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

  “You know I want him, Ari.”

  “Then let him settle an old score with the Russians,” Shamron said, “and he’ll be yours.”

  “Who’s going to tell Uzi?”

  “I doubt he’ll take my call.”

  And so it was that the Israeli prime minister, acting at the behest of Ari Shamron, called the chief of his foreign intelligence service and ordered him to approve an operation the chief wanted no part of. Witnesses would later attest to the fact that voices were raised, and there were rumors Navot threatened to resign. But they were only that, rumors, for Navot loved being the chief almost as much as Shamron had. In a sign of things to come, Navot refused to call Gabriel in London to personally bestow his blessing, leaving the task to a lowly desk officer instead. Gabriel received his formal operational charter shortly after midnight London time, in a phone call lasting less than ten seconds. After hanging up the phone, he and Keller left the embassy and set out through the quiet streets of London, toward the Grand Hotel Berkshire.

  “What about me?” asked Keller. “Do I stay, or do I get on the next plane to Corsica?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I think I’ll stay.”

  “You won’t be disappointed.”

  “I don’t speak Hebrew.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can make fun of you, and you’ll never know it.”

  “How are you going to use me?”

  “You speak French like a Frenchman, you have several clean passports, and you’re rather good with a gun. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

  “May I offer a piece of advice?”

  “Just one.”

  “You’re going to need a Russian.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Gabriel. “I’ve got one.”

  39

  GRAYSWOOD, SURREY

  The rambling Tudor house stood a mile from the old Grayswood parish church, at the edge of the Knobby Copse. A rutted beech drive led to it; thick hedgerows shielded it from view. There was a tangled garden for thinking deep thoughts, eight private acres for wrestling with one’s demons, and a stock pond that hadn’t been fished in years. The bass that stalked its dark waters were now the size of sharks. Housekeeping, the Office division that acquired and maintained secure properties, referred to the pond as Loch Ness.

  Gabriel and Keller arrived at the property shortly after noon the next day, in a four-wheel-drive Land Rover that had been supplied by Transport. In the back were two stainless steel crates filled with secure communications equipment taken from the embassy safe room, along with several bags of groceries from the Sainsbury’s supermarket in Guildford. After loading the food into the pantry, they pulled the covers from the furniture, blew the cobwebs from the eaves, and searched the old house from end to end for listening devices. Then they went into the garden and stood on the banks of the stock pond. Dorsal fins carved slits in the black surface.

  “They weren’t joking,” said Keller.

  “No,” said Gabriel.

  “What do they eat?”

  “They devoured one of my best officers the last time we were here.”

  “Is there any tackle?”

  “In the mudroom.”

  Keller went inside and found a pair of rods leaning in the corner, next to a splintered old oar. While searching for a lure, he heard a dull thud, like the snapping of a tree limb. Stepping outside, he smelled the unmistakable odor of gunpowder on the air. Then he glimpsed Gabriel coming up the garden path, a silenced Beretta in one hand, a two-foot fish in the other.

  “That hardly seems sporting,” Keller said.

  “I don’t have time for sport,” said Gabriel. “I have to figure out a way to get an agent inside a Russian oil company. And I have many mouths to feed.”

  Late that afternoon, as the hedgerows melted into the gathering darkness and the air turned brittle with cold, there arrived at the isolated Tudor house at the edge of the Knobby Copse a caravan of three motorcars. The vehicles were of different make and model, as were the nine operatives who emerged from them, weary after a long day of clandestine travel. Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the operatives were known as Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, because of their ability to gather and strike quickly. The Americans, jealous of the unit’s matchless list of operational accomplishments, referred to them as “God’s team.”

  Chiara entered the house first, followed by Rimona Stern and Dina Sarid. Petite and dark-haired, Dina was the Office’s top terrorism analyst, but she possessed a brilliant analytical mind that made her an asset in any kind of operation. Rimona, a Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, had started her career in military intelligence but was now part of the Office unit that focused exclusively on the Iranian nuclear program. She also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Indeed, Gabriel’s fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless child on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house in Tiberias.

  Next came a pair of all-purpose field operatives named Oded and Mordecai, followed by Yaakov Rossman and Yossi Gavish. Yaakov, a hard figure with black hair and a pockmarked face, was an agent runner by trade who specialized in the recruitment and maintenance of Arab spies. Yossi was a senior officer from Research, the Office’s analytical division. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced British accent.

  From the last car emerged two men—one of late middle age, the other in the prime of life. The elder of the two was none other than Eli Lavon: noted archaeologist, hunter of Nazi war criminals and looted Holocaust assets, and surveillance artist extraordinaire. As usual, Lavon was wearing many layers of mismatched clothing. He had thinning hair that defied styling of any sort and the vigilant brown eyes of a terrier. His suede loafers made no sound as he crossed the entrance hall and entered Gabriel’s warm embrace. Eli Lavon did nearly everything silently. Shamron once said that the legendary Office watcher could disappear while shaking your hand.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” asked Gabriel.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Besides,” Lavon added, “your leading man said he wouldn’t go anywhere near the Russians unless I was watching his back.”

  Gabriel looked at the tall figure standing just behind Lavon’s tiny shoulder. His name was Mikhail Abramov. Lanky and fair with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun. It was Mikhail, working with a CIA officer named Sarah Bancroft, who had infiltrated the personal entourage of one Ivan Kharkov, thus initiating the long and bloody war between the Office and Ivan’s private army. Had Viktor Orlov not surrendered Ruzoil to the Kremlin, Mikhail would have died in Russia, along with Gabriel and Chiara. Indeed, on Mikhail’s porcelain cheekbone was a deep scar left by Ivan’s sledgehammer fist.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Gabriel said, touching the scar now. “We can find someone else.”

  “Like who?” asked Mikhail, glancing around the room.

  “Yossi can do it.”

  “Yossi speaks four languages,” Mikhail said, “but Russian doesn’t happen to be one of them. They could
be talking about slitting his throat, and he would think they were ordering chicken Kiev.”

  The members of Gabriel’s fabled team had stayed in the house before, and so they settled into their old rooms with a minimum of bickering while Chiara headed into the kitchen to prepare an elaborate reunion meal. The main entrée was the enormous bass, which she roasted with white wine and herbs. Gabriel placed Keller to his right at dinner, a deliberate sign to the others that, for now at least, the Englishman was to be treated as a member of the family. At first the others were uneasy about his presence, but gradually they warmed to him. For the most part, they conducted the meal in English for his benefit. But when discussing their last operation, they reverted to Hebrew.

  “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 looki
ng 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 recourse 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.