The English Spy (18 page)

T
HE WALLS OF
W
ORMWOOD
C
OTTAGE
contained a sophisticated audio-and-video surveillance system capable of recording every word and deed of its guests. Graham Seymour ordered Parish to switch off the system and to remove all staff save for Miss Coventry, the cook, who served them a pot of Earl Grey tea and freshly baked scones with Devonshire clotted cream. They sat at the small table in the kitchen, which was set in a snug alcove with windows all around. Spread on one chair like an uninvited guest was a copy of the
Guardian
. Seymour looked at it with an expression as bleak as the moors.

“I see you’ve been keeping up with the news.”

“I didn’t have much else to do.”

“It was for your own good.”

“Yours, too.”

Seymour drank his tea but said nothing.

“Will you survive?”

“I should think so. After all, the prime minister and I are rather close.”

“He owes you his political life, not to mention his marriage.”

“Actually, you were the one who saved Jonathan’s career. I was only your secret enabler.” Seymour picked up the newspaper and frowned at the headline.

“It’s remarkably accurate,” said Gabriel.

“It should be. He had a good source.”

“You seem to be taking it all quite well.”

“What choice do I have? Besides, it wasn’t personal. It was an act of self-defense. Amanda wasn’t about to take the fall.”

“The result is still the same.”

“Yes,” said Seymour darkly. “British intelligence is a shambles. And as far as the public are concerned, I’m squarely to blame.”

“Funny how it all worked out that way.”

A silence fell between them.

“Are there any more surprises to come?” asked Seymour.

“A dead body in County Mayo.”

“Liam Walsh?”

Gabriel nodded.

“I suppose he deserved it.”

“He did.”

Seymour picked thoughtfully at a scone. “I’m sorry I got you mixed up in all this. I should have left you in Rome to finish your Caravaggio.”

“And I should have told you that a woman who’d just spent the night in Eamon Quinn’s secret Lisbon apartment had boarded a flight for London.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“It might have.”

“We aren’t policemen, Gabriel.”

“Your point?”

“My instincts would have been the same as yours. I wouldn’t have detained her at Heathrow. I would have let her run and hoped she led me to the prize.”

Seymour returned the newspaper to the empty chair. “I must admit,” he said after a moment, “you don’t look bad for a man who just came face-to-face with a five-hundred-pound bomb. Perhaps you truly are an archangel after all.”

“If I were an archangel, I would have found a way to save them all.”

“You saved a great many, though, at least a hundred by our estimate. And you would have come through it without a scratch if you’d had the sense to take cover inside Harrods.”

Gabriel made no reply.

“Why did you do it?” asked Seymour. “Why did you go running back into the street?”

“I saw them.”

“Who?”

“The woman and the child who were in that car. I tried to warn her, but she didn’t understand. She wouldn’t—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Seymour, cutting him off.

“Do you know their names?”

Seymour stared out the window. The descending sun had set fire to the moors.

“The woman was Charlotte Harris. She was from Shepherd’s Bush.”

“And the boy?”

“He was called Peter, after his grandfather.”

“How old was he?”

“Two years, four months.” Seymour paused and considered Gabriel carefully. “About the same age as your son, wasn’t he?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does.”

“Dani was a few months older.”

“And strapped to a car seat when the bomb exploded.”

“Are you finished, Graham?”

“No.” Seymour allowed a silence to creep into the room. “You’re about to be a father again. A chief, too. And fathers and chiefs don’t go face-to-face with five-hundred-pound bombs.”

Outside, the sun was balanced atop a distant hill. The fire was draining from the moors.

“How much does my service know?” asked Gabriel.

“They know you were close to the bomb when it exploded.”

“How?”

“Your wife recognized you in the CCTV video. As you might expect, she’s rather anxious to have you home. So is Uzi. He threatened to fly to London and bring you back personally.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Shamron convinced him to stay away. He thought it best to let the dust settle.”

“Wise move.”

“Would you have expected anything else?”

“Not from Shamron.”

Ari Shamron was the twice-former director-general of the Office, the chief of chiefs, the eternal one. He had formed the Office in his likeness, written its language, handed down its commandments, imparted its soul. Even now, in old age and failing health, he guarded his creation jealously. It was because of Shamron that Gabriel would soon succeed his friend as chief of the Office. And it was because of Shamron, too, that he had hurled himself like a
madman toward a white Ford car with a child strapped into the rear seat.

“Where’s my phone?” he asked.

“In our lab.”

“Are your techs having a good time pulling apart our software?”

“Ours is better.”

“Then I suppose they’ve managed to figure out where Quinn was when he sent that text.”

“GCHQ thinks it came from a mobile in London. The question is,” he continued, “how did he get your private number?”

“I suppose he got it from the same people who hired him to kill me.”

“Any suspects?”

“Only one.”

