The English Girl: A Novel Read online

  “What are they talking about?” Keller asked quietly of Gabriel.

  “A new program on Israeli television.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “No.”

  Their mood was more subdued than usual, for Ivan’s shadow hung over them. They did not speak his name at dinner. Instead, they talked about the matsav, the situation. Yossi, deeply read in the classics and history, served as their guide. He saw a world spinning dangerously out of control. The promises of the great Arab Awakening had been exposed as lies, he said, and soon there would be a crescent of radical Islam stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. America was bankrupt, tired, and no longer able to lead. It was possible this turbulent new world disorder would produce a twenty-first-century axis led by China, Iran, and, of course, Russia. And standing alone, surrounded by a sea of enemies, would be Israel and the Office.

  With that, they cleared away the dishes and repaired to the sitting room, where Gabriel finally explained why he had brought them all to England. They knew fragments of it already. Now, standing before them, a gas fire burning at his back, Gabriel swiftly completed the painting. He told them everything that had transpired, beginning with the desperate search for Madeline Hart in France and ending with the deal he had struck with Graham Seymour the previous evening in Hampstead Heath. There was one aspect of the affair, however, that he recounted out of sequence. It was his brief encounter with Madeline Hart, in the hours before her death. He had given Madeline his word he would bring her home safely. Having failed, he intended to keep that promise by undoing what was a Russian operation from beginning to end. To accomplish that, they were going to insert Mikhail into KGB Oil & Gas, he said. And then they were going to find proof that Madeline Hart had been murdered as part of a Russian plot to steal British oil from the North Sea.

  “How?” asked Eli Lavon incredulously when Gabriel had finished speaking. “How in God’s name are we going to get Mikhail inside a Kremlin-owned oil company run by Russian intelligence?”

  “We’ll find a way,” said Gabriel. “We always do.”

  The real work began the next morning when the members of Gabriel’s team began secretly burrowing into the state-owned Russian energy company known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. At the outset, the bulk of their material came from open sources such as business journals, press releases, and academic papers written by experts in the rough-and-tumble Russian oil industry. In addition, Gabriel requested help from Unit 1400, the Israeli electronic eavesdropping service. As expected, the Unit discovered that Volgatek’s Moscow-based computer networks and communications were protected by high-quality Russian firewalls—the same firewalls, interestingly enough, used by the Kremlin, the Russian military, and the SVR. Late in the day, however, the Unit managed to hack into the computers of a Volgatek field office in Gdansk, where the company owned an important refinery that produced much of Poland’s gasoline. The material was forwarded directly to the safe house in Surrey. Mikhail and Eli Lavon, the only members of the team who spoke Russian, handled the translation. Mikhail dismissed the intelligence as a dry hole, but Lavon was more optimistic. By getting their foot in the door of Gdansk, he said, they would learn much about how Volgatek operated beyond the boundaries of Mother Russia.

  By instinct, they approached their target as if it were a terrorist organization. And the first order of business when confronted with a new terror group or cell, Dina reminded them needlessly, was to identify the structure and key personnel. It was tempting to focus on those who resided at the top of the food chain, she said, but the middle managers, foot soldiers, couriers, innkeepers, and drivers usually proved far more valuable in the end. They were the passed over, the forgotten, the neglected. They carried grudges, harbored resentments, and oftentimes spent more money than they earned. This made them far easier targets for recruitment than the men who flew on private planes, drank champagne by the bucketful, and had a stable of Russian prostitutes at their beck and call, no matter where they went in the world.

  At the top of the organization chart was Gennady Lazarev, the former Russian nuclear scientist and KGB informant who had served as Viktor Orlov’s deputy at Ruzoil. Lazarev’s trusted deputy was Dmitry Bershov, and his chief of European operations was Alexei Voronin. Both were former officers of the KGB, though Voronin was by far the more presentable of the two. He spoke several European languages fluently, including English, which he had acquired while working in the KGB’s London rezidentura during the last days of the Cold War.

  The rest of Volgatek’s hierarchy proved harder to identify, which surely was no accident. Yaakov likened the company’s profile to that of the Office. The name of the chief was public knowledge, but the names of his key deputies, and the tasks they carried out, were kept secret or concealed beneath layers of deception and misdirection. Fortunately, the e-mail traffic from the Gdansk field office allowed the team to identify several other key players inside the company, including its chief of security, Pavel Zhirov. His name appeared in no company documents, and all attempts to locate a photograph were fruitless. On the team’s organizational chart, Zhirov was a man without a face.

  As the days wore on, it became clear to the team that the enterprise Zhirov protected was about more than just oil. The company was part of a larger Kremlin stratagem to turn Russia into a global energy superpower, a Eurasian Saudi Arabia, and to resurrect the Russian Empire from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Eastern and Western Europe were already overly dependent on Russian natural gas. Volgatek’s mission was to extend Russian dominance over Europe’s energy market through its purchases of oil refineries. And now, thanks to Jeremy Fallon, it had a foothold in the North Sea that would eventually send billions in oil profits gushing into the Kremlin. Yes, Volgatek Oil & Gas was about Russian avarice, the team agreed. But it was first and foremost about Russian revanchism.

