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

  “How did it go?” she asked without looking up.

  “With rest and proper rehabilitation, there’s a chance I might regain partial use of my left hand.”

  “That bad?”

  “He’s angry. And I don’t blame him.”

  Gabriel removed his coat and tossed it over the back of a chair. Chiara rolled her eyes in disapproval. Then she licked the tip of her finger and turned the page of the magazine.

  “He’ll get over it,” she said.

  “It’s not the sort of thing that one gets over, Chiara. And it would have never happened if you and Shamron hadn’t conspired behind my back.”

  “It wasn’t like that, darling.”

  “How was it exactly?”

  “Shamron came to see me when you were in France looking for Madeline. He said he wanted to put the screws to you one last time about becoming chief, and he wanted my blessing.”

  “It was nice of him to ask.”

  “Don’t be angry, Gabriel. It’s what he wants.” She paused, then added, “And it’s what I want, too.”

  “You?” asked Gabriel, surprised. “Do you realize what it’s going to be like after I take my oath?”

  “We’re sharing a room in a safe house with eight other people, including a man who once tried to kill you. I think I can handle your being chief.”

  Gabriel walked over to the bed and leafed through the stack of magazines lying next to Chiara. One was devoted to women who were pregnant. He held it up for her to see and asked, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  She snatched the magazine from his grasp without responding. Gabriel scrutinized her for a moment with his head tilted to one side and his hand resting against his chin.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m a painting.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  She smiled. Then she asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that I wish we were alone instead of in a safe house surrounded by eight other people.”

  “Including a man who once tried to kill you,” she added. “But what are you really thinking?”

  “I’m wondering why you haven’t asked me not to go to Moscow.”

  “So am I.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “Because they locked her in a car and burned her to death.”

  “No other reason?”

  “None,” she replied. “And if you’re wondering whether I want to go to Moscow with the rest of the team, the answer is no. I don’t think I’d be able to handle being back there. I might make a mistake.”

  Without a word, Gabriel crawled into bed and laid his head upon Chiara’s womb.

  “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” she asked.

  “I’m too tired to take off my clothes.”

  “Do you mind if I read a little longer?”

  “You can do anything you want.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes. The sound of Chiara gently turning the pages of her magazine nudged him toward sleep.

  “Are you still awake?” she asked suddenly.

  “No,” he murmured.

  “Did she know this was going to end in Moscow, Gabriel?”

  “Who?”

  “The old woman in Corsica. Did she know?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “I suppose she did.”

  “Did she warn you not to go?”

  “No,” said Gabriel as the knife of guilt twisted in his chest. “She told me I would be safe there.”

  “Did she see anything else?”

  “A child,” said Gabriel. “She saw a child.”

  “Whose child?” asked Chiara, but Gabriel didn’t hear her. He was running toward a woman, across an endless field of snow. The woman was burning. The snow was stained with blood.

  47

  GRAYSWOOD, SURREY

  Uzi Navot, director of Israel’s secret intelligence service, arrived at the Grayswood safe house at twenty minutes past seven the next morning, as a gray December dawn was breaking over the bare trees of the Knobby Copse. The first person he encountered was Christopher Keller, who was chasing down a Ping-Pong ball that Yaakov had just flicked past him for a winner. The score in the match was eight to five, with Yaakov leading and Keller closing hard.

  “Who are you?” Keller asked of the unsmiling, bespectacled figure standing in the entrance hall.

  “None of your business,” replied Navot.

  “Strange name. Hebrew, is it?”

  Navot frowned. “You must be Keller.”

  “I must be.”

  “Where’s Gabriel?”

  “He and Chiara went to Guildford.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we ate all the fish in the stock pond.”

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “The inmates.”

  Navot smiled. “Not anymore.”

  With Navot’s unorthodox arrival, the team went on war footing. It was an undeclared war, as all its conflicts were, and it would be fought in a hostile land, against an enemy of superior size and capability. The Office was regarded as one of the most capable intelligence services in the world, yet it was no match for the brotherhood of the sword and the shield. The intelligence services of the Russian Federation were heirs to a proud and murderous tradition. For more than seventy years, the KGB had ruthlessly protected Soviet communism from enemies both real and perceived and had acted as the Party’s vanguard abroad, recruiting and planting thousands of spies around the world. Its power had been almost without limit, allowing it to operate as a virtual state within a state. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the state. And Volgatek was its oil company.

  It was this connection—the connection between Volgatek and the SVR—that Gabriel emphasized time and time again as the team began its work. The oil company and Russia’s intelligence service were one and the same, he said, which meant that Mikhail would be in enemy hands the minute his plane left the ground in London. His cover identity had been sound enough to fool Gennady Lazarev, but it would not survive long in the interrogation rooms of Lubyanka. And neither would Mikhail, for that matter. Lubyanka was the place where agents and operations went to die, warned Gabriel. Lubyanka was the end of the line.

