The English Girl: A Novel
Page 22
“We’ve got company,” said Keller.
“How many?”
“It looks like just one, but I can’t be sure.”
Gabriel parted the gauzy curtains of Madeline’s window a fraction of an inch and saw a woman walking along Blackwater Way beneath the shelter of an umbrella. As she passed through a cone of yellow lamplight, he glimpsed her face briefly and realized at once that he had seen it somewhere before. The answer came to him as she veered into the concrete drive. It had been in an ancient church, in the mountains of the Lubéron. She was the woman who had crossed herself as though the movement were unfamiliar to her. And for some reason she was now inserting a key into Madeline Hart’s front door.
Gabriel switched off the phone and drew the gun from the small of his back. He was tempted to steal down the stairs and confront the woman immediately, but decided it was better to wait. Eventually, he thought, the woman would tell him who she was and why she was here, preferably without realizing she had done so. That was always the best way to acquire a piece of intelligence—without the knowledge of the target. As Shamron always preached, it was better for a spy to be a pickpocket than a mugger.
And so Gabriel stood stock-still in Madeline Hart’s childhood room, the barrel of the gun pressed reassuringly to his cheek, as the woman stepped into the entrance hall and quietly closed the door. She emitted a single syllable that was unfamiliar to Gabriel. Then came a series of swishes and rustles that suggested she was gathering up the post and placing it into a plastic bag. Next she moved into the sitting room, where she spent approximately two minutes. Then she entered the kitchen and again uttered the same single syllable. Gabriel suspected it was a vulgarity from a language other than English, Hebrew, French, Italian, or German. He suspected something else, too. The woman, whoever she was, was searching the house, just as Gabriel had before her arrival.
When her footfalls reached the base of the stairs, Gabriel was seized by a moment of indecision. If he was right about the woman’s intentions—that she was looking for something—she would surely search Madeline’s bedroom. He glanced around to see if there was a place to conceal himself but saw nothing suitable; the room was scarcely larger than the cell where Madeline had been held captive in France. As the woman’s steps grew louder, Gabriel decided he had no choice but to leave. But where? The bathroom was just across the hall. As he entered it without a sound, he wondered what Shamron would be thinking if he could see the future chief of Israeli intelligence at this moment. He would approve, thought Gabriel. In fact, he was certain the great Ari Shamron had taken cover in places that were far more professionally degrading than the bathroom of a Basildon council house.
He left the door slightly ajar—a quarter inch, no more—and held the gun in his outstretched hands as the woman completed her journey up the stairs. She entered the largest bedroom first and, judging from the sound of opening drawers and slamming doors, searched it thoroughly. Five minutes later she emerged and walked past the bathroom without pausing, seemingly unaware a gun was at that instant pointed at her head. She was wearing the same tan raincoat she had worn in France, though her hair was arranged slightly differently. In her left hand was a green shopping bag from Marks & Spencer. It looked as though it contained more than just unread post.
When she entered Madeline’s room, her search turned suddenly violent. It was a professional search, thought Gabriel, listening. A crash search . . . She tore clothing from the closet, ripped sheets from the bed, and emptied the contents of drawers onto the floor. Finally, there was a sharp crack, like the splintering of wood, followed by a heavy silence. It was broken a moment later by the sound of her voice. It was low and calm, the kind of voice one uses to deliver news to a superior over a device that transmitted a signal over the open airwaves. Gabriel couldn’t understand what she was saying—he had no ear for Slavic tongues—but he was certain of one thing.
The woman was speaking Russian.
35
BASILDON, ESSEX
Her car, a boxy old Volvo sedan, was parked across the street from the meanest of the Lichfields apartment blocks. She walked to it directly, the umbrella in her right hand, the green Marks & Spencer bag in her left. The umbrella was purely cosmetic, thought Gabriel, watching from Madeline’s window, for the rain had ended. The bag looked heavy. After opening the car door, she swung the bag onto the front passenger seat, then climbed in, leaving the umbrella unfurled until she was safely inside. The engine hesitated before coughing to life. She waited until she had reached the perimeter of the estate before switching on the headlamps. She drove fast but smoothly, like a professional.
Gabriel took one last look at the destruction the woman had wrought in Madeline’s room and then hurried down the stairs. By the time he stepped from the doorway, Keller had pulled the car around and was waiting outside in the street. Gabriel climbed in quickly and nodded for Keller to follow the woman.
“But be careful,” he cautioned. “She’s good.”
“How good?”
“Moscow Center good.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I could be wrong,” said Gabriel, “but I believe the woman driving that car is KGB.”
