The English Girl: A Novel (17 page)
PAS-DE-CALAIS, FRANCE
T
hree kilometers was slightly less than two miles, or seven and a half laps on a four-hundred-meter oval track. A world-class distance runner could be expected to complete the distance in under eight minutes; a fit athlete who jogged regularly, in about twelve. But for a middle-aged man who was wearing jeans and street shoes, and who had twice been shot in the chest, fifteen minutes was more than a fair test. And that was if the distance was truly three kilometers, he thought. If it was a few hundred meters longer, the time limit might be beyond his physical limits.
Mercifully, the road was flat. In fact, because Gabriel was moving toward the sea, it had a slight downhill pitch in places, though the wind blew hard and steady into his face. Fueled by a rush of adrenaline and anger, he set off at a maniacal sprint, but after a hundred meters or so he settled into what he assumed to be roughly a seven-minute-mile pace. He clutched the phone in his right hand but kept his left hand loose and relaxed. His breath was smooth at first, but it soon grew ragged and the back of his throat tasted like rust. It was Shamron’s fault, he thought resentfully, as he pounded along the pavement with the rain stinging his face. Shamron and his damn cigarettes.
Beyond the commercial building there was nothing at all—no cottages or streetlamps, only black fields and hedgerows and the broken white line at the edge of the road that guided Gabriel through the dark. The gaps between the lengths of white line were equidistant to the lines themselves, two strides per line, two strides per gap. Gabriel used the lines to keep his motion rhythmic and even. Two strides per line, two strides per gap. Fifteen minutes to cover three kilometers.
“Or what?”
“You’re wasting time.”
After five minutes his calves felt like granite and he was sweating beneath the weight of his leather jacket. He tried to shed the coat while running but couldn’t, so he paused long enough to remove it and hurl it into a farmer’s field. When he started running again, he saw a faint dome of yellow light on the horizon. Then two lamps, the parking lamps of a vehicle, peaked over the crest of a small rise and headed toward him at high speed. The vehicle was a small paneled van, pale gray in color, well worn. As it shot past in a blur, Gabriel noticed that the driver and his passenger were both wearing balaclava masks. The bagmen, he thought, coming to collect their prize. He didn’t bother turning to watch. Instead, he tried to ignore the burning in his calves and the sting of the rain on his face. Two strides per line, two strides per gap. Fifteen minutes to cover three kilometers.
When she is dead. Then you will know the truth . .
.
Gabriel cleared the small rise and immediately saw a chain of lights glowing in the distance. They were the lights of Audresselles, he thought, the small coastal village just south of the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez. He checked the time on the mobile phone. Eight minutes elapsed, seven remaining. His stride was beginning to falter, and the back of his neck felt numb. He lamented the fact he had not taken better care of his body, but mainly his thoughts were of Vienna. Of a car parked at the edge of a snowy square. Of an engine that wouldn’t start right away because of a bomb drawing power from the battery. He looked at the phone. Nine minutes elapsed, six remaining. Two strides per line, two strides per gap.
He lifted the phone to his mouth. “Did you get the money?”
The voice responded a few seconds later.
“We got it. Thank you very much.”
Thin, lifeless, stressing all the wrong words. Even so, Gabriel swore it was filled with mirth.
“You have to give me more time,” he shouted.
“That’s not possible.”
“I can’t make it.”
“You have to try harder.”
He looked at the clock. Ten minutes elapsed, five remaining. Three strides per line, three strides per gap.
“I’m coming for you, Leah,” he shouted into the wind. “Don’t turn the key again. Don’t turn the key.”
H
e sprinted past a sprawling manor house, new but built to look old, and immediately felt the pull of the sea. The road sank toward it, and the smell of it tasted of fish and salt on Gabriel’s tongue. A sign materialized from the dark indicating there was beach access two hundred meters ahead. And then Gabriel saw the Citroën. It was waiting in a small sandy car park, its headlamps staring him straight in the face, seemingly watching him as he hurtled toward it like a madman. He glanced at the clock on the phone. Thirteen minutes elapsed, two remaining. He would make it with time to spare. Still, he forced himself to see the race to its end, pounding his feet on the asphalt, flailing his arms, until he thought his heart would burst. Starved of oxygen, his brain started to play tricks on him. He saw a Citroën parked by the beach one instant, but the next it was a dark blue Mercedes sedan in a snowy Vienna square. He swore he heard an engine struggling to start, and later he would remember shouting something incoherent before being blinded by the flash of an explosion. The blast wave hit him with the force of a speeding car and blew him off his feet. He lay on the cold asphalt for several minutes, gasping for breath, wondering whether it was real or only a dream.
