The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Page 22

  “We need a car,” he said in rapid French.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Basildon.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  34

  BASILDON, ESSEX

  It had been created after World War II as part of a grand scheme to reduce overcrowding in the bombed-out slums of London’s East End. The result was what the central planners called a New Town—a town without a history, without a soul, without a purpose other than to warehouse the working classes. Its commercial center, the Basildon town plaza, was a masterpiece of neo-Soviet architecture. So, too, was the tower of council flats that loomed menacingly over one flank, like a giant slab of burnt toast.

  A half mile farther to the east lay a tattered colony of apartment blocks and terraced houses known as the Lichfields. The streets all had agreeable names—Avon Way, Norwich Walk, Southwark Path—but cracks split the pavements and weeds thrived in the courts. A few of the houses had small front lawns, but the tiny unit at the end of Blackwater Way had only a patch of broken concrete where a worn-out car was usually parked. Its exterior was pebbledash on the ground floor and brown brick on the second. There were three small windows; all were curtained and dark. No light burned over the inhospitable little front door.

  “Does anyone work?” asked Keller, as they drove slowly past the house for a second time.

  “The mother works a few hours a week at the Boots pharmacy in the plaza,” answered Gabriel. “The brother drinks for a living.”

  “And you’re sure no one’s in there?”

  “Does it look occupied to you?”

  “Maybe they like the dark.”

  “Or maybe they’re vampires.”

  Gabriel eased the car into a common parking area around the corner and switched off the engine. Just beyond Keller’s window was a sign warning that the entire area was under twenty-four-hour CCTV surveillance.

  “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “You just killed a man for money.”

  “Not on camera.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “How long are you planning to stay in there?” asked Keller.

  “As long as necessary.”

  “What happens if the police show up?”

  “It might be a good idea if you let me know.”

  “And if they notice me sitting here?”

  “Show them your French passport and tell them you’re lost.”

  Without another word, Gabriel opened the car door and climbed out. As he started across the street, a dog began to bark somewhere in the estate. It must have been a very large dog, for each deep, sonorous volley echoed from the crumbling facades of the apartment blocks like cannon fire. For an instant Gabriel considered returning to the car—surely, he thought morosely, the beast had designs on his throat. Instead, he silently crossed the Harts’ concrete garden and presented himself at their door.

  There was no alcove or shelter from the steady rain. Gabriel tried the latch and, as expected, found it was locked. Then he withdrew a thin metal tool from his pocket and inserted it into the mechanism. A few seconds was all it took—indeed, a stranger might have assumed he was merely fumbling for his key in the dark. When he tried the latch a second time, it yielded without resistance. He eased the door open, stepped into the darkened void, and closed the door quickly. Outside the dog unleashed one last barrage of barks before finally falling silent. Gabriel returned the lock pick to his pocket, removed a small Maglite, and clicked the power switch.

  He was standing in a cramped entrance hall. The linoleum floor was strewn with unread post, and on his right several cheap wool and oilskin coats hung from hooks. Gabriel emptied the coat pockets of litter—matchbooks, receipts, business cards—before following the beam of light into the sitting room. It was a claustrophobic little space, about eight feet by ten, with three shabby armchairs arrayed around a television. In the center of the room was a low table with two overflowing ashtrays, and on one wall hung framed photographs of Madeline. Madeline as a young girl chasing a ball across a sunlit field. Madeline receiving her degrees from the University of Edinburgh. Madeline posing with Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster at Downing Street. There was also a photo of the entire Hart family standing unhappily along a gray seashore. Gabriel stared at the broad, flat features of Madeline’s parents and tried to imagine how they had been combined to produce a face as beautiful as hers. She was a mistake of nature, he thought. She was the child of a different God.

  He left the sitting room and, after passing through a small dining room, entered the kitchen. Stacks of dirty dishes stood on the countertops, and in the basin was a pool of greasy water. The air was heavy with the stench of rot. Gabriel opened one of the foot-level cabinets and found a rubbish bin overflowing with spoiled food. There was more in the refrigerator. He wondered what could have possessed them to leave the house in such chaos.

  Gabriel returned to the front entrance hall and climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor. There were three bedrooms—two tiny cells on the left side of the house and a larger room on the right, which he entered first. It belonged to Madeline’s mother. The double bed had been left unmade, and a cold draft was pouring through an open window overlooking the dirt patch that was the rear garden. Gabriel opened the paper-thin closet door and shone the beam around the interior. The rod was hung with garments from end to end, and more clothing was stacked neatly on the shelf above it. Next he went to the dresser. All the drawers were filled to capacity except for the top left—the drawer, he thought, where a woman typically kept personal papers and keepsakes. Crouching, he shone a light beneath the bed but found nothing but clouds of dust. Then he went to the telephone. It stood on one of the matching bedside tables, next to an empty glass. He lifted the receiver to his ear but heard no dial tone. Then he pressed the playback button on the answering machine. There were no messages.

