The Other Woman Read online

  “How long can he keep it secret?” asked Chiara.

  “Which part?”

  “The identity of Rebecca Manning’s father.”

  “I suppose that depends on how many people inside MI6 know she refers to herself as Rebecca Philby.”

  Chiara placed a bowl of spaghetti al pomodoro before Gabriel. He whitened it with grated cheese but hesitated before taking a first bite. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said at last, “about what happened that morning along the banks of the river.”

  “I think I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Do you?”

  “You were somewhere you ought not to have been, alone, with no backup or bodyguards. Fortunately, you had the sense to slip a gun into your pocket on your way out the safe house door.”

  “A big one,” said Gabriel.

  “Forty-fives were never your preference.”

  “Too loud,” said Gabriel. “Too messy.”

  “The illegal was killed with a nine-millimeter,” Chiara pointed out.

  “Eva,” said Gabriel. “At least that was her Brazilian name. She never told us her real name.”

  “I suppose Rebecca killed her.”

  “I suppose she did.”

  “Why?”

  Gabriel hesitated, then said, “Because I didn’t kill Rebecca first.”

  “You couldn’t?”

  No, said Gabriel, he couldn’t.

  “And now you’re guilt-ridden because the woman you coerced into doing your bidding is dead.”

  Gabriel made no reply.

  “But there’s something else bothering you.” Greeted by silence, Chiara said, “Tell me, Gabriel—exactly how close did you come to getting yourself killed last week?”

  “Closer than I would have preferred.”

  “At least you’re honest.” Chiara looked at the television. The BBC had dredged up an old snapshot of Rebecca taken while she was at Trinity College. She looked remarkably like her father. “How long can they keep it a secret?” Chiara asked again.

  “Who would believe such a story?”

  On the television screen, the old photograph of Rebecca Manning dissolved. In its place was yet another image of Graham Seymour.

  “You made one mistake, my love,” said Chiara after a moment. “If you had only killed her when you had the chance, none of this would have happened.”

  Late that night, as Chiara slept soundly beside him, Gabriel sat with a laptop balanced on his thighs and headphones over his ears, repeatedly watching the same fifteen minutes of video. Shot by a Samsung Galaxy, it commenced at 7:49 a.m., when a woman in a business suit and a tan overcoat entered a popular Starbucks just north of Georgetown and joined the queue at the register. Eight people waited ahead of her. Through his headphones, Gabriel could hear the barista singing “A Change Is Gonna Come” quite well. Graham Seymour, he remembered, had missed the performance. He was outside at the time, in the tangled garden of the command post, taking a call from Vauxhall Cross.

  It was 7:54 when the woman placed her order, a tall dark-roast coffee, nothing to eat, and 7:56 when she sat down at a communal table and took up her iPhone. She executed several commands, all with her right thumb. Then, at 7:57, she placed the iPhone on the tabletop and fished a second device, a BlackBerry KEYone, from her handbag. The password was long and hard as a rock, twelve characters, both thumbs. After entering it, she glanced at the screen. The barista was singing “What’s Going On.”

  Mother, mother . . .

  At 7:58 the woman took up her iPhone again, glanced at the screen, glanced around the interior of the café. Nervously, thought Gabriel, which was not like her. Then she tapped the screen of the iPhone several times, quickly, and placed it in the bag. Rising, she dropped her coffee through the slot in the condiment stand. The door was to her right. She headed left instead, into the back of the café.

  As she approached the Samsung Galaxy, her face was a blank mask. Gabriel clicked the pause icon and stared into Kim Philby’s blue eyes. Had she been spooked, as Graham Seymour had suggested, or had she been warned? If so, by whom?

  Sasha was the most obvious suspect. It was possible he had been monitoring the drop from afar, with teams on the street or inside the café itself. He might have seen something he didn’t like, something that made him order his life’s work to abort without transmitting and make a run for a prearranged bolt-hole. But if that was the case, why hadn’t Rebecca walked out of the café? And why had she run into the arms of Eva Fernandes instead of an SVR exfiltration team?

  Because there was no exfiltration team, thought Gabriel, recalling the rapid exodus, at approximately 8:20 a.m., of known SVR assets from the back of the Russian Embassy. Not yet.

  He adjusted the time code on the video and clicked play. It was 7:56 at the popular Starbucks just north of Georgetown. A woman in a business suit and a tan overcoat sits down at a communal table and executes several commands on an iPhone. At 7:57 she trades the iPhone for a BlackBerry, but at 7:58 it’s back to the iPhone again.

  Gabriel clicked pause.

  There it was, he thought. The slight jolt to the body, the nearly imperceptible widening of the eyes. That was when it happened, at 7:58:46, on the iPhone.

  He clicked play and watched Rebecca Manning thumbing several commands into the iPhone—commands that doubtless deleted her report to Moscow Center, along with the SVR’s software. Gabriel reckoned she had also deleted the message that had warned her to run. Perhaps the FBI had found it, perhaps not. It was no matter; they would never share it with the likes of him. The British were cousins. Distant cousins, but cousins nonetheless.

