The English Girl: A Novel

chair. Gabriel was seated opposite; behind him stood Yossi, his eyes fixed on the display screen of a tripod-mounted video camera. After making a small adjustment to the angle of the shot, Yossi nodded to Mikhail, who ripped the tape from Zhirov’s eyes and mouth. The Russian blinked rapidly several times. Then his eyes swept slowly around the room, recording every face, every detail, before finally settling on the photograph in Gabriel’s hands. It showed Zhirov, looking very different than he did now, having lunch with Madeline Hart at Les Palmiers in Calvi.
    “How did you meet her?” asked Gabriel.
    “Meet who?” replied Zhirov.
    Gabriel laid the photograph upon the table and told Yossi to shut off the camera.
    T hey cut him away from the chair, tied a length of rope to his wrists, and carried him outside, to the shore of the lake. A dock stretched fifty feet into the darkness; and at the end was a patch of water that had yet to freeze. Zhirov entered it gracelessly, as a heavily bound man is prone to do when hurled by three angry men.
    “Do you know the survival time for water like that?” asked Keller.
    “He’ll start to lose feeling and dexterity in two minutes. And there’s a good chance he’ll be unconscious in about fifteen.”
    “If he doesn’t drown first.”
    “There’s always that,” said Gabriel.
    Keller watched the thrashing figure in silence for a moment. “How will you know when he’s had enough?” he asked finally.
    “When he starts to sink.”
    “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
    “These things happen in a place like Russia.”

52
    TVER OBLAST, RUSSIA
    T wo minutes in the lake was all it took. After that, there were no more protestations of innocence, no more threats that the FSB would soon be riding to his rescue. Resigned to his fate, he became a model prisoner. He made only one request, that they do something about his appearance. Like most spies, he had spent his career avoiding cameras, and he didn’t want to make his star turn looking like the loser of a prizefight.
    There is a truism about the intelligence trade: contrary to popular belief, most spies like to talk, especially when confronted with a situation that renders their career unsalvageable. At that point, they spill their secrets in a torrent, if only to prove to themselves that they had been more than simply a cog in the covert machine, that they had been important, even if they were not.
    Therefore, it came as no surprise to Gabriel that Pavel Zhirov, after recovering from his plunge into the lake, was suddenly in a talkative mood. Dressed in dry clothing, warmed by sweetened tea and a bit of brandy, he began his account not with Madeline Hart but with himself. He had been a child of the nomenklatura , the Communist elite of the Soviet Union. His father had been a senior official at the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Andrei Gromyko, which meant that Zhirov had attended special schools reserved for the children of the elite and had been allowed to shop in special Party stores that contained luxury goods most Soviet citizens could only dream of. And then there was the almost unheard-of luxury of foreign travel. Zhirov had spent much of his childhood outside the Soviet Union—mainly in the Soviet vassal states of Eastern Europe, which was his father’s area of expertise, though he did spend six months in New York once when his father was working at the United Nations. He hated New York because, as a loyal child of the Party, he had been bred and educated to hate it. “We didn’t see the wealth and greed of the United States as something to be emulated,” he said. “We saw it as something we could use against the Americans to destroy them.”
    Despite the fact he was an indifferent and oftentimes disruptive student, Zhirov won admission to the prestigious Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. Upon graduation, it was assumed he would go to work at the Foreign Ministry. Instead, a recruiter from the Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB, came calling at the Zhirovs’ apartment in Moscow. The recruiter said the KGB had been watching Pavel since he was a child and believed he possessed all the attributes of a perfect spy.
    “I was incredibly flattered,” Zhirov admitted. “It was 1975. Ford and Brezhnev were making nice in Helsinki, but behind the facade of détente the contest between East and West, capitalism and socialism, was still raging. And I was going to be a part of