The New Girl

by Daniel Silva

  “You left out Saudi Arabia.”

  “Once the American withdrawal from the Middle East is complete, the Saudis will realize they have nowhere else to turn to for protection but us, with or without Abdullah on the throne.”

  “Not if Khalid is king.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Is that your plan?”

  “The Allegiance Council will choose the next king, not the State of Israel. But my money is on the man who stayed by his beloved uncle’s side while he was suffering the terrible effects of a radioactive Russian poison.”

  “You mean this?” She placed a small glass vial on the table.

  Gabriel leaned away. “What is it?”

  “It doesn’t have a name yet. I’m sure the Internet Research Agency will think of something catchy.” She smiled. “Something very Israeli-sounding.”

  “Is there any chance Abdullah will survive?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “And what about you, Rebecca?”

  She returned the vial to her handbag.

  “They’ll never trust you again,” said Gabriel. “Not after this. Who knows? They might even assume you’ve been working for MI6 since the moment you set foot in Moscow Center. Either way, you’d be a fool to go back. The best you can hope for is that they’ll lock you away in some desolate little village, the kind of place that has a number instead of a name. You’ll end up like your father, a broken-down old drunk, alone in the world.”

  “You’ve no right to speak of my father like that.”

  Gabriel accepted her rebuke in silence.

  “And where would I go? Back to England?” Rebecca frowned. “I appreciate the heartfelt advice, but I think I’ll take my chances in Russia.” She reached for her phone. “Shall we finish this?”

  Gabriel picked up his phone, typed a brief message, and hit send. The reply arrived ten seconds later. “Dragunov’s plane has just been cleared for departure. He’ll be out of British airspace in about forty-five minutes.”

  Rebecca dialed a number. She spoke a few words in Russian, then severed the connection. “There’s a large square in the middle of Renesse with a church in the center. Very busy, lots of people. We’ll drop her outside the pizzeria exactly one hour from now.” She glanced at her father’s old wristwatch, as if marking the time. Then she dropped the phone into her bag and looked toward the table where Mikhail and Keller were sitting. “The very pale one looks familiar to me. Was he in that Starbucks in Washington where you trapped me into betraying myself?”

  Gabriel hesitated, then nodded.

  “And the other one?”

  “He’s the one you shot on that little street in Georgetown.”

  “What a pity. I was sure I’d killed him.” Rebecca Manning rose abruptly. “To be continued,” she said, and went out.

  79

  Renesse, the Netherlands

  The church was brick, austere, and ringed by a cobbled traffic circle. Gabriel and Eli Lavon were parked in front of a small hotel. Mikhail and Keller had found a spot outside a seafood restaurant called Vischmarkt Renesse. Behind them was the pizzeria where Rebecca Manning had promised to drop Sarah at 11:43 a.m. exactly.

  It was 11:39. Mikhail was watching the pizzeria in the rearview mirror; Keller, in the side-view. He was chain-smoking Marlboros. Mikhail lowered his window a few inches and scanned the square.

  “You realize we’re sitting ducks.” Mikhail paused, then added, “And so is the director-general of my service.”

  “We have a deal.”

  “So did Khalid.” Mikhail watched as Keller crushed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “You really need to stop that, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sarah hates it.”

  Keller smoked in silence, eyes on the mirror.

  “Don’t you think we should talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Your obvious feelings for Sarah.”

  Keller gave Mikhail a sidelong glance. “What is it with you people?”

  “You people?”

  “You and Gabriel. Have you nothing better to do than meddle in the personal lives of others?”

  “Like it or not, you’re one of us now, Christopher. And that means we reserve the right to poke our noses into your love life whenever we feel like it.” After a brief silence, Mikhail added quietly, “Especially when it involves my ex-fiancé.”

  “Nothing happened in that hotel, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “I’m not.”

  “And I’m not in love with her.”

  “If you say so.” Mikhail checked the time. It was 11:41. “I don’t want it to be awkward, that’s all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our relationship.”

  “I didn’t realize we were having one.”

