At that same moment, the man responsible for Colonel Milchenko’s summons to the Kremlin was walking along Admiralty Prospekt in St. Petersburg. He could no longer feel the cold, only the place on his arm where her hand had alighted briefly before they parted. His heart was banging against his breastbone. Surely they had been watching her. Surely he was about to be arrested. To calm his fears, he told himself lies. He was not in Russia, he thought. He was in Venice and Rome and Florence and Paris, all at the same time. He was safe. And so was she.
St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the colossal marble church that the Soviets had turned into a museum of atheism, appeared before him. He entered it from the square and made his way up the narrow winding staircase, to the cupola surrounding the single golden dome. As expected, the platform was abandoned. The fairy-tale city stirred beneath his feet, traffic moving sluggishly along the big prospekts. On one a woman walked alone, a hat covering her pale hair, a scarf concealing the lower half of her face. A few moments later he heard her footfalls in the stairwell. And then she was standing before him. There were no lights in the cupola. She was barely visible in the darkness.
“How did you find me?”
The sound of her voice was almost unreal. It was the English accent. Then Gabriel realized it was the only accent she had.
“It’s not important how I found you,” he replied.
“How?” she asked again, but this time Gabriel said nothing. He took a step closer to her so she could see his face clearly.
“Do you remember me now, Madeline? I’m the one who risked everything to try to save your life. It never occurred to me at the time that you were in on it from the beginning. You fooled me, Madeline. You fooled us all.”
“I was never in on it,” she shot back. “I was just doing what I was ordered to do.”
“I know,” he said after a moment. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Who are you?”
“Actually,” said Gabriel, “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m Madeline,” she said. “Madeline Hart of Basildon, England. I followed all the rules. Did well at school and university. Got a job at Party headquarters. My future was limitless. I was going to be an MP one day. Maybe even a minister.” She paused, then added, “At least, that’s what they said about me.”
“What’s your real name?”
“I don’t know my real name,” she answered. “I barely speak Russian. I’m not Russian. I’m Madeline. I’m an English girl.”
She dug the copy of A Room with a View from her coat pocket and held it up. “Where did you find this?”
“In your room.”
“What were you doing in my room?”
“I was trying to find out why your mother left Basildon without telling anyone.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“I know that now. Actually,” he added, “I think I knew when I saw a photograph of you standing next to her and your father. They look like—”
“Peasants,” she said spitefully. “I hated them.”
“Where are your mother and brother now?”
“In an old KGB training center in the middle of nowhere. I was supposed to go there, too, but I refused. I told them I wanted to live in St. Petersburg, or I would defect to the West.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
“They threatened to.” She looked at him for a moment. “How much do you really know about me?”
“I know that your father was an important general in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, maybe even the big boss himself. Your mother was one of his typists. She overdosed on sleeping pills and vodka not long after you were born, or so the story goes. After that, you were placed in something like an orphanage.”
“A KGB orphanage,” she interjected. “I was raised by wolves, truly.”
“At a certain point,” Gabriel resumed, “they stopped speaking Russian to you in the orphanage. In fact, they said nothing at all in your presence. You were raised in complete silence until you were about three years old. Then they started speaking English to you.”
“KGB English,” she said. “For a while I had the inflection of a newsreader on Radio Moscow.”
“When did you meet your new parents for the first time?”
“When I was about five. We lived together in a KGB camp for a year or so to get to know one another. Then we settled in Poland. And when the great Polish migration to London began, we went with it. My KGB parents already spoke perfect English. They established new identities for themselves and engaged in low-level espionage. Mainly, they looked after me. We never spoke Russian inside the house. Only English. After a while, I forgot I actually was Russian. I read books to learn how to be a proper English girl—Austen, Dickens, Lawrence, Forster.”
“A Room with a View.”
“That’s all I ever wanted,” she said. “A room with a view.”
“Why the council house in Basildon?”
“It was the nineties,” she replied. “Russia was broke. The SVR was a shambles. There was no budget to support a family of illegals in London, so we settled in Basildon and went on the dole. The British welfare state nurtured a spy within its midst.”
“What happened to your father?”
“He contracted the illegal disease.”
“He went stir-crazy?”
She nodded. “He told Moscow Center he wanted out. Otherwise, he was going to go to MI5. The Center brought him back to Russia. God only knows what they did to him.”
“Vysshaya mera.”
“What does that mean?”