AUDRESSELLES, PAS-DE-CALAIS
T
he hour was early, the location remote, and therefore the response was slow. Much later, a commission of inquiry would reprimand the chief of the local gendarmerie and issue a lofty set of recommendations that went largely ignored, for in the quaint little fishing village of Audresselles, recriminations were the last thing on anyone’s mind. For many months afterward, its shocked residents would speak of that morning in the most somber of tones. One woman, an octogenarian whose family had lived in the village when it was ruled by an English king, would describe the incident on the beach as the worst thing she had seen since the Nazis hoisted a swastika over the Hôtel de Ville. No one took issue with her claim, though a few found it hyperbolic. Surely, they said, Audresselles had seen worse than this, though, when pressed, none could provide an example.
The commune of Audresselles is only two thousand acres in size, and the blast wave from the explosion rattled windows the length and breadth of it. Several startled residents immediately called the gendarmes, though twenty long minutes would elapse before the first mobile unit arrived at the little sand car park adjacent to the beach. There they discovered a Citroën C4 engulfed in a fire so hot no one could get within thirty meters of it. Another ten minutes would pass before the firefighters arrived. By the time they managed to smother the flames, the Citroën was little more than a blackened shell. For reasons that were never made clear, one of the firefighters took it upon himself to pry open the rear hatch. Instantly, he fell to his knees and was violently sick. The first gendarme to look inside fared no better. But the second, a veteran of some twenty years, managed to maintain his composure as he confirmed that the blackened contents of the car were indeed the remains of a human being. He then radioed the desk officer for the Pas-de-Calais region and reported that the exploding car on the beach at Audresselles was now a murder case—and a grisly one at that.
By daybreak more than a dozen detectives and forensic experts were working the crime scene, watched over by what seemed like half the town. Only one resident of Audresselles had anything useful to tell them: Léon Banville, owner of a recently built manor house on the edge of town. As it happened, Monsieur Banville had been awake at 5:09 a.m., when a man in street clothes had come running past his window shouting in a language he didn’t recognize. Police immediately undertook a search of the road and found a leather jacket that looked as though it would fit a man of moderate height and build. Nothing else of interest was ever found—not the key that the running man had hurled into the field of grain, nor the Volkswagen car that it operated. The car vanished without a trace, along with the ten million euros hidden inside two suitcases in its trunk.
The intense heat of the fire did significant damage to the remains of the body in the back of the Citroën but did not destroy them completely. As a result, forensic examiners were able to determine that the victim had been a young woman, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, approximately five-foot-eight inches in height. The description was a rough match for Madeline Hart, the English girl who had gone missing on Corsica in late August. The French police quietly reestablished contact with their brethren across the Channel and within forty-eight hours had in their possession a DNA sample taken from Ms. Hart’s London flat. An expedited comparison test showed that the sample matched DNA taken from the car. The French interior minister immediately sent word to the Home Office in London before making the findings public at a hastily called news conference in Paris. Madeline Hart was dead. But who had killed her? And why?
T
hey held the funeral at St. Andrew’s Church in Basildon, just down the road from the little council house where she had been raised. Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster was not in attendance—his schedule would not permit it, or so said his press spokesman, Simon Hewitt. Nearly the entire staff of party headquarters was there, as was Jeremy Fallon. He wept openly at the graveside, which inspired one reporter to remark that perhaps he had a heart after all. Afterward, he spoke briefly to Madeline’s mother and brother, who looked curiously out of place amid the well-dressed London crowd. “I’m so sorry,” he was overheard telling them. “I’m so very sorry.”
