The English Girl: A Novel

Service.
    The bodyguards watched Gabriel with obvious curiosity as he headed up the garden walk and presented himself at Orlov’s front door. The doorbell, when pressed, produced a maid in a starched black-and-white uniform. After ascertaining Gabriel’s identity, she conveyed him up a flight of wide, elegant stairs to Orlov’s office. The room was an exact replica of the queen’s private study in Buckingham Palace—all except for the giant plasma media wall that flickered with financial newscasts and market data from around the world. As Gabriel entered, Orlov was standing before it, as if in a trance. As usual, he wore a dark Italian suit and a lavish pink necktie bound in an enormous Windsor knot. His thinning gray hair was gelled and spiked. Reflected numbers glowed softly in the lenses of his fashionable eyeglasses. He was motionless except for the left eye, which was twitching nervously.
    “How much did you make today, Viktor?”
    “Actually,” said Orlov, still staring at the video wall, “I think I lost ten or twenty million.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Tomorrow’s another day.”
    Orlov turned and regarded Gabriel silently for a long moment before finally extending a manicured hand. His skin was cool to the touch and peculiarly soft. It was like shaking hands with an infant.
    “Because I am a Russian,” he said, “I’m not easily shocked. But I have to admit I am truly surprised to see you standing here in my office. I assumed we would never meet.”
    “I’m sorry, Viktor. I should have come a long time ago.”
    “I understand why you didn’t.” Orlov smiled sadly. “We have something in common, you and I. We were both targeted by the Kremlin. And we both managed to survive.”
    “Some of us have survived better than others,” said Gabriel, glancing around the magnificent room.
    “I’ve been lucky. And the British government has been very good to me,” Orlov added pointedly, “which is why I want to do nothing that might upset the powers that be in Whitehall.”
    “Our interests are the same.”
    “I’m glad to hear that. So, Mr. Allon, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?”
    “Volgatek Oil and Gas.”
    Orlov smiled. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad someone finally noticed.”

37
    CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA
    V iktor Orlov had never been reluctant to talk about money. In fact, he rarely talked about anything else. He boasted that his suits cost ten thousand dollars each, that his handmade dress shirts were the finest in the world, and that the diamond-and-gold watch he wore on his wrist was among the most expensive ever made. The current incarnation of the watch was actually his second. He had famously destroyed the first in Switzerland, when he had struck it against a pine tree while skiing. “Silly me,” he told a British tabloid after the multimillion-dollar crash, “but I forgot to take the damn thing off before leaving the chalet.”
    His wine of choice was Château Pétrus, the famous Pomerol that he drank as though it were Evian. It was a bit early in the afternoon, even for Orlov, so they had tea instead. Orlov drank his Russian style, through a sugar cube that he held between his front teeth. His arm was flung toward Gabriel along the back of an elegant brocade couch, and he was twirling his costly spectacles by the stem, something he always did when he was speaking about Russia.
    It was not the Russia of his childhood, or the Russia he had served as a nuclear scientist, but the Russia that had stumbled into existence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was lawless Russia—drunken, confused, lost Russia. Its traumatized people had been promised cradle-to-grave security. Now, suddenly, they had to fend for themselves. It was social Darwinism at its most vicious. The strong preyed on the weak, the weak went hungry, and the oligarchs reigned supreme. They became the new tsars of Russia, the new commissars. They blew through Moscow in bulletproof caravans surrounded by heavily armed security details. At night, the security details fought each other in the streets. “It was the Wild East,” said Orlov reflectively. “It was madness.”
    “But you loved it,” said Gabriel.
    “What was not to love? We were gods, truly.”
    Early in his career as a capitalist, Orlov had run his burgeoning empire alone and with an iron fist. But after the acquisition of Ruzoil, he realized he needed a second-in-command. He found one in Gennady Lazarev, a