The New Girl

by Daniel Silva

  “We went to a great deal of trouble to make Abdullah the next king of Saudi Arabia,” Ryzhkov was saying. “But now it seems we’ve been deceived.” He waved the cable from London, dramatically, like a barrister in a courtroom. “Or maybe this is the deception. Perhaps MI6 is up to its old tricks. Perhaps they merely want us to think Abdullah is working for them.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  It was the president who answered. “To discredit him, of course. To make us wary of him.”

  “Graham’s a glorified policeman. He’s not capable of something so clever.”

  “He caught you, didn’t he?”

  “It was Allon who found me out, not Graham.”

  “Ah, yes.” Anger flashed briefly across the president’s face. “I’m afraid he’s involved in this, too.”

  “Allon?”

  The president nodded. “After we kidnapped the child, Abdullah told us that his nephew had turned to Allon for help.”

  “You would have been wise to kill him instead of Khalid’s daughter.”

  “We tried. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go as planned.”

  Rebecca took the cable from Ryzhkov and reread it. “It sounds to me as though Abdullah has been selling his wares on both sides of the street. He took your money and support when he needed it. But now that the keys to the Kingdom are within his grasp . . .”

  “He’s decided to be his own man?”

  “Or London’s,” said Rebecca.

  “And if he really is a British asset? What do I do about it? Do I let him take several billion dollars from me with no repercussions? Do I let the British laugh at me behind my back? Do I give Allon the same privilege?”

  “Of course not.”

  He held up a hand. “Well, then?”

  “You have no choice but to remove Abdullah from the line of succession.”

  “How?”

  “In a way that does as much damage to British credibility and prestige as possible.”

  The president’s smile appeared almost genuine. “I’m relieved to hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you had suggested leaving Abdullah in place, I would have doubted your loyalty to the motherland.” He was still smiling. “Congratulations, Rebecca. The job is yours.”

  “What job?”

  “Getting rid of Abdullah, of course.”

  “Me?”

  “Who better to run a major operation in London?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing I do.”

  “Are you not the director of the United Kingdom Department of the SVR?”

  “Deputy director.”

  “Yes, of course.” The president glanced at Leonid Ryzhkov. “My mistake.”

  54

  Moscow–Washington–London

  It was the assumption of the SVR’s counterintelligence directorate that MI6 did not know Colonel Rebecca Philby’s Moscow address. In point of fact, that was not the case. MI6 learned the location of her apartment quite by chance when one of its Moscow-based officers spotted her walking along the Arbat with a pair of bodyguards and a formidable-looking woman of advanced years. The officer followed them to Kuntsevo Cemetery, where they placed flowers on the grave of history’s greatest traitor, then to the entrance of a smart new apartment building on Sadovnicheskaya Street.

  At the direction of Vauxhall Cross, Moscow Station took great care with its discovery. No attempt was made to place Rebecca under full-time surveillance—it wasn’t possible in a city like Moscow, where MI6 personnel were under near-constant watch themselves—and an ill-conceived scheme to purchase a flat in her building was quickly shelved. Instead, they watched her only occasionally and only from afar. They were able to confirm that she lived on the building’s ninth floor and that she reported for work each morning at SVR headquarters in Yasenevo. They never saw her run a personal errand, dine in a restaurant, or attend a performance at the Bolshoi. There was no evidence of a man in her life, or, for that matter, a woman. In general, she seemed quite miserable, which pleased them no end.

  But in early March, for reasons Moscow Station could not possibly fathom, Rebecca vanished from view. When five days passed with no sign of her, the Moscow Head informed Vauxhall Cross—and Vauxhall Cross duly sent word to the sprawling Tudor house of many wings and gables in Hatch End in Harrow. There they cautiously interpreted Rebecca’s sudden disappearance as evidence that Moscow Center was feeding on the bread they had cast upon the water.