Once again, the Party’s political team noticed a spike in Lancaster’s approval ratings, though this time they had the decency not to invoke Madeline’s name. With his popularity at an all-time high, the prime minister announced a sweeping program to make government more efficient and then jetted off on a high-profile trip to Moscow, where he promised a new era in Russian-British relations, especially in the arenas of counterterrorism, finance, and energy. A handful of conservative commentators gently criticized Lancaster for not meeting with the leaders of Russia’s pro-democracy movement while in Moscow, but most of the British press applauded his restraint. With the domestic economy still on life support, they wrote, the last thing Britain needed was another cold war with the Russians.
Upon returning to London, Lancaster was questioned at every turn as to whether he intended to call an election. For ten days he toyed with the press while Simon Hewitt orchestrated a steady stream of leaks that made it clear an announcement was imminent. Therefore, when Lancaster finally rose in the Commons to declare his intention to seek a new mandate, it was an anticlimax. In fact, the most surprising news concerned the future of Jeremy Fallon, who planned to leave his powerful post at Downing Street to run for a safe seat in Parliament. There were numerous press reports, all unconfirmed, that if Lancaster were to win a second term as prime minister, Fallon would be appointed the next chancellor of the exchequer. Fallon denied the reports categorically, going so far as to claim that he and the prime minister had held no substantive discussions about his future. Not a single member of the Whitehall press corps believed him.
As October turned to November, and the campaign commenced in earnest, Madeline Hart again faded from the public consciousness. This proved to be a blessing for the French police, for it allowed them to conduct their investigation without the British press peering over their shoulders. Among the most promising developments was the discovery of four bodies at an isolated villa in the Lubéron. All four were known members of a violent Marseilles criminal gang. Three had been killed with professional-looking shots to the head; the fourth, a woman, had been hit twice in the upper torso. More important, however, was the discovery of a purpose-built holding cell in the lower level of the villa. It was clear to the police that Madeline had been held in the room after her abduction in Corsica, probably for a lengthy period of time. It was possible she was the victim of sexual enslavement, but it was unlikely, given the pedigrees of the four people who had been staying in the house with her. These people were not sexual predators; they were professional criminals interested only in money. All of which led the police to conclude that Madeline Hart had been held as part of a kidnap-for-ransom scheme—a scheme that, for some reason, was never reported to the authorities.
But why kidnap a girl from a working-class family who had been raised in a council house in Essex? And who had killed the four Marseilles criminals at the villa in the Lubéron? Those were just two of the questions the French police still could not answer a month after Madeline’s terrible death on the beach at Audresselles. Nor did they have any clue about the identity of the man who had been spotted running past Monsieur Banville’s house at 5:09 a.m., minutes before the car exploded. One veteran detective who had worked numerous kidnapping cases had a theory, though. “The poor devil was the bagman,” he told his colleagues assuredly. “Somewhere along the line, he made a mistake, and the girl died for his sins.” But where was he now? They assumed he was lying low somewhere, licking his wounds and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. And though the French police would never know it, they were entirely correct.
B
ut there were many other things about the running man that the French police, even in their wildest dreams, would never imagine to be true. They would never know, for example, that he was Gabriel Allon, the legendary Israeli spy and assassin who had been operating with impunity on French soil since he was a boy of twenty-two. Or that the man who had spirited him to safety after the bomb exploded was none other than Christopher Keller, the Corsican-based assassin about whom the French police had been hearing whispers for years. Or that the two men, once bitter rivals, had proceeded to a seaside villa near Cherbourg where a team of four Israeli operatives waited on standby. Keller had stayed at the villa only a few hours before returning quietly to Corsica, but Gabriel and Chiara remained there for a week while they waited for the many small cuts on Gabriel’s face to heal. On the morning of Madeline Hart’s funeral, they drove to Charles de Gaulle Airport and boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. And by nightfall they were once again at the apartment in Narkiss Street.
