“I’m askingyou.”
“Hasn’t she suffered enough?”
“We’ve both suffered.”
Because ofhim, thought Gabriel.
He rose abruptly. Rebecca also. Once again, the hand shot between the bars. Ignoring it, Gabriel tapped a knuckle against the one-way window and waited for the guards to unlock the outer door.
“You made one mistake in Washington,” said Rebecca as she withdrew her hand.
“Only one?”
“You should have killed me when you had the chance.”
“My wife told me the same thing.”
“Her name is Chiara.” Rebecca smiled coldly behind the bars of her cage. “Do give her my best.”
It was a few minutes after two when the transport plane set down at RAF Northolt in suburban London. Heathrow was three miles to the south, which meant Gabriel arrived in plenty of time to catch the 4:45 British Airways Flight to Tel Aviv. Uncharacteristically, he accepted a glass of preflight champagne. He had earned it, he assured himself. Then he thought of Rebecca Manning in her cage, and Alistair Hughes in his coffin, and Konstantin Kirov on a snow-covered street in Vienna, and he returned the glass to the flight attendant untouched. As the plane thundered along the runway, rainwater pulsed along Gabriel’s window like blood through a vein. Everyone loses, he thought as he watched England sinking away beneath him. Everyone except the Russians.
88
Zahara, Spain
The exchange took place six weeks later, on the tarmac of a desolate old airfield in far eastern Poland. There were two planes present. One was an Aeroflot Sukhoi; the other, a chartered Airbus from British Airways. At the stroke of noon, twelve men, all prized assets of the British and American intelligence services, all prison thin, came filing down the steps of the Sukhoi. As they tripped happily across the tarmac toward the Airbus, they passed a single woman walking soberly in the opposite direction. There were no cameras or reporters present to record the event, only a couple of senior Polish secret policemen who made certain everyone played by the rules. The woman passed them without a word, with her eyes downcast, and took the place of the twelve men aboard the Sukhoi. The aircraft was in motion even before the cabin door had closed. At twelve fifteen it entered the airspace of friendly Belarus, bound for Moscow.
It would be another week before the public was informed of the exchange, and even then they were told very little. The twelve men, they were assured, had supplied invaluable intelligence about the New Russia and consequently were well worth the price. In America there was outrage in the usual quarters, but the reaction in London was characterized by tight-lipped resignation. Yes, it was a bitter pill to swallow, the mandarins of Whitehall agreed, but probably for the best. The only bright spot was a report in theTelegraphthat said the exchange had gone forward despite the fact the Russians had wanted two prisoners rather than one. “At leastsomeone had the backbone to stand up to them,” a retired British spymaster groused that evening at the Travellers Club. “If only it had been us.”
The Russians waited another month before putting their prize on public display. The venue was an hour-long documentary on a Russian television network controlled by the Kremlin. A press conference followed, presided over by the Tsar himself. She extolled his virtues, praised Russia’s return to global prominence under his leadership, and railed against the British and the Americans, whose secrets she had happily plundered. Her only regret, she said, was that she had failed to become the director-general of MI6 and thus complete her mission.
“Have you enjoyed your time in Russia?” asked a member in good standing of the Kremlin’s docile press corps.
“Oh, yes, it’s perfectly lovely,” she replied.
“And can you tell us where you’re living?”
“No,” answered the Tsar sternly on her behalf. “She cannot.”
In apueblo blancoof Zahara in the hills of Andalusia, the events in Moscow were an occasion for a brief celebration, at least by adherents of the anti-immigrant, anti-NATO far right. The Kremlin was once again the mecca toward which a certain type of European prostrated himself. In the twentieth century, it had been the guiding light of the left. Now, perversely, it was the extreme right that toed Moscow’s line, the political brutes who sneered at Charlotte Bettencourt each afternoon as she made her way through the streets of the village. If only they knew the truth, she thought.If only...
Not surprisingly, she followed the case of the female British spy more carefully than most in the village. The Kremlin press conference was a spectacle, there was no other word for it—Rebecca sitting on the dais like some specimen under a bell jar, the Tsar next to her, grinning and preening at his latest triumph over the West. And just who did he think he was fooling with that starched and pressed face of his? Real fascists, thought Charlotte, did not use Botox. Rebecca looked worn-out in comparison. Charlotte was shocked by her daughter’s gaunt appearance. She was shocked, too, by how much she looked like Kim. Even the stammer had returned. It was a miracle no one had noticed.
But just as quickly as Rebecca surfaced, she vanished from view. Charlotte’s Israeli houseguests departed Andalusia soon after. Before leaving, however, they scoured the villa one final time for any trace of Rebecca and Kim among her keepsakes. They took the last of Charlotte’s old photographs from Beirut and, despite her objections, the only copy ofThe Other Woman. It seemed her brief literary career was over before it started.
By then, it was late June, and the village was besieged by sweating, sunburned tourists. In her solitude, Charlotte retreated once more to her old routine, for it was all she had left. Forbidden to complete her memoir, she decided to write the story as a roman à clef instead. She switched the setting from Beirut to Tangier. Charlotte became Amelia, the impressionable daughter of a collaborationist French colonial administrator, and Kim she cast as Rowe, a dashing if somewhat world-weary British diplomat whom Amelia discovers to be a Russian spy. But how would it end? With an old woman sitting alone in an isolated villa waiting for a message from the daughter she had abandoned? Who would believe such a story?
She burned the manuscript in late October, using it as kindling to light the autumn’s first fire, and took up Kim’s mendacious autobiography. He had reduced his time in Beirut to five vague, dishonest paragraphs.My experiences in the Middle East from 1956 to 1963 do not lend themselves readily to narrative form... Perhaps hers did not, either, she thought. Then she burned Kim’s book, too.
That same afternoon she walked along the paseo through a swirlinglevechewind, counting her steps, aloud, she realized quite suddenly, which surely was a sign she was finally going mad. She took her lunch beneath the orange trees at Bar Mirador. “Did you see the news from Palestine?” asked the waiter as he brought her a glass of wine, but Charlotte was in no mood for an anti-Zionist polemic. Truth be told, she had changed her opinion of the Israelis. Kim, she decided, had been wrong about them. But then Kim had been wrong about everything.
She had purchased a day-old copy ofLe Mondeon her way to the café, but the wind made it impossible to read. Lowering the paper, she noticed a small bespectacled man sitting alone at the next table. He looked very different. Even so, Charlotte knew at once it was him, the silent friend of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the bellman who had accompanied her to Seville for the confession of her secret sins. But why had he returned to Zahara? And why now?
Nervously, Charlotte considered the possibilities as they each consumed a moderate lunch while assiduously avoiding one another’s gaze. The little Israeli finished first and as he was leaving slid a postcard onto Charlotte’s table. It happened so furtively it took her a moment to notice it, tucked carefully beneath the serving platter so thelevechewouldn’t carry it away. On the front was the inevitable streetscape of whitewashed houses. On the back was a brief note, in French, written in beautiful script.
Calmly, Charlotte drank the last of her wine, and when the bill came she left twice the requested amount. The light in the square dazzled her eyes. It was twenty-two steps to the entrance of the church.
“I thought it would be you.”
