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

  “We ran them all the time,” Zhirov admitted. “In fact, false flags were standard operating procedure. We almost never moved against a target unless we could create a plausible cover story that someone else was behind it.”

  “How long were you at Department V?”

  “Until the end.”

  By that, he meant the end of the Soviet Union, which crumbled in December 1991. Almost overnight, the once-mighty superpower became fifteen separate countries, with Russia, the heart of the old union, the first among equals. The KGB was broken into two separate services. Before long, Moscow Center, once a cathedral of intelligence, fell on hard times. Cracks appeared in the exterior of the building, and the lobby was filled with uncollected trash. Unshaven officers in wrinkled clothing wandered the halls in an alcoholic daze.

  “There wasn’t even toilet paper in the men’s room,” Zhirov said, disgust creeping into his voice. “The entire place was a pigsty. And no one was in charge.”

  That changed, he said, when Boris Yeltsin finally exited the stage and the siloviki, men from the security services, took control of the Kremlin. Almost immediately, they ordered the SVR to increase operations against the United States and Great Britain, both nominal allies of the new Russian Federation. Zhirov was named the SVR’s new chief rezident in Washington, one of the most important posts in the service. But on the day he was supposed to depart Russia, he received a summons to the Kremlin. It seemed the president, an old colleague from the KGB, wanted a word.

  “I assumed he wanted to give me some parting instructions about how to handle my job in Washington,” Zhirov said. “But as it turned out, he had other plans for me.”

  “Volgatek,” said Gabriel.

  Zhirov nodded. “Volgatek.”

  To understand what happened next, Zhirov said, it was first necessary to understand the importance of oil to Russia. He reminded his audience that, for decades, the Soviet Union was the world’s second-largest oil producer, trailing only Saudi Arabia and the emirates of the American-dominated Persian Gulf. The oil shocks of the 1970s and ’80s had been a boon to the wobbly Soviet economy—they were like a respirator, said Zhirov, that prolonged the life of the patient long after the brain had ceased functioning. The new Russian president understood what Boris Yeltsin had not, that oil could turn Russia into a superpower again. So he showed the oligarchs like Viktor Orlov the door and brought the entire Russian energy sector under effective Kremlin control. And then he started an oil company of his own.

  “KGB Oil and Gas,” said Gabriel.

  “More or less,” agreed Zhirov, nodding slowly. “But our company was to be different. We were tasked with acquiring drilling rights and downstream assets outside Russia. And we were KGB from top to bottom. In fact, a substantial percentage of our profits now flow directly into the accounts at Yasenevo.”

  “Where does the rest of it go?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Into the pockets of the Russian president?”

  “He didn’t get to be Europe’s richest man by wisely investing his KGB pension. Our president is worth about forty billion dollars, and much of his wealth comes from Volgatek.”

  “Whose idea was it to drill in the North Sea?”

  “It was his,” replied Zhirov. “He took it very personally. He said he wanted Volgatek to stick a straw into British territorial waters and suck on it until there was nothing left. For the record,” he added, “I was against it from the beginning.”

  “Why?”

  “Part of my job as chief of security and operations was to survey the playing field before we made a move on an asset or a drilling contract. My assessment of the situation in Britain wasn’t promising. I predicted that the political tensions between London and Moscow would lead to a rejection of our application to drill off the Western Isles. And, regrettably, I was proven correct.”

  “I take it the president was disappointed.”

  “He was angrier than I’d ever seen him,” Zhirov said. “Mainly because he suspected Viktor Orlov had played a role in it. He called me into his Kremlin office and told me to use any and all means necessary to get that contract.”

  “So you set your sights on Jeremy Fallon.”

  Zhirov hesitated before responding. “You obviously have very good sources in London,” he said after a moment.

  “Five million euros in a Swiss bank account,” said Gabriel. “That’s what you gave Jeremy Fallon to get the contract for

  you.”

  “He drove a hard bargain. Needless to say,” Zhirov added, “we were extremely disappointed when he failed to deliver. He said there was nothing he could do. Lancaster and the energy secretary were dead set against the deal. We had to do something to change the dynamic—shape the battlefield, if you will.”

  “So you kidnapped the prime minister’s mistress.”

  Zhirov made no reply.

  “Say it,” said Gabriel, “or we’re going to take another moonlight swim.”

  “Yes,” Zhirov said, looking directly into the camera, “I kidnapped the prime minister’s mistress.”

  “How did you know Lancaster was having an affair with her?”

  “The London rezidentura had been hearing rumors for some time about a young woman from Party headquarters coming to Downing Street late at night. I asked them to press a little harder on the issue. It didn’t take them long to figure out who she was.”

  “Did Fallon know that you were planning to kidnap her?”

  Zhirov shook his head. “I waited until after delivering Madeline’s confession before telling Fallon that we were behind it. I told him to use the opportunity to get the deal done. Otherwise, I was going to burn him, too.”

  “By leaking the fact that he took a five-million-euro bribe from a Kremlin-owned Russian oil company.”

  Zhirov nodded.

