The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(72)
52
Moscow
The dream came to Rebecca, as it always did, in the last hours before dawn. She was submerged in shallow water near the bank of a tree-lined American river. A face hovered over her, blurry, indistinct, contorted with rage. Gradually, as she began to lose consciousness, the face receded into darkness, and her father appeared. He was calling to her from the door of his dacha. Rebecca, my d-d-darling, there’s something we need to discuss . . .
She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. Through her uncurtained bedroom window she could see a red star over the Kremlin. Even now, nine months after her arrival in Moscow, the view surprised her. A part of her still expected to awaken each morning in the little cottage on Warren Street in Northwest Washington where she had lived during her final posting for MI6. Were it not for the man from her dream—the man who had nearly drowned her in the Potomac River—she would be there still. She might even be the director of MI6.
The sky over the Kremlin was black, but when Rebecca checked the time on her SVR-issue phone she saw it was nearly seven a.m. The forecast for Moscow called for light snow and a high temperature of twelve degrees below zero, a warming trend. She threw aside the bedding and, shivering, pulled on her robe and padded into the kitchen.
It was bright and modern and filled with shiny German-made appliances. The SVR had done well by her—a large apartment near the Kremlin walls, a dacha in the country, a car and driver. They had even granted her a security detail. Rebecca was under no illusion as to why she had been given a perquisite usually reserved for only the highest-ranking officers of the Russian intelligence service. She had been born and bred to be a spy for the motherland and had worked for Russia throughout a long and successful career at MI6, and yet they did not quite trust her. At Moscow Center, where she reported for work each day, they derisively referred to her as novaya devushka: the new girl.
She pushed the brew button on the automatic; and when it noisily coughed and spat the last of the coffee into the carafe, she drank it in a bowl with frothy steamed milk, the way she had when she was a child growing up in Paris. Her name had been Bettencourt then—Rebecca Bettencourt, the illegitimate daughter of Charlotte Bettencourt, a French communist and journalist who in the early 1960s had lived in Beirut, where she’d had a brief affair with a married freelance correspondent for the Observer and the Economist. Manning was the name Rebecca took when her mother, at the direction of the KGB, married a homosexual from the British upper classes so that her daughter might gain British citizenship and admission to Oxford or, preferably, Cambridge. Publicly, Manning was still the surname by which Rebecca was infamously known. Inside Moscow Center, however, she was called by her father’s name, which was Philby.
She aimed the remote at the television, and a few seconds later the BBC appeared on the screen. For professional reasons, her viewing habits had remained decidedly British. Rebecca worked in the United Kingdom Department of Directorate PR. It was vital she kept abreast of the news from London. These days it was almost universally bad. Brexit, which was clandestinely supported by the Kremlin, was a national calamity. Britain would soon be a shell of its former self, unable to put up any meaningful resistance to Russia’s spreading influence and growing military power. Rebecca had inflicted terrible damage on Britain from within the Secret Intelligence Service. Now it was her job to finish off her old country from behind a desk at Moscow Center.
While skimming the headlines from London on her phone, Rebecca smoked the day’s first L&B. Her intake of cigarettes had risen sharply since her arrival in Russia. The London rezidentura bought them by the carton from a shop in Bayswater and sent them in the pouch to Moscow Center. Her intake of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which she purchased at a steep discount from the SVR commissary, had increased as well. It was only the winter weather, she assured herself. The melancholia would pass once summer arrived.
In her room Rebecca removed a dark pantsuit and a white blouse from the closet and laid them out on her unmade bed. Like the L&B cigarettes, the clothing came from London. Unwittingly, she had fallen into her father’s old habits. He never fully adjusted to life in Moscow. He listened to the news from home on the BBC World Service, followed the cricket scores religiously in the Times, spread English marmalade on his toast and English mustard on his sausages, and drank Johnnie Walker Red Label, nearly always to the point of unconsciousness. As a child, Rebecca had witnessed his titanic drinking during her clandestine visits to Russia. She had loved him nonetheless and loved him still. It was his face she saw when she examined her appearance in the bathroom mirror. The face of a traitor. The face of a spy.
Dressed, Rebecca bundled herself in a woolen overcoat and scarf and rode the elevator to the lobby. Her chauffeured Mercedes sedan waited in Sadovnicheskaya Street. She was surprised to find Leonid Ryzhkov, her immediate superior at Moscow Center, in the backseat.
She ducked inside and closed the door. “Is there a problem?”
“That depends.”
The driver made a hard U-turn and accelerated rapidly. Moscow Center was in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” asked Rebecca.
“The boss would like a word.”
“The director?”
“No,” answered Ryzhkov. “The boss.”
53
The Kremlin
The red star atop the Borovitskaya Tower, the business entrance of the Kremlin, was scarcely visible through the falling snow. The driver parked in a courtyard outside the Grand Presidential Palace, and Rebecca and Leonid Ryzhkov hurried inside. The president was waiting upstairs behind the golden doors of his ornate office. Rising, he emerged from behind the desk with that peculiar walk of his, the right arm straight at his side, the left swinging mechanically. His blue suit fit him to perfection, and a few strands of gray-blond hair were combed neatly over his otherwise bald pate. His face, puffy and smooth and tanned from his annual ski trip to Courchevel, scarcely looked human. His eyes were pulled tight, giving him a vaguely Central Asian appearance.