It was not thunder that caused them to start their engines but a quiet voice. It told them the call had just gone through to Ivan’s phone. It told them the time was nearly at hand. Gabriel touched the.45 caliber Glock at the small of his back-the Glock loaded with highly destructive hollow-tipped rounds-and made a slight modification in its position. Then he lowered the visor on his helmet and waited for the signal.
IT WAS Oleg Rudenko calling from Moscow-at least, that’s what Ivan was led to believe. He couldn’t quite be certain. He never would be. The connection was too tenuous, the music too loud. Ivan knew three things: the caller spoke Russian, had the direct number for his mobile, and said it was extremely urgent. That was enough to put him on his feet and send him marching into the quiet of the street, phone to one ear, hand over the other. If Ivan heard the approaching motorbikes, he gave no sign of it. In fact, he was shouting in Russian, his back turned, at the instant Gabriel brought his motorbike to a stop. The bodyguards at the front door immediately sensed trouble and foolishly reached into their blazers. Mikhail shot each through the heart before they managed to touch their weapons. Seeing the guards go down, Ivan whirled around in terror, only to find himself staring down the suppressor at the end of the Glock. Gabriel lifted the visor of his helmet and smiled. Then he pulled the trigger, and Ivan’s face vanished. For Grigori, he thought, as he drove off into the darkness. For Chiara.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE DEFECTOR is a work of entertainment. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Siberian oil giant Ruzoil does not exist, nor does the Moskovskaya Gazeta or Galaxy Travel of Tverskaya Street. Viktor Orlov, Olga Sukhova, and Grigori Bulganov are in no way meant to be construed as fictitious renderings of real people.
The headquarters of the Israeli secret service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there in part because I have always liked the name. I have tinkered with airline schedules to make them fit my story. Anyone trying to reach London from Moscow will search in vain for Aeroflot Flight 247. There is no private bank in Zurich called Becker & Puhl. Its internal operating procedures were invented by the author. The Office of Presidential Advance has been accurately portrayed, but, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been used to provide cover for an Israeli spy.
There is no airfield at Konakovo, at least not one I am aware of; nor is there a division of the FSB known as the Department of Coordination. A chess club does indeed meet on Tuesday evenings in the Lower Vestry House of St. George’s Church in Bloomsbury. It is called the Greater London Chess Club, not the Central London Chess Club, and its members are charming and gracious to a fault. Deepest apologies to the management of Villa Romana in Saint-Tropez for carrying out an assassination on their doorstep, but I’m afraid it had to be done. Also, apologies to the residents of the lovely Bristol Mews in Maida Vale for placing a Russian defector in their midst. Were the author ever to go into hiding in London, it would certainly be there. Readers should not go looking for Gabriel Allon at No. 16 Narkiss Street in Jerusalem or for Viktor Orlov at No. 43 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Nor should they read too much into my use of a poison-dispensing ring, though I suspect the KGB and its successors probably have one.
The Great Terror killing ground discovered at the climax of The Defector is fictitious, but, sadly, the historical circumstances that could have created such a place are not. Precisely how many people were shot to death during the brutal repressions lasting from 1936 to 1938 may never be known. Estimates range from approximately seven hundred thousand to well over a million. Suffice it to say the number of those executed is but one measure of the suffering Stalin inflicted on Russia during the time of the Great Terror. Historian Robert Conquest estimates that the purges and Stalin-induced famines probably claimed between eleven million and thirteen million lives. Other historians place the number even higher. And still opinion polls consistently find that Stalin remains highly popular among Russians to this day.
One of the few sites where Russians can mourn Stalin’s victims is Butovo, just south of Moscow. There, from August 1937 to October 1938, an estimated twenty thousand people were shot in the back of the head and buried in long mass graves. I visited the recently opened memorial at Butovo with my family in the summer of 2007 while researching Moscow Rules, and in large measure it inspired The Defector. One question haunted me as I walked slowly past the burial trenches, accompanied by weeping Russian citizens. Why are there not more places like this? Places where ordinary Russians can see evidence of Stalin’s unimaginable crimes with their own eyes. The answer, of course, is that the rulers of the New Russia are not terribly interested in exposing the sins of the Soviet past. On the contrary, they are engaged in a carefully orchestrated endeavor to airbrush away its most repulsive aspects while celebrating its achievements. One can understand their motives. The NKVD, which carried out the Great Terror at Stalin’s behest, was the forerunner of the KGB. And former officers of the KGB, including Vladimir Putin himself, are now running Russia.
There is a danger to such historical myopia, of course: the danger that it might happen again. In smaller, far more subtle ways, it already is. Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s former president and now prime minister, has overseen a wide-ranging curtailment of press and civic freedoms. And in December 2008 the government introduced new legislation that would greatly expand the definition of “state treason.” Human rights activists, already on shaky ground, fear the laws could be used to jail anyone who dares to criticize the regime. Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB officer accused by British authorities of the November 2006 poisoning of the dissident defector Alexander Litvinenko, apparently feels the new law does not go far enough. Now a member of parliament, and a hero to many Russians, he told the Spanish newspaper El País that anyone who dares to criticize Russia “should be exterminated.”
Lugovoi went on to say: “Do I think someone should have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state? If you’re talking about the interests of the Russian state, in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order.” This from the man wanted by British authorities for the very same murder of which he speaks.
For those who dare to question the Kremlin and Russia ’s powerful elite, arrest and prosecution are sometimes the least of their worries. Too many have simply been killed in cold blood. Witness the case of Stanislav Markelov, the crusading human rights lawyer and social justice activist, gunned down on a central Moscow street in January 2009 as he was leaving a news conference. Also killed was Anastasia Baburova, a freelance journalist for Novaya Gazeta-tragically, the same publication that employed Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house in October 2006.
According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-nine media professionals have been killed in Russia since 1992. Only in Iraq and Algeria have more died in the line of duty during the same period. This, too, is a Russian tragedy.