by Daniel Silva
“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.”
The 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.
59
LONDON
For 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.
Seymour 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.
He 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.”
She 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.
Which 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.
Much 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.”
60
LONDON
Thirteen hours later a junior functionary from Downing Street delivered a bundle of newspapers to a redbrick house in the Hampstead section of London. The house belonged to Simon Hewitt, press spokesman for Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, and the thud the papers made upon hitting his doorstep woke him from an unusually sound sleep. He had been dreaming of an incident from his childhood when a schoolyard bully had blackened his eye. It was a slight improvement over the previous night, when he dreamed he was being torn to pieces by wolves, or the night before that, when a cloud of bees had stung him bloody. It was all part of a recurring theme. Despite Lancaster’s triumph at the polls, Hewitt was gripped by a sense of impending doom quite unlike any he had experienced since coming to Downing Street. He was convinced that the quiet in the press was illusory. Surely, he thought, the earth’s crust was about to move.
All of which explained why Hewitt was slow to rise from his bed and open his front door that cold London morning. The act of retrieving the bundle of newspapers from his doorstep sent his back into spasm, a reminder of the toll the job had taken on his health. He carried the parcel into the kitchen, where the coffeemaker was emitting the wheezy death rattle that signaled it was nearing the end of its cycle. After pouring a large cup and whitening it with heavy cream, he removed the newspapers from their plastic cover. As usual, Hewitt’s old paper, the Times, was on top. He scanned it quickly, found nothing objectionable, then moved on to the Guardian. Next it was the Independent. Then, finally, the Daily Telegraph.
“Shit,” he said softly. “Shit, shit, shit.”
At first the press was at a loss over exactly what to call it. They tried the Madeline Hart Affair, but that seemed too narrow. So did the Fallon Fiasco, which was en vogue for a few hours, or the Kremlin Connection, which enjoyed a brief run on ITV. By late morning the BBC had settled on the Downing Street Affair, which was bland but broad enough to cover all manner of sins. The rest of the press quickly fell into line, and a scandal was born.
For most of that day, the man at the center of it, Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster, remained curiously silent. Finally, at six that evening, the black door of Number Ten swung open, and Lancaster emerged alone to face the country. His tone was remorseful, but he remained dry-eyed and steady. He acknowledged that he had carried on a brief and unwise affair with a young woman from Party headquarters. He also admitted that he had retained the services of a foreign intelligence operative to find the young woman after her disappearance, that he had improperly withheld information from the British authorities, and that he had paid ten million euros in ransom and extortion money. At no point, he insisted, did he ever suspect that the young woman was actually a Russian-born sleeper spy. Nor did he suspect that her disappearance was part of a well-orchestrated conspiracy by a Kremlin-owned energy company to obtain drilling
rights in the North Sea. He had approved the Volgatek license, he said, at the suggestion of his longtime aide and chief of staff, Jeremy Fallon. And that deal, he added pointedly, was now dead.
Fallon wisely issued his first statement in written form, for even on his best days he looked like a man who was guilty of something. He acknowledged having helped the prime minister deal with the consequences of his “reckless personal conduct” but denied categorically that he had accepted a payment of money from anyone connected to Volgatek Oil & Gas. The commentators took note of the statement’s sharp tone. It was clear, they said, that Jeremy Fallon believed that Lancaster might not survive and that the premiership might be his for the taking. This was shaping up to be a fight for survival, they said. Perhaps even a fight to the death.
The next statement came not in London but in Moscow, where the Russian president called the allegations against the Kremlin and its oil company a malicious Western lie. In a clear sign the affair would have geopolitical repercussions, he accused British intelligence of involvement in the disappearance of Pavel Zhirov, the man upon whose word the allegations were based. Then, without offering any evidence, he suggested that Viktor Orlov, the Russian oil oligarch now residing in the United Kingdom, was somehow linked to the affair. Orlov issued a taunting denial from his Mayfair headquarters in which he called the Russian president a congenital liar and kleptocrat who had finally shown his true stripes. Then he promptly handed himself over to an MI5 security detail for protection and disappeared from view.
But who was the mysterious operative from a foreign intelligence service whom Lancaster had retained to find Madeline Hart after her disappearance in Corsica? Citing issues of national security, Lancaster refused to identify him. Nor did Jeremy Fallon shed any light on the matter. Initially, speculation centered on the Americans, with whom Lancaster was known to be close. That changed, however, when the Times reported that the noted Israeli intelligence operative Gabriel Allon had been seen entering Downing Street on two separate occasions during the period in question. The Daily Mail then reported that a senior MP had spotted the same Gabriel Allon having coffee with a young woman at Café Nero, one day before the scandal broke. The Mail story was dismissed as tabloid silliness—surely the great Gabriel Allon would not be so foolish as to sit openly in a busy London coffeehouse—but the Times account proved tougher to deflate. In a break with tradition, the Office released a terse statement denying both reports, which the British press saw as ironclad confirmation of Allon’s involvement.
