Текст книги "The English Spy"

Автор книги: Daniel Silva

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 27 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 12 страниц]

31

WORMWOOD COTTAGE, DARTMOOR

THERE WERE BARBOUR JACKETS HANGING in the hall closet and Wellington boots lined against the wall of the mudroom. Miss Coventry prevailed upon them to take a torch—night fell suddenly on the moor, she explained, and even experienced hikers sometimes became disoriented in the featureless landscape. The torch was military-issue and had a beam like a searchlight. If they became lost, quipped Gabriel as he dressed, they could use it to signal a passing airliner.

By the time they left the cottage, the sun was a memory. Ribbons of orange light lay low upon the horizon, but a fingernail moon floated overhead and a spray of stars shone cold and hard in the east. Gabriel, weakened, his body aching from a thousand bruises, moved hesitantly along the footpath, the unlit torch in his hand. Seymour, taller, for the moment fitter, hovered at his side, his brow deeply furrowed in concentration as he listened to Gabriel explain what had transpired and, more important, why it had come to pass. The plot had its genesis, he said, at a house in a birch forest, on the shore of a frozen lake. Gabriel had committed an unforgivable act there against a man like himself—a made man, a man protected by a vengeful service—and for that Gabriel had been sentenced to die. But not just Gabriel; another would die with him. And a third man who had been complicit in the affair would be punished, too. The man would be disgraced, his service weakened by scandal.

“Me?” asked Seymour.

“You,” said Gabriel.

The men behind the plot, he continued, had not acted in haste. They had planned with great care, with their political master looking over their shoulders every step of the way. Quinn was their weapon. Quinn was their perfect bait. The men behind the plot had no established links to the bomb maker, but surely their paths had crossed. They had flown him to their headquarters, treated him like a conquering hero, showered him with toys and money. And then they had sent him into the world to commit an act of murder—a murder that would shock a nation and set the rest of the plot in motion.

“The princess?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You can’t prove a word of it.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “Not yet.”

For several days after her murder, he continued, British intelligence had been unaware of Quinn’s involvement. Then Uzi Navot came to London with a piece of intelligence from an important Iranian source. Seymour traveled to Rome; Gabriel, to Corsica. Then, with Keller as his guide, he went trolling through Quinn’s murderous past. They found a secret family in West Belfast and a small apartment in the hills of Lisbon, where a woman called Anna Huber spent a single night, watched over by three men. Two of the men boarded an airplane with her, and the next act of the plot commenced. A blue BMW, stolen, repainted, fitted with false license plates, was left at Heathrow Airport. The woman collected the car and drove it to Brompton Road. She parked across the street from a London landmark, armed the bomb, and melted into the crowd while the two men tried desperately to save as many lives as possible. They knew the bomb was about to explode because Quinn had told them so. With a cryptic text message, Quinn had signed his name. And all the while, the men who had hired him were watching. Perhaps, added Gabriel, they still were.

“You think my service has been penetrated?” asked Seymour.

“Your service was penetrated a long time ago.”

Seymour paused and looked over his shoulder at the fading lights of Wormwood Cottage. “Is it safe for you here?”

“You tell me.”

“Parish knew my father. He’s as loyal as they come. Even so,” Seymour added, “we should probably move you soon, just to be on the safe side.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that, Graham.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m already dead.”

Seymour stared at Gabriel for a moment, bewildered. And then he understood.

“I want you to contact Uzi over your usual link,” said Gabriel. “Tell him I’ve succumbed to my injuries. Express your deepest condolences. Tell him to send Shamron to collect the body. I can’t do this without Shamron.”

“Do what?”

“I’m going to kill Eamon Quinn,” said Gabriel coldly. “And then I’m going to kill the man who paid for the bullet.”

“Leave Quinn to me.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “Quinn is mine.”

“You’re in no shape to go chasing after anyone, let alone one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”

“Then I suppose I’ll need someone to carry my bags. He should probably be someone from MI6,” Gabriel added quickly. “Someone to look after British interests.”

“Do you have someone in mind?”

“I do,” replied Gabriel. “But there’s one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s not MI6.”

