Moscow Rules - Daniel Silva

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About Daniel Silva

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Moscow Rules

» Daniel Silva

Michael Joseph
Hardback : 31 Jul 2008

£18.99

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Synopsis

The extraordinary new Gabriel Allon thriller from one of the world’s finest writers of international intrigue and espionage. The violent death of a journalist leads agent turned art-restorer, Gabriel Allon, to Russia. Here he finds that in terms of spycraft, the stakes are the highest they’ve ever been. He’s playing by Moscow Rules now. It is not the grim Moscow of Soviet times, but a new Moscow, awash in oil wealth and bulletproof Bentleys. A Moscow where a new generation of Stalinists is plotting to reclaim an empire lost and to challenge the global dominance of the old enemy, the United States. One such man is Ivan Kharkov, a former KGB colonel who built a global investment empire on the rubble of the Soviet Union. Hidden within that empire is a lucrative and deadly business. Kharkov is an arms dealer – and he is about to deliver Russia’s most sophisticated weapons to al-Qaeda. Unless Allon can learn the time and place of the delivery, the world will see the deadliest terror attacks since 9/11 – and the clock is ticking fast. Filled with rich prose and breathtaking turns of plot, Moscow Rules is at once superior entertainment and a searing cautionary tale about the new threats rising to the East – and Silva’s finest novel yet.

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Interview

A Conversation with Daniel Silva

What are the Moscow Rules and are they real?
They are real, and every spy and intelligence officer knows them. During the Cold War, Moscow was by far the toughest, most dangerous city in the world to work. So the CIA created a set of operating principles. They applied not only to Moscow but other rough stations and bases as well. When I started researching the book, I tried to find an official list of the rules, but I discovered from friends at the CIA that the agency never really bothered to write them down. I suppose they did that on purpose. Some of the rules are quite chilling: “Assume everyone you meet is under opposition control.” “Assume every telephone is tapped and every room is bugged.” Some are hysterical: “Murphy was right.” “Technology will always let you down.” My personal favorite is: “Don’t look back. You are never completely alone.” That rule serves not only as the epigraph of the novel but its spine as well.

Why did you pick Moscow Rules for the title?
Without giving too much away, the villain of the book is one of those New Russian oligarchs we’ve all been reading about in the newspapers. His name is Ivan Kharkov. Before the fall of communism, he was a KGB officer. Now he’s a fabulously successful investor and businessman. He has mansions in Moscow, London, and the South of France, and he flies between them on his private jet. He has close friends in high places in Moscow, including the Russian president himself.

But there’s a part of Ivan’s business empire he keeps carefully hidden from outside eyes. Ivan is the world’s biggest arms dealer, and he’s planning to sell some very dangerous weapons to some very dangerous people. Someone close to Ivan - someone who is surrounded day and night by bodyguards, someone who’s every e-mail and conversation is monitored - has risked everything in an attempt to stop the deal. The hero of my series, Gabriel Allon, needs to talk to this person. To do so, he has to operate under the Moscow Rules.

What I was trying to do with the title and tone of the book was to take the iconography of the Cold War and apply it to a very human, present-day story. I wanted to create a sense in the reader’s mind that maybe things haven’t changed that much in Russia. Maybe a new tsar, a new Stalin, is running the place. The action at the end of the novel flows up and down a boulevard called the Leninsky Prospekt. I did that for a specific reason. Lenin is the man who inflicted communism on the Russian people, yet one of the most important avenues in Moscow still bears his name.

This is your eleventh novel and the eighth in your featuring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Your thrillers take place all over the world, but this is the first time you’ve chosen to set a book in Russia. Why now?
I suppose Russia has been calling me for a long time. I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage. I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy in college. I even wanted to work in Moscow as a foreign correspondent. But by the time I started writing novels full-time, the Cold War was over. I thought several times about writing a historical novel of the Cold War, but it didn’t feel right. I’d always enjoyed the challenge of trying to catch history in the act. I knew enough about Russian history to bide my time. I told myself to be patient. Eventually, Russia would find a new tsar and challenge us again. The new tsar turned out to be Vladimir Putin, and his critics were soon dying under mysterious and violent circumstances. When Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered in London in 2006 with a lethal dose of polonium-210, I knew it was time for Gabriel Allon to go to Russia.

