Daniel Silva: The English Girl

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2013

Copyright © Daniel Silva 2013

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Cover photographs © Elizabeth Ansley/Arcangel Images (woman); Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (city scene)

Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007433377

Version: 2014-07-03

Once again, for my wife, Jamie,and my children, Lily and Nicholas

He who lives an immoral lifedies an immoral death.

CORSICAN PROVERB

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: The Hostage

1. Piana, Corsica

2. Corsica–London

3. Jerusalem

4. King David Hotel, Jerusalem

5. King David Hotel, Jerusalem

6. Israel Museum, Jerusalem

7. Corsica

8. Corsica

9. Corsica

10. Marseilles

11. Off Marseilles

12. Off Marseilles

13. Côte D’Azur, France

14. Aix-En-Provence, France

15. Aix-En-Provence, France

16. The Lubéron, France

17. Paris

18. Apt, France

19. The Lubéron, France

20. Marseilles–London

21. 10 Downing Street

22. London

23. 10 Downing Street

24. Dover, England

25. Grand-Fort-Philippe, France

26. Northern France

27. Grand-Fort-Philippe, France

28. Pas-De-Calais, France

Part Two: The Spy

29. Audresselles, Pas-De-Calais

30. Tiberias, Israel

31. Corsica

32. Corsica–London

33. London

34. Basildon, Essex

35. Basildon, Essex

36. Chelsea, London

37. Cheyne Walk, Chelsea

38. Hampstead Heath, London

39. Grayswood, Surrey

40. Grayswood, Surrey

41. Mayfair, London

42. Copenhagen, Denmark

43. Copenhagen, Denmark

44. Copenhagen, Denmark

45. Zealand, Denmark

46. Grayswood, Surrey

47. Grayswood, Surrey

48. Moscow

49. Red Square, Moscow

50. Café Pushkin, Moscow

51. Tver Oblast, Russia

52. Tver Oblast, Russia

53. St. Petersburg, Russia

54. Lubyanka Square, Moscow

55. St. Petersburg, Russia

56. Lubyanka Square, Moscow

57. St. Petersburg, Russia

Part Three: The Scandal

58. London–Jerusalem

59. London

60. London

61. Corsica

62. Corsica

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Written By Daniel Silva

About the Publisher

THEY CAME FOR her in late August, on the island of Corsica. The precise time would never be determined—some point between sunset and noon the following day was the best any of her housemates could do. Sunset was when they saw her for the last time, streaking down the drive of the villa on a red motor scooter, a gauzy cotton skirt fluttering about her suntanned thighs. Noon was when they realized her bed was empty except for a trashy half-read paperback novel that smelled of coconut oil and faintly of rum. Another twenty-four hours would elapse before they got around to calling the gendarmes. It had been that kind of summer, and Madeline was that kind of girl.

They had arrived on Corsica a fortnight earlier, four pretty girls and two earnest boys, all faithful servants of the British government or the political party that was running it these days. They had a single car, a communal Renault hatchback large enough to accommodate five uncomfortably, and the red motor scooter which was exclusively Madeline’s and which she rode with a recklessness bordering on suicidal. Their ocher-colored villa stood at the western fringe of the village on a cliff overlooking the sea. It was tidy and compact, the sort of place estate agents always described as “charming.” But it had a swimming pool and a walled garden filled with rosemary bushes and pepper trees; and within hours of alighting there they had settled into the blissful state of sunburned semi-nudity to which British tourists aspire, no matter where their travels take them.

Though Madeline was the youngest of the group, she was their unofficial leader, a burden she accepted without protest. It was Madeline who had managed the rental of the villa, and Madeline who arranged the long lunches, the late dinners, and the day trips into the wild Corsican interior, always leading the way along the treacherous roads on her motor scooter. Not once did she bother to consult a map. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the island’s geography, history, culture, and cuisine had been acquired during a period of intense study and preparation conducted in the weeks leading up to the journey. Madeline, it seemed, had left nothing to chance. But then she rarely did.

She had come to the Party’s Millbank headquarters two years earlier, after graduating from the University of Edinburgh with degrees in economics and social policy. Despite her second-tier education—most of her colleagues were products of elite public schools and Oxbridge—she rose quickly through a series of clerical posts before being promoted to director of community outreach. Her job, as she often described it, was to forage for votes among classes of Britons who had no business supporting the Party, its platform, or its candidates. The post, all agreed, was but a way station along a journey to better things. Madeline’s future was bright—“solar flare bright,” in the words of Pauline, who had watched her younger colleague’s ascent with no small amount of envy. According to the rumor mill, Madeline had been taken under the wing of someone high in the Party. Someone close to the prime minister. Perhaps even the prime minister himself. With her television good looks, keen intellect, and boundless energy, Madeline was being groomed for a safe seat in Parliament and a ministry of her own. It was only a matter of time. Or so they said.

Which made it all the more odd that, at twenty-seven years of age, Madeline Hart remained romantically unattached. When asked to explain the barren state of her love life, she would declare she was too busy for a man. Fiona, a slightly wicked dark-haired beauty from the Cabinet Office, found the explanation dubious. More to the point, she believed Madeline was being deceitful—deceitfulness being one of Fiona’s most redeeming qualities, thus her interest in Party politics. To support her theory, she would point out that Madeline, while loquacious on almost every subject imaginable, was unusually guarded when it came to her personal life. Yes, said Fiona, she was willing to toss out the occasional harmless tidbit about her troubled childhood—the dreary council house in Essex, the father whose face she could scarcely recall, the alcoholic brother who’d never worked a day in his life—but everything else she kept hidden behind a moat and walls of stone. “Our Madeline could be an ax murderer or a high-priced tart,” said Fiona, “and none of us would be the wiser.” But Alison, a Home Office underling with a much-broken heart, had another theory. “The poor lamb’s in love,” she declared one afternoon as she watched Madeline rising goddess-like from the sea in the tiny cove beneath the villa. “The trouble is, the man in question isn’t returning the favor.”