The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Page 35

  Milchenko exchanged a long look with Strelkin before staring wordlessly at his notebook. He had yet to write anything in it, which was probably wise. A missing former KGB officer and a missing associate of the Kremlin’s most vocal opponent. Milchenko was beginning to think he should have called in sick that morning.

  “I take it they left Café Pushkin together,” he said finally.

  Lazarev nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Pavel wanted to ask him a few questions.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  Lazarev said nothing.

  “What kind of questions?” Milchenko asked.

  “Pavel had suspicions about him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He thought he might be connected to a foreign intelligence service.”

  “Any service in particular?”

  “For obvious reasons,” Lazarev said carefully, “his suspicions centered on the British.”

  “So he was planning to give him a good going-over.”

  “He was going to ask him a few questions,” Lazarev said deliberately.

  “And if he didn’t like the answers?”

  “Then he was going to give him a good going-over.”

  “I’m glad we cleared that up.”

  The phone at Lazarev’s elbow emitted a soothing purr. He lifted the receiver to his ear, listened in silence, then said, “Right away,” before replacing the receiver.

  “What is it?” asked Milchenko.

  “The president would like a word.”

  “You shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

  “Actually,” said Lazarev, “you’re the one he wants to see.”

  55

  ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

  At that same moment, the man responsible for Colonel Milchenko’s summons to the Kremlin was walking along Admiralty Prospekt in St. Petersburg. He could no longer feel the cold, only the place on his arm where her hand had alighted briefly before they parted. His heart was banging against his breastbone. Surely they had been watching her. Surely he was about to be arrested. To calm his fears, he told himself lies. He was not in Russia, he thought. He was in Venice and Rome and Florence and Paris, all at the same time. He was safe. And so was she.

  St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the colossal marble church that the Soviets had turned into a museum of atheism, appeared before him. He entered it from the square and made his way up the narrow winding staircase, to the cupola surrounding the single golden dome. As expected, the platform was abandoned. The fairy-tale city stirred beneath his feet, traffic moving sluggishly along the big prospekts. On one a woman walked alone, a hat covering her pale hair, a scarf concealing the lower half of her face. A few moments later he heard her footfalls in the stairwell. And then she was standing before him. There were no lights in the cupola. She was barely visible in the darkness.

  “How did you find me?”

  The sound of her voice was almost unreal. It was the English accent. Then Gabriel realized it was the only accent she had.

  “It’s not important how I found you,” he replied.

  “How?” she asked again, but this time Gabriel said nothing. He took a step closer to her so she could see his face clearly.

  “Do you remember me now, Madeline? I’m the one who risked everything to try to save your life. It never occurred to me at the time that you were in on it from the beginning. You fooled me, Madeline. You fooled us all.”

  “I was never in on it,” she shot back. “I was just doing what I was ordered to do.”

  “I know,” he said after a moment. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Actually,” said Gabriel, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “I’m Madeline,” she said. “Madeline Hart of Basildon, England. I followed all the rules. Did well at school and university. Got a job at Party headquarters. My future was limitless. I was going to be an MP one day. Maybe even a minister.” She paused, then added, “At least, that’s what they said about me.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “I don’t know my real name,” she answered. “I barely speak Russian. I’m not Russian. I’m Madeline. I’m an English girl.”

  She dug the copy of A Room with a View from her coat pocket and held it up. “Where did you find this?”

  “In your room.”

  “What were you doing in my room?”

  “I was trying to find out why your mother left Basildon without telling anyone.”

  “She’s not my mother.”

  “I know that now. Actually,” he added, “I think I knew when I saw a photograph of you standing next to her and your father. They look like—”

  “Peasants,” she said spitefully. “I hated them.”

  “Where are your mother and brother now?”

  “In an old KGB training center in the middle of nowhere. I was supposed to go there, too, but I refused. I told them I wanted to live in St. Petersburg, or I would defect to the West.”

  “You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”

  “They threatened to.” She looked at him for a moment. “How much do you really know about me?”

  “I know that your father was an important general in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, maybe even the big boss himself. Your mother was one of his typists. She overdosed on sleeping pills and vodka not long after you were born, or so the story goes. After that, you were placed in something like an orphanage.”

  “A KGB orphanage,” she interjected. “I was raised by wolves, truly.”

  “At a certain point,” Gabriel resumed, “they stopped speaking Russian to you in the orphanage. In fact, they said nothing at all in your presence. You were raised in complete silence until you were about three years old. Then they started speaking English to you.”

