and strained—the stuff of a bad television drama—and when the check came it was Astrid who paid. In cash, of course.
Outside, a car was waiting. Heathcliff raised no objections when Astrid quietly instructed him to climb into the backseat. Nor did he protest when the car headed in the opposite direction from his hotel. The driver was quite obviously a professional; he spoke not a word while undertaking several textbook maneuvers designed to shake surveillance. Astrid passed the time sending and receiving text messages. To Heathcliff she said nothing at all.
“Did we ever—”
“Make love?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She stared out the window.
“Good,” he said. “It’s better that way.”
When they finally stopped, it was at a small cottage by the sea. Inside, a man was waiting. He addressed Heathcliff in German-accented English. Said his name was Marcus. Said he worked for a Western intelligence service. Didn’t specify which one. Then he displayed for Heathcliff several highly sensitive documents Astrid had copied from his locked attaché case the previous evening while he was incapacitated by the drugs she had given him. Heathcliff was going to continue to supply such documents, said Marcus, and much more. Otherwise, Marcus and his colleagues were going to use the material they had in their possession to deceive Moscow Center into believing Heathcliff was a spy.
Unlike his namesake, Heathcliff was neither bitter nor vengeful. He returned to Moscow a half million dollars richer and awaited his next assignment. The SVR delivered a beautiful young girl to his apartment in the Sparrow Hills. He nearly fainted with fear when she introduced herself as Ekaterina. He made her an omelet and sent her away untouched.
The life expectancy for a man in Heathcliff’s position was not long. The penalty for betrayal was death. But not a quick death, an unspeakable death. Like all those who worked for the SVR, Heathcliff had heard the stories. The stories of grown men begging for a bullet to end their suffering. Eventually, it would come, the Russian way, in the nape of the neck. The SVR referred to it as vysshaya mera: the highest measure of punishment. Heathcliff resolved never to allow himself to fall into their hands. From Marcus he obtained a suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds, then it would be over.
Marcus also gave Heathcliff a covert communications device that allowed him to transmit reports via satellite with encrypted microbursts. Heathcliff used it rarely, preferring instead to brief Marcus in person during his trips abroad. Whenever possible, he allowed Marcus to photograph the contents of his attaché case, but mainly they talked. Heathcliff was a man of no importance, but he worked for important men, and transported their secrets. Moreover, he knew the locations of Russian dead drops around the world, which he carried around in his prodigious memory. Heathcliff was careful not to divulge too much, too quickly—for his own sake, and for the sake of his rapidly growing bank account. He doled out his secrets piecemeal, so as to increase their value. A half million became a million within a year. Then two. And then three.
Heathcliff’s conscience remained untroubled—he was a man without ideology or politics—but fear stalked him day and night. The fear that Moscow Center knew of his treachery and was watching his every move. The fear he had passed along one secret too many, or that one of the Center’s spies in the West would eventually betray him. On numerous occasions he pleaded with Marcus to bring him in from the cold. But Marcus, sometimes with a bit of soothing balm, sometimes with a crack of the whip, refused. Heathcliff was to continue his spying until such time as his life was truly in danger. Only then would he be allowed to defect. He was justifiably dubious about Marcus’s ability to judge the precise moment the sword was about to fall, but he had no choice but to continue. Marcus had blackmailed him into doing his bidding. And Marcus was going to wring every last secret out of him before releasing him from his bond.
But not all secrets are created equal. Some are mundane, workaday, and can be passed with little or no threat to the messenger. Others, however, are far too dangerous to betray. Heathcliff eventually found such a secret in a dead-letter box, in faraway Montreal. The letter box was actually an empty flat, used by a Russian illegal operating under deep cover in the United States. Hidden in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink was a memory stick. Heathcliff had been ordered to collect it and carry it back to Moscow Center, thus evading the mighty American National Security Agency. Before leaving the apartment, he inserted the flash drive into his laptop and found it unlocked and its contents unencrypted. Heathcliff read the documents freely. They were from several different American intelligence services, all with the highest possible level of classification.
Heathcliff didn’t dare copy the documents. Instead, he committed every detail to his flawless memory and returned to Moscow Center, where he handed over the flash drive to his control officer, along with a sternly worded rebuke of the illegal’s failure to secure it properly. The control officer, who was called Volkov, promised to address the matter. Then he offered Heathcliff a lowstress junket to friendly Budapest as recompense. “Consider it an all-expenses-paid holiday, courtesy of Moscow Center. Don’t take this the wrong way, Konstantin, but you look as though you could use some time off.”
That evening, Heathcliff used the covert communications device to inform Marcus that he had uncovered a secret of such import he had no choice but to defect. Much to his surprise, Marcus did not object. He instructed Heathcliff to dispose of the device in a way it could never be found. Heathcliff smashed it to pieces and dropped the remains down an open sewer. Even the bloodhounds of the SVR’s security directorate, he reasoned, wouldn’t look there.
A week later, after paying a final visit to his mother in her rabbit’s hutch of an apartment, with its brooding portrait of an everwatchful Comrade Stalin, Heathcliff left Russia for the last time. He arrived in Budapest in late afternoon, as snow fell gently upon the city, and took a taxi to the InterContinental Hotel. His room overlooked the Danube. He double-locked the door and engaged the safety bar. Then he sat down at the desk and waited for his mobile phone to ring. Next to it was Marcus’s suicide ampule. One bite was all it would take. Ten seconds. Then it would be over.
One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, a few lazy bends along the river Danube, an exhibition featuring the works of Sir Peter Paul Rubens—painter, scholar, diplomat, spy—limped toward its melancholy conclusion. The imported hordes had come and gone, and by late afternoon only a few regular patrons of the old museum moved hesitantly through its rose-colored rooms. One was a man of late middle age. He surveyed the massive canvases, with their corpulent nudes swirling amid lavish historical settings, from beneath the brim of a flat cap, which was pulled low over his brow.
A younger man stood impatiently at his back, checking the time on his wristwatch. “How much longer, boss?” he asked sotto voce in Hebrew. But the older man responded in German, and loudly enough so the drowsy guard in the corner could hear. “There’s just one more I’d like to see before I leave, thank you.”
He went into the next room and paused before Madonna and Child, oil on canvas, 137 by 111 centimeters. He knew the painting intimately; he had restored it in a cottage by the sea in West Cornwall. Crouching slightly, he examined the surface in raked lighting. His work had held up well. If only he could say the same for himself, he thought, rubbing the fiery patch of pain at the base of his spine. The two recently fractured vertebrae were the least of his physical maladies. During his long and distinguished career as an officer of Israeli intelligence, Gabriel Allon had been shot in the chest twice, attacked by an Alsatian guard dog, and thrown down several flights of stairs in the cellars of Lubyanka in Moscow. Not even Ari Shamron, his legendary mentor, could match his record of bodily injuries.
The young man trailing Gabriel through the rooms of the museum was called Oren. He was the head of Gabriel’s security detail, an unwanted fringe benefit of a recent promotion. They had been traveling for the past