The English Spy (40 page)

I
T WASN
’
T AS IF THEY
had nothing better do that spring. After all, even the most casual observer—the historically brain-dead, as Graham Seymour often described them in his darker moments—realized the world was wobbling dangerously out of control. Strapped for resources, Seymour assigned only one officer to the task. It didn’t matter; one officer was all he needed. He gave the man a briefcase full of cash and considerable operational leeway. The briefcase came from a shop in Jermyn Street. The money was American, for in the nether regions of the espionage world, dollars remained the reserve currency.

He traveled under many names that spring, none of them his own. In fact, at that particular point of his life and career, he really didn’t have a name. His parents, with whom he had recently been reunited, referred to him by the name they had given him at birth. At work, however, he was known only by a four-digit numeric cipher. His flat
in Chelsea was officially owned by a company that did not exist. He had set foot there only once.

His search took him to many dangerous places, which was of no consequence, for he was a dangerous man himself. He spent several days in Dublin at the perilous intersection of drugs and rebellion, and then popped into Lisbon on the off chance his quarry’s connection to the city was more than merely cosmetic. A nasty rumor took him to a godforsaken village in Belarus; an intercepted e-mail, to Istanbul. There he met a source who claimed to have seen the target in an ISIS-controlled region of Syria. With London’s reluctant blessing, he crossed the border on foot and, disguised as an Arab, made his way to the house where the target was said to be living. The house was empty, save for a few snippets of wiring and a notebook that contained several diagrams for bombs. He pocketed the notebook and returned to Turkey. Along the way he saw images of brutality that he would not soon forget.

Late February saw him in Mexico City, where a bribe produced a lead that sent him to Panama. He spent a week there watching an empty condominium on the Playa Farallón. Then, on a hunch, he flew to Rio de Janeiro, where a plastic surgeon with a dubious clientele admitted he had recently altered the target’s appearance. According to the doctor, the patient claimed he was living in Bogotá, but a visit there turned up nothing but a distraught woman who might or might not have been carrying his child. The woman suggested he look in Buenos Aires, which he did. And it was there, on a cool afternoon in mid-April, that an old debt came due.

He was cooking at a restaurant called Brasserie Petanque, in the southern barrio of San Telmo. His apartment was around the corner,
on the third floor of a building that looked as though it had been plucked from the boulevard Saint-Germain. Across the street was a café where Keller sat drinking coffee at a table on the pavement. He wore a brimmed hat and sunglasses; his hair had the healthy sheen of a man gone prematurely gray. He appeared to be reading a Spanish-language literary magazine. He was not.

He left a few pesos on the table, crossed the street, and entered the foyer of the apartment building. A tabby cat circled his feet while he read the name on the mailbox for Apartment 309. Upstairs, he found the door to the apartment locked. It was no matter; Keller had acquired a copy of the key from the building’s maintenance man for a bribe of five hundred dollars.

He drew his gun as he entered and closed the door. The apartment was small and sparsely furnished. Next to the bed was a pile of books and a shortwave radio. The books were thick, weighty, and learned. The radio was of a quality rarely seen any longer. Keller powered it on and raised the volume to a whisper. “My Funny Valentine” by Miles Davis. He smiled. He had come to the right place.

Keller switched off the radio and moved aside the curtain that shaded Quinn’s last remaining window on the world. And there he stood with the discipline of a close-observation specialist for the remainder of the afternoon. Finally, a man appeared at the café and sat at the same table Keller had vacated. He drank local beer and was dressed in local clothing. Even so, it was clear he was not a native of Argentina. Keller raised a miniature monocular telescope to his eye and studied the man’s face. The Brazilian had done a fine job, he thought. The man at the table was unrecognizable. The only thing that betrayed him was the way he handled his knife when the proprietor brought his steak. Quinn was a master technician, but he always did his best work with a knife.

Keller remained at the edge of the window with the miniature
telescope pressed to his eye, watching, waiting, while Quinn consumed the last meal he would ever eat. When he was finished, he paid the proprietor and, rising, crossed the street. Keller slipped the miniature telescope into his pocket and stood in the entrance hall, the gun in his outstretched hands. After a moment he heard footfalls in the corridor and the crunch of a key entering the lock. Quinn never saw Keller’s face and never felt the two bullets—one for Elizabeth Conlin, the other for Dani Allon—that ended his life. For that much at least, Keller was sorry.

T
HE
E
NGLISH
S
PY
IS A WORK
of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

There is indeed a lovely cottage at the southern end of the Gunwalloe fishing cove that has always reminded the author of Monet’s
Customs Officer’s Cabin at Pourville
, but to the best of my knowledge neither Gabriel Allon nor Madeline Hart have ever resided there. Nor should readers go searching for Gabriel at 16 Narkiss Street, as he and Chiara have their hands full at the moment. Reports from Jerusalem indicate that mother and children are doing fine. Father is another matter altogether. More on that in the next installment of the series.

Visitors to the northern English town of Fleetwood will search in vain for an Internet café opposite the chippy. There is no pub in Gunwalloe called Lamb and Flag, nor is there a bar in Crossmaglen called the Emerald, though there are several like it. Apologies to the management of Le Piment restaurant on the island of Saint Barthélemy for placing an IRA bomb maker in their small but glorious kitchen. Apologies as well to Die Bank restaurant in Hamburg, the InterContinental Hotel in Vienna, and, especially, the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin. Room 518 must have been quite a mess.

For the record, I am aware that the headquarters of Israel’s secret intelligence service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. My fictitious service continues to reside there, in part because I like the name better than that of the current location, which I will not mention in print. Also, I have been asked many times whether Don Anton Orsati is based on a real individual. He is not. The don, his valley, and his unique business enterprise were all invented by the author.