  “KGB English,” she said. “For a while I had the inflection of a newsreader on Radio Moscow.”

  “When did you meet your new parents for the first time?”

  “When I was about five. We lived together in a KGB camp for a year or so to get to know one another. Then we settled in Poland. And when the great Polish migration to London began, we went with it. My KGB parents already spoke perfect English. They established new identities for themselves and engaged in low-level espionage. Mainly, they looked after me. We never spoke Russian inside the house. Only English. After a while, I forgot I actually was Russian. I read books to learn how to be a proper English girl—Austen, Dickens, Lawrence, Forster.”

  “A Room with a View.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted,” she said. “A room with a view.”

  “Why the council house in Basildon?”

  “It was the nineties,” she replied. “Russia was broke. The SVR was a shambles. There was no budget to support a family of illegals in London, so we settled in Basildon and went on the dole. The British welfare state nurtured a spy within its midst.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He contracted the illegal disease.”

  “He went stir-crazy?”

  She nodded. “He told Moscow Center he wanted out. Otherwise, he was going to go to MI5. The Center brought him back to Russia. God only knows what they did to him.”

  “Vysshaya mera.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Nothing mattered now other than this girl, he thought. He peered into the darkened square and saw Eli Lavon stamping his feet against the cold. Madeline saw him, too.

  “Who is he?”

  “A friend.”

  “A watcher?”

  “The best.”

  “He’d better be.”

  She turned away and set out slowly along the parapet.

  “When did they activate you?”
Gabriel asked of her long, elegant back.

  “When I was at university,” she replied. “They told me they wanted me to prepare for a career in government. I studied political science and social work, and the next thing I knew I had a job at Party headquarters. Moscow Center was thrilled. Then Jeremy Fallon took me under his wing, and Moscow Center was over the moon.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  She turned and smiled for the first time. “Have you ever seen Jeremy Fallon?”

  “I have.”

  “Then I’m sure you won’t doubt me when I say that, no, I did not sleep with Jeremy Fallon. He wanted to sleep with me, though, and I gave him just enough hope that he gave me everything I wanted.”

  “Like what?”

  “A few minutes alone with the prime minister.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “It was Moscow Center’s,” she replied. “I never did anything without their approval.”

  “They thought Lancaster might be vulnerable to an approach?”

  “They’re all vulnerable,” she answered. “Unfortunately for Jonathan, he gave in to temptation. He was totally compromised the moment he made love to me for the first time.”

  “Congratulations,” said Gabriel. “You must have been very proud of yourself.”

  She turned sharply and looked at him for a moment without speaking. “I’m not proud of what I did,” she said finally. “I became very fond of Jonathan. I never wanted any harm to come to him.”

  “Then perhaps you should have told him the truth.”

  “I thought about it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I went on holiday to Corsica,” she said, smiling sadly. “And then I died.”

  But there was more to it than that, of course, beginning with the message she received from Moscow Center directing her to meet with a fellow SVR officer at Les Palmiers restaurant in Calvi. The officer informed her that her mission in England was over, that she would be returning to Russia, that they had to make it appear like a kidnapping in order to fool British intelligence.

  “You quarreled,” said Gabriel.

  “Quietly but vehemently,” she said. “I told him I wanted to stay in England and live out the rest of my life as Madeline Hart. He said that wasn’t possible. He told me that if I didn’t do exactly as he said, the kidnapping would be real.”

  “So you left your villa on your motorbike and had an accident.”

  “I’m lucky they didn’t kill me. I still have the scars from the collision.”

  “How much time did you actually spend in the hands of the French criminals?”

  “Too much,” she answered. “But most of the time I was with an SVR team.”

  “What about the night I came to see you?”

  “Everyone in that house was SVR,” she said. “Including the girl they sent to count the money.”

  “You gave quite a performance that night, Madeline.”

  “It wasn’t all a performance.” She paused. “I did want you to get me.”

  “I tried,” said Gabriel. “But the cards were stacked against me.”

  “It must have been terrible.”

  “Especially for the girl they stuffed in the trunk of that car.”

  She said nothing.

  “Who was she?” Gabriel asked.

  “Some girl they plucked off the streets of Moscow. They spread her DNA around my apartment in London, and then . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “They lit a match.”

  Her expression darkened. She turned away and looked out over the dark, frozen city.

  “It’s not so bad here, you know. They gave me a lovely flat. It has a view. I can spend the rest of my life here and pretend that I’m in Rome or Venice or Paris.”

  “Or Florence,” said Gabriel.

