The English Girl: A Novel

immediately lit another.
    Two turns to the right, two turns to the left . . .
    M ikhail was still singing to himself as he departed his hotel room, dressed for dinner. The gift bag was in his right hand as he entered the elevator, though it was absent when he came out of the lobby men’s room three minutes after that. The team in the Ops Center saw him for the first time at 7:51 as he passed within range of Dina’s camera and started toward the hotel entrance. Waiting there, his arm raised as though he were signaling a rescue aircraft, was Gennady Lazarev. The hand seized Mikhail by the shoulder and drew him into the back of a waiting Maybach limousine. “I hope you managed to get a little rest,” Lazarev said as the car eased gracefully away from the curb, “because tonight you’re going to get a taste of the real Russia.”

50
    CAFÉ PUSHKIN, MOSCOW
    I n the aftermath, when they were tidying up their files and writing their after-action reports, there would be a heated debate over the true meaning of Gennady Lazarev’s words. One camp saw them as a harmless expression of goodwill; the other as a clear warning that Gabriel, a chief in waiting, would have been wise to heed. As usual, it was Shamron who settled the dispute. Lazarev’s words were without consequence, he declared, for Mikhail’s fate had been sealed the instant he climbed into the car.
    The setting for what transpired next, Moscow’s renowned Café Pushkin, could not have appeared any more inviting, especially on a December evening, with the air brittle and snow dancing on a Siberian wind. It was located at the corner of Tverskaya Street and the Boulevard Ring, in a stately old eighteenth-century house that looked as though it had been imported from Renaissance Italy. Beyond its pretty French doors ran three lanes of traffic; and beyond the traffic was a small square where Napoleon’s soldiers had once pitched their tents and burned the lime trees for warmth. Muscovites hurried home along the gravel footpaths, and a few brave mothers sat on the benches in the lamplight, watching their overbundled children playing on the snow-whitened lawns. Mordecai and Rimona sat silently among them, Mordecai watching the entrance of Café Pushkin, Rimona the children. Keller and Yossi had found a parking space fifty yards short of the restaurant. Yaakov and Oded, also in a Land Rover, were fifty yards beyond it.
    The dinner had been called for eight, but owing to the heavier than normal traffic in Moscow that evening, Lazarev and Mikhail did not arrive until twelve minutes past. Mordecai made a note of the time, as did the teams in the Land Rovers. So did Gabriel, who quickly flashed a message to the Op Center at King Saul Boulevard. The message was unnecessary, of course, because Navot and Shamron were closely monitoring the live audio feed from Mikhail’s phone. Therefore, they heard his heavy footfalls over the unpolished floorboards in Pushkin’s entrance. And the rattle of the old elevator that bore him to the second floor. And the round of throaty Russian applause that greeted him as he entered the private room that had been set aside for his coronation.
    A place had been reserved for Mikhail at the head of the table, with Lazarev to his right and Pavel Zhirov, Volgatek’s chief of security, to his left. Zhirov alone seemed to take no joy in the acquisition of Viktor Orlov’s protégé. Throughout the evening, he wore the blank expression of an experienced gambler who was losing badly at roulette. His gaze, narrow and dark, never strayed long from Mikhail’s face. He seemed to be calculating his losses and deciding whether he had the stomach for another turn of the wheel.
    If Zhirov’s brooding presence made Mikhail uneasy, he gave no sign of it. Indeed, all those who listened in on Mikhail’s performance that evening would describe it as one of the finest they had ever heard. He was the Nicholas Avedon whom they had all fallen in love with from afar. The witty Nicholas. The edgy Nicholas. The smarter than everyone else in the room Nicholas—save for Gennady Lazarev, who was perhaps smarter than anyone else in the world. As the evening wore on, he spoke less English and more Russian, until he stopped speaking English altogether. He was one of them now. He was Nicolai Avdonin. A Volgatek man. A man of Russia’s future. A man of Russia’s past.
    The transformation was made complete shortly after ten o’clock when he did a spot-on imitation