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

  But it would be meaningless, he thought, if he lost the girl. He glanced at his wristwatch, then looked up in time to see Yossi and Rimona entering the departure lounge. Next came Mordecai and Oded. Then Yaakov and Dina. Then, lastly, Eli Lavon, looking as though he had wandered into the airport by mistake. He roamed the lounge for a moment, inspecting each empty chair with the diligence of a man who lived in fear of germs, before settling opposite Gabriel. They stared past one another without speaking, two sentinels on a night watch without end. There was nothing to do now but wait. The waiting, thought Gabriel. Always the waiting. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing. And waiting for his wife to carry a dead girl back to the land of the living.

  He looked at his watch again, then at Lavon.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  Lavon delivered his response to his open newspaper. “They’ve already cleared passport control,” he said. “The customs boys are just having a peek inside their luggage.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Tell me there’s no problem with the luggage.”

  “The luggage is fine.”

  “So why are they searching it?”

  “Maybe they’re bored. Or maybe they just like touching ladies’ underwear. They’re Russians, for God’s sake.”

  “How long, Eli?”

  “Two minutes. Maybe less.”

  Lavon’s two minutes passed with no sign of them. Then a third. And then an interminable fourth. Gabriel stared at his watch, and at the filthy carpet, and at the child next to him—anything but the entrance of the departure lounge. And then, finally, he glimpsed them from the corner of his eye, a flash of blue and white, like the waving of a banner. Mikhail was walking at the side of the captain, and Madeline was next to Chiara. She was smiling nervously and seemed to be holding Chiara’s arm for support. Or was it the other way around? Gabriel couldn’t be sure. He watched them turn in unison toward the gate and disappear down the Jetway. Then he looked at Lavon.

  “I told you everything would be fine,” he said.

  “You were never worried?”

  “Terrified beyond description.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Lavon didn’t answer. He just sat there reading his newspaper until the flight was called. Then he rose to his feet and followed Gabriel onto the plane. One last check for opposition surveillance, just to be certain.

  They had given her a seat in the third row next to the window. She was peering out at the dark oily apron of Pulkovo, her last glimpse of a Russia she never knew. In her blue-and-white uniform, she looked curiously like an English schoolgirl. She glanced at Gabriel as he slid into the seat next to her but quickly turned away. Gabriel fired off one last message to King Saul Boulevard on his secure BlackBerry. Then he watched his wife preparing the cabin for takeoff. As the aircraft thundered down the runway, Madeline’s eyes glistened; and as the wheels rose from Russian soil, a tear broke onto her cheek. She reached out for Gabriel’s hand and held it tightly.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said in her prim English accent.

  “Then don’t,” he answered.

  “How long is the flight?”

  “Five hours.”

  “Will it be warm in Israel?”

  “Only in the south.”

  “Will you take me there?”

  “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  Chiara appeared and handed them each a glass of champagne. Gabriel raised his glass toward Madeline in a silent toast and then placed it on the center console without drinking any.

  “You don’t like champagne?” she asked.

  “It gives me a terrible headache.”

  “Me, too.”

  She drank some of the champagne and stared out her window at the darkness below.

  “How did you find me down there?” she asked.

  “It’s not important.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me who you are?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  PART THREE

  THE

  SCANDAL

  58

  LONDON–JERUSALEM

  The next morning Britain went to the polls. Jonathan Lancaster cast his ballot early, accompanied by his wife, Diana, and their three photogenic children, before returning to Downing Street to await the verdict of the voters. The day held little suspense; a final election-eve survey predicted Lancaster’s Party would almost certainly increase the size of its parliamentary majority by several seats. By midafternoon Whitehall was swirling with rumors of an electoral massacre, and by early evening the champagne was flowing at the Party’s Millbank headquarters. Even so, Lancaster appeared curiously somber when he strode onto the stage at the Royal Festival Hall to deliver his victory speech. Among the political reporters who took note of his serious demeanor was Samantha Cooke of the Daily Telegraph. The prime minister, she wrote, looked like a man who knew his second term would not go as well as his first. But then, she added, second terms rarely did.

  Lancaster’s troubles began later that week when he undertook the traditional reshuffling of his Cabinet and personal staff. As widely predicted, Jeremy Fallon, now member of Parliament from Bristol, was appointed chancellor of the exchequer, which meant that Lancaster’s brain and puppet master would be his Downing Street neighbor as well. The man whom the press had once characterized as a deputy prime minister in name only now appeared to all of Whitehall like a prime minister in waiting. Fallon quickly gathered up the remaining members of his old Downing Street staff—at least, those who could still stand to work for him—and used his influence inside Party headquarters to fill key political positions with loyalists. The stage was now set, wrote Samantha Cooke, for a power struggle of Shakespearean proportions. Soon, she said, Fallon would be knocking on the door of Number Ten and asking for the keys. Jeremy Fallon had created Lancaster. And surely, she predicted, Fallon would try to destroy Lancaster as well.

