AllFreeNovel
Share Us
49
New Forest
It would be another forty-five minutes before Gabriel would be able to say with any degree of confidence that he was not in fact dead. He reached this conclusion in the New Forest of Hampshire, though this, too, would have been a revelation to him. Hooded and gagged, his limbs immobilized by duct tape, he was largely cut off from the world around him. He was aware of motorized movement—he could hear the drone of an engine and tires rushing over wet tarmac—and could discern the warm presence of a body lying next to him. The faint aroma of female scent told him it was Ingrid.
Precisely how this state of affairs had come to pass remained a mystery to him. He recalled a meeting in a stylish office in Mayfair and a visit to a London art museum, which one, he could not say. The injury to his head had occurred in a fetid stairwell—of that much, at least, he was certain. He had been struck with something heavy behind his left ear, though he had no idea who had wielded the implement. The stickiness along the side of his neck told him the blow had resulted in substantial bleeding. His inability to hold even a simple thought was doubtless a symptom of a severe concussion.
He had always prided himself on his mastery of time. It was one of many peculiar skills he had developed as a child, the ability to declare with stopwatch accuracy when a minute or an hour had passed. Now time slipped through his fingers like water, and any effort to measure its progress set his head to throbbing. Instead, he attempted to recall the purpose of his visit to the office in Mayfair. He had met a woman there, a woman with a pleasing voice. Lucinda was her name, Lucinda Graves. Her husband was someone important. A politician, yes, that was it. The next prime minister, or so they said.
But why had he called on Lucinda Graves, of all people? And what had compelled him to visit a museum afterward? Those were the questions bouncing around Gabriel’s suddenly disordered mind when the vehicle beneath him—he assumed it was a transit van—made a right turn onto an unpaved track. Some length of time later, a few minutes, perhaps an hour or more, it crunched to a stop in a bed of gravel. Then the engine died and doors were hauled open. Gabriel, his head throbbing, counted the footfalls of at least four men.
Two pairs of hands seized him, one pair by the shoulders, the other by his legs, and lifted him from the back of the van. Neither of his porters spoke a word as they bore him across the expanse of gravel and into a shelter of some sort. The floor on which they laid him was concrete and cold as the surface of a frozen millpond. “Where’s Ingrid?” he tried to shout through the gag, but a sliding wooden door rattled shut, and the shackle of a heavy-duty lock snapped into place.
So, too, did a portion of Gabriel’s memory. He had gone to the stylish office in Mayfair, he recalled with a flash of sudden clarity, to ask Lucinda Graves about her conversation with Charlotte Blake. And he had subsequently paid a visit to the Courtauld Gallery to prove that Lucinda had lied to him. Lucinda Graves was the reason Professor Blake was dead—and why Gabriel was lying hooded and bound on a cold concrete floor. Lucinda’s husband would soon be prime minister, and Gabriel would soon be dead. Of that much, at least, he was certain.
***
By six that evening the whole of Whitehall was in agreement that it was a foregone conclusion. The only question still to be answered, went the thinking, was how it would come about. His margin of victory in the 1922 Committee had been considerably larger than the experts and oddsmakers had predicted, suggesting that Tory MPs had been eager to demonstrate fealty to the man who would soon control their political fortunes. They streamed to his parliamentary office after the vote to offer their congratulations and lobby for a seat in his Cabinet. And then they found the nearest reporter and declared—on background and in hushed tones—that it was time for Stephen Frasier to bow out of the race.
The foreign secretary was confronted with the statements during a sometimes-contentious interview on the Six O’Clock News. It didn’t help matters that the BBC presenter mistakenly referred to Frasier’s rival as “Prime Minister Graves.” Frasier’s shrinking band of loyalists urged him to see the race to its end. But during a meeting with his closest political advisers at seven that evening—details of which somehow leaked to the press—it was made clear to Frasier that he faced an uphill battle. Graves, a tough-on-immigration Brexiteer, was popular with the Party’s increasingly populist rank and file, while Frasier, a late convert to Euroscepticism, was regarded with suspicion. The best he could hope for, advised the advisers, was a lopsided loss. The more likely outcome, though, was a career-damaging thrashing. The wiser move would be to declare a ceasefire for the good of the Party and sue for peace.
And so it was that Foreign Secretary Stephen Frasier, at 8:07 p.m., took the first hesitant step toward bringing about a dignified withdrawal from the field of battle. He did so with a phone call to his rival, personal device to personal device. Graves suggested they meet at his palatial home in Holland Park. Frasier, a lifelong public servant of far more modest means, insisted the meeting take place at Conservative Campaign Headquarters instead.
