The Other Woman: A Novel Read online

  “How much?” asked Gabriel.

  “Ten million pounds in cash and a house in the English countryside.”

  “One of those,” said Gabriel contemptuously.

  “Yes,” agreed Seymour.

  “And the piece of information that made him worthy of such riches?”

  “The name of a Russian mole working at the pinnacle of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.”

  “Did he specify which service or which side of the divide?”

  Seymour shook his head.

  “What was your reaction?”

  “Caution bordering on skepticism, which is our default opening position. We assumed he was telling us a tall tale, or that he was an agent provocateur sent by Moscow Center to mislead us into carrying out a self-destructive witch hunt for a traitor in our midst.”

  “So you told him you weren’t interested?”

  “The opposite, actually. We told him we were very interested but that we needed a few weeks to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, we checked his references. Gribkov was no probationer. He was a veteran SVR officer who’d served in several rezidenturas in the West, most recently in Vienna, where he’d had numerous contacts with my Head of Station.”

  “Dishy Alistair Hughes.”

  Seymour said nothing.

  “What was the nature of the contacts?”

  “The usual,” said Seymour. “What’s important is that Alistair reported each and every one of them, as he’s required to do. They were all logged in his file, with cross-references in Gribkov’s.”

  “So you brought Hughes to Vauxhall Cross to get his impressions of Gribkov and what he was selling.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And?”

  “Alistair was even more skeptical than London Control.”

  “Was he really? I’m shocked to hear that.”

  Seymour frowned. “By this point,” he said, “six weeks had passed since Gribkov’s initial offer of defection, and he was starting to get nervous. He made two highly inadvisable phone calls to my man in New York. And then he did something truly reckless.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He reached out to the Americans. As you might expect, Langley was furious at the way we’d handled the case. They put pressure on us to take Gribkov as quickly as possible. They even offered to pay a portion of the ten million. When we resisted, it turned into a full-blown family feud.”

  “Who won?”

  “Moscow Center,” said Seymour. “While we were bickering with our American cousins, we failed to notice when Gribkov was ordered home for urgent consultations. His wife and children returned to Russia a few days later, and the following month the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations announced the appointment of a new press attaché. Needless to say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Gribkov has never been seen or heard from since.”

  “Why wasn’t I told about any of this?”

  “It didn’t concern you.”

  “It concerned me,” said Gabriel evenly, “the minute you let Alistair Hughes within a mile of my operation in Vienna.”

  “It didn’t cross our mind not to let him work on the operation.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because our internal inquiry cleared him of any role in Gribkov’s demise.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that. But how exactly did the Russians learn Gribkov was trying to defect?”

  “We concluded he must have tipped them off with his behavior. The Americans agreed with our assessment.”

  “Thus ending a potentially destabilizing fight among friends. But now you have another dead Russian defector on your hands. And the one common denominator is your Head of Station in Vienna, a man who carried on an extramarital affair with the wife of an American consular officer.”

  “Her husband wasn’t a consular officer, he was Agency. And if marital infidelity were an accurate indicator of treason, we wouldn’t have a service. Neither would you.”

  “He’s been spending a lot of time across the border in Switzerland.”

  “Did your little bird tell you that, too, or have you been watching him?”

  “I would never watch one of your officers without telling you, Graham. Friends don’t do that to one another. They don’t keep each other in the dark. Not when lives are at stake.”

  Seymour offered no response. He looked suddenly exhausted and weary of the quarrel. Gabriel did not envy his friend’s predicament. A spymaster never won in a situation like this. It was only a question of how badly he lost.

  “At the risk of putting my nose somewhere it doesn’t belong,” said Gabriel, “it seems to me you have two choices.”

  “Do I?”

  “The most logical course of action would be to open an internal investigation into whether Alistair Hughes is flogging your secrets to the Russians. You’ll be obligated to tell the Americans about the inquiry, which will send your relationship into the deep freeze. What’s more, you’ll have to bring your rivals at MI5 into the picture, which is the last thing you want.”

  “And the second option?” asked Seymour.

  “Let us watch Hughes for you.”

  “Surely, you jest.”

  “Sometimes. But not now.”

  “It’s without precedent.”

  “Not entirely,” replied Gabriel. “And it’s not without its advantages.”

  “Such as?”

  “Hughes knows your surveillance techniques and, perhaps more important, your personnel. If you try to watch him, there’s a good chance he’ll spot you. But if we do it—”

  “You’ll have license to rummage into the private affairs of one of my officers.”

  With a shrug of his shoulders, Gabriel made it clear that such license was his already, with or without Seymour’s acquiescence. “He won’t be able to hide it from us, Graham, not if he’s under round-the-clock surveillance. If he’s in contact with the Russians, we’ll see it.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll hand the evidence over to you, and you can do with it as you see fit.”

  “Or as you see fit.”