  At no point during the post-election political maneuverings did Madeline Hart’s name appear in the press, not even when the Party chairman decided the time had come to fill her vacant post. A headquarters underling saw to the morbid chore of removing the last of her things from her old cubicle. There wasn’t much left—a few dusty files, her calendar, her pens and paper clips, the dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice she used to read whenever she had a spare moment or two. The underling delivered the items to the Party chairman, who in turn prevailed upon his secretary to quietly dispose of them with as much dignity as possible. And thus the final traces of an unfinished life were expunged from Party headquarters. Madeline Hart was finally gone. Or so they thought.

  At first it seemed she had traded one form of captivity for another. This time the apartment that served as her prison cell overlooked not the river Neva in St. Petersburg but the Mediterranean Sea in Netanya. The building’s management had been told she was convalescing after a long illness. It wasn’t far from the truth.

  For a week she did not set foot beyond the flat’s walls. Her days lacked any discernible routine. She slept late, she watched the sea, she reread her favorite novels, all under the watchful gaze of an Office security team. A doctor came once each day to check on her. On the seventh day, when asked whether she had any ailments, she answered that she was suffering from terminal boredom.

  “Better to die from boredom than from a Russian poison,” the doctor quipped.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she replied in her English drawl.

  The doctor promised to appeal the conditions of her confinement to higher authority; and on the eighth day of her stay, higher authority allowed her to take a brief walk on the cold, windswept stretch of sand that lay beneath her terrace. The day after that she was allowed to walk a little farther. And on the tenth day she trekked ne
arly to Tel Aviv before her minders placed her gently in the back of an Office car and ran her back to the flat. Entering, she found an exact copy of The Pond at Montgeron hanging on the wall in the sitting room—exact except for the signature of the artist who had painted it. He rang her a few minutes later and introduced himself properly for the first time.

  “The Gabriel Allon?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” he answered.

  “And who was the woman who helped me onto the plane?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Gabriel and Chiara arrived in Netanya at noon the following day, after Madeline had returned from her morning walk along the beach. They took her to Caesarea for lunch and a stroll through the Roman and Crusader ruins; then they headed farther up the coast, nearly to Lebanon, to wander the sea caves at Rosh HaNikra. From there, they moved eastward along the tense border, past the IDF listening posts and the small towns that had been depopulated by the last war with Hezbollah, until they arrived in Kiryat Shmona. Gabriel had booked two rooms at the guesthouse of an old kibbutz. Madeline’s had a fine view of the Upper Galilee. An Office security guard spent the night outside her door, and another sat outside the room’s garden terrace.

  The next morning, after taking breakfast in the kibbutz’s communal dining hall, they drove into the Golan Heights. The IDF was expecting them; a young colonel took them to a spot along the Syrian border where it was possible to hear the regime’s forces shelling rebel positions. Afterward, they paid a brief visit to the Nimrod Fortress, the ancient Crusader bastion overlooking the flatlands of the Galilee, before making their way to the ancient Jewish city of Safed. They ate lunch in the artists’ quarter, at the home of a woman named Tziona Levin. Though Gabriel referred to Tziona as his doda, his aunt, she was actually the closest thing he had to a sibling. She didn’t seem at all surprised when he appeared on her doorstep accompanied by a beautiful young woman whom the entire world believed to be dead. She knew that Gabriel had a habit of returning to Israel with lost objects.

  “How’s your work?” she asked over coffee in her sunlit garden.

  “Never better,” replied Gabriel, with a glance at Madeline.

  “I was talking about your art, Gabriel.”

  “I just finished restoring a lovely Bassano.”

  “You should be focused on your own work,” she said reproachfully.

  “I am,” he responded vaguely, and Tziona let it drop. When they had finished their coffee, she took them into her studio to see her newest paintings. Then, at Gabriel’s request, she unlocked her storage room. Inside were hundreds of paintings and sketches by Gabriel’s mother, including several works depicting a tall man wearing the uniform of the SS.

  “I thought I told you to burn these,” Gabriel said.

  “You did,” Tziona admitted, “but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Who is he?” asked Madeline, staring at the paintings.

  “His name was Erich Radek,” Gabriel answered. “He ran a secret Nazi program called Aktion 1005. Its goal was to conceal all evidence that the Holocaust had taken place.”

  “Why did your mother paint him?”

  “He nearly killed her on the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945.”

  Madeline raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Wasn’t Radek the one who was captured in Vienna a few years ago and brought to Israel for trial?”

