The Cellist by Daniel Silva
64Washington
The outgoing president left the White House for the final time at 8:17 a.m. the following morning, making him the only chief executive in more than a century and a half not to attend the inauguration of his successor. The Washington he left behind was an armed camp, with twenty-five thousand National Guard troops deployed around the city, the most since the Civil War. A sealed red zone stretched from Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial, and from I-395 to Massachusetts Avenue. The green zone, restricted to residents and employees of local businesses, was even larger. Bridges were closed, downtown Metro stops shuttered. Miles of seven-foot non-scalable fencing, in some places reinforced with concrete barriers and strung with razor wire, gave the city the appearance of a giant prison.
As the president departed Joint Base Andrews, the president-elect arrived for mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. Gabriel, in his room at the nearby Madison Hotel, heard the sirens of the massive motorcade as it moved through the empty streets. His phone rang a few minutes after nine, as he was finishing dressing. It was Morris Payne calling from Langley.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said by way of greeting.
“Sorry, Morris. I’ve been crushed with work.”
“Is that any way to treat a friend?”
“Are you, Morris?”
“In a few short days you will realize I was the best friend you ever had.”
“Actually, I think I’m on fairly good footing with the new administration.”
“I’ll say. There’s a nasty rumor going around that you’re attending the inauguration as a guest of the president.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I was given a heads-up by the Secret Service. They also told me about this so-called threat from a Russian asset called Rebel. Needless to say, I should have heard about Rebel from you.”
“I didn’t want anything to be lost in translation.”
“Translate this,” snapped Payne. “Rebel is total bullshit. Rebel is a fantasy you’ve created to ingratiate yourself with the new crowd and get an invite to the inauguration.”
“If anyone should be attending the inauguration, it’s your boss.”
“It’s better he left town. The country needs to move on. And if you ever repeat that, I’ll denounce you from the highest mountaintop. Which is exactly where I’m headed.”
“When are you leaving Langley?”
“As soon as you tell me what really happened in France on New Year’s Eve.”
“Someone called the Russian president from a secure phone in Washington and told him that I had placed an agent close to Arkady Akimov.”
Payne said nothing.
“Who knew about my operation, Morris?”
“The people who needed to know.”
“Was the president one of them?”
“If he was,” said Payne before hanging up the phone, “he didn’t hear it from me.”
Gabriel pulled on an overcoat and a scarf and headed downstairs. Masked, he walked through the frigid, sunlit morning to Capitol Hill. Agent Emily Barnes of the United States Secret Service, an athletic-looking woman in her mid-thirties with freckled cheeks, met him at the edge of the red zone.
She handed him a set of credentials. “Are you armed?”
“No. Are you?”
She patted the side of her heavy jacket. “A SIG Sauer P229.”
Gabriel hung the credentials around his neck and followed the agent to a checkpoint, where he was thoroughly searched. Inside the red zone, they made their way to the East Front of the Capitol. The outgoing vice president, no longer speaking to the man he served faithfully for four years, was just arriving.
Agent Barnes led Gabriel through a doorway that gave on to the ground floor of the Capitol’s North Wing. “What did you think of our Beer Hall Putsch?” she asked.
“It made me sick to my stomach.”
“How about the guy with the Auschwitz hoodie?”
“I wish he had been walking down a street in Tel Aviv wearing that shirt instead of through the halls of the Capitol.”
She pointed out a doorway. “That’s the Old Supreme Court Chamber. The justices met there until 1860. Samuel Morse sent the first Morse-coded message from that room in 1844.”
“What did it say?”
“‘What hath God wrought?’”
“How prophetic.”
They climbed a flight of stairs to the second level of the Capitol. The Great Rotunda, defiled only two weeks earlier, glowed with the warm light streaming through the upper windows of the dome.
Agent Barnes turned to the right. “You’ve been assigned a seat down on the lawn, but the president-elect asked us to give you a quick tour of the platform to put your mind at ease.”
They emerged through a doorway onto the temporary structure abutting the West Front: one hundred and sixty thousand pounds of scaffolding, thirteen hundred sheets of plywood, a half million nails, twenty thousand pounds of grout and mortar, and twelve hundred gallons of gleaming white paint. Like the rotunda, it bore no traces of the damage inflicted just fourteen days earlier by the insurrectionists.
The three previous presidents and their wives had arrived and were mingling with the other dignitaries. A few members of Congress were searching for their seats, including a universally loathed and poorly groomed senator from Texas who had attempted to overturn the results of the election. Agent Barnes was describing some of the extraordinary measures the Secret Service had taken to secure the event. Gabriel was gazing at the two hundred thousand American flags fluttering in the cold breeze blowing across the empty Mall.
Shortly before eleven a.m., the president-elect’s family stepped onto the platform. “We should go downstairs to our seats,” said Agent Barnes.
“Our seats?”
“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”
“Poor you.”
They entered the Capitol, descended a flight of stairs, and emerged onto the lawn that two weeks earlier had been trampled by the marauding insurrectionists. Their seats were next to the camera platform. The first female vice president in American history, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was administered the oath of office at 11:42 a.m.; the new president, at 11:48. Nine minutes before the constitutionally prescribed start of his term, he took to the podium to deliver his inaugural address to a nation ravaged by illness and death and torn by political divisions. As Gabriel rose to his feet, he scanned the platform for a Russian asset code-named Rebel.
