The English Girl: A Novel (32 page)
LONDON–JERUSALEM
T
he next morning Britain went to the polls. Jonathan Lancaster cast his ballot early, accompanied by his wife, Diana, and their three photogenic children, before returning to Downing Street to await the verdict of the voters. The day held little suspense; a final election-eve survey predicted Lancaster’s Party would almost certainly increase the size of its parliamentary majority by several seats. By midafternoon Whitehall was swirling with rumors of an electoral massacre, and by early evening the champagne was flowing at the Party’s Millbank headquarters. Even so, Lancaster appeared curiously somber when he strode onto the stage at the Royal Festival Hall to deliver his victory speech. Among the political reporters who took note of his serious demeanor was Samantha Cooke of the
Daily Telegraph
. The prime minister, she wrote, looked like a man who knew his second term would not go as well as his first. But then, she added, second terms rarely did.
Lancaster’s troubles began later that week when he undertook the traditional reshuffling of his Cabinet and personal staff. As widely predicted, Jeremy Fallon, now member of Parliament from Bristol, was appointed chancellor of the exchequer, which meant that Lancaster’s brain and puppet master would be his Downing Street neighbor as well. The man whom the press had once characterized as a deputy prime minister in name only now appeared to all of Whitehall like a prime minister in waiting. Fallon quickly gathered up the remaining members of his old Downing Street staff—at least, those who could still stand to work for him—and used his influence inside Party headquarters to fill key political positions with loyalists. The stage was now set, wrote Samantha Cooke, for a power struggle of Shakespearean proportions. Soon, she said, Fallon would be knocking on the door of Number Ten and asking for the keys. Jeremy Fallon had created Lancaster. And surely, she predicted, Fallon would try to destroy Lancaster as well.
At no point during the post-election political maneuverings did Madeline Hart’s name appear in the press, not even when the Party chairman decided the time had come to fill her vacant post. A headquarters underling saw to the morbid chore of removing the last of her things from her old cubicle. There wasn’t much left—a few dusty files, her calendar, her pens and paper clips, the dog-eared copy of
Pride and Prejudice
she used to read whenever she had a spare moment or two. The underling delivered the items to the Party chairman, who in turn prevailed upon his secretary to quietly dispose of them with as much dignity as possible. And thus the final traces of an unfinished life were expunged from Party headquarters. Madeline Hart was finally gone. Or so they thought.
A
t first it seemed she had traded one form of captivity for another. This time the apartment that served as her prison cell overlooked not the river Neva in St. Petersburg but the Mediterranean Sea in Netanya. The building’s management had been told she was convalescing after a long illness. It wasn’t far from the truth.
For a week she did not set foot beyond the flat’s walls. Her days lacked any discernible routine. She slept late, she watched the sea, she reread her favorite novels, all under the watchful gaze of an Office security team. A doctor came once each day to check on her. On the seventh day, when asked whether she had any ailments, she answered that she was suffering from terminal boredom.
“Better to die from boredom than from a Russian poison,” the doctor quipped.
“I’m not so sure about that,” she replied in her English drawl.
The doctor promised to appeal the conditions of her confinement to higher authority; and on the eighth day of her stay, higher authority allowed her to take a brief walk on the cold, windswept stretch of sand that lay beneath her terrace. The day after that she was allowed to walk a little farther. And on the tenth day she trekked nearly to Tel Aviv before her minders placed her gently in the back of an Office car and ran her back to the flat. Entering, she found an exact copy of
The
Pond at Montgeron
hanging on the wall in the sitting room—exact except for the signature of the artist who had painted it. He rang her a few minutes later and introduced himself properly for the first time.
“The
Gabriel Allon?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he answered.
“And who was the woman who helped me onto the plane?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
G
abriel and Chiara arrived in Netanya at noon the following day, after Madeline had returned from her morning walk along the beach. They took her to Caesarea for lunch and a stroll through the Roman and Crusader ruins; then they headed farther up the coast, nearly to Lebanon, to wander the sea caves at Rosh HaNikra. From there, they moved eastward along the tense border, past the IDF listening posts and the small towns that had been depopulated by the last war with Hezbollah, until they arrived in Kiryat Shmona. Gabriel had booked two rooms at the guesthouse of an old kibbutz. Madeline’s had a fine view of the Upper Galilee. An Office security guard spent the night outside her door, and another sat outside the room’s garden terrace.