The English Spy
is the fourth Gabriel Allon adventure to feature the don’s best assassin: former SAS commando Christopher Keller. The novel ends in the place where Keller’s story began, in the dangerous green hills of South Armagh. During the worst of the long and bloody war for Northern Ireland, the region truly was the most dangerous place in the world to wear the uniform of a soldier or police officer. The largest single loss of life occurred on August 27, 1979, when two large roadside bombs killed eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint. The attack occurred just hours after Lord Mountbatten, a British statesman and relative of Queen Elizabeth II, was killed by an IRA bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat—an incident that suggested the opening passages of
The English Spy
. Clearly, I borrowed much from the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, when constructing my fictitious princess, but in no way was it my intention
to suggest Diana’s death was a murder. She died in a Paris tunnel because an intoxicated man was behind the wheel of her car, not as a result of an international conspiracy.

The Republic of Ireland’s long struggle against illegal narcotics has been well documented. Less well known, however, is the role played in the drug trade by elements of the Real IRA, the dissident republican terrorist group formed in 1997. The organization, which included several members of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, carried out a series of devastating bombings in the spring and summer of 1998, as Northern Ireland was moving tentatively toward peace. The deadliest was the bombing of the market town of Omagh on August 15 that killed twenty-nine people and left more than two hundred others wounded. Specific details of the attack that appear in the novel are accurate, though I granted myself license when portraying the actions of my fictitious British spymaster, Graham Seymour. Eamon Quinn and Liam Walsh were not in the bomb car that day, as they are inventions of the author.

At the time of this writing, the real bombers still have not been officially identified. Only they know why they parked the bomb car in the wrong place on Lower Market Street. And only they know why they allowed inaccurate warnings to be passed on to the media and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, thus creating the circumstances for a catastrophic loss of innocent life. Surely the police and intelligence services of Ireland and the United Kingdom know their names. Yet seventeen years after the bombing, no one has been convicted for the largest mass murder in British or Irish history. In June 2009 a judge in Northern Ireland ordered four men—Michael McKevitt, Liam Campbell, Colm Murphy, and Seamus Daly—to pay one and a half million pounds to the families of the Omagh victims. To date, no money has changed hands. In April 2014 Seamus Daly was arrested at a shopping center in South Armagh, where he was living openly, and charged with twenty-nine
counts of murder. If past cases are any guide, the chances of a successful prosecution are remote. In 2002 Ireland’s Special Criminal Court convicted Colm Murphy of conspiracy in the bombing, only to see its verdict overturned on appeal. Murphy’s nephew faced trial in Northern Ireland in 2006 but was acquitted.

In the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, British intelligence learned that highly skilled IRA bomb makers were selling their expertise on the open market. Among the countries where former IRA terrorists plied their deadly trade was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Historian Gordon Thomas, in his history of MI6 entitled
Secret Wars
, wrote that a delegation of IRA terrorists traveled secretly to Tehran in 2006 to help Iran build an antitank weapon for its Lebanese client Hezbollah—a weapon that could create a fireball capable of traveling a thousand feet per second. Hezbollah used the weapon against Israeli tanks and armored vehicles, but British soldiers serving in Iraq also found themselves the targets of IRA-developed technology. In 2005 eight British soldiers were killed in Basra by a sophisticated roadside bomb that was identical to devices used by the IRA in South Armagh. Counterterrorism experts speculated that the blueprints for the weapon reached Iraq as a result of the IRA’s long association with the PLO. Both organizations enjoyed the patronage of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and trained at his infamous desert camps, where they shared knowledge and resources. Libya did indeed supply virtually all of the Semtex used by the IRA during the war for Northern Ireland.

But Libya was not the only state sponsor of the IRA. The KGB also provided material support to the terrorists in an attempt to create mayhem in Great Britain and thus weaken the Atlantic alliance. Much has changed in the quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but fomenting discord within the Western alliance remains a primary goal of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Putin
would like nothing more than to see the complete collapse of NATO so he can reconstitute Russia’s lost empire without the meddlesome West standing in his way. Under his leadership, Russia is once again quietly funneling money to extreme political parties in Western Europe on both the left and the right. It seems Putin doesn’t care much about his friends’ politics, so long as they are opposed to the United States and see the world roughly as he does. Besides, Putin has no real politics of his own. He is a kleptocrat and has no philosophy other than the cynical exercise of power.

Gabriel Allon first matched wits with Russia in
Moscow Rules
, which was published in the summer of 2008, when Moscow was awash in oil revenues and critics of the Kremlin were being killed in the streets. Unfortunately, the novel proved to be prescient. Consider the Kremlin’s behavior of late. It has stood by a murderous client regime in Syria. It has agreed to sell sophisticated antiaircraft missiles to Iran. Crimea and eastern Ukraine are under Russian control. Nuclear-armed Russian bombers are buzzing NATO allies. Indeed, a pair of Russian bombers recently took a joyride down the English Channel with their transponders switched off, disrupting civil aviation for hours. As the West takes a budget ax to its defenses, the Red Army is modernizing at a furious pace. Putin has spoken openly about the use of tactical nuclear weapons to preserve his gains.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is rightfully alarmed by what he sees. In March 2015, he described Russia as “the single greatest threat” to Britain’s security. A month later, however, President Obama offered a sharply different view, dismissing Russia as a “regional power” that was acting out of weakness rather than strength. The implication is that, by invading Ukraine and snatching Crimea, Vladimir Putin is actually
losing
. If only it were so. Putin is winning, which means Ukraine is but a preview of coming attractions.