The English Girl: A Novel

version of Madison Avenue. It bore them down a long gentle hill, past Volgatek’s glittering new headquarters, to the redbrick walls of the Kremlin, where it emptied into the eight lanes of Okhotnyy Ryad Street. Turning left, they sped past the Russian Duma, the old House of Unions, and the Bolshoi Theatre. Gabriel saw none of them. He had eyes only for the floodlit yellow fortress perched atop the heights of Lubyanka Square.
    “KGB,” said the driver, pointing over the top of the wheel.
    “There is no KGB,” Gabriel replied distantly. “The KGB is a thing of the past.”
    The driver muttered something about the naïveté of foreigners and guided the taxi toward the entrance of the Metropol. The lobby had been faithfully restored to its original decor, but the middle-aged woman at the check-in counter hadn’t fared nearly as well. She greeted Gabriel with a frozen smile, made polite inquiries about the nature of his travel, and then handed him a long registration form, a copy of which would be forwarded to the relevant authorities. Gabriel completed it swiftly as Jonathan Albright of Markham Capital Advisers and was rewarded with a key to his room. A bellman offered to assist with his bag and seemed relieved when Gabriel said he could manage on his own. Nevertheless, he gave the bellman a tip for his troubles. Its size suggested he was unfamiliar with the value of Russian currency.
    His room was on the fourth floor, overlooking the ten lanes of Teatralny Prospekt. Gabriel assumed it was bugged and therefore made no effort to search it. Instead, he placed two phone calls to clients who were not really his clients and then hacked his way through the stack of e-mail that had piled up in his in-box during the flight from London. One of them was from a lawyer in New York and concerned the tax implications of a certain investment of dubious legality. Its true sender was Eli Lavon, who was staying in a room down the hall, and its true content was revealed when Gabriel keyed in the proper password. It seemed that Gennady Lazarev had taken his prospective new employee to the O2 Lounge at the Ritz for drinks and a nosh. Also in attendance were Dmitry Bershov, Pavel Zhirov, and four pieces of Russian eye candy. Surveillance photos to follow, courtesy of Yaakov and Dina, who were in a booth on the opposite side of the room.
    Gabriel rekeyed the password, and the message returned to its original text. Then he slipped on a pair of headphones and patched into a secure feed of the audio from Mikhail’s mobile phone. He heard clinking glass, laughter, and the twitter of the Russian eye candy, which sounded inane, even in a language he could not comprehend. Then he heard the familiar voice of Gennady Lazarev murmuring a confidence into Mikhail’s ear. “Make sure you get some rest tonight,” he was saying. “We have big plans for you tomorrow.”
    T hey remained in the lounge until eleven, when Mikhail repaired to his luxury suite at the Ritz with no company other than a raging headache. Despite Lazarev’s admonition, he did not sleep that night, for his thoughts were a swirl of operations past, strung together like a television newsreel of the century’s most catastrophic events. He craved activity, movement of any kind, but the surveillance cameras that were surely hidden within the room wouldn’t allow it. And so he lay tangled in the damp sheets of his bed with the stillness of a corpse until 7:00 a.m., when his wakeup call lifted him gratefully to his feet.
    His coffee arrived a minute later, and he drank it while watching the morning business news from London. Afterward, he headed down to the health club, where he put in an impressive workout witnessed by a watcher from one of the Russian intelligence services. Returning to his room, he subjected himself to an ice-water shower to beat some life into his weary bones. Then he dressed in his finest gray chalk-stripe suit—the one Dina had chosen for him at Anthony Sinclair of Savile Row. He saw her in the breakfast room fifteen minutes later, staring into the eyes of Christopher Keller as if they held the secret to eternal happiness. A few tables away, Yossi was in the process of sending back his scrambled eggs. “I asked for them runny,” he was saying, “but these should have been served in a glass.” The remark bounced off the waiter like a pebble thrown at a freight train. “You want your eggs in a glass?” he asked.
    At nine o’clock sharp, having read