  But how to plant an agent inside such an organization? It was Eli Lavon who found a possible solution, which he explained to Gabriel while they were walking in the tangled garden. After purchasing the refinery in Gdansk, he said, Volgatek had made a local Polish hire to serve as the refinery’s nominal director. In practice, the Pole had absolutely nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the refinery. He was window dressing, a bouquet of flowers designed to smooth over hurt Polish feelings over the Russian bear gobbling up a vital economic asset. Furthermore, Lavon explained, Poland wasn’t the only place Volgatek hired local helpers. They did it in Hungary, Lithuania, and Cuba as well. None of those managers fared any better than the one from Gdansk. To a man, they were all marginalized, ignored, and cut out of the loop.

  “They’re walking coffee cups,” said Lavon.

  “Which means they have no access to the kind of closely held information we’re looking for,” Gabriel pointed out.

  “That’s true,” replied Lavon. “But if the local hire also happened to be Russian by birth or ancestry, Volgatek central command might look more kindly upon him, especially if he happened to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. If that were the case, they might be tempted to give him actual responsibilities. Who knows? They might even let him into the inner sanctum in Moscow.”

  “It’s brilliant, Eli.”

  “Yes, it is,” Lavon conceded. “But it has one serious problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How do we get Volgatek to take notice of him in the first place?”

  “That’s easy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, smiling. “Really.”

  Gabriel did not take part in the family meal that night. Instead, he drove to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, where he dined alone with Viktor Orlov. His nascent plan met no resistance from the Russian; in fact, Orlov offered several key suggestions that made it better. At the conclusion of the meal, Gabriel handed Orlov the boilerplate document given to all non-Office individuals who participate in Office operations. It barred Orlov from ever disclosing his role in the affair and left him no legal rec
ourse if he or his businesses were harmed in any way. Orlov refused to sign it. Gabriel had expected nothing less.

  After leaving Orlov’s mansion, Gabriel drove up to Hampstead and then made his way on foot to Parliament Hill. Graham Seymour was waiting on the bench, flanked by his two bodyguards. They moved out of earshot as Gabriel spoke about the operation he was about to undertake and what he required in the way of unofficial British assistance. Listening, Seymour couldn’t help but smile. It was unorthodox, but then most Office operations were, especially when conceived by Gabriel and his team.

  “You know,” Seymour said, “it might actually work.”

  “It is going to work, Graham. The question is,” he added, “do you want me to go forward with it?”

  Seymour was silent for a moment. Then he rose to his feet and turned his back on the lights of London. “Bring me proof the Russians were behind Madeline’s kidnapping and murder,” he said calmly, “and I’ll make sure those bastards in the Kremlin never see a drop of our oil.”

  “Let me do it for you, Graham. That way, you won’t—”

  “This is something only I can do,” Seymour said. “Besides, a very wise man once told me a career without scandal is not a proper career at all.”

  “Type my name into a Google box, and then tell me whether you think I’m so wise.”

  Seymour smiled. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”

  “None,” replied Gabriel.

  “Good lad,” said Seymour. “But do keep one thing in mind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It might be easy for you to get Mikhail into Volgatek, but getting him out again might be quite another thing entirely.”

  With that, Seymour returned to the company of his bodyguards and melted into the darkness. Gabriel remained on the bench for another five minutes. Then he walked to his car and headed back to the house at the edge of the Knobby Copse.

  40

  GRAYSWOOD, SURREY

  The education of Mikhail Abramov, future employee of the state-owned Russian energy company known as Volgatek Oil & Gas, commenced at nine o’clock the following morning. His first tutor was none other than Viktor Orlov. Despite Gabriel’s objections, Orlov insisted on traveling to Surrey in his Mercedes Maybach limousine, trailed by a Land Rover filled with bodyguards. The small motorcade caused something of a commotion in Grayswood, and for much of the day a rumor floated about the village that the occupant of the car had been the prime minister himself. But Jonathan Lancaster was nowhere near Surrey; he was campaigning that morning in Sheffield. The latest polls gave him a commanding lead over the opposition candidate. Britain’s most famous political analyst was now predicting a landslide of historic proportions.

  Orlov returned to the safe house the following morning, and the morning after that as well. His lectures were a reflection of his unique personality: brilliant, arrogant, opinionated, condescending. He spoke mainly in English to Mikhail, with occasional forays into Russian that only Eli Lavon could understand. And sometimes he mixed the two languages together into a bizarre tongue the team referred to as “Rusglish.” He was indefatigable, irritating, and impossible not to love. He was a force to be reckoned with. He was Orlov on a mission.

  He began his tutorial with a history lesson: life under Soviet Communism, the fall of an empire, the lawless era of the oligarchs. Much to everyone’s surprise, Orlov admitted that he and the other robber barons of Russia had sown the seeds of their own destruction by growing far too rich, far too quickly. In doing so, he added, they had helped to bring about the circumstances that had led to a return of authoritarianism. The current president of Russia was a man with no ideology or belief system other than the exercise of naked power. “He is a fascist in everything but name,” Orlov said. “And I created him.”

