By now, she had reached the northernmost end of the beach. She pirouetted and the man in the nylon jacket turned with her. The sea spray added a dreamlike quality to the image. She paused to watch the fisherman lift a struggling bass from the breakers and, laughing at something the man had said, plucked a stone from the tide line and flung it into the sea. Turning, she paused again, apparently distracted by something unexpected she had seen. Perhaps it was the man standing at the railing of the terrace, in the manner of the man who had been standing on the parapet of a church tower in St. Petersburg. She cast another stone into the turbulent sea, lowered her head, and kept walking. Now, as then, Madeline Hart did not look up.

It had started as an affair between Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster and a young woman who worked at his party’s headquarters. But the woman was no ordinary woman—she was a Russian sleeper agent who had been planted in England as a child—and the affair was no ordinary affair. It was part of an elaborate Russian plot designed to pressure the prime minister into signing over lucrative North Sea drilling rights to a Kremlin-owned energy company called Volgatek Oil & Gas. Gabriel had learned the truth from the man who had run the operation, an SVR officer named Pavel Zhirov. Afterward, Gabriel and his team of Office operatives had plucked Madeline Hart from St. Petersburg and smuggled her out of the country. The scandal that accompanied her defection was the worst in British history. Jonathan Lancaster, personally humiliated and politically wounded, responded by canceling the North Sea deal and freezing Russian money held by British banks. By one estimate, the Russian president personally lost several billion dollars. Frankly, thought Gabriel, it was a wonder he had waited so long to retaliate.

It had been the intention of the KGB to turn Madeline Hart into an English girl, and through years of training and manipulation they had succeeded. Her grasp of the Russian language was limited, and she felt no allegiance to the land she had left as a child. It had been her wish upon her return to Britain to resume her old life, but political and security considerations had made that impossible. Gabriel had given her the use of his beloved cottage in Cornwall. He knew she would find the setting to her liking. She had been raised in government-funded deprivation, in a council house in Basildon, England. She wanted nothing more in life than a room with a view.

“How did you find me?” she asked as she climbed the steps to the terrace. And then she smiled. It was the same question she had posed to Gabriel that afternoon in St. Petersburg. Her eyes were the same blue-gray and were wide with excitement. Now they narrowed with concern as she scrutinized the damage to his face.