  “For the record,” replied Gabriel, “Erich Radek volunteered to come to Israel.”

  “Yes,” said Madeline dubiously. “And I was kidnapped by French criminals from Marseilles.”

  The next day they drove to Eilat. The Office had rented a large private villa not far from the Jordanian border. Madeline passed her days lying next to the swimming pool, reading and rereading a stack of classic English novels. Gabriel realized that she was preparing herself to return to the country that wasn’t truly hers. She was no one, he thought. She was not quite a real person. And, not for the first time, he wondered whether she might be better off living in Israel than in the United Kingdom. It was a question he put to her on the final night of their stay in the south. They were seated atop an outcropping of rock in the Negev, watching the sun sinking into the badlands of the Sinai.

  “It’s tempting,” she said.

  “But?”

  “It’s not my home,” she answered. “It would be like Russia. I’d be a stranger here.”

  “It’s going to be hard, Madeline. Much harder than you think. The British will put you through the wringer until they’re certain of your loyalties. And then they’ll lock you away somewhere the Russians will never find you. You’ll never be able to go back to your old life. Never,” he repeated. “It’s going to be miserable.”

  “I know,” she said distantly.

  Actually, she didn’t know, thought Gabriel, but perhaps it was better that way. The sun hung just above the horizon. The desert air was suddenly cold enough to make her shiver.

  “Should we be getting back?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” she answered.

  He removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m going to be the chief of Israeli intelligence soon.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Condolences are probably in order,” replied Gabriel. “But it means I have the power to look after you. I’ll give you a nice place to live. A family. It’s a dysfunctional family,” he added hastily, “but it’s the only family I have. We’ll give you a country. A home. That’s what we do in Israel. We give people a home.”

  “I already have a home.”

  She said nothing more. The sun slipped below the horizon. Then she was lost to the darkness.

  “Stay,” said Gabriel. “Stay here with us.”

  “I can’t stay,” she said. “I’m Madeline. I’m an English girl.”

  The next night was the gala opening of the Pillars of Solomon exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The president and prime minister were in attendance, as were the members of the Cabinet, most of the Knesset, and numerous important writers, artists, and entertainers. Chiara was among those who spoke at the ceremony, which was held in the newly built exhibition hall. She made no mention of the fact that her husband, the legendary Israeli intelligence officer Gabriel Allon, had discovered the pillars, or that the beautiful dark-haired woman at his side was actually a dead English girl named Madeline Hart. They remained at the cocktail reception for only a few minutes before driving across Jerusalem to a quiet restaurant located on the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Afterward, while they were walking in Ben Yehuda Street, Gabriel again asked Madeline if she wanted to remain in Israel, but her answer was the same. She spent her final night in Israel in the spare bedroom of Gabriel’s Narkiss Street apartment, the room meant for a child. Early the next morning they drove to Ben Gurion Airport in darkness and boarded a flight for London.

  59

  LONDON

  For several days Gabriel debated whether to warn Graham Seymour that he was about to be the recipient of a rather unusual Russian defector. In the end, he decided against it. His reasons were personal rather than operational. He simply didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

  As a result, the reception team waiting at Heathrow Airport late that same morning was Office rather than MI5. It took clandestine possession of Gabriel and Madeline in the arrivals hall and ferried them to a hastily procured service flat in Pimlico. Then Gabriel rang Seymour at his office and told him that, once again, he had entered the United Kingdom without signing the guestbook.

  “What a surprise,” said Seymour dryly.

  “More to come, Graham.”

  “Where are you?”

  Gabriel gave him the address.

  Seymour had a meeting with a visiting delegation of Australian spies that couldn�
��t be put off, so an hour would elapse before his car appeared in the street outside the building. Entering the flat, he found Gabriel alone in the sitting room. On the coffee table was an open notebook computer, which Gabriel used to play a video of Pavel Zhirov confessing the many sins of the Kremlin-owned energy firm known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. By the time the video ended, Seymour appeared stricken. Which proved one of Ari Shamron’s favorite maxims, thought Gabriel. In the intelligence business, as in life, sometimes it was better not to know.

  “He’s the one who had lunch with Madeline in Corsica?” Seymour asked finally, still staring at the computer screen.

  Gabriel nodded his head slowly. “You told me to find him,” he said, “and I found him.”

  “What happened to his face?”

  “He said something to Mikhail he shouldn’t have.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Gone,” said Gabriel.

  “There are degrees of gone, you know.”

  The blank expression on Gabriel’s face made it clear that Pavel Zhirov was gone permanently.

  “Do the Russians know?” Seymour asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “How long before they find out?”

  “Spring, I’d say.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Another story for another time.”