The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Read online

  “Midnight.”

  Gabriel switched off the phone, removed the battery and SIM card, and placed both on the coffee table.

  “What’s supposed to happen at midnight?”

  It was Lancaster who responded.

  “He wants an answer, yes or no. Yes means I agree to pay ten million euros in cash in exchange for Madeline and a promise the video will never be made public. If I say no, Madeline will die and everything will come out. Obviously,” he added, exhaling heavily, “I have no choice but to agree to their demands.”

  “That would be the biggest mistake of your life, Prime Minister.”

  “The second biggest.”

  Lancaster lowered his long body onto the couch and covered his famous face with his hand. Gabriel thought of the people he had seen on the streets of London that evening going about their business, unaware of the fact their prime minister was at that moment paralyzed by scandal.

  “What choice do I have?” Lancaster asked after a moment.

  “You can still go to the police.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “Then you have to negotiate.”

  “He said he wouldn’t. He said he’d kill her if I didn’t agree to pay the ten million.”

  “They always say that. But trust me, Prime Minister—if you agree, he’ll get angry.”

  “At me?”

  “At himself. He’ll think he blew it by asking for only ten million. He’ll come back to you for more money. And if you agree to pay that number, he’ll come back for even more. He’ll bleed you dry, million by million, until there’s nothing left.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “We wait for the phone to ring. And when it does, we tell him we’ll pay one million, take it or leave it. And then we hang up the phone and wait for him to call back.”

  “What if he doesn’t call back? What if he kills her?”

  “He won’t.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because he’s invested too much time, effort, and money. To him, this is business, nothing more. You have to act the same way. You have to approach this like any other tough negotiation. There are no shortcuts. You have to wear him down. You have to be patient. It’s the only way we’re going to get her back.”

  A heavy silence fell over the room. Jeremy Fallon had moved from his post in the window and was contemplating a painting, a London cityscape by Turner, as if noticing it for the first time. Graham Seymour seemed to have developed a passionate interest in the carpet.

  “I appreciate your advice,” Lancaster said after a moment, “but we’ve—” He stopped himself, then, deliberately, said, “I’ve decided to give them whatever they want. It is because of my reckless behavior that Madeline has been kidnapped. And I am obligated to do whatever is necessary to bring her home safely. It is the honorable thing to do, for her sake, and for the sake of this office.”

  The line sounded as though Jeremy Fallon had written it—and if the smug expression on Fallon’s unfortunate face were any indicator, he had.

  “Honorable, perhaps,” said Gabriel, “but unwise.”

  “I disagree,” said Lancaster. “And so does Jeremy.”

  “With all due respect,” Gabriel said, turning to Fallon, “when was the last time you successfully negotiated the release of a hostage?”

  “I think you’ll agree,” Fallon responded, “this isn’t an ordinary kidnapping case. The target of the extortionists is the prime minister of the United Kingdom. And under no circumstances can I allow him to be incapacitated by a long, drawn-out negotiation.”

  Fallon had made this speech quietly and with the supreme confidence of someone who was used to whispering instructions into the ear of one of the world’s most powerful men. It was an image that had been captured many times by the British news media. And it was why the cartoonists routinely depicted Fallon as a puppeteer, with Jonathan Lancaster dancing at the end of his string.

  “Where do you intend to get the money?” asked Gabriel.

  “Friends of the prime minister have agreed to lend it to him until he’s in a position to repay them.”

  “It must be nice to have friends like that.” Gabriel rose. “It looks as though you have everything under control. All you need now is someone to deliver the money. But make sure you find someone good. Otherwise, you’re going to be back in this room in a few days, waiting for the phone to ring.”

  “Do you have any candidates?” asked Lancaster.

  “Just one,” said Gabriel, “but I’m afraid he’s unavailable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he has a plane to catch.”

  “When’s the next flight to Ben Gurion?”

  “Eight a.m.”

  “Then I suppose there’s no harm in staying a little longer, is there?”

  Gabriel hesitated. “No, Prime Minister. I suppose there isn’t.”

  By then, it was a few minutes past ten. Gabriel had no desire to spend the next two hours trapped with a politician whose career was about to go supernova, so he saw himself downstairs to the kitchen to raid the prime ministerial fridge. The night chef, a plump woman of fifty with the face of a cherub, made a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea, then studied Gabriel attentively as he ate, as though she feared he were malnourished. She knew better than to ask about the nature of his visit. Few people came to Number Ten late at night dressed in clothing from a discount department store in Marseilles.

  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 th
e 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.