49 New Forest

49 New Forest

It would be another forty-five minutes before Gabriel would be able to say with any degree of confidence that he was not in

fact dead. He reached this conclusion in the New Forest of Hampshire, though this, too, would have been a revelation to him.

Hooded and gagged, his limbs immobilized by duct tape, he was largely cut off from the world around him. He was aware of motorized

movement—he could hear the drone of an engine and tires rushing over wet tarmac—and could discern the warm presence of a body

lying next to him. The faint aroma of female scent told him it was Ingrid.

Precisely how this state of affairs had come to pass remained a mystery to him. He recalled a meeting in a stylish office

in Mayfair and a visit to a London art museum, which one, he could not say. The injury to his head had occurred in a fetid

stairwell—of that much, at least, he was certain. He had been struck with something heavy behind his left ear, though he had

no idea who had wielded the implement. The stickiness along the side of his neck told him the blow had resulted in substantial

bleeding. His inability to hold even a simple thought was doubtless a symptom of a severe concussion.

He had always prided himself on his mastery of time. It was one of many peculiar skills he had developed as a child, the ability to declare with stopwatch accuracy when a minute or an hour had passed. Now time slipped through his fingers like water, and any effort to measure its progress set his head to throbbing. Instead, he attempted to recall the purpose of his visit to the office in Mayfair. He had met a woman there, a woman with a pleasing voice. Lucinda was her name, Lucinda Graves. Her husband was someone important. A politician, yes, that was it. The next prime minister, or so they said.

But why had he called on Lucinda Graves, of all people? And what had compelled him to visit a museum afterward? Those were

the questions bouncing around Gabriel's suddenly disordered mind when the vehicle beneath him—he assumed it was a transit

van—made a right turn onto an unpaved track. Some length of time later, a few minutes, perhaps an hour or more, it crunched

to a stop in a bed of gravel. Then the engine died and doors were hauled open. Gabriel, his head throbbing, counted the footfalls

of at least four men.

Two pairs of hands seized him, one pair by the shoulders, the other by his legs, and lifted him from the back of the van.

Neither of his porters spoke a word as they bore him across the expanse of gravel and into a shelter of some sort. The floor

on which they laid him was concrete and cold as the surface of a frozen millpond. "Where's Ingrid?" he tried to shout through

the gag, but a sliding wooden door rattled shut, and the shackle of a heavy-duty lock snapped into place.

So, too, did a portion of Gabriel's memory. He had gone to the stylish office in Mayfair, he recalled with a flash of sudden clarity, to ask Lucinda Graves about her conversation with Charlotte Blake. And he had subsequently paid a visit to the Courtauld Gallery to prove that Lucinda had lied to him. Lucinda Graves was the reason Professor Blake was dead—and why Gabriel was lying hooded and bound on a cold concrete floor. Lucinda's husband would soon be prime minister, and Gabriel would soon be dead. Of that much, at least, he was certain.

***

By six that evening the whole of Whitehall was in agreement that it was a foregone conclusion. The only question still to

be answered, went the thinking, was how it would come about. His margin of victory in the 1922 Committee had been considerably

larger than the experts and oddsmakers had predicted, suggesting that Tory MPs had been eager to demonstrate fealty to the

man who would soon control their political fortunes. They streamed to his parliamentary office after the vote to offer their

congratulations and lobby for a seat in his Cabinet. And then they found the nearest reporter and declared—on background and

in hushed tones—that it was time for Stephen Frasier to bow out of the race.

The foreign secretary was confronted with the statements during a sometimes-contentious interview on the Six O'Clock News . It didn't help matters that the BBC presenter mistakenly referred to Frasier's rival as "Prime Minister Graves." Frasier's shrinking band of loyalists urged him to see the race to its end. But during a meeting with his closest political advisers at seven that evening—details of which somehow leaked to the press—it was made clear to Frasier that he faced an uphill battle. Graves, a tough-on-immigration Brexiteer, was popular with the Party's increasingly populist rank and file, while Frasier, a late convert to Euroscepticism, was regarded with suspicion. The best he could hope for, advised the advisers, was a lopsided loss. The more likely outcome, though, was a career-damaging thrashing. The wiser move would be to declare a ceasefire for the good of the Party and sue for peace.

And so it was that Foreign Secretary Stephen Frasier, at 8:07 p.m., took the first hesitant step toward bringing about a dignified

withdrawal from the field of battle. He did so with a phone call to his rival, personal device to personal device. Graves

suggested they meet at his palatial home in Holland Park. Frasier, a lifelong public servant of far more modest means, insisted

the meeting take place at Conservative Campaign Headquarters instead.

"When?" asked Graves.

"How about nine o'clock?"

"See you then."

"And no bloody leaks," insisted Frasier.

"You have my word."

But by half past eight the news of Stephen Frasier's imminent capitulation was the talk of Whitehall. The news reached Samantha

Cooke as she was sinking her teeth into a brie-and-bacon panini at Caffè Nero in Bridge Street. She devoured the rest of the

sandwich while rushing over to CCHQ. Hugh Graves was stepping from the back of his ministerial car when she arrived, looking

every inch the prime minister. The foreign secretary appeared five minutes later. "Is it over?" Samantha called out, but Frasier

smiled bravely and said, "Actually, it's only just begun."

Which was not at all the case, as Samantha Cooke, with a rapid series of phone calls to her trusted sources, quickly discovered. Frasier had come to Party HQ to offer his sword in surrender. Graves planned to extend an olive branch in return, a wholly disingenuous invitation to stay on as foreign secretary in the new Cabinet. Frasier, of course, would politely decline the offer and return to the backbenches. It would all be over in time for the News at Ten . And tomorrow morning, after receiving the required invitation from the monarch to form a new government, Hugh Graves would

stride through the world's most famous front door as prime minister.

Samantha bashed out an update, and by nine thirty it was the lead item on the Telegraph 's website. She forwarded a link to Gabriel Allon's number but once again received no response. She was now worried that some

terrible tragedy had befallen him. An accident, perhaps something worse. Fortunately, one of his closest friends and associates

had by then reached the same conclusion. And at 9:45 that evening, as the rest of official London awaited a puff of white

smoke from Party Headquarters, he was in a taxi bound for Garrick Street, the last known location of his Bentley motorcar.