Technically, there was no KGB, of course. It had been disbanded not long after the collapse of the old Soviet empire. The Russian Federation now had two intelligence services: the FSB and the SVR. The FSB handled matters inside Russia’s borders: counterintelligence, counterterrorism, the mafiya, the pro-democracy activists who were brave enough, or stupid enough, to challenge the men who now ruled Russia from behind the walls of the Kremlin. The SVR was Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It ran its global network of spies from the same secluded campus in Yasenevo that had served as the headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. SVR officers still called the building Moscow Center—and, not surprisingly, even Russian citizens still referred to the SVR as the KGB. And for good reason. The Kremlin might have changed the name of Russia’s intelligence service, but the SVR’s mission remained the same—to penetrate and weaken the nations of the old Atlantic alliance, with the United States and Great Britain at the top of its list.
But why had an SVR field agent followed Gabriel and Keller to an ancient church in the mountains of the Lubéron? And why had the same SVR field agent just searched the family home of a dead English girl named Madeline Hart? A girl who had been the lover of the British prime minister. A girl who had been kidnapped while on holiday on the island of Corsica and held for ransom. A girl who had burned to death in the trunk of a Citroën C4, on the beach at Audresselles.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Keller.
“I know what I heard,” replied Gabriel.
“You heard a woman speaking Russian.”
“No,” countered Gabriel, “I heard a Moscow Center agent turning over a room.”
They were headed west on the A127. The time was approaching eight o’clock. The eastbound lanes were still thick with the remnants of the London evening rush, but the westbound side was moving at speed. The woman was about two hundred yards ahead. Keller had no trouble keeping track of the old Volvo’s distinctive taillights.
“Let’s assume you’re right,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Let’s assume that the KGB, or the SVR, or whatever the hell you want to call it, is somehow connected to the kidnapping of Madeline Hart.”
“I would argue that, at this moment in time, that fact is beyond dispute.”
“Point taken,” said Keller. “But what’s the link?”
“I’m still working on that. But if I had to guess, I’d say it was their operation from the beginning.”
“Operation?” asked Keller incredulously. “You’re saying the Russians kidnapped the mistress of the British prime minister?”
Gabriel made no reply. He didn’t quite believe it yet, either.
“Would you allow me to remind you of a few salient facts?” Keller asked.
“Please do.”
“Maybe they didn’t realize who they were working for.”
“What about Paul?”
“We don’t know anything about him except that he speaks French like he learned it from a tape—or so said the great Don Anton Orsati of Corsica.”
“Peace be upon him.”
Gabriel rapped his knuckle on the windshield and said, “She’s too far ahead of you.”
“I’ve got her.”
“Close the gap some.”
Keller accelerated for a few seconds, then eased off the throttle.
“You think Paul is Russian?” he asked.
“That would help explain why the French police were never able to attach a name to his face.”
“But why would he hire French criminals to kidnap Madeline instead of doing the job himself?”
“Have you ever heard of a false flag operation?” asked Gabriel. “Intelligence services routinely conduct operations that would cause diplomatic or political damage if they were ever exposed. So they cloak those activities under a false flag. Sometimes they pose as operatives from another service. Or sometimes they pose as something else entirely.”
“Like French criminals?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“There’s just one problem with your theory.”
“Just one?”
“The SVR doesn’t need money.”
“I doubt very much that this was about money.”
“You gave them two suitcases filled with ten million euros.”
“Yes, I know.”
“If this wasn’t about money, what was the payment all about?”
“They flew the false flag until the end,” said Gabriel.
Keller was silent for a moment. Finally, he asked, “But why did they kill Madeline?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s her family?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did the Russians find out about Madeline and Lancaster?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“There’s someone who might.”
“Who’s that?”
“The woman driving that car,” said Keller, pointing over the steering wheel toward the taillights of the Volvo.
“It’s better to be a pickpocket than a mugger.”
“What does that mean?”
“Close the gap,” said Gabriel, rapping his knuckle against the glass. “She’s too far ahead of you.”
She passed beneath the M25 ring road, sped over a landscape of farms and fields, and then entered the suburbs of metropolitan London. After thirty minutes the suburbs gave way to the boroughs of the East End and, eventually, to the office towers of the City. From there, she headed across Holborn and Soho to Mayfair, where she pulled to the curb of a busy section of Duke Street, just south of Oxford Street. After engaging the emergency flashers, she climbed out of the Volvo and carried the Marks & Spencer bag toward a Mercedes sedan that was parked a few feet away. As she approached the car, the trunk lid rose automatically, though Gabriel could see no evidence the woman had been the one to open it. She placed the bag inside, closed the lid with a thump, and returned to the Volvo. Ten seconds later she eased carefully away from the curb and headed toward Oxford Street.
“What should I do?” asked Keller.
“Let her go.”
“Why?”
“Because the person who opened the trunk of that Mercedes is watching to see if she’s being tailed.”
Keller scanned the street. So did Gabriel. There were restaurants on both sides, all of them catering to the tourist trade, and the pavements were crowded with pedestrians. Any one of them might have been carrying the key to the Mercedes.
