The New Girl

by Daniel Silva

  Lavon had continued straight along Church Street to the old town hall before reversing course and making his way back to Stamford Hill. Mikhail and Sarah Bancroft had left Kookies café and were waiting in a Ford Fiesta in the car park of a Morrisons supermarket. Lavon dropped into the backseat and soundlessly closed the door.

  “Well?” asked Mikhail.

  Lavon didn’t answer; he was listening to the chatter of his watchers in his ear. They were in the game, he thought. They were definitely in the game.

  The house overlooked the Grims Dyke Golf Club in the Hatch End section of Harrow. A sprawling Tudor pile of many wings and gables, it was surrounded by thick trees and reached by a long private drive. With a single text message to Khalid, Gabriel made a gift of the house to Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, which was sorely in need of safe properties. There were eight bedrooms and a large double great room that served as the operation’s nerve center. Israeli and British officers worked side by side at two long trestle tables. Large flat-screen panels displayed live CCTV images. Secure radios crackled with updates from the field in Hebrew and British-accented English.

  At Gabriel’s insistence there was no smoking in the op center or any other room of the house, only in the gardens. He also ruled that there would be no catering or food deliveries. They shopped for themselves at the Tesco Superstore down the road in Pinner Green and ate communally whenever possible. In the process, they became well known to each other, which was the peril of any joint operation—the exposure of personnel and tradecraft. Gabriel paid an especially high price in watchers and other field assets, most of whom would never be able to work covertly in Britain again.

  But some of Gabriel’s personnel were known to the British from previous joint endeavors, including Sarah, Mikhail, and Eli Lavon. It was half past eight when they returned to the house at Hatch End. Entering, they joined Gabriel, Graham Seymour, and Christopher Keller before one of the video screens. On it was the output of a CCTV camera located outside the Arsenal Tube station in Gillespie Road. The man from the Rose & Crown was now standing at the kiosk next to the station’s entrance. Had he walked there directly from the pub, he might have made the journey in fifteen minutes at most. Instead, he had taken a circuitous route full of switchbacks and wrong turns that had forced five of Eli Lavon’s most experienced watchers to abandon the chase.

  One, however, managed to follow the man into the station and board the same inbound Piccadilly Line train. The man rode it to Hyde Park Corner. Emerging, he entered Mayfair and once again engaged in a series of textbook countersurveillance measures that compelled Lavon’s final watcher to fall away. It was no matter; the cameras of London’s Orwellian CCTV system never blinked.

  They followed him through the streets of Mayfair to Marble Arch and then westward along Bayswater Road, where he passed beneath the darkened windows of the Office safe flat known affectionately as Gabriel’s London pied-à-terre. A moment later he crossed the road illegally, ducked into Hyde Park, and vanished from view. Graham Seymour ordered the technicians to engage the cameras along Kensington Palace Gardens, and at 9:18:43 p.m. they observed the man entering the Russian Embassy. The technicians ran his photo through the database. Facial recognition flagged him as one Dmitri Mentov.

  “A nobody in the consular section,” said Graham Seymour.

  “There are no nobodies at the Russian Embassy,” replied Gabriel. “He’s an SVR hood. And he just made contact with your controller for Middle East stations.”

  At the two long trestle tables, the news that yet another senior MI6 officer might be working for the Russians was greeted only with the tapping of keyboards and the crackle of secure radios. They were in the game. They were most definitely in the game.

  51

  Epping Forest, Essex

  When Charles Bennett stepped from his residence in Albion Road at half past nine on Saturday morning, he was wearing a dark blue waterproof anorak and quick-dry pants. Over one shoulder was a nylon rucksack, and in his right hand he held a carbon walking stick. A devoted hiker, Bennett had traipsed across much of the British Isles. Weekends he typically had to make do with one of the many excellent trails near Greater London. Hester, who considered gardening exercise, never accompanied him. Bennett didn’t mind; he preferred to be alone. In that respect, at least, he and Hester were entirely compatible.

