The English Girl: A Novel Read online

  At eleven o’clock Graham Seymour came downstairs looking gray and very tired. He declined the chef’s offer of food and then proceeded to devour the remnants of Gabriel’s egg-and-dill sandwich. Afterward, they went outside to walk in the walled garden. It was silent except for the occasional crackle of a police radio and the wet rush of traffic along Horse Guards Road. Seymour extracted a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his overcoat and lit one moodily.

  “I never knew,” said Gabriel.

  “Helen made me quit years ago. I tried to get her to stop cooking, but she refused.”

  “She sounds like a good negotiator. Maybe we should let her deal with Paul.”

  “He wouldn’t stand a chance.” Seymour blew smoke at the starless sky and watched it drift beyond the walls. “It’s possible you’re wrong, you know. It’s possible everything will go smoothly and Madeline will be home by tomorrow night.”

  “It’s also possible that Britain will one day regain control of the American colonies,” said Gabriel. “Possible, but unlikely.”

  “Ten million euros is a lot of money.”

  “Paying the money is the easy part,” said Gabriel. “But getting the hostage back alive is another thing entirely. The person who delivers the money has to be an experienced professional. And he has to be prepared to walk away from the deal if he thinks the kidnappers are trying to deceive him.” Gabriel paused, then added, “It’s not a job for the faint of heart.”

  “Is there any chance you would consider doing it?”

  “Under these circumstances,” said Gabriel, “none whatsoever.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “Who put you up to it?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Lancaster?”

  “Actually, it was Jeremy Fallon. You made quite an impression on him.”

  “Not enough of an impression to make him listen to me.”

  “He’s desperate.”

  “Which is exactly why he shouldn’t go anywhere near that phone.”

  Seymour dropped his cigarette onto the wet grass and smothered it with his shoe, then led Gabriel back inside, to the White Drawing Room. Nothing had changed. One man pacing the carpet, another staring numbly out a window, and still another trying desperately to appear calm and in control, even when there was no control to be had. The phone was still lying in pieces on the coffee table. Gabriel inserted the battery and the SIM card and switched on the power. Then he sat on the couch opposite Jonathan Lancaster and waited for it to ring.

  The call came through at midnight precisely. Fallon had set the volume to train whistle level and switched on the vibrate function, so the phone shimmied across the surface of the coffee table, as if moving to a private little earthquake. He reached for it at once, but Gabriel stayed his hand and held it for ten agonizing seconds before finally releasing it. Fallon seized and raised it swiftly to his ear. Then, with his eyes fixed on Lancaster, he said, “I agree to your terms.” Gabriel admired Fallon’s choice of words. The call had surely been recorded by GCHQ, Britain’s eavesdropping service, and it would remain stored in its databases until the end of time.

  For the next forty-five seconds, Fallon did not speak. Instead, with his gaze still fixed on Lancaster, he drew a fountain pen from his suit coat pocket and scribbled a few illegible lines on a notepad. Gabriel could hear the sound of the voice machine, thin, lifeless, and stressing all the wrong words, bleeding from the earpiece. “No,” said Fallon finally, adopting the same laborious delivery, “that won’t be necessary.” Then, in response to another question, he said, “Yes, of course. You have our word.” After that, there was another silence during which his eyes moved from Lancaster, to Gabriel, and then back to Lancaster. “That might not be possible,” he said carefully. “I’ll have to ask.”

  And then the line went dead. Fallon switched off the phone.

  “Well?” asked Lancaster.

  “He wants us to put the money into two rolling black suitcases. No tracking devices, no dye packs, no police. He’ll call again tomorrow at noon to tell us what to do next.”

  “You didn’t ask for proof of life,” said Gabriel.

  “He didn’t give me a chance.”

  “Were there any additional demands?”

  “Just one,” said Fallon. “He wants you to deliver the money. No Gabriel, no girl.”

  22

  LONDON

  It was a few minutes after one in the morning by the time Gabriel finally departed Downing Street. Graham Seymour offered to drive him, but he wanted to walk; it had been many months since he had been in London, and he thought the damp night air would do him good. He slipped out the back security gate along Horse Guards Road and headed westward through the empty parks to Knightsbridge. Then he made his way along Brompton Road to South Kensington. The street number of his destination was tucked away in the drawers of his prodigious memory: 59 Victoria Road, the last known British address of an SAS deserter and professional assassin named Christopher Keller.

  It was a stout little house, with a wrought-iron gate and a fine flight of steps rising to a white front door. Flowers bloomed in the tiny forecourt, and in the window of the drawing room a single light burned. The curtain was parted a few inches; through the gap Gabriel could see a man, Dr. Robert Keller, sitting upright in a wing chair—reading or sleeping, it was impossible to know. He was a bit younger than Shamron but, even so, not a man with long to live. For twenty-five years he had suffered under the belief that his son was dead, a pain that Gabriel knew only too well. It was a cruel thing that Keller had done to his parents, but it was not Gabriel’s place to make it right. And so he stood alone in the empty street, hoping the old man could somehow feel his presence. And in his thoughts he told him that his son was a flawed man who had done evil things for money, but that he was also decent and honorable and brave and still very much alive.

