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

  Gabriel ejected the DVD disk from the computer and offered it to Seymour. Accepting it, he exhaled slowly, as though he were trying to keep his blood pressure in check.

  “I’ve been in this game a long time,” he said at last, “and that video is the single most explosive thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “You haven’t seen everything yet, Graham.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed,” Seymour said as though he hadn’t heard Gabriel’s warning, “but we had an election in this country recently. Jonathan Lancaster just won by one of the biggest landslides in British history. And Jeremy Fallon is now the chancellor of the exchequer.”

  “Not for long,” said Gabriel.

  Seymour made no reply.

  “You’re not thinking about letting him get away with it, are you, Graham?”

  “No,” he said. “But it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

  “You always knew it would be.”

  “But I was hoping the blood wouldn’t spatter on me, too.” He lapsed into a heavy silence.

  “Is there something you need to get off your chest, Graham?”

  “The prime minister has offered me a promotion,” he said after a hesitation.

  “What kind of promotion?”

  “The kind I couldn’t turn down.”

  “Director general?”

  Seymour nodded. “But not of MI5,” he added quickly. “You’re looking at the future chief of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You and I are going to be running the world together—covertly, of course.”

  “Unless you bring down the Lancaster government.”

  “Correct,” replied Seymour. “If I do that, there’s a good chance I’ll be swept out to sea with the rest of them. And you will lose a close ally in the process.” He lowered his voice and added, “I would think a man in your position would want to hang on to a friend like me. You don’t have many these days.”

  “But you can’t possibly allow a KGB-owned energy company to drill for oil in your territorial waters.”

  “That would be a dereliction of duty,” Seymour agreed genially.

  “Nor can you allow a paid agent of the Kremlin to continue serving as the chancellor. Otherwise,” Gabriel added, “he might be your next prime minister.”

  “I shudder at the very thought.”

  “Then you have to destroy him, Graham.” Gabriel paused. “Or you have to avert your eyes while I do it for you.”

  Seymour was silent for a moment. “How would you go about it?”

  “By repaying a favor.”

  “What about Lancaster?”

  “He was guilty of an affair. There’s a good chance the British people will forgive him, especially when they learn that Jeremy Fallon has five million euros sitting in a Swiss bank account.” Gabriel paused, then added, “And there is one other mitigating circumstance I haven’t told you about yet.”

  “What is it?”

  Gabriel smiled and rose to his feet.

  He entered the bedroom and returned a moment later with a beautiful young woman at his side. She had coal-black hair and her once-pale skin was deeply tanned by the sun of the Red Sea. Seymour rose chivalrously and, smiling, extended his hand. As it hovered there unaccepted, his face took on a puzzled expression. And then he understood. He looked at Gabriel and whispered, “Dear God.”

  She told Graham Seymour the story from the beginning—the same story she had told Gabriel on that frozen afternoon in St. Petersburg, in the cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Then, calmly, primly, she declared that she wished to defect to the United Kingdom and, if possible, to one day resume her old life.

  As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour did not possess the authority to grant defector status to a Russian spy; the only person who could do that was Madeline’s former lover, Jonathan Lancaster. Which explained why, at two fifteen that afternoon, Seymour presented himself at Number Ten unannounced and demanded a word with the prime minister in private. Coincidentally, the encounter took place in the Study Room. There, beneath the same glowering portrait of Baroness Thatcher, Seymour told the prime minister everything he had learned. That the Russian president had ordered Volgatek to use any means possible to gain access to the oil of the North Sea. That Jeremy Fallon, Lancaster’s closest aide and confidant, had betrayed him for five million pieces of Russian silver. And that Madeline Hart, his former lover, was a Russian-born spy who was still very much alive and requesting asylum in Britain. To his credit, Lancaster, though visibly shaken, did not hesitate before giving his answer. Fallon had to go, Madeline had to stay, and let the chips fall where they may. He made only one request, that he be given the chance to break the news to his wife.

  “I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you, Prime Minister.”

  Lancaster reached slowly for the telephone. Seymour rose to his feet and slipped silently from the room.

  Which left only the name of the reporter who would be granted the most sensational exclusive in British political history. Seymour suggested Tony Richmond at the Times or perhaps Sue Gibbons from the Independent, but Gabriel overruled him. He had made a promise, he said, and he planned to keep it. He rang her mobile, got her voice mail, and left a brief message. She rang him back right away. Four o’clock at Café Nero, he said. And this time don’t be late.

  Much to Graham Seymour’s chagrin, Gabriel and Madeline insisted on taking one last walk together. They headed up Millbank through a gusty wind—past the Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament—and at ten minutes to four entered the café. Gabriel ordered black coffee; Madeline had milky Earl Grey tea and a digestive biscuit. She removed a compact from her handbag and checked her face in the mirror.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Very Israeli.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Put it away,” said Gabriel.

  She did as Gabriel instructed. Then she looked out the window at the crowds moving along the pavements of Bridge Street. As though she had never seen them before, thought Gabriel. As though she would never see them again. He glanced around the interior of the café. No one recognized her. Why should they? She was dead and buried—buried in a churchyard in Basildon. A town without a soul for a girl without a name or a past.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said after a moment.

