67

WEST CORNWALL

MADELINE HART NEVER HEARD the gunshots, only the sharp crack of splintering wood. And then she had seen the man rushing through the broken front door of the cottage, an ugly-looking submachine gun in his hands. He had driven his fist into her abdomen—a brutal blow that had left her incapable of uttering a sound or drawing a breath—and as she lay writhing he had bound her hands and mouth with tape and covered her head in a hood of black serge cloth. Even so, she became aware of the presence of a second intruder, smaller than the first, lighter in step. Together they wrenched her to her feet and marched her gasping across her room with a view. Outside, a phone rang unanswered—the phone, she assumed, of one of her security guards. The intruders forced her into the trunk of a car and slammed the hatch with a coffin finality. She heard tires crunching over gravel and, faintly, waves breaking in the cove. Then the sea abandoned her and there was only the rush of rubber over asphalt. And voices. Two voices, one a man, the other a woman. The man was almost certainly from Ireland, but the woman’s muddled accent did not betray her homeland. Madeline was certain of only one thing. She had heard the voice somewhere before.

She could not fathom the direction they were driving, only that the road was of moderate quality. It was a B road, she thought. Not that it mattered much; her knowledge of Cornwall’s geography was limited by the fact that she had remained a virtual prisoner of Gabriel’s cottage. Yes, there was the occasional ride down to Lizard Point for tea and scones at the café atop the cliffs, but for the most part she ventured no farther than the beach in Gunwalloe Cove. A man from MI6 headquarters in London came out to Cornwall regularly to brief her about her security situation—or, as he put it, to read her the riot act. His presentation rarely varied. Her defection, he said, had been a grave embarrassment to the Kremlin. It was only a matter of time before the Russians attempted to correct the situation.

Apparently that time had come. Madeline supposed her abduction was linked to the attempt on Gabriel’s life. The man with the Irish accent was undoubtedly Eamon Quinn. And the woman? Madeline listened now to the low murmur of her voice and the peculiar blend of German, British, and Russian accents. Then she closed her eyes and saw two girls sitting in a park in a movie-set English village. Two girls who had been taken from their mothers and raised by wolves. Two girls who one day would be sent into the world to spy for a country they had never truly known. Now it seemed that someone at Moscow Center had dispatched one of the girls to kill the other. Only a Russian could be so cruel.

Madeline had only the thinnest grasp on time, but she reckoned that twenty minutes elapsed before the car stopped. The engine died, the hatch rose, and two pairs of hands lifted her upright—one male, the other discernibly female. The air was sharp and iodized, the ground beneath her feet rocky and unstable. She could hear the sea and, overhead, the cry of circling gulls. As they moved closer to the water’s edge, an engine fired and she smelled smoke. They splashed her through a foot of water and forced her aboard a small craft. Instantly, the craft came about and, rising on an approaching wave, headed out to sea. Hooded and bound, Madeline listened to the rotor churning beneath the surface of the water. You’re going to die, it seemed to be saying. You’re already dead.

68

GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

THE HELICOPTER WAITING ON THE pad at Battersea was a Westland Sea King transport with Rolls-Royce Gnome turboshaft engines. It bore Gabriel and Keller across the width of southern England at 110 knots, just shy of its top speed. They reached Plymouth at six, and a few minutes later Gabriel spotted the lighthouse at Lizard Point. The pilot wanted to set down at Culdrose, but Gabriel prevailed upon him to go straight to Gunwalloe instead. As they passed over the cottage, the rotating blue lights of police cruisers flashed in the drive and along the road from the Lamb and Flag. Light shone in the cove, too. It was crime-scene white. Gabriel felt suddenly ill. His beloved Cornish sanctuary, the place where he had found peace and restoration after some of his most difficult operations, was now a place of death.

The pilot dropped Gabriel and Keller at the northern end of the cove. They came down the tide line at a sprint and stopped at the crime-scene lamps. In their harsh downward glow lay the corpse of a man. He had been shot repeatedly in the chest. The tight dispersal suggested the gunman had been well trained. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, the killer had been a woman. He looked up at the four men standing over the body. Two were wearing the uniform of the Devon and Cornwall Police. The other two were plainclothes detectives from the Major Crime Branch. Gabriel wondered how long they’d been present. Long enough, he thought, to light up the cove like a football stadium at night.

“Do you really have to use those arc lamps? It’s not as if he’s going anywhere.”

“Who’s asking?” replied one of the detectives.

“MI6,” said Keller quietly. It was the first time he had identified himself as an employee of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the effect on his audience was instantaneous.

“I’ll need to see some identification,” said the detective.

Keller pointed toward the Sea King at the end of the cove and said, “That’s my identification. Now do what the man says and turn off the damn lights.”

One of the uniformed officers turned off the arc lamps.

“Now tell the cruisers to kill their flashers.”

The same officer gave the order over his radio. Gabriel looked up toward the cottage and saw the blue lights go dark. Then he stared down at the corpse lying at his feet.

“Where did you find him?”

“Are you MI6, too?” asked the plainclothes detective.

“Answer his question,” snapped Keller.

“He was at the water’s edge.”

“He’d been fishing?” asked Gabriel.

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

The detective turned and pointed toward the cliffs. “The shooter was over there. We found twenty shell casings.” He looked down at the body. “Obviously, most of them found their target. He was probably dead before he hit the water.”

“Any witnesses?”

“None that have come forward.”

“What about footprints near the shell casings.”

The detective nodded. “Whoever did the shooting was wearing hiking boots.”

“What size?”

“Small.”

“Was it a woman?”

“Could have been.”

Without another word, Gabriel led Keller up the footpath to the cottage. They entered through the French doors off the terrace. Gabriel’s living room had been converted into a field command post. The broken front door hung ajar on one hinge, and through the opening he observed two more bodies lying in the drive. A tall detective approached and introduced himself as DI Frazier. Gabriel accepted the detective’s hand, but did not identify himself. Neither did Keller.

“Which one of you is MI6?” asked the DI.

Gabriel looked at Keller.

“And you?” the detective asked Gabriel.

“He’s a friend of the service,” said Keller.

The detective’s disdain for irregulars was written clearly on his face. “We’ve got four fatalities that we know of,” he said. “One in the cove, two outside the cottage, and a fourth on the coastal path. He was hit once in the chest and once in the head. Never had a chance to draw his sidearm. The ones in the drive were hit multiple times, like the bloke in the cove.”

“And the woman who lives here?” asked Gabriel.

“She’s unaccounted for.”

The detective walked over to Gabriel’s easel, upon which he had hung a map of West Cornwall. “We have two witnesses from the village who noticed a Renault driving at high speed shortly after three this afternoon. The car was headed north. We’ve established roadblocks here, here, and here,” he added, touching the map in three places. “Neither witness managed to see the driver, but both said the passenger was a woman.”