  After a moment the light was extinguished and Keller’s father disappeared from view. Gabriel turned and made his way to Kensington Road. As he was nearing Queen’s Gate, a motorcycle swept past him on the right. He had seen the bike a few minutes earlier as he was crossing Sloane Street, and a few minutes before that as he was leaving Downing Street. He had assumed then that the figure riding it was an MI5 watcher. But now, as he scrutinized the supple line of the back and the generous curve of the hips, he no longer believed that to be the case.

  He continued eastward along the edge of Hyde Park, watching the taillight of the bike grow smaller, confident he would see it again soon. He did not have to wait long—two minutes, perhaps less. That was when he glimpsed it speeding directly toward him. This time, instead of passing him by, it swung a U-turn around a traffic pylon and stopped. Gabriel eased his leg over the seat and clasped his arms around the narrow waist. As the bike shot forward, he inhaled the familiar scent of vanilla and softly stroked the underside of a warm, rounded breast. He closed his eyes, at peace for the first time in seven days.

  The flat was located in an ugly postwar building on Bayswater Road. It had been an Office safe flat once, but inside King Saul Boulevard—and MI5, too, for that matter—it was now known as Gabriel Allon’s London pied-à-terre. Entering, he hung the key on the little hook just inside the kitchen door and opened the refrigerator. Inside was a carton of fresh milk, along with a crate of eggs, a lump of Parmesan cheese, mushrooms, herbs, and a bottle of Gabriel’s favorite pinot grigio.

  “The cupboard was bare when I arrived,” said Chiara, “so I picked up a few things from that market around the corner. I was hoping we might have dinner together.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “About an hour after you.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  Gabriel looked at her seriously. “What neighborhood?”

  “France,” she answered without hesitation. “A farmhouse not far from Cherbourg, to be precise. Four bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, lovely views of the Channel.”
/>   “You got yourself assigned to the reception team?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “How was it exactly?”

  “Ari did it for me.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “His.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “He thought I was perfect for the job, and I couldn’t argue with him. After all, it’s not as if I don’t have some idea of what it’s like to be kidnapped and held for ransom.”

  “Which is exactly why I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near her.”

  “It was a long time ago, darling.”

  “Not that long.”

  “It seems like another lifetime. In fact, sometimes it seems like it never happened at all.”

  She closed the refrigerator door and kissed Gabriel softly. Her leather jacket still held the cold of the night ride across London, but her lips were warm.

  “We waited all day for you to arrive,” she said, kissing him again. “The operations desk finally sent us a message saying you’d boarded a British Airways flight from Marseilles to London.”

  “That’s funny, but I don’t remember mentioning my travel plans to the Operations Desk.”

  “They watch your credit cards, darling—you know that. They had a team from London Station waiting at Heathrow. They saw you leave with Nigel Whitcombe. And then they saw you entering Downing Street through the back door.”

  “I was slightly disappointed we didn’t go through the front, but under the circumstances it was probably for the best.”

  “What happened in France?”

  “Things didn’t go according to plan.”

  “So what now?”

  “Britain’s prime minister is about to make someone a very rich man.”

  “How rich?”

  “Ten million euros rich.”

  “So crime pays after all.”

  “It usually does. That’s why there are so many criminals.”

  Chiara withdrew from Gabriel and removed her coat. She was wearing a tight black sweater with a roll neck. She had arranged her hair to fit inside the helmet. Now, with her eyes fixed warily on Gabriel, she removed several clasps and pins, and it fell about her square shoulders in an auburn-and-chestnut cloud.

  “So that’s it?” she asked. “We can go home now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means someone has to deliver the ransom money.” He paused, then added, “And then someone has to bring her out.”

  Chiara narrowed her eyes. They seemed to have darkened in color, never a good sign.

  “I’m sure the prime minister can find someone other than you,” she said.

  “I’m sure he can, too,” said Gabriel, “but I’m afraid he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the kidnappers made one final demand tonight.”

  “You?”

  Gabriel nodded. “No Gabriel, no girl.”

  Despite the lateness of the hour, Chiara wanted to cook. Gabriel sat at the tiny kitchen table, a glass of wine at his elbow, and recounted the journey he had taken after leaving her in Jerusalem. In any other marriage, the wife surely would have responded with incredulity and astonishment to such a story, but Chiara seemed preoccupied by the preparation of her vegetables and herbs. Only once did she look up from her work—when Gabriel told her about the empty holding cell in the house in the Lubéron, and the woman who had died in his arms. When he finished, she filled the center of her palm with salt, discarded a small portion into the sink, and poured the rest into a pot of boiling water.

  “And after all that,” she said, “you decided to take a midnight stroll to South Kensington.”

  “I considered doing a very foolish thing.”