T
HERE WERE
B
ARBOUR
J
ACKETS
HANGING
in the hall closet and Wellington boots lined against the wall of the mudroom. Miss Coventry prevailed upon them to take a torch—night fell suddenly on the moor, she explained, and even experienced hikers sometimes became disoriented in the featureless landscape. The torch was military-issue and had a beam like a searchlight. If they became lost, quipped Gabriel as he dressed, they could use it to signal a passing airliner.

By the time they left the cottage, the sun was a memory. Ribbons of orange light lay low upon the horizon, but a fingernail moon floated overhead and a spray of stars shone cold and hard in the east. Gabriel, weakened, his body aching from a thousand bruises, moved hesitantly along the footpath, the unlit torch in his hand. Seymour, taller, for the moment fitter, hovered at his side, his brow deeply furrowed
in concentration as he listened to Gabriel explain what had transpired and, more important, why it had come to pass. The plot had its genesis, he said, at a house in a birch forest, on the shore of a frozen lake. Gabriel had committed an unforgivable act there against a man like himself—a made man, a man protected by a vengeful service—and for that Gabriel had been sentenced to die. But not just Gabriel; another would die with him. And a third man who had been complicit in the affair would be punished, too. The man would be disgraced, his service weakened by scandal.

“Me?” asked Seymour.

“You,” said Gabriel.

The men behind the plot, he continued, had not acted in haste. They had planned with great care, with their political master looking over their shoulders every step of the way. Quinn was their weapon. Quinn was their perfect bait. The men behind the plot had no established links to the bomb maker, but surely their paths had crossed. They had flown him to their headquarters, treated him like a conquering hero, showered him with toys and money. And then they had sent him into the world to commit an act of murder—a murder that would shock a nation and set the rest of the plot in motion.

“The princess?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You can’t prove a word of it.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “Not yet.”

For several days after her murder, he continued, British intelligence had been unaware of Quinn’s involvement. Then Uzi Navot came to London with a piece of intelligence from an important Iranian source. Seymour traveled to Rome; Gabriel, to Corsica. Then, with Keller as his guide, he went trolling through Quinn’s murderous past. They found a secret family in West Belfast and a small apartment in the hills of Lisbon, where a woman called Anna Huber spent
a single night, watched over by three men. Two of the men boarded an airplane with her, and the next act of the plot commenced. A blue BMW, stolen, repainted, fitted with false license plates, was left at Heathrow Airport. The woman collected the car and drove it to Brompton Road. She parked across the street from a London landmark, armed the bomb, and melted into the crowd while the two men tried desperately to save as many lives as possible. They knew the bomb was about to explode because Quinn had told them so. With a cryptic text message, Quinn had signed his name. And all the while, the men who had hired him were watching. Perhaps, added Gabriel, they still were.

“You think my service has been penetrated?” asked Seymour.

“Your service was penetrated a long time ago.”

Seymour paused and looked over his shoulder at the fading lights of Wormwood Cottage. “Is it safe for you here?”

“You tell me.”

“Parish knew my father. He’s as loyal as they come. Even so,” Seymour added, “we should probably move you soon, just to be on the safe side.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that, Graham.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m already dead.”

Seymour stared at Gabriel for a moment, bewildered. And then he understood.

“I want you to contact Uzi over your usual link,” said Gabriel. “Tell him I’ve succumbed to my injuries. Express your deepest condolences. Tell him to send Shamron to collect the body. I can’t do this without Shamron.”

“Do what?”

“I’m going to kill Eamon Quinn,” said Gabriel coldly. “And then I’m going to kill the man who paid for the bullet.”

“Leave Quinn to me.”

“No,” said Gabriel. “Quinn is mine.”

“You’re in no shape to go chasing after anyone, let alone one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”

“Then I suppose I’ll need someone to carry my bags. He should probably be someone from MI6,” Gabriel added quickly. “Someone to look after British interests.”

“Do you have someone in mind?”

“I do,” replied Gabriel. “But there’s one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s not MI6.”

“No,” said Seymour. “Not yet.”

Seymour followed Gabriel’s gaze into the blackened landscape. At first there was nothing. Then three figures rose slowly from the darkness. Two appeared to be laboring with fatigue, but the third was pounding along the footpath as though he had many miles to go. He paused briefly and, looking up, gave a single stiff-armed wave. Then suddenly he was standing before them. Smiling, he extended a hand toward Seymour.

“Graham,” he said amiably. “Long time no see. Are you staying for supper? I hear Miss Coventry is making her famous cottage pie.”

Then he turned and set off into the darkness. And a moment later he was gone.