  There was other evidence as well, such as an alarming spike in coded signal traffic emanating from the roof of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens; and a second meeting in the Epping Forest between Charles Bennett and his SVR controller, Yevgeny Teplov; and the arrival in London, in mid-March, of one Konstantin Dragunov, personal friend and business associate of both the present ruler of Russia and the future king of Saudi Arabia. Taken in isolation, the developments were proof of nothing. But when viewed through the prism of the Anglo-Israeli team at Hatch End, they appeared to be the first stirrings of a great Russian undertaking.

  It was Gabriel who had once again prodded the sleeping bear, but he monitored the Russian response not from Hatch End but from his desk at King Saul Boulevard, based on his firmly held operational conviction that a watched pot never boils. In late March he paid another clandestine visit to Khalid’s superyacht in the Gulf of Aqaba, if only to hear the latest gossip from Riyadh. Unbeknownst to the outside world, Khalid’s father had taken a turn for the worse—another stroke, perhaps a heart attack. He was attached to several machines at the Saudi National Guard Hospital. The vultures were circling, dividing up the spoils, fighting over the scraps. Khalid had requested permission to return to Riyadh to be at his father’s side. Abdullah had refused.

  “If you have a card up your sleeve,” said Khalid, “I suggest you play it now. Otherwise, Saudi Arabia will soon be controlled by Comrade Abdullah and his puppet master in the Kremlin.”

  A sudden storm grounded Tranquillity’s helicopter and forced Gabriel to spend that night at sea in one of the ship’s luxurious guest suites. When he returned to King Saul Boulevard the next morning he found a report waiting on his desk. It was the analysis of the stolen Iranian nuclear archives. The documents proved conclusively that Iran had been working on a nuclear weapon when it was telling the global community the precise opposite. But there was no firm evidence they were violating the terms of the nuclear accord they had negotiated with the previous American administration.

  Gabriel briefed the prime minister that afternoon in his office in Jerusalem. And a week later he flew to Washington to bring the Americans into the picture. Much to his surprise, the meeting took place in the White House Situation Room, with the president in attendance. He had made no secret of his intention to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal and was disappointed that Gabriel had not brought him incontrovertible proof—“a smoking mullah”—that the Iranians were secretly building a bomb.

  Later that day Gabriel traveled to Langley, where he gave a more detailed briefing to the officers of the Persia House, the CIA’s Iran operations unit. Afterward, he dined alone with Morris Payne in a wood-paneled room on the seventh floor. Spring had finally arrived in Northern Virginia after an inhospitable winter, and the trees along the Potomac were in new leaf. Over wilted greens and cartilaginous beef, they swapped secrets and naughty rumors, including some about the men they served. Like many of his predecessors at the Agency, Payne had no background in intelligence. Before coming to Langley, he had been a soldier, a businessman, and a deeply conservative member of Congress from one of the Dakotas. He was big and bluff and blunt, with a face like an Easter Island statue. Gabriel found him a refreshing change from the previous CIA director, who had routinely referred to Jerusalem as al-Quds.

  “What do you think of Abdullah?” Payne asked abruptly over coffee.

  “Not much.”

  “Fucking British.”

  “What have they
done now?”

  “Invited him to London before we could get him to Washington.”

  Gabriel shrugged indifferently. “The House of Saud can’t survive without you. Abdullah will promise to buy a few British toys and then he’ll come running.”

  “We’re not so sure about that.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We hear MI6 might have their hooks in him.”

  Gabriel suppressed a smile. “Abdullah? A British asset? Come on, Morris.”

  Payne nodded gravely. “We were wondering whether you might be interested in facilitating a change in the Saudi line of succession.”

  “What kind of change?”

  “The kind that eventually places KBM’s ass on the throne.”

  “Khalid is damaged goods.”

  “Khalid is the best we can hope for, and you know it. He loves us, and for some reason he’s reasonably fond of you.”

  “What do we do about Abdullah?”

  “He would have to be moved aside.”

  “Moved aside?”

  Payne stared at Gabriel blankly.

  “Morris, really.”

  After dinner Gabriel was driven in a CIA motorcade to the Madison Hotel in downtown Washington. Exhausted, he fell into a dreamless sleep but was awakened at 3:19 a.m. by an urgent message on his BlackBerry. At dawn he went to the Israeli Embassy and remained there until early afternoon, when he left for Dulles Airport. He had told his American hosts he was planning to return to Tel Aviv. Instead, at half past five, he boarded a British Airways flight to London.