  “More foolish than agreeing to deliver ten million euros in ransom to the kidnappers of the British prime minister’s mistress?”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “Who lives at Fifty-Nine Victoria Road?”

  “Dr. and Mrs. Robert Keller.”

  Chiara was about to ask Gabriel why he had gone to see them, but then she understood.

  “What on earth would you have told them?”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  Chiara placed several mushrooms in the center of the cutting board and began slicing them precisely. “It’s probably better they think he’s dead,” she said reflectively.

  “And if it was your son? Wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”

  “If you’re asking whether I would want to know that my son killed people for a living, the answer is no.”

  A silence fell between them.

  “I’m sorry,” Chiara said after a moment. “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

  “I know.”

  Chiara placed the mushrooms in a sauté pan and seasoned them with salt and pepper. “Did she ever know?”

  “My mother?”

  Chiara nodded.

  “No,” said Gabriel. “She never knew.”

  “But she must have suspected something,” Chiara said. “You were gone for three years.”

  “She knew I was involved in secret work and that it had something to do with Munich. But I never told her that I was the one who did the actual killing.”

  “She must have been curious.”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Munich was a trauma for the entire country,” Gabriel responded, “but it was especially hard on people like my mother—German Jews who had survived the camps. She could barely look at the newspapers or watch the funerals on television. She locked herself in her studio and painted.”

  “And when you came home after Wrath of God?”

  “She could see the death in my eyes.” He paused, then added, “She knew what it looked like.”

  “But you never talked about it?”

  “Never,” said Gabriel, shaking his head slowly. “She never told me what happened to her during the Holocaust, and I never told her what I had done while I was in Europe for three years.”

  “Do you think she would have approved?”

  “It didn’t matter to me what she thought.”

  “Of course it did, Gabriel. You’re really not as fatalistic as all that. If you were, you wouldn’t have gone to Keller’s old house in the middle of the night to stare at his father through the window.”

  Gabriel said nothing. Chiara placed a bundle of fettuccine in the boiling water and stirred it once with a wooden spoon.

  “What’s he like?” she asked.

  “Keller?”

  She nodded.

  “Extremely capable, utterly ruthless, and without a shred of conscience.”

  “He sounds like the perfect person to deliver ten million euros in ransom money to the kidnappers of Madeline Hart.”

  “Her Majesty’s government is under the impression he’s dead. Besides,” Gabriel added, “the kidnappers specifically asked for me to deliver the money.”

  “Which is precisely the reason you have no business doing it.”

  Gabriel made no reply.

  “How did they even know you were involved?”

  “They must have spotted me in Marseilles or Aix.”

  “So why would they want a professional like you to deliver the money? Why not a flunky from Downing Street who they can manipulate?”

  “I suppose they’re entertaining thoughts of killing me. But that’s going to be rather hard to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll be in possession of ten million euros that they want very badly, which means we call the shots.”

  “We?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to do this alone, do you? I’m going to have someone watching my back.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone extremely capable, utterly ruthless, and without a shred of conscience.”

  “I thought he was back in Corsica.”

&nb
sp; “He is,” said Gabriel. “But he’s about to get a wake-up call.”

  “What about me?”

  “Go back to the house in Cherbourg. I’ll bring Madeline there after paying the ransom. When she’s ready to be moved, we’ll bring her back to Britain. And then we’ll go home.”

  Chiara was silent for a moment. “You make it sound so simple,” she said at last.

  “If they play by my rules, it will be.”

  Chiara placed a bowl of steaming fettuccine and mushrooms in the center of the table and sat down opposite Gabriel.

  “No more questions?” he asked.

  “Just one,” she said. “What did the old woman in Corsica see when you dropped the oil into the water?”

  By the time they finished the dishes, it was nearly four in the morning, which meant it was nearly five on Corsica. Even so, Keller sounded awake and alert when he took Gabriel’s call. Using carefully coded language, Gabriel explained what had transpired at Downing Street and what was to happen later that day.

  “Can you make the first flight to Orly?” he asked.

  “No problem.”

  “Pick up a car at the airport and get up to the coast. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  “No problem.”

  After severing the connection, Gabriel stretched out on the bed next to Chiara and tried to sleep, but it was no use. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the woman who had died in his arms in the Lubéron, in the valley with three villas. So he lay very still, listening to the sound of Chiara’s breathing and the hiss of the traffic on Bayswater Road, as the gray light of a London dawn crept slowly into the room.

  He woke Chiara with fresh coffee at nine o’clock and showered. When he emerged from the bathroom, Jonathan Lancaster was on the television discussing his costly new initiative to repair Britain’s troubled families. Gabriel couldn’t help but marvel at the prime minister’s performance. His career was at that moment hanging by a gossamer thread, and yet he looked as commanding and unflappable as ever. Indeed, by the end of his remarks, even Gabriel was convinced that spending a few million more pounds in taxpayer money would solve the problems facing Britain’s permanent underclass.