“What now?” asked Keller.
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Pickpockets and muggers?”
“Something like that.”
Keller was staring at the Mercedes, but Gabriel was looking around at the culinary nightmare that was upper Duke Street: Pizza Hut, Garfunkel’s, something called Pure Waffle, whatever that meant. The class of the street was Bella Italia, a chain restaurant with locations scattered across the city, and it was there that Gabriel’s gaze finally settled. A man and a woman several years apart in age were at that moment stepping from the doorway, presumably having finished their meal. The man wore a waxed hat against the light drizzle, and the woman was staring into her handbag as though she had misplaced something. Earlier that day, in the exhibition rooms of the Courtauld Gallery, she had been carrying a guidebook open to the wrong page, and the man had been wearing tinted eyeglasses. Now he wore no spectacles at all. After helping the woman into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, he walked around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel. The engine, when started, seemed to make the street vibrate. Then the car shot away from the curb with a sharp chirp of its tires and barreled across Oxford Street at the instant the traffic signal turned to red.
“Well played,” said Keller.
“Indeed,” replied Gabriel.
“Should I try to follow him?”
Gabriel shook his head slowly. They were good, he thought. Moscow Center good.
The Grand Hotel Berkshire was not grand, nor was it in the enchanted English county of Berkshire. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Cromwell Road, with a discount electronics store on one flank and a suspect Internet café on the other. Gabriel and Keller arrived at midnight. They had no reservation and no luggage; it was still inside the Bayswater safe flat, which Gabriel now assumed was under Russian surveillance. He paid for a two-night stay in cash and told the night clerk that he and his companion were expecting no guests and wanted no interruptions of any kind, including maid service. The night clerk found nothing unusual in Gabriel’s instructions. The Grand Hotel Berkshire—or GHB, as management referred to it in shorthand—catered to those who took the road less traveled.
Their room was on the uppermost floor, the fourth, and had a sniper’s view of the road. Gabriel insisted Keller sleep first. Then he sat in the window, with the gun in his lap and his feet resting on the sill, five questions running ceaselessly through his thoughts. Why would the Russian intelligence service be so reckless as to kidnap the mistress of the British prime minister? Why had there been a payment of ransom when surely money was not what the Russians wanted? Why had they killed Madeline? Where was her family? And how much did Jonathan Lancaster and Jeremy Fallon know? Satisfactory answers eluded him. He could make educated guesses, deductions, but nothing more. He needed to pick a few more pockets, he thought—and, if necessary, he would carry out a mugging or two as well. And then what? He thought of the old signadora and her prophecies about an old enemy and the city of heretics in the east.
You must never set foot there. If you do, you will die . . .
Just then, a newspaper delivery truck screeched to a halt outside the Tesco Express on the other side of the road. Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. It was nearly four o’clock, time to wake Keller and get a few hours’ sleep himself. Instead, he picked up the volume of E. M. Forster he had taken from Madeline’s room, opened it to a random page, and began to read:
Gabriel closed the volume and watched the delivery truck move off along the wet, darkened street. And then he understood. But how to prove it? He needed the help of someone who knew the dark world of Russian business and politics. Someone who was just as ruthless as the men in the Kremlin.
He needed Viktor Orlov.
36
CHELSEA, LONDON
Viktor Orlov had always been good with numbers. Born in Moscow during the darkest days of the Cold War, he had attended the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics and had worked a
s a physicist in the Soviet nuclear weapons program. At the suggestion of his superiors, he joined the Communist Party—though many years later, in an interview with a British newspaper, he would claim he was never a true believer. “I joined the Party,” he said without a trace of remorse, “because it was the only avenue of career advancement available to me. I suppose I could have been a dissident, but the gulag never seemed like a terribly appealing place to me.”
When the Soviet Union finally breathed its last, Orlov did not shed a tear. In fact, he became wildly drunk on cheap Soviet vodka and ran through the streets of Moscow shouting, “The king is dead.” The next morning, thoroughly hungover, he renounced his membership in the Communist Party, resigned from the Soviet nuclear program, and vowed to become rich. Within a few years, Orlov had earned a sizable fortune importing computers, appliances, and other Western goods for the nascent Russian market. Later, he used that fortune to acquire Russia’s largest state-owned steel company along with Ruzoil, the Siberian oil giant, at bargain-basement prices. Before long, Viktor Orlov, a former government physicist who once had to share an apartment with two other Soviet families, was a billionaire many times over and the richest man in Russia. He was one of the original oligarchs, a modern-day robber baron who built his empire by looting the crown jewels of the Soviet state. Orlov was unapologetic about how he had become wealthy. “Had I been born an Englishman,” he once told a British interviewer, “my money might have come to me cleanly. But I was born a Russian. And I earned a Russian fortune.”