  Bennett’s destination that morning was the Oak Trail in Epping Forest, the ancient woodland that stretched from Wanstead in East London to Essex in the north. The footpath wandered for six and a half miles through the uppermost reaches of the forest near the village of Theydon Bois. Bennett drove there in Hester’s Swedish sedan. He parked at the Tube station and in violation of service rules left his MI6 BlackBerry in the glove box. Then, stick in hand, rucksack on his back, he struck out along Coppice Row.

  He passed a couple of shops and restaurants, the village hall, and the parish church. A thin fog hung over Theydon Plain like the smoke of a distant battle, then the forest swallowed him. The trail was wide and smooth and covered with fallen leaves. Ahead, a woman of about forty emerged from the gloom and, smiling, bade him a pleasant morning. She reminded him of Magda.

  Magda . . .

  He had met her at the Rose & Crown one night when he stopped for a beer rather than rush home to Hester’s cold embrace. She was a recent immigrant from Poland, or so she said. She was a beautiful woman, newly divorced, with luminous white skin and a wide mouth that smiled easily. She claimed she was meeting a friend—“a girlfriend, not a man”—and that the friend was running late. Bennett was suspicious. Nevertheless, he had a second drink with her. And when the “friend” sent a text saying she had to cancel, he agreed to walk Magda home. She took him into Clissold Park and pushed him up against a tree near the old church. Before Bennett knew it, his fly was open and her mouth was upon him.

  He knew what would come next. Indeed, he supposed he had known it from the moment he laid eyes on her. It happened a week later. A car drew alongside him in Stamford Hill, a hand beckoned from an open rear window. It was Yevgeny’s hand. He was holding a photograph. “Why don’t you let me give you a lift? It’s a filthy night to be out walking.”

  Bennett came upon a rubbish bin. The chalk mark at the base was clearly visible. He left the trail and picked his way through the dense trees and undergrowth. Yevgeny was leaning against the trunk of a silver birch, an unlit cigarette dangling impossibly from his lips. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Bennett. Yevgeny was a cruel bastard, as most SVR officers were, but he could be pleasant when it suited his purposes. Bennett possessed the same set of skills. They were two sides of the same coin. Bennett, in a moment of weakness, had allowed Yevgeny to get the upper hand. But perhaps one day it would be Yevgeny who would be forced to reveal his country’s secrets because of a personal misdeed. That was the way the game was played. All it took was a single slip.

  “You were careful?” the Russian asked.

  Bennett nodded. “You?”

  “The oafs from A4 tried to follow me, but I lost them in Highgate.” A4 were the surveillance artists of MI5, the British security and counterintelligence service. “You know, Charles, they really need to raise their game a bit. It’s got to the point where it’s not even sporting.”

  “You have more intelligence officers in London now than you did during the height of the Cold War. A4 are overwhelmed.”

  “There’s safety in numbers.” Yevgeny lit his cigarette. “That said, we shouldn’t stay long. What have you got?”

  “An operation your superiors in Moscow Center might find interesting.”

  “What sort?”

  “A long-term recruitment of a highly placed asset.”

  “Russian?”

  “House of Saud,” answered Bennett. “The source has been working on our behalf for several years. He briefs us regularly on internal family matters and political developments inside the Kingdom.”

  “You’re the Middle East controller, Charles. Wh
y am I hearing about this only now?”

  “The source was recruited and run by London Station. I was told about him only this week.”

  “By whom?”

  “‘C’ himself.”

  “Why did Graham decide to bring you into the picture?”

  “Because the highly placed asset is coming to London in a few weeks for an official visit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Crown Prince Abdullah, the next king of Saudi Arabia, is an asset of MI6. We own him, Yevgeny. He’s ours.”

