Page 59 of The Other Woman

“When was it opened?”

“Sasha never dated his private files.”

Gabriel instructed Sergei Morosov to hazard a guess.

“I’d say it was some time in the mid-nineties. Hughes had been an MI6 officer for about ten years. By then, he was working in the Berlin station. I was one of the officers who made a pass at him.”

“So you and Alistair were already acquainted.”

“We were on a first-name basis.”

“When did you start watching him in Vienna?”

“I had the surveillance operation up and running by mid-November. Sasha reviewed every aspect, down to the makes of the cars and the clothing worn by the pavement artists.”

“How pervasive was it?”

It was total, said Sergei Morosov, with the exception of the station itself. The SVR had been trying for years to bug the place but without success.

“Specifics, please,” said Gabriel.

“We had two flats on the Barichgasse, one on each side of the street. The inside of his flat was wired to the hilt, and we owned his Wi-Fi network. On any given day we had twenty or thirty pavement specialists at our disposal. We brought them in on the Danube river ferry from Budapest disguised as day-trippers. When Alistair had lunch with a diplomat or a fellow intelligence officer, we were at the next table. And when he stopped for a coffee or a drink, we had a coffee or a drink, too. And then there were the girls he brought home to his apartment.”

“Any of them yours?”

“A couple,” admitted Sergei Morosov.

“What about the trips to Bern?”

“Same story, different town. We flew with Hughes on the plane, stayed with Hughes at the Schweizerhof, and went with him to his appointments at the clinic up in Münchenbuchsee. It was a ten-minute ride by taxi. Alistair never took a car from the hotel, always from a taxi stand and never the same stand twice in a row. And when he returned to Bern after his appointment, he had the car drop him somewhere other than the entrance of the hotel.”

“He didn’t want the staff to know where he was going?”

“He didn’t wantanyone to know.”

“What about when he wasn’t at the clinic?”

“That’s where he made his mistake,” replied Sergei Morosov. “Our friend Alistair was a bit predictable.”

“How so?”

“There’s only one flight a day from Vienna to Bern, the two o’clock SkyWork. Unless the flight was delayed, which was rare, Alistair was always at the hotel by four at the latest.”

“Leaving him with more than an hour and a half before his appointment.”

“Exactly. And he always spent it the same way.”

“Afternoon tea in the lobby lounge.”

“Same table, same time, last Friday of every month.”

With the exception of December, said Sergei Morosov. Alistair spent the holidays with his family in Britain and the Bahamas. He returned to duty three days after the New Year, and a week later, on a Wednesday evening, he was called to the station late at night to take delivery of an urgent eyes-only telegram from Vauxhall Cross. Which returned them once more to the subject of the traitor Kirov and his murder on a snowy night in Vienna.

38

Upper Galilee, Israel

Under normal circumstances, he would have been arrested and interrogated for days, weeks, perhaps even months, until they had wrung every last secret out of him, until he was too exhausted, too crazed with pain, to offer a coherent answer to even the simplest question. Then he might well have been given one last beating before being taken to a windowless room in the basement of Lefortovo Prison with walls of concrete and a drain in the floor for ease of cleaning. There he would have been forced to kneel, and a large-caliber handgun would have been placed, in the Russian way, to the nape of his neck. One shot would have been fired. It would have exited through his face, leaving his body unsuitable for proper burial. Not that he would have received one. He would have been hurled into an unmarked hole in the Russian earth and hastily buried. No one, not even his mother, would have been told of his grave’s whereabouts.