  “When were you in contact with him?”

  “I traveled to London while you and your little friend from Corsica were tearing up France looking for her. Lancaster was so incapacitated by stress he told Fallon to do whatever he wanted. Fallon pushed through the deal despite the objections of the energy secretary. Then I initiated the endgame.”

  “The ransom demand,” said Gabriel. “Ten million euros, or the girl dies. And Fallon knew all along that it was nothing more than a charade designed to cover up Volgatek’s role in Madeline’s disappearance.”

  “And his role, too,” Zhirov added.

  “How much did Lancaster know?”

  “Nothing,” Zhirov responded. “He still believes he paid ten million euros to save his mistress and his political career.”

  “Why did you insist that I be the one to deliver the money?”

  “We wanted to have a little fun at your expense.”

  “By killing Madeline in front of me?”

  Zhirov was silent.

  “Say it for the cameras, Pavel. Admit that you killed Madeline.”

  “I killed Madeline Hart,” he recited.

  “How?”

  “By placing her in the back of a Citroën with a gasoline bomb.”

  “Why?” asked Gabriel. “Why did you kill her?”

  “She had to die,” Zhirov said. “There was no way she could be allowed to return to England.”

  “Why didn’t you kill me, too?”

  “Trust me, Allon, nothing would have made us happier. But we thought you were more useful alive than dead. After all, who better to authenticate that Madeline had been killed as part of a garden-variety kidnap-for-ransom scheme than the great Gabriel Allon?”

  “Where’s the ten million euros?”

  “I gave it to the Russian president as a gift.”

  “I’d like it back.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Gabriel placed the photograph of the luncheon at Les Palmiers on the tab
le again.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “I suppose you could call it the final stages of a romantic recruitment.”

  Gabriel gave a skeptical frown. “Why would a beautiful young girl like Madeline be interested in a creep like you?”

  “I’m good at my job, Allon. Just like you. Besides,” Zhirov added, “she was a lonely girl. She was easy.”

  “Watch yourself, Pavel.” Gabriel made a show of scrutinizing the photograph more carefully. “It’s funny,” he said after a moment, “but the two of you look very comfortable together.”

  “It was our third meeting.”

  “Meeting?”

  “Date,” Zhirov said, correcting himself.

  “It doesn’t look to me as though you’re having a good time,” said Gabriel, still staring at the photo. “In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were quarreling.”

  “We weren’t,” Zhirov said quickly.

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Gabriel wordlessly set aside the photograph.

  “Any more questions?” asked Zhirov.

  “Just one,” said Gabriel. “How did you know Madeline was having an affair with Jonathan Lancaster?”

  “I’ve already answered that question.”

  “I know,” said Gabriel. “But this time, I want you to tell me the truth.”

  He offered up the same explanation—the one about rumors reaching the ears of the SVR rezident in London—but Gabriel was having none of it. He gave Zhirov one more chance; then, when told the same lie, he marched the Russian out to the end of the dock and pressed the barrel of a Makarov against the nape of his neck. And there, at the edge of the frozen lake with no name, the truth came spilling out. A part of Gabriel had suspected it all along. Even so, he could scarcely believe the story Zhirov told. But it had to be true, he thought. In fact, it was the only possible explanation for all that had happened.

  Back inside the dacha, Zhirov recited the story again, this time for the video camera, before being returned, bound and gagged, to the fallout shelter. The operation was now almost complete. They had obtained proof that Volgatek had bribed and blackmailed its way into the lucrative North Sea oil market. All they had to do now was make their way to the airport and board their separate flights home. Or, suggested Gabriel, they could postpone their departure to conduct one last piece of business. It was not a decision he could make alone so, uncharacteristically, he put it to a vote. There were no dissenters.

  53

  ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

  Gabriel decided it was safer to take the train. There was a station in the town of Okulovka; he could catch the first local of the morning and be in St. Petersburg by early afternoon. Privately, he was relieved when Eli Lavon insisted on coming with him. He needed Lavon’s eyes. And he needed his Russian, too.

  It was only forty miles to Okulovka, but the dreadful roads and weather stretched the trip to nearly two hours. They left the Volvo SUV in a small windblown car park and hurried into the station, a newly built redbrick structure that looked oddly like a factory. The train was already boarding by the time Lavon managed to secure a pair of first-class tickets from one of the surly glass-enclosed agents. They shared a compartment with two Russian girls who chattered without pause and a thin elegantly dressed businessman who never once looked up from his phone. Lavon passed the time by reading the morning papers from Moscow, which contained no mention of a missing oil executive. Gabriel stared out the frosted window at the endless fields of snow until the swaying of the carriage lulled him into something like sleep.

  He woke with a start as the train rattled into St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky Station. Upstairs the great vaulted hall was in turmoil; it seemed the afternoon bullet train to Moscow had been delayed by a Chechen bomb threat. Trailed by Lavon, Gabriel picked his way through the sobbing children and quarreling couples and headed into Vosstaniya Square. The Hero City Obelisk rose skyward from the center of the swirling traffic circle, its golden star tarnished by the falling snow. Streetlamps burned up and down the length of Nevsky Prospekt. It was only two in the afternoon, but whatever daylight there had been was long gone.

