“Do you see that?” she asked.
“What?”
She held up the photograph. “She has a scar.”
“It could be a flaw in the image.”
“It could be, but it isn’t. It’s a flaw in the girl.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because,” said Madeline, “I was there when it happened.”
“Do you know her?”
“No,” she said, staring at the photograph. “But I know the girl she used to be.”
35
GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL
GABRIEL HAD HEARD THE STORY the first time on the shore of a frozen Russian lake, from the mouth of a man called Pavel Zhirov. Now, in a cottage by the sea, he heard it again from the woman who had become Madeline Hart. She did not know her real name; of her biological parents she knew little. Her father had been a senior general in the KGB, perhaps the head of the all-powerful First Chief Directorate. Her mother, a KGB typist of no more than twenty, had not survived long after the birth. An overdose of sleeping pills and vodka had taken her life, or so Madeline had been told.
She had been placed in an orphanage. Not a real orphanage, but a KGB orphanage where, as she liked to say, she had been raised by wolves. At a certain point—she could not recall when—her caretakers had stopped speaking to her in Russian. For a time she was raised in total silence, until the last traces of the Russian language had leaked from her memory. Then she was placed in the care of a unit that spoke to her only in English. She watched videos of British children’s programs and read British children’s books. The limited exposure to British culture did little for her accent. She spoke English, she said, like a newsreader for Radio Moscow.
The facility where she lived was in suburban Moscow, not far from the headquarters of the First Chief Directorate in Yasenevo, which the KGB referred to as Moscow Center. Eventually she was moved to a KGB training camp deep in the Russian interior, near a closed city that had no name, only a number. The camp contained a small English town, with high street shops, a park, a bus with an English-speaking driver, and a terrace of brick houses where the trainees lived together as families. In a separate part of the camp was a small American town with a theater that played popular American movies. And a short distance from the American town was a German village. It was run in concert with the East German Stasi. The food was flown in weekly from East Berlin: German sausage, beer, fresh German ham. Everyone agreed the German-speaking trainees had it best.
For the most part the trainees kept to their separate false worlds. Madeline lived with the man and woman who would eventually resettle with her in Britain. She attended a stern English school, had tea and crumpets in a little English shop, and played in an English park that was invariably buried beneath several inches of Russian snow. On occasion, however, she was allowed to watch an American movie in the American town, or to have dinner in the beer garden of the German village. It was on one such outing that she met Katerina.
“I assume she wasn’t living in the American village,” said Gabriel.
“No,” answered Madeline. “Katerina was a German girl.”
She was several years older than Madeline, an adolescent on the doorstep of womanhood. She was already beautiful, but not as beautiful as she would become. She spoke a bit of English—the trainees in the German program were taught to be bilingual—and she enjoyed practicing with Madeline, whose English, while oddly accented, was perfect. As a rule, friendships between trainees from different schools were discouraged, but in the case of Madeline and Katerina the trainers made an exception. Katerina had been depressed for some time. Her trainers were not at all convinced she was suited for life in the West as an illegal.
“How did she end up in the illegals program?” asked Gabriel.
“In much the same way I did.”
“Her father was KGB?”
“Her mother, actually.”
“And the father?”
“He was a German intelligence officer who’d been targeted for sexual entrapment. Katerina was the offspring of the relationship.”
“Why didn’t the mother have an abortion?”
“She wanted the baby. They took it from her. And then they took her life.”
“And the scar?”
Madeline didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up the photograph again—the photograph of the girl she had known as Katerina standing on a balcony in Lisbon.
“What was she doing there?” she asked. “And why did she leave a bomb on Brompton Road?”
“She was in Lisbon because her controllers knew we were watching the apartment.”
“And the bomb?”
“It was meant for me.”
She looked up sharply. “Why were they trying to kill you?”
Gabriel hesitated, and then said, “Because of you, Madeline.”
A silence fell between them.
“What did you think would happen,” she said finally, “if you killed a KGB officer on Russian soil and then helped me to defect to the West?”
“I thought the Russian president would be angry. But I didn’t think he would set off a bomb on Brompton Road.”
“You underestimate the Russian president.”
“Never,” replied Gabriel. “The Russian president and I have a long history.”
“He’s tried to kill you before?”
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “But this is the first time he’s ever succeeded.”
Her blue-gray eyes flashed over him quizzically. And then she understood.
“When did you die?” she asked.
“Several hours ago, at a British military hospital. I fought hard, but it was no use. My injuries were too severe.”
“Who else knows?”
“My service, of course, and my wife has been quietly notified of my passing.”
“What about Moscow Center?”
“If, as I suspect, they’ve been reading MI6’s mail, they’re already raising glasses of vodka to my demise. But just to make sure, I’m going to make it abundantly clear.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Say nice things about me at my funeral. And take more than one bodyguard when you go walking on the beach.”
“There were two, actually.”
“The fisherman?”
“We’re having roast sea bass for dinner.” She smiled and asked, “What are you going to do with all your free time now that you’re dead?”
“I’m going to find the men who killed me.”
Madeline picked up the photograph of Katerina on the balcony. “What about her?” she asked.
Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You never told me about the scar on her arm.”
“It happened during a training exercise.”
“What kind of training?”
“Silent killing.” She looked at Gabriel and added darkly, “The KGB starts early.”
“You?”
“I was too young,” she said, shaking her head. “But Katerina was older and they had other plans for her. Her instructor handed her a knife one day and told her to kill him. Katerina obeyed. Katerina always obeyed.”
“Go on.”
“Even after he disarmed her, she kept coming at him. Eventually, she cut herself on her own weapon. She’s lucky she didn’t bleed to death.” Madeline looked down at the photograph. “Where do you think she is now?”
“I suppose she’s somewhere in Russia.”
“In a town without a name.” Madeline returned the photograph to Gabriel. “Let’s hope she stays there.”
When Gabriel returned to Wormwood Cottage, he climbed the stairs to his room and fell exhausted into his bed. He longed to telephone his wife but didn’t dare. Surely, his enemies were prowling the grid for traces of his voice. Dead men didn’t make phone calls.
When sleep finally claimed him, he was made restless by dreams. In one he was crossing the nave of a cathedral in Vienna, carrying a wooden case filled with his restoration supplies. A German girl waited in the doorway to engage him in conversation, as she had done that night, but in his dream she was Katerina and blood flowed freely from a deep wound to her arm. “Can you repair it?” she asked, showing him the wound, but he slipped past her without a word and made his way through quiet Viennese streets, to a square in the old Jewish Quarter. The square was blanketed with snow and jammed with London buses. A woman was trying to start the engine of a Mercedes sedan but the engine wouldn’t turn over because the bomb was pulling power from the battery. His son was strapped into his car seat in the back, but the woman behind the wheel was not his wife. It was Madeline Hart. “How did you find me?” she asked through the broken glass of her window. And then the bomb exploded.