“No,” said Seymour. “Not yet.”

Seymour followed Gabriel’s gaze into the blackened landscape. At first there was nothing. Then three figures rose slowly from the darkness. Two appeared to be laboring with fatigue, but the third was pounding along the footpath as though he had many miles to go. He paused briefly and, looking up, gave a single stiff-armed wave. Then suddenly he was standing before them. Smiling, he extended a hand toward Seymour.

“Graham,” he said amiably. “Long time no see. Are you staying for supper? I hear Miss Coventry is making her famous cottage pie.”

Then he turned and set off into the darkness. And a moment later he was gone.

32

WORMWOOD COTTAGE, DARTMOOR

GRAHAM SEYMOUR DID INDEED STAY AT Wormwood Cottage for supper that night, and for a long time afterward, too. Miss Coventry served them the cottage pie and a decent claret at the kitchen table and then left them to a warm fire in the sitting room and to the past. Gabriel remained largely a spectator to the proceedings, a witness, a taker of notes. Keller did most of the talking. He spoke of his undercover work in Belfast, of the death of Elizabeth Conlin, and of Quinn. And he spoke, too, of the night in January 1991 when his Sabre squadron came under Coalition air attack in western Iraq, and of his long walk into the waiting arms of Don Anton Orsati. Seymour listened largely without interruption and without judgment, even when Keller described some of the many assassinations he’d carried out at the don’s behest. Seymour wasn’t interested in passing judgment. He was interested only in Keller.

And so he cracked a bottle of Wormwood Cottage’s finest single malt, added a log to the pile of embers in the grate, and proposed an arrangement that would result in Keller’s repatriation. He would be given a job at MI6. With it would come a new name and identity. Christopher Keller would remain dead to everyone but his immediate family and his service. He would handle cases that suited his particular skill set. Under no circumstances would he be drafting white papers at a desk in Vauxhall Cross. MI6 had plenty of analysts to do that.

“And if I bump into an old chum on the street?”

“Tell the old chum he’s mistaken and keep walking.”

“Where will I live?”

“Anywhere you want, so long as it’s in London.”

“What about my villa in Corsica?”

“We’ll see.”

From his outpost next to the fire, Gabriel treated himself to a brief smile. Keller’s questions resumed.

“Who will I work for?”

“Me.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever I need.”

“And when you’re gone?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s not what I read in the newspapers.”

“One of the things you’ll soon learn working at MI6 is that the newspapers are almost always wrong.” Seymour raised his glass and examined the color of the whisky by the light of the fire.

“What are we going to say to Personnel?” asked Keller.

“As little as possible.”

“There’s no way I can survive a traditional vetting.”

“I should think not.”

“What about my money?”

“How much is there?”

Keller answered truthfully. Seymour raised an eyebrow.

“We’ll have to work out something with the lawyers.”

“I don’t like lawyers.”

“Well, you can’t keep it hidden in secret bank accounts.”

“Why not?”

“Because, for obvious reasons, MI6 officers aren’t allowed to keep them.”

“I won’t be a normal MI6 officer.”

“You still have to play by the rules.”

“I never have before.”

“Yes,” said Seymour. “That’s why you’re here.”

And on it went, long past midnight, until finally the deal was done and Seymour crawled laboriously into the back of his undignified unmarked van. He left behind a notebook computer incapable of making contact with the outside world, and a password-protected thumb drive containing two videos. The first was an edited montage of CCTV images showing the delivery of the blue BMW to Heathrow Airport. The car had appeared on CCTV for the first time near Bristol, several hours before the bombing. The driver headed directly toward London along the M4. He wore a hat and sunglasses, rendering his features invisible to the cameras. He stopped once for fuel, paid in cash, and said nothing to the clerk during the exchange. Nor did he address anyone in the car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, where he deposited the BMW at 11:30 a.m., half an hour after British Airways Flight 501 departed Lisbon. After retrieving a suitcase from the backseat, he entered the terminal and boarded the Heathrow Express train to London’s Paddington Station, where a motorcycle was waiting. One hour later the bike slipped out of CCTV coverage on a country lane south of Luton. The motorcycle remained unaccounted for. The car’s point of origin on the day of the bombing was never determined.

