House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(12)

“Don’t you see the assessments and scores?” asked Keller.

“Of course. But I value your opinion.”

“Finch gives snakes a bad name,” said Keller, “which means he has the makings of a fine spy.”

“Baker’s scores were quite good, too.”

“So was the first chapter of the thriller he’s working on.”

“And the course itself?” asked Seymour. “Did they manage to teach you anything?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“How you intend to use me.”

With a spy’s careful smile, Seymour declined Keller’s invitation to brief him on his maiden voyage as a full-fledged MI6 agent. Instead, as rain pelted the windows of the alcove, he spoke of his father. Arthur Seymour had spied for England for more than thirty years. But at the end of his career, when he was blown to kingdom come by Philby and the other moles and traitors, the service sent him down to the gray pile of stone by the sea to light the secret fire within the next generation of British spies. “And he hated every minute of it,” said Seymour. “He saw it for what it was, the end of the line. My father always thought of the Fort as a crypt into which the Service tossed his battered old corpse.”

“If only your father could see you now.”

“Yes,” said Seymour distantly. “If only indeed.”

“He was hard on you, the old man?”

“He was hard on everyone, especially my mother. Fortunately, I was little more than an afterthought. I was with him in Beirut in the sixties when Philby was there, too. Then he shipped me off to school. After that, he was someone I saw only a couple of times a year.”

“He must have been disappointed when you joined MI5.”

“He threatened to disown me. He thought MI5 were policemen and proletarian plods, as did everyone else at MI6.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Because I preferred to be judged on my own accomplishments. Or maybe,” said Seymour after a moment, “I didn’t want to join a service that had been gutted by traitors. Maybe I wanted to catch spies instead of recruit them. Maybe I wanted to stop IRA bombs from exploding in our streets.” He paused, then added, “Which is where you came in.”

There was a silence.

“We did good work together in Belfast, you and I. We stopped many attacks, saved countless lives. And what did you do? You ran off and joined Don Orsati’s little band of assassins.”

“You left a few things out of your account.”

“Only for the sake of time.” Seymour shook his head slowly. “I grieved for you, you bastard. And so did your parents. At your memorial service, I tried to comfort your father, but he was inconsolable. That was a terrible thing you did to them.”

Keller ignited a cigarette and then handed the new gold lighter to Seymour. “Do you remember what the inscription says?”

“Point taken. It’s all in the past. You’ve been fully restored, Christopher. You’re as good as new. All you need now is a nice girl to share that beautiful home of yours in Kensington.” Seymour reached for Keller’s cigarettes but stopped himself. “Eight million pounds, quite a tidy sum. By my calculation that leaves you with a mere twenty-five million, all of it earned by working for Don Orsati. At least the money is in a fine British financial institution now instead of those Swiss and Bahamian banks you were using. It’s been repatriated, just like you.”

“We had a deal,” said Keller quietly.

“And I intend to abide by it. Don’t worry, you can keep your ill-gotten money.”

Keller made no reply.

“And the girl?” asked Seymour, changing the subject. “Any prospects? We’ll have to vet her thoroughly, you realize.”

“I’ve been a bit busy, Graham. I haven’t had a chance to meet many girls.”

“What about the one who proposed to you at the Druid’s Arms?”

“She was quite drunk at the time. She was also under the impression I was French.”

Seymour smiled. “She won’t be the first to make that mistake.”





7





London—Corsica



It had been fifteen years since Christopher Keller had willingly allowed his photograph to be taken. On that occasion he had been perched atop a wobbly wooden stool in a little shop high in the mountains of central Corsica. The walls of the shop had been hung with portraits—brides, widows, patriarchs—all unsmiling, for the inhabitants of the village were a serious lot who were suspicious of outsiders and modern gadgets like cameras, which were thought to be dispensers of the evil eye. The photographer was a distant relative of Don Anton Orsati, a cousin of some sort, by marriage rather than blood. Even so, he had been fearful in the presence of the hard, silent Englishman who, it was rumored, carried out assignments for the Orsati clan that ordinary taddunaghiu could not. The photographer had taken six pictures that day; in none did Keller look remotely the same. They appeared in the six false French passports Keller used throughout his career as a professional assassin. Two of the passports were still valid. One he kept in a bank vault in Zurich, the other in Marseilles, a fact he had neglected to tell his new employers at the Secret Intelligence Service. One never knew, he reasoned, when one might require an ace in the hole.