The next morning, after taking breakfast in the kibbutz’s communal dining hall, they drove into the Golan Heights. The IDF was expecting them; a young colonel took them to a spot along the Syrian border where it was possible to hear the regime’s forces shelling rebel positions. Afterward, they paid a brief visit to the Nimrod Fortress, the ancient Crusader bastion overlooking the flatlands of the Galilee, before making their way to the ancient Jewish city of Safed. They ate lunch in the artists’ quarter, at the home of a woman named Tziona Levin. Though Gabriel referred to Tziona as his
doda
, his aunt, she was actually the closest thing he had to a sibling. She didn’t seem at all surprised when he appeared on her doorstep accompanied by a beautiful young woman whom the entire world believed to be dead. She knew that Gabriel had a habit of returning to Israel with lost objects.
“How’s your work?” she asked over coffee in her sunlit garden.
“Never better,” replied Gabriel, with a glance at Madeline.
“I was talking about your art, Gabriel.”
“I just finished restoring a lovely Bassano.”
“You should be focused on your own work,” she said reproachfully.
“I am,” he responded vaguely, and Tziona let it drop. When they had finished their coffee, she took them into her studio to see her newest paintings. Then, at Gabriel’s request, she unlocked her storage room. Inside were hundreds of paintings and sketches by Gabriel’s mother, including several works depicting a tall man wearing the uniform of the SS.
“I thought I told you to burn these,” Gabriel said.
“You did,” Tziona admitted, “but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Who is he?” asked Madeline, staring at the paintings.
“His name was Erich Radek,” Gabriel answered. “He ran a secret Nazi program called Aktion 1005. Its goal was to conceal all evidence that the Holocaust had taken place.”
“Why did your mother paint him?”
“He nearly killed her on the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945.”
Madeline raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Wasn’t Radek the one who was captured in Vienna a few years ago and brought to Israel for trial?”
“For the record,” replied Gabriel, “Erich Radek
volunteered
to come to Israel.”
“Yes,” said Madeline dubiously. “And I was kidnapped by French criminals from Marseilles.”
The next day they drove to Eilat. The Office had rented a large private villa not far from the Jordanian border. Madeline passed her days lying next to the swimming pool, reading and rereading a stack of classic English novels. Gabriel realized that she was preparing herself to return to the country that wasn’t truly hers. She was no one, he thought. She was not quite a real person. And, not for the first time, he wondered whether she might be better off living in Israel than in the United Kingdom. It was a question he put to her on the final night of their stay in the south. They were seated atop an outcropping of rock in the Negev, watching the sun sinking into the badlands of the Sinai.
“It’s tempting,” she said.
“But?”
“It’s not my home,” she answered. “It would be like Russia. I’d be a stranger here.”
“It’s going to be hard, Madeline. Much harder than you think. The British will put you through the wringer until they’re certain of your loyalties. And then they’ll lock you away somewhere the Russians will never find you. You’ll never be able to go back to your old life. Never,” he repeated. “It’s going to be miserable.”
“I know,” she said distantly.
Actually, she didn’t know, thought Gabriel, but perhaps it was better that way. The sun hung just above the horizon. The desert air was suddenly cold enough to make her shiver.
“Should we be getting back?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she answered.
He removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m going to be the chief of Israeli intelligence soon.”
“Congratulations.”
“Condolences are probably in order,” replied Gabriel. “But it means I have the power to look after you. I’ll give you a nice place to live. A family. It’s a dysfunctional family,” he added hastily, “but it’s the only family I have. We’ll give you a country. A home. That’s what we do in Israel. We give people a home.”
“I already have a home.”
She said nothing more. The sun slipped below the horizon. Then she was lost to the darkness.
“Stay,” said Gabriel. “Stay here with us.”
“I can’t stay,” she said. “I’m Madeline. I’m an English girl.”
T
he next night was the gala opening of the Pillars of Solomon exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The president and prime minister were in attendance, as were the members of the Cabinet, most of the Knesset, and numerous important writers, artists, and entertainers. Chiara was among those who spoke at the ceremony, which was held in the newly built exhibition hall. She made no mention of the fact that her husband, the legendary Israeli intelligence officer Gabriel Allon, had discovered the pillars, or that the beautiful dark-haired woman at his side was actually a dead English girl named Madeline Hart. They remained at the cocktail reception for only a few minutes before driving across Jerusalem to a quiet restaurant located on the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Afterward, while they were walking in Ben Yehuda Street, Gabriel again asked Madeline if she wanted to remain in Israel, but her answer was the same. She spent her final night in Israel in the spare bedroom of Gabriel’s Narkiss Street apartment, the room meant for a child. Early the next morning they drove to Ben Gurion Airport in darkness and boarded a flight for London.
