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

  They had arrived at the top of the hill. Lavon slowed to a stop and gazed at the enormous yellow fortress on the opposite side of Lubyanka Square. “Why do you suppose they kept it?” he asked seriously. “Why didn’t they tear it down and put up a monument to its victims?”

  “For the same reason they didn’t remove Stalin’s bones from the Kremlin wall,” answered Gabriel.

  Lavon was silent for a moment. “I hate this place,” he said finally. “And at the same time, I love it dearly. Am I crazy?”

  “Certifiable,” said Gabriel. “But that’s just one man’s opinion.”

  “I’d feel better if we could take him to another country.”

  “So would I, Eli. But we can’t.”

  “How far is it to Mongolia?”

  “Too far to drive,” said Gabriel. “And the food is terrible.”

  Five minutes later, as Gabriel entered the Metropol’s overheated lobby, Yossi Gavish stepped from his fourth-floor room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel dressed in a banker’s gray suit and a silver necktie. In his left hand was a gold name tag that read ALEXANDER—a student of history, Yossi had chosen it himself—and in his right was a glossy blue gift bag bearing the hotel’s logo. The bag was heavier than Yossi made it appear, for it contained a Makarov 9mm pistol, one of several weapons that Moscow Station had acquired from illicit local sources before the team’s arrival. For three days the weapon had been concealed between the mattress and box spring in Yossi’s room. He was understandably relieved to finally be rid of it.

  Yossi waited until he was certain the corridor was unoccupied before quickly affixing the name tag to his lapel. Then he made his way to the doorway of Room 421. From the opposite side he could hear a man singing “Penny Lane” quite well. He knocked twice, firm but polite, the knock of a concierge. Then, upon receiving no answer, he knocked again, louder. This time a man in a white toweling robe answered. He was tall, impossibly fit, and pink from his bath.

  “I’m busy,” he snapped.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt, Mr. Avedon,” replied Yossi in a neutral cosmopolitan accent, “but management would like to offer you a small gift of our appreciation.”

  “Tell management thanks but no thanks.”

  “Management would be disappointed.”

  “It’s not more bloody caviar, is it?”

  “I’m afraid management didn’t say.”

  The pink man in the white robe snatched the gift bag and slammed the door on Yossi’s false hotelier’s smile. With that, Yossi turned on his heel and, after plucking the name tag from his lapel, headed back to his own room. There he quickly removed his suit and changed into a pair of jeans and a heavy woolen sweater. His suitcase stood at the foot of the bed; if everything went according to plan, a courier from Moscow Station would collect it in a few hours and destroy the contents. Yossi stuffed the suit into a side pocket and pulled the zipper closed. Then he wiped down every object he had touched in the room and left it for what he hoped would be the last time.

  Downstairs in the lobby, he saw Dina leafing skeptically through an English-language Moscow newspaper. He walked past her as though they were unacquainted and stepped outside. A Range Rover waited at the curb, its tailpipe sending a plume of vaporous exhaust into the bitterly cold night. Seated behind the wheel was Christopher Keller. He pulled into the evening rush-hour traffic on Tverskaya Street even before Yossi had closed the door. Directly before them rose the Kremlin’s Corner Arsenal Tower, its red star glowing like a warning light. Keller whistled tunelessly as he drove.

  “Do you know the way?” asked Yossi.

  “Left on Okhotnyy Ryad Street, left on Bol’shaya Dmitrovka Street, and then another left on the Boulevard Ring.”

  “Spend much time in Moscow, do you?”

  “Never had the pleasure.”

  “Can you at least pretend to be nervous?”

  “Why should I be nervous?”

  “Because we’re about to kidnap a KGB officer in the middle of Moscow.”

  Keller smiled as he made the first left turn. “Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

  It took Keller and Yossi the better part of twenty minutes to make the short drive to their holding point on the Boulevard Ring. Upon arrival, Yossi fired off a secure message to Gabriel at the Metropol, and Gabriel in turn bounced it to King Saul Boulevard, where it flashed across the status screen in the Op Center. Seated in his usual chair was Uzi Navot. He was staring at a live video image of the Ritz-Carlton’s lobby, courtesy of the miniature transmitter concealed in Dina’s handbag. The time was 7:36 in Moscow, 6:36 in Tel Aviv. At 6:38 the phone at Navot’s elbow rang. He brought the receiver swiftly to his ear, grunted something that sounded like his own name, and heard the voice of Orit, his executive secretary. Inside King Saul Boulevard, she was known as “the Iron Dome” because of her unrivaled ability to shoot down requests for a moment with the chief.

  “No way,” responded Navot. “Not a chance.”

  “He’s made it clear he’s not going to leave.”

  Navot sighed heavily. “All right,” he said. “Send him down, if you have to.”

  Navot hung up the phone and stared at the image of the hotel lobby. Two minutes later he heard the sound of the Op Center door opening and closing behind him. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw a liver-spotted hand place two packs of Turkish cigarettes on the tabletop, along with a battered old Zippo. The lighter flared. A cloud of smoke blurred the image on the screen.