  The next phase of Mikhail’s hasty education began on the fourth day, when he undertook what Eli Lavon described as the shortest MBA program in history. His professor was from Tel Aviv, but he had attended the Wharton School of Business and had worked briefly for ExxonMobil before returning to Israel. For seven long days and nights, he lectured Mikhail on the basics of business administration: accounting, statistics, marketing, corporate finance, risk management. Mikhail proved to be a quick study—hardly surprising, for his parents had both been prominent Soviet academics. At the conclusion of the course, the professor predicted that Mikhail had a bright future, though he had no idea what that future might hold. Then he happily signed Gabriel’s nondisclosure pledge and boarded a flight home to Israel.

  While Mikhail labored over his studies, the rest of the team worked diligently on the identity that would cloak him once he entered the field. They built him as a novelist might construct a character upon the page: ancestry and education, loves and losses, triumphs and disappointments. For several days his name eluded them, for it had to suit a man who had one foot in the West and another still rooted firmly in the East. It was Gabriel who finally chose the name Nicholas Avedon, an English perversion of Nicolai Avdonin. With Graham Seymour’s blessing, they forged him a well-traveled British passport and wrote a long and detailed curriculum vitae to match. Then, when Mikhail had completed his coursework, they took him on a tour of a life that had never been lived. There was the house in a leafy London suburb that he had never entered, and the college at Oxford where he had never cracked a book, and the offices of an unheralded drilling services firm in Aberdeen where he had never earned a paycheck. They even flew him to America so that he could recall what it was like to walk the streets of Cambridge on a chilly autumn afternoon, though he had never been to Cambridge, in autumn or any other time of the year.

  Which left only the matter of Mikhail’s appearance. It had to be altered dramatically. Otherwise, Volgatek’s friends in the SVR would remember Mikhail from operations past. Plastic surgery was not an option; the healing time was too long, and Mikhail refused to allow anyone to touch his face with a knife. It was Chiara who conceived of a potential solution, which she demonstrated to Gabriel on one of the computers. On the screen was the photograph she had taken of Mikhail for his false British passport. She pressed a single button, and the photo reappeared, with one distinct change.

  “I barely recognize him myself,” Gabriel said.

  “But will he go for it?”

  “I’ll make it clear that he has no choice.”

  That evening, in the presence of the entire team, Mikhail shaved his head bald. Yaakov, Oded, and Mordecai shaved theirs in solidarity, but Gabriel refused. His commitment to unit cohesion, he said, went only so far. The following morning, the women took Mikhail into London for a shopping excursion that raised more than a few eyebrows in the accounting department of King Saul Boulevard. Upon their return to Grayswood, they found Viktor Orlov waiting to give Mikhail a final examination, which he passed with flying colors. To celebrate, Viktor opened several bottles of his beloved Château Pétrus. As he was raising a glass in his student’s honor, there came from the garden the dull thump of a suppressed Beretta.

  “What was that?” asked Orlov.

  “I think we’re having fish for dinner,” said Mikhail.

  “Someone should have told me,” Orlov replied. “I would have brought a nice Sancerre instead.”

  Not long after Viktor Orlov received his British passport, he purchased a controlling interest in a failing newspaper, the venerable Financial Journal of London, as a means of raising his profile among the city’s smart set. A few members of the staff, including the renowned investigative reporter Zoe Reed, had resigned in protest, but most stayed on, in part because they had nowhere else to go. Under the terms of the ownership agreement, Orlov had agreed to play no role whatsoever in shaping the newspaper’s editorial content. It was a pledge he had somehow managed to keep, despite his desire to use the paper as a cudgel with which to beat his enemies in the Kremlin.

  That didn’t mean, however, that Orlov was averse to calling his editors with the occasional news tip, especially when it
concerned his own business. And so it was that, three days later, a small item appeared deep in the paper regarding a new addition to the staff at Viktor Orlov Investments, LLC. Orlov confirmed the hiring in a press release later that morning, saying that a thirty-five-year-old executive named Nicholas Avedon would be taking control of VOI’s energy portfolio, along with its oil futures trading desk. Within minutes, the Internet was swirling with rumors that Orlov had chosen a successor and was preparing a gradual withdrawal from the company’s day-to-day operations. By that evening, the rumors were so intense that Orlov felt compelled to make a rare appearance on CNBC to deny them. His performance was hardly convincing. Indeed, one prominent commentator said it raised many more questions than it answered.

  No one in London’s financial circles would ever know that the rumors of Orlov’s imminent retirement were started by a team of men and women working from an isolated house in Surrey. Nor would they know that the same rumors were injected into the bloodstream of Moscow’s business community, or that they reached the highest level of the state-owned energy company known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. Gabriel and his team were aware of this, because they read about it in a caustic e-mail sent by Alexei Voronin, Volgatek’s chief of European operations, to the head of the Gdansk field office. Eli Lavon presented a printout of the e-mail to Gabriel over dinner and translated the text, even the parts that were unfit for polite company. Gabriel responded by opening a leftover bottle of the Château Pétrus and pouring a glass for each member of the team. All in all, it was an auspicious beginning. Mikhail was now Viktor Orlov’s heir apparent. And KGB Oil & Gas was watching.