The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Page 23

“Where’s her family?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did the Russians find out about Madeline and Lancaster?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “There’s someone who might.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The woman driving that car,” said Keller, pointing over the steering wheel toward the taillights of the Volvo.

  “It’s better to be a pickpocket than a mugger.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Close the gap,” said Gabriel, rapping his knuckle against the glass. “She’s too far ahead of you.”

  She passed beneath the M25 ring road, sped over a landscape of farms and fields, and then entered the suburbs of metropolitan London. After thirty minutes the suburbs gave way to the boroughs of the East End and, eventually, to the office towers of the City. From there, she headed across Holborn and Soho to Mayfair, where she pulled to the curb of a busy section of Duke Street, just south of Oxford Street. After engaging the emergency flashers, she climbed out of the Volvo and carried the Marks & Spencer bag toward a Mercedes sedan that was parked a few feet away. As she approached the car, the trunk lid rose automatically, though Gabriel could see no evidence the woman had been the one to open it. She placed the bag inside, closed the lid with a thump, and returned to the Volvo. Ten seconds later she eased carefully away from the curb and headed toward Oxford Street.

  “What should I do?” asked Keller.

  “Let her go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the person who opened the trunk of that Mercedes is watching to see if she’s being tailed.”

  Keller scanned the street. So did Gabriel. There were restaurants on both sides, all of them catering to the tourist trade, and the pavements were crowded with pedestrians. Any one of them might have been carrying the key to the Mercedes.

  “What now?” asked Keller.

  “We wait.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Pickpockets and muggers?”

  “Something like that.”

  Keller was staring at the Mercedes, but Gabriel was looking around at the culinary nightmare that was upper Duke Street: Pizza Hut, Garfunkel’s, something called Pure Waffle, whatever that meant. The class of the street was Bella Italia, a chain restaurant with locations scattered across the city, and it was there that Gabriel’s gaze finally settled. A man and a woman several years apart in age were at that moment stepping from the doorway, presumably having finished their meal. The man wore a waxed hat against the light drizzle, and the woman was staring into her handbag as though she had misplaced something. Earlier that day, in the exhibition rooms of the Courtauld Gallery, she had been carrying a guidebook open to the wrong page, and the man had been wearing tinted eyeglasses. Now he wore no spectacles at all. After helping the woman into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, he walked around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel. The engine, when started, seemed to make the street vibrate. Then the car shot away from the curb with a sharp chirp of its tires and barreled across Oxford Street at the instant the traffic signal turned to red.

  “Well played,” said Keller.

  “Indeed,” replied Gabriel.

  “Should I try to follow him?”

  Gabriel shook his head slowly. They were good, he thought. Moscow Center good.

  The Grand Hotel Berkshire was not grand, nor was it in the enchanted English county of Berkshire. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Cromwell Road, with a discount electronics store on one flank and a suspect Internet café on the other. Gabriel and Keller arrived at midnight. They had no reservation and no luggage; it was still inside the Bayswater safe flat, which Gabriel now assumed was under Russian surveillance. He paid for a two-night stay in cash and told the night clerk that he and his companion were expecting no guests and wanted no interruptions of any kind, including maid service. The night clerk found nothing unusual in Gabriel’s instructions. The Grand Hotel Berkshire—or GHB, as management referred to it in shorthand—catered to those who took the road less traveled.

  Their room was on the uppermost floor, the fourth, and had a sniper’s view of the road. Gabriel insisted Keller sleep first. Then he sat in the window, with the gun in his lap and his feet resting on the sill, five questions running ceaselessly through his thoughts. Why would the Russian intelligence service be so reckless as to kidnap the mistress of the British prime minister? Why had there been a payment of ransom when surely money was not what the Russians wanted? Why had they killed Madeline? Where was her family? And how much did Jonathan Lancaster and Jeremy Fallon know? Satisfactory answers eluded him. He could make educated guesses, deductions, but nothing more. He needed to pick a few more pockets, he thought—and, if necessary, he would carry out a mugging or two as well. And then what? He thought of the old signadora and her prophecies about an old enemy and the city of heretics in the east.

  You must never set foot there. If you do, you will die . . .

  Just then, a newspaper delivery truck screeched to a halt outside the Tesco Express on the other side of the road. Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. It was nearly four o’clock, time to wake Keller and get a few hours’ sleep himself. Instead, he picked up the volume of E. M. Forster he had taken from Madeline’s room, opened it to a random page, and began to read:

  Gabriel closed the volume and watched the delivery truck move off along the wet, darkened street. And then he understood. But how to prove it? He needed the help of someone who knew the dark world of Russian business and politics. Someone who was just as ruthless as the men in the Kremlin.

  He needed Viktor Orlov.

  36

  CHELSEA, LONDON

  Viktor Orlov had always been good with numbers. Born in Moscow during the darkest days of the Cold War, he had attended the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics and had worked as a physicist in the Soviet nuclear weapons program. At the suggestion of his superiors, he joined the Communist Party—though many years later, in an interview with a British newspaper, he would claim he was never a true believer. “I joined the Party,” he said without a trace of remorse, “because it was the only avenue of career advancement available to me. I suppose I could have been a dissident, but the gulag never seemed like a terribly appealing place to me.”