  52

  Moscow

  The dream came to Rebecca, as it always did, in the last hours before dawn. She was submerged in shallow water near the bank of a tree-lined American river. A face hovered over her, blurry, indistinct, contorted with rage. Gradually, as she began to lose consciousness, the face receded into darkness, and her father appeared. He was calling to her from the door of his dacha. Rebecca, my d-d-darling, there’s something we need to discuss . . .

  She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. Through her uncurtained bedroom window she could see a red star over the Kremlin. Even now, nine months after her arrival in Moscow, the view surprised her. A part of her still expected to awaken each morning in the little cottage on Warren Street in Northwest Washington where she had lived during her final posting for MI6. Were it not for the man from her dream—the man who had nearly drowned her in the Potomac River—she would be there still. She might even be the director of MI6.

  The sky over the Kremlin was black, but when Rebecca checked the time on her SVR-issue phone she saw it was nearly seven a.m. The forecast for Moscow called for light snow and a high temperature of twelve degrees below zero, a warming trend. She threw aside the bedding and, shivering, pulled on her robe and padded into the kitchen.

  It was bright and modern and filled with shiny German-made appliances. The SVR had done well by her—a large apartment near the Kremlin walls, a dacha in the country, a car and driver. They had even granted her a security detail. Rebecca was under no illusion as to why she had been given a perquisite usually reserved for only the highest-ranking officers of the Russian intelligence service. She had been born and bred to be a spy for the motherland and had worked for Russia throughout a long and successful career at MI6, and yet they did not quite trust her. At Moscow Center, where she reported for work each day, they derisively referred to her as novaya devushka: the new girl.

  She pushed the brew button on the automatic; and when it noisily coughed and spat the last of the coffee into the carafe, she drank it in a bowl with frothy steamed milk, the way she had when she was a child growing up in Paris. Her name had been Bettencourt then—Rebecca Bettencourt, the illegitimate daughter of Charlotte Bettencourt, a French communist and journalist who in the early 1960s had lived in Beirut, where she’d had a brief affair with a married freelance correspondent for the Observer and the Economist. Manning was the name Rebecca took when her mother, at the direction of the KGB, married a homosexual from the British upper classes so that her daughter might gain British citizenship and admission to Oxford or, preferably, Cambridge. Publicly, Manning was still the surname by which Rebecca was infamously known. Inside Moscow Center, however, she was called by her father’s name, which was Philby.

  She aimed the remote at the television, and a few seconds later the BBC appeared on the screen. For professional reasons, her viewing habits had remained decidedly British. Rebecca worked in the United Kingdom Department of Directorate PR. It was vital she kept abreast of the news from London. These days it was almost universally bad. Brexit, which was clandestinely supported by the Kremlin, was a national calamity. Britain would soon be a shell of its former self, unable to put up any meaningful resistance to Russia’s spreading influence and growing military power. Rebecca had inflicted terrible damage on Britain from within the Secret Intelligence Service. Now it was her job to finish off her old country from behind a desk at Moscow Center.

  While skimming the headlines from London on her phone, Rebecca smoked the day’s first L&B. Her intake of cigarettes had risen sharply since her arrival in Russia. The London rezidentura bought them by the carton from a shop in Bayswater and sent them in the pouch to Moscow Center. Her intake of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which she purchased at a steep discount from the SVR commissary, had increased as well. It was only the winter weather, she assured herself. The melancholia would pass once summer arrived.

  In her room Rebecca removed a dark pantsuit and a white blouse from the closet and laid them out on her unmade bed. Like the L&B cigarettes, the clothing came from London. Unwittingly, she had fallen into her father’s old habits. He never fully adjusted to life in Moscow. He listened to the news from home on the BBC World Service, followed the cricket scores religiously in the Times, spread English marmalade on his toast and English mustard on his sausages, and drank Johnnie Walker Red Label, nearly always to the point of unconsciousness. As a child, Rebecca had witnessed his titanic drinking during her clandestine visits to Russia. She had loved him nonetheless and loved him still. It was his face she saw when she examined her appearance in the bathroom mirror. The face of a traitor. The face of a spy.

