Page 123 of A Death in Cornwall

Christopher fortified himself with some of the whisky before attempting to explain the situation.

“What on earth was he doing in Covent Garden?”

“Truth be told, I haven’t a clue.”

Frowning, Graham reached for his secure phone and dialed Amanda Wallace, his counterpart at MI5. “Sorry to be calling so late, but I’m afraid we have a bit of a crisis on our hands. It seems something has happened to our friend Gabriel Allon... Yes, I know. Why did it have to be tonight of all nights?”

***

Later it would be determined that Amanda Wallace rang the Operations Room at MI5’s Millbank headquarters at 10:19 p.m. and informed the duty officer that Gabriel Allon was missing and presumed kidnapped. She then gave the duty officer Allon’s last known location, which was a public car park in Garrick Street. He had arrived there at midday in a borrowed Bentley automobile. MI5 was to make no effort to identify the owner of the vehicle, as he was a clandestine operative of the rival service based on the opposite side of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross.

With an array of invasive surveillance tools at his disposal, the duty officer and his crack staff quickly determined that the borrowed Bentley had entered the car park at 12:03 p.m. Allon emerged four minutes later, accompanied by an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. They made their way on foot to the nearby Courtauld Gallery and remained there for a period of forty-two minutes. Leaving, they engaged in an animated conversation as they walked along the Strand. After making the turn into Bedford Street, Allon appeared to have composed and sent a single text message.

They returned to the car park in Garrick Street at one fifteen and were not seen again. The next vehicle to depart the facility, at 1:20 p.m., was a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter transit van, dark blue in color, driven by a large man wearing a dark coverall and a woolen watch cap. He headed across the Waterloo Bridge to Southbank and by three o’clock was approaching the cathedral city of Canterbury. The van’s last known location was the Kent Downs, a 326-square-mile nature area where CCTV cameras were scarce. It was the assumption of the MI5 duty officer and his staff that the kidnappers had transferred Allon and the woman to a second vehicle—and that they were no longer in the southeast of England.

But what was Gabriel Allon doing in London in the first place? And where had he gone before his visit to the Courtauld Gallery? An answer to the second question, at least, was easily obtainable. Allon had dropped the woman in Piccadilly at 10:55 a.m. and driven to Old Burlington Street, where he entered a six-story modern office block. The building’s most prominent client, interestingly enough, was the wealth management firm run by Lucinda Graves, the wife of the next British prime minister.

It was this intriguing piece of news that MI5 director-general Amanda Wallace, at 11:10 p.m., delivered by secure phone to her counterpart at the Secret Intelligence Service. “The question is, Graham, what was he doing there?”

“Lucinda’s on the board of trustees at the Courtauld, if I recall.”

“She is, indeed.”

“Could have been art related,” suggested Graham.

“Perhaps,” replied Amanda.

“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned any of this to the home secretary. After all, he is your minister.”

“I didn’t want to spoil his evening. Evidently, they’re having quite a blowout in Holland Park at the moment.”

“In that case, I think we should keep it between us for now.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Graham rang off and looked at Christopher. “Do you have any idea why your friend Gabriel Allon went to see the wife of the next British prime minister this morning?”

“Lucinda Graves?” Christopher helped himself to another glass of the single malt before answering. “Actually, I’m afraid I might.”

51

Blackdown Hills

It was 11:17 p.m. when the wooden door of the shelter finally trundled open and two men entered Gabriel’s makeshift prison cell. Bound and hooded, he was unaware of the time, but the number of visitors was easily discernible by the scrape of their shoes over the concrete floor. They seized him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet. Instantly his darkened world began to spin out of control.

They sawed away the duct tape from his ankles and prodded him to walk, but his legs were unresponsive and he feared he was about to be sick. At last the spinning subsided and he was able to place one foot in front of the other, hesitantly, like a patient walking the halls of a surgical ward. His first steps were on the concrete floor of the shelter, then the gravel of the drive. A gentle rain was falling, and the air smelled of freshly turned earth. There was not a sound to be heard other than the crunch of footfalls. Gabriel’s were arrhythmic and faltering, the stagger of a wounded man.

“Where is she?” he tried to ask through the duct-tape gag, but his two handlers only laughed in response. It was his considered opinion, having resided in the United Kingdom for a number of years, that it was the laughter of two Englishmen of working-class upbringing, perhaps thirty to thirty-five years of age. They were both several inches taller than Gabriel, and the hands holding him upright were large and powerful. He wondered whether one of the men was responsible for the dent in the left side of his skull. He only hoped he was presented with an opportunity to return the favor.

Eventually the loose gravel was replaced by the firmer footing of a paved walkway. Then, after a laborious climb up a flight of steps, there was a roof over Gabriel’s head and carpet beneath his feet. The two men helped him into a straight-backed chair and removed the hood. Gabriel closed his eyes. The photophobia brought about by the injury to his head made the light painful in its intensity.

He opened one eye slowly, then the other, and surveyed the room around him. It took a moment to appreciate the scale of the place; it was the size of a tennis court. The overstuffed chairs and couches were covered in silk and chintz and brocade, and there was a pervasive smell of newness in the air. The leather-bound books lining the shelves appeared unread. The gilt-framed Old Master paintings looked as though they had been executed earlier that evening.

The two men who had delivered Gabriel to this place were now standing like pillars beside him. Two more men were seated in a pair of matching wing chairs, and Trevor Robinson, in a dark suit and tie, was pouring himself a whisky at the drinks trolley.

He waved the crystal decanter in Gabriel’s direction. “You, Allon?”

Gabriel, his mouth covered by duct tape, made no attempt to reply. Robinson, smiling, returned the decanter to the trolley and carried his glass over to an ornate credenza. It was strewn with the wreckage of two laptop computers, two external eight-terabyte hard drives, and a mobile phone. By all appearances it was Ingrid’s Android device. Gabriel’s Solaris phone had been in his coat pocket when he entered the car park in Garrick Street. He reckoned it was now in the signal-blocking Faraday pouch that Robinson held in his free hand.

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