  When the Soviet Union finally breathed its last, Orlov did not shed a tear. In fact, he became wildly drunk on cheap Soviet vodka and ran through the streets of Moscow shouting, “The king is dead.” The next morning, thoroughly hungover, he renounced his membership in the Communist Party, resigned from the Soviet nuclear program, and vowed to become rich. Within a few years, Orlov had earned a sizable fortune importing computers, appliances, and other Western goods for the nascent Russian market. Later, he used that fortune to acquire Russia’s largest state-owned steel company along with Ruzoil, the Siberian oil giant, at bargain-basement prices. Before long, Viktor Orlov, a former government physicist who once had to share an apartment with two other Soviet families, was a billionaire many times over and the richest man in Russia. He was one of the original oligarchs, a modern-day robber baron who built his empire by looting the crown jewels of the Soviet state. Orlov was unapologetic about how he had become wealthy. “Had I been born an Englishman,” he once told a British interviewer, “my money might have come to me cleanly. But I was born a Russian. And I earned a Russian fortune.”

  But in post-Soviet Russia, a land with no rule of law and rife with crime and corruption, Orlov’s fortune made him a marked man. He survived at least three attempts on his life, and it was rumored that he had ordered several men killed in retaliation. But the greatest threat to Orlov would come from the man who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia. He believed that Viktor Orlov and the other oligarchs had stolen the country’s most valua
ble assets, and it was his intention to steal them back. After settling into the Kremlin, the new president summoned Orlov and demanded two things: his steel company and Ruzoil. “And keep your nose out of politics,” he added ominously. “Otherwise, I’m going to cut it off.”

  Orlov agreed to relinquish his steel interests but not Ruzoil. The president was not amused. He immediately ordered prosecutors to open a fraud-and-bribery investigation, and within a week he had an arrest warrant in hand. Orlov wisely fled to London, where he became one of the Russian president’s most vocal and effective critics. For several years, Ruzoil remained legally icebound, beyond the reach of both Orlov and the new masters of the Kremlin. Finally, Orlov was convinced to surrender it as part of a secret deal to secure the release of four people who had been taken hostage by a Russian arms dealer named Ivan Kharkov. In return, the British rewarded Orlov by making him a subject of the realm and granting him a brief and very private meeting with Her Majesty the Queen. The Office gave him a note of gratitude, which had been dictated by Chiara and handwritten by Gabriel. Ari Shamron delivered the note in person and burned it when Orlov had finished reading it.

  “Will I ever get the opportunity to meet this remarkable man in person?” Orlov had asked.

  “No,” Shamron had replied.

  Undeterred, Orlov had given Shamron his most private number, which Shamron had given to Gabriel. He called it later that morning, from a public phone near the Grand Hotel Berkshire, and was surprised when Orlov answered himself.

  “I’m one of the people you saved by giving up Ruzoil,” Gabriel said without mentioning his name. “The one who wrote you the note that the old man burned after you read it.”

  “He was one of the most disagreeable creatures I’ve ever met.”

  “Wait until you get to know him a little better.”

  Orlov emitted a small, dry laugh. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I need your help.”

  “The last time you needed my help, it cost me an oil company worth at least sixteen billion dollars.”

  “This time it won’t cost you a thing.”

  “I’m free at two this afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “Number Forty-Three,” said Orlov.

  And then the line went dead.

  Number Forty-Three was the street address of Viktor Orlov’s redbrick mansion on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Gabriel made his way there on foot, with Keller running countersurveillance a hundred yards behind. The house was tall and narrow and covered in wisteria. Like its neighbors, it was set back from the street, behind a wrought-iron fence. An armored Bentley limousine stood outside, a chauffeur at the wheel. Directly behind the Bentley was a black Range Rover, occupied by four members of Orlov’s security detail. All were former members of Keller’s old regiment: the elite Special Air Service.

  The bodyguards watched Gabriel with obvious curiosity as he headed up the garden walk and presented himself at Orlov’s front door. The doorbell, when pressed, produced a maid in a starched black-and-white uniform. After ascertaining Gabriel’s identity, she conveyed him up a flight of wide, elegant stairs to Orlov’s office. The room was an exact replica of the queen’s private study in Buckingham Palace—all except for the giant plasma media wall that flickered with financial newscasts and market data from around the world. As Gabriel entered, Orlov was standing before it, as if in a trance. As usual, he wore a dark Italian suit and a lavish pink necktie bound in an enormous Windsor knot. His thinning gray hair was gelled and spiked. Reflected numbers glowed softly in the lenses of his fashionable eyeglasses. He was motionless except for the left eye, which was twitching nervously.

  “How much did you make today, Viktor?”

  “Actually,” said Orlov, still staring at the video wall, “I think I lost ten or twenty million.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  Orlov turned and regarded Gabriel silently for a long moment before finally extending a manicured hand. His skin was cool to the touch and peculiarly soft. It was like shaking hands with an infant.

