“I did see it.”
“I know he’s in love with what’s-her-name, but he still cares about me.” She leaned her head against Gabriel’s shoulder. “What are we going to do now?”
“You’re going home, Sarah.”
“I am home,” she said, and closed her eyes.
21
Later that same evening, as a train bearing the chief of Israeli intelligence approached the Gare de Lyon in Paris, three hooded figures roused Princess Reema bint Khalid Abdulaziz Al Saud from a tormented sleep. They were clearly agitated, which surprised her. Since the incident involving the notepad, Reema’s interactions with her captors had been formal and silent but without undue rancor. All three of the hooded figures were men. In fact, it had been some time since she had seen the woman. Reema could not say for certain how long it had been. She measured the passage of the hours and days not with a clock or calendar but by the rhythm of her meals and her supervised visits to the toilet.
One of the men was holding a hairbrush and a small paddle-shaped mirror. He also had a note. He wanted Reema to improve her appearance—for what reason, he did not say. The first glimpse of the creature in the looking glass shocked her. She scarcely recognized the pale, gaunt face. Her raven hair was a tangled, filthy mess.
The man withdrew while Reema, holding the mirror before her, forced the brush through the thicket of her hair. He returned a moment later with a copy of a London newspaper and a bright red instant camera. It looked like a toy, not something a ruthless criminal might wield. He handed Reema the newspaper—it was that morning’s edition of theTelegraph—and with crude hand gestures instructed her to hold it beneath her chin. For her photograph she adopted ajuhaymin, the traditional “angry face” of the Arabian Bedouin. With her eyes, however, she pleaded with her father to end her suffering.
The camera flashed and a few seconds later ejected the photograph. Then the man took a second photo, which he preferred to the first. He kept both as he and the other two men prepared to take their leave.
“May I have it?”
The eyes behind the mask gazed at her quizzically.
“The one you’re not going to send to my father to prove I’m still alive.”
The eyes appeared to weigh her request carefully. Then the unwanted photo came spinning through the air, curving gently before landing on the cot next to Reema. The door closed, the deadbolts snapped. The light in the ceiling burned on.
Reema picked up the snapshot. It was, she thought, quite good. She looked older than twelve, slightly drunk or drugged, a little sexy, like the models inVogueandGlamour. She doubted her father would see it the same way.
She stretched her body on her cot, supine, and stared into the eyes of the girl in the photograph. “You’re dead,” she whispered. “Dead, dead, dead.”
22
Paris–London
The safe flatwas located in a small apartment building at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Mikhail and Sarah each claimed a bedroom, leaving the davenport in the sitting room—the bed of nails, as it was known inside the Office—to Gabriel. Consequently, like Princess Reema, he did not sleep well that night.
He rose early, dressed, and went into the cold, nickeled light of morning. A two-man security team from the embassy waited curbside in a Renault sedan with diplomatic plates. They drove along quiet streets to the Gare du Nord, where Gabriel boarded an eight fifteen Eurostar bound for London. His seat was in business class. Surrounded by merchants and financiers, he read the morning papers. They were filled with misleading accounts of the mysterious bombing in Geneva involving the former head of security from an elite private school for the children of diplomats.
As the train approached the Channel Tunnel, Gabriel dispatched an encrypted text message, informing the recipient of his imminent arrival in the British capital. The reply was a long time in coming and inhospitable in tone. It contained no greeting or salutation, only an address. Gabriel assumed it was the address of a safe house. Or perhaps not. The British didn’t have any safe houses, he thought. At least none Moscow Center didn’t know about.
It was half past nine when the train drew into London’s St. Pancras International. Gabriel expected to be met on arrival, but as he crossed the gleaming ticket hall he saw no evidence of a British reception committee. He should have immediately called London Station and requested a driver and escort. Instead, he spent the next two hours wandering the streets of the West End, searching for evidence he was being followed. It was a violation of Office protocol but in Gabriel’s case not without precedent. The last time he ventured into public alone he had encountered Rebecca Manning, MI6’s traitorous Washington Head of Station, and a heavily armed Russian extraction team. The Russians had not survived. Rebecca Manning, for better or worse, had lived.
The Russian Embassy in London, with its generously staffed SVRrezidentura, occupied a valuable plot of land near Kensington Palace. Gabriel walked past it along Bayswater Road and made his way to Notting Hill. St. Luke’s Mews lay at the northern fringe of the fashionable neighborhood, near the Westway. Number 7, like all the other cottages along the street, was a converted garage. The exterior was a gray scale—light gray for the brickwork, dark gray for the trim and the door. The knocker was a large silver ring. Gabriel banged it twice. And when he received no answer, he banged it again.
At length, the door opened and Nigel Whitcombe admitted him. Whitcombe had recently turned forty, but he still looked like an adolescent who had been stretched and molded into manhood. Gabriel had known him since he was a probationer at MI5. Now he was the personal aide-de-camp and primary runner of off-the-record errands for the director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.
“I’m well,” said Gabriel pointedly after Whitcombe had closed the door. “How are you, Nigel?”
“Davies,” he answered. “We don’t use real names in safe flats, only work names.”
“And who am I today?”
“Mudd,” said Whitcombe.
“Catchy.”
“You should have heard the one we rejected.”
“I can only imagine.” Gabriel looked around the interior of the tiny house. It was recently renovated and freshly painted, but largely unfurnished.
