by Daniel Silva
“And what was your role in this endeavor?”
“A brief marriage. And an enormous sacrifice.”
“Who was the lucky groom?”
“An Englishman from a well-connected family who also believed in peace.”
“By that, you mean he was a KGB agent.”
“His exact affiliation with Moscow was never made clear to me. His father had known Kim at Cambridge. He was quite radical, and quite homosexual. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t to be a real marriage.”
“Where were you wed?”
“England.”
“Church?”
“Civil.”
“Did your family attend?”
“Of course not.”
“And how long did this union last?”
“Two years. Ours wasn’t a match made in heaven, Monsieur Allon. It was a match made at Moscow Center.”
“What precipitated the divorce?”
“Adultery.”
“How fitting.”
“Apparently, I was caught in flagrante with one of my husband’s closest friends. It was quite a scandal, actually. So was my heavy drinking, which had left me unfit to be a mother. For the good of the child, I agreed to surrender custody.”
A long and painful period of estrangement followed so that the child would become thoroughly English. Charlotte stayed in Paris for a time. Then, at Moscow Center’s behest, she settled in a pueblo blanco in the mountains of Andalusia where no one would find her. There were letters at first, but soon the letters stopped. Sasha claimed they were slowing the transition.
Occasionally, Charlotte received vague, bland updates, such as the one that arrived in 1981 concerning admission to an elite British university. The update did not specify which university, but Charlotte knew enough of Kim’s past to make a reasonable assumption. Without informing Sasha, she returned to England in 1984 and made her way to Cambridge. And there, on Jesus Lane, she spotted the child of treason, Philby’s child, walking through the shadow cast by a tall redbrick wall, an unruly forelock covering one very blue eye. With her camera, Charlotte surreptitiously snapped a photo.
“It was the last time I . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“And after Cambridge?” asked Gabriel.
Charlotte received an update saying the endeavor had proven successful. She was never told which department of British intelligence it was, but she assumed it was MI6. Kim, she said, would have never settled for MI5, not after the way they pursued him so relentlessly.
“And you’ve had no contact in all these years?”
“Occasionally, I receive a letter, a few empty lines no doubt composed by Moscow Center. They contain no information about work or a personal life, nothing that I might use to—”
“Find the child you abandoned?” The remark wounded her. “I’m sorry, Madame Bettencourt, I don’t understand how—”
“That’s right, Monsieur Allon. You don’t.”
“Perhaps you could explain it to me.”
“It was a different time. The world was different. They were different.”
“Who?”
“The Russians. As far as we were concerned, Moscow was the center of the universe. They were going to change the world, and we were obliged to help them.”
“Help the KGB? They were monsters,” said Gabriel. “They still are.”
Greeted by silence, Gabriel asked when she had last received a letter.
“It was about two weeks ago.”
Gabriel concealed his alarm. “How was it delivered?”
“By an oaf called Karpov from the Madrid rezidentura. He also informed me that Moscow Center would like me to take a long holiday in Russia.”
“Why now?” asked Gabriel.
“You would know better than I, Monsieur Allon.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t come for you a long time ago.”
“It was part of my original arrangement with Kim and Sasha. I had no desire to live in the Soviet Union.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t such a Marxist utopia after all.”
Charlotte Bettencourt suffered his rebuke in penitential silence. All around them, Seville was beginning to stir. There was music in the air, and from the bars and cafés in a nearby plaza came the chiming of glasses and cutlery. Evening breeze swirled in the courtyard. It carried the scent of oranges into the room and, quite suddenly, the sound of a young woman’s laughter. Charlotte Bettencourt cocked her head expectantly, listening as the laughter faded. Then she stared at the Victorian box resting on the table.
“It was a gift from Kim,” she said after a moment. “He found it in a little shop in the Christian quarter of Beirut. It’s rather fitting, don’t you think? Leave it to Kim to give me a box to lock away my secrets.”
“His, too,” said Gabriel. He lifted the lid and removed a stack of envelopes bound by a faded ribbon of Lenten violet. “He was rather prolific, wasn’t he?”
“During the first weeks of our affair, I sometimes received two letters a day.”
Gabriel reached into the box again. This time, he withdrew a single sheet of paper, a birth certificate from Saint George Hospital in Beirut, Lebanon’s oldest, dated May 26, 1963. He pointed to the child’s given name.
“Was it ever changed?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “As fortune would have it, it was sufficiently English.”
“Like yours.” Gabriel reached into Kim Philby’s box of secrets again. This time, he withdrew a British marriage certificate dated April 1977. “A spring wedding. It must have been lovely.”
“It was quite small, actually.”
Gabriel pointed to the groom’s family name. “I assume you both took it.”
“For a time,” she answered. “I became Charlotte Bettencourt again after the divorce.”
“But not—”
“That would have been counterproductive,” she said, cutting him off. “After all, the entire point of the marriage was to acquire a name and a pedigree that would open the doors of an elite university and eventually the Secret Intelligence Service.”