  “Because I am a Russian,” he said, “I’m not easily shocked. But I have to admit I am truly surprised to see you standing here in my office. I assumed we would never meet.”

  “I’m sorry, Viktor. I should have come a long time ago.”

  “I understand why you didn’t.” Orlov smiled sadly. “We have something in common, you and I. We were both targeted by the Kremlin. And we both managed to survive.”

  “Some of us have survived better than others,” said Gabriel, glancing around the magnificent room.

  “I’ve been lucky. And the British government has been very good to me,” Orlov added pointedly, “which is why I want to do nothing that might upset the powers that be in Whitehall.”

  “Our interests are the same.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. So, Mr. Allon, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”

  “Volgatek Oil and Gas.”

  Orlov smiled. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad someone finally noticed.”

  37

  CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA

  Viktor Orlov had never been reluctant to talk about money. In fact, he rarely talked about anything else. He boasted that his suits cost ten thousand dollars each, that his handmade dress shirts were the finest in the world, and that the diamond-and-gold watch he wore on his wrist was among the most expensive ever made. The current incarnation of the watch was actually his second. He had famously destroyed the first in Switzerland, when he had struck it against a pine tree while skiing. “Silly me,” he told a British tabloid after the multimillion-dollar crash, “but I forgot to take the damn thing off before leaving the chalet.”

  His wine of choice was Château Pétrus, the famous Pomerol that he drank as though it were Evian. It was a bit early in the afternoon, even for Orlov, so they had tea instead. Orlov drank his Russian style, through a sugar cube that he held between his front teeth. His arm was flung toward Gabriel along the back of an elegant brocade couch, and he was twirling his costly spectacles by the stem, something he always did when he was speaking about Russia.

  It was not the Russia of his childhood, or the Russia he had served as a nuclear scientist, but the Russia that had stumbled into existence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was lawless Russia—drunken, confused, lost Russia. Its traumatized people had been promised cradle-to-grave security. Now, suddenly, they had to fend for themselves. It was social Darwinism at its most vicious. The strong preyed on the weak, the weak went hungry, and the oligarchs reigned supreme. They became the new tsars of Russia, the new commissars. They blew through Moscow in bulletproof caravans surrounded by heavily armed security details. At night, the security details fought each other in the streets. “It was the Wild East,” said Orlov reflectively. “It was madness.”

  “But you loved it,” said Gabriel.

  “What was not to love? We were gods, truly.”

  Early in his career as a capitalist, Orlov had run his burgeoning empire alone and with an iron fist. But after the acquisition of Ruzoil, he realized he needed a second-in-command. He found one in Gennady Lazarev, a brilliant theoretical mathematician he had worked within the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Lazarev knew nothing of capitalism, but like Orlov he was good with numbers. Lazarev learned the business from the ground up. Then Orlov placed him in charge of Ruzoil’s day-to-day operations. It was, said Orlov, the biggest mistake he had ever made in business.

  “Why?” asked Gabriel.

  “Because Gennady Lazarev was KGB,” Orlov answered. “He was KGB when he was working inside the nuclear weapons program, and he was KGB when I placed him in charge of Ruzoil.”

  “You never had any suspicions?”

  Orlov shook his head. “He was very good—and very loyal to the sword and the shield, which is how th
e KGB thugs like to refer to themselves. Needless to say,” Orlov added, “Lazarev betrayed me. He gave the Kremlin mountains of internal documents—documents that the state prosecutors then used to fabricate a case against me. And when I fled the country, Lazarev ran Ruzoil as though it were his own.”

  “He cut you out?”

  “Completely.”

  “And when you agreed to give up Ruzoil in order to get us out of Russia?”

  “Lazarev was already gone by then. He was running a new state-owned petroleum company. Apparently, the Russian president chose the name for this enterprise himself. He called it Volgatek Oil and Gas. There was a joke running round the Kremlin at the time that the president wanted to call the company KGB Oil and Gas but didn’t think that would play well in the West.”

  Volgatek, Orlov resumed, was to have no role in domestic Russian oil production, which had already leveled off. Instead, its sole purpose was to expand Russia’s oil and gas interests internationally, thus increasing the Kremlin’s global power and influence. Backed by Kremlin money, Volgatek went on a shopping spree in Europe, purchasing a chain of oil refineries in Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary. Then, over the objections of the Americans, it signed a lucrative drilling agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It also signed development deals with Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria.

  “Do you see a pattern here?” asked Orlov.

  “The deals Volgatek struck were all in the lands of the old Soviet empire or in countries hostile to the United States.”

  “Correct,” said Orlov.

  But Volgatek wasn’t content to stop there, he added. It expanded its operations into Western Europe, signing distribution and refinery deals in Greece, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Then it set its sights on the North Sea, where it wanted to drill in two newly discovered fields off the Western Isles of Scotland. Volgatek’s geologists estimated that production would eventually reach one hundred thousand barrels a day, with a large portion of profits flowing directly into the coffers of the Kremlin. The company applied to Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change for a license. And then the secretary of state for energy asked Viktor Orlov to pop over to his office for a chat.