Gabriel watched the video again from the beginning, watched the BMW slide into the bus-only lane outside the HSBC bank, watched the woman climb out and walk calmly away. Then he saw two men leap from a silver Passat—one armed with a gun, one with only brute strength—and begin herding the crowds to safety. At forty-five seconds the street went deathly still and quiet. Then a man could be seen running wildly toward a white Ford compact trapped in the stalled traffic. The bomb obliterated the shot. It should have obliterated the man, too. Perhaps Graham Seymour was right. Perhaps Gabriel was an archangel after all.

It was nearly dawn by the time he powered off the computer. As instructed, he returned it to Parish the caretaker at breakfast, along with a handwritten note to be delivered personally to Graham Seymour at Vauxhall Cross. In it, Gabriel requested permission to conduct two meetings—one with London’s most prominent political journalist, the other with the world’s most famous defector. Seymour agreed to both requests and dispatched an unmarked service van to Wormwood Cottage. By late that afternoon it was speeding along the cliffs of the Lizard Peninsula in West Cornwall. Keller, it seemed, was not alone. The late Gabriel Allon was going home, too.

33

GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

HE HAD SEEN IT FOR the first time from the deck of a ketch a mile out to sea, the small cottage at the southern end of Gunwalloe Cove, perched atop the cliffs in the manner of Monet’s Customs Officer’s Cabin at Pourville. Below it was a crescent of beaten sand where an old shipwreck slept beneath the treacherous surf. Behind it, beyond the purple thrift and red fescue of the cliff tops, rose a sloping green field crisscrossed by hedgerows. At that moment, Gabriel saw none of it, for he was hunched like a refugee in the back of the service van. He knew they were close, though; the road told him so. He knew every bend and straightaway, every dip and pothole, the bark of every watchdog, the sweet bovine aroma of every pasture. And so, when the van made the hard right turn at the Lamb and Flag pub and started the final downhill run toward the beach, he straightened slightly in anticipation. The van slowed, probably to avoid a fisherman coming up from the cove, and then made another sharp turn, a left, into the private drive. Suddenly, the rear door of the van was swinging open and an MI6 security man was welcoming him to his own home, as though he were a stranger setting foot in Cornwall for the first time. “Mr. Carlyle,” he bellowed over the wind. “Welcome to Gunwalloe. I hope you had a good trip, sir. The traffic can be positively brutal this time of day.”