  Brexit had produced at least one positive impact on the British economy. Owing to a double-digit drop in the value of the pound, more than ten million foreign tourists were pouring into the United Kingdom each month. MI5 routinely screened the new arrivals for unwanted elements such as terrorists, criminals, and known Russian intelligence operatives. At Gabriel’s suggestion, the Anglo-Israeli team at Hatch End were duplicating MI5’s efforts. As a result, they knew that British Airways Flight 216 from Dulles landed at Heathrow the next morning at 6:29 and that Gabriel cleared passport control at 7:12. They even found several minutes of video of his passage through the endless non-EU immigration queue. It was playing on a loop on one of the large-screen video monitors when he entered the makeshift op center.

  Sarah Bancroft, in jeans and a fleece pullover, directed his attention to the adjacent video screen. On it was a still image of a lean, well-built man in a peacoat walking across a car park at night. A bag hung from his right shoulder. An American-style baseball cap obscured most of his face.

  “Recognize him?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Mikhail Abramov aimed a remote at the screen and pressed play. “How about now?”

  The man approached a Toyota hatchback, tossed the bag into the backseat, and dropped behind the wheel. The lights burst on automatically when the engine started, a small mistake in tradecraft. The man quickly switched them off and reversed out of the space. A few seconds later the car disappeared from the camera’s view.

  Mikhail hit pause. “Nothing?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Watch it again. But this time pay careful attention to the way he walks. You’ve seen it before.”

  Mikhail played the video a second time. Gabriel focused only on the man’s athletic gait. Mikhail was right, he had seen it before. The man had walked past the front of Gabriel’s car in Geneva, a few minutes after leaving his briefcase behind at Café Remor. Mikhail had been walking a few paces behind him.

  “I wish I could take credit for spotting him,” he said, “but it was Sarah.”

  “Where was the video taken?”

  “The car park at the Holyhead ferry terminal.”

  “When?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  Gabriel frowned. “Two nights?”

  “We did the best we could, boss.”

  “How did he get to Dublin?”

  “On a flight from Budapest.”

  “Do we know how the car got there?”

  “Dmitri Mentov.”

  “The nobody from the consular section of the Russian Embassy?”

  “I can show you the video if you like.”

  “I’ll use my imagination. Where’s our boy now?”

  Mikhail tapped the remote and a new piece of video appeared on the screen. A man climbing out of a Toyota hatchback outside a seaside hotel.

  “Where’s Graham?”

  “Vauxhall Cross.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Part Four

  Assassination

  55

  Frinton-on-Sea, Essex

  In the late nineteenth century there was nothing but a church, a few farms, and a cluster of cottages. Then a man called Richard Powell Cooper laid out a golf course along the sea, and there arose a resort town with stately homes lining broad avenues and several luxury hotels along the Esplanade. Connaught Avenue, the town’s main thoroughfare, became known as the Bond Street of East Anglia. The Prince of Wales was a frequent visitor, and Winston Churchill once rented a house for the summer. When the Germans dropped their last bomb on Britain in 1944, it landed on Frinton-on-Sea.

  Though the town was no longer a fashionable resort, Frintonians had clung, with varying degrees of success, to the genteel ways of the past. Older, wealthier, and deeply conservative, they did not hold with immigrants, the European Union, or the policies of the Labour Party. Much to their dismay, Frinton’s first pub, the Lock & Barrel, had recently opened its doors on Connaught Avenue. It was still a violation of the town’s bylaws, however, to sell ice cream on the beach or to take a picnic lunch on the grassy Greensward atop the cliffs. If one wanted to spread a blanket and eat out of doors, one could drive down the road to neighboring Clacton, a place where few Frintonians ever set foot.