The second video was devoted entirely to the woman. It began with her passage through Heathrow Airport and ended with her disappearance in the smoke and chaos that she had unleashed on London’s Brompton Road. To it, Gabriel added several minutes of footage from his own memory. There was a woman sitting alone at a street-side restaurant, and a woman abruptly hailing a taxi on a busy boulevard, and a woman on an airplane staring directly into his face without a trace of recognition. She was good, he thought, a worthy opponent. She had known that dangerous men were following her, and yet she had never once shown fear or even apprehension. It was possible she was someone whom Quinn had met during his travels through the nether regions of global terrorism, but Gabriel doubted it. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.

Gabriel watched the video again from the beginning, watched the BMW slide into the bus-only lane outside the HSBC bank, watched the woman climb out and walk calmly away. Then he saw two men leap from a silver Passat—one armed with a gun, one with only brute strength—and begin herding the crowds to safety. At forty-five seconds the street went deathly still and quiet. Then a man could be seen running wildly toward a white Ford compact trapped in the stalled traffic. The bomb obliterated the shot. It should have obliterated the man, too. Perhaps Graham Seymour was right. Perhaps Gabriel was an archangel after all.

It was nearly dawn by the time he powered off the computer. As instructed, he returned it to Parish the caretaker at breakfast, along with a handwritten note to be delivered personally to Graham Seymour at Vauxhall Cross. In it, Gabriel requested permission to conduct two meetings—one with London’s most prominent political journalist, the other with the world’s most famous defector. Seymour agreed to both requests and dispatched an unmarked service van to Wormwood Cottage. By late that afternoon it was speeding along the cliffs of the Lizard Peninsula in West Cornwall. Keller, it seemed, was not alone. The late Gabriel Allon was going home, too.

33

GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

HE HAD SEEN IT FOR the first time from the deck of a ketch a mile out to sea, the small cottage at the southern end of Gunwalloe Cove, perched atop the cliffs in the manner of Monet’s Customs Officer’s Cabin at Pourville. Below it was a crescent of beaten sand where an old shipwreck slept beneath the treacherous surf. Behind it, beyond the purple thrift and red fescue of the cliff tops, rose a sloping green field crisscrossed by hedgerows. At that moment, Gabriel saw none of it, for he was hunched like a refugee in the back of the service van. He knew they were close, though; the road told him so. He knew every bend and straightaway, every dip and pothole, the bark of every watchdog, the sweet bovine aroma of every pasture. And so, when the van made the hard right turn at the Lamb and Flag pub and started the final downhill run toward the beach, he straightened slightly in anticipation. The van slowed, probably to avoid a fisherman coming up from the cove, and then made another sharp turn, a left, into the private drive. Suddenly, the rear door of the van was swinging open and an MI6 security man was welcoming him to his own home, as though he were a stranger setting foot in Cornwall for the first time. “Mr. Carlyle,” he bellowed over the wind. “Welcome to Gunwalloe. I hope you had a good trip, sir. The traffic can be positively brutal this time of day.”

The air was crisp and salty, the late-afternoon light was brilliant orange, the sea was aflame and flecked with whitecaps. Gabriel stood for a moment in the drive, feeling hollowed out with longing, until the security man nudged him politely toward the entrance—because the security man was under strict orders not to allow him to remain visible to a world that would soon believe him dead. Looking up, he imagined Chiara standing reproachfully in the doorway, her riotous hair tumbling about her shoulders, her arms folded across her childless womb. But as he climbed the three front steps, she slipped away from him. Automatically, he hung his oilskin coat on the hook in the entrance hall and ran a hand over the old suede flat cap he used to wear during his sojourns along the cliffs. Then, turning, he saw Chiara for a second time. She was removing a heavy earthenware pot from the oven, and when she lifted its lid the savor of veal, wine, and sage filled the cottage. Photographs of a missing Rembrandt portrait lay scattered across the kitchen counter where she worked. Gabriel had just agreed to find the painting for an art dealer named Julian Isherwood, not knowing his search would lead directly into the heart of Iran’s nuclear program. He had managed to locate and destroy four secret uranium enrichment facilities, a stunning achievement that significantly slowed Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon. The Iranians surely did not view Gabriel’s accomplishment in the same flattering light. In fact, they wanted him dead just as badly as the men who had hired Eamon Quinn.

