60 Land’s End
Land’s End
She pleaded with him to take her for a proper English tea at the Land’s End Hotel, and when he refused, she agreed to settle
for a pasty from the Cornish Pantry instead. By the time they set off for the return trip to Gwennap Head, the weather had
taken a turn for the worse and a veil of mist hung over the Coast Path, limiting visibility to a few hundred yards at most.
For a time it seemed like they were the only two people in the world, lone survivors of some cataclysm that had claimed the
lives of others like them. Then the mist parted and a lone figure appeared. He was wearing ordinary street clothes rather
than the outdoor attire worn by most hikers along the footpath. His head was lowered against the sharp wind blowing from the
sea. His pace was brisk, as though he were running late for an appointment.
“No,” said Alice suddenly. “It can’t possibly be him.”
“Who?”
“The man walking toward us. That’s bloody Hiccups.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Liam Higgins,” she said. “Edward’s old assistant.”
Gabriel eyed the man marching toward them through the mist. “It has to be someone else.”
“I’d recognize that walk anywhere. It’s definitely him.”
“But why on earth would he be here, of all places?”
“Edward must have sent him.”
“Edward doesn’t know where you are.”
But Edward knew the location of Gabriel’s remote Cornish retreat, and therefore so did his former assistant, Liam Higgins.
After all, it was Higgins who had fetched Gabriel at Land’s End Airport after he agreed to look into Alice’s disappearance.
“Walk back to the hotel,” he told her. “And while you’re there, you should probably call nine-nine-nine.”
“Why?”
Higgins was upon them before Gabriel could answer. He bore little resemblance to the pressed and polished figure who had whispered
into the ear of Edward Knight the evening of the Wickham House fundraiser. His clothing looked slept in, his hair was uncombed,
his cheeks were unshaven, his eyes were red and raw with fatigue. And bloodlust, thought Gabriel.
“Allon!” he called out with counterfeit astonishment as he slowed to a stop. “Fancy meeting you here.” Then he looked at Alice
and said, “You too, Ms. Winter. After all, aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
Gabriel answered on Alice’s behalf. “What’s that you have under your jacket, Higgins?”
He drew the gun in reply, an ugly old Makarov with a suppressor screwed into the end of the barrel.
“A Russian gun for a Russian agent,” said Gabriel. “So much for the GRU upping its game.”
“I fooled you, though, didn’t I?”
“You did,” admitted Gabriel.
He smiled with what appeared to be genuine satisfaction. His forehead seemed more prominent, his cheekbones harder and more defined. Gabriel admonished himself for having missed what was now obvious.
“What’s your real name?” he asked.
“It’s not important.”
“Don’t I have the right to know the name of the man who’s about to kill me?”
“My name,” he answered in Russian-accented English, “is Valery Fedorov.”
“I’m glad we cleared that up.” Gabriel removed his eyes briefly from the Russian’s face and glimpsed a distant figure loping
along the Coast Path near Mill Bay. “And your GRU rank?” he asked.
“Colonel.”
Which meant that he had outranked Yuri Ivanov. It was important to keep him talking. Flattery seemed the safest option.
“Why would they use an important man like you to do a wet job like this? Why not kill me with a miniature drone the way they
killed Yuri Ivanov in Copenhagen?”
“It was determined that you should receive a proper Russian execution.”
“Vysshaya mera?”
“I never realized you spoke our language.”
“And who determined that I should receive the highest measure of punishment? The director of the GRU?”
“Oh no,” said Colonel Valery Fedorov. “It was the Russian president himself who handed down your sentence.”
“I suppose Edward Knight is next.”
“Mr. Knight,” said Fedorov with mock sadness, “is already dead.”
“Did he know your real identity?”
“Of course not.”
“How did you end up working for him?”
“My previous employer was expelled from the United Kingdom after the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine. He asked Mr. Knight to take me on, and Mr. Knight generously agreed.”
“Your previous employer was Dmitri Savin?”
“Very good, Allon.”