  Dressed, Rebecca bundled herself in a woolen overcoat and scarf and rode the elevator to the lobby. Her chauffeured Mercedes sedan waited in Sadovnicheskaya Street. She was surprised to find Leonid Ryzhkov, her immediate superior at Moscow Center, in the backseat.

  She ducked inside and closed the door. “Is there a problem?”

  “That depends.”

  The driver made a hard U-turn and accelerated rapidly. Moscow Center was in the opposite direction.

  “Where are we going?” asked Rebecca.

  “The boss would like a word.”

  “The director?”

  “No,” answered Ryzhkov. “The boss.”

  53

  The Kremlin

  The red star atop the Borovitskaya Tower, the business entrance of the Kremlin, was scarcely visible through the falling snow. The driver parked in a courtyard outside the Grand Presidential Palace, and Rebecca and Leonid Ryzhkov hurried inside. The president was waiting upstairs behind the golden doors of his ornate office. Rising, he emerged from behind the desk with that peculiar walk of his, the right arm straight at his side, the left swinging mechanically. His blue suit fit him to perfection, and a few strands of gray-blond hair were combed neatly over his otherwise bald pate. His face, puffy and smooth and tanned from his annual ski trip to Courchevel, scarcely looked human. His eyes were pulled tight, giving him a vaguely Central Asian appearance.

  Rebecca had expected a warm reception—she had not seen the president since the Kremlin news conference announcing her arrival in Moscow—but he gave her only a businesslike handshake before gesturing indifferently toward the seating area. Stewards entered, tea was poured. Then, without preamble, the president handed Rebecca a copy of an SVR cable. It had been transmitted to Moscow Center overnight by Yevgeny Teplov of the London rezidentura. The topic was a clandestine meeting Teplov had conducted with an agent code-named Chamberlain. His real name was Charles Bennett. Rebecca, while still working inside MI6, had targeted Bennett for sexual compromise and recruitment.

  Her Russian had improved markedly since settling in Moscow. Even so, she read the cable slowly. When she looked up, the president was studying her without expression. It was like being contemplated by a cadaver.

  “When were you planning to tell us?” he asked at last.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That Crown Prince Abdullah is a long-term asset of British intelligence.”

  A lifetime of lies and deception allowed Rebecca to conceal her unease at being interrogated by the most powerful man in the world. “While I was at MI6,” she said deliberately, “I was unaware of any relationship between Vauxhall Cross and Prince Abdullah.”

  “You were one step away from becoming director-general of MI6. How could you not have known?”

  “It’s called the Secret I
ntelligence Service for a reason. I had no need to know.” Rebecca returned the cable. “Besides, it shouldn’t come as a shock that MI6 might have ties to a Saudi prince who spent most of his time in London.”

  “Unless the Saudi prince is supposed to be working for me.”

  “Abdullah?” Rebecca’s tone was incredulous. Her brief was strictly limited to the United Kingdom. Even so, she had followed Khalid’s spectacular fall from grace with more than a passing interest. She never imagined that Moscow Center might have had a hand in it. Or the president.

  As usual, he was slouched in his chair. His chin was lowered, his eyes had a slight upward cast. Somehow he managed to convey both boredom and menace simultaneously. Rebecca supposed he practiced the expression in the mirror.

  “I assume,” she said after a moment, “that Khalid’s abdication wasn’t voluntary.”

  “No.” The president gave a half smile. Then the life drained once more from his features. “We encouraged him to relinquish his claim to the throne.”

  “How?”

  The president shot a glance at Ryzhkov, who briefed Rebecca on the operation that had led to Khalid’s removal from the line of succession. It was monstrous, there was no other word for it. But then Rebecca always knew the Russians didn’t play by the same rules as MI6.