The English Girl: A Novel

you?”
    “I’m good at my job, Allon. Just like you. Besides,” Zhirov added, “she was a lonely girl. She was easy.”
    “Watch yourself, Pavel.” Gabriel made a show of scrutinizing the photograph more carefully. “It’s funny,” he said after a moment, “but the two of you look very comfortable together.”
    “It was our third meeting.”
    “Meeting?”
    “Date,” Zhirov said, correcting himself.
    “It doesn’t look to me as though you’re having a good time,” said Gabriel, still staring at the photo. “In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were quarreling.”
    “We weren’t,” Zhirov said quickly.
    “You sure about that?”
    “I’m sure.”
    Gabriel wordlessly set aside the photograph.
    “Any more questions?” asked Zhirov.
    “Just one,” said Gabriel. “How did you know Madeline was having an affair with Jonathan Lancaster?”
    “I’ve already answered that question.”
    “I know,” said Gabriel. “But this time, I want you to tell me the truth.”
    H e offered up the same explanation—the one about rumors reaching the ears of the SVR rezident in London—but Gabriel was having none of it. He gave Zhirov one more chance; then, when told the same lie, he marched the Russian out to the end of the dock and pressed the barrel of a Makarov against the nape of his neck. And there, at the edge of the frozen lake with no name, the truth came spilling out. A part of Gabriel had suspected it all along. Even so, he could scarcely believe the story Zhirov told. But it had to be true, he thought. In fact, it was the only possible explanation for all that had happened.
    Back inside the dacha, Zhirov recited the story again, this time for the video camera, before being returned, bound and gagged, to the fallout shelter. The operation was now almost complete. They had obtained proof that Volgatek had bribed and blackmailed its way into the lucrative North Sea oil market. All they had to do now was make their way to the airport and board their separate flights home. Or, suggested Gabriel, they could postpone their departure to conduct one last piece of business. It was not a decision he could make alone so, uncharacteristically, he put it to a vote. There were no dissenters.

53
    ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
    G abriel decided it was safer to take the train. There was a station in the town of Okulovka; he could catch the first local of the morning and be in St. Petersburg by early afternoon. Privately, he was relieved when Eli Lavon insisted on coming with him. He needed Lavon’s eyes. And he needed his Russian, too.
    It was only forty miles to Okulovka, but the dreadful roads and weather stretched the trip to nearly two hours. They left the Volvo SUV in a small windblown car park and hurried into the station, a newly built redbrick structure that looked oddly like a factory. The train was already boarding by the time Lavon managed to secure a pair of first-class tickets from one of the surly glass-enclosed agents. They shared a compartment with two Russian girls who chattered without pause and a thin elegantly dressed businessman who never once looked up from his phone. Lavon passed the time by reading the morning papers from Moscow, which contained no mention of a missing oil executive. Gabriel stared out the frosted window at the endless fields of snow until the swaying of the carriage lulled him into something like sleep.
    He woke with a start as the train rattled into St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky Station. Upstairs the great vaulted hall was in turmoil; it seemed the afternoon bullet train to Moscow had been delayed by a Chechen bomb threat. Trailed by Lavon, Gabriel picked his way through the sobbing children and quarreling couples and headed into Vosstaniya Square. The Hero City Obelisk rose skyward from the center of the swirling traffic circle, its golden star tarnished by the falling snow. Streetlamps burned up and down the length of Nevsky Prospekt. It was only two in the afternoon, but whatever daylight there had been was long gone.
    Gabriel set out along the prospekt with Lavon floating watchfully in his wake. He was no longer in Russia, he thought. He was in a tsarist dreamland, imported from the West and built by terrorized peasants. Florence called to him from the facades of the Baroque palaces, and, crossing the Moyka River, he dreamed of Venice. He wondered how many bodies lay beneath the ice. Thousands, he thought. Tens of thousands. No other city in the world