  “Of course I do.”

  “I have enough without you. I have the video of Zhirov.”

  “The Kremlin can deny Zhirov,” she answered. “But it can’t deny me.”

  She was still staring out the window.

  “Take a good look,” Gabriel said, “because if you do this, it’s going to be a long time before they let you come back to London.”

  “Where do you suppose they’ll put me?”

  “A safe house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe a military base until the storm passes.”

  “It doesn’t sound very appealing, does it?”

  “You can always come back to Israel with me.”

  She made no reply. Gabriel leaned forward across the table and took hold of her hand. It was trembling slightly.

  “I keep a cottage in Cornwall,” he said quietly. “The town isn’t much, but it’s by the sea. You can stay there if you like.”

  “Does it have a view?” she asked.

  “A lovely view,” he answered.

  “I might like that.”

  She smiled bravely. Across the road Big Ben tolled four o’clock.

  “She’s late,” Gabriel said incredulously. “I can’t believe she’s late.”

  “She’s always late,” Madeline said.

  “You made quite an impression on her, by the way.”

  “She wasn’t the only one.”

  Madeline laughed in spite of herself and drank some of her tea. Gabriel frowned at his wristwatch.
Then he looked up in time to see Samantha Cooke rushing through the door. A moment later she was standing at their table, slightly out of breath. She looked at Gabriel for a moment before turning her gaze toward the beautiful dark-haired girl seated across from him. And then she understood.

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “Can we get you something to drink?” Madeline asked in her English accent.

  “Actually,” stammered Samantha Cooke, “it might be better if we walked.”

  60

  LONDON

  Thirteen hours later a junior functionary from Downing Street delivered a bundle of newspapers to a redbrick house in the Hampstead section of London. The house belonged to Simon Hewitt, press spokesman for Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, and the thud the papers made upon hitting his doorstep woke him from an unusually sound sleep. He had been dreaming of an incident from his childhood when a schoolyard bully had blackened his eye. It was a slight improvement over the previous night, when he dreamed he was being torn to pieces by wolves, or the night before that, when a cloud of bees had stung him bloody. It was all part of a recurring theme. Despite Lancaster’s triumph at the polls, Hewitt was gripped by a sense of impending doom quite unlike any he had experienced since coming to Downing Street. He was convinced that the quiet in the press was illusory. Surely, he thought, the earth’s crust was about to move.

  All of which explained why Hewitt was slow to rise from his bed and open his front door that cold London morning. The act of retrieving the bundle of newspapers from his doorstep sent his back into spasm, a reminder of the toll the job had taken on his health. He carried the parcel into the kitchen, where the coffeemaker was emitting the wheezy death rattle that signaled it was nearing the end of its cycle. After pouring a large cup and whitening it with heavy cream, he removed the newspapers from their plastic cover. As usual, Hewitt’s old paper, the Times, was on top. He scanned it quickly, found nothing objectionable, then moved on to the Guardian. Next it was the Independent. Then, finally, the Daily Telegraph.

  “Shit,” he said softly. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  At first the press was at a loss over exactly what to call it. They tried the Madeline Hart Affair, but that seemed too narrow. So did the Fallon Fiasco, which was en vogue for a few hours, or the Kremlin Connection, which enjoyed a brief run on ITV. By late morning the BBC had settled on the Downing Street Affair, which was bland but broad enough to cover all manner of sins. The rest of the press quickly fell into line, and a scandal was born.

  For most of that day, the man at the center of it, Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, remained curiously silent. Finally, at six that evening, the black door of Number Ten swung open, and Lancaster emerged alone to face the country. His tone was remorseful, but he remained dry-eyed and steady. He acknowledged that he had carried on a brief and unwise affair with a young woman from Party headquarters. He also admitted that he had retained the services of a foreign intelligence operative to find the young woman after her disappearance, that he had improperly withheld information from the British authorities, and that he had paid ten million euros in ransom and extortion money. At no point, he insisted, did he ever suspect that the young woman was actually a Russian-born sleeper spy. Nor did he suspect that her disappearance was part of a well-orchestrated conspiracy by a Kremlin-owned energy company to obtain drilling rights in the North Sea. He had approved the Volgatek license, he said, at the suggestion of his longtime aide and chief of staff, Jeremy Fallon. And that deal, he added pointedly, was now dead.

  Fallon wisely issued his first statement in written form, for even on his best days he looked like a man who was guilty of something. He acknowledged having helped the prime minister deal with the consequences of his “reckless personal conduct” but denied categorically that he had accepted a payment of money from anyone connected to Volgatek Oil & Gas. The commentators took note of the statement’s sharp tone. It was clear, they said, that Jeremy Fallon believed that Lancaster might not survive and that the premiership might be his for the taking. This was shaping up to be a fight for survival, they said. Perhaps even a fight to the death.

