The English Girl: A Novel

had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun. It was Mikhail, working with a CIA officer named Sarah Bancroft, who had infiltrated the personal entourage of one Ivan Kharkov, thus initiating the long and bloody war between the Office and Ivan’s private army. Had Viktor Orlov not surrendered Ruzoil to the Kremlin, Mikhail would have died in Russia, along with Gabriel and Chiara. Indeed, on Mikhail’s porcelain cheekbone was a deep scar left by Ivan’s sledgehammer fist.
    “You don’t have to do this,” Gabriel said, touching the scar now. “We can find someone else.”
    “Like who?” asked Mikhail, glancing around the room.
    “Yossi can do it.”
    “Yossi speaks four languages,” Mikhail said, “but Russian doesn’t happen to be one of them. They could be talking about slitting his throat, and he would think they were ordering chicken Kiev.”
    The members of Gabriel’s fabled team had stayed in the house before, and so they settled into their old rooms with a minimum of bickering while Chiara headed into the kitchen to prepare an elaborate reunion meal. The main entrée was the enormous bass, which she roasted with white wine and herbs. Gabriel placed Keller to his right at dinner, a deliberate sign to the others that, for now at least, the Englishman was to be treated as a member of the family. At first the others were uneasy about his presence, but gradually they warmed to him. For the most part, they conducted the meal in English for his benefit. But when discussing their last operation, they reverted to Hebrew.
    “What are they talking about?” Keller asked quietly of Gabriel.
    “A new program on Israeli television.”
    “Are you telling me the truth?”
    “No.”
    Their mood was more subdued than usual, for Ivan’s shadow hung over them. They did not speak his name at dinner. Instead, they talked about the matsav , the situation. Yossi, deeply read in the classics and history, served as their guide. He saw a world spinning dangerously out of control. The promises of the great Arab Awakening had been exposed as lies, he said, and soon there would be a crescent of radical Islam stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. America was bankrupt, tired, and no longer able to lead. It was possible this turbulent new world disorder would produce a twenty-first-century axis led by China, Iran, and, of course, Russia. And standing alone, surrounded by a sea of enemies, would be Israel and the Office.
    With that, they cleared away the dishes and repaired to the sitting room, where Gabriel finally explained why he had brought them all to England. They knew fragments of it already. Now, standing before them, a gas fire burning at his back, Gabriel swiftly completed the painting. He told them everything that had transpired, beginning with the desperate search for Madeline Hart in France and ending with the deal he had struck with Graham Seymour the previous evening in Hampstead Heath. There was one aspect of the affair, however, that he recounted out of sequence. It was his brief encounter with Madeline Hart, in the hours before her death. He had given Madeline his word he would bring her home safely. Having failed, he intended to keep that promise by undoing what was a Russian operation from beginning to end. To accomplish that, they were going to insert Mikhail into KGB Oil & Gas, he said. And then they were going to find proof that Madeline Hart had been murdered as part of a Russian plot to steal British oil from the North Sea.
    “How?” asked Eli Lavon incredulously when Gabriel had finished speaking. “How in God’s name are we going to get Mikhail inside a Kremlin-owned oil company run by Russian intelligence?”
    “We’ll find a way,” said Gabriel. “We always do.”
    T he real work began the next morning when the members of Gabriel’s team began secretly burrowing into the state-owned Russian energy company known as Volgatek Oil & Gas. At the outset, the bulk of their material came from open sources such as business journals, press releases, and academic papers written by experts in the rough-and-tumble