The English Girl: A Novel

headquarters. My future was limitless. I was going to be an MP one day. Maybe even a minister.” She paused, then added, “At least, that’s what they said about me.”
    “What’s your real name?”
    “I don’t know my real name,” she answered. “I barely speak Russian. I’m not Russian. I’m Madeline. I’m an English girl.”
    She dug the copy of A Room with a View from her coat pocket and held it up. “Where did you find this?”
    “In your room.”
    “What were you doing in my room?”
    “I was trying to find out why your mother left Basildon without telling anyone.”
    “She’s not my mother.”
    “I know that now. Actually,” he added, “I think I knew when I saw a photograph of you standing next to her and your father. They look like—”
    “Peasants,” she said spitefully. “I hated them.”
    “Where are your mother and brother now?”
    “In an old KGB training center in the middle of nowhere. I was supposed to go there, too, but I refused. I told them I wanted to live in St. Petersburg, or I would defect to the West.”
    “You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
    “They threatened to.” She looked at him for a moment. “How much do you really know about me?”
    “I know that your father was an important general in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, maybe even the big boss himself. Your mother was one of his typists. She overdosed on sleeping pills and vodka not long after you were born, or so the story goes. After that, you were placed in something like an orphanage.”
    “A KGB orphanage,” she interjected. “I was raised by wolves, truly.”
    “At a certain point,” Gabriel resumed, “they stopped speaking Russian to you in the orphanage. In fact, they said nothing at all in your presence. You were raised in complete silence until you were about three years old. Then they started speaking English to you.”
    “KGB English,” she said. “For a while I had the inflection of a newsreader on Radio Moscow.”
    “When did you meet your new parents for the first time?”
    “When I was about five. We lived together in a KGB camp for a year or so to get to know one another. Then we settled in Poland. And when the great Polish migration to London began, we went with it. My KGB parents already spoke perfect English. They established new identities for themselves and engaged in low-level espionage. Mainly, they looked after me. We never spoke Russian inside the house. Only English. After a while, I forgot I actually was Russian. I read books to learn how to be a proper English girl—Austen, Dickens, Lawrence, Forster.”
    “A Room with a View .”
    “That’s all I ever wanted,” she said. “A room with a view.”
    “Why the council house in Basildon?”
    “It was the nineties,” she replied. “Russia was broke. The SVR was a shambles. There was no budget to support a family of illegals in London, so we settled in Basildon and went on the dole. The British welfare state nurtured a spy within its midst.”
    “What happened to your father?”
    “He contracted the illegal disease.”
    “He went stir-crazy?”
    She nodded. “He told Moscow Center he wanted out. Otherwise, he was going to go to MI5. The Center brought him back to Russia. God only knows what they did to him.”
    “Vysshaya mera .”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    Nothing mattered now other than this girl, he thought. He peered into the darkened square and saw Eli Lavon stamping his feet against the cold. Madeline saw him, too.
    “Who is he?”
    “A friend.”
    “A watcher?”
    “The best.”
    “He’d better be.”
    She turned away and set out slowly along the parapet.
    “When did they activate you?” Gabriel asked of her long, elegant back.
    “When I was at university,” she replied. “They told me they wanted me to prepare for a career in government. I studied political science and social work, and the next thing I knew I had a job at Party headquarters. Moscow Center was thrilled. Then Jeremy Fallon took me under his wing, and Moscow Center was over the moon.”
    “Did you sleep with him?”
    She turned and smiled for the first time. “Have you ever seen Jeremy Fallon?”
    “I have.”
    “Then I’m sure you won’t doubt me when I say that, no, I did not sleep with Jeremy Fallon. He wanted to sleep with me, though, and I gave him just enough hope that he gave me everything I wanted.”
    “Like what?”
    “A few minutes alone with the prime