  “I thought I pulled all your passes,” Navot said quietly, still staring straight ahead.

  “You did,” replied Shamron.

  “How did you get in the building?”

  “I tunneled in.”

  Shamron twirled the old lighter in his fingertips. Two turns to the right, two turns to the left.

  “You have a lot of nerve showing your face around here,” Navot said.

  “This isn’t the time or the place, Uzi.”

  “I know it isn’t,” Navot said. “But you still have a lot of nerve.”

  Two turns to the right, two turns to the left . . .

  “Would it be possible to turn up the volume on the audio feed from Mikhail’s phone?” Shamron asked. “My hearing isn’t what it once was.”

  “Your hearing isn’t the only thing.”

  Navot caught the eye of one of the technicians and gestured for him to increase the volume.

  “What’s that song he’s singing?” Shamron asked.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Answer the question, Uzi.”

  “It’s ‘Penny Lane.’ ”

  “The Beatles?”

  “Yes, the Beatles.”

  “Why do you suppose he chose that song?”

  “Maybe he likes it.”

  “Maybe,” said Shamron.

  Navot glanced at the clock. It was 7:42 in Moscow, 6:42 in Tel Aviv. Shamron crushed out his cigarette and immediately lit another.

  Two turns to the right, two turns to the left . . .

  Mikhail was still singing to himself as he departed his hotel room, dressed for dinner. The gift bag was in his right hand as he entered the elevator, though it was absent when he came out of the lobby men’s room three minutes after that. The team in the Ops Center saw him for the first time at 7:51 as he passed within range of Dina’s camera and started toward the hotel entrance. Waiting there, his arm raised as though he were signaling a rescue aircraft, was Gennady Lazarev. The hand seized Mikhail by the shoulder and drew him into the back of a waiting Maybach limousine. “I hope you managed to get a little rest,” Lazarev said as the car eased gracefully away from the curb, “because tonight you’re going to get a taste of the real Russia.”

  50

  CAFÉ PUSHKIN, MOSCOW

  In the aftermath, when they were tidying up their files and writing their after
-action reports, there would be a heated debate over the true meaning of Gennady Lazarev’s words. One camp saw them as a harmless expression of goodwill; the other as a clear warning that Gabriel, a chief in waiting, would have been wise to heed. As usual, it was Shamron who settled the dispute. Lazarev’s words were without consequence, he declared, for Mikhail’s fate had been sealed the instant he climbed into the car.

  The setting for what transpired next, Moscow’s renowned Café Pushkin, could not have appeared any more inviting, especially on a December evening, with the air brittle and snow dancing on a Siberian wind. It was located at the corner of Tverskaya Street and the Boulevard Ring, in a stately old eighteenth-century house that looked as though it had been imported from Renaissance Italy. Beyond its pretty French doors ran three lanes of traffic; and beyond the traffic was a small square where Napoleon’s soldiers had once pitched their tents and burned the lime trees for warmth. Muscovites hurried home along the gravel footpaths, and a few brave mothers sat on the benches in the lamplight, watching their overbundled children playing on the snow-whitened lawns. Mordecai and Rimona sat silently among them, Mordecai watching the entrance of Café Pushkin, Rimona the children. Keller and Yossi had found a parking space fifty yards short of the restaurant. Yaakov and Oded, also in a Land Rover, were fifty yards beyond it.

  The dinner had been called for eight, but owing to the heavier than normal traffic in Moscow that evening, Lazarev and Mikhail did not arrive until twelve minutes past. Mordecai made a note of the time, as did the teams in the Land Rovers. So did Gabriel, who quickly flashed a message to the Op Center at King Saul Boulevard. The message was unnecessary, of course, because Navot and Shamron were closely monitoring the live audio feed from Mikhail’s phone. Therefore, they heard his heavy footfalls over the unpolished floorboards in Pushkin’s entrance. And the rattle of the old elevator that bore him to the second floor. And the round of throaty Russian applause that greeted him as he entered the private room that had been set aside for his coronation.

  A place had been reserved for Mikhail at the head of the table, with Lazarev to his right and Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of security, to his left. Zhirov alone seemed to take no joy in the acquisition of Viktor Orlov’s protégé. Throughout the evening, he wore the blank expression of an experienced gambler who was losing badly at roulette. His gaze, narrow and dark, never strayed long from Mikhail’s face. He seemed to be calculating his losses and deciding whether he had the stomach for another turn of the wheel.

  If Zhirov’s brooding presence made Mikhail uneasy, he gave no sign of it. Indeed, all those who listened in on Mikhail’s performance that evening would describe it as one of the finest they had ever heard. He was the Nicholas Avedon whom they had all fallen in love with from afar. The witty Nicholas. The edgy Nicholas. The smarter than everyone else in the room Nicholas—save for Gennady Lazarev, who was perhaps smarter than anyone else in the world. As the evening wore on, he spoke less English and more Russian, until he stopped speaking English altogether. He was one of them now. He was Nicolai Avdonin. A Volgatek man. A man of Russia’s future. A man of Russia’s past.