Gabriel laid the marriage certificate next to the birth certificate and Philby’s love letters. Then he reached into the box a final time and removed a Kodak snapshot dated October 1984. Even Gabriel could see the resemblance—to Philby, unquestionably, but to Charlotte Bettencourt as well.
“You took the photograph and then walked away?” he asked. “You didn’t speak?”
“What would I have said?”
“You could have begged for forgiveness. You could have put a stop to it.”
“Why would I have done a thing like that, after everything I’d sacrificed? Remember, the Cold War was at a low point. Reagan the cowboy was in the White House. The Americans were pouring nuclear missiles into Western Europe.”
“And for this,” said Gabriel coldly, “you were prepared to give up your daughter?”
“She wasn’t mine alone, she was Kim’s, too. I was only a salon militant, but not her. She was the genuine article. She had betrayal in the blood.”
“So do you, Madame Bettencourt.”
“Everything I did,” she said, “I did as a matter of conscience.”
“You obviously don’t have one. And neither did Philby.”
“Kim,” she said. “He’ll always be Kim to me.”
She was staring at the photograph. Not in anguish, thought Gabriel, but with pride.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you do it?”
“Is there an answer I could give that you would find satisfactory?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps, Monsieur Allon, we should leave it to the past.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “Perhaps we should.”
Part Three
Down by the River
51
Seville—London
There were several flights between Seville and London the next morning, but Gabriel and Christopher Keller drove to Lisbon instead, on the assumption that Moscow Cente
r was checking the outgoing Spanish manifests. Keller paid for their tickets with a credit card that bore the name Peter Marlowe, his MI6 work name. He did not inform Vauxhall Cross of his pending return to British soil, and Gabriel did not alert his station. He had no luggage other than his Office-built attaché case. Concealed in its false compartment were three items taken from the Victorian strongbox Kim Philby had given Charlotte Bettencourt on the occasion of her twenty-fifth birthday. A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and a snapshot taken without the subject’s knowledge on Jesus Lane in Cambridge. On Gabriel’s BlackBerry were photographs of the remaining items. The silly love letters, the notebooks, the beginnings of a memoir, the many intimate photos of Philby taken inside Charlotte Bettencourt’s Beirut apartment. Madame Bettencourt herself was at the house in Seville, under Office protection.
The plane touched down at Heathrow a few minutes after ten. Gabriel and Keller cleared passport control separately and reunited in the chaos of the arrivals hall. Keller’s MI6 BlackBerry pinged with an incoming message a few seconds later.
“We’re busted.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Nigel Whitcombe. He must have been watching my credit card. He wants to give us a lift into town.”
“Tell him thanks, but no thanks.”
Keller frowned at the taxi queue. “What harm would it do?”
“That depends on whether the Russians followed Nigel from Vauxhall Cross.”
“There he is.”
Keller nodded toward the Ford hatchback waiting outside the terminal doors, its headlamps flashing. Gabriel reluctantly followed him outside and climbed into the backseat. A moment later they were speeding along the M40 toward central London. Whitcombe’s eyes found Gabriel’s in the rearview mirror.
“The chief asked me to take you to the Stockwell safe house.”
“We’re not going anywhere near it. Take me to the Bayswater Road instead.”
“It’s not exactly the safest of safe flats.”
“Neither are yours,” said Gabriel beneath his breath. The clouds were low and heavy, and it was not yet properly light. “How long does the chief intend to keep me waiting?”
“He’s meeting with the Joint Intelligence Committee until noon. Then he’s going to Downing Street for a private lunch with the prime minister.”
Gabriel swore softly.
“Shall I tell him to cancel lunch?”
“No. It’s important he keep to his normal schedule.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It is,” said Gabriel. “As bad as it gets.”
It was true that the Office safe flat located on the Bayswater Road was no longer fully secure. In fact, Gabriel had used it so often that Housekeeping referred to it as his London pied-à-terre. It had been six months since his last stay. It was the night he and Keller returned to London after killing Saladin at his compound in Morocco. Gabriel had arrived at the safe flat to find Chiara waiting. They had shared a midnight supper, he had slept a few hours, and in the morning, outside the security barrier at Downing Street, he and Keller had killed an ISIS terrorist armed with a radiological dispersion device, a dirty bomb. Together they had spared Britain a calamity. Now they were delivering one to her doorstep.
Housekeeping had left a few nonperishables in the pantry and a Beretta 9mm with a walnut grip in the bedroom closet. Gabriel warmed a tin of minestrone while Keller, from the sitting room window, watched the traffic moving along the road, and the man, vaguely Russian in appearance, resting on a bench in Hyde Park. The man left the bench at half past twelve, and a woman took his place. Keller rammed the loaded magazine into the Beretta and chambered the first round. At the sound, Gabriel poked his head into the room and raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Maybe Nigel was right,” said Keller. “Maybe we should go to one of our safe houses.”
“MI6 doesn’t have any. Not anymore.”