Before Gabriel Allon could go to Moscow, you had to go. You spent last summer there. What did you find?
I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. Strange, because it’s not an easy place to visit. Just getting around the city can be a challenge because of the nightmarish traffic. But it’s one of those places where you can’t help but trip over history at every turn. And now, because of Russia’s newfound wealth, it’s a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin’s Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world. The city is filled with luxury cars, exclusive boutiques, and trendy restaurants. It’s as if the entire country is trying to make up for sixty years of lost time with an orgy of capitalism and consumerism. Every night, we watched Russian millionaires making deals in the bar of our hotel. They dressed in the latest designer clothing, spoke fluent English, and were surrounded by bodyguards who made no effort to conceal their weapons. There’s a reason why they call Moscow “the Wild East”. Needless to say, I found it to be the perfect setting for a thriller.

There’s a theme that runs through the novel, a sort of running joke between the characters about how everything in Russia is “the world’s biggest”.
It really came to be a refrain wherever we went. World’s biggest hotel. World’s biggest bell. World’s biggest swimming pool. World’s biggest supermarket. One evening when I was returning to my hotel from a meeting, my driver looked at one of the old Stalinist towers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. “Europe’s biggest apartment building,” he said. Then he sighed heavily and added, “Everything in this country has to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest, and the best. We cannot live as normal people.” The line really stuck with me, and I used it as the spine of the novel. Russians cannot live as normal people. Russia is not a normal country.

The action in Moscow Rules moves from one exotic locale to the next: Moscow, Italy, Israel, the Alps, the French Riviera, London. Did you spend a lot of time in those places?
Thankfully, yes. That’s the best part of my job. For example, at the start of the story, Gabriel is staying at an isolated cattle farm in the hills of Umbria. My family and I were lucky enough to stay on a farm just like it as I was finishing The Messenger. I also spent a great deal of time chasing rich Russians around Western Europe, trying to get a glimpse of the way they’re spending their money. And I can report that they’re spending an enormous amount of it. Even a novelist can’t make this up. In Saint-Tropez, there’s a restaurant frequented by Russians where a caviar appetizer costs three thousand euros, about five thousand dollars. In Courchevel, I visited a restaurant where the manager told me about a group of Russians who had just spent three hundred thousand euros for lunch. That’s about a half million dollars. For lunch! My dedication to accuracy went only so far. I didn’t eat at these restaurants, but my characters had a fabulous time there. Our guides in Russia also told us several jokes that Russians like to tell on themselves about the extravagant spending of the New Russian millionaires. Our favorite was this one: A Russian millionaire buys a luxury Mercedes. The next week, he goes back to the dealer and says he wants to trade the car in for a new model. The mystified dealer asks, “What wrong with this one?” The Russian millionaire answers, “The ashtrays are full.”

Is it true the KGB really has a private museum?
Absolutely true. It’s near the offices that were once used by some of the KGB’s most notorious chiefs. No other intelligence service in the world has a history quite like the KGB’s, and for someone like me, a student of Russian history and espionage, the museum was Valhalla. It’s a surprisingly candid place, but it contains almost no evidence that the KGB had ever tried to spy on the United States. When I asked to see the exhibits dealing with the traitors Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, our guide only laughed. My favorite moment occurred when we stopped before a large album containing the official portraits of every KGB and FSB chief, beginning with Felix Dzerzhinsky. “He was shot,” the colonel said of one early chief. He turned the page. “He was shot… He was shot… He was shot.” At the next portrait, he paused for a moment. “Ah, this one was different.” He paused dramatically. “He was poisoned.” What more could I ask for?