  Between the Greensward and the sea was a promenade lined with pastel-colored beach huts. Because it was early April and the afternoon was chill and windblown, Nikolai Azarov had the walkway to himself. He carried a rucksack on his back and wore a pair of Zeiss binoculars around his neck. Had a passerby wished him a pleasant afternoon or asked for directions, he would have assumed that Nikolai was exactly what he appeared to be—a well-educated Englishman of the middle classes, probably from London or one of the Home Counties, almost certainly a graduate of Oxbridge or one of the better redbrick universities. A more discerning eye might have noticed a vaguely Slavic cast to his features. But no one would have assumed he was Russian, or that he was an assassin and special operative employed by Moscow Center.

  It was not the career Nikolai had chosen for himself. Indeed, as a young man growing up in post-Soviet Moscow, he had dreamed of working as an actor, preferably in the West. Unfortunately, the prestigious school where he learned to speak his flawless British-accented English was the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, a favorite hunting ground for the SVR. Upon graduation, Nikolai entered the SVR’s academy, where his instructors determined he had a natural flair for certain darker aspects of the trade, including the construction of explosive devices. At the conclusion of his training, he was assigned to the SVR directorate responsible for “active measures.” They included the assassination of Russian citizens who dared to oppose the Kremlin, or intelligence officers who were spying for Russia’s enemies. Nikolai had personally killed more than a dozen of his countrymen living in the West—with poison, with chemical or radiological weapons, or with a gun or a bomb—all on the direct orders of the Russian president himself.

  The next town to the north of Frinton was Walton-on-the-Naze. Nikolai stopped for a coffee at the pier before making his way to the marshlands of the Hamford Water nature reserve. At the tip of the headland, he paused for a moment and, binoculars to his eyes, gazed across the North Sea toward the Netherlands. Then he headed south along the banks of Walton Channel. It led him to the river Twizzle, where he found a marina filled with many fine sailing vessels and motor yachts. Nikolai
planned to leave Britain the same way he had entered it, by car ferry. But in his experience, it was always best to have an ace in the hole. Operations did not always go as planned. Like Geneva, he thought suddenly. Or France.

  You’re dead! Dead, dead, dead . . .

  Two women, holidaymakers, pensioners, were coming up the footpath, trailed by a rust-colored spaniel. Nikolai bade them a pleasant afternoon, and they chirped a greeting in return before continuing north to the headland. Despite their age, he scrutinized them carefully as they moved off. And for an instant he even considered how best to kill them both. He had been trained to assume that every encounter—especially one that occurred in a remote location, such as a marshland in Essex—was potentially hostile. Unlike ordinary SVR operatives, Nikolai possessed the authority to kill first and worry about the consequences later. So, too, did Anna.

  He checked the time. It was nearly two o’clock. He crossed the headland to Naze Tower and then retraced his steps along the seafront to Frinton. The sun had finally burned a hole in the clouds by the time he arrived at the Bedford House. One of the last surviving hotels from the town’s golden age, it stood at the far southern end of the Esplanade, a Victorian mausoleum with pennants flying from its turrets. The woman had chosen it, the woman known in the West as Rebecca Manning and at Moscow Center as Rebecca Philby. The Bedford’s management was under the impression that Nikolai was Philip Lane, a writer of television crime dramas who had come to Essex in search of inspiration.

  Entering the hotel, he made his way to the atrium-like Terrace Café for afternoon tea. Phoebe, the tight-skirted waitress, showed him to a table overlooking the Esplanade. Nikolai, playing the role of Philip Lane, spread a Moleskine notebook before him. Then, absently, he took up his SVR-issue mobile phone.

  Concealed within its applications was a protocol that allowed him to communicate securely with Moscow Center. Even so, the wording of the message he typed was so vague as to be incomprehensible to an adversarial signals intelligence service like Britain’s GCHQ. It stated that he had just completed a long surveillance-detection run and had seen no evidence he was being followed. In his opinion, it was safe to insert the next member of the team. Upon arrival, she was to make her way to Frinton to collect the weapon of assassination, which Nikolai had smuggled into the country. And upon completion of her assignment, Nikolai would see that she made it out of Britain safely. For this operation, at least, he was little more than a glorified delivery boy and driver. Still, he was looking forward to seeing her again. She was always better when they were in the field.