“Don’t worry,” said the young Secret Service agent standing at his side. “Nothing is going to happen.”
He declared that this was America’s day, democracy’s day, a day of history and hope. The nation, he said, had been tested by a crucible for the ages. And yet its institutions, the very institutions his predecessor had spent four years trying to destroy, had risen to the challenge. He called on Americans to end their uncivil war—a war that pitted red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal—and assured them that their democracy would never fall to a mob like the one that had invaded the Capitol. Gabriel, awed by the majesty of the ceremony, hoped the president would be proven correct. The world’s oldest democracy had survived its brush with authoritarianism, but it had been a near-death experience.
When the speech was over, a country music star sang “Amazing Grace,” and the youngest inaugural poet in American history declared that the country wasn’t broken, simply unfinished. Afterward, the new chief executive withdrew to the President’s Room, a gilded chamber on the Senate side of the Capitol, where congressional leaders looked on as he signed an Inauguration Day proclamation and several nominations to cabinet and sub-cabinet positions.
Next they moved to the Great Rotunda for a traditional presentation of gifts, a ceremony that ordinarily takes place during the inaugural luncheon. One of the gifts, a framed photograph of the ceremony that had occurred only moments earlier, was bestowed by the House minority leader, a Californian who had repeatedly claimed that the president had not won the election. The president, intent on bridging the nation’s cavernous political divide, accepted the gift graciously.
The final event before his departure took place on the steps of the East Front. There the president reviewed a parade of troops from every branch of the armed forces, a ceremony dating back to George Washington’s first inauguration that symbolized the transfer of power to a new, duly elected civilian leader. Power had indeed been transferred, thought Gabriel, watching the ritual from the East Plaza, but it had not been peaceful.
At the conclusion of the ceremony, the largest motorcade Gabriel had ever seen assembled at the base of the steps, and the new president settled into the back of his limousine. By two fifteen he was headed down Independence Avenue toward Arlington Cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
“I told you nothing would happen,” said Agent Barnes.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” replied Gabriel.
“What do you mean?”
“You live in an extraordinary country. Take good care of it.”
“Why do you think I work for the Secret Service?” She offered Gabriel her elbow in farewell. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Director Allon. I have to say, you’re not what I expected.”
“Really? How so?”
She smiled. “I thought you’d be taller.”
The razor wire sparkled in the brilliant winter sunlight as Gabriel walked down the gentle slope of Constitution Avenue. He crossed the empty boulevard at New Jersey Avenue and headed north, past the grassy plateau known as Lower Senate Park. In the deep silence of the locked-down city, he could hear footfalls behind him, muted, the occasional chirp of rubber against concrete. Female, he reckoned. Perhaps fifty kilograms, slightly out of breath. The footfalls drew closer as he approached the intersection of Louisiana Avenue. He slowed, as though to take his bearings, and turned around.
Caucasian female, mid-forties, five foot one or two, solidly built, professionally attired, visibly agitated. No, thought Gabriel suddenly. She was spun up out of her mind. In her right hand was a gun, a compact Glock 32 .357. It was a lot of firepower for so petite a woman. Fortunately, it was pointed toward the sidewalk. At least, for the moment.
Gabriel smiled and addressed the woman in a voice he reserved for those of unsound mind.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Gabriel Allon?”
“I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”
“You drink their blood, eat their flesh.”
“Who?”
“The children.”
Dear God, no. She was down the rabbit hole. A terrorist Gabriel might have been able to reason with, but not this one. Unprotected and unarmed, he had no choice but to try.
“You’ve been deceived,” he said in the same placid tone. “There’s no cabal. No one’s drinking the blood of children. The Storm will never happen. It’s all a lie.”
“The Storm will begin after I kill you.”
“The only thing that will happen is that you will destroy your life. Now place the gun gently on the sidewalk and walk away. I promise not to tell anyone.”
“Pedophile,” she whispered. “Bloodsucker.”
Gabriel stood with the stillness of a figure in a painting. Twenty-five thousand National Guard troops, another twenty thousand police officers and security personnel, and not one had noticed the professionally attired QAnon adherent standing on New Jersey Avenue with a loaded .357 in her hand.
Three meters separated them, no more. For now, the gun was still pointed at the ground. If he waited until she started to raise it, he would have no chance to disarm her. He had to make the first move and hope she wasn’t law enforcement or ex-military. If she was, his life would doubtless end at the corner of New Jersey and Louisiana Avenues in Northeast Washington.
Her lips were moving, like a suicide bomber reciting a final prayer. “Trust the plan,” she was whispering. “Enjoy the show.”
Too late, Gabriel rushed forward, shouting like a madman, as the woman’s right arm levered into firing position. The powerful .357 round tore through him like an artillery shell. As death’s darkness fell over him, he heard two more shots, the double tap of a trained professional. Then there was nothing at all, only a voice calling to him from across the green fields of the Valley of Jezreel. It was the voice of his mother, begging him not to die.