The English Girl: A Novel

ceremony, which was held in the newly built exhibition hall. She made no mention of the fact that her husband, the legendary Israeli intelligence officer Gabriel Allon, had discovered the pillars, or that the beautiful dark-haired woman at his side was actually a dead English girl named Madeline Hart. They remained at the cocktail reception for only a few minutes before driving across Jerusalem to a quiet restaurant located on the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Afterward, while they were walking in Ben Yehuda Street, Gabriel again asked Madeline if she wanted to remain in Israel, but her answer was the same. She spent her final night in Israel in the spare bedroom of Gabriel’s Narkiss Street apartment, the room meant for a child. Early the next morning they drove to Ben Gurion Airport in darkness and boarded a flight for London.

59
    LONDON
    F or several days Gabriel debated whether to warn Graham Seymour that he was about to be the recipient of a rather unusual Russian defector. In the end, he decided against it. His reasons were personal rather than operational. He simply didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
    As a result, the reception team waiting at Heathrow Airport late that same morning was Office rather than MI5. It took clandestine possession of Gabriel and Madeline in the arrivals hall and ferried them to a hastily procured service flat in Pimlico. Then Gabriel rang Seymour at his office and told him that, once again, he had entered the United Kingdom without signing the guestbook.
    “What a surprise,” said Seymour dryly.
    “More to come, Graham.”
    “Where are you?”
    Gabriel gave him the address.
    S eymour had a meeting with a visiting delegation of Australian spies that couldn’t be put off, so an hour would elapse before his car appeared in the street outside the building. Entering the flat, he found Gabriel alone in the sitting room. On the coffee table was an open notebook computer, which Gabriel used to play a video of Pavel Zhirov confessing the many sins of the Kremlin-owned energy firm known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. By the time the video ended, Seymour appeared stricken. Which proved one of Ari Shamron’s favorite maxims, thought Gabriel. In the intelligence business, as in life, sometimes it was better not to know.
    “He’s the one who had lunch with Madeline in Corsica?” Seymour asked finally, still staring at the computer screen.
    Gabriel nodded his head slowly. “You told me to find him,” he said, “and I found him.”
    “What happened to his face?”
    “He said something to Mikhail he shouldn’t have.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “Gone,” said Gabriel.
    “There are degrees of gone, you know.”
    The blank expression on Gabriel’s face made it clear that Pavel Zhirov was gone permanently.
    “Do the Russians know?” Seymour asked.
    “Not yet.”
    “How long before they find out?”
    “Spring, I’d say.”
    “Who killed him?”
    “Another story for another time.”
    Gabriel ejected the DVD disk from the computer and offered it to Seymour. Accepting it, he exhaled slowly, as though he were trying to keep his blood pressure in check.
    “I’ve been in this game a long time,” he said at last, “and that video is the single most explosive thing I’ve ever seen.”
    “You haven’t seen everything yet, Graham.”
    “I don’t know if you noticed,” Seymour said as though he hadn’t heard Gabriel’s warning, “but we had an election in this country recently. Jonathan Lancaster just won by one of the biggest landslides in British history. And Jeremy Fallon is now the chancellor of the exchequer.”
    “Not for long,” said Gabriel.
    Seymour made no reply.
    “You’re not thinking about letting him get away with it, are you, Graham?”
    “No,” he said. “But it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
    “You always knew it would be.”
    “But I was hoping the blood wouldn’t spatter on me, too.” He lapsed into a heavy silence.
    “Is there something you need to get off your chest, Graham?”
    “The prime minister has offered me a promotion,” he said after a hesitation.
    “What kind of promotion?”
    “The kind I couldn’t turn down.”
    “Director general?”
    Seymour nodded. “But not of MI5,” he added quickly. “You’re looking at the future chief of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You and I are going to be running the world together—covertly, of course.”
    “Unless you bring down the Lancaster