  Gabriel opened the laptop’s Web browser and skimmed the headlines of the London papers. Each one was worse than the last. If you had only killed her when you had the chance, none of this would have happened . . . Yes, he thought, as he lay next to his sleeping wife in the darkness, that would explain everything.

  86

  Eaton Square, London

  Gabriel flew to London three days later on an Israeli diplomatic passport bearing a false name. A security detail from the embassy met him upon arrival at Heathrow Airport, as did a not-so-covert surveillance team from the A4 branch of MI5. He rang Graham Seymour during the drive into central London and asked for a meeting. Seymour agreed to see him at nine that evening at his home in Eaton Square. The late hour suggested dinner would not be in the offing, as did Helen Seymour’s chilly greeting. “He’s upstairs,” she announced coolly. “I believe you know the way.”

  When Gabriel entered the study on the second floor, Seymour was reviewing the contents of a red-striped classified file. He made a mark in it with a green Parker fountain pen and dropped it hastily into a stainless-steel attaché case. For all Gabriel knew, Seymour had already locked up the silver and the china. He did not rise or offer his hand. Nor did he suggest retreating to his personal safe-speech chamber. Gabriel supposed it wasn’t necessary. MI6 had no more secrets to lose. Rebecca Manning had given them all to the Russians.

  “Help yourself,” Seymour said with an indifferent glance toward the drinks trolley.

  “Thank you, no,” replied Gabriel, and without invitation sat down. A leaden silence ensued. He suddenly regretted making the trip to London. Their relationship, he feared, was beyond repair. He recalled with fondness the afternoon at Wormwood Cottage when they had scoured the old files for the name of Kim Philby’s mistress. If Gabriel had known it would come to this, he would have whispered Philby’s name into Seymour’s ear and washed his hands of the whole thing.

  “Happy?” asked Seymour at last.

  “My children are well, and my wife seems to be reasonably fond of me at the moment.” Gabriel shrugged. “So, yes, I suppose I’m as happy as I’m ever going to be.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “A good friend of mine is under fire for something that wasn’t his fault. I’m concerned about his well-being.”

  “Sounds like something I read once in a s
ympathy card.”

  “Come on, Graham, let’s not do this. We’ve been through too much together, you and I.”

  “And once again, you’re the hero, and I’m the one who gets to clean up the mess.”

  “There are no heroes in a situation like this. Everyone loses.”

  “Except the Russians.” Seymour went to the trolley and poured an inch of whisky into a glass. “Keller sends his best, by the way.”

  “How is he?”

  “Unfortunately, the doctors say he’ll live. He’s walking around with a very important secret in his head.”

  “Something tells me your secret is safe with Christopher Keller. Who else knows?”

  “No one other than the prime minister.”

  “A total of three people inside HMG,” Gabriel pointed out.

  “Four,” said Seymour, “if you include Nigel Whitcombe, who has a pretty good idea.”

  “And then there’s Rebecca.”

  Seymour made no reply.

  “Is she talking?” asked Gabriel.

  “The last person in the world I want to talk,” said Seymour, “is Rebecca Manning.”

  “I’d like a word with her.”

  “You already had your chance.” Seymour contemplated Gabriel over his whisky. “How did you know she was going to be there?”

  “I had a feeling she would want to pick up something on her way out of the country. Something her father left there in 1951 after Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected.”

  “The camera and the film?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “That would explain the shovel. But how did you know where the stuff was buried?”

  “I was reliably informed.”

  “By Charlotte Bettencourt?”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “If only you’d taken that shovel when you left . . .”

  Gabriel invited Seymour to elaborate.

  “We could have slipped Rebecca out of Washington without the Americans knowing,” Seymour went on. “The video of her purchasing the shovel from that hardware store is what doomed her.”

  “How would you have explained the three dead SVR agents?”

  “Very carefully.”

  “And Rebecca’s sudden recall to London?”

  “A health problem,” suggested Seymour. “A new assignment.”

  “A cover-up.”

  “Your word,” said Seymour. “Not mine.”

  Gabriel made a show of thought. “The Americans would have seen through it.”

  “Thanks to you, we’ll never know.”

  Gabriel ignored the remark. “In fact, it would have been far better if Rebecca had left Washington with the Russians.” He paused, then added, “Which is what you wanted all along, isn’t it, Graham?”

  Seymour said nothing.

  “That’s why you sent a text message to her iPhone two minutes before the window opened, warning her not to transmit. That’s why you told her to run.”

  “Me?” asked Seymour. “Why would I do something like that?”

  “For the same reason MI6 let Kim Philby run in 1963. Better to have the spy in Moscow than a British courtroom.”

  Seymour’s smile was condescending. “You seem to have it all figured out. But weren’t you the one who told me that my Vienna Head of Station was a Russian spy?”

  “You can do better than that, Graham.”

  Seymour’s smile dissolved.

  “If I had to guess,” Gabriel continued, “you sent the message from the garden while you were supposedly taking that urgent call from Vauxhall Cross. Or maybe you had Nigel send it for you, so you wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.”

