner. Chiara would set a table outside in the cool of the garden, and Irene and Raphael would happily recount the details of their day, which invariably were identical to the particulars of the previous day. Afterward, Gabriel would take them for a walk along the dusty farm roads of the valley and tell them stories of his childhood in the young state of Israel.

He was born in the neighboring kibbutz of Ramat David. There were no computers or mobile phones, of course, and no television, either; it didn’t arrive in Israel until 1966. Even then, his mother would not permit one in the house, fearing it would interfere with her work. Gabriel explained to the children how he used to sit at her feet while she painted, imitating her brushstrokes on a canvas of his own. He did not mention the numbers tattooed on her left arm. Or the candles that burned in their home for the family members who had not survived the camps. Or the screams he used to hear from the other bungalows in Ramat David, late at night, when the demons came.

Gradually, he told them more about himself—a thread here, a fragment there, bits of truth mixed with subtle evasion, the occasional outright lie, if only to protect them from the horrors of the life he had led. Yes, he said, he had been a soldier, but not a very good one. When he left the IDF, he entered the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and began his formal training as a painter. But in the autumn of 1972, after a terrorist attack at the Olympic Games in Munich, Ari Shamron, whom the children referred to as their saba, asked him to take part in an undertaking known as Operation Wrath of God. He did not tell the children that he personally killed six members of the PLO faction responsible for the attack, or that whenever possible he shot them eleven times. He implied, however, that his experiences had robbed him of the ability to produce satisfactory original paintings. Rather than allow his talents to go to waste, he learned to speak Italian and then traveled to Venice, where he trained to be an art restorer.

But children, especially the children of intelligence officers, are not easily misled, and Irene and Raphael sensed intuitively that their father’s account of his life was far from complete. They probed with care and with guidance from their mother, who thought a familial exhumation of Gabriel’s skeletons was overdue. The children already knew, for example, that he had been married once before and that the face of his dead son peered at them nightly from the clouds he had painted on the wall of their bedroom. But how had it happened? Gabriel answered with a heavily redacted version of the truth, knowing full well it would open Pandora’s box.

“Is that why you always look under our car before we get in?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love Dani more than you love us?”

“Of course not. But we must never forget him.”

“Where’s Leah?”

“She lives in a special hospital not far from us in Jerusalem.”

“Has she ever met us?”

“Only Raphael.”

“Why?”

Because God, in his infinite wisdom, had created in Raphael a duplicate of Gabriel’s dead son. This, too, he withheld from his children, for their sake and his. That night, as Chiara slept contentedly at his side, he relived the bombing in Vienna in his dreams and awoke to find his half of the bed drenched with sweat. It was perhaps fitting, then, that when he reached for the phone on the bedside table, he learned that an old friend had been murdered in London.

He dressed in darkness and climbed into his SUV for the drive to King Saul Boulevard. After submitting to a temperature check and a rapid Covid test, he rode in his private elevator to his sanitized office on the top floor. Two hours later, after watching the British prime minister’s evasive appearance before reporters outside Number Ten, he rang Graham Seymour on the secure hotline. Graham volunteered no additional information about the murder, save for the identity of the woman who had stumbled upon the body. Gabriel responded with the same question the prime minister had posed the previous evening.

“What in God’s name was she doing in Viktor Orlov’s house?”

If there was a bright spot in Gabriel’s post-Covid existence, it was the Gulfstream jet. A G550 of astounding comfort and murky registry, it touched down at London City Airport at half past four that afternoon. The passport Gabriel displayed to the immigration authorities was Israeli, diplomatic, and pseudonymous. It fooled no one.

Nevertheless, after passing yet another rapid Covid test, he was granted provisional admittance to the United Kingdom. A waiting embassy sedan delivered him to 18 Queen’s Gate Terrace in Kensington. According to the list of names on the intercom panel, the occupant of the lower maisonette was someone called Peter Marlowe. The bell rang unanswered, so Gabriel descended a flight of wrought-iron steps to the lower entrance and drew the thin metal tool he carried habitually in his jacket pocket. Neither of the two high-quality locks put up much of a fight.

Inside, an alarm chirped in protest. Gabriel entered the correct eight-digit code into the keypad and switched on the overhead lights, illuminating a large designer kitchen. The stonework was Corsican, as was the bottle of rosé he unearthed from the well-provisioned Sub-Zero refrigerator. He removed the cork and switched on the Bose radio resting on the granite countertop.

The Russian government has denied any role in Mr. Orlov’s death . . .

The BBC news presenter made an awkward transition from Orlov’s assassination to the latest pandemic news. Gabriel switched off the radio and drank some of the Corsican wine. Finally, at twenty minutes past six, a Bentley Continental pulled up in the street, and a well-dressed man emerged. A moment later he was standing in the open door of the kitchen, a Walther PPK in his outstretched hands.

“Hello, Christopher,” said Gabriel as he raised the wineglass in greeting. “Do me a favor and put down that damn gun. Otherwise, one of us might get hurt.”