  Gabriel crossed the hall and poked his head into one of the smaller bedrooms. It looked like the aftermath of a car bombing. Only the walls remained intact. They were plastered with the usual fare—football stars, supermodels, cars the occupant would never be able to afford. On the air hung a foul male odor that, thankfully, Gabriel had not encountered since leaving the army. He searched the room quickly but discovered nothing out of the ordinary—nothing except that it contained no object or slip of paper that bore the name of the creature who resided there.

  The last room Gabriel entered was Madeline’s room. It was not the Madeline who had been Jonathan Lancaster’s lover, or the remnant of Madeline whom Gabriel had encountered in France, but the Madeline who had somehow survived a childhood spent in this sad little house. It seemed to Gabriel that she had accomplished it the same way she had survived a month in captivity, with neatness and order. Her bed was crisply made; her tiny schoolgirl’s desk was ready for inspection. On it stood a row of classic English novels—Dickens, Austen, Forster, Lawrence. The volumes looked as though they had been read many times, and their pages were filled with underlined passages and notations written in a small, precise hand. Gabriel was about to slip one of the books, A Room with a View, into his coat pocket when his mobile phone vibrated softly. He picked up the call and brought the phone quickly to his ear.

  “We’ve got company,” said Keller.

  “How many?”

  “It looks like just one, but I can’t be sure.”

  Gabriel parted the gauzy curtains of Madeline’s window a fraction of an inch and saw a woman walking along Blackwater Way beneath the shelter of an umbrella. As she passed through a cone of yellow lamplight, he glimpsed her face briefly and realized at once that he had seen it somewhere before. The answer came to him as she veered into the concrete drive. It had been in an ancient church, in the mountains of the Lubéron. She was the woman who had crossed herself as though the movement were unfamil
iar to her. And for some reason she was now inserting a key into Madeline Hart’s front door.

  Gabriel switched off the phone and drew the gun from the small of his back. He was tempted to steal down the stairs and confront the woman immediately, but decided it was better to wait. Eventually, he thought, the woman would tell him who she was and why she was here, preferably without realizing she had done so. That was always the best way to acquire a piece of intelligence—without the knowledge of the target. As Shamron always preached, it was better for a spy to be a pickpocket than a mugger.

  And so Gabriel stood stock-still in Madeline Hart’s childhood room, the barrel of the gun pressed reassuringly to his cheek, as the woman stepped into the entrance hall and quietly closed the door. She emitted a single syllable that was unfamiliar to Gabriel. Then came a series of swishes and rustles that suggested she was gathering up the post and placing it into a plastic bag. Next she moved into the sitting room, where she spent approximately two minutes. Then she entered the kitchen and again uttered the same single syllable. Gabriel suspected it was a vulgarity from a language other than English, Hebrew, French, Italian, or German. He suspected something else, too. The woman, whoever she was, was searching the house, just as Gabriel had before her arrival.

  When her footfalls reached the base of the stairs, Gabriel was seized by a moment of indecision. If he was right about the woman’s intentions—that she was looking for something—she would surely search Madeline’s bedroom. He glanced around to see if there was a place to conceal himself but saw nothing suitable; the room was scarcely larger than the cell where Madeline had been held captive in France. As the woman’s steps grew louder, Gabriel decided he had no choice but to leave. But where? The bathroom was just across the hall. As he entered it without a sound, he wondered what Shamron would be thinking if he could see the future chief of Israeli intelligence at this moment. He would approve, thought Gabriel. In fact, he was certain the great Ari Shamron had taken cover in places that were far more professionally degrading than the bathroom of a Basildon council house.

  He left the door slightly ajar—a quarter inch, no more—and held the gun in his outstretched hands as the woman completed her journey up the stairs. She entered the largest bedroom first and, judging from the sound of opening drawers and slamming doors, searched it thoroughly. Five minutes later she emerged and walked past the bathroom without pausing, seemingly unaware a gun was at that instant pointed at her head. She was wearing the same tan raincoat she had worn in France, though her hair was arranged slightly differently. In her left hand was a green shopping bag from Marks & Spencer. It looked as though it contained more than just unread post.

  When she entered Madeline’s room, her search turned suddenly violent. It was a professional search, thought Gabriel, listening. A crash search . . . She tore clothing from the closet, ripped sheets from the bed, and emptied the contents of drawers onto the floor. Finally, there was a sharp crack, like the splintering of wood, followed by a heavy silence. It was broken a moment later by the sound of her voice. It was low and calm, the kind of voice one uses to deliver news to a superior over a device that transmitted a signal over the open airwaves. Gabriel couldn’t understand what she was saying—he had no ear for Slavic tongues—but he was certain of one thing.

  The woman was speaking Russian.

