The English Spy (19 page)

H
E 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.

T
HERE WERE FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
in all: the single shot that Gabriel had taken of the woman sitting alone at the restaurant and three more he had snapped as she stood on Quinn’s rusted balcony. He arranged them on the countertop, where he had once laid the photographs of the stolen Rembrandt for Chiara, and felt a tug of guilt as Madeline bent at the waist to scrutinize them.

“Who took these?”

“It’s not important.”

“You have a good eye.”

“Almost as good as Giovanni Rossi.”

She picked up the first photograph, a woman in dark sunglasses alone at a streetside table, seated in a direction that afforded her an inferior view of the city.

“She didn’t zip up her handbag.”

“You noticed that, too.”

“A normal tourist would zip up her bag because of thieves and pickpockets.”

“She would.”

She returned the photograph to its place on the counter and lifted another. It showed a woman standing alone at the balustrade of a balcony, a flowering vine spilling from her feet. The woman was holding a cigarette to her lips in a manner that exposed the underside of her right arm. Madeline leaned closer and knitted her brow thoughtfully.

“Do you see that?” she asked.

“What?”

She held up the photograph. “She has a scar.”

“It could be a flaw in the image.”

“It could be, but it isn’t. It’s a flaw in the girl.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because,” said Madeline, “I was there when it happened.”

“Do you know her?”

“No,” she said, staring at the photograph. “But I know the girl she used to be.”