  The transformation was made complete shortly after ten o’clock when he did a spot-on imitation of Viktor Orlov, along with the twitching left eye, which brought down the house. Only Pavel Zhirov seemed not to find it amusing. Nor did he join in the ovation that followed Gennady Lazarev’s benedictory remarks. Afterward, the party spilled onto the pavement, where a line of Volgatek limousines waited at the curb. Lazarev offhandedly asked Mikhail to stop by the office on his way out of town in the morning to tie up a few loose ends on the deal memo. Then he guided him toward the open rear door of a waiting Mercedes. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said through his mathematician’s smile, “I’m going to have Pavel run you back to the hotel. He has a few questions he’d like to ask you on the way.”

  Mikhail heard himself say “No problem, Gennady.” Then, without an instant’s hesitation, he slid into the waiting car. Pavel Zhirov, the night’s only loser, sat opposite, staring inconsolably out his window. He said nothing as the car pulled into the street. Mikhail tapped his finger against the armrest. Then he forced himself to stop.

  “Gennady said you had a few questions for me.”

  “Actually,” replied Zhirov in his underpowered voice, “I only have one.”

  “What is it?”

  Zhirov turned and looked at Mikhail for the first time. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Sounds like Pavel just moved the goalposts,” Navot said.

  Shamron frowned; he considered the use of sports metaphors to be inappropriate for a business as vital as espionage. He looked up at one of the video panels and saw lights moving quickly across a map of central Moscow. The light depicting Mikhail’s position flashed red. Four blue lights moved along with it, two in front, two behind.

  “Looks like we’ve got him boxed in,” said Shamron.

  “Quite nicely, actually. The question is, does Pavel have backup of his own, or is he flying solo?”

  “I’m not sure it matters much at this point.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “Kick the ball,” said Shamron, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Quickly.”

  They shot past Tverskaya Street in a blur and continued on along the Boulevard Ring.

  “My hotel is that way,” said Mikhail, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  “You seem to know Moscow well,” replied Zhirov. Clearly, it was not meant as a compliment.

  “Habit of mine,” said Mikhail.

  “What’s that?”

  “Getting to know my way around foreign cities. Hate having to ask for directions. Don’t like doing the tourist thing.”

  “You like to blend in?”

  “Listen, Pavel, I don’t like the sound of where this is—”

  “Or maybe you’ve been to Moscow before,” Zhirov suggested.

  “Never.”

  “Not recently?”

  “No.”

  “Not as a child?”

  “Never means never, Pavel. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to my hotel.”

  Zhirov was looking out his window again. Or was he peering into the driver’s sideview mirror? Mikhail couldn’t be sure.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Zhirov said finally.

  “I haven’t answered it because it doesn’t deserve one,” Mikhail shot back.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Nicholas Avedon,” Mikhail said calmly. “I’m an employee of Viktor Orlov Investments in London. And thanks to this little display of yours, I’m going to remain one.”

  Zhirov was obviously unconvinced. “Who are you?” he asked again.

  “I’m Nicholas. I grew up in England. I went to Cambridge and Harvard. I worked in the oil biz in Aberdeen for a time. And then I came to Viktor.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I grow up in England? Why did I go to Harvard?”

  “Why did you go to work for a known enemy of the Kremlin like Viktor Orlov?”

  “Because he was looking for someone to take over his oil portfolio. And at this moment, I’m sorry I betrayed him.”

  “Did you know about his politics when you went to work for him?”

  “I don’t care about his politics. In fact, I don’t care about anyone’s politics.”

  “You’re a freethinker?”

  “No, Pavel, I’m a busine
ssman.”

  “You are a spy.”

  “A spy? Are you off your meds, Pavel?”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “Take me back to my hotel.”

  “The British?”

  “My hotel, Pavel.”

  “The Americans?”

  “You were the ones who approached me, remember, Pavel? It happened in Copenhagen, at the oil forum. We met at the house in the middle of nowhere. I’m sure you were there.”

  “Who are you working for?” Zhirov asked again, a teacher to a dull pupil.

  “Stop the car. Let me out.”

  “Who?”

  “Stop the fucking car.”

  It did stop, but not because of Zhirov; they had reached Petrovka Street. It was a large intersection, with streets leading away in several different directions. The light had just turned red. Directly in front of them was a Land Rover with two men in front. Mikhail shot a glance over his shoulder and saw a second Rover behind them. Then he felt his mobile phone give three short bursts of vibration.

  “What was that?” asked Zhirov.

  “Just my mobile.”

  “Turn it off and remove the battery.”

  “You can never be too careful, right, Pavel?”

  “Turn it off,” Zhirov snapped.

  Mikhail reached into his overcoat, drew the Makarov, and screwed the barrel hard into Zhirov’s ribs. The Russian’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. He looked at Mikhail for a few seconds, then his gaze moved toward Yaakov, who was climbing out of the Land Rover in front of them. Keller had already climbed out of the second Land Rover and was approaching the Mercedes from behind.

  “Tell the driver to put the car in park,” Mikhail said quietly. “Otherwise, I’m going to put a bullet in your heart. Tell him, Pavel, or you’re going to die right now.”