  “Yes, Florence,” she agreed. “Just like Lucy and Charlotte.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  She turned to face him again. “What choice do I have?”

  “You can come with me.”

  “It can’t be done,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You’ll get yourself killed. Me, too.”

  “If I can find you in St. Petersburg, Madeline, I can get you out.”

  “How did you find me?” she asked again.

  “I still can’t tell you that.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that, either.”

  “Where will you take me?”

  “Home,” he said, “with one stop along the way.”

  She lived in a grand old building on the other side of the Neva with a view of the Winter Palace. Eli Lavon saw her clandestinely to her door while Gabriel checked into the Astoria Hotel. Upstairs in his room, he composed a priority update for King Saul Boulevard, a copy of which was handed to a bleary-eyed Uzi Navot at 5:47 p.m. Tel Aviv time. Navot read it in silence, then looked at Shamron.

  “What is it, Uzi?”

  “He wants to change the departure city from Moscow to St. Petersburg.”

  “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Navot handed the update to Shamron, who read it through a haze of smoke. By the time Shamron had finished, Navot was handed a second update.

  “He’s about to feed us some video.”

  “Of what?”

  Before Navot could answer, Paul Zhirov’s swollen face appeared on one of the monitors.

  “Looks like he took a nasty fall,” Shamron said.

  “Several,” said Navot.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Navot instructed the techs to increase the volume.

  “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 . . .”

  Shamron smiled. “Now that’s what I call an ace in the hole,” he said.

  “Plus a pair of kings.”

  “What time does the next El Al flight leave for St. Petersburg?”

  Navot tapped a few keys on the computer in front of him. “Flight six two five departs Ben Gurion at one ten a.m. and lands in St. Petersburg at eight in the morning. The crew spends the day resting at a downtown hotel. Then they bring the plane back to Tel Aviv that night.”

  “Call the head of El Al,” Shamron said. “Tell him we need to borrow that airplane.”

  Navot reached for the phone. Shamron watched the video monitor.

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

  “I killed Madeline Hart.”

  “How?”

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

  “Why? Why did you kill her?”

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

  56

  LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW

  It was at times like these, thought Colonel Leonid Milchenko, that Russia’s immense size was more of a curse than a blessing. He was standing before a map in his Lubyanka Square office, Vadim Strelkin at his side. They had just returned from the Kremlin where the federal president, the tsar himself, had ordered them to spare no effort to find the three missing men. The tsar had not been disposed to explain why it was so important, only that it concerned the vital interests of the federation and its relations with the United Kingdom. It was Strelkin, during the drive back to Lubyanka, who reminded Milchenko that Volgatek had just secured lucrative rights t
o drill for oil in the North Sea.

  “You think Volgatek pulled a fast one to get that license?” Milchenko asked now, his eyes still on the map.

  “I wouldn’t want to prejudge the situation without knowing all the facts,” Strelkin replied cautiously.

  “We work for the FSB, Vadim. We never worry about the facts.”

  “You know what they call Volgatek, don’t you, boss.”

  “KGB Oil and Gas.”

  Strelkin said nothing.

  “So let’s assume Volgatek didn’t play it straight when they secured that license,” Milchenko said.

  “They rarely do. At least that’s what one hears on the street.”

  “Let’s assume they bribed someone.”

  “Or worse.”

  “And let’s assume British intelligence responded by trying to insert an agent into the company.”

  “Let’s,” Strelkin said, nodding.

  “Let us also assume the British were listening when Zhirov pulled their man into his car and started pounding him with questions.”

  “They probably were.”

  “And that the British assumed their man was in danger.”

  “He was.”

  “And that the British responded by pulling their man out.”

  “With extreme prejudice.”

  “And that they took Zhirov and his driver with him.”

  “They probably had no choice.”

  Milchenko lapsed into a thoughtful silence. “So where’s Zhirov now?” he asked finally.

  “He’ll turn up eventually.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “The British don’t like mokriye dela.”

  “Wherever did you hear a thing like that?” Milchenko took a step closer to the map. “If you were the British,” he said, “what would you be trying to do right now?”

  “I’d be trying to get my man out of the country as quickly as possible.”

  “How would you do it?”

  “I suppose I could drive him to one of the western border crossings, but the quickest way out is Sheremetyevo.”

  “He’ll be carrying a different passport.”

  “And wearing a new face,” added Strelkin.

  “Get over to the Ritz,” Milchenko said. “Get some pictures of him from hotel security. And then get those pictures into the hands of every passport control officer and militiaman at Sheremetyevo.”