Free The Defector by Daniel Silva Page A

where Grigori had become too frightened to continue. The spot where he had frozen in his tracks and turned impulsively toward the oncoming traffic. In the recording, it had appeared as if Grigori had briefly considered attempting to cross the busy road. Then, as now, it almost certainly would have meant death by other means.
    Gabriel looked to his left and saw a brick wall, six feet tall and covered in graffiti. Then he looked to his right and saw the river of steel and glass flowing along Harrow Road. Why did he stop here? And why, when a car appeared without being summoned, did he get in without hesitation? Was it a prearranged bolt-hole? Or a perfectly sprung trap?
    Help me, Grigori. Did they send an old enemy to frighten you into coming home? Or did they send a friend to take you gently by the hand?
    Gabriel gazed into the glare of the oncoming headlamps. And for an instant he glimpsed a small, well-dressed figure advancing toward him along the pavement, tapping his umbrella. Then he saw the woman. A woman in a car-length leather coat who carried no umbrella. A woman who was hatless in the rain. She brushed past him now, as if late for an appointment, and hurried off along Harrow Road. Gabriel tried to recall the features of her face but could not. They were ghostlike and fragmentary, like the first faint lines of an unfinished sketch. And so he stood there alone, London’s rush hour roaring in his ears, and watched her disappear into the darkness.

14
    WEST LONDON
    IT HAD BEEN more than thirty-six hours since Gabriel had slept, and he was bone-weary with exhaustion. Under normal circumstances, he would have contacted the local station and requested use of a safe flat. That was not an option, since assets from the local station were probably engaged in a frantic search for him at that very moment. He would have to stay in a hotel. And not a nice hotel with computerized registration that could be searched by sophisticated data-mining software. It would have to be the sort of hotel that accepted cash and laughed at requests for amenities like room service, telephones that functioned, and clean towels.
    The Grand Hotel Berkshire was just such a place. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Crom well Road. The night manager, a tired man in a tired gray sweater, expressed little surprise when Gabriel said he had no reservation and even less when he announced he would pay the bill for his stay—three nights, perhaps two if his business went well—entirely in cash. He then handed the manager a pair of crisp twenty-pound notes and said he was expecting no visitors of any kind, nor did he want to be disturbed by telephone calls or maid service. The night manager slipped the money into his pocket and promised Gabriel’s stay would be both private and secure. Gabriel bade him a pleasant evening and saw himself upstairs to his room.
    Located on the third floor overlooking the busy street, it stank of loneliness and the last occupant’s appalling cologne. Closing the door behind him, Gabriel found himself overcome by a sudden wave of depression. How many nights had he spent in rooms just like it? Perhaps Chiara was right. Perhaps it was time to finally leave the Office and allow the fighting to be done by other men. He would take to the hills of Umbria and give his new wife the child she so desperately wanted, the child Gabriel had denied himself because of what had happened on a snowy night in Vienna in another lifetime. He had not chosen that life. It had been chosen for him by others. It had been chosen by Yasir Arafat and a band of Palestinian terrorists known as Black September. And it had been chosen by Ari Shamron.
    Shamron had come for him on a brilliant afternoon in Jerusalem in September 1972. Gabriel was a promising young painter who had forsaken a post in an elite military unit to pursue his formal training at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Shamron had just been given command of