G
RAHAM
S
EYMOUR DID INDEED STAY AT
Wormwood Cottage for supper that night, and for a long time afterward, too. Miss Coventry served them the cottage pie and a decent claret at the kitchen table and then left them to a warm fire in the sitting room and to the past. Gabriel remained largely a spectator to the proceedings, a witness, a taker of notes. Keller did most of the talking. He spoke of his undercover work in Belfast, of the death of Elizabeth Conlin, and of Quinn. And he spoke, too, of the night in January 1991 when his Sabre squadron came under Coalition air attack in western Iraq, and of his long walk into the waiting arms of Don Anton Orsati. Seymour listened largely without interruption and without judgment, even when Keller described some of the many assassinations he’d carried out at the don’s behest. Seymour wasn’t interested in passing judgment. He was interested only in Keller.

And so he cracked a bottle of Wormwood Cottage’s finest single malt, added a log to the pile of embers in the grate, and proposed an arrangement that would result in Keller’s repatriation. He would be given a job at MI6. With it would come a new name and identity. Christopher Keller would remain dead to everyone but his immediate family and his service. He would handle cases that suited his particular skill set. Under no circumstances would he be drafting white papers at a desk in Vauxhall Cross. MI6 had plenty of analysts to do that.

“And if I bump into an old chum on the street?”

“Tell the old chum he’s mistaken and keep walking.”

“Where will I live?”

“Anywhere you want, so long as it’s in London.”

“What about my villa in Corsica?”

“We’ll see.”

From his outpost next to the fire, Gabriel treated himself to a brief smile. Keller’s questions resumed.

“Who will I work for?”

“Me.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever I need.”

“And when you’re gone?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s not what I read in the newspapers.”

“One of the things you’ll soon learn working at MI6 is that the newspapers are almost always wrong.” Seymour raised his glass and examined the color of the whisky by the light of the fire.

“What are we going to say to Personnel?” asked Keller.

“As little as possible.”

“There’s no way I can survive a traditional vetting.”

“I should think not.”

“What about my money?”

“How much is there?”

Keller answered truthfully. Seymour raised an eyebrow.

“We’ll have to work out something with the lawyers.”

“I don’t like lawyers.”

“Well, you can’t keep it hidden in secret bank accounts.”

“Why not?”

“Because, for obvious reasons, MI6 officers aren’t allowed to keep them.”

“I won’t be a normal MI6 officer.”

“You still have to play by the rules.”

“I never have before.”

“Yes,” said Seymour. “That’s why you’re here.”

And on it went, long past midnight, until finally the deal was done and Seymour crawled laboriously into the back of his undignified unmarked van. He left behind a notebook computer incapable of making contact with the outside world, and a password-protected thumb drive containing two videos. The first was an edited montage of CCTV images showing the delivery of the blue BMW to Heathrow Airport. The car had appeared on CCTV for the first time near Bristol, several hours before the bombing. The driver headed directly toward London along the M4. He wore a hat and sunglasses, rendering his features invisible to the cameras. He stopped once for fuel, paid in cash, and said nothing to the clerk during the exchange. Nor did he address anyone in the car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, where he deposited the BMW at 11:30 a.m., half an hour after British Airways Flight 501 departed Lisbon. After retrieving a suitcase from the backseat, he entered the terminal and boarded the Heathrow Express
train to London’s Paddington Station, where a motorcycle was waiting. One hour later the bike slipped out of CCTV coverage on a country lane south of Luton. The motorcycle remained unaccounted for. The car’s point of origin on the day of the bombing was never determined.

The second video was devoted entirely to the woman. It began with her passage through Heathrow Airport and ended with her disappearance in the smoke and chaos that she had unleashed on London’s Brompton Road. To it, Gabriel added several minutes of footage from his own memory. There was a woman sitting alone at a street-side restaurant, and a woman abruptly hailing a taxi on a busy boulevard, and a woman on an airplane staring directly into his face without a trace of recognition. She was good, he thought, a worthy opponent. She had known that dangerous men were following her, and yet she had never once shown fear or even apprehension. It was possible she was someone whom Quinn had met during his travels through the nether regions of global terrorism, but Gabriel doubted it. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.

Gabriel watched the video again from the beginning, watched the BMW slide into the bus-only lane outside the HSBC bank, watched the woman climb out and walk calmly away. Then he saw two men leap from a silver Passat—one armed with a gun, one with only brute strength—and begin herding the crowds to safety. At forty-five seconds the street went deathly still and quiet. Then a man could be seen running wildly toward a white Ford compact trapped in the stalled traffic. The bomb obliterated the shot. It should have obliterated the man, too. Perhaps Graham Seymour was right. Perhaps Gabriel was an archangel after all.

It was nearly dawn by the time he powered off the computer. As instructed, he returned it to Parish the caretaker at breakfast, along
with a handwritten note to be delivered personally to Graham Seymour at Vauxhall Cross. In it, Gabriel requested permission to conduct two meetings—one with London’s most prominent political journalist, the other with the world’s most famous defector. Seymour agreed to both requests and dispatched an unmarked service van to Wormwood Cottage. By late that afternoon it was speeding along the cliffs of the Lizard Peninsula in West Cornwall. Keller, it seemed, was not alone. The late Gabriel Allon was going home, too.