  The next statement came not in London but in Moscow, where the Russian president called the allegations against the Kremlin and its oil company a malicious Western lie. In a clear sign the affair would have geopolitical repercussions, he accused British intelligence of involvement in the disappearance of Pavel Zhirov, the man upon whose word the allegations were based. Then, without offering any evidence, he suggested that Viktor Orlov, the Russian oil oligarch now residing in the United Kingdom, was somehow linked to the affair. Orlov issued a taunting denial from his Mayfair headquarters in which he called the Russian president a congenital liar and kleptocrat who had finally shown his true stripes. Then he promptly handed himself over to an MI5 security detail for protection and disappeared from view.

  But who was the mysterious operative from a foreign intelligence service whom Lancaster had retained to find Madeline Hart after her disappearance in Corsica? Citing issues of national security, Lancaster refused to identify him. Nor did Jeremy Fallon shed any light on the matter. Initially, speculation centered on the Americans, with whom Lancaster was known to be close. That changed, however, when the Times reported that the noted Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon had been seen entering Downing Street on two separate occasions during the period in question. The Daily Mail then reported that a senior MP had spotted the same Gabriel Allon having coffee with a young woman at Café Nero, one day before the scandal broke. The Mail story was dismissed as tabloid silliness—surely the great Gabriel Allon would not be so foolish as to sit openly in a busy London coffeehouse—but the Times account proved tougher to deflate. In a break with tradition, the Office released a terse statement denying both reports, which the British press saw as ironclad confirmation of Allon’s involvement.

  With that, the scandal fell into a predictable cycle of leaks, counterleaks, and naked political warfare. The opposition leader declared his revulsion and demanded Lancaster’s resignation. But when a head count in the Commons revealed that Lancaster would narrowly survive a vote of no confidence, the opposition leader didn’t bother to schedule one. Even Jeremy Fallon seemed to have weathered the storm. After all, there was no proof he had accepted any payment from Volgatek, only the word of a Russian oil executive who seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth.

  And there it all might have ended, with the Lancaster-Fallon marriage badly damaged but still intact, were it not for the edition of the Daily Telegraph that landed with a thud on Simon Hewitt’s doorstep on the second Tuesday of January. On the front page, next to an article by Samantha Cooke, was a photograph of Jeremy Fallon entering a small private bank in Zurich. A few hours later Lancaster again appeared alone outside the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, this time to announce the firing of his chancellor of the exchequer. A few minutes later Scotland Yard announced that Fallon was now the target of a bribery-and-fraud investigation. Once again, Fallon declared his innocence. Not a single member of the Whitehall press corps believed him.

  He left Downing Street for the last time at sunset and returned to his empty bachelor’s apartment in Notting Hill, which was surrounded, it seemed, by every reporter and cameraman in London. The inquest would never determine how or when he eluded them, though a CCTV camera captured a clear image of his stricken face at 2:23 the next morning as he walked along a deserted stretch of Park Lane, one end of a rope already tied around his neck. Using a nautical knot taught to him by his father, he tied the other end of the rope to a lamppost at the center of the Westminster Bridge. No one happened to see Fallon hurl himself over the edge, and so he hung there through the long night, until the sun finally shone upon his slowly swaying body. Thus lending proof to an ancient and wise Corsican proverb: He who lives an immoral life dies an immoral death.

  61

  CORSICA

  But who had been the so
urce of the damning photograph that drove Jeremy Fallon from office and over the railing of Westminster Bridge? It was a question that would dominate British political circles for months to come; but on the enchanted island where the scandal had its genesis, only a few north-looking sophisticates gave much thought to it. Occasionally, a couple would have their photograph taken at Les Palmiers, posed as Madeline Hart and Pavel Zhirov on the afternoon of their fateful lunch, but for the most part the island did its best to forget the small role it had played in the death of a senior British statesman. As the winter took hold, the Corsicans instinctively returned to the old ways. They burned the macchia for warmth. They waggled their fingers at strangers to ward off the evil eye. And in an isolated valley near the southwestern coast, they turned to Don Anton Orsati for help when they could turn to no one else.

  On a blustery afternoon in the middle of February, while seated at the oaken desk in his large office, he received an unusual telephone call. The man at the other end was not looking to have someone eliminated—hardly surprising, thought the don, for the man was more than capable of seeing to his own killing. Instead, he was looking for a villa where he might spend a few weeks alone with his wife. It had to be in a place where no one would recognize him and where he had no need of bodyguards. The don had just the place. But there was one problem. There was only one road in and out—and the road passed the three ancient olive trees where Don Casabianca’s wretched palomino goat made his encampment.

  “Is there any way it can have a tragic accident before we arrive?” asked the man on the telephone.

  “Sorry,” replied Don Orsati. “But here on Corsica some things never change.”

  They arrived on the island three days later, having flown from Tel Aviv to Paris and then from Paris to Ajaccio. Don Orsati had left a car at the airport, a shiny gray Peugeot sedan that Gabriel drove with Corsican abandon southward down the coast, then inland through the valleys thick with macchia. When they arrived at the three ancient olive trees, the goat rose menacingly from its resting place and blocked their path. But it quickly gave ground after Chiara spoke a few soothing words into its tattered ear.