  Gabriel did not rise to the bait; the contest was nearly over. Seymour lifted his eyes irritably toward the grate in the ceiling. The air was Siberian cold.

  “I can’t let you watch my Vienna Head without someone from our side looking over your shoulder,” he said at last. “I want one of my officers on the surveillance team.”

  “That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, Graham.” Greeted by silence, Gabriel said, “Given the current circumstances, there’s only one MI6 officer I’d accept.”

  “Have you forgotten that he and Alistair know each other?”

  “No,” replied Gabriel, “that important fact has not suddenly slipped my mind. But don’t worry, we won’t let them within a mile of each other.”

  “Not a word to the Americans,” demanded Seymour.

  Gabriel raised his right hand, as though swearing a solemn oath.

  “And no access whatsoever to any MI6 files or the inner workings of Vienna station,” Seymour insisted. “Your operation will be limited to physical surveillance only.”

  “But his apartment is fair game,” countered Gabriel. “Eyes and ears.”

  Seymour made a show of deliberation. “Agreed,” he said finally. “But do try to show a little discretion with your cameras and microphones. A man is entitled to a zone of immunity.”

  “Unless he’s spying for the Russians. Then he’s entitled to vysshaya mera.”

  “Is that Hebrew?”

  “Russian, actually.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Gabriel punched the eight-digit numerical code into the internal keypad, and the locks opened with a snap.

  Seymour frowned. “I’ll have that changed first thing in the morning.”

  “Do,” said Gabriel.

  Seymour was distracted during dinner, and so it fell to Helen, the perfect service wife, to
guide the conversation. She did so with admirable discretion. Gabriel was no stranger to the London press, yet never once did she raise the unpleasant topic of his past exploits on British soil. Only later, as he was preparing to take his leave, did he realize they had spoken of nothing at all.

  He had hoped to walk back to his hotel, but a Jaguar limousine waited curbside. Christopher Keller was sitting in the backseat, reading something on his MI6 BlackBerry. “I’d get in if I were you,” he said. “A good friend of the Tsar lives on the other side of the square.”

  Gabriel ducked into the car and closed the door. The limousine moved away from the curb with a lurch and a moment later was speeding along the King’s Road through Chelsea.

  “How was dinner?” asked Keller warily.

  “Almost as bad as Vienna.”

  “I hear we’re going back.”

  “Not me.”

  “Too bad.” Keller stared out the window. “I know how much you love the place.”

  15

  British Embassy, Washington

  The director-general of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had no private aircraft of his own—only the prime minister had such a perquisite—and so Graham Seymour crossed the Atlantic the next morning aboard a chartered Falcon executive jet. He was met on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport by a CIA reception team and driven at high speed through the sprawl of suburban Northern Virginia, to the British Embassy compound on Massachusetts Avenue. Upon arrival, he was shown upstairs for the obligatory meeting with the ambassador, a man he had known nearly all his life. Their fathers had served together in Beirut in the early 1960s. The ambassador’s father had worked for the Foreign Office, Seymour’s for MI6.

  “Dinner tonight?” asked the ambassador as he showed Seymour to the door.

  “Back to London, I’m afraid.”

  “Pity.”

  “Quite.”

  Seymour’s next stop was the MI6 station, which lay behind a bank vault of a door, a secret kingdom, separate and apart from the rest of the embassy. It was MI6’s largest station by far, and without question its most important. By standing agreement, its officers made no attempt to collect intelligence on American soil. They served merely as liaisons to the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, where they were regarded as valued customers. MI6 had helped to build America’s espionage capability during World War II, and now, decades later, it was still reaping the rewards. The close familial relationship allowed the United Kingdom, a hollowed-out former imperial power with a small military, to play an outsize role on the world stage, and thus maintain the illusion it was a global power to be reckoned with.

  Rebecca Manning, the Washington Head of Station, was waiting for Seymour on the other side of the security barrier. She had been beautiful once—far too beautiful to be an intelligence officer, in the opinion of one long-forgotten service recruiter—but now, in the prime of her professional life, she was merely formidably attractive. A stray lock of dark hair fell over a cobalt-blue eye. She moved it aside with one hand and extended the other toward Seymour. “Welcome to Washington,” she intoned, as though the city and all it represented were hers exclusively. “I trust the flight wasn’t too terrible.”

  “It gave me a chance to read your briefing materials.”

  “There are one or two more points I’d like to review before we leave for Langley. There’s coffee in the conference room.”

