The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon #7)(27)

“That’s probably sound advice.” He looked at Gabriel for a moment without speaking. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I can convince you to stay in London for a few days and help find my daughter?”

“I’m afraid I have to go home and face the music for getting my picture in the newspaper. Besides, this is a matter for you and the British. Obviously, if we happen to pick up any intelligence, we’ll pass it along right away.”

The telephone rang. The ambassador lifted the receiver out of the console and brought it to his ear. He listened for a moment, face tense, then murmured, “Thank you, Prime Minister.” He hung up the phone and looked at Gabriel. “The Metropolitan Police just raided a house in Walthamstow in East London. Nothing.” He lapsed into a contemplative silence. “It just occurred to me that you were the last person to see my daughter—the last decent person, I should say.”

“Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I suppose I was.”

“Did you see her face?”

Gabriel nodded. “Yes, sir, I saw her face.”

“Did they harm her?”

“It didn’t look as though she was injured.”

“Was she frightened?”

Gabriel answered truthfully. “I’m sure she was very frightened, sir, but she didn’t go willingly. She fought them.”

The ambassador’s eyes shone suddenly with tears.

“I’m glad she fought them,” Robert Halton said. “I hope she’s fighting them right now.”





12




She had fought them. Indeed she had fought them with more rage, and for much longer, than they had anticipated. She had fought them as they raced up the Edgware Road from Hyde Park, and she had fought them in the mews garage in Maida Vale, where they had transferred her to a second van. She had clawed and kicked. She had spit in their faces and called them murderous cowards. In the end, they had been forced to use the needle on her. She didn’t like the needle. She didn’t fight them anymore.

Her room was small and square, with cinder-block walls painted bone white and a cement floor. It contained nothing except for a folding army cot with a bricklike pillow and a scratchy woolen blanket that smelled of mothballs and disinfectant. Her hands were cuffed and her legs shackled, and they left the light on always so that she had no idea whether it was day or night. There was a spy hole in the metal door through which a malevolent brown eye watched her constantly. She dreamed of ramming a scalpel into it. When she slept, which was seldom, her dreams were filled with violence.

Interaction with her captors was kept to an absolute minimum and strictly regulated. The ground rules were established early on the first day, after she had awakened from the drugs. All communication was conducted in writing, with notes slipped beneath the door of her cell. Upon receipt of such a note, she was to reply yes or no in a low voice. Any deviation from the procedures, they warned, would result in a loss of food and water. Thus far they had asked her only two questions. One was: Do you want food? The other was: Do you wish to use the toilet? Each time a question appeared beneath her door, she replied yes, regardless of whether she was hungry or needed to relieve herself. Saying yes to them meant a break from the tedium of staring at the featureless white walls. Saying yes meant a moment of contact with her kidnappers, which, no matter how much she loathed them, she found strangely comforting.

Her food never varied: a bit of bread and cheese, a bottle of water, a few pieces of chocolate if she had been behaving herself. Her toilet was a yellow plastic bucket. Only two of the kidnappers ever entered her cell. They wore balaclava hoods in her presence to conceal their faces, but she learned to recognize them by their eyes. One had brown eyes; the other had green eyes that she found perversely beautiful. She nicknamed “brown eyes” Cain and “green eyes” Abel. Cain always brought her food, but poor Abel was the one who had to collect her bucket. He was kind enough to avert his green eyes when he did so.

She played mind games with herself to fill the long empty hours. She floated down endless ski runs through perfect crystalline air. She performed difficult surgeries and reread all her dreary medical school textbooks. She spoke often to her mother. But it was the moment of her capture she thought of most. It played ceaselessly in her memory, like a loop of videotape over which she had no control: the men in black jumpsuits pouring out of the vans, the shredded bodies of her friends lying in Hyde Park, the man who had tried to save her. She had glimpsed him briefly as they were forcing her into the back of the van, an angular figure with gray temples, crouched on one knee with a gun in his outstretched hands. She wondered often who he was. She hoped that one day, if she were ever rescued, she would have an opportunity to thank him.

If she were ever rescued… For some reason she found it easier to contemplate her own death than to picture the moment of her liberation. She knew that she was almost certainly the target of a massive search, but her hope of ever being found faded as the days ground slowly past—and as the notes came with a mind-deadening regularity. Do you want food?…Do you wish to use the toilet?… But on the fifth day, as the man with gray temples was boarding a jetliner at Heathrow Airport, a different note appeared. It said: One of my men needs a doctor. Will you help us? “Yes,” she replied in a low voice, and a moment later Cain and Abel entered her cell and lifted her gently to her feet.