The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(101)

“About what?”

“Your obvious feelings for Sarah.”

Keller gave Mikhail a sidelong glance. “What is it with you people?”

“You people?”

“You and Gabriel. Have you nothing better to do than meddle in the personal lives of others?”

“Like it or not, you’re one of us now, Christopher. And that means we reserve the right to poke our noses into your love life whenever we feel like it.” After a brief silence, Mikhail added quietly, “Especially when it involves my ex-fiancé.”

“Nothing happened in that hotel, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I’m not.”

“And I’m not in love with her.”

“If you say so.” Mikhail checked the time. It was 11:41. “I don’t want it to be awkward, that’s all.”

“What’s that?”

“Our relationship.”

“I didn’t realize we were having one.”

Mikhail smiled in spite of himself. “We’ve done a lot of good work together, you and I. And I suspect we’re going to be working together again in the future. I wouldn’t want Sarah to complicate things.”

“Why would she?”

“Do me a favor, Christopher. Treat her better than I did. She deserves it.” Mikhail lifted his eyes to the mirror. “Especially now.”

A moment passed. Then another. The dashboard clock read 11:44. So did the clock on Keller’s phone. He swore beneath his breath as he crushed out his cigarette.

“You really didn’t think Rebecca was going to be on time, did you? Thanks to Gabriel, she’s going home to a rather uncertain future.”

Keller absently rubbed his clavicle. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”

“Look,” said Mikhail suddenly. “There’s the car.”

It had drawn to a stop outside the pizzeria, a Volvo sedan, dark in color, two men in front, two women in back. One was the daughter of Kim Philby. The other was Sarah Bancroft. In one final act of rebellion, she left her door open after climbing out. Rebecca leaned across the backseat and closed it. Then the car shot forward, passing a few inches from Mikhail’s window.

Sarah stood for a moment in the bright sunlight, looking dazed. But when she spotted Keller running toward her, her face broke into a wide smile.

“Sorry about standing you up for dinner last night, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped.”

Keller touched her bruised cheek.

“Our friend from the hotel did that. His name is Nikolai, by the way. Perhaps one day you can return the favor.”

Keller helped her into the backseat of the car. She watched a row of pretty little cottages flow past her window as Mikhail followed Gabriel and Eli Lavon from the town.

“I used to like Holland. Now I can’t get out of here fast enough.”

“We have a plane in Rotterdam.”

“Where’s it taking us?”

“Home,” said Keller.

Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I am home.”





Part Five

Vengeance





80

London–Jerusalem


It began in a room at the InterContinental Hotel in Budapest. From there, it hopscotched its way from the back of a taxi, to Seat 14A of a Boeing 737 operated by Ryanair, to the lounge of an Irish ferry called Ulysses, to a Toyota Corolla, and to the Bedford House Hotel in the Essex resort town of Frinton-on-Sea. High levels of radiation were also found in the ransacked office of a marina on the river Twizzle, in an abandoned Jaguar F-Type motorcar, and in the salon of a Bavaria 27 Sport that had run aground off the Dutch beach community of Renesse. Later, Dutch authorities would also find contamination in a holiday bungalow in the dunes near Ouddorp.

Ground zero, however, was a pair of neighboring houses in Eaton Square. There the story of what had transpired was written indelibly in a trail of radiation stretching from a bathroom on the uppermost floor of Number 71 to the drawing room and kitchen of Number 70. In the rubbish bin, the Metropolitan Police found the murder weapons—an empty glass vial, a Pasteur pipette dropper, a crystal champagne flute, a maid’s apron. All registered readings of thirty thousand counts per second. Too dangerous to store in the Met’s evidence rooms, they were sent for safekeeping to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the British government’s nuclear facility.

The woman who wielded the weapons had been the first to die. Her corpse was so radioactive it had been stored in a nuclear-safe casket—and the driver’s seat of her car, a Renault Clio, was so saturated with radiation it was sent to Aldermaston. So, too, was a lounge chair from the London Jet Centre. The source of the chair’s contamination, one Konstantin Dragunov, had been allowed to leave Britain aboard his private jet after suffering symptoms of acute radiation sickness. The Russian government, in its first official statement, attributed Dragunov’s ill health on the night of the incident to a simple case of food poisoning. As for the contamination inside Dragunov’s home, the Kremlin said it had been planted by the British Secret Intelligence Service in a bid to discredit Russia and harm its standing in the Arab world.

The Russian line of defense collapsed the next day when Commissioner Stella McEwan of the Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of releasing a portion of the videotaped statement Dragunov made before boarding his plane. The Kremlin dismissed the recording as a fraud, as did Dragunov himself. He was said to be recovering at his mansion in the Moscow district of Rublyovka. In truth, he was under heavy guard at the Central Clinical Hospital in Kuntsevo, the facility reserved for senior government officials and Russian business elites. The doctors struggling to save his life did so in vain. There was no medication, no emergency treatment, that could forestall the inevitable destruction of Dragunov’s cells and organs. For all intents and purposes, he was already dead.