LONDON
F
or several days Gabriel debated whether to warn Graham Seymour that he was about to be the recipient of a rather unusual Russian defector. In the end, he decided against it. His reasons were personal rather than operational. He simply didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
As a result, the reception team waiting at Heathrow Airport late that same morning was Office rather than MI5. It took clandestine possession of Gabriel and Madeline in the arrivals hall and ferried them to a hastily procured service flat in Pimlico. Then Gabriel rang Seymour at his office and told him that, once again, he had entered the United Kingdom without signing the guestbook.
“What a surprise,” said Seymour dryly.
“More to come, Graham.”
“Where are you?”
Gabriel gave him the address.
S
eymour had a meeting with a visiting delegation of Australian spies that couldn’t be put off, so an hour would elapse before his car appeared in the street outside the building. Entering the flat, he found Gabriel alone in the sitting room. On the coffee table was an open notebook computer, which Gabriel used to play a video of Pavel Zhirov confessing the many sins of the Kremlin-owned energy firm known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. By the time the video ended, Seymour appeared stricken. Which proved one of Ari Shamron’s favorite maxims, thought Gabriel. In the intelligence business, as in life, sometimes it was better not to know.
“He’s the one who had lunch with Madeline in Corsica?” Seymour asked finally, still staring at the computer screen.
Gabriel nodded his head slowly. “You told me to find him,” he said, “and I found him.”
“What happened to his face?”
“He said something to Mikhail he shouldn’t have.”
“Where is he now?”
“Gone,” said Gabriel.
“There are degrees of gone, you know.”
The blank expression on Gabriel’s face made it clear that Pavel Zhirov was gone permanently.
“Do the Russians know?” Seymour asked.
“Not yet.”
“How long before they find out?”
“Spring, I’d say.”
“Who killed him?”
“Another story for another time.”
Gabriel ejected the DVD disk from the computer and offered it to Seymour. Accepting it, he exhaled slowly, as though he were trying to keep his blood pressure in check.
“I’ve been in this game a long time,” he said at last, “and that video is the single most explosive thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You haven’t seen everything yet, Graham.”
“I don’t know if you noticed,” Seymour said as though he hadn’t heard Gabriel’s warning, “but we had an election in this country recently. Jonathan Lancaster just won by one of the biggest landslides in British history. And Jeremy Fallon is now the chancellor of the exchequer.”
“Not for long,” said Gabriel.
Seymour made no reply.
“You’re not thinking about letting him get away with it, are you, Graham?”
“No,” he said. “But it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“You always knew it would be.”
“But I was hoping the blood wouldn’t spatter on me, too.” He lapsed into a heavy silence.
“Is there something you need to get off your chest, Graham?”
“The prime minister has offered me a promotion,” he said after a hesitation.
“What kind of promotion?”
“The kind I couldn’t turn down.”
“Director general?”
Seymour nodded. “But not of MI5,” he added quickly. “You’re looking at the future chief of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You and I are going to be running the world together—covertly, of course.”
“Unless you bring down the Lancaster government.”
“Correct,” replied Seymour. “If I do that, there’s a good chance I’ll be swept out to sea with the rest of them. And
you
will lose a close ally in the process.” He lowered his voice and added, “I would think a man in your position would want to hang on to a friend like me. You don’t have many these days.”
“But you can’t possibly allow a KGB-owned energy company to drill for oil in your territorial waters.”
“That would be a dereliction of duty,” Seymour agreed genially.
“Nor can you allow a paid agent of the Kremlin to continue serving as the chancellor. Otherwise,” Gabriel added, “he might be your next prime minister.”
“I shudder at the very thought.”
“Then you have to destroy him, Graham.” Gabriel paused. “Or you have to avert your eyes while I do it for you.”
Seymour was silent for a moment. “How would you go about it?”
“By repaying a favor.”
“What about Lancaster?”
“He was guilty of an affair. There’s a good chance the British people will forgive him, especially when they learn that Jeremy Fallon has five million euros sitting in a Swiss bank account.” Gabriel paused, then added, “And there is one other mitigating circumstance I haven’t told you about yet.”
“What is it?”