  For the most part, though, Gabriel’s thoughts remained focused on Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of security and the mastermind behind the operation to gain access to Britain’s North Sea oil. Within twenty-four hours of Navot’s arrival at the safe house, the Office station in Moscow had determined that Zhirov resided in a fortified apartment building in Sparrow Hills, the exclusive highlands on the banks of the Moscow River. His typical daily schedule was illustrative of the bifurcated nature of his work—mornings at Volgatek’s flashy headquarters on Tverskaya Street, afternoons at Moscow Center, the SVR’s wooded compound in Yasenevo. The Moscow surveillance team managed to snap several photographs of Zhirov climbing in and out of his chauffeured Mercedes limousine, though none showed his face clearly. Gabriel couldn’t help but admire the Russian’s professionalism. He had already proven himself to be a worthy opponent with the false flag kidnapping of Madeline Hart. Plucking him from the streets of Moscow, said Gabriel, would require an operation of matching skill.

  “With two important differences,” Eli Lavon pointed out. “Moscow isn’t Corsica. And Pavel Zhirov won’t be riding a motorbike on an isolated road, wearing only a sundress.”

  “Then I suppose we’ll have to figure out a way to get Mikhail into Zhirov’s car,” replied Gabriel. “With a loaded gun in his back pocket, of course.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “Like this.”

  Gabriel sat down at one of the computers and with a few quick keystrokes retrieved the recording of Gennady
Lazarev’s final words to Mikhail in Denmark.

  “We’ll bring you to Moscow for a few days so you can meet the rest of the team. If we both like what we see, we’ll take the next step. If not, you’ll stay with Viktor and pretend this never happened.”

  “Why Moscow?”

  “Are you afraid to come to Moscow, Nicolai?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You shouldn’t be. Pavel will take very good care of you.”

  Gabriel clicked the STOP icon and looked at Lavon. “I could be wrong,” he said, “but I suspect Nicholas Avedon’s Russian homecoming isn’t going to be without problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “The kind only Pavel can solve.”

  “And when Mikhail is in the car?”

  “He’s going to give Pavel a simple choice.”

  “A choice between coming quietly or having his brains splattered over the inside of his nice Mercedes?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What about Shamron’s golden rule?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one about waving guns around in public.”

  “There’s a little-known exception when it comes to sticking a gun in the ribs of a hood like Pavel.”

  Lavon made a show of thought. “We’ll have to take the driver, too,” he said finally. “Otherwise, every FSB officer and militiaman in Russia will be looking for us.”

  “Yes, Eli, I realize that.”

  “Where do you intend to conduct the interrogation?”

  “Here,” said Gabriel, tapping the keyboard again.

  “Lovely,” said Lavon, looking at the screen. “Who does it belong to?”

  “A Russian businessman who couldn’t stand living in Russia anymore.”

  “Where does he live now?”

  “Just down the road from Shamron.”

  With a click of the mouse, Gabriel removed the image from the screen.

  “That leaves just one last thing,” Lavon said.

  “Getting Mikhail out of Russia.”

  Lavon nodded. “He’ll have to leave as someone other than Nicholas Avedon.”

  “Preferably with as few Russian hurdles to clear as possible,” added Gabriel.

  “So how do we do it?”

  “The same way Shamron got Eichmann out of Argentina.”

  “El Al?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Naughty boy,” said Lavon.

  “Yes,” replied Gabriel, smiling. “And I’m just getting started.”

  Navot approved Gabriel’s plan immediately, which left the team five days until Mikhail was to give Gennady Lazarev an answer as to whether he was coming to Moscow. Five days to see to a thousand details large and small—or, as Lavon put it, five days to determine whether Mikhail’s visit to Russia would turn out better than his last. Passports, visas, identities, travel arrangements, lodgings: everything had to be procured on a crash basis. And then there were the bolt-holes, the backup plans, and the backup plans for the backup plans. Their task was made even more difficult by the fact that Gabriel could not tell them where or when the snatch of Zhirov would take place. They were going to have to improvise in a city that, throughout its long and bloody history, had never been particularly kind to freethinkers.

  Gabriel drove his team hard during those long days and nights; and when his back was turned, Navot drove them even harder. There was no visible tension between the two men, no evidence that one was in ascendance and the other was headed toward the exits. Indeed, several members of the team wondered if they might be witnessing the formation of a partnership that could survive long after Gabriel assumed his rightful place as chief of the Office. Yaakov, the most fatalistic of the lot, scoffed at the notion. “It would be like the new wife deciding to let the first wife keep her old room. It will never happen.” But Eli Lavon wasn’t so sure. If there was anyone who was confident enough to allow his predecessor to stay on in some capacity, it was Gabriel Allon. After all, Lavon said, if Gabriel could make peace with Christopher Keller, he could reach an accommodation with Navot.

