The second video was devoted entirely to the woman. It began with her passage through Heathrow Airport and ended with her disappearance in the smoke and chaos that she had unleashed on London’s Brompton Road. To it, Gabriel added several minutes of footage from his own memory. There was a woman sitting alone at a street-side restaurant, and a woman abruptly hailing a taxi on a busy boulevard, and a woman on an airplane staring directly into his face without a trace of recognition. She was good, he thought, a worthy opponent. She had known that dangerous men were following her, and yet she had never once shown fear or even apprehension. It was possible she was someone whom Quinn had met during his travels through the nether regions of global terrorism, but Gabriel doubted it. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.

Gabriel watched the video again from the beginning, watched the BMW slide into the bus-only lane outside the HSBC bank, watched the woman climb out and walk calmly away. Then he saw two men leap from a silver Passat—one armed with a gun, one with only brute strength—and begin herding the crowds to safety. At forty-five seconds the street went deathly still and quiet. Then a man could be seen running wildly toward a white Ford compact trapped in the stalled traffic. The bomb obliterated the shot. It should have obliterated the man, too. Perhaps Graham Seymour was right. Perhaps Gabriel was an archangel after all.

It was nearly dawn by the time he powered off the computer. As instructed, he returned it to Parish the caretaker at breakfast, along with a handwritten note to be delivered personally to Graham Seymour at Vauxhall Cross. In it, Gabriel requested permission to conduct two meetings—one with London’s most prominent political journalist, the other with the world’s most famous defector. Seymour agreed to both requests and dispatched an unmarked service van to Wormwood Cottage. By late that afternoon it was speeding along the cliffs of the Lizard Peninsula in West Cornwall. Keller, it seemed, was not alone. The late Gabriel Allon was going home, too.

33

GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

HE HAD SEEN IT FOR the first time from the deck of a ketch a mile out to sea, the small cottage at the southern end of Gunwalloe Cove, perched atop the cliffs in the manner of Monet’s Customs Officer’s Cabin at Pourville. Below it was a crescent of beaten sand where an old shipwreck slept beneath the treacherous surf. Behind it, beyond the purple thrift and red fescue of the cliff tops, rose a sloping green field crisscrossed by hedgerows. At that moment, Gabriel saw none of it, for he was hunched like a refugee in the back of the service van. He knew they were close, though; the road told him so. He knew every bend and straightaway, every dip and pothole, the bark of every watchdog, the sweet bovine aroma of every pasture. And so, when the van made the hard right turn at the Lamb and Flag pub and started the final downhill run toward the beach, he straightened slightly in anticipation. The van slowed, probably to avoid a fisherman coming up from the cove, and then made another sharp turn, a left, into the private drive. Suddenly, the rear door of the van was swinging open and an MI6 security man was welcoming him to his own home, as though he were a stranger setting foot in Cornwall for the first time. “Mr. Carlyle,” he bellowed over the wind. “Welcome to Gunwalloe. I hope you had a good trip, sir. The traffic can be positively brutal this time of day.”

The air was crisp and salty, the late-afternoon light was brilliant orange, the sea was aflame and flecked with whitecaps. Gabriel stood for a moment in the drive, feeling hollowed out with longing, until the security man nudged him politely toward the entrance—because the security man was under strict orders not to allow him to remain visible to a world that would soon believe him dead. Looking up, he imagined Chiara standing reproachfully in the doorway, her riotous hair tumbling about her shoulders, her arms folded across her childless womb. But as he climbed the three front steps, she slipped away from him. Automatically, he hung his oilskin coat on the hook in the entrance hall and ran a hand over the old suede flat cap he used to wear during his sojourns along the cliffs. Then, turning, he saw Chiara for a second time. She was removing a heavy earthenware pot from the oven, and when she lifted its lid the savor of veal, wine, and sage filled the cottage. Photographs of a missing Rembrandt portrait lay scattered across the kitchen counter where she worked. Gabriel had just agreed to find the painting for an art dealer named Julian Isherwood, not knowing his search would lead directly into the heart of Iran’s nuclear program. He had managed to locate and destroy four secret uranium enrichment facilities, a stunning achievement that significantly slowed Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon. The Iranians surely did not view Gabriel’s accomplishment in the same flattering light. In fact, they wanted him dead just as badly as the men who had hired Eamon Quinn.

The vision of Chiara was gone. He opened the French doors and for an instant he imagined he could hear the church bells of Lyonesse, the mythical submerged City of Lions, tolling beneath the surface of the sea. A single fisherman stood waist-deep in the breakers; the beach was deserted except for a woman walking along the water’s edge, trailed a few feet by a man in a nylon sailing jacket. She was headed north, which meant she presented him with her long back. A gust of cold wind blew from the sea, cold enough to chill Gabriel, and in his thoughts he was watching her walk along a frozen street in St. Petersburg. Then, as now, he had viewed her from above; he had been standing at the parapet of a church dome. The woman had known he was there but had not looked up. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.

By now, she had reached the northernmost end of the beach. She pirouetted and the man in the nylon jacket turned with her. The sea spray added a dreamlike quality to the image. She paused to watch the fisherman lift a struggling bass from the breakers and, laughing at something the man had said, plucked a stone from the tide line and flung it into the sea. Turning, she paused again, apparently distracted by something unexpected she had seen. Perhaps it was the man standing at the railing of the terrace, in the manner of the man who had been standing on the parapet of a church tower in St. Petersburg. She cast another stone into the turbulent sea, lowered her head, and kept walking. Now, as then, Madeline Hart did not look up.

It had started as an affair between Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster and a young woman who worked at his party’s headquarters. But the woman was no ordinary woman—she was a Russian sleeper agent who had been planted in England as a child—and the affair was no ordinary affair. It was part of an elaborate Russian plot designed to pressure the prime minister into signing over lucrative North Sea drilling rights to a Kremlin-owned energy company called Volgatek Oil & Gas. Gabriel had learned the truth from the man who had run the operation, an SVR officer named Pavel Zhirov. Afterward, Gabriel and his team of Office operatives had plucked Madeline Hart from St. Petersburg and smuggled her out of the country. The scandal that accompanied her defection was the worst in British history. Jonathan Lancaster, personally humiliated and politically wounded, responded by canceling the North Sea deal and freezing Russian money held by British banks. By one estimate, the Russian president personally lost several billion dollars. Frankly, thought Gabriel, it was a wonder he had waited so long to retaliate.