The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(75)
“Not much.”
“Fucking British.”
“What have they done now?”
“Invited him to London before we could get him to Washington.”
Gabriel shrugged indifferently. “The House of Saud can’t survive without you. Abdullah will promise to buy a few British toys and then he’ll come running.”
“We’re not so sure about that.”
“Meaning?”
“We hear MI6 might have their hooks in him.”
Gabriel suppressed a smile. “Abdullah? A British asset? Come on, Morris.”
Payne nodded gravely. “We were wondering whether you might be interested in facilitating a change in the Saudi line of succession.”
“What kind of change?”
“The kind that eventually places KBM’s ass on the throne.”
“Khalid is damaged goods.”
“Khalid is the best we can hope for, and you know it. He loves us, and for some reason he’s reasonably fond of you.”
“What do we do about Abdullah?”
“He would have to be moved aside.”
“Moved aside?”
Payne stared at Gabriel blankly.
“Morris, really.”
After dinner Gabriel was driven in a CIA motorcade to the Madison Hotel in downtown Washington. Exhausted, he fell into a dreamless sleep but was awakened at 3:19 a.m. by an urgent message on his BlackBerry. At dawn he went to the Israeli Embassy and remained there until early afternoon, when he left for Dulles Airport. He had told his American hosts he was planning to return to Tel Aviv. Instead, at half past five, he boarded a British Airways flight to London.
Brexit had produced at least one positive impact on the British economy. Owing to a double-digit drop in the value of the pound, more than ten million foreign tourists were pouring into the United Kingdom each month. MI5 routinely screened the new arrivals for unwanted elements such as terrorists, criminals, and known Russian intelligence operatives. At Gabriel’s suggestion, the Anglo-Israeli team at Hatch End were duplicating MI5’s efforts. As a result, they knew that British Airways Flight 216 from Dulles landed at Heathrow the next morning at 6:29 and that Gabriel cleared passport control at 7:12. They even found several minutes of video of his passage through the endless non-EU immigration queue. It was playing on a loop on one of the large-screen video monitors when he entered the makeshift op center.
Sarah Bancroft, in jeans and a fleece pullover, directed his attention to the adjacent video screen. On it was a still image of a lean, well-built man in a peacoat walking across a car park at night. A bag hung from his right shoulder. An American-style baseball cap obscured most of his face.
“Recognize him?” she asked.
“No.”
Mikhail Abramov aimed a remote at the screen and pressed play. “How about now?”
The man approached a Toyota hatchback, tossed the bag into the backseat, and dropped behind the wheel. The lights burst on automatically when the engine started, a small mistake in tradecraft. The man quickly switched them off and reversed out of the space. A few seconds later the car disappeared from the camera’s view.
Mikhail hit pause. “Nothing?”
Gabriel shook his head.
“Watch it again. But this time pay careful attention to the way he walks. You’ve seen it before.”
Mikhail played the video a second time. Gabriel focused only on the man’s athletic gait. Mikhail was right, he had seen it before. The man had walked past the front of Gabriel’s car in Geneva, a few minutes after leaving his briefcase behind at Café Remor. Mikhail had been walking a few paces behind him.
“I wish I could take credit for spotting him,” he said, “but it was Sarah.”
“Where was the video taken?”
“The car park at the Holyhead ferry terminal.”
“When?”
“Two nights ago.”
Gabriel frowned. “Two nights?”
“We did the best we could, boss.”
“How did he get to Dublin?”
“On a flight from Budapest.”
“Do we know how the car got there?”
“Dmitri Mentov.”
“The nobody from the consular section of the Russian Embassy?”
“I can show you the video if you like.”
“I’ll use my imagination. Where’s our boy now?”
Mikhail tapped the remote and a new piece of video appeared on the screen. A man climbing out of a Toyota hatchback outside a seaside hotel.
“Where’s Graham?”
“Vauxhall Cross.”
“Doing what?”
“Waiting for you.”
Part Four
Assassination
55
Frinton-on-Sea, Essex
In the late nineteenth century there was nothing but a church, a few farms, and a cluster of cottages. Then a man called Richard Powell Cooper laid out a golf course along the sea, and there arose a resort town with stately homes lining broad avenues and several luxury hotels along the Esplanade. Connaught Avenue, the town’s main thoroughfare, became known as the Bond Street of East Anglia. The Prince of Wales was a frequent visitor, and Winston Churchill once rented a house for the summer. When the Germans dropped their last bomb on Britain in 1944, it landed on Frinton-on-Sea.