The English Girl: A Novel

Downing Street neighbor as well. The man whom the press had once characterized as a deputy prime minister in name only now appeared to all of Whitehall like a prime minister in waiting. Fallon quickly gathered up the remaining members of his old Downing Street staff—at least, those who could still stand to work for him—and used his influence inside Party headquarters to fill key political positions with loyalists. The stage was now set, wrote Samantha Cooke, for a power struggle of Shakespearean proportions. Soon, she said, Fallon would be knocking on the door of Number Ten and asking for the keys. Jeremy Fallon had created Lancaster. And surely, she predicted, Fallon would try to destroy Lancaster as well.
    At no point during the post-election political maneuverings did Madeline Hart’s name appear in the press, not even when the Party chairman decided the time had come to fill her vacant post. A headquarters underling saw to the morbid chore of removing the last of her things from her old cubicle. There wasn’t much left—a few dusty files, her calendar, her pens and paper clips, the dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice she used to read whenever she had a spare moment or two. The underling delivered the items to the Party chairman, who in turn prevailed upon his secretary to quietly dispose of them with as much dignity as possible. And thus the final traces of an unfinished life were expunged from Party headquarters. Madeline Hart was finally gone. Or so they thought.
    A t first it seemed she had traded one form of captivity for another. This time the apartment that served as her prison cell overlooked not the river Neva in St. Petersburg but the Mediterranean Sea in Netanya. The building’s management had been told she was convalescing after a long illness. It wasn’t far from the truth.
    For a week she did not set foot beyond the flat’s walls. Her days lacked any discernible routine. She slept late, she watched the sea, she reread her favorite novels, all under the watchful gaze of an Office security team. A doctor came once each day to check on her. On the seventh day, when asked whether she had any ailments, she answered that she was suffering from terminal boredom.
    “Better to die from boredom than from a Russian poison,” the doctor quipped.
    “I’m not so sure about that,” she replied in her English drawl.
    The doctor promised to appeal the conditions of her confinement to higher authority; and on the eighth day of her stay, higher authority allowed her to take a brief walk on the cold, windswept stretch of sand that lay beneath her terrace. The day after that she was allowed to walk a little farther. And on the tenth day she trekked nearly to Tel Aviv before her minders placed her gently in the back of an Office car and ran her back to the flat. Entering, she found an exact copy of The Pond at Montgeron hanging on the wall in the sitting room—exact except for the signature of the artist who had painted it. He rang her a few minutes later and introduced himself properly for the first time.
    “The Gabriel Allon?” she asked.
    “I’m afraid so,” he answered.
    “And who was the woman who helped me onto the plane?”
    “You’ll know soon enough.”
    G abriel and Chiara arrived in Netanya at noon the following day, after Madeline had returned from her morning walk along the beach. They took her to Caesarea for lunch and a stroll through the Roman and Crusader ruins; then they headed farther up the coast, nearly to Lebanon, to wander the sea caves at Rosh HaNikra. From there, they moved eastward along the tense border, past the IDF listening posts and the small towns that had been depopulated by the last war with Hezbollah, until they arrived in Kiryat Shmona. Gabriel had booked two rooms at the guesthouse of an old kibbutz. Madeline’s had a fine view of the Upper Galilee. An Office security guard spent the night outside her door, and another sat outside the room’s garden terrace.
    The next morning, after taking breakfast in the kibbutz’s communal dining hall, they drove into the Golan Heights. The IDF was expecting them; a young colonel took them to a spot along the Syrian border where it was possible to hear the regime’s forces shelling rebel positions. Afterward, they paid a brief visit to the Nimrod Fortress, the ancient Crusader bastion overlooking the flatlands of the Galilee, before making their way to the ancient Jewish city of Safed. They ate lunch in the artists’