  Gabriel set out along the prospekt with Lavon floating watchfully in his wake. He was no longer in Russia, he thought. He was in a tsarist dreamland, imported from the West and built by terrorized peasants. Florence called to him from the facades of the Baroque palaces, and, crossing the Moyka River, he dreamed of Venice. He wondered how many bodies lay beneath the ice. Thousands, he thought. Tens of thousands. No other city in the world concealed the horrors of its past more beautifully than St. Petersburg.

  Near the end of the prospekt was its only eyesore—the old Aeroflot building, a hideous flint-gray monstrosity inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with a dash of Florentine Medici thrown in for good measure. Gabriel turned into Bolshaya Morskaya Street and followed it through the Triumphal Arch, into Palace Square. As he neared the Alexander Column, Lavon drew alongside him to say that he was not being followed. Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch, which seemed frozen to his arm. It was twenty minutes past two. It happens the same time every day, Zhirov had said. They all go a little crazy when they come home after a long time in the cold.

  Adjacent to Palace Square was a small park, green in summer, now bone-white with snow. Lavon waited there on an icy bench while Gabriel walked alone to the Palace Embankment. The Neva had been stilled by ice. He glanced at his watch one final time. Then he stood alone at the barrier, as motionless as the mighty river, and waited for a girl he did not know.

  He saw her at five minutes to three, coming across the Palace Bridge. She wore a heavy coat and boots that rose nearly to her knees. A wool hat covered her pale hair. A scarf concealed the lower half of her face. Even so, Gabriel knew instantly it was her. The eyes betrayed her—the eyes and the contour of her cheekbones. It was as if Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring had been freed from her canvas prison and was now walking along a riverbank in St. Petersburg.

  She passed him as if he were invisible and made her way toward the Hermitage. Gabriel waited to see whether she was under surveillance before following, and by the time he entered the museum she was already gone. It didn’t matter; he knew where she was going. Same painting every time, Zhirov had said. No one can figure out why.

  He purchased an admission ticket and walked along the endless corridors and loggias to Room 67, the Monet Room. And there she sat alone, staring at The Pond at Montgeron. When Gabriel sat down next to her, she glanced at him only briefly before resuming her study of the painting. His disguise was better than hers. He meant nothing to her. He supposed he never had.

  When another minute passed and he had yet to move, she turned and looked at him a second time. That was when she noticed the copy of A Room with a View balanced upon his knee. “I believe this belongs to you,” he said. Then he placed the book carefully into her trembling hand.

  54

  LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW

  On the fourth floor of FSB Headquarters is a suite of rooms occupied by the organization’s smallest and most secretive unit. Known as the Department of Coordination, it handles only cases of extreme political sensitivity, usually at the behest of the Russian president himself. At that moment its longtime chief, Colonel Leonid Milchenko, was seated at his large Finnish-made desk, a telephone to his ear, his eyes on Lubyanka Square. Vadim Strelkin, his number two, was standing anxiously in the door. He could tell by the way Milchenko slammed down the phone it was going to be a long night.

  “Who was it?” Strelkin asked.

  Milchenko delivered his response to the window.

  “Shit,” replied Strelkin.

  “Not shit, Vadim. Oil.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He’d like a word in private.”

  “Where?”

  “His
office.”

  “When?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It could be anything,” Milchenko said. “But if Volgatek is involved, it can’t be good.”

  “I’ll get the car then.”

  “Good idea, Vadim.”

  It took longer to haul the car from the bowels of Lubyanka than it did to make the short drive over to Volgatek headquarters on Tverskaya Street. Dmitry Bershov, the firm’s second-ranking officer, was waiting tensely in the lobby as Milchenko and Strelkin entered—another bad sign. He said nothing as he led the two FSB men into an executive elevator and pressed a button that shot them directly into an office on the building’s top floor. The office was the biggest Milchenko had ever seen in Moscow. In fact, it took a few seconds for him to spot Gennady Lazarev seated at one end of a long executive couch. Milchenko chose to remain on his feet while the Volgatek CEO explained that Pavel Zhirov, his chief of security, had not been seen or heard from since eleven the previous evening. Milchenko knew the name; he and Zhirov had been contemporaries at the KGB. He dropped a leather-bound notebook on Lazarev’s glass coffee table and sat down.

  “What was going on at eleven last night?”

  “We were having a party at Café Pushkin to celebrate an important new hire at the firm. By the way,” Lazarev added, “the new hire is missing, too. So is the driver.”

  “You might have mentioned that at the outset.”

  “I was getting to it.”

  “What’s the new hire’s name?”

  Lazarev answered the question.

  “Russian?” asked Milchenko.

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s of Russian ancestry but carries a British passport.”

  “So he is, in fact, British.”

  “He is.”

  “Anything else I should know about him?”

  “He’s currently employed by Viktor Orlov in London.”