Page 38 of The Collector
“A rental.”
“Can you get down to Schiphol?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“How many in your party?”
“Two.”
“The plane will collect you at the FBO tomorrow morning at seven. And don’t worry about the car,” the woman said before ringing off. “Amsterdam station will take care of it.”
The plane in question was a Gulfstream G550 that Gabriel had acquired during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when he scoured the globe in search of ventilators, testing material, and protective medical clothing. It departed Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at 7:15 a.m. and landed at Ben Gurion at half past twelve. Gabriel emerged from the cabin door to find Mikhail Abramov waiting on the tarmac. He was a tall, long-limbed man in his early fifties, withfair hair and pale, bloodless skin. His eyes were blue-gray and translucent, like glacial ice.
Smiling, he extended a hand toward his former director-general. He addressed him in Russian-accented Hebrew. “I was beginning to think we’d never see you again.”
“It’s only been ten months, Mikhail.”
“Trust me, it feels longer. Things haven’t been quite the same around here since you left.”
Born in Moscow to a pair of dissident Soviet scientists, Mikhail had immigrated to Israel as a teenager. After serving in the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special forces unit, he joined the Office, where he specialized in a type of operation known as “negative treatment,” the Office euphemism for a targeted assassination. His enormous talents, however, were not limited to the gun. It was Mikhail Abramov, at Gabriel’s behest, who broke into a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran and stole Iran’s entire nuclear archives.
He glanced at Ingrid. “You haven’t done something foolish, have you, boss?”
“I agreed to track down a stolen painting for the Italian police. Things went downhill from there.”
Mikhail indicated the armored SUV idling nearby. “Your successor ordered me to personally escort you to your apartment in Narkiss Street.”
“Actually,” said Gabriel, “we have a little errand to run first.”
They headednorth to Mount Carmel, then east toward the Sea of Galilee. By the time they reached Rosh Pina, founded by thirty families of Romanian Jews in 1882, it was nearly two fifteen. The driver started toward the mountain hamlet of Amuka, then turned ontoan unmarked track cut through a dense grove of cypress and pine. He slowed to a stop a moment later after coming upon four men in khaki vests, each clutching a Galil ACE automatic. Behind them was a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire.
“Where are we?” asked Ingrid.
“Nowhere,” answered Mikhail.
“What does that mean?”
“It means this place doesn’t exist. Which is why those four nice boys are about to shoot the former director-general of the Office.”
Gabriel lowered his window, and one of the guards approached the car. “Is that you, boss?”
“Former boss,” replied Gabriel.
“You should have told us you were coming.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not here.” Gabriel glanced at Ingrid. “And neither is she.”
His real name was Aleksander Yurchenko, but like most aspects of his previous life, it was gone forever. Even now, five years after his coerced defection to Israel, he still referred to himself by his workname, which was Sergei Morosov.
He was a child of the old order. His father had been a senior official at Gosplan, the masterminds behind the Soviet Union’s Marxist command economy. His mother had worked as a typist at the headquarters of the KGB, the monsters who crushed anyone foolish enough to complain. Later, she would serve as the personal secretary to Yuri Andropov, the longtime KGB chairman who would eventually succeed Leonid Brezhnev as the leader of an empire that would soon be dead and buried.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was in his mother’s footsteps that Sergei Morosov chose to follow. He spent three years at the Red Banner Institute, the KGB’s school for fledgling spies, and upon graduation was assigned to the German operations desk at Moscow Center. A year later he was posted to therezidenturain East Berlin, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, knowing full well the Soviet Union would crumble next.
When the end came in December 1991, the KGB was disbanded, renamed, reorganized, and renamed again. Eventually, it would be broken in two, with the Lubyanka-based FSB handling domestic security and the SVR, headquartered in Yasenevo, responsible for foreign intelligence gathering and other assorted special tasks. Sergei Morosov served in three declared SVRrezidenturas—first Helsinki, then The Hague, and finally Ottawa, where he foolishly tried to tempt the Canadian defense minister with a bit of honey and was asked to quietly pack his bags.
