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

  “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.

  41

  MAYFAIR, LONDON

  The offices of Viktor Orlov Investments, LLC, occupied four floors of a luxury Mayfair office block, not far from the American Embassy. When Nicholas Avedon arrived there early the next morning, the entire senior staff of the firm was waiting in the main conference room to greet him. Orlov made a few brief remarks, followed by a round of hasty introductions, all of which were unnecessary because Mikhail had memorized the names and faces of Orlov’s team during his preparation at the safe house in Surrey.

  If they had expected him to ease into the job slowly, they were sadly mistaken. Because within an hour of settling into his new corner office overlooking Hanover Square, he had begun a top-to-bottom review of VOI’s lucrative investments in the energy field. Never mind that he had conducted the same review already within the walls of the safe house, or that his insightful findings had already been written for him by Victor Orlov. The review sent a signal to the rest of the staff that Nicholas Avedon was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been brought to VOI to do a job. And heaven help the fool who tried to stand in his way.

  His days quickly acquired a strict routine. He would arrive at his desk early, having read the morning business journals and checked the Asian markets, and then spend an hour or two with his spreadsheets and charts before joining the morning senior staff meeting, which was always held in Orlov’s spacious office. He tended to keep his own counsel during large gatherings, but when he did choose to speak, his remarks set new standards for brevity. Most days he lunched alone. Then he would labor at his desk until seven or eight, when he would return to the spacious flat Gabriel had rented for him in Maida Vale. Housekeeping had taken a smaller flat in the building across the street as well. Whenever Mikhail was at home, a member of the team watched over him. And when he was at work, a high-resolution video camera with a secure transmitter kept a vigil for them.

  As it turned out, Volgatek was watching him, too. Gabriel and the team knew this because Unit 1400 had finally managed to break into Volgatek’s computer network, and they were now reading the e-mail of top company executives almost in real time. The name Nicholas Avedon featured prominently in several—including one sent by Gennady Lazarev to Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s faceless security chief, requesting a background check. Nicholas Avedon was now a flashing light on Volgatek’s radar screen. It was time, said Gabriel, to make him burn a little brighter.

  The next morning, Nicholas Avedon presented the findings of his review to Viktor Orlov and the entire team at VOI. Orlov declared them brilliant, which was hardly a surprise, since he had conceived and written them himself. Over the next few days, he undertook a series of bold market moves, all of which had been long in the planning, that radically altered VOI’s position in the global energy sector. During a whirlwind round of print and broadcast interviews, Orlov called it “energy for the twenty-second century and beyond”—and whenever possible, he gave credit to the plan’s nominal architect: Nicholas Avedon. The moneymen from the City liked what they saw of Orlov’s young protégé. And so, it seemed, did KGB Oil & Gas.

  They had demonstrated competence on the part of Nicholas Avedon. Now it was time to reveal the level to which Viktor Orlov had grown dependent upon him. Stock analysts and middle managers, said Gabriel, were a dime a dozen. Gennady Lazarev would make a play for Nicholas Avedon for one reason and one reason only—in order to screw his former mentor and business partner.

  And so began what the team described as the Viktor and Nicholas Follies. For the next two weeks, they were inseparable. They lunched together, dined together, and wherever Viktor went in public, Nicholas was at his side. On several occasions he was seen leaving Orlov’s Cheyne Walk mansion late in the evening, and he spent a weekend relaxing at Orlov’s sprawling Berkshire estate, a perquisite bestowed upon no other employee of the firm. As their relationship grew closer, tensions began to rise inside VOI’s Mayfair headquarters. Orlov’s other division chiefs didn’t like the fact that Nicholas Avedon began sitting in on what were usually one-on-one meetings with the boss—or that Avedon was often seen whispering advice into Viktor’s cocked ear. A few of the other staff declared open war on him, but most trimmed their sails accordingly. Avedon was besieged with invitations for after-work drinks and working dinners. He turned them all down. Viktor, he said, required his full attention.

