The English Girl
Gabriel Allon, master art restorer and assassin, returns in a spellbinding new thriller from No.1 bestselling author Daniel Silva. For all fans of Robert Ludlum.When a beautiful young British woman vanishes on the island of Corsica, a prime minister’s career is threatened with destruction. And Gabriel Allon, master art restorer, spy, and assassin, is thrust into a game of shadows where nothing is what it seems and where the only thing more dangerous than his enemies might be the truth…
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The English Girl
Daniel Silva
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover photographs © Elizabeth Ansley/Arcangel Images (woman); Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (city scene)
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007433377
Version: 2014-07-03
Once again, for my wife, Jamie,and my children, Lily and Nicholas
He who lives an immoral lifedies an immoral death.
CORSICAN PROVERB
Table of Contents
4. King David Hotel, Jerusalem
5. King David Hotel, Jerusalem
25. Grand-Fort-Philippe, France
27. Grand-Fort-Philippe, France
THEY CAME FOR her in late August, on the island of Corsica. The precise time would never be determined—some point between sunset and noon the following day was the best any of her housemates could do. Sunset was when they saw her for the last time, streaking down the drive of the villa on a red motor scooter, a gauzy cotton skirt fluttering about her suntanned thighs. Noon was when they realized her bed was empty except for a trashy half-read paperback novel that smelled of coconut oil and faintly of rum. Another twenty-four hours would elapse before they got around to calling the gendarmes. It had been that kind of summer, and Madeline was that kind of girl.
They had arrived on Corsica a fortnight earlier, four pretty girls and two earnest boys, all faithful servants of the British government or the political party that was running it these days. They had a single car, a communal Renault hatchback large enough to accommodate five uncomfortably, and the red motor scooter which was exclusively Madeline’s and which she rode with a recklessness bordering on suicidal. Their ocher-colored villa stood at the western fringe of the village on a cliff overlooking the sea. It was tidy and compact, the sort of place estate agents always described as “charming.” But it had a swimming pool and a walled garden filled with rosemary bushes and pepper trees; and within hours of alighting there they had settled into the blissful state of sunburned semi-nudity to which British tourists aspire, no matter where their travels take them.
Though Madeline was the youngest of the group, she was their unofficial leader, a burden she accepted without protest. It was Madeline who had managed the rental of the villa, and Madeline who arranged the long lunches, the late dinners, and the day trips into the wild Corsican interior, always leading the way along the treacherous roads on her motor scooter. Not once did she bother to consult a map. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the island’s geography, history, culture, and cuisine had been acquired during a period of intense study and preparation conducted in the weeks leading up to the journey. Madeline, it seemed, had left nothing to chance. But then she rarely did.