  Mikhail smiled in spite of himself. “We’ve done a lot of good work together, you and I. And I suspect we’re going to be working together again in the future. I wouldn’t want Sarah to complicate things.”

  “Why would she?”

  “Do me a favor, Christopher. Treat her better than I did. She deserves it.” Mikhail lifted his eyes to the mirror. “Especially now.”

  A moment passed. Then another. The dashboard clock read 11:44. So did the clock on Keller’s phone. He swore beneath his breath as he crushed out his cigarette.

  “You really didn’t think Rebecca was going to be on time, did you? Thanks to Gabriel, she’s going home to a rather uncertain future.”

  Keller absently rubbed his clavicle. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”

  “Look,” said Mikhail suddenly. “There’s the car.”

  It had drawn to a stop outside the pizzeria, a Volvo sedan, dark in color, two men in front, two women in back. One was the daughter of Kim Philby. The other was Sarah Bancroft. In one final act of rebellion, she left her door open after climbing out. Rebecca leaned across the backseat and closed it. Then the car shot forward, passing a few inches from Mikhail’s window.

  Sarah stood for a moment in the bright sunlight, looking dazed. But when she spotted Keller running toward her, her face broke into a wide smile.

  “Sorry about standing you up for dinner last night, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped.”

  Keller touched her bruised cheek.

  “Our friend from the hotel did that. His name is Nikolai, by the way. Perhaps one day you can return the favor.”

  Keller helped her into the backseat of the car. She watched a row of pretty little cottages flow past her window as Mikhail followed Gabriel and Eli Lavon from the town.

  “I used to like Holland. Now I can’t get out of here fast enough.”

  “We have a plane in Rotterdam.”

  “Where’s it taking us?”

  “Home,” said Keller.

  Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I am home.”

  Part Five

  Vengeance

  80

  London–Jerusalem

  It began in a room at the InterContinental Hotel in Budapest. From there, it hopscotched its way from the back of a taxi, to Seat 14A of a Boeing 737 operated by Ryanair, to the lounge of an Irish ferry called Ulysses, to a Toyota Corolla, and to the Bedford House Hotel in the Essex resort town of Frinton-on-Sea. High levels of radiation were also found in the ransacked office of a marina on the river Twizzle, in an abandoned Jaguar F-Type motorcar, and in the salon of a Bavaria 27 Sport that had run aground off the Dutch beach community of Renesse. Later, Dutch authorities would also find contamination in a holiday bungalow in the dunes near Ouddorp.

  Ground zero, however, was a pair of neighboring houses in Eaton Square. There the story of what had transpired was written indelibly in a trail of radiation stretching from a bathroom on the uppermost floor of Number 71 to the drawing room and kitchen of Number 70. In the rubbish bin, the Metropolitan Police found the murder weapons—an empty glass vial, a Pasteur pipette dropper, a crystal champagne flute, a
maid’s apron. All registered readings of thirty thousand counts per second. Too dangerous to store in the Met’s evidence rooms, they were sent for safekeeping to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the British government’s nuclear facility.

  The woman who wielded the weapons had been the first to die. Her corpse was so radioactive it had been stored in a nuclear-safe casket—and the driver’s seat of her car, a Renault Clio, was so saturated with radiation it was sent to Aldermaston. So, too, was a lounge chair from the London Jet Centre. The source of the chair’s contamination, one Konstantin Dragunov, had been allowed to leave Britain aboard his private jet after suffering symptoms of acute radiation sickness. The Russian government, in its first official statement, attributed Dragunov’s ill health on the night of the incident to a simple case of food poisoning. As for the contamination inside Dragunov’s home, the Kremlin said it had been planted by the British Secret Intelligence Service in a bid to discredit Russia and harm its standing in the Arab world.