“Then let’s go somewhere else. This place is giving me the heebies.”
“Why?”
“Her,” said Keller, pointing toward the park.
Gabriel walked over to the window. “Her name is Aviva. She’s one of ours.”
“When did you contact your station?”
“I didn’t. King Saul Boulevard must have told them I was coming to town.”
“Let’s hope the Russians weren’t listening.”
Twenty minutes later the woman left the bench, and the same man returned. “That’s Nir,” said Gabriel. “He’s the ambassador’s primary bodyguard.”
Keller checked the time. It was nearly one o’clock. “How long does it take for a prime minister and his intelligence chief to have lunch?”
“That depends on the agenda.”
“And if the intelligence chief were confessing to his prime minister that his service was completely compromised by the Russians?” Keller shook his head slowly. “We’re going to need to rebuild MI6 from the ground up. This is going to be the scandal to end all scandals.”
Gabriel was silent.
“Do you think he’ll survive it?” asked Keller.
“Graham? I suppose it depends on how he handles it.”
“An arrest and trial are going to be messy.”
“What choice does he have?”
Keller didn’t answer; he was staring at his phone. “Graham has left Downing Street. He’s on his way. In fact,” said Keller, looking up from the phone, “here he comes now.”
Gabriel watched the approaching Jaguar limousine. “That was quick.”
“He must have skipped the pudding.”
The car stopped at the building’s entrance. Graham Seymour climbed grimly out.
“He looks like he’s going to a funeral,” observed Keller.
“Another funeral,” added Gabriel.
“Have you given any thought as to how you’re going to tell him?”
“I don’t have to say a word.”
Gabriel opened the attaché case and from the hidden compartment removed three items. A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and a snapshot taken without the subject’s knowledge on Jesus Lane in Cambridge. It was bad, thought Gabriel. As bad as it gets.
52
Bayswater Road, London
The birth certificate was issued by Saint George Hospital in Beirut on May 26, 1963. It listed bettencourt, charlotte as the mother and philby, harold adrian russell as the father. The child weighed slightly under seven pounds at birth. She was called rebecca. She took the family name of her mother rather than her father—he was married to another woman at the time—but acquired a new surname when bettencourt, charlotte married a manning, robert in a civil service in London on November 2, 1976. A simple check of Cambridge University’s admission records would confirm that a manning, rebecca went up to Trinity College in the autumn of 1981. And a check of U.K. immigration records would similarly confirm that a bettencourt, charlotte entered the country in 1984. During her brief stay, she snapped a photograph of manning, rebecca as she walked along Jesus Lane—a photograph she gave to allon, gabriel in a house in Seville. Thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that MI6’s Head of Station in Washington was the illegitimate child of history’s greatest spy and a long-term agent of Russian penetration. In the jargon of the trade, a mole.
“Unless,” said Gabriel, “you have a different explanation.”
“Such as?”
“That MI6 knew about her from the beginning. That you turned her around and have been playing her back against Moscow Center. That she is the greatest double agent in history.”
“If only it were true.” Seymour was staring at the photograph, almost in disbelief.
“Is it her?” asked Gabriel.
“You’ve never met her in any professional capacity?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure.”
“It’s her,” said Seymour after a moment. “A younger version, of course, but it’s definitely Rebecca Manning.”
It was the first time he had spoken her n
ame.
“Did you ever—”
“Suspect she was a Russian spy? The illegitimate daughter of Kim Philby?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“One makes lists at a time like this,” said Seymour, “rather like when one suspects one’s wife of being unfaithful. Is it him? Or him?”
“What about her?” said Gabriel, nodding toward the photo.
“I was the one who made Rebecca our Head of Station in Washington. Needless to say, I had no qualms about her loyalty.”
Keller was staring into the Bayswater Road, as though unaware of the two spymasters confronting one another over the laminated coffee table.
“Surely,” said Gabriel, “you must have reviewed her file thoroughly before giving her the job.”
“Of course.”
“Nothing recorded against?”
“Her personnel file is spotless.”
“What about the circumstances of her childhood? She was born in Beirut, and her mother was a French citizen who disappeared from her life when she was a child.”
“But Robert Manning was from the right sort of family.”
“That’s why Philby chose him,” interjected Gabriel.
“And her tutors at Cambridge thought very highly of her.”
“Philby chose them, too. He knew how to pull the levers to get Rebecca a job at MI6. He’d done it once himself.” Gabriel held up the birth certificate. “Did your vetters never notice that her mother’s name appeared in your father’s telegrams from Beirut?” He recited the relevant passage from his prodigious memory. “‘The other woman’s name is Charlotte Bettencourt. I am reliably informed Mademoiselle Bettencourt is now several months pregnant.’”
“Obviously,” said Seymour, “the vetters didn’t make the connection.”
“A simple blood test would do it for them.”
“I don’t need a blood test.” Seymour stared at the photograph of Rebecca Manning at Cambridge. “Hers is the same face I saw at the bar of the Normandie when I was a boy.”