In Gabriel’s absence, Chiara had moved the painting and his supplies to the room that was supposed to be his studio. But the next morning, after she left for work at the museum, he promptly moved his things back to the sitting room. For three days he stood before the canvas almost without a break, from dawn each morning until late afternoon, when Chiara returned home. He tried to keep the memories of the nightmare in France at bay, but the subject matter of the painting, a beautiful young woman bathing in her garden, would not allow it. Madeline was in his thoughts constantly, especially on the fourth day, when he began work on the extensive losses to the hands of Susanna. Here he saw much evidence of Bassano’s luminous brushwork. Gabriel imitated it so immaculately it was nearly impossible to discern the original from the retouching. Indeed, in Gabriel’s humble opinion, he managed to outdo the master in places. He wished he could take credit for the high quality of his work, but he could not. It was Madeline who inspired him.
He forced himself to take a break for lunch early each afternoon, but inevitably he ate at the computer, where he scoured the Internet for news about the French investigation into Madeline’s death. He knew the stories were far from complete, but it appeared the police were unaware of his involvement in the case. Nor could he find any evidence in the British press to suggest that Jonathan Lancaster might have been linked in any way to Madeline’s disappearance and death. It seemed that Lancaster and Jeremy Fallon had pulled off the impossible—and now, according to the polls, they were headed toward a landslide victory. Needless to say, neither man tried to contact Gabriel. Even Graham Seymour waited three long weeks before calling. From the background noise, Gabriel guessed he was using a public phone in Paddington Station.
“Our mutual friend sends his regards,” Seymour said carefully. “He was wondering whether there’s anything you need.”
“A new leather jacket,” said Gabriel with more good humor than he was feeling.
“What size?”
“Medium,” replied Gabriel, “with a hidden compartment for false passports and a weapon.”
“Are you ever going to tell me how you managed to get away without being arrested?”
“Someday, Graham.”
Seymour fell silent as the station announcer called a train for Oxford. “He’s grateful,” he said finally, speaking of Lancaster again. “He knows you did everything you could.”
“It just wasn’t enough to save her.”
“Have you considered the possibility that they never intended to let her go?”
“I have,” said Gabriel. “But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.”
“Is there anything else you want me to tell him?”
“You might want to remind him that the kidnappers still have a copy of her video confession of the affair.”
“No girl, no story.”
If it had been Seymour’s intention to lift Gabriel’s spirits with the phone call, he failed miserably. In fact, in the days after, Gabriel’s mood grew darker still. Dreams disturbed his sleep. Dreams of running toward a car that receded farther into the distance with each stride. Dreams of fire and blood. In his subconscious, Madeline and Leah became indistinguishable, two women, one whom he had loved, another whom he had sworn to protect, both consumed by fire. He was despondent with grief. More than anything, though, he was gripped by an overwhelming sense of failure. He had given Madeline his word he would get her out alive. Instead, she had died a nightmarish death, bound and gagged in a coffin of fire. He only hoped she had been sedated at the time, that she had been oblivious to the pain and terror.
But why had they killed her? Had Gabriel made a mistake during the drop that cost Madeline her life? Or had it always been their intention to kill her in front of Gabriel, so that he had no choice but to watch her burn? It was a question that Chiara posed one evening while they were walking along Ben Yehuda Street. Gabriel answered by telling her about the
signadora
’s vision, that she had seen an old enemy when peering into her magic potion of olive oil and water. Not an old enemy of Keller’s, but of Gabriel’s.
“I never knew you had any enemies inside the criminal underworld of Marseilles.”
“I don’t,” replied Gabriel. “At least, none that I know about. But maybe they were acting at the behest of someone else when they kidnapped Madeline.”
“Like who?”
“Someone who wanted to punish me for something I’d done in the past. Someone who wanted to humiliate me.”
“Is there anything else the
signadora
said that you forgot to mention?”
“When she is dead,” answered Gabriel. “Then you will know the truth.”
It was a few minutes after nine o’clock by the time they returned to Narkiss Street, but Gabriel decided to spend some time at the easel. He slipped a copy of
La
Bohème
into his paint-smudged portable CD player, lowered the volume to a whisper, and worked with a clarity of purpose that had eluded him since his return to Jerusalem. He did not hear when the opera reached its end, nor did he notice the sky beginning to lighten at his back. Finally, at dawn, he laid down his brush and stood motionless before the painting, his hand to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.