Gabriel smiled and rose to his feet.
H
e entered the bedroom and returned a moment later with a beautiful young woman at his side. She had coal-black hair and her once-pale skin was deeply tanned by the sun of the Red Sea. Seymour rose chivalrously and, smiling, extended his hand. As it hovered there unaccepted, his face took on a puzzled expression. And then he understood. He looked at Gabriel and whispered, “Dear God.”
S
he told Graham Seymour the story from the beginning—the same story she had told Gabriel on that frozen afternoon in St. Petersburg, in the cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Then, calmly, primly, she declared that she wished to defect to the United Kingdom and, if possible, to one day resume her old life.
As deputy director of MI5, Graham Seymour did not possess the authority to grant defector status to a Russian spy; the only person who could do that was Madeline’s former lover, Jonathan Lancaster. Which explained why, at two fifteen that afternoon, Seymour presented himself at Number Ten unannounced and demanded a word with the prime minister in private. Coincidentally, the encounter took place in the Study Room. There, beneath the same glowering portrait of Baroness Thatcher, Seymour told the prime minister everything he had learned. That the Russian president had ordered Volgatek to use any means possible to gain access to the oil of the North Sea. That Jeremy Fallon, Lancaster’s closest aide and confidant, had betrayed him for five million pieces of Russian silver. And that Madeline Hart, his former lover, was a Russian-born spy who was still very much alive and requesting asylum in Britain. To his credit, Lancaster, though visibly shaken, did not hesitate before giving his answer. Fallon had to go, Madeline had to stay, and let the chips fall where they may. He made only one request, that he be given the chance to break the news to his wife.
“I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you, Prime Minister.”
Lancaster reached slowly for the telephone. Seymour rose to his feet and slipped silently from the room.
W
hich left only the name of the reporter who would be granted the most sensational exclusive in British political history. Seymour suggested Tony Richmond at the
Times
or perhaps Sue Gibbons from the
Independent
, but Gabriel overruled him. He had made a promise, he said, and he planned to keep it. He rang her mobile, got her voice mail, and left a brief message. She rang him back right away. Four o’clock at Café Nero, he said. And this time don’t be late.
M
uch to Graham Seymour’s chagrin, Gabriel and Madeline insisted on taking one last walk together. They headed up Millbank through a gusty wind—past the Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament—and at ten minutes to four entered the café. Gabriel ordered black coffee; Madeline had milky Earl Grey tea and a digestive biscuit. She removed a compact from her handbag and checked her face in the mirror.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Very Israeli.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“Put it away,” said Gabriel.
She did as Gabriel instructed. Then she looked out the window at the crowds moving along the pavements of Bridge Street. As though she had never seen them before, thought Gabriel. As though she would never see them again. He glanced around the interior of the café. No one recognized her. Why should they? She was dead and buried—buried in a churchyard in Basildon. A town without a soul for a girl without a name or a past.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said after a moment.
“Of course I do.”
“I have enough without you. I have the video of Zhirov.”
“The Kremlin can deny Zhirov,” she answered. “But it can’t deny me.”
She was still staring out the window.
“Take a good look,” Gabriel said, “because if you do this, it’s going to be a long time before they let you come back to London.”
“Where do you suppose they’ll put me?”
“A safe house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe a military base until the storm passes.”
“It doesn’t sound very appealing, does it?”
“You can always come back to Israel with me.”
She made no reply. Gabriel leaned forward across the table and took hold of her hand. It was trembling slightly.
“I keep a cottage in Cornwall,” he said quietly. “The town isn’t much, but it’s by the sea. You can stay there if you like.”
“Does it have a view?” she asked.
“A lovely view,” he answered.
“I might like that.”
She smiled bravely. Across the road Big Ben tolled four o’clock.
“She’s late,” Gabriel said incredulously. “I can’t believe she’s late.”
“She’s always late,” Madeline said.
“You made quite an impression on her, by the way.”
“She wasn’t the only one.”
Madeline laughed in spite of herself and drank some of her tea. Gabriel frowned at his wristwatch. Then he looked up in time to see Samantha Cooke rushing through the door. A moment later she was standing at their table, slightly out of breath. She looked at Gabriel for a moment before turning her gaze toward the beautiful dark-haired girl seated across from him. And then she understood.
“Dear God,” she whispered.
“Can we get you something to drink?” Madeline asked in her English accent.
“Actually,” stammered Samantha Cooke, “it might be better if we walked.”