The English Girl: A Novel

of the team, the answer is no. I don’t think I’d be able to handle being back there. I might make a mistake.”
    Without a word, Gabriel crawled into bed and laid his head upon Chiara’s womb.
    “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” she asked.
    “I’m too tired to take off my clothes.”
    “Do you mind if I read a little longer?”
    “You can do anything you want.”
    Gabriel closed his eyes. The sound of Chiara gently turning the pages of her magazine nudged him toward sleep.
    “Are you still awake?” she asked suddenly.
    “No,” he murmured.
    “Did she know this was going to end in Moscow, Gabriel?”
    “Who?”
    “The old woman in Corsica. Did she know?”
    “Yes,” said Gabriel. “I suppose she did.”
    “Did she warn you not to go?”
    “No,” said Gabriel as the knife of guilt twisted in his chest. “She told me I would be safe there.”
    “Did she see anything else?”
    “A child,” said Gabriel. “She saw a child.”
    “Whose child?” asked Chiara, but Gabriel didn’t hear her. He was running toward a woman, across an endless field of snow. The woman was burning. The snow was stained with blood.

47
    GRAYSWOOD, SURREY
    U zi Navot , director of Israel’s secret intelligence service, arrived at the Grayswood safe house at twenty minutes past seven the next morning, as a gray December dawn was breaking over the bare trees of the Knobby Copse. The first person he encountered was Christopher Keller, who was chasing down a Ping-Pong ball that Yaakov had just flicked past him for a winner. The score in the match was eight to five, with Yaakov leading and Keller closing hard.
    “Who are you?” Keller asked of the unsmiling, bespectacled figure standing in the entrance hall.
    “None of your business,” replied Navot.
    “Strange name. Hebrew, is it?”
    Navot frowned. “You must be Keller.”
    “I must be.”
    “Where’s Gabriel?”
    “He and Chiara went to Guildford.”
    “Why?”
    “Because we ate all the fish in the stock pond.”
    “Who’s in charge?”
    “The inmates.”
    Navot smiled. “Not anymore.”
    W ith Navot’s unorthodox arrival, the team went on war footing. It was an undeclared war, as all its conflicts were, and it would be fought in a hostile land, against an enemy of superior size and capability. The Office was regarded as one of the most capable intelligence services in the world, yet it was no match for the brotherhood of the sword and the shield. The intelligence services of the Russian Federation were heirs to a proud and murderous tradition. For more than seventy years, the KGB had ruthlessly protected Soviet communism from enemies both real and perceived and had acted as the Party’s vanguard abroad, recruiting and planting thousands of spies around the world. Its power had been almost without limit, allowing it to operate as a virtual state within a state. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the state. And Volgatek was its oil company.
    It was this connection—the connection between Volgatek and the SVR—that Gabriel emphasized time and time again as the team began its work. The oil company and Russia’s intelligence service were one and the same, he said, which meant that Mikhail would be in enemy hands the minute his plane left the ground in London. His cover identity had been sound enough to fool Gennady Lazarev, but it would not survive long in the interrogation rooms of Lubyanka. And neither would Mikhail, for that matter. Lubyanka was the place where agents and operations went to die, warned Gabriel. Lubyanka was the end of the line.
    For the most part, though, Gabriel’s thoughts remained focused on Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of security and the mastermind behind the operation to gain access to Britain’s North Sea oil. Within twenty-four hours of Navot’s arrival at the safe house, the Office station in Moscow had determined that Zhirov resided in a fortified apartment building in Sparrow Hills, the exclusive highlands on the banks of the Moscow River. His typical daily schedule was illustrative of the bifurcated nature of his work—mornings at Volgatek’s flashy headquarters on Tverskaya Street, afternoons at Moscow Center, the SVR’s wooded compound in Yasenevo. The Moscow surveillance team managed to snap several photographs of Zhirov climbing in and out of his chauffeured Mercedes limousine, though none showed his face clearly. Gabriel couldn’t help but admire the Russian’s