Page 60 of The Other Woman

But these were not normal circumstances, continued Sergei Morosov. These were Sasha circumstances, and Sasha handled the traitor Kirov with extraordinary care. He sent the traitor Kirov on numerous errands, unwatched, knowing full well that on some of those errands he was meeting with his Israeli handlers, which was precisely what Sasha wanted. To that end, he made certain the material to which Kirov was exposed was of sufficient quality that his Israeli handlers and their Anglo-American partners would not be suspicious. In the jargon, it was fool’s gold. It shone and glittered but was without strategic or operational value.

Finally, Sasha dispatched the traitor Kirov on the errand that would result in his decision to defect. By all appearances, it was a routine assignment. The traitor Kirov was instructed to clean out a dead-letter box in Montreal and return the contents to Moscow Center. The dead-letter box was actually an apartment, used by a Brazilian citizen, a woman, living permanently in the promised land of the United States. But the woman was not Brazilian at all. She was a Russian illegal operating under deep cover in Washington.

“Doing what?”

“Sasha never divulged her assignment to me.”

“And if you were to hazard a guess?”

“I’d say the Russian illegal was servicing a mole.”

“Because officers from the localrezidenturaare under constant FBI surveillance, making it impossible for them to run a high-level asset.”

“Difficult,” suggested Sergei Morosov, “but not impossible.”

“Did Sasha ever tell you the name of this Russian illegal operating in Washington?”

“Sasha? Don’t be silly.”

“Her cover occupation?”

“No.”

Gabriel asked what had been left in the apartment.

“A memory stick,” replied Sergei Morosov. “It was hidden beneath the kitchen sink. I placed it there myself.”

“What did it contain?”

“Forgeries.”

“Of what?”

“Documents of the highest possible classification.”

“American?”

“Yes.”

“CIA?”

“NSA as well,” said Sergei Morosov, nodding. “Sasha instructed me to leave the memory stick unlocked so Kirov would see the contents.”

“How did you know he would look at them?”

“No SVR fieldman would ever transport an unlocked, unencrypted flash drive across international borders. They always check to make certain.”

“What if he hadn’t returned to Moscow?” asked Gabriel. “What if he had walked straight into our arms?”

“It was the one errand where he was watched. If he had made a break for the other side, he would have been shipped back to Moscow in a box.”

But that wasn’t necessary, Sergei Morosov continued, because the traitor Kirov returned to Moscow on his own. At which point he faced a painful dilemma. The documents he had seen were too dangerous to share with his Israeli handlers. If Moscow Center ever learned they had gone astray, Kirov would instantly fall under suspicion. Defection, therefore, was his only option.

The rest of Sasha’s conspiracy unfolded precisely as planned. The traitor Kirov traveled to Budapest and then to Vienna, where Gabriel Allon, the chief of Israeli intelligence and an implacable enemy of the Russian Federation, waited in a safe flat. An assassin waited, too, one of Moscow Center’s very best. His death on the Brünnerstrasse was the evening’s only false note. Otherwise, the performance was pitch perfect. The traitor Kirov had been granted the undignified death he so richly deserved. And the enemy Allon would soon embark on an investigation, guided at every step by the hidden hand of Sasha, that would identify Alistair Hughes as Moscow Center’s mole inside British intelligence.

“How did you know we’d targeted him?” asked Gabriel.

“We saw Eli Lavon and your friend Christopher Keller move into an observation flat on the Barichgasse. And our watchers saw your watchers following Alistair around Vienna. On Sasha’s orders, we pared our teams to the bone to minimize the risk of detection.”