  “If anyone told Rebecca to run,” said Seymour, “it was Sasha.”

  “It wasn’t Sasha, it was you.”

  The silence returned. So this is how it ends, thought Gabriel. He rose to his feet.

  “In case you were wondering,” said Seymour suddenly, “the deal has already been made.”

  “What deal is that?”

  “The deal to send Rebecca to Moscow.”

  “Pathetic,” murmured Gabriel.

  “She’s a Russian citizen and a colonel in the SVR. It’s where she belongs.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, Graham. Even you might believe it.”

  Seymour made no reply.

  “How much did you get for her?”

  “Everyone we asked for.”

  “I suppose the Americans got in on the act, too.” Gabriel shook his head slowly. “When will you learn, Graham? How many more elections does the Tsar have to steal? How many more political opponents does he have to assassinate on your soil? When are you going to stand up to him? Do you need his money that badly? Is it the only thing keeping this overvalued city afloat?”

  “Life is very black and white for you, isn’t it?”

  “Only when it comes to fascists.” Gabriel started toward the door.

  “The deal,” said Seymour, “is contingent on one thing.”

  Gabriel stopped and turned. “What’s that?”

  “Sergei Morosov. You have him, the Russians want him.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  With his expression, Seymour made clear he was.

  “I wish I could help you,” said Gabriel, “but Sergei Morosov is dead. Remember? Tell Rebecca I’m sorry, but she’ll just have to spend the rest of her life here in Britain.”

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you wanted a word with her.”

  “I do.”

  “As it turns out,” said Seymour, “she’d like one with you, too.”

  87

  Scottish Highlands

  Gabriel spent that night at the safe flat on the Bayswater Road and in the morning boarded a military transport plane at RAF Northholt, on the fringes of Greater London. His MI6 security detail gave him no inkling of their destination, but the long duration of the flight, and the lay of the land below, left the far north of Scotland as the only possibility. Rebecca Manning, it seemed, had been banished to the end of the realm.

  At last, Gabriel glimpsed a stretch of golden sand and a small town by the sea and two runways carved like a sidelong X into a patchwork quilt of farmland. It was RAF Lossiemouth. A caravan of Range Rovers waited on the windblown tarmac. They drove for several miles through gentle hills covered in heather and gorse, until finally they arrived at the gate of a remote country manor. It looked like something MI6 had borrowed during the war and conveniently forgotten to return.

  Behind the double fence, guards in plain clothes patrolled broad green lawns. Inside, a disagreeable man called Burns briefed Gabriel on matters related to security and the prisoner’s state of mind.

  “Sign this,” he said, placing a document beneath Gabriel’s nose.

  “What is it?”

  “A declaration that you will never discuss anything you have seen or heard today.”

  “I’m a citizen of the State of Israel.”

  “That doesn’t matter, we’ll think of something.”

  The chamber to which Gabriel was eventually led was not quite a dungeon, but it might well have been one once. It was reached by a long and twisting series of stone steps that smelled of damp and drains. The original stone walls had been paved over with smooth concrete. The paint was white as bone—as white, thought Gabriel, as a pueblo blanco in the hills of Andalusia. The overhead lights burned with the intensity of surgical lamps and hummed with current. Cameras peered down from the corners, and a couple of guards kept watch from an anteroom through a panel of shatterproof one-way glass.

  A chair had been left for Gabriel against the bars of Rebecca’s cell. There was a cot, neatly made up, and a small table piled with old paperback novels. There were several newspapers, too; Rebecca, it seemed, had been following the progress of her case. She wore a pair of loose-fitting corduroy trousers and a heavy Scottish sweater against the cold. She looked smaller than
when Gabriel had seen her last, and very thin, as though she had embarked on a hunger strike to win her freedom. She had no makeup on her face, and her hair hung straight and limp. Gabriel was not sure she deserved all this. Philby, perhaps, but not the child of treason.

  After a moment’s pointed hesitation, Gabriel reluctantly accepted the hand she thrust between the bars. Her palm was coarse and dry. “Please sit,” she suggested affably and Gabriel, again with hesitation, lowered himself into the chair. A guard brought him tea. It was milky and sweet. The mug was lethally heavy.

  “Nothing for you?” he asked.

  “I’m only allowed at mealtime.” Intentionally or not, she had forsaken her English accent. She looked and sounded very French. “It seems a silly rule to me, but there you are.”

  “If it bothers you—”

  “No, please,” she insisted. “It must have been a long trip. Or perhaps not,” she added. “To tell you the truth, I have no idea where I am.”

  To tell you the truth . . .

  Gabriel wondered if she were even capable, or whether she knew the truth from a lie.

  She sat down at the edge of her cot, with her knees together and her feet flat on the concrete floor. She wore fur-lined suede moccasins with no laces. There was nothing in the cell she might use to harm herself. It seemed a needless precaution to Gabriel. The Rebecca Manning he had encountered on the banks of the Potomac was not the suicidal type.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said.

  “Why?” asked Gabriel candidly.

  “Because I would have killed you that day were it not for—”

  “I admire your honesty,” said Gabriel, cutting her off.