  35

  BASILDON, ESSEX

  Her car, a boxy old Volvo sedan, was parked across the street from the meanest of the Lichfields apartment blocks. She walked to it directly, the umbrella in her right hand, the green Marks & Spencer bag in her left. The umbrella was purely cosmetic, thought Gabriel, watching from Madeline’s window, for the rain had ended. The bag looked heavy. After opening the car door, she swung the bag onto the front passenger seat, then climbed in, leaving the umbrella unfurled until she was safely inside. The engine hesitated before coughing to life. She waited until she had reached the perimeter of the estate before switching on the headlamps. She drove fast but smoothly, like a professional.

  Gabriel took one last look at the destruction the woman had wrought in Madeline’s room and then hurried down the stairs. By the time he stepped from the doorway, Keller had pulled the car around and was waiting outside in the street. Gabriel climbed in quickly and nodded for Keller to follow the woman.

  “But be careful,” he cautioned. “She’s good.”

  “How good?”

  “Moscow Center good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I could be wrong,” said Gabriel, “but I believe the woman driving that car is KGB.”

  Technically, there was no KGB, of course. It had been disbanded not long after the collapse of the old Soviet empire. The Russian Federation now had two intelligence services: the FSB and the SVR. The FSB handled matters inside Russia’s borders: counterintelligence, counterterrorism, the mafiya, the pro-democracy activists who were brave enough, or stupid enough, to challenge the men who now ruled Russia from behind the walls of the Kremlin. The SVR was Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It ran its global network of spies from the same secluded campus in Yasenevo that had served as the headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. SVR officers still called the building Moscow Center—and, not surprisingly, even Russian citizens still referred to the SVR as the KGB. And for good reason. The Kremlin might have changed the name of Russia’s intelligence service, but the SVR’s mission remained the same—to penetrate and weaken the nations of the old Atlantic alliance, with the United States and Great Britain at the top of its list.

  But why had an SVR field agent followed Gabriel and Keller to an ancient church in the mountains of the Lubéron? And why had the same SVR field agent just searched the family home of a dead English girl named Madeline Hart? A girl who had been the lover of the British prime minister. A girl who had been kidnapped while on holiday on the island of Corsica and held for ransom. A girl who had burned to death in the trunk of a Citroën C4, on the beach at Audresselles.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Keller.

  “I know what I heard,” replied Gabriel.

  “You heard a woman speaking Russian.”

  “No,” countered Gabriel, “I heard a Moscow Center agent turning over a room.”

  They were headed west on the A127. The time was approaching eight o’clock. The eastbound lanes were still thick with the remnants of the London evening rush, but the westbound side was moving at speed. The woman was about two hundred yards ahead. Keller had no trouble keeping track of the old Volvo’s distinctive taillights.

  “Let’s assume you’re right,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Let’s assume that the KGB, or the SVR, or whatever the hell you want to call it, is somehow connected to the kidnapping of Madeline Hart.”

  “I would argue that, at this moment in time, that fact is beyond dispute.”

  “Point taken,” said Keller. “But what’s the link?”

  “I’m still working on that. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was their operation from the beginning.”

  “Operation?” asked Keller incredulously. “You’re saying the Russians kidnapped the mistress of the British prime minister?”

  Gabriel made no reply. He didn’t quite believe it yet, either.

  “Would you allow me to remind you of a few salient facts?” Keller asked.

  “Please do.”

  “Marcel Lacroix and René Brossard weren’t Russian, and they didn’t work for the SVR. They were both French organized crime figures with a long track record in Marseilles and the south of France.”

  “Maybe they didn’t realize who they were working for.”

  “What about Paul?”

  “We don’t know anything about him except that he speaks French like he learned it from a tape—or so said the great Don Anton Orsati of Corsica.”

  “Peace be upon him.”

  Gabriel rapped his
knuckle on the windshield and said, “She’s too far ahead of you.”

  “I’ve got her.”

  “Close the gap some.”

  Keller accelerated for a few seconds, then eased off the throttle.

  “You think Paul is Russian?” he asked.

  “That would help explain why the French police were never able to attach a name to his face.”

  “But why would he hire French criminals to kidnap Madeline instead of doing the job himself?”

  “Have you ever heard of a false flag operation?” asked Gabriel. “Intelligence services routinely conduct operations that would cause diplomatic or political damage if they were ever exposed. So they cloak those activities under a false flag. Sometimes they pose as operatives from another service. Or sometimes they pose as something else entirely.”

  “Like French criminals?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “There’s just one problem with your theory.”

  “Just one?”

  “The SVR doesn’t need money.”

  “I doubt very much that this was about money.”

  “You gave them two suitcases filled with ten million euros.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “If this wasn’t about money, what was the payment all about?”

  “They flew the false flag until the end,” said Gabriel.

  Keller was silent for a moment. Finally, he asked, “But why did they kill Madeline?”

  “I don’t know.”