“When?” asked Graves.
“How about nine o’clock?”
“See you then.”
“And no bloody leaks,” insisted Frasier.
“You have my word.”
But by half past eight the news of Stephen Frasier’s imminent capitulation was the talk of Whitehall. The news reached Samantha Cooke as she was sinking her teeth into a brie-and-bacon panini at Caffè Nero in Bridge Street. She devoured the rest of the sandwich while rushing over to CCHQ. Hugh Graves was stepping from the back of his ministerial car when she arrived, looking every inch the prime minister. The foreign secretary appeared five minutes later. “Is it over?” Samantha called out, but Frasier smiled bravely and said, “Actually, it’s only just begun.”
Which was not at all the case, as Samantha Cooke, with a rapid series of phone calls to her trusted sources, quickly discovered. Frasier had come to Party HQ to offer his sword in surrender. Graves planned to extend an olive branch in return, a wholly disingenuous invitation to stay on as foreign secretary in the new Cabinet. Frasier, of course, would politely decline the offer and return to the backbenches. It would all be over in time for the News at Ten. And tomorrow morning, after receiving the required invitation from the monarch to form a new government, Hugh Graves would stride through the world’s most famous front door as prime minister.
Samantha bashed out an update, and by nine thirty it was the lead item on the Telegraph’s website. She forwarded a link to Gabriel Allon’s number but once again received no response. She was now worried that some terrible tragedy had befallen him. An accident, perhaps something worse. Fortunately, one of his closest friends and associates had by then reached the same conclusion. And at 9:45 that evening, as the rest of official London awaited a puff of white smoke from Party Headquarters, he was in a taxi bound for Garrick Street, the last known location of his Bentley motorcar.
50
Garrick Street
The technology that allowed Christopher Keller to determine the whereabouts of his automobile was nothing more sophisticated or secretive than the Bentley app on his mobile phone. He had used the same software to monitor Gabriel and Ingrid’s movements during their visit to Cornwall. He knew, for example, that they had lunched at the Blue Ball Inn in Clyst Road in Exeter, doubtless with Detective Sergeant Timothy Peel of the Devon and Cornwall Police. He also knew that they had spent the night in Bath, probably at the Gainsborough hotel and spa in Beau Street. By eleven o’clock that morning the Bentley was in Old Burlington Street in Mayfair, and shortly before noon it was moved to Garrick Street in Covent Garden. Christopher had no idea why, as all attempts to reach Gabriel that evening had proven fruitless. Even more ominous, it now appeared as though his phone was off the air.
The taxi dumped Christopher outside a Waterstones. He crossed Garrick Street, phone in one hand, the spare remote for his car in the other, and headed down the corkscrew ramp of the garage. He found the car crammed into a corner space on the lower level, its doors unlocked. There was no luggage or computer bags—and no external hard drives containing sensitive attorney-client documents from the law firm of Harris Weber & Company.
Christopher walked over to the metal door that gave onto the internal stairwell. On the tarmac there were dark droplets of something that appeared to be dried blood. He found more droplets inside the stairwell itself, though he had to use his phone to see them because someone had unscrewed the overhead light. This was the spot where they had made their move, he thought. They were professionals, men such as himself. But because this was London, where the CCTV surveillance cameras never blinked, it was all on video.
Christopher hurried over to the Bentley and slid behind the wheel. Five minutes later, after paying the exorbitant charge for a ten-hour stay, he was speeding down Whitehall toward Parliament Square. The political drama unfolding at Conservative Campaign Headquarters had brought Westminster to a standstill. He battled his way along Broad Sanctuary to Victoria Street and continued west to Eaton Square in Belgravia, where, at ten fifteen, he arrived at the home of Graham Seymour, the director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service.
His eccentric wife, Helen, answered the bell dressed in a flowing silk kaftan. Graham was upstairs in his study, watching the news on television. He inclined a cut-glass tumbler of single malt toward the screen. Hugh Graves and Stephen Frasier were standing shoulder to shoulder on the floodlit pavement outside Party Headquarters. Graves was all smiles. Frasier appeared stoic in defeat.
“It seems we have a new prime minister,” said Graham.
“I’m afraid we have a much bigger problem than that,” replied Christopher.
Graham muted the television. “What now?”
