Page 83 of The Other Woman

“Then let’s go somewhere else. This place is giving me the heebies.”

“Why?”

“Her,” said Keller, pointing toward the park.

Gabriel walked over to the window. “Her name is Aviva. She’s one of ours.”

“When did you contact your station?”

“I didn’t. King Saul Boulevard must have told them I was coming to town.”

“Let’s hope the Russians weren’t listening.”

Twenty minutes later the woman left the bench, and the same man returned. “That’s Nir,” said Gabriel. “He’s the ambassador’s primary bodyguard.”

Keller checked the time. It was nearly one o’clock. “How long does it take for a prime minister and his intelligence chief to have lunch?”

“That depends on the agenda.”

“And if the intelligence chief were confessing to his prime minister that his service was completely compromised by the Russians?” Keller shook his head slowly. “We’re going to need to rebuild MI6 from the ground up. This is going to be the scandal to end all scandals.”

Gabriel was silent.

“Do you think he’ll survive it?” asked Keller.

“Graham? I suppose it depends on how he handles it.”

“An arrest and trial are going to be messy.”

“What choice does he have?”

Keller didn’t answer; he was staring at his phone. “Graham has left Downing Street. He’s on his way. In fact,” said Keller, looking up from the phone, “here he comes now.”

Gabriel watched the approaching Jaguar limousine. “That was quick.”

“He must have skipped the pudding.”

The car stopped at the building’s entrance. Graham Seymour climbed grimly out.

“He looks like he’s going to a funeral,” observed Keller.

“Anotherfuneral,” added Gabriel.

“Have you given any thought as to how you’re going to tell him?”

“I don’t have to say a word.”

Gabriel opened the attaché case and from the hidden compartment removed three items. A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and a snapshot taken without the subject’s knowledge on Jesus Lane in Cambridge. It was bad, thought Gabriel. As bad as it gets.

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Bayswater Road, London

The birth certificate was issued by Saint George Hospital in Beirut on May 26, 1963. It listedbettencourt, charlotteas the mother andphilby, harold adrian russellas the father. The child weighed slightly under seven pounds at birth. She was calledrebecca. She took the family name of her mother rather than her father—he was married to another woman at the time—but acquired a new surname whenbettencourt, charlottemarried amanning, robertin a civil service in London on November 2, 1976. A simple check of Cambridge University’s admission records would confirm that amanning, rebeccawent up to Trinity College in the autumn of 1981. And a check of U.K. immigration records would similarly confirm that abettencourt, charlotteentered the country in 1984. During her brief stay, she snapped a photograph ofmanning, rebeccaas she walked along Jesus Lane—a photograph she gave toallon, gabrielin a house in Seville. Thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that MI6’s Head of Station in Washington was the illegitimate child of history’s greatest spy and a long-term agent of Russian penetration. In the jargon of the trade, a mole.

“Unless,” said Gabriel, “you have a different explanation.”

“Such as?”