The vision of Chiara was gone. He opened the French doors and for an instant he imagined he could hear the church bells of Lyonesse, the mythical submerged City of Lions, tolling beneath the surface of the sea. A single fisherman stood waist-deep in the breakers; the beach was deserted except for a woman walking along the water’s edge, trailed a few feet by a man in a nylon sailing jacket. She was headed north, which meant she presented him with her long back. A gust of cold wind blew from the sea, cold enough to chill Gabriel, and in his thoughts he was watching her walk along a frozen street in St. Petersburg. Then, as now, he had viewed her from above; he had been standing at the parapet of a church dome. The woman had known he was there but had not looked up. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.

By now, she had reached the northernmost end of the beach. She pirouetted and the man in the nylon jacket turned with her. The sea spray added a dreamlike quality to the image. She paused to watch the fisherman lift a struggling bass from the breakers and, laughing at something the man had said, plucked a stone from the tide line and flung it into the sea. Turning, she paused again, apparently distracted by something unexpected she had seen. Perhaps it was the man standing at the railing of the terrace, in the manner of the man who had been standing on the parapet of a church tower in St. Petersburg. She cast another stone into the turbulent sea, lowered her head, and kept walking. Now, as then, Madeline Hart did not look up.

It had started as an affair between Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster and a young woman who worked at his party’s headquarters. But the woman was no ordinary woman—she was a Russian sleeper agent who had been planted in England as a child—and the affair was no ordinary affair. It was part of an elaborate Russian plot designed to pressure the prime minister into signing over lucrative North Sea drilling rights to a Kremlin-owned energy company called Volgatek Oil & Gas. Gabriel had learned the truth from the man who had run the operation, an SVR officer named Pavel Zhirov. Afterward, Gabriel and his team of Office operatives had plucked Madeline Hart from St. Petersburg and smuggled her out of the country. The scandal that accompanied her defection was the worst in British history. Jonathan Lancaster, personally humiliated and politically wounded, responded by canceling the North Sea deal and freezing Russian money held by British banks. By one estimate, the Russian president personally lost several billion dollars. Frankly, thought Gabriel, it was a wonder he had waited so long to retaliate.

It had been the intention of the KGB to turn Madeline Hart into an English girl, and through years of training and manipulation they had succeeded. Her grasp of the Russian language was limited, and she felt no allegiance to the land she had left as a child. It had been her wish upon her return to Britain to resume her old life, but political and security considerations had made that impossible. Gabriel had given her the use of his beloved cottage in Cornwall. He knew she would find the setting to her liking. She had been raised in government-funded deprivation, in a council house in Basildon, England. She wanted nothing more in life than a room with a view.

“How did you find me?” she asked as she climbed the steps to the terrace. And then she smiled. It was the same question she had posed to Gabriel that afternoon in St. Petersburg. Her eyes were the same blue-gray and were wide with excitement. Now they narrowed with concern as she scrutinized the damage to his face.

“You look positively dreadful,” she said in her English accent. It was a combination of London and Essex but without a trace of Moscow. “What happened?”

“It was a skiing accident.”

“You don’t strike me as the sort to ski.”

“It was my first time.”

A faintly awkward moment followed as she invited him to enter his own home. She hung her coat on the hook next to his and went into the kitchen to make tea. She filled the electric kettle with bottled water and pulled down an old box of Harney & Sons from the cupboard. Gabriel had picked it up a hundred years ago at the Morrisons in Marazion. He sat on his favorite stool and watched another woman inhabit the space usually occupied by his wife. The London newspapers lay on the countertop, unread. All featured lurid coverage of the Brompton Road bombing and the infighting between Britain’s intelligence services. He looked at Madeline. The cold sea air had added color to her pale cheeks. She seemed content, happy even, not at all like the broken woman he had found in St. Petersburg. Suddenly, he hadn’t the heart to tell her she was the cause of all that had happened.