  All talk of Gabriel’s future plans ended whenever Chiara entered the room. At first, she tried to work alongside the others, but the endless talk of Russia quickly darkened her mood. She was alive only because the members of the team had once risked their lives to save her. Now, as they struggled against the deadline, she assumed the role of their caretaker. Despite the tension inside the house, she made certain the atmosphere remained familial. Each evening they sat down to a lavish meal and, at Chiara’s insistence, spoke of anything except the operation—books they had read, films they had seen, the future of their troubled country. Then, after an hour or so, Gabriel and Navot would rise restlessly to their feet, and the work would start up again. Chiara happily saw to the dishes each night. Alone at the basin, she sang softly to herself to drown out the sound of the conversation in the next room. Later, she would confess to Gabriel that the mere sound of a Russian word produced a hollow aching in her abdomen.

  The man at the center of the operation remained happily oblivious to the team’s efforts, or so it seemed to anyone who encountered Nicholas Avedon after his return to London. His demeanor was of a man who no longer cared to conceal the fact he was going places others could only dream about. Orlov doted on his protégé as though he were the son he’d never had, and with each passing day seemed to grow more dependent upon him. The pronoun we entered Orlov’s vocabulary for the first time when talking about his business, a change in tone that did not go unnoticed in the City. He informed the staff that he would be spending much of January at an undisclosed location in the Caribbean. “I need a nice long break,” he said. “And now that I have Nicholas, I can finally take one.”

  With Orlov seemingly in retreat, word spread through financial circles that Nicholas Avedon was now the man to see at VOI. Most suitors had to wait a week or more for a chance to sit at his feet. But when he received a call from a Jonathan Albright of something called Markham Capital Advisers, he agreed to a meeting without delay. It took place in his office overlooking Hanover Square, though the topic had nothing to do with business or investing. At the conclusion of the meeting, he placed a call to a number in Moscow that lasted three minutes and was satisfactory in outcome. Then he walked Mr. Albright to the elevators with the contented air of a man who could do no wrong. “I’ll run it past Viktor,” he said loudly enough for everyone in close proximity to hear. “But it sounds to me as if all systems are go.”

  That night, a car appeared outside Mikhail’s apartment house in Maida Vale. Later, Graham Seymour would identify the man who emerged from it as a courier from the SVR’s generously staffed London rezidentura. The man took possession of Mikhail’s false passport and carried it back to the Russian Embassy in Kensington Gardens. One hour later, when he returned it, the passport had been stamped with a hastily issued Russian visa. Tucked inside was a boarding pass for a British Airways flight to Moscow, leaving Heathrow at ten the following morning.

  Mikhail slipped the ticket and passport into his briefcase. Then he rang Orlov at Cheyne Walk to say he needed a few days off. “Sorry, Viktor,” he said, “but I’m burnt to a crisp. And, please, no phone calls or e-mails. I’m going off the grid.”

  “For how long?”

  “Wednesday. Thursday at the latest.”

  “Take the week.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I promise not to make a mess of things while you’re gone.”

  “Thanks, Viktor. You’re a dream.”

  Mikhail tried to sleep that night, but it was no good; he had never been able to sleep the night before an operation. And so shortly after four the next morning, he rose from his bed and clothed himself in the armor of Nicholas Avedon, aka Nicolai Avdonin. A car appeared outside his door at six; it ferried him to Heathrow where he passed effo
rtlessly through security, with Christopher Keller and Dina Sarid watching his back. As he entered the departure gate, he saw a heavily altered version of Gabriel reading a copy of the Economist with what appeared to be inordinate interest. Mikhail walked past him without a glance and boarded the aircraft, but Gabriel waited until the doors were about to close before finally stumbling into the first-class cabin in a rush. After takeoff, British controllers routed the plane directly over the town of Basildon, and at half past ten precisely it passed into international airspace. Mikhail drummed his fingers nervously on the center console. He was now in the hands of his enemy. And so was the future chief of Israeli intelligence.

  48

  MOSCOW

  The protesters trickled into Red Square in small clusters so that the Moscow City Militia and leather-jacketed thugs of the FSB wouldn’t notice—artists, writers, journalists, punk rockers, even a few old babushkas who dreamed of spending their last years on earth in a truly free country. By noon, the crowd numbered several hundred, too large to conceal its true motives. Someone unfurled a banner. Someone else produced a bullhorn and accused the Russian president of having stolen the last election, which had the advantage of being entirely true. Then he made a joke about all the other things the president had stolen from the Russian people, which the leader of the leather-jacketed FSB thugs didn’t find funny at all. With scarcely more than a nod, he unleashed the militiamen, who responded by smashing everything in sight, including several of the more important heads. The man with the bullhorn got the worst of it. When last seen, he was being hurled bloody and semiconscious into the back of a police van. Later, the Kremlin announced he would be charged with attempting to instigate a riot, an offense that carried a ten-year sentence in the neo-gulag. The subservient Russian press referred to the protesters as “hooligans,” the same label the Soviet regime applied to its opponents, and not a single commentator dared to criticize the heavy-handed tactics. They were to be forgiven for their silence. Journalists who annoyed the Kremlin these days had a funny way of ending up dead.