The English Girl: A Novel

called Pure Waffle, whatever that meant. The class of the street was Bella Italia, a chain restaurant with locations scattered across the city, and it was there that Gabriel’s gaze finally settled. A man and a woman several years apart in age were at that moment stepping from the doorway, presumably having finished their meal. The man wore a waxed hat against the light drizzle, and the woman was staring into her handbag as though she had misplaced something. Earlier that day, in the exhibition rooms of the Courtauld Gallery, she had been carrying a guidebook open to the wrong page, and the man had been wearing tinted eyeglasses. Now he wore no spectacles at all. After helping the woman into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, he walked around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel. The engine, when started, seemed to make the street vibrate. Then the car shot away from the curb with a sharp chirp of its tires and barreled across Oxford Street at the instant the traffic signal turned to red.
    “Well played,” said Keller.
    “Indeed,” replied Gabriel.
    “Should I try to follow him?”
    Gabriel shook his head slowly. They were good, he thought. Moscow Center good.
    T he Grand Hotel Berkshire was not grand, nor was it in the enchanted English county of Berkshire. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Cromwell Road, with a discount electronics store on one flank and a suspect Internet café on the other. Gabriel and Keller arrived at midnight. They had no reservation and no luggage; it was still inside the Bayswater safe flat, which Gabriel now assumed was under Russian surveillance. He paid for a two-night stay in cash and told the night clerk that he and his companion were expecting no guests and wanted no interruptions of any kind, including maid service. The night clerk found nothing unusual in Gabriel’s instructions. The Grand Hotel Berkshire—or GHB, as management referred to it in shorthand—catered to those who took the road less traveled.
    Their room was on the uppermost floor, the fourth, and had a sniper’s view of the road. Gabriel insisted Keller sleep first. Then he sat in the window, with the gun in his lap and his feet resting on the sill, five questions running ceaselessly through his thoughts. Why would the Russian intelligence service be so reckless as to kidnap the mistress of the British prime minister? Why had there been a payment of ransom when surely money was not what the Russians wanted? Why had they killed Madeline? Where was her family? And how much did Jonathan Lancaster and Jeremy Fallon know? Satisfactory answers eluded him. He could make educated guesses, deductions, but nothing more. He needed to pick a few more pockets, he thought—and, if necessary, he would carry out a mugging or two as well. And then what? He thought of the old signadora and her prophecies about an old enemy and the city of heretics in the east.
    You must never set foot there. If you do, you will die . . .
    Just then, a newspaper delivery truck screeched to a halt outside the Tesco Express on the other side of the road. Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. It was nearly four o’clock, time to wake Keller and get a few hours’ sleep himself. Instead, he picked up the volume of E. M. Forster he had taken from Madeline’s room, opened it to a random page, and began to read:

    Gabriel closed the volume and watched the delivery truck move off along the wet, darkened street. And then he understood. But how to prove it? He needed the help of someone who knew the dark world of Russian business and politics. Someone who was just as ruthless as the men in the Kremlin.
    He needed Viktor Orlov.

36
    CHELSEA, LONDON
    V iktor Orlov had always been good with numbers. Born in Moscow during the darkest days of the Cold War, he had attended the prestigious Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics and had worked as a physicist in the Soviet nuclear weapons program. At the suggestion of his superiors, he joined the Communist Party—though many years later, in an interview with a British newspaper, he would claim he was never a true believer. “I joined the Party,” he said without a trace of remorse, “because it was the only avenue of career advancement available to me. I suppose I could have been a dissident, but the gulag never seemed like a terribly appealing place to me.”
    When the Soviet Union finally breathed its last, Orlov did not shed a tear. In