  Next they took the Follies on a tour of the Continent. There was the business forum in Paris, where they were dazzling. And the gathering of Swiss bankers in Geneva, where they couldn’t put a foot wrong. And the rather tense meeting in Madrid with the CEO of an Orlov-owned pipeline company, who was given six months to show a profit or he would find himself looking for another job, along with the rest of Spain.

  Finally, they flew to Budapest for a meeting of business and government leaders from the so-called emerging markets of Eastern Europe. Gazprom, the Russian gas giant, sent a representative to assure those present that they had nothing to fear from their overdependence on Russian energy, that the Kremlin would never dream of turning off the spigot as a means of imposing its will on the lost lands of its former empire. That evening, at a cocktail reception held on the banks of the Danube, the man from Gazprom introduced himself to Nicholas Avedon and found, much to his surprise, that he spoke fluent Russian. Clearly, the Gazprom executive was impressed by what he heard, because a few minutes after the encounter an e-mail arrived in Gennady Lazarev’s in-box. Gabriel and the team read it even before Lazarev managed to open it. It seemed that Nicholas Avedon was now in play. “Hire him,” said the man from Gazprom. “If you don’t, we will.”

  But how to bring the two sides together so that the relationship could be consummated? Never one to wait by the phone, Gabriel wanted to force the issue by placing Mikhail and Lazarev in close proximity, in a place where they might have a moment or two for a private chat. He saw his chance when Unit 1400 intercepted an e-mail that had been sent to Lazarev by his secretary. The topic was Lazarev’s itinerary for the upcoming Global Energy Forum, the biennial gathering of something called the International Association of Petroleum Producers. Reading it, Gabriel smiled. The Follies were going to Copenhagen. And the Office was going with them.

  42

  COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

  Five anxious days later, the lords of oil began flowing into Copenhagen from the four corners of the earth: Saudis and Emiratis, Azeris and Kazakhs, Brazilians and Venezuelans, Americans and Canadians. The global warming activists were predictably appalled by the gathering, with one group issuing the hysterical claim that the carbon emitted by the conference itself would eventually cause the oceans to swallow a village in Bangladesh. The delegates seemed not to notice. They arrived in Copenhagen aboard private jets and roared through
its quaint streets in armored limousines powered by internal combustion engines. Perhaps one day the oil would run out and the planet would grow too hot to sustain human life. But for now at least, the extractors of fossil fuels still reigned supreme.

  The competition for resources in Copenhagen was intense. Dinner reservations were impossible to come by, and the Hotel d’Angleterre, a white luxury liner of a building overlooking the sprawling King’s New Square, was filled to capacity. Viktor Orlov and Mikhail arrived at its graceful entrance in a blinding snowstorm and were escorted by management to a pair of neighboring suites on an upper floor. Mikhail’s contained a platter of Danish treats and a bottle of Dom Pérignon, which was chilling in an ice bucket. The last time he had stayed in a hotel on Office business, he had used the complimentary champagne to inflict an injury on his knee for the sake of his cover. Surely, he thought, his cover for this operation demanded that he partake of a glass or two. As he was removing the cork he heard a discreet knock at the door—curious, because he had hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the latch before generously tipping the bellman. He opened the door slowly and peered over the security bar at the man of medium height and build standing in the corridor. He wore a mid-length woolen coat with a German-style collar and a Tyrolean felt hat. His hair was lush and silver; his eyes brown and bespectacled. A soft-sided leather briefcase, scuffed and weathered, dangled from his right hand.

  “How can I help you?” asked Mikhail.

  “By opening the door,” replied Gabriel softly.

  Mikhail disengaged the security bar, stepped to one side so Gabriel could enter, and then closed the door again quickly. Turning, he saw Gabriel moving slowly about the hotel room with his BlackBerry extended in his right hand. After a moment he nodded at Mikhail to indicate that the room was free of listening devices. Mikhail walked over to the champagne bucket and poured himself a glass of the Dom Pérignon.