“I was beginning to think I’d never see you again,” she said. “It’s been—”

“Too long,” said Gabriel, cutting her off.

“When was the last time you were in the UK?”

“I was here this summer.”

“Business or pleasure?”

He hesitated before answering. For a long time after her defection, he had refused even to tell Madeline his real name. Defectors had a way of becoming homesick.

“It was a business venture,” he said at last.

“Successful, I hope.”

He had to think about it. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I suppose it was.”

Madeline lifted the kettle from its base and poured the steaming water into a chubby white teapot that Chiara had picked out from a shop in Penzance. Watching her, Gabriel asked, “Are you happy here, Madeline?”

“I live in fear you’re going to evict me.”

“Why would you think such a thing?”

“I’ve never had a home of my own before,” she said. “No mother, no father, only the KGB. I became the person I wanted to be. And then they took that away from me, too.”

“You can stay here as long as you want.”

She opened the refrigerator, removed a container of milk, and poured a measure into Chiara’s little beehive jug.

“Warm or cold?” she asked.

“Cold.”

“Sugar?”

“Heavens, no.”

“There might be a tube of McVitie’s in the pantry.”

“I ate.” Gabriel poured milk into the bottom of his cup and poured the tea on top of it. “Are my neighbors behaving?”

“They’re a bit nosy.”

“You don’t say.”

“It seems you made quite an impression on them.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“No,” she said. “It was Giovanni Rossi, the great Italian art restorer.”

“Not so great.”

“That’s not what Vera Hobbs says.”

“How are her scones these days?”

“Almost as good as the scones at the café atop Lizard Point.”

His smile must have betrayed how much he missed it here.

“I don’t know how you could have left this place,” she said.

“Nor do I.”

She eyed him thoughtfully over the rim of her teacup. “Are you the chief of your service yet?”

“Not yet.”

“How much longer?”

“A few months, maybe less.”

“Will I read about it in the newspapers?”

“We now publicize the name of our chief, just like MI6.”

“Poor Graham,” she said with a glance toward the papers.

“Yes,” said Gabriel vaguely.

“Do you think Jonathan will sack him?”

It was odd to hear her refer to the prime minister by his Christian name. He wondered what she had called him on those nights at Downing Street when Diana Lancaster was away.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t think so.”

“Graham knows too much.”

“There’s that.”

“And Jonathan is very loyal.”

“To everyone but his wife.”

The remark wounded her.

“I’m sorry, Madeline. I shouldn’t—”

“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I deserved it.”

Her long, sinewy hands were suddenly restless. She calmed them by removing the teabags from the pot, adding a splash of hot water, and replacing the lid.

“Is everything as you remember it?” she asked.

“The woman behind the counter is different. Otherwise, everything is the same.”

She smiled uneasily but said nothing.

“Have you been rummaging through my things?” he asked.

“Constantly.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Regrettably, no. It’s almost as if the man who lived here didn’t exist.”

“Just like Madeline Hart.”

He saw dismay in her eyes. They moved slowly around the room, her room with a view.

“Are you ever going to tell me why you look so dreadful?”

“I was on Brompton Road when the bomb exploded.”

“Why?”

Gabriel answered truthfully.

“So you’re the foreign intelligence operative.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And you were the one who tried to move the people to safety.”

He said nothing.

“Who was the other man?”

“It’s not important.”

“You always say that.”

“Only when it really is.”

“And the woman?” she asked.

“Her passport said she was—”

“Yes,” she interrupted him. “I read that in the newspaper.”

“Did you see the CCTV video?”

“Nothing much to see, really. A woman gets out of a car, a woman walks calmly away, a street goes boom.”

“Very professional.”

“Very,” she agreed.

“Did you see the still photo of her from Heathrow?”

“Pretty grainy.”

“Think she’s German?”

“Half, I’d say.”

“And the other half?”

Madeline stared at the sea.