“And Dmitri, of course, knew your real identity.”
“We spoke only Russian to one another.”
Gabriel permitted himself a glance toward the approaching figure. “And when you’ve killed me?” he asked. “What then?”
“I shall return to the motherland.”
“How are you going to manage that?”
“There’s a boat waiting for me in Padstow.” It was a little fishing village on Cornwall’s northern coast. “I’ll meet up with
a cargo ship in the Irish Sea. It’s part of our shadow fleet.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me, Colonel Fedorov. In fact, as someone who knows these waters well, I rank your
chances of survival at one in ten.”
“Rest assured, Allon, your odds are much worse.” He pointed the Makarov at Gabriel’s face and spoke in the voice of Liam Higgins.
“In all honesty, I’m a rather dreadful shot. But even I can’t miss at this range.”
Just then the air shuddered with the distant thump of a helicopter rotor. The man running along the Coast Path had closed
to within about three hundred meters. He might have been nearer by now had he not been wearing a detective’s dark suit and
carrying a Glock 19 pistol, which weighed nearly two pounds when fully loaded. Gabriel needed to buy him another minute.
“Your superiors have sent you on a fool’s errand,” he told Colonel Valery Fedorov. “You’ll never get out of Britain alive.
Put the gun down, and I’ll make sure my friends at the Secret Intelligence Service take good care of you.”
“I’m not a traitor, Allon. And if you must know, I volunteered for the job of killing you. You should consider yourself lucky that I didn’t do it sooner.”
“What stopped you?”
“I had a more important assignment.”
“You and your colleague Chloé Lamont were assembling ten drones at that house in Wilton Crescent. She was the one you were
talking to that evening in Berkeley Square. I only wished you had introduced us. I would have enjoyed meeting her.”
“Regrettably she was running late.”
“Where is she now?”
“Safely back in Moscow.”
“Her DNA is all over that house. And so is yours, for that matter.”
“And yours,” said Fedorov, “will soon be splattered along this path.” He pointed the gun toward the cliff’s edge. “Turn around
and get on your knees.”
“Not a chance.”
He swung the gun toward Alice. “I’d be more than happy to kill her first, if you prefer.”
Gabriel briefly considered attempting to disarm the Russian but calmly directed his gaze toward the northern sky instead.
“Look there, Colonel Fedorov. That’s not a sightseeing helicopter, not on a day like this. That will be the police.”
He had a look at the helicopter for himself. It had the effect of diverting his attention away from Detective Inspector Timothy
Peel of the Devon and Cornwall Police, who was approaching from the opposite direction. He was at least a hundred yards away.
Even Gabriel would struggle to pull off a shot like that.
“It’s over, Colonel Fedorov,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the helicopter. “Put down the gun and
give yourself up. It’s your only chance.”
The Russian responded by grabbing a fistful of Alice’s hair and screwing the barrel of the Makarov into her right temple. His face was white as a bedsheet, revealing the skull beneath his skin. “On your knees, Allon.”
Gabriel rotated slowly to the right, granting himself one last look at Peel, then walked the five steps from the footpath
to the cliff’s edge and dropped to his knees. Colonel Valery Fedorov forced Alice to her knees at his side. She seized hold
of Gabriel’s hand and squeezed it so tightly he feared his fingers might snap. “Please forgive me,” she was saying, but he
was staring spellbound at the sea. There were, he assured himself, far worse places to die.
At last he felt the cold barrel of the Makarov pressing against the nape of his neck and an instant later heard a single deafening
gunshot. He had expected to see a flash of blinding light, but instead there was only the sea, heaving itself silently against
the rocks of Pordenack Point. He looked down and saw Alice lying next to him in a bed of purple thrift and red fescue, the
left half of her face covered in blood. Surely, he thought, it was his blood, because he was the one who had been shot, not
her, and he was the one who was now dead. “I’m sorry,” she shouted over the thunderous roar of a helicopter. “None of this
would have happened if it wasn’t for me.”