  She released her grip on Seymour’s hand and led him along the station’s central corridor. Her stylish jacket and skirt smelled faintly of tobacco; she had no doubt stepped into the garden for a quick L&B before Seymour’s arrival. Rebecca Manning was an unrepentant and wholly unapologetic smoker. She had acquired the habit at Cambridge, and it had worsened considerably during a posting in Baghdad. She had also served in Brussels, Paris, Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman, where she had been the Head of Station. It was Seymour, early in his tenure as chief, who had given her the job as H/Washington, as it was known in the lexicon of the service. In doing so, he had virtually anointed her as his successor. Washington would be Rebecca’s final overseas station; there was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere but a final lap at Vauxhall Cross so that she might be formally introduced to the barons of Whitehall. Her appointment would be historic, and long overdue. MI5 had already had two female chiefs—including Amanda Wallace, the current director-general—but Six had never entrusted the reins of power to a woman. It was a legacy Seymour would be proud to leave.

  Family ties aside, Washington Station observed the same security procedures as any other post in the world, especially when it came to sensitive conversations between senior officers. The conference room was impervious to electronic eavesdropping. A leather-bound briefing book had been left at Seymour’s place at the table. Inside was the agenda for the meeting with CIA director Morris Payne, along with summaries of current policies, future goals, and ongoing operations. It was one of the most valuable documents in the world of global intelligence. Moscow Center would surely have killed for it.

  “Cream?” asked Rebecca Manning.

  “Black.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Nothing serious, I trust.”

  “My cholesterol is a bit too high. So is my blood pressure. It’s one of the fringe benefits of the job.”

  “I gave up worrying about my health a long time ago. If I can survive Baghdad, I can survive anything.” She handed Seymour his coffee. Then she prepared one for herself and frowned. “Coffee without a fag. What’s the point?”

  “You really should quit, you know. If I can do it, anyone can.”

  “Morris tells me the same thing.”

  “I didn’t realize you were on a Christian-name basis.”

  “He’s not so bad, Graham.”

  “He’s ideological, which makes me nervous. A spy should believe in nothing.” He paused, then added, “Like you, Rebecca.”

  “Morris Payne isn’t a spy, he’s the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There’s an enormous difference.” She opened her copy of the briefing book. “Shall we begin?”

  Seymour had never doubted the wisdom of Rebecca Manning’s appointment to Washington, never less so than in the forty-five minutes of her briefing. She moved through the agenda swiftly and sure-footedly—North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the global effort against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Her command of the policy issues was complete, as was her exposure to American covert operations. As MI6’s Head of Station in Washington, Rebecca Manning knew far more about the secret workings of the American intelligence community than most members of the Senate. Her thinking was subtle and sophisticated, and not given to hyperbole or rashness. For Rebecca, the world was not a dangerous place spinning rapidly out of control; it was a problem to be managed by men and women of competence and training.

  The last item on the agenda was Russia. It was inherently treacherous ground. The new American president had made no secret of his admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader and expressed a desire for better relations with Moscow. Now he was embroiled in an investigation into whether the Kremlin had provided covert assistance that helped him prevail in a close election against his Democratic opponent. Seymour and MI6 had concluded it was so, as had Morris Payne’s predecessor at the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “For obvious reasons,” said Rebecca, “Morris has no desire to discuss American domestic politics. He’s interested in one topic and one topic only.”

  “Heathcliff?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “If that’s the case, he should invite Gabriel Allon to Washington for a chat.”

  “It was Allon’s fault—is that your position?” There was a brief silence. “May I speak frankly?”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  “The Americans won’t buy it. They’ve worked closely with Allon for many years, as have you. And they know he’s more than capable of taking in a defecting Russian agent.�
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  “You seem to have your fingers firmly on the American pulse.”

  “That’s part of my job, Graham.”

  “What should I expect from them?”

  “Grave concern,” answered Rebecca. She said nothing more, for nothing more needed to be said. If the CIA shared Gabriel’s belief that MI6 had been penetrated by the Russians, it was a disaster.

  “Is Morris going to make the accusation explicitly?” asked Seymour.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. That said, he’s not one to mince words. I’m already detecting a change in temperature in my dealings with them. The air is getting a bit chilly. Lots of long silences and blank stares. We have to address their concerns head-on. Otherwise, they’ll begin withholding the crown jewels.”

  “And if I tell them I share their concerns?”

  “Do you?” asked Rebecca Manning.

  Seymour sipped his coffee.

  “You need to be aware of the fact that Heathcliff’s assassination has led the Americans to take another look at what went wrong with the Gribkov case. A very hard look,” Rebecca added.

  “They would be fools not to.” After a pause, Seymour said, “And so would we.”

  “Have you opened a formal investigation?”

  “Rebecca, you know I can’t possibly—”

  “And I can’t possibly carry out my duties as your Washington Head of Station unless I know the answer to that question. I’ll be left in an untenable situation, and any residual trust the Americans have in me will evaporate.”

  Her point was valid. “No formal investigation,” said Seymour evenly, “has been opened at this time.”

  The response was a masterpiece of passive, bureaucratic murk. It did not escape Rebecca’s notice. “What about an informal one?” she asked.

  Seymour allowed a moment to pass before answering. “Suffice it to say, certain inquiries are being made.”