  The Russian line of defense collapsed the next day when Commissioner Stella McEwan of the Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of releasing a portion of the videotaped statement Dragunov made before boarding his plane. The Kremlin dismissed the recording as a fraud, as did Dragunov himself. He was said to be recovering at his mansion in the Moscow district of Rublyovka. In truth, he was under heavy guard at the Central Clinical Hospital in Kuntsevo, the facility reserved for senior government officials and Russian business elites. The doctors struggling to save his life did so in vain. There was no medication, no emergency treatment, that could forestall the inevitable destruction of Dragunov’s cells and organs. For all intents and purposes, he was already dead.

  He would linger, however, for three dreadful weeks, as Moscow’s standing in the world plunged to depths not seen since the downing of Korea Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. Anti-Russia demonstrations swept the Arab and Muslim world. A bomb exploded outside the Russian Embassy in Cairo. Protesters stormed the embassy in Pakistan.

  In the West the response was peaceful, but devastating to Russia’s diplomatic and financial interests. Meetings were canceled, bank accounts were frozen, ambassadors were recalled, known operatives of the SVR were sent packing. London was selective in its expulsions, for it wished to send a message. Only Dmitri Mentov and Yevgeny Teplov, two SVR officers operating under diplomatic cover, were declared persona non grata and ordered to leave. That same evening a senior MI6 officer named Charles Bennett was quietly taken into custody while attempting to board a Paris-bound Eurostar at St. Pancras. The British public would never be informed of the arrest.

  Much else was kept from them, all in the name of national security. They were not told, for example, precisely how or when the intelligence services learned a Russian hit team was on British soil. Nor were they given a satisfactory explanation as to why Konstantin Dragunov had been allowed to leave the country after admitting his role in the operation.

  Under the relentless glare of the media, cracks soon appeared in the official account. Eventually, Downing Street acknowledged that the order came directly from the prime minister himself, though it said little regarding the PM’s motives. A respected investigative reporter from the Guardian suggested that Dragunov had been released in exchange for a hostage after first being subjected to a harsh interrogation. Stella McEwan’s cautious statement, that no officer of the Metropolitan Police Service had mistreated the oligarch, left open the possibility that someone else had.

  Nearly forgotten amid the swirl of controversy was Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. According to Al Arabiya, the Saudi state broadcaster, he died nine days after his return from London, at 4:37 in the morning. Among those at his bedside was his beloved nephew, Prince Khalid bin Mohammed.

  But why had the Russians poisoned the crown prince in the first place? Was the Kremlin not actively courting new friends in the Arab world? Was Russia not in the process of replacing the retreating Americans as the region’s dominant power? From Riyadh, there was only silence. From Moscow, denials and misdirection. The rented television experts speculated. The investigative reporters burrowed and sifted. None strayed remotely close to the truth.

  There were clues everywhere, however—in a consulate in Istanbul, at a private school in Geneva, and in a field in southwest France. But like the trail of radiation, the evidence was invisible to the naked eye. One journalist knew much more than most, but for reasons she did not share with her colleagues, she chose to remain silent.

  On the evening the Kremlin belatedly announced the death of Konstantin Dragunov, she emerged from her office in Berlin and, as was her custom, scanned the street in both directions before making her way to a café on Friedrichstrasse near the old Checkpoint Charlie. They were following her, she was certain of it. One day they would come for her. And she would be ready.

  There was one final trail of radiation, the existence of which would never be revealed. It stretched from London City Airport, to a beach café in the Netherlands, to an apartment in Jerusalem, and to the top floor of an anonymous office block in Tel Aviv. It was, declared Uzi Navot, yet another milestone in Gabriel’s already-distinguished tenure as chief. He was the only director-general to have killed in the field, and the only one to have been injured in a bombing. Now he had earned the dubious distinction of being the first to have been contaminated by radiation, Russian or otherwise. Navot jokingly bemoaned his rival’s good fortune. “Perhaps,” he told Gabriel upon his return to King Saul Boulevard, “you should quit while you’re ahead.”

  “I’ve tried. Several times, in fact.”

