The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(80)
58
Heathrow Airport, London
The flight from Venice was slow in disgorging its passengers. Therefore, Anna had to spend an additional five minutes pressed against the window in the twenty-second row of economy class to avoid the damp, fleshy arm of Henry, her space-invading seatmate. Her carry-on suitcase was stowed in the overhead. Her handbag was beneath the seat in front of her. In it was a German passport that identified her place of birth as Berlin. That much, at least, was accurate.
She was born in the eastern half of the city in 1983, the unwanted by-product of a secret relationship between two intelligence officers. Her mother, Johanna Hoffmann, had worked for the department of the Stasi that provided logistical support to Western European and Palestinian terrorist groups. Her father, Vadim Yurasov, was a colonel in the KGB, based in the backwater of Dresden. They fled East Germany a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and settled in Moscow. After the wedding, which was approved by the KGB, Anna took the name Yurasova. She attended a special school reserved for the children of KGB officers, and after graduating from the prestigious Moscow State University, she entered the SVR’s training academy. One of her classmates was a tall, handsome aspiring actor named Nikolai Azarov. They had worked together on numerous operations, and like Anna’s parents they were secretly lovers.
Inside the terminal, Anna followed the procession to passport control and joined the queue for citizens of the European Union. The uniformed man on the dais scarcely looked at her passport.
“The purpose of your visit?”
“Tourism,” Anna answered in her mother’s German accent.
“Any special plans?”
“As much theater as possible.”
The passport was returned. Anna made her way to the arrivals hall and then to the platform for the Heathrow Express. Upon arrival at Paddington she walked north along Warwick Avenue to Formosa Street and turned left. No one followed her.
She made another left into Bristol Gardens. A Renault Clio, silver-blue, was parked outside an exercise studio. The doors were unlocked. She tossed her suitcase into the rear compartment and slid behind the wheel. The keys were in the center console. She started the engine and eased away from the curb.
She had studied the route carefully so as not to be distracted by a navigation device. She headed north along the Finchley Road to the A1, then east on the M25 Orbital Motorway to the A12. Diligently, she scanned the road behind her for signs of surveillance, but when darkness fell her mind began to drift.
She thought about the night she and her parents had fled East Berlin. They had made the journey aboard a stinking Soviet transport plane. One of the other passengers was a little man with sunken cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. He worked with Anna’s father at the KGB’s Dresden bureau. He was a nobody who spent his days posing as a translator and clipping articles from German newspapers.
Somehow the little nobody was now the most powerful man in the world. In the span of a few years he had wreaked havoc on the postwar global economic and political order. The European Union was in shambles, NATO was hanging by a thread. After meddling in the politics of Britain and America, he had meddled in Saudi Arabia’s. Anna and Nikolai had helped him alter the line of succession in the House of Saud. Now, for reasons that had not been made fully clear to them, they were about to alter it again.
Anna never questioned orders from Moscow Center—especially when they concerned “active measures” near and dear to the president’s heart—but the assignment unnerved her. She did not like taking orders from someone like Rebecca Philby, a former MI6 officer who scarcely spoke Russian. She was also worried about a piece of unfinished business from her last assignment.
Gabriel Allon . . .
Anna should have killed the Israeli in the café in Carcassonne when she’d had the chance, but Moscow Center’s orders had been specific. They wanted him to die with the Saudi prince and the child. Anna was not ashamed to admit she feared Allon’s vengeance. He was not the sort of man to make empty threats.
You’re dead! Dead, dead, dead . . .
The Israeli receded from Anna’s thoughts as she approached the market town of Colchester. The only route into Frinton-on-Sea was the level crossing at Connaught Avenue. Nikolai was staying at a hotel on the Esplanade. Anna left the car with the valet but carried her suitcase into the lobby.
A couple were sharing a bottle of Dom Perignon in the lounge bar—a good-looking man of perhaps fifty, blond and tanned, and a woman with black hair. They paid Anna no heed as she walked over to reception to collect the room key that had been left under her cover name. The door it opened was on the fourth floor, and the room Anna entered without knocking was in darkness. She stripped off her clothing and, watched by the cameras of MI6, moved slowly toward the bed.
59
10 Downing Street
For the second consecutive evening, a Jaguar limousine passed through the security gate on Horse Guards Road at eight fifteen. The brown-and-white tabby cat beat a hasty retreat as Gabriel and Graham Seymour hurried along Downing Street through a pouring rain. Geoffrey Sloane wordlessly ushered them into the Cabinet Room, where the prime minister was seated in his usual chair at the center of the long table. Before him was a copy of the final schedule for Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to London.
When Sloane had gone and the doors were closed, Graham Seymour delivered the promised update. Earlier that evening a second Russian operative, a woman, had arrived by motorcar at the Bedford House Hotel in Frinton-on-Sea. After engaging in sexual activity with her colleague, she had taken possession of a Stechkin 9mm pistol, two magazines, a sound suppressor, and a small object that Tech-Ops was still attempting to identify.