  Someone had plastered a yellow sign on the door of his office that read caution radiation area, and at the first meeting of his senior staff, Yossi Gavish presented him with a ceremonial Geiger counter and a hazmat suit stitched with his name. It was the extent of their celebration. By any objective measure, the operation had been an overwhelming success. Gabriel had brilliantly baited his rival into a colossal blunder. In doing so, he had managed to simultaneously check Russia’s rising influence in the Middle East and eliminate the Kremlin’s puppet in Riyadh. The Saudi throne was once again within Khalid’s grasp. All he had to do was convince his father and the Allegiance Council to grant him a second chance. If Khalid were successful, his debt to Gabriel would be enormous. Together they could change the Middle East. The possibilities for Israel—and for Gabriel and the Office—were endless.

  His first priority, however, was Iran. That evening he spent several hours at Kaplan Street briefing the prime minister on the contents of the secret Iranian nuclear archives. And the evening after that he was standing just off camera when the prime minister disclosed those findings in a prime-time news conference broadcast live around the world. Three days later he instructed Uzi Navot to give a sanitized briefing about the Iran operation to the reporters from Haaretz and the New York Times. The message of the stories was unmistakable. Gabriel had reached into the heart of Tehran and stolen the regime’s most precious secrets. And if the Iranians ever dared to restart their nuclear weapons program, he would be back.

  And yet for all his successes, Reema rarely left his thoughts. During the heat of the operation against the Russians, he had been granted a brief respite. But now that he had returned to King Saul Boulevard, Reema gave him no peace. In dreams she appeared in her misshapen toggle coat and her patent leather shoes. Sometimes she bore an uncanny resemblance to Nadia al-Bakari, but in one terrible dream she appeared as Gabriel’s son Daniel. The setting was not a remote field in France, but a snowy square in Vienna. The child in the toggle coat and patent leather shoes, the girl with a young boy’s face, was trying to start the engine of a Mercedes. “Isn’t it beautiful?” the child remarked as the bomb exploded. Then, as the flames consumed her, she looked at Gabriel and said, “One last kiss . . .”

  The next evening, over a quiet dinner of fettuccine and mushrooms at the little café-style table in the kitchen, he described for Chiara precisely what had
transpired in the field in southwest France. The Russian woman’s voice on the phone, the gunshot through the car’s rear window, Khalid gathering up Reema’s limbs by the harsh white light of the headlamps. The bomb, said Gabriel, had been meant for him. He had punished the men responsible, beaten them in a great game of deception that would change the course of history in the Middle East. And yet Reema was gone forever. What’s more, her abduction and brutal murder had not yet been made public. It was almost as if she had never existed.

  “Then perhaps,” said Chiara, “you should do something about that.”

  “How?”

  She laid her hand on Gabriel’s.

  “I don’t have time,” he protested.

  “I’ve seen how fast you can work when you set your mind to it.”

  Gabriel considered the idea. “I suppose I could ask Ephraim to let me use the restoration lab at the museum.”

  “No,” said Chiara. “You’ll work here in the apartment.”

  “With the children?”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “It’s time for them to see the real Gabriel Allon.”

  As always, he prepared his own canvas—180 by 120 centimeters, oak stretcher, Italian linen. For his ground he used the formula he first learned in Venice from the master restorer Umberto Conti. His palette was Veronese’s, with a touch of Titian.

  He had seen Reema only once, under conditions that, try as he might, he could not forget. He had also seen the photograph the Russians had taken of her while she was in captivity in the Basque Country in Spain. It, too, was engraved in Gabriel’s memory. She had been tired and thin, her hair had been a mess. But the photo showed her regal bone structure and, more important, her character. For better or worse, Reema bint Khalid was her father’s daughter.

  He established his makeshift studio in the sitting room, near the terrace. As was his habit, he was protective of his workspace. The children were given strict instructions not to touch his supplies. As a precaution, however, he always left one of his Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes at a precise angle on his trolley so he could tell if there had been an intruder, which was invariably the case. For the most part, there were no mishaps, though on one occasion he returned from King Saul Boulevard to find several fingerprints in the lower left corner of the canvas. Forensic analysis determined they were Irene’s.